by Mhani Alaoui
Khadija was also looking at Maryam, and she was holding her breath. Her entire posture was a hesitation between the now and the what if, between the real and the dream. There was hope in her held breath and beautiful mouth. The entire world danced in her eyes. She began to believe that change and wonderful things do not only happen to others but could happen to someone like her. Then she felt an inexplicable cold enter her heart, and she thought how crazy she was to feel such things. She looked at Maryam and saw in her the stranger she in fact was, and the connection between them snapped and broke. She turned her back on Maryam and closed her eyes.
Maryam fell into a profound melancholia. She was confused by the sudden change in Khadija and blamed herself for it. For a minute, she had forgotten, or chosen to forget as people often do, the curse of solitude that had plagued her since her naming.
“Tomorrow come dawn,” Zohra’s voice cut through the pain. “We will be on our way to the forest of cedars. Breaking bread with you was our honor.” She turned to look at Maryam, who nodded. Zohra gave the husband and wife some cheese, bread, and canned tuna, and continued. “Allow us to leave these gifts with you. Whenever you or your children go hungry, place this food in front of you at the campfire, and it will fill your belly. It will remain abundant for as long as Maryam walks this earth.” Then her voice fell to a whisper. “When the food runs dry, then you will know.” Maryam heard Zohra’s strange predictions through the haze of late-night musings and dusk-filled imaginings. Her eyes were already closing, but she sensed the truth in Zohra’s words. She could not remain with the nomads. Her own trail led her elsewhere.
Taylit, the mistress of the camp, spoke for the first time in the evening. Her voice was clapped and chipped, as though seldom used.
“You’ve been kind to us. I’ve heard of people like you, people who inhabit the grey zones between this world and the next, the past and the present. We know of magic here. But it is a fearsome, primitive magic that obeys no laws and yearns for chaos. Why did you come here?”
“We are on a quest. We are following a dream-message that urged us to the land of the cedars.”
“No human is safe there. Only the tattooed butterfly people of the forest or the lost traveler with a mind teetering at the edge of sanity will ever be found roaming the wild woods at night. Even the most powerful spirits hesitate to enter the forest.”
“Yes. That is known.”
“You must find the tattooed butterfly people. They are barely human, and they survive on an uneasy truce with the cedars. They may choose to help you. What is this thing you are looking for?”
“It is not a thing.”
“Then you truly are on a dangerous quest. If the butterfly folk agree to help you, they may ask for something in return, and you must be prepared to give it to them.”
“Thank you, sister, for your guidance.”
An ache crawled up Maryam’s legs. She knew that a vision was on its way, and she allowed the familiar pain inside her. She saw that the cedars were waiting for her coming. She saw that they were restless and awake. But she also saw something the tribeswoman of the Zayans did not tell them. She saw a sky filled with voices and writing. Stars were words and the night sky the screen on which they were scrolled. It was the universe’s own manuscript of legends and myths about the dawn of a new world. It was spread out in absolute vulnerability for all to read, but who cared to read anymore? Who lives by the book anymore? Fragmented, shattered, following inklings every which way, the manuscript has burnt itself out for most readers. But not so for Maryam. She had spent her life looking for that fabulous story that would tell her of her beginning, guide her through its unforeseeable plots before leaving her breathless, exhaling that one final sigh.
She saw the story unfolding, rolling toward the land of the cedars, and she burnt to reach it. She pushed deep within her the softness she had seen in Khadija’s eyes, because she knew that love was not for her. There, beyond the ridge, scribbled on the cedars’ ancient bark, was a narration waiting for her arrival, thrilled by the possibilities that would emerge with her coming.
For the land of the cedars was a land of primal terror but also of ancient resistance. Its chaos was one filled with ever-renewed life. A forest of calm and beauty during the day, the cedars become terrible things when night fell, beating to a rhythm unbearable to humans but heavy with the call of a new world. And they were waiting for her. Yes, she would find the answers she came looking for. The pain subsided and Maryam slipped into sleep.
~
Zohra and Maryam woke up with the dawn. They washed their faces with good snow melted on embers and left the nomads’ camp behind. Zohra gripped her broom like a cane, the full weight of her two hundred eighty years heavy on her shoulders as she walked. Maryam strolled along, whistling at Aoud Errih to fall in step at her side. They trekked for kilometers through muddy and often steep paths into the wilderness. Silence reigned all around, and the air turned to a steely grey. Signs of life decreased as they came closer to the land of the cedars. Only the rare falcon circled the sky, hovering with beak lowered toward the ground and watching its prey. The silence became heavier, a black hole quenching all sound from the atmosphere. Before them stretched the immensity of the plain, and the darkness beyond could only be the forest of cedars. The silence weighed on their shoulders, and they felt as though they were the only human beings left in the world.
Soon, the forest of cedars stretched before them. Dark and brown or silvery and gold, their branches like sinewy arms holding green velvet, the millennial trees rose as high as eyes could see. Maryam and Zohra paused in front of this brute force of the earth that spent its days immersed in its own existence, oblivious to theirs. They rode toward it, their hearts trapped in an eerie sadness. They reached the forest’s edge and inhaled its musk. They expected the air to turn into lead and the silence into void, but, to their surprise, the deafening silence was withering away fast. The soundlessness of the plain had lifted to give way to the light breezes stirring in the trees. The air rang with a buzzing that had no origin and no end. The winds clung to the canopy. The air, the sounds, the wetness, and the warmth all came from within the trees. The buzzing and the humming began to sound like whispers in beautiful, old languages that neither Zohra nor Maryam could understand but that made them silent and want to listen forever. They filled the air like silvery fumes, wispy lianas, or thickset clouds. They were the words of the tree spirits, weaving their stories, their myths, their wrath, their ancient justice. The travelers had entered a world intent on its own creation, one that hummed, buzzed, and whispered like no other place they had seen. It was a world that sang of dissonance and apartness.
Maryam and Zohra placed their rides against a great cedar and watched as its branches slid around Aoud Errih and the broomstick to hold them firmly against its bark. They entered and felt the stony earth turn soft and easy under their feet. They had come upon a world for which they were not prepared. They had expected to find fear and emptiness but instead discovered a place of disconnect. It lay in the midst of a wasteland but denied the drought and famine all around. It exuded an earthen, drunken scent that shattered all certainty. It was triumphant, out of time, on edge, and uncontrollable: pure, wild magic. They walked deeper and deeper into the forest. The trees loomed thicker and higher with each step they took. The fullness of the whispers shattered any possibility of silence.
“What answers can be gleaned here, Umi? How could I decipher the endless messages that fill the air?”
“It’s a strange place that’s not meant for humans. It has chosen to lie outside our domains, and we have come to disturb its peace.”
“Is there reason to fear?”
“There is reason to fear annihilation.”
“Annihilation is not destruction, Umi. That much I can sense.”
“It is destruction of everything we believe ourselves to be. Of the lines between you, me, the demons, and the spirits. We are in a place that is playing with us. We a
re close to nothing here.”
They walked deeper into the woods surrounded by the incessant noises of the trees. After what could have been an eternity, or a mere intake of breath, they found themselves in a sun-filled clearing. Their skins became luminous, bathed in light. Their steps were lighter as though a weight had been lifted. There was something ephemeral and unreal about the golden clearing they had stumbled upon. The tree words lingered high in the air above it. Maryam and Zohra were now at the center of the clearing. They looked about and saw ravens all around them, their beaks open and their wings deployed as though ready for the next message to be delivered to the waiting dream.
Thought
Maryam watched the ravens at the edge of the clearing and listened to the tree words high above her head. She was more focused than she had ever been in her life. Her senses were heightened and her eyes sharp. Her legs began to ache, and a prickling raised the soft hairs on her arms. “Something strange is coming our way, Umi,” she said to the ancient woman beside her. Soon, the lightness became even lighter, and the hovering words turned into a fluttering of wings. The light turned white. Suddenly they found that they were surrounded by wispy creatures with large wings covered in geometric tattoos and with bodies rounded like the Venus of Willendorf. They released pollen, sand, and butterfly dust everywhere. Maryam breathed in a multitude of particles and could no longer see or sense Zohra at her side.
She raised her voice, “Who are you?”
The creatures shuddered. Despite their mass and large wings, they were touchy, fragile types.
“We are the Idaid. We are the children of this forest wild.”
“You are the butterfly tribe of our legends.”
“We are called that, yes. We also have many other names, some names mortals have dared utter and died, hiiihiii-eee…Why have you come here?”
“I came following the raven’s dream-message. I was told you could help me.”
“You are disturbing our peace in your quest of mind. You have tipped the fragile order of our things, you’ll find. Perchance you have brought chaos and consequence in your stride. Why should we help you, child?”
They spoke in singsong voices, their unity of sound never complete, yet never broken, either. Maryam was hit by the foreignness of their speech. There was a hollowness to their voices that terrified her. She vaguely sensed Zohra’s presence around her somehow, on a different plane as it were. So Maryam stood there in the clearing, on the other side of the world, surrounded by creatures whose dangerous nature she instinctively sensed. Creatures who did not care to distinguish between the old and the new, the real and the unreal; creatures who could suck her into their world to annihilate her and her fragile sense of existence.
She was close to dread, sweat trickling down her back. She understood that they would not help her, that they hungered for her. She saw herself in the very back of their opaque eyes, a prisoner of their ravaging wilderness. She was about to walk toward them and submit to the call of the wild when she saw the butterfly folk take an uneasy step back. They were looking at her uneven legs. They peered into her huge black eyes with the blue pupils and their wings began to flutter uncontrollably as they sniffed her from afar.
“You are not a mortal like other mortals we have seen. You too have many names, do you not? Daughter of Adam and Lilith. They could have been one of us, but they chose to leave us behind. What a risk for you to come to the land of day and night. Not fully human yourself, it appears. You are the One, perhaps. You have come here to find on that rickety ride, beneath your manners so mild, answers to questions, answers that can no longer hide, hiiihiii-eee...”
The excitement in their voice was mounting, reaching its breaking point, flirting with the high notes, wispy, lispy until it finally snapped. It was a screech rather than a word, sounding like a freed bird gone mad. Then, in the midst of that high-strung folly of vocals, they heard a sound that resonated like the ocean tide breaking on the rocks before the first sign of life transformed the planet’s destiny forever. The sound seemed to come from the earth itself, below ground. Maryam closed her eyes and could feel the sound flowing from the earth to the roots, sap, trunk, branches, and leaves of the cedars. The spirits of the cedars had awakened, and they rumbled liked thunder and lightning.
Maryam heard it all, acutely and perfectly. She knew of the uneasy truce between the butterfly folk and the cedars. She felt the primal force of the trees overpowering the unearthly beings fluttering around her. The cedars were interceding in her favor, reminding the butterfly folk of their truce and its fragile base. The butterfly folk obeyed the cedars, reluctantly, with trembling bodies and twitching antennas.
“Fine,” they screeched. “We will help the magical mortal, hiiihiii-eee…We tremble at the edge of the world and hurray for its end. We are immortal and will only perish, with joy, when the end of the world arrives. We are creatures feared by all—but not by you. Our power you deny. Our existence you allow. To you with your deep, deep roots, we are poor, wretched exiles, exiles disgusting and vile! Are we not so in your eyes? Poor, poor tribe without homeland, begging for you to be kind, to kindly let us here reside. Cedars of might and fright, even you shall one day die in the great bonfire of the end of time, hiiihiii-eee…”
Maryam’s head hurt from the foreign voice and sounds ranging all around. The rumbling thunder and lightning rose to become a full-fledged tempest. The cedars were awake and angry. The butterfly people quieted down suddenly. Playtime was over.
“Okay, the bile has for now expired. Clap-clap, blocked by your perfect sappy-sap. But we are victims, the consequence of this bitching truce that makes us so wild. So enough, fine. But she must give us something first, this maiden fine—we want the box.”
The tempest stopped.
“I don’t know what you mean by a box. I don’t have any box.”
“What? Lies! Or.. .your companion perhaps may hide?”
Maryam fell silent.
For some reason she herself did not know, she was afraid of what was about to happen. A veil lifted and she saw Zohra now, clearly. She was standing at her side, slightly dazed from an ordeal only she knew of.
“The box, dear lady. We want the box! If you want the answers you came looking for, give us the box in your robes you hide…”
Zohra looked at the creatures surrounding her, and she too was afraid. She whispered under her breath: “What should I do, Old Mother? The heritage of Solomon and Sheeba, the heart of the secret…How can I give it up?” A voice only she could hear answered: “It’s alright, my daughter. They will respect a pact. Give them the box, for the story must write itself, and Maryam must find her way. It is our only hope.”
Her eyes full, reeling from the pain of separation, Zohra lifted her voice.
“I know who you are. I know of your treacherous natures. Your designs are not our designs. But the choice is mine, and I choose to give you the box. But you must promise my companion and me safe passage through the territory you inhabit.”
“In our territory, you have nothing to fear from our kind. Now give us the box.”
Zohra produced the box from under her robes. It was a simple box made of cedarwood, with engravings on the side. It fit well in her hands. It was as if the box had been made to fit in her hands and her hands had been made to hold it. Maryam watched as the old woman presented her box to the wild tribe hovering above ground expectantly.
“Don’t, Umi. Keep your box. We’ll find other ways.”
“No, it is as it must be. It’s being written as we speak. The box is not as weak as they think. It can defend itself. It has survived centuries, has it not?
“To the Idaid: Here is what you have asked for.”
High-pitched yelps filled the air, and the small brown box shifted hands. Zohra’s hands dropped to her side, and she looked old and frail. Maryam could sense the other woman’s power leaving her body, bleeding from her pores, leaking onto the ground. She felt her suffering and loss, and she never admi
red or loved her as much as she did at that moment. Then as they looked, the box seemed to shift shapes. From a perfect square, it became a hazy oval. Zohra whispered, “Nothing is lost. Everything is transformed.”
The Idaid turned the box this way and that, passing their antennas over the ancient script. Satisfied, they asked Maryam once more what she was seeking. “The second gift,” was her answer.
“We are the butterfly tribe, the Idaid. Barely human, we are what lies beneath and what lies beyond, what came before and what came after. Do you acknowledge our might?”
“Yes.”
“And are you willing to abide by the ties that bind? The gift is precious, quasi-divine.”
“Yes. So be it. What is it?”
“Open your mind and the gift you will find.”
A rush of images filled her mind. She saw Adam and Lilith as they once were in the clearing with the two lakes and the two trees. She saw how the thick cedar forest grew to protect this world from the unknowns that lie beyond, but how the temptation to see, learn, and grasp were stronger than any dream of happiness and unity. She then saw hatred, violence, their residues, the silver stardust that became the high-strung, curvy butterfly folk, and the endless cedar forest that became the forest of today.
Finally, she saw refusal. She saw Lilith rebel against an order invoked by a God of power and domination. She saw Lilith open her wings and disappear into the night, never to be seen or heard from again. She saw that Lilith and Leila Tair were one and that Adam and Adam Tair were also one. She saw her past—a possible past, a dream of a past—and she understood.
“You come from a place where fabrications abound—lies, lies, everywhere there are lies.”
“Yes. It is a kingdom of lies.”
“Why?”
“Why…Aren’t all lands forged on lies?”
“Dig deeper, child. Why are there lies?”
