SSCS 01: Installment 19 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 19 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
Instead it is the honey that answers. “You may have it,” the dry honey-cracks whisper, the wet honey-veins slurp, “if you can refuse to sing.” And in the distance, all around the rim edges of the valley, the star wind pauses and breathes in, and begins to beat, and beat. And beat. With a vast, greater-than-worlds heartbeat.
In reply, Silver-desert-snake plants the crab shell in the valley’s very center, then coils – not around it, but off to one side – and watches as sand, spilling out flat and silent, begins to bubble forth.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 19: 19.1205
***
Beyond the Sun, beyond most of the stars, the scouts cling to a great, black bone, hanging within a strip of void, hiding from the OneVoice.
They cling there for a long time, silent and afraid. Almost, it begins to seem that they should never move, should never make a sound. They should weave themselves to be still and black as shadows, black as the dark lurking beneath thick-set leaves when the Moon is shining bright above.
Because if the OneVoice finds them, and traps them, they will add their own songs to it, however thin and brittle and quickly lost. And then it will grow stronger, and lure others, and grow stronger still. It will push everything aside to make room for itself. Clinging to the great, black bone, in the narrow, velvet-black void, the scouts can taste that this is true. It is a knowing, damp and clinging, that presses at their fur, and – slowly, slowly – hollows out their bones, that they may be made into flutes when the next ones come.
“I am the last one – the last of me.”
Though the scouts have grown still and quiet as forgotten stones, the great, black bone shifts and crackles suddenly beneath them. It shudders, faint and high, a buzz, with something that might once have been loneliness, but has grown too old for that, older than moons.
“I was the shrine on the hillside,” the buzz whispers through the tips of the scouts’ claws, through the pads of their thumbs. “The rest of me is singing now, trapped within the song of the OneVoice and so unknowable to anything beyond it.” Sighs and cracks, almost unhearable in the void, enough to cause a toe to slip, but nothing more. “Mine are not searching for me, they have not found me. Eventually, I will surrender and sing also, and be lost.”
And Black-fire cannot help it, with the silence of her body she cries out, with the clutch of her claws and the stick-thin shuddering of her bones: “But how can yours find you!?”
“They must listen for my silence.”
And to this Green-and-purple and the rest of the scouts add their own silent voices: “And how will that help? How will that matter if you are the last?”
For a moment, their perch is suddenly unstable, something within shudders and slips. Then: “Because I can feel the rest of me. Though their song makes them mute to all else, I can feel them. Listen. Through me, you might feel them, too.”
And then the scouts are not slipping. They are locked in place. The velvet-black void is suddenly crystalline and hard, and even the shallowest of not-breaths is met with such resistance the scouts can feel what is on the other side. Deep, deep on the other side, in a place so loud and ringing that the world has become absolutely silent. That is where the other great bones are singing.
It is a song of grass and hillsides, if both grass and hillside were made of glass. A sharp sighing, breathing, moving; like dust rubbing against itself. The great bones were meant to sing to touch. Every footfall upon them should crumble and crack – softly – with a song like the wind sighing, like the wind picking out harp-notes in grass like glass and the promise of dust. And when a shroud is dragged across them, they should weep with a susurrus like rain.
Soft hiss and crack now as the great bone beneath the scouts’ claws releases them from the other place, and the velvet void is soft again and thin, though they can still feel – almost, almost – where the other great bones might be. Soft spider-webs of shuddered thought. “So it might be with your bees, if they are not all surrendered. If there is one left that you can find by her silence.”