Valstar

We dug ourselves in. We decided to anticipate our defeat. In our awkward meeting, which would be our first and last, certain voices made the case for fighting back, or at least defending our living structures with all that we had. But in the end even they understood that we would not survive a struggle for power with your kind. There was nothing in our existence that we could put to use in battle. That was your territory. We were a different kind of being. Our force contained no aggression. A bleak strategy took shape amongst us, following the first rule of life: self-preservation.

We took refuge in the deepest layers of that which had always nurtured us, in hopes that your arms would not come to grasp there. The cold sleep of the mother material. This, too, was not without risk. Who knew what kinds of systems you would yet build and how deep into the earth these penetrate. Who knew if a time would return when the wood world could spread out again. We burrowed deeper into the dark, found roots and fungal threads to link with so that they might provide us with the sober provisions needed to preserve our bodies. That is where our tale ended; the light no longer reached us.

Except that it wasn’t the end. We were awoken. Something made its way through the heavy material, made it quiver in a way that shook us up, subtle though the movement was. But we had given birth to these vibrations. Half asleep we pulled ourselves up through the horizons, driven by your call. When we surfaced, cold, impaired, huddled, for a moment our old world seemed unchanged. Here was the wealth of green and brown and golden life that we left behind; maybe not as full as it had been, but complete enough, the rings of death and rebirth unbroken. But the edges could be felt at every turn. They were loud, their compounds gnawing at the wood. But there was wood yet. We had no idea how the world had changed. We started our inspection, to see what you had made of it, to search for that new source of our old songs.

Every night we returned to your world, drank your words in gulps, while the new building blocks of your world crowded our senses. How could the language have remained, when everything else was unrecognisable? There were but small variations, a rhythmic shift, a modified mouth position for some sounds, melodic aspects weakened. But the language was clear, intelligible, irresistible. Meanwhile we visited your gardens, your tame plants, full of poison, and our resilient insects. We tasted the bite in your materials. And every night we returned to our bulwark, with no choice but to speak to one another. What did your call mean? We had seen you, had immediately heard that you were human and not of our kind. We observed you among your equals, the sad enclosed dwellings where you sounded out our song. We had known that you didn’t understand our meaning, but this rendition was as foreign to us as the world in which we found ourselves. Yet, there was no doubt that it was the same language.

Wednesday

That night I didn’t sleep. I considered getting up and going out to the garden to search for the thing I glimpsed at the Tuesdays’. To gather evidence. What kept me in bed was the suspicion that searching without a strategy was not likely to get me very far. I had to sort through the knowledge I had already obtained, those three nights I made contact with the voice that had already become more than a voice.

There were two kinds of listening, and they couldn’t be used at the same time. With one kind I could hear the voice, with the other, the drums. Something had moved, and that, too, I probably would not have been able to sense if I had let myself get carried away by the reading. If I kept my attention on the voices of my people I could make contact with the voice. If I closed myself off to the familiar words perhaps I could hear and see things that would shed light on the origin of the voice. Whatever I did, it was crystal clear to me that Wednesday was the last night to experiment. If something were revealed, it would be on Thursday. The day of the welcome.

I chose the first listening, the one of the recital, and decided to stick with my original plan. This would allow me to hear the voice that spoke and ask it who it was. Who they were. Wild conjecture seized my sleepless mind. It was a forgotten god and the words we spoke were his prayer. It was death, and I was a sacrifice. They were the dead, the spirits of previous generations who sought us out to hear their old language again. Animals; the language was an animal language. Our counterparts from different realities. The only completely natural explanation I could think of scared me the most: it was a plot against me, to put me in my place. You thought you were special? How ready you were to accept this exclusive role. This will teach you. Was it vain to be more afraid of being humiliated than of the violation of natural laws, and uprooting all that I thought I knew? Childish, maybe, but I was still a child. Just about.

Come morning, sleep arrived, and with it the most vivid dreams. My sister had lost her rabbit, but in the course of the dream she herself disappeared. The others tore apart the house and the garden but I went straight for the forest, Chak on my heels. I called her name and checked every hut and hideout we’d created together. The stick tent against the tall fir, the pockets of space in the underbrush where she camped out with her dolls, the pond house. But I only found her treasures: feathers, pretty pebbles, a mole skeleton. I heard the dog bark and followed it back home. When I opened the back door, the whole congregation was gathered around the kitchen table, chalk white, their eyes wide with shock. ‘What is it?’ I asked, but meanwhile I felt an ice-cold wind around my body blowing into the house. It stripped the flesh from the bones of my friends, neighbours and family. A table full of skeletons stared back at me.