II. Red Walls
The path trails off
And heads down a mountain
Through the dry bush, I don't
know where it leads
I don't really care
I feel this love to the core
– Glass Eyes, Radiohead
'It is the consecrated man who kills and the act of killing is made sacred…tragōidia [is understood] to mean… "song at the sacrifice of a goat."'
– Walter Burkert
His realm offers many charmed entrances for would-be travellers, and many more for those who know where and how to find them. Despite this, the main gates (some ramshackle, some tended by dwarves and some by creatures entirely worse) are often aloof. Even when located, they can be excessively, even cruelly, unbreachable.
The easiest way to gain access to the Labyrinth is a strong will, predefined purpose, and select material goods. Those who do so regularly know this.
There are a few, however, who have gone further to cultivate an understanding of its seemingly arbitrary shiftings and evasions. To say they could augur its movements would be false: the Labyrinth supplies nothing so definite. But though not sentient in any conventional sense of the word, the maze does express itself particularly, favouring certain patterns and configurations above others. Like all changing, thriving things, in order to diverge, it must first have something to deviate from. So the Labyrinth can, to an extent, be read. There are a number of its tracks and byways which loopingly recur and thus become traversable with relative consistency.
(Legible, scriptural, inscribed).
(This is how the girl will eventually re-enter, by an ancient goat-path which has been in the habit of reiterating itself across many summers).
Yet whether by accident or its own intent or whim, most of those seeking to set foot in the Labyrinth are haplessly met with the jutting red rock of its hinterlands. Rather than the (comparatively) well-architected and regularly goblin-patrolled initial coil – which often deigns to manifest outside the more defined entry-points – these cliffs are ruthless and reaching.
Rearing up in irregular yet tightly compact formations, they seem an impenetrable barrier between one world and the next. Despite their great height, the sun never falls on them in a way which casts any shadow. They provide no respite from the heat of the wastes beyond.
(Some say the cliffs are reddened so by the blood of the hands that have tried and failed to scale them).
But like so much of the Labyrinth, the desolation of the red walls was only a sleight.
The Scaathi had dwelled on these outer reaches for as long as anyone could remember. Perhaps before memory entirely.
On is the operative word – startlingly so, for these were a people more of the sky than the land.
Clinging to the red rock, they did not eke out an existence but prospered. On their far-side, the cliffs were latticed with determined fauna. High Witsia, which had learned to shoot down through the walls in search of nourishment, functioned as a kind of organic irrigation system. Their hollow roots were redirected to feed water to other fruiting plants and the mouths and drinking leathers of the Scaathi themselves. Evering vine was used for making rope and stitching clothes and wounds. Pepperleaf, clustering in rocky overhangs, was harvested before being dried into acrid and spiced tobacco. The very red ochre of the cliffs coated skin to provide protection from the high sun.
And the goats. The Labyrinthine goats were great, fabled beasts, pushing out from myth into the present tense. Overlarge with shaggy coats brindled red-black. The billies have twisting horns which they use to dislodge rock and each other. Their hooves are slaty grey and cloven. Their eyes are too knowing to be wholly animal. Fleet-footed and prodigious climbers, the goats spend most of their mature lives at high altitude, cudding on scrub and root, licking moisture left by the gathered clouds.
Hunted and hunter. Their lives and those of the Scaathi twin one another in terrible symmetry.
Both goat babes and Scaathi babes are born near the base of the cliffs, yet all never touch the hard-packed earth below. (If one ever did it would be immediately forsaken, for this to them was the most unnatural of states. To die in the Scaathi tongue is to fall).
As goat and man grow, one excels the other in maturity. The young goats quickly follow their mothers to greater heights while Scaathi children are still bound to the backs of their parents, small mouths screaming red nothings.
The goats' advantage ebb as soon as the hunter commences their craft. They, too, begin to further ascend.
When of age, they are each other's perfect foil. In the heights, the chase appears almost ineffable, an event set in motion before the conception of either predator or prey.
The Scaathi use blow-tubes and darts tipped with bellamy (a dark flower venom) and short throwing javelins to bring down their quarry. Bows, arrows and longer blades are cumbersome and useless at such climaxes, proffering more hinderance than help.
Moving fast across this elevated landscape is perilous. Yet like the goats, the Scaathi have a preternatural poise, their centres aligned from birth with the red walls' impossible verticality. This inherent balance is enhanced by an elaborate system of ancestral hunting-paths constructed over generations. In the relentless kinaesthesis of the hunt, one misstep would mean a long and final descent to the unhallowed ground below.
The hunting-paths the Scaathi use are just wide enough to accommodate the footfall of an adult hunter, etched into the sheer rock-side. Where the cliffs fall away from each other, creating gaps and slot canyons, stakes of old, strong wood bored into the red rock act as makeshift ladders and bridges. Climbing them, running across them, at points leaping through the empty space between two, is the utmost test of a hunter's courage and skill.
These are a tall, svelte people. Lean muscled, with long arms and legs. They have little need for the distinctions between man and woman, boy-child and girl. Scaathi language accommodates no such discrimination. All are coequal. All are pitched toward the same end. They revel in this communality.
The hunts can last for days. Groups of Scaathi work together to ambush and bring down their quarry. Scouts track ahead, moving across the red rock quickly and silently. They carry blow-tubes filled with purple berries. Taking aim, they hit the intended animal and it is stained irreversibly. A mock wound parodying the eventual strike.
The goats often spook then, startling and climbing ever-higher. They are wary of the one marked and shun its presence. They understand it soon will fall.
The rest of the hunting party lingers a couple of days behind, unhurried. Like the goats, they know all too well that the marked one is damned.
When the Scaathi find the goats again, they do not stop running. Hours on end, across the red rock in relentless pursuit. The herd eventually breaks off and the marked one is alone and ahead.
(The Scaathi are covered in red ochre so it appears as if the walls themselves are alive and fleeing. The goat is a milk white allegory, a purity with one purple wound).
The chasers will run parallel to their prey across the adjacent red rock whilst others drive it forward from behind. Two lower parties shadow the action above from further down the cliff face.
When the spear or dart is leased the goat succumbs quickly; by virtue of the bellamy venom, painlessly.
A net is thrown out between the two lower groups to catch the tumbling body.
When the hunters return, libations are poured. Goat milk and grape wine. Thanks are given. It is a reverence, this sacrifice. Most cry when they partake of the flesh. A soft wailing begins, a song, more than a song, words are cheapening here. The goatsong is an inexpressible lament given voice.
The meat feeds the Scaathi for weeks. They climb alongside the watchful eyes of the herd to the clouded heights and sow seeds which will grow in the moisture and nourish the goats. Sometimes the planters slip.
Everything has a cost.
The girl's mother had loved him with frightening immediacy.
He was masked. A hollow eyed, gaping thing. Wooden. Maybe ash. She saw only rings of darkness where his eyes should have been.
He was tall and thin and moved like white water.
She was still in the flush of youth then. Her long red hair was waist length and tangled with leaves small blue flowers. She was dressed in nothing but a thin shift, her medicine horn and foraging knife slung at her waist. Her eyes were dark like the girl's would be and her olive skin was further weathered and tanned from a life spent under the sun.
She was barefoot and had danced through a faery ring of pale capped mushrooms straight the arms of the stranger. One whom she was suddenly so sure she loved, even though she could not see his face.
He had crooned to her in a tongue she could not speak but the words shot through her like roots in loam. She felt like a dryad. A divine mouthpiece. Both muse and poem. She was his silvered lady by moonlight. Her herbs, her toil, her muttered, remembered, precious, incantations fell away. She forgot about the callouses on her hands. She had never been struck by magic like this before.
She never would again.
She threaded her hands through his dark hair. He did not remove the mask.
They came together on the woodland floor, the girl's mother and the ashen man. She did not see chorus of other masked figures – empty watchers – gathered around her.
Later, she did not question why the trees would laugh.
The girl's mother already had a Scaathi child. Cain's father had fallen when they were only three summers. They did not remember his face.
When the girl's mother returned to the Labyrinth, she was swollen and could not climb far. She squatted low on the red rock. Mistrusted. Loathed. Cain was the only reason she was able to return. A blood tie. Her babe.
They were growing strong and lean. They ascended without her and begun to fashion crude darts. At eight summers they were the fastest of all the Scaathi babes. The girl's mother saw only the shocking pinks of their soles as they climbed away from her.
She ministered to the young and sick and weak. When she was too far gone, she was carried to a birthing cave, scooped out of the rock and softened by centuries of use.
She screamed bloody as her daughter was born and her pain echoed across the red walls. The child's hair was a more offensive crimson than her own. Her eyes were dark.
The babe cried and cried and cried.
Her becoming was sorrowful and, with it, she assaulted all who would listen.
Cain was the only one who could quell her sobs. They rocked her gently and cooed.
Sing your red song,
I'll hold you,
I'll sing too.
Sing your red song,
Sweet babe,
I'll sing too.
One evening when the girl's mother and Cain sat together by the small light of a fire, them rocking the babe gently, it was decided that she would need a name.
Flaming-babe, red-song, red-rock.
Eithne. Enya.
The word of fire.
He watched the small boat nearing shore impassively.
The crystal dissolved with a twist of his hand.
She still had far to travel. She could die. But to hope for that would be too much. Perhaps even a loss. He was vaguely curious as to how this would play out. For her to fall now, so early, would prove a bathetic end to a story which had, in so many ways, not even begun.
The Labyrinth anticipated the arrival of the vessel feverishly. It had been vindictive as of late, coiling back on itself in rude eternities.
He sighed.
So much trouble for such a small thing. And yet so much power.
He would have to move carefully.
How best to steal from a thief? Only time would tell.
A/N.
Second chapter. I'm still getting into the swing of things/actually committing to writing prose so forgive me if the pacing is weird and the length is short at the moment. I will work up to longer chapters.
I'm just trying to get out the world I've had in my head for a long time now.
The goats and the Scaathi were born out of Enya's (she's named! Irish-ish/fire/kernel) need for family ties and my lasting obsession with the aesthetic of what I imagine to be the Labyrinth's hinterlands. Red rock, white goats, a chase...
I did wax quite lyrical about the tribe but it was important to me. They will recur and their significance will be explained in more detail. Cain is Enya's half-sibling - her father...well, who knows.
I have recently consumed lots of Greek tragedy, hence the image of the chorus/masks. Even the goats. Walter Burkert's Homo Necans tries to figure out the etymological origins of tragedy as a concept and seems to decide that tragōidia - 'the song at the sacrifice of a goat' - is this site. Instead of cannibalising each other, homo necan - man the killer - gained consciousness as homo religiosus and rationalised the irreversible death act through sacrifice - i.e., killing the tragos, the goat - and lament - the song. Hence tragedy is borne as a kind of reflexive mechanism to assuage the hunter's guilt. I was captured by this idea and thought it sat well within the uncertain moral context of the Labyrinth with all its dark uncanniness. I want to maintain the odd Alice in Wonderland-esque feeling of not knowing quite where one stands as much as possible.
Also GK sneak peek. Very sneaky. Small glimpse only.
Thank you for reading if you are! This is a very indulgent project for me so I'm not expecting much interest. I'm working a lot at the moment but will continue to update when I can. Hopefully often.