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4
As Soft as Fruit
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THE GOBLIN who was to be called Dos pulled himself from the swamp. The wet soil was his mother, his father, the earth was the womb where his limbs were made flesh and his heart first beat. As lightning crawled through the sky like a centipede cracking between the clouds, as the water fell like wet dirt caught by the hundreds of leaves, and ever so slowly, dropping to the goblin’s small body.
When goblins are born they do not cry as humans do; the heavens do it for them.
Instead they would smile. Something simple, pure. A smile that held no concept of pain, of sickness, of cold; so crisp and guiltless, like water calmly brushing upon the goblin’s face. His chest throbbed; his limbs shook, his head ached, and he kept pulling his other arm still buried in the earth.
What is this? And that, and that. . .
The storm poured between the gaps in the soil, towards the worms safely buried in the earth, towards the ants who took to the sky as gods and kings.
As the goblin’s arm stuck out, he realized that it was his arm and that he could control it, and this sudden realization made him panic. He hurried to stand, to run away, but his legs wobbled as his bones were still weak. He fell, pushed himself back up, and fell again.
He made his way to Tael’blanc, the nearest tree, and sought shelter. Water dripped on its dark trunk, flooding on its roots. The tree stood as steady as a pillar; its branches danced helplessly along the blow of the storm.
The goblin wondered about the unheard, unplaying music the tree was dancing to. He tried to listen to it, swayed his head according to the wind as if he himself was a tree. He waved his limbs, swung his head. When this wasn’t enough, he grabbed leaves and held them, licked to stick to his skin. He was Tael’blanc for seven hours. He stood where the tree stood, moved only when it moved, until the sun came and the heat dried both of them.
A stag distracted him. It was an unusual animal, walking in all fours, eating grass. Was he a stag? Should he eat grass? The goblin wondered. Is he supposed to walk like that? He grabbed two twigs that seemed to resemble antlers and tied it to his ears. The stag’s name was Harumonjesi, and that was the goblin’s name for three hours.
He imitated Harumonjesi like he was its baby, trailing behind it, pouncing with it. His palms and feet met the softness of grass as his back ached at the posture. When Harumonjesi drank, he drank. He ate the same berries. He walked in the same path, under the same sunlight. When the stag stopped to chew leaves, his teeth went for the nearest one. The taste made him throw up.
After he decided he wasn’t a stag, he went back to the river he saw before and drank water as much as his stomach could fill. He cupped his hand, sipped. Being Tael’blanc was nice, but Tael’blanc had no limbs and had no back to bend. Harumonjesi had a strict diet, not one for a stomach such as his.
What is my name? He asked, picking up pebbles, throwing them, watching them jump and sink, most of the time just sink.
He glanced at the stone he found. It was a small stone, and he was particularly fond of its shape. It had an odd shape, and he thought, wow, that’s a cool stone. Its name was Bingontso, a name that precisely described its height, length, and width, its colors and cracks and curves.
His eyes darted at another one, slightly bigger, heavier. Its name was Gibblopop, a name that described its concaves, its smoothness, its attraction to moss.
He saw another, then another, then another, picking them up one by one and then looking at them closely. That’s a lot of shapes.
The goblin wondered if stones lived by the river. If it was true, then each stone he throws was a stone he was helping home.
He wanted to live near the river too, the water was clean and drinking felt nice in the mouth and the stomach, but looking at it after a storm made him feel sad. The remnants of trees scattered around, the torn leaves and broken twigs, floating with no legs of their own to swim, no mouths to ask for help.
He thought about all the names of all the branches he saw and each name caused a pang in his heart. One of the branch’s name was Polinonsi, for the smell and the roughness of its skin. There was Caltunsa with the thorns, Grismolino from a shrub that bore white flowers, then Tarcobski, who was friendly with insects.
Other more popped to his head. Hestiades was a rock the size of his fist, carved in the shape of a perfect heart. Saying its name twisted the tip of his tongue and he felt like he was tasting the wind. It was a perfect name, he decided to keep it.
The afternoon sun burned his skin, so he hid under the shade of trees. Their branches spread forming a spiderweb of shadows. In his ears, the crickets played along an ensemble, the birds sang in the background and the main vocalist was the water, like a voice flowing, curving, dropping, never pausing until the song itself ends and the notes form a puddle beside an anthill.
The goblin spent the first two months of his life naming rocks. When he got bored, he started naming wood: the trees, twigs, and barks. A small puddle of water, a drop, a handful of sand. He crossed the river Malegobsi and saw a rabbit leaping behind a tree. The rabbit’s name is Nmambed, the tree’s name is Harwo’klim. He stepped on a fallen branch and realized that its name was Kerbrupal, but since his feet snapped it into two there were now two twigs with entirely different names, Kerbruspol and Spolbrupal.
It never felt like he was giving them names but more like he discovered them. When he looked at Hestiades, he knew already that there exist no other series of sounds that could identify that specific stone other than Hestiades.
When one says Hestiades, it was impossible to think of any other stone than this stone. It was the name that described all the sediments crushed and joint together to make its body, the thousands of water and wind that shaped its form, the worms that dragged it from place to place, the wolf whose claws scratched one of its corners.
It was if he had read the entire history that made Hestiades, as if the stone itself had a soul that he had touched. The name captured the stone’s essence, its entirety, as if it existed only to carry the weight of the name it possessed. This was the same for Tael’blanc, Harumonjesi, Bingontso, Gibblopop, Malegobsi, and all the things the goblin had named and yet to name.
It was to be said that these names were universal names, almost another language in itself. It was to be said that except one, all the goblins whose feet walked the earth knew the names of all things.
And so, the goblin, whom in a few months would be called Dos, looked at lines of his hand, felt the long of his pointed ears, the sharpness of his nose, the softness of his pudgy face; what is my name? He wondered if it was as good as the names of things.
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HESTIADES WAS A GREAT ROCK, it was an amazing rock. When the goblin knocked it against other rocks it goes tok¸ when he threw it to the river it went plop, then clack when it hits wood.
The night was beginning to blanket the sky and he busied himself producing sounds. Sounds were easier to name. There were thirty-five different sounds made from running, seventeen from raising the arm, yet the sounds Hestiades made were still different, far more complex. He spent the entire day gathering a series of other rocks to drum Hestiades on. The smoothest rocks, the tall ones, the thick ones, the ones with the oddest shape.
He noted how boulders tok at a lower pitch; stones made a higher one. Wood was different. Shells made a sound that seemed to echo from an empty inside. He arranged them at Galo’jera, a Manera tree, and as the moon came he began drumming.
At first, he drummed a random melody and grinned when he got it right. He thought of the mud from where he was born, about how it first felt to breathe. The opposing feelings of horrific amazement, the confused certainty of life. He banged Hestiades in a peculiar rhythm, each series of beats he ended using a stick from Galo’jera hitting against a snakil’s shell. The sound reminded him of the first movement of the bone, the first tearing of flesh.
What he played was something beyond music, beyond the normal searching of the best series of sounds to dance into. It was “The Sound of Being Born,” his rock imitating the slow drumming of the storm against the ground, against the petals of flowers, against his face. The heartbeat, the light trembling of the earth, the calm swaying of leaves.
The lizards kissed where they stood and the wolves howled into his rhythm. He drummed and Hestiades blended to the orchestra of the forest, of the dark night that fell and fell as if to choke the land. He drummed until his arms burned and his palms were cut, until the stones cracked and the music dried in its beat, until the cold hands of sleep took him to rest.
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THE GOBLIN who was to be called Dos began travelling when he found out he could make a sound by whistling on a leaf. It was De’metre, a yellow leaf the length of his hand, as flat as paper. In a week, he played De’metre like an amateur on harmonica, sometimes drumming Hestiades using his feet. He put them in a knapsack he fashioned from a bunch of twigs, leaves, and vines.
He wanted to compose a lot of songs, amused at the leaf’s flexibility and versatility. He tried imitating the feeling of “Walking by the River Waters,” or “Birds Calling for Love,” and kept failing. Like now, when the sun was high and bright, he attempted “The Soil While Raining,” thinking about his naked feet traveling along the grass, atop a mountain, upon a rocky hill. No luck.
He wasn’t on any journey to go anywhere; he just decided on a direction and went there. When he was hungry, he would pick some fruits from the trees. A peach, a banana, some weird berries. He knew immediately which ones he could eat and which ones he should never touch only by the sound of their names.
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The mango, he would dip his fingers deep into and open it, then bite it. His favorite was the coconut, whose hardness were met by Hestiades, revealing its soft insides. He liked the gentleness of fruits, their sweetness, their colors from which eyes alone could feast.
Walking was always optional. Sometimes he’d pick a tree, gather a bunch of rocks around and experiment with Hestiades for several days. He was never able to play The Sound of Being Born the same way. It always felt like it lacked life, the notes failed and the rocks weren’t able to capture the sound he wanted to make.
He gathered shells, from snails to snakils, to horns. When he found berries, he learned not to pick all of them at once, less they rot in his knapsack. Stay away from monkey’s territories, they throw rocks at you. Rocks hurt, they would bruise and turn the skin blue. Follow the squirrels around and find nuts. Rabbits were cute but smelly, but cute nonetheless. He walked and leaped and walked and climbed, until his feet bore callouses and his legs ached, until his throat was dry from playing. Until sunsets, until he found cliffs and mountain walls, until there were wolves to run from, until he saw the first thing he could not name.
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THE OBJECT was made from timber. The wood was butchered from several different trees, chopped to pieces, shaved into shape, then nailed into another shape. It was held together using iron, an emasculated metal taken from its original rock. There was copper too, reduced to strings like a spider’s, and the weirdest one—steel, molded into bars, into wheels, gears, breaks and pulleys. This evil amalgamation of different things, of many different names was the vilest, most disturbing object the goblin had ever seen to the point that seeing it made him boil.
When he looked at the wagon, he wasn’t looking at a convenient tool of transportation. He was looking at a combination of lumber and mineral made hostage, pillaged, gutted, forced into a form that betrayed the names they held. He knew immediately that whatever that thing was, it had to be destroyed. It was against nature, against normal, against everything the goblin knew.
He rushed to the wagon and began hammering Hestiades into it. He pulled the wheels and the metal scraped against his fingers; the force he used tore the muscle in his arms. It wouldn’t budge an inch. He grabbed a nearby twig and smashed it across the deck. The cages, which he didn’t understand what, he lifted and threw to the ground.
For a long time he did not realize that he was screaming, that he had been working for minutes and minutes and all the results he had was a series of dents and lungs out of breath. He kept trying still, raising Hestiades from a height and pounding, beating, thrashing, until a hand grabbed his wrist, pulled, and in the next second his entire body was in the air, then dropping to the mud.
Run, said his body, his heart was leaping out of his chest. He wiped the mud from his eyes and a punch landed on his cheek. He crawled away as he found Hestiades in his hand. He turned to look at his attacker— a human, standing tall in front of him. Run. His arm moved on instinct, already half-swung but the man’s foot was already on his stomach. His intestines twisted as he flew backwards, his head hitting the wagon.
His vision dazed. He looked at his attacker, at its body that was almost like his, yet completely different. The brown skin, the short ears, the small nose. Run. He tried to crawl away, but his back was already so pushed against the wagon. His arms ached, his throat felt coarse, and the skin on his hands had blisters.
Sounds escaped from his throat. He was screaming but there was nothing to scream. All he could muster were the names of things around him. “HAGISAM SITABLIG MANURAJ BROZANT GRAL’VIDA—”
This time it was a slap to the face. He could feel his jaw dislocate; his head rang from the inside. For a while, it felt like the whole world grew silent, and he could hear nothing but his pain. The pounding of his heart, his blood that felt thick pulsating across his limbs, the buzzing inside his ears. The forest disappeared. There was only him, sitting with his back against the wagon, all the veins in his body like storm-flooded rivers, his skin like ground where animals stomped.
When the sound came back, he heard the birds, followed by the barking of dogs. Then a voice, deep, and stern, as if Hestiades banged on the emptiest shell rousing the deepest of echoes: “Blasted piss-drinker,” the man said, his voice shaking. “What the hell are you doing to my wagon you half-witted pig-dog?”
He didn’t understand a single name the man said, and he wasn’t in any condition to respond. He just stared at him, wide-eyed and confused. The man was young, too young, and the goblin fixated at the heavy ornaments on the man’s body, at the helmet, at the crossbow strapped on his back, at the way his hands shook.
Nothing made sense.
He watched the man look around, he paced about the area as if looking for something, then stopped when it saw the object made of steel. It was a cage. “You stay there!” the man shouted from afar, approaching beside him. “If I don’t find any Tarizard you’d at least sell as a good slave,” he said, grabbing the goblin’s wrist and cuffing him to the side of the wagon. “You’re my second bounty for today, so keep your head down the wagon if you don’t want to lose it.”
And something clicked inside the goblin, who in a few moments would be called Dos. Wagon, he thought, it was referring to this, he thought. Wagon was the name of the thing he was trying to destroy. It did not make sense. Wagon could not even begin to capture the thing’s entirety, not even in the slightest. Wagon cannot be its name.
Why wagon? He thought. He could move his arms now and the pain was almost gone. The blisters on his hand were slowly disappearing. He shifted his legs and was relieved that it didn’t hurt as much. If he could break his hand, he could slip through the cuffs and run this time, surely, while the man was busy fiddling around with the crossbow thing, aiming it at somewhere.
Wagon, he thought again. It was easy to call it that. It wasn’t tiring, like he wasn’t searching for the name of things anymore, only declaring them. Wagon. He managed to stand. It would be hard to hurt the man with the helmet on, but with Hestiades in his hand, he—
An arrow zoomed past beside his neck, missing him only by an inch. He was not really listening to it before, but the barking was louder now. The man crouched beside him, behind the wagon, putting bolts into his weapon. The goblin looked around and noticed that they were surrounded.
He saw boars once, but never this big, never standing on their legs. They were at least twice the size of the man, their skin were pink and grimy with soil, dressed in leather, in metal, in dirt. Tied to their backs were steel cages, handcuffs on their belts, and long wooden clubs gripped between their fingers. Their bodies were built heavy, their footsteps burying in the mud.
“Orc slavers,” the man murmured, his fingers shaking on his grip. “Tough competition.”
The goblin who was to be called Dos picked up a pointed stick from the wagon’s back. It was a thick, straight branch whose end had been shaved to be sharp. Sisura, he thought of its name. Wagon, he thought again, as his hid behind it. He knew that the orcs weren’t there to be friendly, and they weren’t there just to throw stones at him like the monkeys did. Their names were horrifying. Its sound rattled him down to the very marrow of his bone. When he looked at the man, he noticed that it already stepped up, ready to run in any second.
“Swine bastards, do you have an inkling about how much you price in the pigsties?”
One of the orcs halted in his advance, confused. “What?” and the man’s bolt went through his neck. “Harold!” one of the orcs bleated, throwing the steel cage from her back, running towards the man.
From there, in the ears of the goblin who was to be called Dos, the forest played its most hostile orchestra: stillness. The barking of dogs scattered around the wagon, the orc’s footsteps slipped or steadied. There was shouting, screaming, voices that drowned all the natural sounds the forest could produce. He trembled, retreating further and further into the wagon, hiding inside it.
The largest orc who had one eye and whose belly was out from his leather shirt found himself trying to keep his insides inside him.
“It’s Gorm, somebody grab Gorm!”
“Arne, the human’s on your le—” Arne fell to the ground, the orc’s knees were cut through the leather. The man went next for the slaver who ran away, and the goblin who was to be called Dos hurried to his knapsack. His fingers were shaking, scanning through the piles and piles of berries and fruits and shells and bones, he grabbed De’metre.
His breathing was hurried, unsteady. He could not hear the forest; he could not hear the water or the trees or the rabbits or the crickets. He felt like somebody took him away and he was far from he had lived. His naked feet atop a rubber mat, his right hand cold against the wagon’s railing.
“Don’t kill him! We need him alive to find Frode!”
“Fire your damn bow Leif!”
All movement had sounds. The slight raising of the elbow, a hurried running, a body slamming against the mud. Still, De’metre refused to whistle, the leaf was dripping with the goblin’s sweat.
The footsteps swarmed around his ear. The heavy boots, the clacking of metal, the fast movement of iron swinging through the air. From his side: an arrow burying through wood, to his skin, to the bone of his shoulder.
He cried in pain. Breathing became harder and each inhale was hard labor. The air seemed thicker, denser, his lungs was heavy and felt like it was about to burst. His blood trickled to his elbow, to his hand. Another arrow passed by beside him, going through the little space beside his rib, below his armpit.
“Baldur’s dead.”
“Arne!?”
“I’m fine, I’ll live.”
The goblin who was to be called Dos breathed through his mouth. He closed his eyes and focused on the air entering his lungs, focused on the pain in his shoulder. His veins were the rivers, his lungs were the trees. He was of the forest, the mud was his mother, his father, the soil was the womb where his limbs were made flesh and his heart first beat.
“Where is Sion? Where’s my brother?”
“Sion’s here, he’s okay but he’s bleeding.”
He steadied himself, and from above the man’s body crashed beside him. Both arms broken, blood pouring from the back of his head.
An orc took a peek on the wagon. She was a piglet of an orc, a girl about as tall as him, her pink snot still soft and clean, her ears hanging limp on her head. She was carrying a crossbow on her hands and a quiver of bolts slung on her back.
The goblin who was to be called Dos met his enemy’s eyes for a second, and the girl fired.
Thunk was the sound of the string, pushing the bolt with such force its trajectory was almost always sure. It never curved, never in its first seconds affected by the gravity that weighs thrown stones to the ground.
The bolt was always sure, always confident to land where it was aimed. And thunk was the surest, clearest, sound that entered the terrified goblin ears, that from that sound alone he knew the amount of force applied to the bolt.
The arrow had two names, Bartoej for the wood, and Tempofas for the metal on its end. Bartoej was slightly thinner near the tail which would cause it to waver, and Temporas had the same weight as four and a half stones, making it a millisecond slower. If Bartoej and Temporas were to be fired with this amount of force, in this certain angle, it would hit. . . Here. Piercing through the goblin’s hand, which he had swung in absolute certainty to block the bolt from hitting his left eye.
The girl pulled a knife from her belt.
The goblin gripped the heart on his hand.
They lunged towards each other.
The knife, the heart, the veins in their arms pumping blood, the tissues in their muscles contracting, expanding, chasing the wind. The weather was nice today, the sun was up and the clouds were soft to the eyes.
The goblin who was to be called Dos was reminded of the coconut, at how he broke its hard shell with Hestiades. Look at him now, the goblin, banging her skull like a drum without reverb, the blades of grass swaying lightly, the trees dancing at its music. There was no melody in it, no rhythm; only a warm, final sound that could not begin to echo the existence it deprived. As loud as thunder, as soft as fruit.
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The Names of Things
[Entry from the Library of Bluemin, Biomancer Aks, courtesy of Sunspine]
After conducting interviews with more than a hundred goblins (a sampling of 78 wild goblins, 42 locally born goblins, 26 slaves, 45 free men, and 9 primers), Biomancer Aks has reached two conclusions regarding goblin linguistics.
Either (A) the goblins have a natural, inherent language of their own, wherein they see that all objects, in their rawest form, have a unique name that is rooted in their history, origin, properties, and behavior combined, or (B) all things have a unique name, and only goblins could see it and can pronounce it… so far.
In layman’s terms: either The Names of Things is a language, or a previously unseen and unobserved natural phenomenon.
Further research is required if The Names of Things can be used in reverse, wherein one can identify an unknown object’s properties through its name alone. In the same vein that Mancing is simply observed Witchcraft, the Biomancers have currently dedicated an entire ward in Bluemin to further study The Names of Things, hoping for a way to apply a Scientific Method to its linguistic intricacies.
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