The girl knew that if any gods were to ever come to her, they would need a place to live, like a temple. The girl didn’t know how to build such marvelous structures like the far-off cities had churches, enviable tabernacles and great spired temples. The girl wanted to have knowledge and to have a god that would listen to her, her dreams and desires, to perhaps dance and sing for, and to consider making her a great person. The girl only knew simple structures to build and to play how she was expected to play. The girl listened to the little voice inside of her, the one she secretly prayed with, imagined with and prayed to.
It’s voice sounded like her own, but as time went on, there were other sounds she couldn’t identify. The girl could hear when she tried hard enough, other things amongst her voice and they were bothersome, but not necessarily frightening. The girl didn’t imagine skittering creatures or dead relatives, like her nanny that coughed and coughed and shivered and shivered no matter how the clans hold dressed her in blankets or got her closer to the blazing hearth, no not the nanny that stared at her some nights at the foot of her bed pulling her bedclothes down while she tried to sleep…though nanny had been buried in the back, where Da had carried her that one last time…cradling what little was left. No these noises were scratching noises and fluttering soft noises and she only heard them once a year, when the taxman in his hooded and dusty road cloak came from Lacon to take money from Da. Money that they didn’t have, so the the scary hooded man invited himself in, walked around their hearth and home and took valuables instead. The cloaked man scared the girl because it was the only time Da was angry and Da didn’t like being mad around Nanny or her. So she went to the fields to play and be with her voice.
The girl built the only thing the voice in her head said when she felt upset for Da or when Nanny would visit her at night. The girl took her simple straw doll out of it’s cradle, the cradle would be the house for her god. The girl wanted to know her god, but didn’t know if her god was anything at all, but the voice and the scratching and the soft fluttering noise…like the tax man scratching in his heavy ledger book, the scratching of his quill, recording their debt, the flipping of the pages, the pages in the heavy ledger, of names and locations and assets and debts…..scratching and fluttering amongst the voice in her head….to this god she dared to pray and she built it a cradle.
The girl took the taxman’s note, the one that he wrote down the time of his return for Da to know, even though Da couldn’t read the marks. She desperately wanted to read it though, she wanted to know when the taxman would return, she longed to do horrible things to the taxman’s eyes with Nanny’s bone rib knotting needles …..could she never see all of them under his deep dark cloak. She never thought like this and her god never spoke in her head like this unless Da had been upset and the taxman had recently left. So she took the fine piece of paper, a simple small note that she couldn’t read the scrawly marks upon, not yet and she prayed and prayed. The girl prayed and played and built and began to believe on that sour ground, beneath where Da laid his Nanny to rest, yet she didn’t rest well it would seem. Upon the sad, dry unyielding clay-pack that never gave much in the way of first fruits - so the girl may be the only thing on the vine that could be offered in the little communion she had, playing at the cradle. She made a little offering in a simple clay bowl, an ugly thing that even the vile taxman wouldn’t collect. In the offertory, upon the shrine, inside the child’s play cradle, she placed the thing she could focus her prayers on until her god arrived, she offered the taxman’s note that Da couldn’t read. The small scribble on precious paper that she so wanted to be able to read. On the second day she offered her lunch, six dried grapes - some of their best yield. She knelt in the clay-pack and let her mind talk and talk to itself, praying to something that she hoped would show itself. On the third day, in the pinnacle of heat of the day, as the girl knelt there a little god appeared.
The girl couldn’t quite see what she knew was there, her head hurt terribly and her sight was sparkly and shimmery. The girl thought it was the high shine of the brilliant day playing a trick, but her heart raced with the experience, she wanted and knew that this was real. Her humble efforts had made a little god, wood and stone, a simple little worship cairn for her little god to move into.
“Hope you can teach me something my Da can’t,” the girl said. She place dried vine in the cup and burned it. “It is all I pray for, to know things.” She watched the vine burn down, asking the stone and the cradle, smelling it. The girl coughed and she was quite thirsty, the water had to last though. “I know I haven’t done much,” she admitted in a whisper clutching her doll so tightly in dirty little hands, “I - I will listen to watch you have to say. Teach me to write and read. I want to understand. It will be a good thing to have a god teach me.”
The little blip of obscured substance, a shimmer that was at times a pin prick of light, sometimes a tear in reality, often times just a sensation, like when the girl spun and spun in the rain (so scarcely did the sky cry for them) spun to much and her whole sight was a blur - it spoke. In her head, the little girl heard the familiar voice, “You should go to a proper tabernacle in Lacon”, it said. It voice was hers, but also the scratching and rustling thing too, except the heard so many pages of so many rows and rows of countless book and quills. The volume of the voice and it’s age were halls of such voices, apparently there was a lot the little god could say, if she asked it the right way. The squeak of the chains that held the books in their place made her shake her head violently. The girl wanted to know what it had to say. “Go to a real house of worship, a good one where they will wash your hands and knees and feet. Have them bless you and teach you. I am not one of those myself and not one that is believed in. Only you do and you can still forget.” There was no wind and even the heat of the day had relented. Even with this change in temperature, even if it could best be described as a lack of any sense of temperature or weather all together, the girl felt so comfortable. She knew comfort in this place after such a long drought of nothingness and loss. The girl pressed on, although it made her skull pulse and her temples ring, she blinked at the dryness in her eyes, she strained to look upon it’s face, if the little god had one, it wasn’t much more than a brilliant corona as it continued.
“I’m no one yet. I could tell others about you though, perhaps put in a good word?” It ran its appendages of light and motion through the clay, creating deep rivets in the dull ground, it plucked a stone that was a brilliant gem when the little god held it. The girl wanted to be like this stone, a precious thing it attended to, if only for a little while.
The stone was made smooth and warm and malleable in its grasp, the little god continued to fashion it as it made a sighing sound, “I mean no offense, little one. I enjoy this house very much, considering that I have never had one before. Do you believe that your belief in me, by yourself will give you what you want?”
The girl was tired when she replied, “This is already more than I have ever had or could have hoped for, when I came to play for my Nanny.” She had forgotten the doll, not realizing that it had dropped out of her grasp. She had also not realized that she was no longer held to the confines of her body’s grasp, as she floated there conversing with her new little god. Her spirit vibrated as the noise they made in her opened third eye continued, “The worship has been nice, for I have never known such things. I couldn’t even begin to explain where or when I was before I heard you. I can promise you nothing though, what do you hope your prayers will do for you? You are restless and they don’t bring you peace.”
The girl responded from a state that felt like the best kind of sleep, “Tell me what I should call you and tell me how I can begin to comprehend you. My eyes are heavy from the effort.”
“I am the forgotten words, written on the oldest pages of lost books never to be found again. My sounds built the bones of your world and what your allowed to touch, believe to see, and smell. The thoughts that run through minds that form language known and not known but is written and pondered. Be it a play or prayer to appease a person such as yourself, I dwell in their mind. I am the boundary between a madman’s thought to a child’s first planned action. I am the sight of the storm, still far off, but I will tell you of a smell and of a sensation that you know that it is there. I am the sweet in fruit that you remember but have not consumed in this place for quite some time and long for. I am a little god of a thousand little threads of thought from all of your minds, flailing and unfurled, and continue to fray at the edges and ends until they fade into the eons. I am a momentary glimpse at an idea that a mind had but couldn’t hold, so it was forgotten - a change in the wind distracted them perhaps and I was gone from them.”
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Another, heavier sigh and it’s noise continued to vibrate her, “There’s no point in the worship of that. Go from here. Go worship Battle. Go find another field and pray you a good Harvest. Run and cry at the Storm itself perhaps, sing your songs to it’s maelstrom. Save your virginal mind for good things, things known and remain as you are, an uncomplicated thing. So tiny and precious, every speck of within the mortar that binds your world. So vulnerable, I do not want to haunt or linger or corrupt. It is best to pray to a greater thing known and believed in.”
The girl braved and reached for the smooth stone, “I think you’re a very fine thing and I have heard what you have shared. This is fine and I will remain with thee.”
“Do what you will” and the light of the little god began to recede into the little stone, “but heed what was shared in this place between us. Do not curse my name when I don’t leave you now.”
The girl returned to herself and held the precious blue stone. She looked across the bare spanse and contemplated the nothing that two now saw and as one together. She placed the stone above and between her brows and pushed until she bled, but not much. It didn’t hurt her to do this. And then the storm rolled in, the first in a long time in that place, and though Da looked and looked, the girl wouldn’t be found to her as she contemplated in stillness. The storm raged for days and nearly weeks, yet she remained, washed by it. Though deep azure turned clouds to black, the wind blustered and boldly turned the soil, she was still. It flooded the clay-pack that could not drink it in, smote the vine field making it catch and cinder. Tore the thatch from roof and toppled cart and fencing, the girl was present and oblivious of this. No harm would come to her.
Da found her, thinking her lost to the storm’s rage. He found her amongst the remains of her play things, she was unscathed, awake yet not quite herself. Da cried and cried in relief as he cradled the only thing that mattered to him amongst his useless strife. “I shouldn’t have let you go out. We’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll be….” over and over his cry of relief as he rocked her on and on.
The girl did not reply nor would she move much for quite some time. Da thought her upset and said, “the storm has passed,” admiring but looking cautiously at the shimmering azure mounted in his child’s head, “We’ll rebuild, no, I can rebuild this for you. It will be better than it was once before and you’ll return to me, daughter. We’ll return with what offering we have and I will shore up the foundations of this thing tomorrow. What say you?”, Da asked desperately.
So the work was done, and in her mind the little god sighed, for it no longer dwelled in the temple. A year passed and Da had built a better structure and let the vine go fallow and untended. Low walls were made and roof of woven twig and shedded vine. Some neighbors tread from afar to see the girl and the stone and the shanty temple, some laughed, but some laid fruit and prayed for awhile. When the land knew no harvest, yet again, the people wailed and tore at their clothes and at what little they had. In merciful sacrifice, some slaughtered what woollied beasts they had out of desperation. They cried to old gods of the moon and harvest that did not answer while the girl silently conversed in her head, all the while watching the scene age before their eyes. Da’s ribs now shown in his chest, but he never left the girl alone (who was no longer alone) ever again. Even when the pitiful revolt came, for the time of the taxman drew near, Da stayed close to her.
The little god was speaking in her mind, “there is nothing left here for you”, huddled within its stone, “and there is nothing that I can do. There is nothing that can be done about this, these human designs and attachments. Remaining here, this burden you’re attached to, it will not cease.”
Some time passes and the taxman wandered back onto the land, far from Lacon. The girl had not spoken and her Da had gotten used to her silence. They were eating what little they had when the pounding came on the splintered wooden frame. Da wrapped her in Nanny’s old blanket and bade her be still and hide her face, since the brilliance of the gem had never dulled, not for a single day since the storm.
The conversation was familiar, a spoken dance presumed to be pleasant as the cloaked figure stood upon the doorstep and Da did his best to hold their frail footing. Da wasn’t letting him in though and this angered the taxman, the seething hiss of a sharp voice of grinding teeth came from beneath a motionless hood, the man never even moved beneath that hideous road-torn garb.
Three days came and went before the taxman returned with two other brutes. This time when Da held the threshold, one ran him thru and it was Da’s life water that drenched what was left of the vine for the first time since the storm. The girl said not a world, made no motion for Nanny’s needles as they packed her up, finding her indeed a precious treasure and took her away from there.
In the taxman’s spire, far away from the bones and blood of her kin, she could see the land. She could look out and try to imagine where she had come from and in which direction it was. In time she became more and more confused about the land marks and features that would lead her back there, were she to escape from her captors - if she wanted to. If she were to leave, she would only eventually return to the sour and dry clay that never gave her what they needed, she would find and abandoned shanty that only told a very unfortunate and miserable tale. She would find that Da’s bones weren’t on the threshold, at rest or scattered. No, she would learn a horrible truth that he had come to, mortally wounded, found that he had failed her and that he was alone and bleeding out. She would follow an umberal trail from the threshold to the cradle, his last effort to look for her or any sign of her. The girl would find his handprint in blood on the cradle, and know the allegiance he swore, anointing this holy site so that she may live and be protected.
She didn’t know these things and had very little time to ponder them because her head was absolutely ringing with the joy pulsing from the stone. Finally the little god in the stone could be free to do her, what it thought was some good, so it showed her many things indeed. From this elevation and opportunity, the little god had the ability to show her the spanse of her kind and on the many blank ledgers that the robed people left for her, she would write and record. So, at a young age, the girl would look out, see very far into distances but no longer looked for home. Her line of sight was almost always obstructed now by many indescribable things that only she could perceive, but somehow knew were akin to her little god and knew were actually there, only veiled. She spied these things, creatures of tyrannical size and shape and form. Some slithered, some were like the many gears that would operate machinations, all had so many eyes, too many eyes.
The girl found language in her mind to describe many things after many years of longing for it knew that she could now know what the taxman wrote on his note to her dear Da. She didn’t dwell there though, she couldn’t find the time to dream or rest because the little god’s words filled her mind relentlessly. Though she scribbled out and wrestled to find the right words that would fit, they did not stop, they did not cease. So she wrote and wrote and the robed people who attended to her in that high spire called her Oracle while they bathed and fed and tended to her, always there was the fluttering of paper, and books were bound of her many papers. The scratching of er quit never ceased and not even a haunt from Nanny could invade her mind….that was all taken up in the little gods words now. The words did not stop, she did not stop until the writing was done and when it was. When she looked and searched for more to scribe and found that the deep recessive well of damnable knowledge had run barren, the stone fell from her brow, dark and dead and she flung herself from the spire as did the stone from her.
The stone fell upon the cobblestones in the garden so far below and became a seed and when she fell, reunited, they became the tree.