The Fall and Ascent of Norumbega
(excerpt from HGOB tie-in novel Norumbega to Babylon)
The mole’s dim curtain. The lynx’s beam. Headlong lioness. Hound sagacious. Spider’s touch. Nice bee. grov’lling swine. Half-reas’ning elephant. Every animal was an image swimming in his head, through all the others, each defined by a sense or quality. All of them had to be acquired in order to fulfill the prophecy.
He knew it could be done, as it had been many times before; Leif Broadstream was merely the latest to attempt it. The first time the words were spoken, the words that raised the golden pillars from the ground and filled their baskets with pearls, was when the two peoples of Norumbega met on the cold rocky shore.
The Norse had completed an impossible journey, sailing across what they had started to assume was an endless ocean. They were half and again starved, but the new land they’d found had a people all its own, and they knew to bring food with them. They were darker of skin, hair, and eye, but arrived in such welcoming warmth that the Norse squinted against their brightness after a year under the sea’s fog.
Somehow, despite sharing not a single word between their languages, the leader of the explorers and the chief of the tribe managed to speak. Later it would be attributed to a handshake between pantheons. One of the offspring of Odin must have stowed away with the Norse, and was equally happy to see a bestial trickster weaving between the natives, laughing with its entire head.
Both leaders had the same thought, and took turns saying one word at a time, and together those words became the prophecy:
And when the tenth invader is a friend
to Norumbega both of us are sent.
There we thrive until the eleventh comes
and drinks our blood alongside teas and rums.
One of both who knows our ways of learning
will undertake ev’ry animal’s journey
until they know the land foes seek to steal
and can repel them to complete the wheel.
With bestial power they are driven off
and our golden branches remain aloft.
But should our chosen fail to understand,
then it’s the end of Norumbega clan.
The gold will sink and the people will rise,
for shared words go unheard under blood cries.
Leif knew only the bounty of Norumbega. Their halls stood by pillars of gold and their streams were sometimes more drifting pearl than water. Wild animals let them be, understanding that they had been blessed, that Norumbega was paradise on Earth, and predation and disease had no place there as long as it lasted.
The two peoples had blended into one, and they were certain a hybrid god now oversaw their civilization. But just as with the Norse and their longboats, eventually another castaway god came to their shore, and this one did not share. He had no pantheon around him; he claimed to be the one and only.
The pilgrims he brought under him could not share words, only crushing judgment. They saw the gold as wealth, not as solid light. They stole, and when they could not steal without violence they took to it enthusiastically, even after they learned that any treasure removed from Norumbega turned to ash. It was cursed ash too, with each grain as heavy as the entire golden pillar had been. One pinch on a man’s back would flatten him to death.
Despite this they kept coming, too blinded by entitled greed. Their weapons used an explosive powder to propel metal balls. They were the sort of wicked devices that would never cross the mind of a Norumbegan. Instead, when they needed new ideas they turned to the powers of nature just beyond their borders.
Leif Broadstream was chosen for cleverness and for his desire to help, but beyond the choosing no help could be offered to him. He wasn’t even allowed clothing, for it was the animal’s world he was about to enter. He sought the powers of nature, and could only begin as he was freshest in life.
Where the invaders sought power in wicked volatile machinery, a true Norumbegan would forage it, use it only as needed, and then let it fall to the side, keeping only the lessons learned. There was something to cherish in every animal’s life, all the way down to the wiggling worms that enriched their soil, but Leif sought those best equipped for harsh and desperate situations.
He started small, with the mole, crawling naked through the forest on all fours until he found the opening to a burrow. Dropping to his belly, he waited nearly a full silent day for one to emerge. When one finally did it was the dead of night and Leif saw only the tiniest sparkle of its weak beady eyes.
That was all they needed to share. Eye to eye. Leif set his soul out on a raft, and willed a wind to send that raft toward the mole, toward the dark tunnels of its eyes. Once it was inside the creature retracted its head back underground, but it took Leif’s spirit with it. The young man was still naked and helpless on his belly, but his sight was in the earthen tunnels.
A deep breath allowed him to smell the muscles of the world. Rich. Moist. Like the sweetest cakes imaginable. Everything the tunnel could terminate in was something the mole could enjoy, especially a dead end, as that was just an opportunity for more creation, but this one was going somewhere in particular. It wanted to show its passenger something special.
Deeper down they went together, past where even the worms go, into a loam so dark it looked like a cloudless and moonless sky. On the surface Leif struggled to breathe, even as his limbs held paralyzed; it felt like he was drowning in the darkness. The mole had no such sensation, swimming through it as elegantly as a beaver.
The human had to keep quiet. This was not his turn to speak. He’d already put his word in, and the mole was free to say its contribution as languidly as it liked. He couldn’t hold his breath either. That was resistance. He had to know the mole’s truth, the mole’s experience, to wield its power.
At the limit of his ability to keep conscious it felt like soil was being poured down his open throat, pebbles and the drippings from the oldest roots filling up all the tiny spaces between his skin and muscles, muscles and bone.
Finally the mole turned the last corner in the bowels of the world, and even in the complete blackness it shone: a golden pillar of Norumbega. It was a brilliant wall to the mole, too big to even appear curved.
The sediment emptied from Leif’s lungs and he understood. The pillars of Norumbega were no mere baubles. They extended all the way to the core of their land, of all lands. Traveling through the bedrock of all creation, their rocky shore was blessed above all other places. Should the pillars ever sink they would still exist, waiting again for those who could make paradise in mortal squalor.
Leif’s vision returned to his eyes; he attempted to stand, wobbling on weakened ankles. He squinted against the risen sun, but he he had to look up to be sure his journey progressed. It didn’t take long. The colored smoke rose above the trees, changing its shape midair like a serpent. The dark blue trail weaved the symbol of the mole. The smoke signaler was a shaman of sorts, the wisest person in all of Norumbega. They had undertaken the same journey once, and so sensed any time the chosen advanced.
Leif smiled; now all of his people saw that he fought for them. He closed his eyes only when the symbol of his success was entirely dissipated, in order to feel his new power. The mole’s dim curtain, the world where eyes were not important, granted him a new sense of vibration. As long as his feet were on the ground he could feel everything that moved upon it, through not just the forest and its maze of roots but the shore and every beating wave that came and went.
He also felt the pilgrims of the invading single god. They marched, all their steps afraid of deviating, as if any uncut path was automatically treacherous. How miserable. No gold would ever rise through such a terrified footprint. Such lives made it so that Norumbega could never expand; it was encircled and entrapped by the thin-skinned bubble of their undying anxieties.
His hatred grew, but he shouldn’t have watered that seed so much. The mole’s power was not granted for him to linger on his disgust for them, but to find the other animals who had what he sought.
Next was the lynx, a challenging target to locate even with his newfound skill. The elegant wildcat’s padded footsteps barely made any vibrations to detect. It traveled lighter than an animal a third its size, and its dozing breath was barely more than the rustling of a leaf. To make it all the more difficult it seemed to sense that it was being tracked immediately, and slept only for short periods in piles of the most agitated leaves it could find.
Even when he was close it would not just be handed over. Dusk was all about him, which he realized moments too late was the lynx’s favored time to hunt, its slashing eyes sharpened in the twilight. The mole was a pacifist creature, fully capable of dying without being bothered. Not this cat. There was no charity, no mercy, no negotiation without bloodshed.
He hadn’t seen it yet, but he knew it was hunting him back, keeping to the branches and the stones so its vibrations couldn’t be felt. Leif sensed its intent regardless. This was a game, with no consequences for the lynx should it lose, and every consequence for Leif should he. If it caught him unaware it would chomp down on the back of his neck and kill him. He had to lock eyes with it before that, had to open the connection.
It could’ve dropped on him from above, so he moved to the first clearing he could find: a mass of boulders with thorns growing out of the seams between them. Those spines meant the hunters had to watch where they stepped. Not only would it cause injury, but the resulting pained thrash could be felt through the vines, plucked like one strand of a spider’s web.
But the spider was for later. Leif’s dread took hold. The cat was getting closer all the time; he felt it. Whirling around he saw nothing, but it was still getting closer. How? If he knew he would not have needed its prize. Another spin. Closer. He checked an empty sky. Closer. Bent and flailed to touch his own back just to make sure it wasn’t already perched on his shoulders. Closer. He stepped back and sent a thorn into his sole. Closer.
All he had was the pain, so he turned it into an idea and used it. The lynx was expecting a degree of intelligence from its prey, so he abandoned all strategy and purpose, doing exactly what he felt like doing. Leif screamed. The sudden outburst startled the creature. It hesitated, and the hesitation caused a claw to scrape across the rock, which Leif’s mole sense detected.
Again he spun, but this time precisely, catching the cat with one foot raised. Its sheer size nearly knocked him over. Gray touched the edges of its brown coat and ringed its black spots. Tufts of silky fur topped its ears. There were plenty of other details outlining its years of impressive hunts, but they all fell away as their eyes met. The mole’s gaze had made way, but the lynx’s met his spearpoint to spearpoint. They clashed with a spark, and when it faded Leif was looking at himself through the cat’s eyes.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The animal was focus incarnate. Everything around the target of its gaze was warped, layered, like its quarry radiated all other substance and light. The hunt was everything; the hunt was gravity.
Lynx turned away, quickly disappeared into the underbrush, but Leif’s vision rode along. There was no great foundational truth this time, just what he already knew. Life was supplied by death, and a life as dense and lithe as a cat’s required the sacrifice of many others. The Norumbegans weren’t violent, but how much death was required to fuel their paradise? He didn’t know.
The cat only showed him how much fueled a cat. There was no minimum challenge needed for a hunt: grasshoppers, frogs, fish, hatchlings fallen out of the nest, all the way up to deer and bear cubs. Once the lynx’s beam was set upon them so too was death. That beam was the prize, for it seemed to pierce any veil and reveal what was behind.
In truth it could do no such thing, and was nothing more than extraordinary focus. In a wall of vegetation it could pick out the gaps, and then the gaps that overlapped other gaps, layers and layers back, until the cat’s eyes found the only open path. If there was any opening all the way through it was like the obstruction wasn’t even there. From one glimpse of passing fur across the forest the lynx knew whether its prey was large or small, young or old, attentive or carefree.
Leif’s eyes were dumped unceremoniously back into his head in the middle of the cat gorging on a trout, as if it had suddenly remembered he was still there and it wanted to shake off the dead weight. It was disappointing compared to the reverence of the mole, but he remembered the lynx was a predator, and likely saw itself as equal to or greater than the humans.
In glancing at the forest his pupils snapped narrow, and suddenly windows through it were thrown wide open. Landmarks like waterfalls and bone piles were revealed, dotting the map in his mind that had previously labeled the entire area as just a green blob and the word ‘forest’. There were roads the animals used, places they avoided, pitfalls now plain as day.
With the lynx’s beam he could see the invaders, marching alongside them, just an arm’s length away, and they would never know thanks to the trees and bushes separating them. Between the beam and the curtain their presence in his mind was already near overwhelming. There wasn’t a moment’s peace with all their stomping, open-mouthed chewing, guffawing, and muttering of prayers.
Perhaps it was best to strike immediately; he was confident he could do it. So powerful was his anger that it convinced him he needed no animals at all. He had lived the Norumbega way his entire life, was born in a rippling pool of its wisdom, and thus had the entire arsenal of their civilization already. Gunpowder could not stop the thundering bison stampede that was his heart.
But the symbol of the lynx went up in smoke, and now he could see his people celebrate him even across a vast distance. Not completing his journey would be disrespectful to them, to his ancestors. Every power would be his, for he knew his place, right there, fenced in by the pillars of gold. Once he had the strength of the world they would drift out of his way as he walked toward them, expanding the boundaries of their perfect city.
Next were the headlong lioness and the hound sagacious. It wasn’t clear what the mountain lion would have to offer that the lynx could not, but he understood it when he felt it pounce. Both creatures could pounce, but the essence of the maneuver was about putting your entire weight and all your force into it without concern for yourself, and was thus more meaningful with a greater weight. Their eyes met with his back on the ground, and the lioness left him there, wandering away with his sight. It took him hours to realize the animal had nothing else to show but that first moment where their breaths mixed.
With her skill he could put all of himself into every blow, and he used it to meet the eyes of the hound sagacious, the gray wolf. It, and its entire pack, found him by scent, knowing he was going to chase them down anyway. Some of them still remembered the last Norumbegan to walk among them, and to walk away with their keen sense of smell.
To them locking eyes was no great sacrifice. Eyes were a convenience. The nose was the true gateway to understanding, as Leif learned when his vision stayed put but his nose and lungs filled up with the air breathed by the retreating wolf pack. They took his respiration to the shore, let him breathe in the salt, the pale dead crabs with their flesh going gelatinous and leaking out when the tide pulled at their fissures, the down of the shorebirds as they flapped and fought with each other, and even the wood of the beached enemy boats, its scent nothing but a long complaint that it wasn’t allowed to decompose.
Now he could smell the invaders with every breath, and so didn’t even look for the smoky symbol of the wolf overhead before beginning his search for the next beast on the checklist. He knew it was up there.
Next came the spider’s touch, which was acquired face to face with a grand web between two trees, far larger than the young man. Its master sat at the center, full of enough silk to cloak the entire forest if it were so inclined. Two eyes met eight, and at first there was confusion as his sight tried to divide itself into compatible pieces.
But again it was not about the eyes, but the pluck of a string. How to pluck without getting stuck. How to walk up trees like they were the ground. How to step around the heat and walk across the roiling surface of a boiling spring. How to choose where the foot lands even when the world wants to make the decision for you.
The nice bee, too nice to think of anything but flowers, buzzed by his head, looking at him incidentally. From flower, to flower, to bloom, to blossom, to petal, to flower. A thousand dives into pools of golden pollen powder. There was nothing to learn, until it was called away to an attack on the hive in which it sacrificed its life, turning its soul into a spear so powerful its innards were ripped free. Its last thought was of flowers, and it occurred before it even heard the call to defense.
It was the power to sacrifice everything without a second thought for the greater good; Leif stored it away. Nice to have, but unnecessary. They would fall with little trouble. A cloud passed overhead, probably the dissolving symbol of the nice, but temporary, little bee.
Eventually he reached the grov’lling swine, and the beast was even worse than it sounded. Leif hoped for a wild boar, something he could at least go tusk to tusk with and respect, but while sneaking close to an enemy camp he accidentally met the eyes of one of their livestock: a fat hog wallowing in the mud.
While they stared at each other it chewed absentmindedly, only handing over its wisdom when Leif became aggressive. That wisdom was to settle for one’s lot in life. If you had a nice mud puddle, and things to chew on that tasted alright, and other disgusting pigs to share it with, everything was as it should be. Sometimes conflict could be allowed to buzz by overhead like a dragonfly. It didn’t need to be seized, a bite didn’t need to be risked.
At least with the bee there was a chance he might need its skill, but with the pig he wished he could scoop it out of his mind and toss it right back into the creature’s trough ungratefully. When he left he didn’t even look in the direction of his people. He didn’t want to see them celebrating such a pointless hurdle in his journey to might.
There were many more, and he bested them all, saw the world from every animal angle. At the end of the list was a very special kind of eye, one which could no longer see anything at all. The half-reas’ning elephant.
He’d never seen a living one, and neither had his parents, nor theirs, nor any Norumbegan. They walked the land an age ago, like woolly mountains. All that remained was their piled bones, sometimes artfully arranged, and not by early people. Leif was drawn to one such sight magnetically, his gaze pulled as if sliding down a wet funnel, into the chasms of a mammoth skull enthroned atop a mound of rib cages.
Through its sockets he saw the passage of time, of an entire age, from ice to dirt. The sun rose and fell so fast that he saw only the changes in the stars. Creatures he’d never even suspected of existing arose and died off, leaving nothing behind. That was the mammoth’s power; it left something behind. It taught him to be noble in defeat, to leave a mark not of destruction, but of life.
No, he told himself, rejecting what was earned over the course of thousands of years, an entire wheelbarrow of time to any of their gods. The elephant had constructed a falsehood in death, settling its spirit by convincing itself there was nothing that could be done to prevent it. Defeat was not an inevitability, nor was it even an option.
He invited the spirit of the mammoth into his own sight so he could give it a real lesson. If it transferred he felt nothing, but he moved as if he had a doubting passenger. The task was complete, and now the invaders could be driven off, and if they weren’t fleeing quickly enough, eliminated from this Earth.
Naked, coated in a hundred layers of dried mud, and with sharpened eyes and teeth, Leif bounded on all fours across the wilds outside Norumbega, using the golden pillars to mark his progress toward the shore. There was a village there, the main hub of what they called trading, but what was really pillaging.
He howled to let them know he was coming; there was nothing they could do to stop it. Let them load their guns and cannons. Let them barricade their doors. Let them dive into their bibles and bounce off the useless page. The pilgrims heard his cry and thought it was a wolf. They corralled their animals and locked them away, unaware they were the only creatures not in peril.
Hardly a weapon was ready when he leapt over their fences and into their midst. No demands were made, for he didn’t want them to do anything other than die. They didn’t deserve the opportunity to learn from the beasts of Norumbega, only to end like them, at the tips of his fangs and claws.
Hiding in their houses did nothing when he could both smell and see them through the slats, and feel their terrified trembling through the ground. If the doors were locked he clambered up the side and bashed his way through the roof. Even hermit crabs left their shells before these people. It was as if they didn’t even value their own lives. The lives brought the gold, not the other way around, the fools.
Bloody shreds were made of them, with no regard for age, sex, or the grov’lling they may have caught from their swine. It might have been smartest to get their leaders first, but Leif was sure he got them at some point. Any that remained had fled on their boats, and they were free to plague any shore but his as far as he was concerned.
Covered in minor scrapes and bruises, caused by his own rabid thrashing rather than resistance from his victims, Leif wandered into the surf and laid on his side, letting the lapping salt burn in his wounds, which was what it took to calm his blazing blood lust. Even with a stomach full of it, and bone, and flesh, it took him hours to sit up and realize that he had become a cannibal.
It wasn’t something the animals ever thought about, except perhaps the mammoth with its reverent treatment of its kin’s bones, so it never occurred to him when he was awash in all their hunting and persevering techniques. The smoke signaler had never mentioned that part of their own journey, but surely they must have walked the same path as he. It was the only way to be rid of them.
Stories came back to him, of others who shared eyes with the animals. They always came back changed, more respected, yet more distant from the people. Suddenly a crucial detail hit him like an anchor. All of them gave up meat. They could no longer consume the creatures they had lived inside, for it so filled their hearts with sorrow and despair.
Not Leif. He was still dripping with it. It was crusted to his lips. And all from one particular animal. But he’d done it. No matter the cost, he’d succeeded. Norumbega was celebrating, surely. All he had to do was pull himself out of the sand, turn around, and see the colored smoke of the great bonfire, around which hundreds would be dancing and praising his name.
Yet it was difficult to turn his neck, like a tree trying to swivel without cracking. When he finally managed he was not rewarded, but punished with an empty sky. No, not empty. The smoke was supposed to be a great veil, but it was only thin jets with short trails. What were those objects headed deeper into the sky?
By their trails it had to be the work of the smoke signaler, but these were not writing. Leif bolted, on all fours once more, toward his people, slowed by his need to keep his head twisted and aimed at the sky.
But should our chosen fail to understand,
then it’s the end of Norumbega clan.
The gold will sink and the people will rise,
for shared words go unheard under blood cries.
Leif skidded to a halt, ignoring the skin torn off the sides of his hands. His eyes went up and up and up, with the power of cats and falcons and all things that could see even in the dark, yet they couldn’t follow the rising objects any further. They were leaving him behind. The people were rising.
But to where? The prophecy never said. Or nobody told him specifically. The signaler tricked him, chose him knowing he would fail. Treachery. Treachery in Norumbega. Of course he hadn’t suspected it. They gave him the world, turned it upside down, and then left him to do… what with it?
His pained howl and flooding tears didn’t slow them. Where? Where was better than Norumbega? Nowhere, not as long as the golden pillars stood. Another lightning strike in his heart. He rushed for the border, just in time to see a golden tree sinking into the ground. He clawed at it, begged it to stay with him, smearing muddy blood and bloody mud along it as it descended.
Burrowing, he followed it underground, but he wasn’t an entire mole, so eventually he ran out of his diving breath and had to turn back, but not before hanging there in the soil for a moment, waiting to see if it was his grave.
It wasn’t, but nothing remained for him when he surfaced. His people were gone, his civilization reclaimed by the deep earth, and that wasn’t even all of his losses. No animal would approach him. They all shared their abilities just enough to track him and keep their distance.
He’d shared their sight, and misused it by their estimation, so now he would never catch sight of them again. Yet Leif lived, days on, seasons on, years on. He never saw a bird in the sky or a marching ant. It was like the world was dead, the oceans airless puddles. The only movement was the wind through the leaves.
And people. They weren’t connected to the rest. Leif would run to them, ready to share the spoils of his journey, eager to slobber his wisdom all over their faces, but by the time he got up to them, quick and quiet as the ultimate cat, the hunger overwhelmed him. He could no longer stomach plants, and no fish or rabbit ever crossed his path.
There was no solution to his isolation after Norumbega ascended. Every chance to end it turned into a tearful shameful devouring. Leif could only speak to his reflection, but over time he didn’t even recognize it.
On he lived regardless, perhaps sharing in some sort of immortality the rest of his people had achieved. On he lived until there was no Leif left, and only the name the other tribes and peoples gave him when he haunted their lands and stalked them in the night:
Wendigo.