Daygo's Fury (28 page)

They sat around the empty fire pit.

“As children, we cling to lives that we knew. But now we know different. I am grateful every day that we do,” said Onyeka.

“For hours I could talk about my childhood in the tribes,” said Bosede. “My life since can be summed up in a small number of words.”

“You wish you were not chosen?” asked Namuso.

“What’s right? Two lives. Daygo flows the same. There are joys in this life. Times of peace and bliss that I never would have owned, that I find hard to imagine living without. Yet I wish I could have brought my tribe with me. Daygo flows. You should not want what is not. I am happy, and at peace, just like us all.”

Yejide rarely gave insight into her mind. When she did speak, it was a practiced voice from an empty face, and always those green eyes that said more. She was the only one that he sometimes watched with interest.

“Did everyone in the tribe need the same release as me? Was everyone taught as I was?” he asked her as she sat naked beside the stream, her feet below the water. The stream passed by her ankles, looking so natural in its movements, flowing, liquid smooth as it changed path, as though destiny had forewarned it.

“I taught Namuso too. At least with sex. In this, he knew more than you. His tension was not so crazed as yours. Still, until you have had sex enough times, it is a thing that will dominate the mind of any young boy.”

“How do you know?”

“Obasi is my guru. He instructed me to teach Namuso. You were more obviously in need. When I was a child, an adolescent, he taught me.”

“Were you in need of teaching?” Niisa asked.

She turned her green-eyed gaze on him. After a while, she answered. “We are all in need of teaching.” Her voice was firm and full as always, motherly and womanly in its richness. Her face was perfect and never changed. Her eyes watched him, long after they had finished talking, and he wondered at the meaning behind her words.

“Are we cursed?” Namuso asked as they sat around the fire pit. “Has Daygo cursed us? Were we a mistake?”

“Why do you ask?” said Jabara.

“We do not have children.”

Jabara nodded slowly. “We are infertile. The Walolang de Kgotia have always been so.”

“Were there not some?”

“Some,” Raba nodded. “But very few.”

“Why is this a curse?” asked Jabara.

“Is it not nature correcting its mistake?”

“Perhaps, as we see the truth, as we sense Daygo’s full intelligence, for us to continue in movement is pointless. But why a curse? We have reached Samadhi. We have attained understanding. This is the ultimate blessing. This is the final point, as a human, that we can hope to attain. Here we can pass back, in peace.”

They were infertile, and they were all unusually healthy. Through the histories of the Walolang de Kgotia that Raba recited to Niisa, almost all died of old age.

“I remember you,” Namuso said one night as he sat down beside Niisa, after the rest had turned to bed. Niisa sat, as usual, gazing into the night sky. “At the gathering. Only vaguely. I had to think back for some time when you arrived, to try to place you. You were … a little different to the rest of us.” Niisa turned his head to Namuso, and Namuso paused. “I guess, I was a kid myself when you arrived. And Raba forbade talking or thinking about our old tribe and our family. When I saw how well you achieved this … it only made me feel I was failing even worse. So … so I never asked.” He turned his eyes up from the cave’s entrance and looked at Niisa. “How were my family, Niisa, at the last gathering you were at? How was my tribe?”

“A girl called Emeka spoke of you,” he said after a moment. “She called you a friend. She spoke of the testing, of how you were chosen. She told me this.”

Namuso’s face lit up in surprise as he looked back at Niisa, and he smiled. “Was she well? Had she found a betrothed?”

“I was to be betrothed to her.”

He laughed. “You? Really? What chance. How funny. And then you were chosen.” His smile turned a little sad. “I hope she is not too disappointed.” He paused and they sat in silence for a little while, Niisa staring up at the moon, Namuso at the hill and the cave mouth, neither really seeing what their gaze lingered on. “I miss her,” he said to nothing and no one.

“You had a sister,” he asked finally, “and a family. Do you miss them?”

Niisa looked to the sky. “My sister, sometimes. We used have a morning ritual, we would rise and clasp each other’s hands and dance, stretch the morning from our limbs, much like we do here each day. But there was something more to what we shared. Something different to what we achieve here.” He silenced for a while, wondering on it as he often had in the past. “I feel it must be something. It must touch on … could it be … the caring … the … what is called love? Of another being?” He shook his head. “I think … I don’t know … perhaps it has something to do with this … perhaps it is a base thing within us to crave or to … feel its loss, upon its passing. It is just a small thing but it does cause me to wonder. There seemed something more … connected, to what we did.”

He paused in thought, and turned to Namuso. “Are you consumed by such things?”

Namuso looked at him. “By love? Does not everyone know love, and loss? Of course I am consumed by such things.”

“Describe them to me.”

“Describe love? What do you mean? When you care for someone …”

“Yes. Describe it to me. Tell me what it is.”

Niisa continued to look into the blackness of the sky, the blackness sparkled with light. He could feel Namuso’s confused gaze upon him; but he knew that, eventually, as Namuso always did, he would do what he was told. Namuso shook his head and looked to the ground.

“How to describe such a thing? When you like someone. When they have supported you in times of need. When you needed company or a friendly ear, when you needed … to feel cared for … to feel loved … to feel as though you are a good person, someone that other people can like, that person has offered that support, that comfort, that … stability to fall back on. Perhaps the person is just a lot of fun to be around, they make you laugh, they make you happy. You love them in return. Your parents are you parents, you love them as they love you.”

“But what is it? What exactly is it? Make me understand it.”

“It is what you feel. It is attachment. It is … more than that, you would do anything for this person. It doesn’t even matter what they have done for you, after a point. They are in your heart. Without them … you would be on your own.”

Niisa smiled, and turned his attention back to the sky. “The fear of isolation. Is that all?” He laughed shortly and quietly. “It always seems to come down to that. What silly creatures fill up the world. It can be hard to fathom Daygo’s wisdom.”

After some time, Namuso stood and left. Niisa barely noticed.

******

There were three known stages to the commune. The first stage was the stage of transition, as when an animal died; when Daygo flowed from a singular stream to many. As in the test, when an animal was butchered alive, Daygo transitioned from the separate flow of the animal to the million different flows within the dead carcass. In the moment of this occurrence, if extreme focus and concentration was held at the exact point of change, communion, a sense of Daygo, could be achieved without reaching Samadhi state. The level of concentration and focus required on this specific point could be achieved artificially by the eating of pacroot, or by long hours of practice over months. And so the priests could decipher quite easily on their annual visits to the tribes if an adolescent child was worthy and in need of a lifetime’s practice and study.

Part of their weekly routine was to spend hours meditating on one object until it lost all association as a separate thing. It became something of everything. It became Daygo, life, in all of its forms. It was a part of Niisa, just as he was a part of it. There was no separation between the two.

The second stage was regarded as full communion with Daygo; when sense of Daygo in the air surrounding the practitioner was achieved. All of the priests reached this level daily in the caves.

The third stage was communion with those already in commune. As they had opened themselves up to communion with the air all around them, so they, too, became accessible to those in a very advanced stage of commune. There were seven members in the history of the Walolang de Kgotia who claimed to have reached this stage and made a lifetime’s study of it. What could be sensed was described by Raba as a person’s aura, and it was vastly more complex than the connection with the air around them.

No one had ever reached a fourth stage of commune, according to Raba’s histories. Where it might go, what was next, was only guessed at.

******

They spent the sixth day of every week in silence. They did not commune, they did not stretch or work the body. They sat and they ate and they drank and they considered all things. Sometimes Niisa would sit looking at a drop of water on a leaf for hours on end, watching its life pass by, or he would watch a flower from early morning until night, as it slowly budded and opened up to sunlight and insects, until it was fully flowered, and then, as the day waned, it slowly closed its petals once more. There was something immeasurably beautiful and stilling to watch the slow process of life in such a way. He had once thought the flower moved slowly, almost too slowly to see, but after watching it thus on occasional days he realised the incredible speed of its change, the fleeting glimpse of its life cycle, the change of Daygo, the immeasurable expanse of time before and after this tiny moment that was a day. How small and short they were living as their own singular entity, living within a separate life they had fabricated and confused into existence. The ignorance that consumed them. The blindness to the Earth and Daygo and true life; something so far greater and larger and blissful that they were a miniscule action within, like a lice or an insect or something on his palm that he could not even see that was a million times smaller than either.

There was an incredible peace, serenity and joy in those days sitting as a silent observer of life. Sometimes he wished he could live out the rest of his days so, as many priests had done before him. But he was consumed with divine purpose that he had always felt and had known to be true that first day he felt the red moon’s pull. He still had to divine what it was, and to do so, he needed more knowledge. On the long nights that he watched the red moon in the sky, he sensed its evil, its distortion towards Daygo, he sensed its threat. It was hard to think something as small as he might make a difference, but he believed in his destiny to do so. He believed in the wisdom of the Daygo stream, and he would follow its wisdom until the threat of the moon was eliminated.

He came upon the third stage slowly.

As the others tried to maintain Samadhi, Niisa allowed it to leave, he allowed a complete return to the self, he watched with open eyes while the rest had theirs closed. He sensed as Niisa, while the rest strived to lose that attachment. Samadhi was indeed blissful and insightful, but Niisa had too much to learn, Niisa had a purpose to be defined. Samadhi state could be reached as he died, or as an old man. It was not what he sought now. Only through retention of the ambitions of the self could he seek out these answers, could he further his learning from a human standpoint. While the rest were slaves to their emotions and susceptible to the increased energy of the commune, Niisa felt none, he was flat, he sought with intelligent calm. Piece by piece, he ingested the connection to everything; he studied it and felt it. He tentatively reached for more.

As time passed, he started to sense more than just the mesh of air. He started to see the connective tissue of the mesh touch and reach into his fellow priests. They had achieved communion, connection, with the air, as had he. He stretched his consciousness towards that connection.

Months passed in practice, until one day, like a foetus pressing, then bursting forth from the womb of a woman into the fresh air of the outside world, he pressed inwards, against an unseen resistance, bending it before him until he, too, burst forth, softly and slowly into the soul of another man. And as it broke before him he became suddenly blinded, consumed by something like light.

Expanding before him were wheels of energy circling within Uksit too fast to dissect or separate. It was a roaring in the ears devoid of sound, a light too bright to see, a pressure consuming his whole being that he could not feel. He felt miniscule and lost, assaulted by information far greater than he. And yet there were the vestiges of understanding within it. Like a long forgotten memory, there was something familiar, and he had a small sense to try to remember, to know, to find a path through the maze to understanding. But the vague sense was fleeting and became lost, until all thought of attention and awareness melted away into simple awe for what was unfolding before him, but not before him, unfolding as part of him. He became small, he reverted to Samadhi. He dropped to nothing and lost all distinction and self. He simply was of the present, of the furious flowing tides of Daygo.

He woke out on the grass, with the blue sky turning purple above him. Were it not for that sign of passed time, he could not have said how long he had retained communion. Time had become meaningless without the human understanding attached to it. He had become simply present, charged within the movement of life, of Daygo, in simplicity and peace.