Episode Ten

‘Jenna?’ Ma heard her childhood name, caught a movement out the corner of her eye and turned. Gone. She turned back to watch this child, this self. The child was nodding as if she were following some instruction. She emptied the basket onto the floor and sorted through the stones that she had collected. 

            ‘How small you are,’ said Ma. ‘Yet how grown up I felt.’

She might have been small to be left alone but had learnt things from Mother, who died in the previous winter. She had learnt the making and containing of fire, the gathering of food, herbs and berries, roots, small prey, and the collecting and cleansing of water. Each had its own incantation. Some she had learnt in the years past, and others her mother continued to teach through dreams and memory.

            It was safe, this place, and Jenna saw now how her younger self spoke so freely with Mother who only answered when needed.

            ‘Should I choose this or this? There is a squirrel there. Should I follow?’ The answer came in a low reassuring voice – yes, follow, but do not go beyond the place where the stream turns to white. Come back then. Watch the sun. When it falls to the top of the Elm turn back and follow the path to the fallen one. If the light is low, make camp there.

The child Jenna was making camp. She felt the brush of her mother’s hair against her own as she bowed down to kiss her on the head. Remember I am with you always. They squatted together placing a ring of large stones encircling a smaller ring. The fire would rise from the inner circle. The fire would be sheltered by the fallen one against which Jenna would rest all night. 

            Jenna took some starting fuel from the basket and piled it into a small airy circle as her mother had shown her. She found the place where the dry wood had been stored along with a vessel for cooking and another for water from the spring. She made a pyramid which she would set alight.

*

Ma smiled at the child, who continued to behave as if she was not there. There was someone else. The woman had been standing behind her, watching her and the child. She said nothing, but took Ma by the hand and it seems that they jumped. Everything sped past. Small villages and great cities sprang up and dissolved as the plants took the earth again, and again. There were wars with sticks and clubs and spears, swords, catapults, guns, fire, great mushroom bombs, guided missiles, drones, and people sitting like sleepwalkers at computer screens, tapping away. People lived and died and lived and died. Life and death turned over, over, plants, insects, oceans, skies, the earth itself. The populations of creatures expanded and diminished. Human babies were born, but there were fewer and fewer.  Human beings experimented with creating other creatures. Strange creatures came and went. Some continued on and grew stronger. Some seemed almost more human than those who created them.

            Ma and the woman were plunging beneath the earth and now they were surfacing, coming up like new plants through the earth, which broke open to let them through. They were emerging from the graves in which bodies lay. Ma felt that she had died before, and lived, but that all of this had come to an end. She saw a man lying motionless, face down upon the hill, with the scavengers closing in. She saw Jenna, alone, sewing by the fire. She was bigger now, a young woman. There was a man coming, a serious man with black eyes, black hair and the palest of skin, a man of religion. He was carrying something on his back and leaning on a stick carved from silver birch.

They plunged again. The last of the graves was shallow. The carcass of a woman was lying with a cat in a pillowcase. As she rose and then looked down upon this she was overwhelmed with sadness, not for herself, but for a boy whose name now escaped her. The woman smiled and took her hand once more.

This time they flew over the forest and she was able to see down into the earth where Dalyon sat in a children’s tea party with his two small companions. They were all wearing feathers and leaves that they had collected from the forest.

Ma longed to stay but there was something else she must see. They flew high above the forest until they came to a small clearing. Something was not right. From high up it seemed that there was a pile of old fur heaped in a small hill. As they drew closer she saw a mother sheltering her two youngsters who lay motionless in their own blood. She was weeping.