It is still dark. The Child, I see, is just setting the bowl down. He is stooped, holding it in both hands, his face covered by the hanks of coarse hair.
He hears me draw breath. He is no more than ten feet away and our eyes meet for a moment, before he drops the bowl. It rolls towards me. He springs to his feet and stands there, puzzled, as if uncertain, for the first time perhaps, which of the two worlds he should fly to - back into the woods, or into whatever new world he has smelled and touched and taken into himself that comes from us. He has eaten from an earthenware bowl made by men, on a wheel. He has eaten grain that has been sown and gathered and crushed and boiled, and sweetend with a spoonful of honey. Something, as we face one another in the darkness, has passed between us. We have spoken. I know it. In a language beyond tongues.
Next year there will be no need to hunt him. He will seek us out.
Only now he backs slowly away into the darkness, his bare feet scuffing the leaves, and I must wait another whole winter to pass.
It all happens as I knew it would.
The year has passed quickly. I have become sturdy and strong again and have stopped mooning about and regretting my fate. I go for long walks in the brushwood, which is full of tiny animals and insects, all of them worth observing. I climb down to the shore and talk to the fishermen, while the sea grinds and rattles at the smooth black pebbles. The sea in these parts is full of strange fish, all beautiful in their own way, all created perfectly after their own needs, every detail of their anatomy useful, necessary, and for that reason admirable, even when they are the product of terror. I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirity works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We have only to find the spring and release it. Such changes are slow beyond imagination. They take generations. But it works, this process. We are already the product of generation after generation of wishing to be thus. And what you are reader, is what we have wished. Are you gods already? Have you found wings? I go out each day with the old man. He is the closest friend I have ever had. How strange that I have had to leave my own people to find him. He has taught me to weave a net, and I begin to be good at it. There are different sorts of nets, and traps also, for the different kinds of fish. There are also the various hooks. I am happy to learn all this. What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitter perfectly to another, and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business with nets and hooks, these old analogies.
I have also begun to gather seeds on my own excursion in the brush - there are little marsh flowers out there, so small you hardly see them, and when I come back I push them into the earth with a grimy forefinger and they sprout. I have begun to make, simple as it is, a garden.
And all winter I drilled with my company of guards and have discovered in myself what my father must always have known was there, however much I denied it, the lineaments of a soldier. How I have changed! What a very different self has begun to emerge in me!
I now understand these people’s speech almost as well as my own, and find it oddly moving. It isn’t at all like our Roman tongue, whose endings are designed to express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling. This language is equally expressive, but what it presents is the raw life and unity of things. I believe I could make poems in it. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer to the first principle of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are and changes them into what they would be. I have even begun to find my eye delighted by the simple forms of this place, the narrower range of colors, the harsh lines of cliff and shrub, the clear, watery light. Now that spring is no longer to be recognized in blossoms or in new leaves on the trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means. I have also, in a winter of long evening arguments, won my battle with Ryzak. In the autumn, when the birches are bare, we will go out and find the boy, and this time, if it can be managed without harm, we will bring him back. Ryzak has only one doubt. He must first get the assurance of the shaman that they can bring the boy into the village without antagonizing some spirit of the woods.
What they are afraid of, I think, is that by allowing the Child into the village, they may make themselves vulnerable to whatever being it is that has raised and protected him. It may be the wolves that prowl round the stockade in winter, howling above the wind, gray packs that are themselves like spirits of the winter plains, shaggy, iron-fanged, famished with cold. Might the boy, Ryzak wonders, have the power to turn himself into a wolf in the winter months? Is that how he survives? And where would we be then? Might he be able to creep out at night and open the gates to his brothers? Or is it some spirit even more savage and terrible than wolves that has nursed him? Some animal presence we do not know and have never seen. What if he were in communion with that, or had the power of assuming the form of a creature whose shape, whose horror, we can only imagine, and have no magic to placate? I argue that he is just a boy, a male child as human as ourselves, and Ryzak believes me, or pretends to because he has a great desire, in my presence, to appear superior to his superstitious people and as reasonable as he thinks I am. But in fact I am deceiving him. I know it is not an ordinary boy. It is the Child.
The summer comes, and my garden flourishes. Wild flowers mostly that I have found in the marshes or between the stalks of oats in our narrow ploughed land. Who knows where the seeds blow in from? Careful tending has made them strong, and regular feeding with leaf mold and manure brings out their color, blue, red, and yellow. The women of the house find so much effort spent on something that we cannot eat foolish beyond belief; but they like the colors and are happy enough to provide me each day with a little water from our meager store. Mostly, I think, they humor me as they would a child. Everything else about us exists purely for use. The women wear no ornaments. What they sew has good strong seams but not a stitch that is fanciful. Only my flowers are frivolous, part of the old life I have not quite abandoned. Only the time I spend upon them is play.
For these people it is a new concept, play. How can I make them understand that till I came here it was the only thing I knew? Everything I ever valued before this was valuable only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law.
But we are free after all. We are bound not by the laws of our nature but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws without doing violence to our essential being.
We are free to transcend ourselves. If we have the imagination for it.
My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome. They are the beginning, the first of the changes. Some day, I know, I shall find one of our women stopping by as she crosses the yard with a bag of seed to smell one of my gaudy little blooms. She will, without knowing it, be taking the first step into a new world.