‘I don’t know if you can imagine how I felt after my Mother Sage died. All your Mother Sages were with you right up to the day you left for the march. They waved you on your way – I saw some of them. Then they would have gone to the forest, I am sure, since their task was done and they were old. But I expect you imagine them still alive, don’t you?’

   Roy saw pain in some of their faces, but he did not wait for anyone to comment.

That time was very terrible for me. My grief and hurt were overwhelming. Not only had Mother Sage left me, but my identity had been shattered. I had no one to talk to about my suffering, having lost the very person I would have been able to share my thoughts and feelings with. I had been trained not to show strong emotions, even to deny I had any, which must have contributed to the trauma I went through.

   The loneliness of losing my companion and guardian was emphasised because, without her, the environment she had surrounded me with began to disintegrate. Most of the servants rolled up their bedding and went down the hill. Village people don’t have any sense of responsibility; it was only Mother Sage’s influence that kept them from going off to do what they pleased. The new Fey stayed for a while. She brought me food twice a day for several days, and then she too went, and I was left to fend for myself. It is pointless now to wrap all that happened to me during that period in descriptions of loneliness and woe. I did recover myself, and I learned a great deal.

   I had a look at the papers in Mother Sage’s basket. None of it had been bound, but most of the loose sheets were in groups enclosed in folders. Several of these containing the journal she had told me about, dated by the calendar system she had devised for my benefit: days within moon cycles within season cycles numbered from when the project of bringing me up was begun. It was all written in tiny script, the lines close together and on both sides of each page. So many words! I started reading it, but I found it disturbing, not so much because it brought my loss vividly to my consciousness, but because I discovered in it another person besides the Mother Sage I had known for most of my life. This person was the one I had had a poignant glimpse of when she told her story just after she died: the watersoul woman drawn back from her going to the forest to be my guardian. The interplay between the two personalities was clearly apparent, but manifested in unexpected ways. I would have thought it would have troubled the watersoul woman to put on a pretence of despising her own people; but not so; she had the careless innocence which I later found was typical of her people. It was the personality coloured by firesoul values who was troubled by the deception.

   Putting the journal aside, I looked to see what else there was and found a small bundle of pink-dyed folders labelled ‘Pattern Mathematics – Bony Bailey’. I could not read that either because the identity I had lost was as an important New Beginning mathematician, and I wanted nothing more to do with mathematical ideas.

   There was another collection of papers which were notes about the project of bringing me up as firesoul. I certainly did not want to know any more about that terrible deception.

   While I was trying to make up my mind what to do next I took to wandering around the empty house. The drawing room and dining room had many embroidered wall hangings showing scenes from the ancient days. Some of the pictures showed what Mother Sage had called ‘classical scenes’, of gods and nymphs and mythical creatures or charming young couples tending flocks of animals amongst flowery meadows and little hills. Other pictures Mother Sage had called ‘religious’; they were less jolly. Some had been taken down. They had shown cruel torture, and had given me bad dreams. Mother Sage had been explaining the religious stories to me, but then she stopped. There were violent scenes in other pictures: plumed generals on horseback and armies engaged in battle, and huntsmen slaughtering wild beasts. They hadn’t bothered me that much, I think because they were not meant to affect you like the religious ones were.

   There was quite a different kind of picture, which had always fascinated me, hanging in my old schoolroom. It showed a city with towering buildings, wide streets teeming with vehicles, and skies streaked with gleaming aeroplanes. I remembered, when I was a boy, going to the tapestry workroom when that picture was being stitched. I suppose that at first the ‘slaves’ had ‘followed the patterns of tapestry making’, and so created close copies of tapestries they saw in the past. Only later did they make one to Mother Sage’s design.

   When I was little I used to enjoy crawling around on the floor of the drawing room tracing the pattern in the fur carpet. The village people only kill small wild animals and so the carpet was made up from hundreds of little pelts stitched together in a complex geometric design.

   The drawing room had more furniture than Mother Sage and I could ever use. There were leather-covered chairs and couches, and others of fine basketwork, with fringed and embroidered cushions. Other items were purely decorative. Displayed on basketwork tables were sculptures of wood and bone: several women in coyly erotic poses, a few fearful beasts leaping to the kill, a warrior in a plumed helmet plunging his sword into a fantastic monster. There were basketwork vases, once always full of fresh flowers, now holding dead stalks and surrounded by shrivelled petals.

   Compared with the simple dwellings of the village people my house was a palace. Like a wealthy man from the ancient times I had many possessions. I had been told as a child that these things showed how important I was, and how the ‘slaves’ had laboured long hours to make them for me, and the latter was surely true. I was to discover later that the village people make things as much for the fun of making them as for their usefulness. They were perpetually discarding and remaking, using materials which grow abundantly and are decomposed to good mulch when discarded. But nothing they make is anyone’s personal possession. And there is no ownership of houses, land or produce from the gardens. Children do not belong to anyone in particular, love and lovers belong to anyone or no one. Curiously, judged by firesoul values, the absence of property is as much carelessness as sharing; one could not say for sure that it is good or bad, it could be seen as a kind of selfishness, even cruelty, in spite of the people having no sense of the separate self to benefit from any selfish behaviour.

   But I am getting ahead of my story; my understanding of watersoul ways was meagre and uncertain before I went to live with the people. Having been reminded of crawling on the fur carpet and watching the tapestry-making when I was much younger, I thought perhaps it would help me come to terms with what had happened if I read the papers about how my upbringing was decided upon. I read through the first folder. In it were records of eversight discussions with other Mother Sages, in which they agreed on what aspects of the ancient pattern they could and should replicate for the boys.

   The most difficult issue was the use of fire. In principle, fire technology was an essential component. At first many of the Mother Sages, including my own, had expressed willingness to use fire; but they could not find ways of using it that were satisfactory. The main problem was that they could not get the other village people who were supposed to be servants to cooperate, not in lighting or using fires, or in moving big stones to make fireplaces, or in digging up clay for bricks. The Mother Sages could have had fires on the ground in the open which they lit and used themselves, but that would have distracted them from the education work, and lowered their status, which they felt ought to be between the firesoul ‘lords’ and the ‘servants or slaves’. Fire inside a house made entirely of wood was only possible with a centre fireplace on an earth floor and a smoke hole in the roof. A single great hall was a possibility, but the Mother Sages decided on a house design with several elegantly furnished rooms. So there would be no fire.

   Another important topic was whether to bring the boys up singly or to bring groups of them together at an early stage into schools. It was the problem with fire that decided this. Fire was linked to the pattern of inturned consciousness, and the isolated self. There would be no fire to reinforce and confirm this essential personality component, therefore it would be confirmed by keeping the boys physically isolated instead, apart from the mother figures, who would carefully avoid being too affectionate and physically close to their charges.

   I could not go on reading about these deliberations. It reminded me of what Mother Sage had told me about artificial environments for wild animals called ‘zoos’, which they had in the ancient times. This was in response to questions I asked about the hunting scenes on the tapestries. It seems some people were sorry that the wild animals had been killed and the wild places they had lived in destroyed, so they collected the last few animals and kept them in zoos. In order for the animals to exhibit their natural behaviour and, most importantly when there were few or none left in the wild, to mate and reproduce their kind, they had to be provided with surroundings sufficiently like their natural habitat. That was what the Mother Sages had been doing for us firesoul boys.

   Mother Sage had told me that the firesoul boys before us had faded away and died because the watersoul village was not a suitable environment for them; even so the discussions about us made me feel uncomfortable. It was as if it was us they were constructing, rather than the environment, and I suppose that was what was done to children in the ancient times. Later, when I began to think in a pattern way, I realised that what the Mother Sages were doing was tuning in to an old pattern, which was present, although its links with ongoing human behaviour had been almost entirely broken. We were the only fragments of its continuing manifestation.

   There was an account in the folder about the building of our house. The house was to be large and rectangular in shape, and durable, which required a great deal of timber. So a swathe of forest trees from the village to half way up the hill was cut down. To make the foundation of the house a number of tree trunks were cut to form piles and driven into the ground using rocks. A sturdy frame was constructed and filled in and roofed with shingle. The upper floor was rigidly boarded.

   Stone axes with long wooden handles had been made for cutting down the big trees. I had seen the axes because, after the house was finished, they were arranged on a table in a special little room which was never to be used. Mother Sage said that this symbolised that the pattern of felling and construction was completed. The episode had been disturbing for the people, who naturally followed old patterns and disliked anything new. When it was all over a healing process began. When the people wandered up or down the cleared avenue they brought pocketfuls of fruit to munch on the way. Then they pushed into the earth some of the small fruit seeds, and any of the stones they did not crack open to eat. When the house was first built the avenue must have looked like a grand drive, such as big houses used to have in the ancient times. But over the years the hillside and the area around the house became an orchard garden, which matured to harmonious balance.

   I went outside then to look at the house. I had not noticed what a bad state it was in. It was covered with moss, many of the shingles on the walls and roof were soft and rotten, loose or missing. It occurred to me what a lot of wood would be needed to keep the house in good repair. Those axes would have been kept busy felling forest trees. Supposing the whole village lived in houses like this, there would surely be hardly any forest left. I began to wonder what effect the New Beginning would have. Not only would vast amounts of timber be needed, but mountains would be demolished for rock and minerals.

   I went back into the house and into the little room where the axes were. I pulled at the handle of one of them and the whole arrangement fell down. The axe was heavy. I lugged it out and went around the back to the servants’ huts. There were six huts, sleeping six or seven people each. There were several big forest trees in amongst the huts. I took a swipe at one of them with the axe. The sharp stone blade bit in deeply, but I could see that it would take me some time to make the V-shaped holes necessary for the tree to fall. I had never tried to do it, but I guessed I could do it in an hour. I found myself talking to the tree.

   ‘I could cut you down in an hour. How long has it taken you to grow? Fifty season cycles? So the new houses have to last that long. Mine didn’t, but we’ll have technology – chemicals or something – to stop the wood from rotting.’

   I imagined the tree lying at my feet. ‘Now what?’ I asked it. ‘I’d have to cut you up. Branches off first, then into lengths, then into thin slices for floor boards and shingles. I suppose when they built my house they propped the sections up and then split them with blows from above.’ I mimed the actions. ‘My word, they must have worked hard! But of course, for the New Beginning there’ll be people who know how to get metals to make better tools, and even machinery. Then it’ll be easier: we’d have you in nice pieces in no time.

   ‘Now, how many of you will it need to house properly all the people who lived here? There were six or seven people to each of the six two-roomed huts, which is about forty people. The two of us had ten rooms between us in the big house. So we’ll need twenty houses with ten rooms. Each house needs the timber from a strip of ground the size of the avenue. My goodness, we’d have to clear the whole hillside. So what about the village?’

   I climbed up the ladder of one of the huts and onto the roof, then onto a branch of my tree, and as high as I could get. I parted the branches to look down at the village. Mentally I sectioned off the village into groups of ten huts, and grouped these in threes.

   ‘If there are six or seven people to a hut, each of those sections would house two hundred people. There are about ten such groups, so this is a village of about two thousand people. We’d have to clear the forest at least to the second firebreak,’ I told the tree. ‘I suppose there’d be other materials: stone, blocks of baked clay, perhaps even metal sections, I don’t know. But they’d have to be dug out of the ground, so the forest would be cleared anyway, perhaps just as fuel for the fire technology.’ I climbed down thoughtfully.

   Picking up the axe, I went back to the big house. I took a swipe at a section of the side wall, severing a supporting pole. A cascade of shingles slithered down to leave a gaping hole.

   ‘Much easier to destroy than to build,’ I muttered.

   I no longer wanted to be in the big, empty, rotting house that had been my childhood cage. I decided to move into one of the servants' huts, which are very small; really more like nests. I had watched when the first one was being built, much to Mother Sage's annoyance. There were plenty of rooms in the house for the servants, but they did not like them, they were too hard and square apparently. They had tolerated them for a few years, but then Mother Sage reluctantly agreed that they could make their own sleeping huts, as long as they were tucked away in the forest at the back, out of my view. But I insisted on watching the construction, and Mother Sage, grudgingly at first, explained the principles and techniques which were used.

   Down in the village there is a long slow cycle of hut-building. Oval rings of fruit or nut trees are grown from seed, so that many season cycles hence they can be used for hut frames. As they grow they are pruned so that there are branches only where they would be needed. They bear fruit meanwhile, and some never become huts.

   When the trees in one of the rings are tall and strong enough, a hut can be built onto them. Lengths of bamboo from the bamboo island, or small roundwood coppice or saplings from the outer garden, or wood from old huts are used for the rest of the frame. The thickest poles are hung from bands over the ‘V’ formed by the first branching and lashed together at first floor level. On these are built the supports for the upper floor and the roof. The walls are filled in with lightly framed woven mats. The roof is thatched with reeds. The upper floor, which is the communal sleeping area is made of tough webbing, attached to the poles at the sides and forming a bouncy floor on which are piled fur blankets and feather quilts. The lower floor is enclosed in secure panels to make a food storeroom.

   Each hut lasts about the same number of season cycles as a human lifespan which, for these people, is intentionally short. During that time, the hut would have its walls replaced and its thatch renewed as often as necessary to keep it neat, and secure against predators and vermin.

   When the supporting trees grow too big, the hut is abandoned and another one made on another tree ring.

   When the servants built their huts behind the house on the hill, they picked out a number of naturally occurring collections of young trees in the forest behind us. Some of the smallest trees were cut down to leave suitable rings, and the huts were built in the usual fashion, using the felled trees as poles instead of bringing bamboo or wood from elsewhere. At the time, my attitudes coached by Mother Sage, I shared her distaste at the idea of sleeping curled up with several others on a bouncy platform. I retired to my four poster bed in my own chamber, and Mother Sage to hers, but I fancy the house echoed with emptiness after the servants moved out.

   Now, years later, I was moving out of the big house into a sleeping hut. I collected some bedding, rolled it into a bundle for putting over my shoulder to climb the ladder, and made a cosy nest in one of the sleeping huts. I slept very soundly that night, and felt ready for anything in the morning, as if my mind had been cleansed of anxiety. I climbed out into the sunlit garden, and went to the stream to wash my body. Approaching the massive shape of the big house on my return, a thought that seemed to have come from a forgotten dream came to me, and I spoke it aloud to the house:

   ‘I wonder if we should make the New Beginning of civilisation. The village way is easy, and the people are happy. They have everything they want round about them, and they can tell what effect they are having: all living things have an effect; that’s all right as long as it all cycles. But shut inside a city with everything brought in from outside we wouldn’t know if all the forests were cut down and the land turned to deserts. Perhaps the wonders of technology would only make the destruction worse. How would we know? Could it be that busy garden villages are better than lonely cities?’

   Though the words I uttered were calmly rational, the implications for my life were shattering. The words echoed through my head, sending reverberations of such force they crushed my soul, my whole reason for being. I shuddered, screwed my eyes shut and crossed my arms around my body as if to defend myself against physical attack.

   But nothing happened. I was still there. Mother Sage had raised me for the New Beginning, and fed me with knowledge. I was approaching manhood with a life to live. I relaxed and opened my eyes. The decaying house confronted me.

   ‘How can she have been wrong?’ I asked the house. ‘And all the others like her who decided to raise firesoul boys? They were convinced the boys were being born because there was a pattern which had to be completed. Of course they assumed that it was the catastrophe brought about by firesoul technology that had to be healed and continued in a better way. But if there is no better way: if firesoul technology would always be destructive and could only be available to a very few people, with the rest miserable slaves, and with constant wars over land and what had to be stripped off the land and taken out of it —

   ‘But perhaps civilisation is worth even such a price, which must be paid again and again. And cities, and grand buildings, are merely the shell. Within the shell, the embryo grows: human creativity – art, literature, philosophy, science, mathematics – that is worth any price, surely?’

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