When Last the Skies Were Blue

“Jhuu, where do we come from?”

I look down at my son and hope that my face does not betray the disgust and anger which threatens to leak out at the seams. He is too young to understand. I rage not at him, but at that word. Jhuu. The Pyala term for ‘matriarch’. If he knew what it represents, what we have forgotten in its place, he would not use it with such unabashed affection. But there is nothing I can do. I will always be Jhuu to him. Even our love is on their terms.

“What do you mean, Gabriel?” I ask quietly.

My son turns away and rubs his sun-bleached hair, a sign that I have embarrassed him. He does not like it when I use his real name. Outside my embrace, his name is Diakh’Frilaech. He considers Gabriel a childish nickname, the straining umbilical of maternal want. This is not the case. His name is a precious thing, one of the few things I can give him that are truly of my heart and soil.

Gabriel kneels down in the warm golden dust at my feet and draws a wobbly circle with his forefinger. He continues his thought. “If this world was made for the Pyala, what world was made for us? Where did we come from?”

Gabriel asks.

Anger is a weed and a wildflower. To plant the seed is a dangerous thing. It can overpower, sweep across the plain of the soul like a red plague; but cultivated – cultivated, perhaps it can become something rare and glorious. Something that inspires like only the wild and free can. But much luck is needed; luck and time. The seed was planted in me, when I was young; but it never bloomed - not until Gabriel was born of me, not until he opened my heart to sorrows and joys no lie can tame. And my child asks for it now, of his own free will. Maybe there is hope.

The Pyala know the power of stories. They construct their lies from our truths, transform our truths into lies. They have done it for centuries now. We know ourselves only through the eyes of monsters.

Humanity: A history of warfare and brutality and savagery; no heroes left save Hitler and Nero - men who triumphed because the species craves madness and despair; homeless because humans are weak and stupid and desperate for salvation.

And the children listen, because that is the nature of the child: To learn. The children have learned to look at their parents with disgust, to look at themselves with hatred. Our children long to be themselves no longer. Our children long to crawl on eight, many-jointed limbs. To be perfect. Like them.

But if Gabriel asks – there is hope.

So I tell him.

I tell him that this land of bitter dust and jagged stone was not made for the Pyala. I tell him of the waters that once stretched further than the reach of the horizon. I tell him of the great beasts that roamed, of how insects were tiny delicate things and we were beautiful and mighty. I tell him that we knew of love and of happiness and of peace long before they were taught us. I tell him that once, long ago, the sky was not a storm of sand. I tell him that once, long ago, it was our gods and our gods alone who walked like ghosts among the stars. I tell him that once, ages ago, this world was ours. And I tell him that we never, ever gave it away.

Gabriel waits expectantly. It is like nothing he has heard before. He stares at the dust and frowns. Clearly he itches to leave my sombre shadow, to be as carefree as the young are allowed to be. He lazily adds eight crooked limbs to his circle in the sand. My son does not believe a word I have said.

I sigh. “Go and play,” I tell him. “I have much work to do for the Matriarch.” The Pyala demand diligence from their servants. I can afford to delay my labours no longer.

The child scrambles to his feet obediently. He runs off a short distance – then stops. Gabriel turns back to me.

“Jhuu, when ..?”

“When?”

“The things in that story you just told me. When did they happen?”

We are discouraged from smiling; the Pyala find it repugnant. But something flutters in my chest, something that should by all rights be dead and yet refuses the darkness. I stare across the barren landscape, to the monolithic shadows of a metropolis burnt into the distant horizon.

“When last the skies were blue,” I reply.

I once dreamt of a sky like an ocean above my head. I no longer do; I dare not dream anything worth dreaming, for fear that my waking hours grow unbearable.

“Blue,” my son says, nodding. And then he runs off, trailing footprints in the sand. In an hour they will be gone, snuffed out by the shifting winds.