scarcely seen for years, lived a short walk away. She returned looking as if someone had hit her. Shusha was always a sensitive soul, too much so, for her own good, as she knew; and as I often warned her. And the story, when at last she was able to tell it, did not seem at once to justify such pain. DeRod at first did not recognise her, and then apologised by saying it was a long time since she had visited. She had to swallow indignation: she had once made every kind of attempt to see him. But he did not seem to see that she was angry. It was a family occasion, the room full of people. His children were like my son, with families of their own. Shusha was only just able to put names to the men and women who must be DeRod’s progeny, and there were a lot of children. A long table was loaded with food. Plentiful, reported Shusha, but not very elegant. And this was the note or tone of what she saw: she was puzzled by it and surprised. She said they were a crude and ordinary lot, and you’d never think they were anything more than a gathering of the kind of people you might find in a low-class eating house or inn. ‘I kept thinking, This is Destra’s son, he was brought up by Destra,’ she said, sorrowful, and with that unfailing note of bewilderment that had to accompany our discussions of DeRod. She was introduced as an aunt, to some, who said it was nice to meet her and as a great-aunt to others, They offered her food but she said to DeRod that she wanted to talk to him, even for a minute. ‘Well, talk away,’ he said, as if it did not occur to him that she might have a special reason for needing to talk. ‘It’s about the festivals’ she said. ‘Why are you abolishing them?’ She said she felt like some idiot, the way they all looked at her. “What makes you think I am abolishing anything?’ DeRod enquired, impatient with her. ‘You’ve just taken over the colleges, you’ve taken our buildings.’ ‘Oh, have we?’ said he, not impudently, but as if hearing the news for the first time. ‘Well, never mind, I’m sure you can fix up your festivals.’
Soon she excused herself and came home, weeping.
The Twelve sent him messages of all kinds, and visited him in delegations of twos and threes at his house. He greeted us with his usual affability, making it clear by his manner that we were an irrelevance; he might offer us a cup of wine, but the most we could get out of him was, ‘I’m working on something, I’m sure you’ll like it.’
On my visit to him, with Eleven and Nine, I said to him, ‘You are destroying the very essence of what we are, the soul of The Cities. We are admired for it by everyone. Why are you doing this?’ I remember his look - I’m not likely to forget it] How often I have recalled that look, to see if there was something there I had missed. His look at me, at us, was not angry. Not discommoded. It showed nothing of the discomfort of one who feels inferior. There was a little embarrassment, not on his own account, but on ours. ‘I didn’t say I am doing away with music,’ he repeated. ‘There are plenty of different kinds of songs and music’
‘And the tales? Our story? The history of The Cities?’
Did he shrug? Well, as good as.
‘We teach our children,’ I said. ‘It is how they learn their skills. They learn from them an enquiring habit of mind, how to think, how to make comparisons. How are our children going to be taught?’
How well I remember his long preoccupied stare, at this. He frowned, he fidgeted, his eyes wandered and then returned, he leaned forward to stare at my face, into our faces, and then sat back. He sighed. He must know what he was destroying: he must. And yet he did not seem to.
The festivals were cancelled, and The Cities began to fall into disorder. There was a sullen, angry mood, and that was when began the outbreaks of public violence. As for us, The Twelve, we were as if he had hit us in the heart region: the way fighters do, to disable an opponent. Some of us became ill. Quite soon Shusha died. I knew it was because of shock, of grief.
Then the new thing began. A Festival was announced, and it would be organised by the armies. When it took place, people who were used to the old ways were uncomfortable. It was all military, to do with army exercises, marching, army life, and even fighting, though that was a rather abstract affair, more like games, and it would be hard to associate blood and death with them. Hard to imagine the ceremonies of our festivals, which insisted on the deep seriousness of our lives, our responsibilities for each other and for The Cities. The choirs of DeRod s armies sang wonderfully: after all, many had been trained at our schools. But what were they singing! You could imagine that not very clever children had written these songs, children who had no idea that anything better was possible. They were pompous, or bombastic; they were silly and jokey - the kind of jokes small children like. The audience showed their disappointment. This did not last. A new generation arrives quickly on any scene, and soon the children were youngsters who became adults, and when they said Festivals they meant DeRod s and ours were not much more than a memory insisted on by their parents.
The nastiness of The Cruel Whip came back. Some of the new songs I could hardly bear to listen to, they were so vulgar, so crude, so full of incipient violence.
We, The Twelve, were not surprised that DeRod was threatening the nearest city to ours, over the mountains, with invasion. The strength and reputation of The Cities saved us: the endangered city succumbed at once to DeRod and sent a tribute of slaves.
So, with the next city he decided to master. Soon half the peninsula owed tribute to us, and not a real battle had been fought.
That was the picture not long after Shusha’s death, at about the time of my son’s coming to live in my house. He was employed by the armies as an administrator, and while of course he had been brought up by myself and by Shusha in the old days, it was as if all that had slipped away from him, gone. I used to marvel that a young man who had had such an upbringing could now see nothing of value in it. His look at me when I tried to remind him that there had been better times was like DeRod’s: it was I, it was we, who were out of place, out of step. And so it was with all the children of The Twelve. The new spirit in The Cities had wiped their memories clean.
When that rich feast of tales and music had so suddenly been silenced, all kinds of superstitions sprang up, and new gods flourished. Our tales and songs had not celebrated Deity, not more than the basic truth of our interconnectedness, under the Sun, our Creator. Now there was a moon cult, and with that ceremonies of a bloody kind which even now I don’t know much about. My son Bora doesn’t either, but my grandson is an initiate. Bora told me, ‘He’s into some weird stuff, I can tell you. Better not be out at night with that lot around or you’ll find yourself with your throat cut and stretched out on a stone to please the moon.’ He laughed. You could think he admired that sort of thing. It was the violence he admired. That he does admire.
At the inns and drinking houses the songs were like wails or bawlings or battle cries, and where the gentle tones, the subtleties, of our songs had been, was now, louder than anything, a loud drumming, like the heartbeat of a criminal. When I walk past such a place I hurry, because I can feel my whole self being aroused to
anger, threat, even murder. And yet our people can now spend all evening in such places, with that loud thumping in their ears, drinking, sometimes dancing. It is hard to believe that some of them must remember a different, gentler time.
I missed and miss more and more, the sounds of the games and songs that once you could hear everywhere, as you went about.
There was a skipping song that went like this:
