the city of light A CHILD IN THE DARKNESS
Benjamin Sharkey
I
n days long past, ten thousand herds still migrated across the northern steppes, a million gazelles, deer, mares and stallions, glorious as an army with banners, before the great hunts of our age. Two ages before our own great age of heat, the ice had not yet waxed south, and the people of the great forests and tundras of the north could still just remember an age when the wild flowers had bloomed and danced, the most beautiful carpet of the forest floor. In those days, in a village to the south, there lived a little girl whose name was Barteh. She grew up in the innocence and curiosity of the greatest of childhoods. Her parents were gentle, and their neighbours kind. The family grew barley and kept oxen, two great beasts whom Barteh, in her childishness, called Og and Ob. When the season for planting came, she would lead these giants with a single piece of twine tied to golden rings in their noses. And when it was time for harvest, she would play in the field among the gatherers, and help them by gathering the stalks into dolls. Such a world was outgrown far too fast. As Barteh grew into youthfulness, the simplest and most genuine pleasures of childhood gripped her less and less, displaced by the potential of other, as yet unrealised pleasures. “In the town are many great pleasures,” a neighbour boy, Breh, one year her senior, told her with great authority, though he had never left the village. “Come with me—you would dearly enjoy it!”
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And so, the two children, while their parents were busy with harvest, set out on the road to the north. It was good fun at first—the people on the road were very different, strange and funny, with huge beards of red and black, long robes or puffy breeches, of rich and sickly colours. Some of them showed the children their strange coins, which bore the faces of terrible looking men from every corner of the world, and even gave them small copper ones. The children excitedly chattered about what they might buy with these when they reached the town. But the cities of this world are dark. Their facades mimic beauty and clamour glory, but at the core there is rottenness. It is the very height which makes its shadows so great, and in those shadows the creatures of the earth hide their deeds, even from themselves. No such deeds could have appeared to the imagination of two such innocents as now wandered within the city walls. How could the paradise of their childhoods have prepared them? And how could their parents now warn them? The town was a cacophony of sights, sounds and smells, of facades and shadows. The two children soon found themselves separated and lost in the swirling chaos, the smoke of people. Barteh wandered through the streets, a little anxious now, but overcome by all that swirled dimly before her.
