the city of light: a child in the darkness

Benjamin Sharkey

In 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!” 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.

“Here,” a man held out a ring to her, of burning gold, like the sun itself when it breathes its last daily breaths. “Try it on?” he offered.

She held out her little hand and he slipped it on her finger. Its glistening dimmed. He grabbed hold of her wrist, and no matter how hard she tugged, with all her child’s might, he held on. She shouted, but who was there to hear her in the shadows?

Those who took her handed her over to the slavers on their travels. And they took her roughly along the great western road, where it wound now to the north. It grew very cold there, and very dry too. And Barteh could hardly walk with them. They carried her for a way, but soon they stopped.

“Who is going to want such a ragged little thing who has withered like a flower caught in spring snow?” they said to themselves. “She is too great a burden for too little a return, and the road ahead is still long. What life will await her there anyway? Come, let us leave her here to the beasts.” And so they left her on the steppe, one man in his mercy leaving for her a gourd of stale water.

Barteh was now alone upon the steppe. No human could be seen on the entire horizon, but the forest of the north gaped in the distance, great and terrible, like an army waiting for battle, still and silent.

It was all there was to shelter her from the wild and cold onset of night, and so she headed north, away from all she knew.

The darkness of the forest advanced towards her, even as she neared it. The trees towered, shapes of jagged darkness. The thick ranks of the forest closed around her. The cold wind no longer blew here, but the stillness stalked her. The slightest sounds agitated her. The ground here was beyond the touch of the light.

Suddenly a movement to the right caught her eye. Stripes of shadows fell across her. She turned to the left. Stripes flickered across the forest wall. She felt as though piercing eyes were fixed on her, but there was nothing glinting in the darkness. A soft padding seemed to echo her footfall beyond the trees before and beside her, and the stripes kept pace with her. She could hardly breathe. Terror filled her heart and all her being. She felt faint and empty.

A light flickered ahead and she ran towards it. The forest seemed to part before the light. She heard the empty echo of a snarl behind her, and she ran for the clearing. The light shimmered across the floor as it does through the depths of the sea. But as she approached it, a new terror gripped her. It appeared to her as it does to all who are drowning: the terror of life. Behind her were dark things, but before her was this awful light. She hid from it in the darkness of the forest. She felt at home in the darkness. The light would dissolve her being as it did all shadows. She hid for fear that her deeds would be exposed. They loomed with monstrous clarity before her: the betrayal she had wrought against her parents, whose gentleness she had despised, and against her friend, whom she had encouraged, and against that whole world of simple beauty which she had, with such recklessness, disdained.

A multitude of colours flashed in the sky. The image of a city of light, far off, scattered in its journey through the depths. It was like no other city: alive, like the forest below, but this life gave out light as it danced; a thousand shapes; an infinite spectrum of hues, such are only beheld in the jewels of the deep earth and the high mountains.

Like lightning, a great host descended through the depths, an army with banners, clothed in robes richer than light. A great host of spirits, a city of colours. A great song of a thousand choirs sang out, audible to the heart alone.

“You wander and are lost,” said the voice, like thunder.

Barteh hid her face in her hands and sought to hide from the light. But it illuminated her.

“Do not fear.”

She looked up, and light filled her eyes. Strong arms gripped her, terrible in tenderness, with the gentleness that only strength possesses.

“You wander away from good things, but now you have found great things.”

In the centre of the clearing, light descended like falling embers around her. And a flame touched her tongue, as sweet as honey. She knew shame no longer, neither her own nor that of those who brought her here, the multitudes in their town of darkness, now forgotten.

Then the hosts were gone. The cohorts left with the echo of their horns and choirs. But the dark sky was a richer blue than before. Barteh walked on through the forest, and no longer were her steps stalked. Light shone on her, even in the thickest part of the woods. It was as though she was facing a sunrise even beneath the night’s trees.

Barteh found herself now beyond the woods, close to the dark town. Its shadows stretched out to meet her, but she walked on anyway. The shadowy streets and façades, which hid hunched and wretched figures, caused her heart to tremble with fear. But the light inside her held her. The shadows grasped and twirled around her like smoke, yet they could not touch her.

The shades of the town people shuffled around her and towards her. If only she might touch them, that they might know the tender light, the sweetness of its flame. The forgiveness she knew, they needed to know too. The sights, sounds and smells stilled, the shadows ceased to move.

“What arrogance is this,” the man who had sold her declared to the crowd of townspeople, “That this child brings this light to disturb us here?”

“What an arrogant child,” they cried, “who thinks we do not have fire of our own?”

“She thinks we are the ones who need forgiveness,” declared the captain of the city guard, “but she is the one who should be ashamed!”

Then the townsfolk took her with firm hands and dragged her from the town, and the captain and his men went and fetched their bows. They took her to the mulberry grove, and there they strung their bows and notched their arrows. They meant to fill her with their barbs and so extinguish the light. But the light shines in the dark and overcomes it.

They loosed their shafts. But as they fell upon their victim, they turned to rays of light. The archers and all the town people fell to the ground, dazzled by the radiance. The shadows fled, and the dark town was bathed in colour.

Benjamin is studying for an MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine studies at Magdalen. When he is not absorbed in Central Asian history, he enjoys drawing, cooking, and reading Wookieepedia, but his favourite thing is bonding with the college deer.