A m******e at Marrows Bend

Before the men were the Palemen who themselves were nomads. When the first Palemen arrived at Marrows Bend, it was nothing but an expanse of opening cluttered with trees and hills and listless animals who didn’t fear the new strangers. Birds sang wistfully into the day, longing for a time even the Palemen knew nothing of; and at night, the owls and crickets and the nocturnal denizens resumed the yearning of the daytime birds. At that time, the lake ran fresh down the hill by the city and the fishes jumped anxiously in it as if they were pleading to be picked and gutted. It was in this shade of utopia that the Palemen arrived and quickly settled into. Being nomads, they built camps in the hopes that someday soon, they would pack up and leave, but that day never came. They lived like visitors, taking a pinch of the resources as if in deference to an absent, trusting host. They were careful to replace whatever resources they took; they didn’t fish in excess; they replanted the trees they fell to build their camps; they turned the fallow spaces into viable, arable clearings; and they never left a fire through the night. They were at one with Marrows Bend, and the land yielded to them in compliance. Things went right between the Palemen and Marrows Bend for so long a time. Then the first men arrived. It was hot this day the men arrived. Older Palemen remember it clearly as the lines on the palm of their wrinkled hands, as the hoots of the first owls hunting in the night. They had all gathered in the haze of the afternoon sun, shading their eyes with their hands from the mirage and the heat to watch the coming Men multiply on the horizon. And when they finally came into the camp, the Palemen shared their food, their water, their tents and their beds in a way that immediately suggested that they did not believe it entirely belonged to them. It was evident in the way they walked gingerly too, as if a giant slept beneath the earth and they didn’t want to rouse it. Perhaps this was what the Men saw, this humble deferent manner – a deference that would later be interpreted by the men as docility – that the Palemen busied their existence, perhaps, was what made the Men not only stay, but also come to dominate all the land from Marrows Bend all the way to the island of King Jozzua. The Palemen, in retrospect, could not have seen it coming. When the race of men arrived in Marrows Bend that hot afternoon sun, the Palemen sent runners to the lake for water, sent another set of runners to collect fruits and fish, and a last set were tasked to go relieve the approaching travellers of their heavy baggage. Upon their arrival at the Palemen’s camp, they were met by two shocking facts: the first was that overwhelming hospitality and humbleness which has been previously addressed; the second was a lot more discernible, a lot more obvious. All the palemen were albinos. Upon their arrival, the men were greeted by the palemen with the calm, collectedness of a catholic priest. Children walked up to them with fruits and bowls of water to soothe and welcome them. Soon the children, the men and the Palemen’s alike, ran through the camp together, playing, accompanied by the unmistakable shrill laughter of innocence. Years later, before the war broke out, this, among many other things, would be referenced. What held the interest of the men was the colour of the Palemen’s skin. The palemen were tall. Their average height stood at least six feet tall. They had gaunt frames with shoulders that sagged from the weight of their humility. They had long fingers to match their height and clear, diaphanous skin like the lake from which they fetched water. And because they rarely had cause to use it, it was difficult for the men to believe in those first days that the palemen had the strength of five men. The men lived peacefully with the palemen for the first few years after their arrival to Marrows Bend. They, like the palemen, fished and farmed and lived in the modesty of their tents and small wooden abodes in the camp. As the days trundled into weeks and the weeks gradually lay themselves to rest, the years came upon them all with an unforeseen energy and suddenness; time, as it always did, went by without anyone noticing it. The men soon felt they had lived long enough in Marrows Bend to be able to lay legitimate claim on the land. Fights broke out at the camp over the littlest squabbles. Resentments built until it brimmed and everyone – palemen and men – saw that what was best would be for both of them to live separately. However, neither was ready to relinquish their claim on Marrows Bend. The palemen reminded the men of the day they arrived and the generosity with which they were welcomed and the fact that they met the palemen settled on this land; the men, in turn, doggedly insisted that the land belonged to them on the simple, obvious basis that all land belong to all the eight gods and the one true god and thus Marrows Bend was as much theirs as it was the Palemen’s. Soon the wisest and shrewdest of the men called a meeting among the leaders of both parties – palemen and men. They went far away from the disquiet of the camp, they went through the forest, they walked beside the lake, and they did not stop. Not even when they arrived at the foot of the hill, they did not stop until they were at its top. They did this because they all believed the hill was a completely neutral ground outside either party’s contention – the forest gave them their food and the lake gave them their water, but the hill merely stood rooted as a tree and watched on in all of its magnitude. There at the foot of this hill, the best of both men and palemen met and deliberated and agreed and disagreed and fought and reconciled until they were tired and rose from the gathering and turned away from the camp from which they all came. They saw, spread out before them, an endless array of space. Then suddenly, all of them found a consensus that was so obvious they wondered why they came all the way to the top of the hill before it presented itself. Then they hurried immediately because it burned within them all to effect this newfound solution. As if someone with the remote of their life pressed the rewind button, they went back the exact route they came; down the hill; past the lake where the fishes no longer jumped out of the water but hit deep because they had been hunted to paucity due to the population increase; they went through the forest that had now worn a ghostly, lacklustre aura because its animals had been hunted close to extinction, its trees now felled in great quantity to build boats, canoes and houses without the thought of replacement, and its crops brusquely tendered to; then they arrived at the camp, exhausted by the journey and the burden of the news they bore. They had unanimously come to the simple solution at the top of the hill that both the palemen and the men were incompatible as cohabitants and therefore must separate. “And who will leave for who?” one of the men asked the harbingers of this newfound solution. The answer came when the leaders of the men went to their tents and their houses and with their very own hands, they demolished them. By nightfall, all the men had all moved away from the Palemen’s camp. They did not leave Marrows Bend however. The same tents and wood which they dismantled from the Palemen’s camp was the same they used to build a fence around themselves kilometres beyond the hill, away from the palemen. In this way, they sealed themselves away from the palemen like a secret and they locked the palemen out of the enclosing forever like fugitives, like outcasts, like all the thing that, years later, would brew and spill over and split brothers and become seeds that bore the fruits of war. The discerning amongst the both of them know that what truly led to the war began at the moment of separation. A great number of people amongst the men insisted that the land beneath the camp rightfully belonged to them and not the palemen and they should have fought for it if that would have made the palemen yield it to them. They, visitors welcomed to Marrows Bend by visitors, wanted to lay claim to the home. Dissenters arose, factions broke in multiple places glass, and they all swore that the palemen would know no peace until the land belonged to them; not only the new space on Marrows Bend which they now found themselves on, but all of Marrows Bend. This was where the war truly started. The palemen remained at peace with the men. The men, most of them, reciprocated this feeling, but the factions, who still believed the palemen had cheated them of their gods-given land, remained and hated the palemen. This hatred soon manifested in other things; they began to call the palemen names that demeaned their skin colours: shining mirror or mirror, albi or albino, shadow light or morning star; what they wanted was to provoke the palemen into retaliation to further their baleful plot. But the palemen, who had been practicing peace long before the arrival of men, did not fall for this obvious bait. They were stronger, taller, older, and by consequence, wiser. Both of them thrived. The palemen were at one with nature; the forests, its animals, the lake, its fishes, all satiated the demands of the palemen and the palemen in turn plucked only what fruit they found ripe, cut what vegetable was fresh, and fished only whatever jumped into their net. The men lorded over the land; they whipped and ploughed until it yielded; fell more trees to build a new building they were calling “a factory”, and their fishing became in excess. Soon it was agreed amongst the palemen elders that something had to be done. They approached the men and proposed that because of how covetous some of the men had become, resources had to be partitioned. The surrounding forests were demarcated and the lake – who has heard of water being held to ransom by the squabble of mortals – was divided into two. (Afterwards, a new source of trouble began. Palemen and men began encroaching each other’s territory, sometimes deliberately, and other times, erroneously, but at all times, arguments ensued that without fail, led to fights and pockets of violence that saw people die.) The factory the men built soon began to yield. They were able to cure their sick faster than the palemen, they catered for their old better than the palemen, they looked after their wounded too better, and soon, visitors from far and wide came to the men for their health woes. Their carriages became more sophisticated, more durable, and could go all the way to the far end of Kingshold and back without the need for repair. This meant that a new economic trade route had been opened for the men, leading, logically, to more wealth for the men. More wealth meant they could make and buy more advanced, deadlier weapons; and nobody stocks up on weapons without the eventual goal of using it. They went on conquests far from Marrows Bend and almost every time, they returned victorious. The leaders of men implored the palemen to join them in battle. They pressed that because they camped outside the fence in the open, vulnerable to the elements, vulnerable to neighbouring attacks, diseases and pestilence, they proposed that could come under the protection of the men. All they needed to do was submit to the men’s authority. As expected, the palemen refused. The palemen realized that the men wanted them to be subservient to their authority not because of a selfless burning desire to protect palemen, but because they were becoming an eyesore on their conquest map. After all, if you have captured the whole world yet you cannot boast control over a small, innocuous group of nomads, that power must be questioned – don’t they say charity begins at home? They promised the palemen free medicine – yet another aspect of life that men had now completely outpaced the palemen – and new houses, but the palemen adamantly refused. All they wanted, they told the leaders of men, was for them to stop polluting the lake with residues from their new factory and to stop encroaching the forest without repair because even though both resources ad been partitioned, severe abuse would still affect the palemen. Some of the men jeered the backwardness of the palemen, “So you want us to stop, tree huggers? Mirror boys. How do we feed our workers and our people if we don’t have more than enough fish? From where will the good wood for our carriages be found if we don’t fell trees?” The hubris rang in their leers and their rhetoric. With more weapons came great power to the broken factions and the dissenters amongst the men. They were of the opinion that they could take on the palemen without the support of their leaders. They began to steal and store weapons away, waiting patiently, biding their time for the perfect moment to strike. They began to recruit secretly and when they found that their leaders were neither in support nor against their hatred for the palemen, they began to recruit openly. And as the years rolled into years perfectly like a boulder rolls into the entrance of a cave, this hatred for the palemen was handed down from fathers to children as inheritance. And the children, first oblivious to this searing hatred of the palemen, then indifferent to it as teenagers, then conversant with it as young adults, then, as adults, they bore it as a scar on their life, and they too, for reasons they could not particularly rationalize, wanted either the servitude if the palemen or the severance of their livelihood and existence. And finally, most importantly, there was love. There will always be love. Some of the men fell in love with some of the women of the palemen. And it is these sorts of affairs, the forbidden ones that burn the brightest in that grandiose, effulgent spectrum of love. These affairs were kept secret and usually, when it came in the open, the man would be disgraced or the woman disowned by her family for bringing them such disgrace. Sometimes, the lovers would be found dead, murdered gruesomely, and the word “Filth” would be branded on their body. The priests of the eight gods preached of love that should be shared within family, within friends and within the race of men but never should the love be interspersed, never should it cut across or be a bridge. But lovers could still be found meeting secretly under the blanket of the night at the places of partitions, by the lake, in the thick of the forest, away from the prying, predatory eyes of society. And once in a while, an encroacher in the forest would find written boldly on a tree, the clear writings of those possessed by love “Paleman and Man”. Of all the creatures that is known, none receives, experiences, and gives love as freely and innocently as a child. It does not matter to those sweet creatures whether they give it to an adult, man or woman, or a fellow child, paleman or man. The children of Marrows Bend were free of hate. They did not know it as a thing that even existed. In the rationale of their world, it was absent and thus, they were incapable of expressing it. And because children are cherished and coveted by almost everyone, the children were let alone. The palemen children and the men’s children mixed freely and played together regardless of the warnings and reservations of their guardians. The palemen children weren’t “see-through mirrors” or “burning glass” or “albinos” to them. They were just playmates with whom the time of childhood might be passes. Annually, the Marrows Bend festival was held in honour of the day the partition happened. It was called the Festival of Partition. During this festival, children ran amok in new colours and adults pretended all was well. The city gates were flung open on this day and the children of men were allowed out to receive treats from the camp of the palemen. And likewise, the palemen children roamed deep into the city of men to collect treats. It was a celebratory day that brought true happiness to the pure of heart. The lovers, although still careful, could be seen together in public but did not express love vividly lest they be marked and targeted for execution later. The palemen brought gifts of fish and an abundance of crops to the men and they in turn brought medicine and health care to the camp of the palemen. It was on this day, after the palemen had left their women and their elderly that members of the faction and dissenters planned to commit the atrocious crime of g******e on the palemen. The dissenters had kept their weapons by the hills and deep within the forest days before the Festival of Partition. Once the festival commenced, they went through the city, far beyond the hills, picked their weapons, and proceeded to the palemen camp, confident that those who could defend the camp were not going to be there. But what they gave no thought to, were the children. When the men arrived at the palemen camp, they found it empty of its men as expected. But the children of men were also there, playing with the reckless abandon that can be found only in children. They were running in droves with the children of palemen, laughing with them, chasing chickens and spooking the herd of goats. Some of them went from tent to tent for treats, scouring the length and extent of the camp for sweets and whatever was available to be given. Then they shared it with the children of the palemen. One wonders how these callow beings could grow to become enemies of these same people they laughed alongside now. As they had now found the children actively dispensing joy through the camp, the men realized the deeds of their hatred could not blossom at the time. The dissenters sat in their numbers and patted the heads of the children – both paleman and theirs alike. They laughed with the adult palemen who, although were a little worried, could not have suspected the magnitude of the misfortune that was soon to befall them. Then the men asked the children when they would be returning to the city. And because happiness is a thing we wish to experience without the worry that time may be running out, the children replied that they did not know. With their coy smiles dancing across their faces as if they all shared a single smile, the men promised the children that whenever they were ready, they would take it upon themselves to escort the children back into the city. They would be waiting for them in the forest, they assured. The men retreated to the cocoon of the forest and waited for the children with the patience of a predator. They sharpened their blades and went over their plans again and again. When the sun got to its highest in the sky, they removed their clothes and bathed in the lake, its water clear as a sunny day. They allowed themselves imagine what it would be to not have to share the forest or this lake with the palemen. Then they convinced themselves further that their impending action was the right course. They just needed the children to leave the camp. But the children remained at the camp. The sun, exhausted from shining its light all day, began to bleed to its death on the horizon. The night animals came out to celebrate the sun’s demise. These men remained. They were adamant because they knew they could not catch the palemen unawares on any other day except the Festival of Partition. They waited. Then after the sun’s demise, when the moon came out in its white melancholic light to mourn the sun, the men began to hear voices. They woke the sleeping amongst them. It was not the children who were returning. The voices they heard belonged to palemen. They did not understand what they were saying because none of them spoke pales, the palemen’s language. The linguistic gulf angered them and they dropped their hatred further into it to fill it up. They agreed the annihilation of the palemen and their way of life must be absolute and irrecoverable. A problem had presented itself however. The male palemen, the strong of the tribe had now returned from the city of men and it would be impossible for them to take the camp without help. It was around this time they were deliberating that the children arrived. One of the children caught the glint of their blades in the moon and he asked about it. And, when they did not reply him, he pieced it together. Suddenly, he broke into a run, guileless and weak as any child’s, toward the Palemen’s camp to warn them. One of the men shot him with an arrow which fell the child immediately. The child died. Seeing the corpse of one of them, the children began screaming. Then the men went to work at silencing. Some of the children, they snapped their necks, others, they slashed their throats. Some of the children were strangled, others were bludgeoned with the blunt force of heavy objects. Some of them were stabbed in the stomach, in the heart, others were stabbed everywhere else. Those who tried to fight back had it worse. They were beaten to death, their heads smashed into the dull weight of trees, blood running amok down the sides of their heads, all over their little faces. The business was done without any real resistance. Then the men proceeded to the side of the lake to wash their weapons and their hands of the blood and their sins. The lake reddened with guilt. The children were dead and everything in Marrows Bend that witnessed this act suddenly began mourning. The owls hooted louder into the night, the animals began to wail. The fishes no longer rose from the depth of the water to bask in the glowing light dripping wet like baptised converts. All of Marrows Bend mourned this inhumanity that had been visited on the innocent. A thousand calls from the animals, a thousand hoots, endless bewailing rose from the forest, from the lake, into the night and the moon heard their anguish and it turned its light far away from this gruesome scene. But this was only the beginning. The men were just getting started. After the deed had been done, they took the corpses of the children and brought them to the edge of the palemen’s camp in the dead darkness of that moonless night. Then they sent runners amongst them to head back to the city to tell them of these dead children. Some of them waited by the palemen camp to make sure the dead children would not be removed by anyone until reinforcements arrived. The runners arrived in the city breathless. They took their time to rouse to interest of their listeners. Then they called for all the leaders of the men, then all the men, then anyone at all who would listen. The runners told them of what happened in a different light. They told the listeners of how they had promised the children they would escort them back to the city. They spoke of them waiting until nightfall for the children. Then after they had waited all day and deep into the night without the sight of the children, they had gone into the camp and had stumbled upon the horror. Then they spoke of how they were killed in gruesome, detailed manner. The cries of the children, the satisfaction on the faces of the “albinos”, how the palemen’s true nature had now come to fore. The men, as expected, lost their minds to anger and they burned with the fire of vengeance. However, some of them still questioned the logic of the runners’ account. “Why did they not defend the children if they witnessed the account?” The others quickly quietened them; what did it matte whether they did or not? The palemen had shown their true colours and whether the runners had defended the children or not, the palemen, on that day or another, would have carried out their evil deed. What mattered was that the children be avenged. What mattered now was that they showed that they could protect their women and children. And so it began. Those who speak of the history of this m******e state that it began and ended at the camp. But this was not the case. The men went through the city first. The Festival of Partition was just coming to its final close so it was not so difficult to find some lingering palemen in the city. They killed all of them. They found children and men and women and they murdered them with the satisfaction of vengeance. Then they went to their armoury and they collected weapons for their assault. Then they lit torches and they charged the runners who had witnessed this affront first-hand to lead them back to the palemen’s camp. They walked through the forest they trudged beside the lake, singing songs of war and chants of violence to the camp of those who were known for peace. The forests floors shook with their marching and the palemen knew what was coming even before it arrived at their doorstep. Just by the edge of their camp, the remainder of the dissidents, the true murderers, were waiting to join the battalion. And when they did, they all charged at the palemen’s camp, never mind that the palemen did not raise a stick to defend themselves. They started from the end of the camp where they knew the elderly and the sick were housed. They hacked their way through the tent and anyone watching from outside the tent could see the silhouettes of the murderer and the victim and the vibrant spurt of blood that splattered of the inside of the tent. And while they murdered a victim, they called the name of one of the eight gods and vowed to the god that they did it to honour their murdered children. Done with the elderly, they proceeded to the nursery tents. There, they relished their violence because they felt they were inflicting a pound for a pound here. They slashed the throat of the children, they smashed their heads in with their boots, they strangled them in their sleep, and they smothered their breaths and snuffed the life out of them as though it were flick of a lamp. The wails of the children woke the whole camp. One wonders again why they did not kill the males first while they were defenceless in their sleep, but the answer tilts toward savagery: they wanted to enjoy killing the men, they wanted them to struggle, to see their loved ones dead, to and they wanted to see their will leave them, to see life desert them. The palemen, as has been said elsewhere, were tall and huge and quite stronger than the men, but the men had been dreaming of an encounter with the palemen for such a long time so they had prepared weapons to even out the battle. They shot poisoned arrows and darts that weakened the palemen, then they hovered around until the effect took hold of their victim, then they swooped in for the kill. Every time a paleman fell, his killer made sure to behead him. The women were beaten and r***d before they were killed. Then the corpses were gathered in the open, all of them. Then a big fire was made out of the bodies. The priest of the men prayed to all the eight gods as if the fire was an altar. The priest thanked the eight gods and the one true god, then he called for every man to do the same. By the time the fire died down, morning had arrived and with it came the celestial hand of a miracle. One paleman survived. The elders of the palemen, conscious of the constant troubles and threats of the men had made contingency plans in case a conflict broke out. They had made a secret passageway that the women and children could hide until the conflict passed and they could escape. That morning after the g******e committed by the men, the paleman crawled out of the passageway and saw the evil that had been visited upon his people. He went from tent to tent to see if, by a generous swing of miracle, someone else had survived with him. He found no one. Then some of the men saw him. They had returned to confirm that they had finished their deed perfectly and now they saw that they hadn’t. They pursued this paleman through the tent and although he was the stronger, the taller man, one of their arrows had hit him and he had weakened. But he knew the fate of his race rested on his survival, that if the dead were to be avenged in any form, such duty rested on his gaunt shoulders. So he soldiered on through the forest with the jeers of the men at his heels and the swish and swoosh of darts and arrows whizzing past him in the forest. They pursued him still. He ran through the morning as a fine shaft of sunlight speared through the thick treetops of the forest into the underbelly. The birds had begun to chirp and sing as though the events of the previous night were a thing forgotten, as though they never happened. They chased the paleman to a lake. There, seeing that he had nowhere else to run, he plunged into the deep of the lake. When the men came there, they found it empty and they assured themselves that he could not survive the poison. But it is on moments like this that the fate of the future rests upon. The paleman survived and it was him who started the war against men.