Quibble, 64. Far

Quibble meets people with a strange way of life.

64. Far @Quibble

It was the second labor at the hottest, and the moon had waxed nearly full. Now jahli – an Aht-jah had claimed responsibility for us – Nuah and I moved freely among the Far. The sah Lurah stayed always at our side. She was my interpreter, but also she was our bodyguard or Sen-aht-nah-lapi’s informant. I didn’t think it wise to ask which.

I walked among the Far in their busy camp as among the surreal images of One’s dream. People sat around fires and talked. Men prepared food and sat mending clothes, while women minded small children. A blacksmith’s hammer rose and fell – ding, ding – shaping a horseshoe. Half-naked people waited their turn in line to bathe in a washtub. Children ran around in a wild, never-ending game of tag or squatted in a circle to play ahnk – “bones,” a game of chance like backgammon, with pebbles and animal bones of differing lengths – or went about in pairs enacting their dramas of childhood, contrived yet as poignant as what adults made up.

Though in the midst of a migration, most of the Aht had settled quite easily into a rhythm of life in their camp inside the box canyon. Outside the canyon, north of the rivulet and against the dunes, stood a few large tents – the abode of the Sen, the nah’s family. Spread out around the Sen’s tents in a semicircle on the edge of the valley were some small tents, evenly spaced in a defensive formation, where the Aht-sah patrolled. Behind the sah’s guard, both people and lifestock were safe from any and all intruders, except perhaps the Djer, against whose magic no defense was possible.

The box canyon’s nearly sheer walls were granite, hewn in a series of flat faces, and its floor was strewn with stone rubble. It had once been a quarry. It abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of rockface towering over a small, deep pond. Cattails lined the pond’s edge in abundance, and a few cottonwoods hunkered there with branches splayed out over the water like hands before a fire. Long ago, using the rubble, the Aht had built a stone wall to cordon off part of the cul-de-sac, making a pen for the livestock. This wall carried out some ways into the pond, the other side of which was bordered by canyon wall. Thus, both animals and people had access to water, well away from each other. For the time being, the livestock lacked only a pasture for grazing.

The Far hardly marred the landscape at all to achieve this sensible arrangement, and therein lay their mystery for me. Their way of life was molded by nature and their environment. By comparison, the aloof, singing Dazed and even the industrious Adroit hardly seemed to belong Without. Yet nothing the Far had done struck me as unsuited to human beings. I recalled Meissa’s criticism of the Ancient’s attempt to control nature: We humans always have to be the masters. We don’t think we’re part of nature. I wished she was with me to see this way of life, the symbiosis of the Far with their world.

Imay gave me only an inkling of how strange the Far were. Now Lurah offered me more insight. A difficulty I sometimes had in understanding her translations was bearing in mind that her world was upside-down. We looked down at the sky, the stars lived at its bottom, and rain “flew” up at us from it. A Far standing up was said to be “diving.” Metaphorically, jahli lived above the jah’s shield, not beneath it.

“Of course we know better!” Lurah exclaimed when I asked her about this. “We have studied the stars and planets. We know our planet is a sphere. What you speak of, Qeht, is not scientific error but an artifact of our language. Far once believed we walked upside-down at the top of the sky. Few Far still believe this, but our speech still reflects the old order of things. When I translate, I replace ‘up’ with ‘down’ and vice versa.”

The nah of the Qahlif had taught Lurah the Djer’s language, though Lurah could not say how the Qahlif-nah herself came by it. I gathered from the sah’s hints that this nah was an extraordinary woman, not least for being a peacemaker, not warlike as most Qahlif-nah were. She even brokered peace with the Isleh, enemies of the Qahlif who, the story went, long ago drove them from their traditional homeland.

Inquiring about the history of the Qahlif and Isleh led me to ponder yet another mystery. They had once raided each other in warfare, stolen from each other, and this seemed to fly in the face of im, according to which they should have shared. I’d seen how fiercely Imay clung to im, but all the stories I’d heard now revealed there were rich and poor Far, people with lots and people with little.

“Uhn-say-ayzhed-nahli-imay told me the Isleh are rich beyond imagination, and I can tell you my imagination isn’t small,” I ventured. “He said they were greedy, too.”

“That is true,” Lurah said. “Ever have the folk of Qahl-forn-dah been rich, and indeed it makes many Isleh greedy, not to mention neglectful of nahli. But their selfish laws are not the laws of all the Far! The Qahlif, the Aht, and even the city-dwelling Uhta share our property and wealth in common. For ourselves, Far own just personal effects. Family, named first, owns all else. If the family dies out, its wealth goes to the tribe to be divided equally. That is im. Not that it seems to matter much to Sen-aht-nah-lapi. When she made Wahn-aht-jah-asreh her nahli-qah, she laid claim—”

Lurah stopped short, looking away from me, as if realizing she was on the verge of an indiscretion. I could get no more from her on the subject of economics. Since she’d mentioned family featured first in names, I pursued that subject instead.

It was a quagmire. A Far’s name was a carefully constructed description of roles and loyalties. Proper names came in order of loyalty – family, tribe, self – but the order of roles was just the reverse. The closer a role appeared to the personal name, the more the person was expected to identify with it. As well, roles served as bridges between the proper names, clarifying relationships. Lurah’s explanation of the latter aspect became a bit labyrinthine, and though I heard it all, I drifted off into my own thoughts.

When Ones came Without, we gave ourselves new names. Nish told me the Dazed just didn’t like their names as Ones, but I saw renaming was really a bid for individuality. Yet hearing the Far’s names, I realized ours lacked the individuality we sought. We only abbreviated our old names – we even called the new name an abbreviation. Many, such as mine, were once again common nouns. We lived Without, but we still carried Within and its strictures around with us. The Adroit called their village a consensus, and just like a spiral Within, it centered on an Axle. And what the Far called a week – not six but seven days, which gave rise to a disorderly calendar – we called a cycle, though cycles Without didn’t correspond to cycles Within.

It was as if nothing had really changed for us.