Today: a perfect day for thinking back. It must all be said, now, before time takes an axe to my memory. Outside, on the balcony the air begins to chill. The season changes. Curled leaves, brazen with death, scratch along the marble terrace and the clear, golden sunlight is rustling with ghosts. Remember: laughter; fear; delight; courage. I walked out to the balcony to write. It was difficult to begin. For some minutes I sat gazing at the distant mountains, smudged in a lilac haze. Someone has turned all the fountains off. Below me, the gardens are mostly silent.
They say to me: "What tales you could tell," and if I tell them; "again, more. There must be more." This may become a history book, but remember, it is only my history.
Chapter one
He faces northwest, the direction of the uknown
My name is Pellaz. I have no age. I have died and lived again. This is my testament.
At the age of fifteen, I lived in a dusty, scorched town at the edge of a desert. I was the son of a peasant, whose family for centuries had worked the cable crop for the Richards family. Our town was really just a farm, and to call it that lends it an undeserved glamour. Huts upon red dirt; there is little else to imagine. The cable crop, a hardy, stringy, tasteless vegetable, used for everything from bulk food to bed springs, straggled meanly over the parched ground. It did not grow high and its unattractive, pitted fruits burst with a sound like gunfire to release pale seeds in yellow jelly and fill the air with the odor of putrescence. The grand house of Sefton Richards, a stern, northern man, whose reclusiveness was supposed to shelter insanity, squatted against the horizon, far from our own humble dwellings. Every year, ten of us were summoned to the Great House and ordered to whitewash it. Through the windows, we could see that it had very little furniture inside.
We lived in a cruel, bitter, petty country and it was inevitable that we shared many of these characteristics. Only when I escaped did I learn to dislike it. Then, I existed in a mindless, innocent way, ignorant of the world outside our narrow territories and content to stretch and pound the cable fiber with the rest of my kind. I don't suppose I ever did really think about things. The closest I came to this was a dim appreciation of the setting sun dyeing all the world purple and rose, lending the land an ephemeral beauty. Even the eye of a true artist would have had difficulty in finding beauty in that place, but the sunsets were pleasantly deceptive.
We first heard of what were
timidly termed "the upsets" by travelers passing hurriedly through our
lands.
An excerpt from Wraeththu by Storm Constantine