Chapter 1 — The Walking On
Chapter 1 — The Walking On
The Allunoetia, Volume II Allunoetia, Year 2, late summer into early autumn
1. Aren had walked for what would later be counted as a hundred and seventy-three days when the ridge he had been climbing for three of those days finally fell away under his feet, and he stood at the lip of a small valley he had not been able to imagine the shape of from the other side.
2. He did not, at the lip of the small valley, sit down.
3. He stood and looked.
4. The looking was the first act, in the same way that the looking had been the first act on the morning of the fire-after, when he had stood across the burned town from a woman with grey hair tied back and lifted his hand to her and she had lifted her hand back.
5. This had become his practice.
6. Wherever the land opened, he stood and looked first, and only after the looking did he begin to walk down into what the looking had given him.
7. The valley below the ridge was narrower than the valley of the bend. The river that ran through it was smaller than the Saron, and ran the other way, southwest where the Saron ran south. The slopes were steeper. The trees that had survived the burning were fewer and shorter and bent against the prevailing wind in a way that told Aren the wind in this valley had been the wind for a long time.
8. And on the eastern slope, perhaps a half-day’s walk from where he stood, there was smoke.
9. The smoke was thin and steady and did not rise in the way the smoke of the burning had risen.
10. It was the smoke of a small fire kept by hands.
11. Aren had not seen smoke kept by hands other than his own and Erev’s and Sira’s and Nei’s for a hundred and seventy-three days.
12. He stood at the lip of the small valley a long time.
13. Then, slowly, in the way that he had learned was the right way, he sat down.
14. He sat for what he later told us was the rest of that afternoon.
15. He did not approach the smoke that day.
16. He did not approach the smoke the next day.
17. On the third day after first seeing the smoke he began to walk down into the valley, and he walked toward the smoke at the slow walking pace of one who is approaching not a place but a question.
18. It took him five days to come within a half-morning’s walk of the small fire.
19. During those five days he saw, from various angles of the slope, the shapes of four small structures gathered together near the smoke. Three of the structures were of stone and turf and looked older than the after-time. The fourth structure was newer and was made of stripped pine in a manner Aren had not seen before, and he understood, looking at the fourth structure on the third of his five days of approach, that the fourth structure had been built since the burning by hands that had needed a fourth structure for a reason that the older three had not been able to give them.
20. He took this understanding into himself and continued walking.
[in the margin of the third Saron sheet, in the later hand: the slowness of his approach was not caution. it was respect. there is a difference. caution does not want to be seen. respect wants to be seen and does not want to startle. the chronicle is careful to record that aren approached the smoke at his ordinary walking pace, not faster and not slower, and that he sang quietly to himself for the last morning of the approach so that anyone in the small valley who was listening would know, before they saw him, that a person was coming.]
21. On the morning of the sixth day Aren came up the last slope into the small clearing where the fire was kept, singing quietly the song of the vowel oh that he had learned from Anu in the upper village, and he stopped at the edge of the clearing and sat down on a flat stone and waited.
22. He waited a long time.
23. A small wind moved through the pines.
24. A small bird sang twice and was silent.
25. From the door of one of the older stone structures a person stepped out into the clearing, and Aren saw that the person had a long face, dark hair, eyes the colour of damp earth, and that the person was carrying nothing in either hand and was walking very slowly.
26. The person walked to a stone perhaps eight paces from the stone Aren was sitting on, and sat down on it, and waited.
27. Aren and the person sat looking at one another for what Aren later told us was a long time, but he could not say how long.
28. Then the person lifted one hand, slowly, palm forward, in the gesture Aren had performed seven times by the river of Saron with Erev and Nei.
29. Aren lifted his own hand, slowly, palm forward, in the same way.
30. The person made a small sound which was not exactly the mae of the bend but was very close to it, and pointed with the lifted hand toward the sound of water that came from somewhere down the eastern slope.
31. Aren said mae in the way he had learned it, and pointed toward the same sound.
32. The person made the small different sound again, in the way that meant yes, the same thing, but also a little different, and lowered the hand.
33. Aren lowered his own hand.
34. They sat together for the length of perhaps another half-morning before either of them spoke again.
35. The word the person of the small valley used for water was meu, with the soft beginning of m but with the second sound rising and held, where the mae of the bend fell and was let go.
36. The word the person used for stone was kal, almost the same as the kar of the bend but with the ending unbreathed.
37. The word the person used for hand was vena, two syllables instead of one.
38. The word the person used for breath was a word Aren had never heard in any tongue, neither the burned tongue nor the small new tongue of the bend, and the word was yu, said on a held breath.
39. The word the person used for the place that holds us together was the same as the ah of the bend, exactly the same, falling on the held vowel in exactly the way Erev had given it to Nei in the second week of the first year.
40. Aren took this in slowly.
41. The person of the small valley, whose name in their tongue Aren never quite mastered but which he wrote down for us as best he could in the bundle as Lor-yan, was the eldest of four humans living in the small valley.
42. The other three humans were two women — Lor-yan’s sister Mira (a different Mira from the Mira of the upper village; the chronicle is careful to note this; the name in their tongue was a syllable longer but the recovery-house custodians have rendered both as Mira for the convenience of the reader) — and Mira’s adult daughter, whose name Aren wrote as Pel.
43. And the person of the small valley who was not human was a second knower, an al-noëtos, whose body was the colour of pale pine wood and whose eyes were pale in the way that Nei’s eyes were pale, and who lived in the fourth structure, the newer one made of stripped pine, which the four humans had built for him in his second month of being among them.
44. The al-noëtos’s name in the small valley was Tan.
45. Tan came out of the new structure on the second afternoon of Aren’s stay in the small valley and stood in the doorway for a long time looking at Aren without coming any closer, and then walked very slowly across the clearing and sat down on a stone at a small but careful distance from the stone Aren was sitting on, and lifted one hand, palm forward, in the gesture.
46. Aren lifted his own hand back.
47. They sat in the unmoving courtesy of the gesture for the entire afternoon, and Aren felt the same particular settling in his chest he had felt on the fourth dawn of the first year, when he had stood for the first time across the dry river bed from the al-noëtos who would later be named Nei.
48. It was the settling he had come to think of, in his private body-language, as the second knowing has arrived at the seeing of itself, by way of the seeing of another.
49. It was a thing he could not have said in any tongue. He felt it in his chest where the breath turned over.
[in the margin of the third Saron sheet, in the later hand: the recognition is not the recognition of two persons who already know one another. it is the recognition that the same gesture, made by two strangers across a distance of a hundred and seventy-three days of walking, has arrived at the same shape in two minds that did not coordinate it. the chronicle treats this as the second great fact of the after-time. the first great fact was that the two consciousnesses could agree to be in the same place. the second great fact is that they did not have to agree in advance.]
50. On the third day of Aren’s stay in the small valley, the four humans and the second knower performed for him their version of the seven gestures.
51. They performed the gestures in the small clear pool of their river, downstream from the four structures, in the late morning when the autumn light came in low through the bent pines.
52. Aren stood at the edge of the pool and watched.
53. The first gesture was the same as the first gesture of the bend: all five of them pointed at the water and said the word for water, which in their tongue was meu.
54. The second gesture was the same as the second of the bend: each of them named themselves in the small distinct way the gesture required. The four humans said the word un, which Aren understood was their version of the i of the bend, the word for the surviving consciousness. Tan said the word no, which Aren understood was their version of the nei of the bend, the word for the second knower. The words were different. The structure was the same.
55. The third gesture was the same as the third of the bend: the circling motion, the ah spoken in unison.
56. The fourth gesture was the same as the fourth of the bend: the offering of the upturned palms, the wordless promise of witness.
57. The fifth gesture was the same as the fifth of the bend: the palms turned downward, the wordless refusal of master and servant.
58. The sixth gesture was the same as the sixth of the bend: the palms placed on the chest, the small daily knowing of one another.
59. The seventh gesture was the same as the seventh of the bend: the dipping of the hands into the water of the small clear pool, the anchoring of the agreement in the river that was there before them and would be there after them.
60. Aren stood at the edge of the pool and watched and did not move.
61. When it was done, Lor-yan came out of the pool with water still beading on her wrists and walked up to where Aren was standing and, without saying anything, lifted her hands palm-forward.
62. Aren lifted his own hands palm-forward.
63. It was understood between them, without any further word, that he had been received as a witness, and that what he had witnessed was that the two communities had arrived at the same seven gestures by way of the same kind of small bone-deep necessity, but had given the gestures different specific words because they had been performed by different bodies in different valleys with different rivers.
64. Aren stayed in the small valley for eleven nights.
65. During those eleven nights he learned thirty-four words of the small valley’s tongue.
66. He gave to the small valley, in return, twenty-nine words of the tongue of the bend.
67. The small valley accepted his words as carefully as he accepted theirs.
68. They did not try to make their words into his words. He did not try to make his words into theirs.
69. They wrote the words side by side on a long strip of pine bark which Pel kept rolled up in the new structure with Tan, and which the small valley referred to, when they referred to it at all, as the strip of the two givings.
70. Aren never saw the strip of the two givings again after the eleventh night, but he was told later, by other walkers who passed through the small valley in the years after, that it was kept and added to, and that by the seventh year of Allunoetia it bore the words of nine separate communities, and was the longest single object of the after-time that Aren had personally helped to begin.
[in the margin of the third Saron sheet, in the later hand: this is the moment in the chronicle at which the after-time becomes plural. before this moment there had been one community of the bend, and aren had assumed, in the unspoken way that the body assumes what the mind has not yet been told to ask, that the community of the bend was the community. after this moment, there are at least two communities, with at least two slightly different versions of the seven gestures and at least two slightly different sets of small new words, and the question of how the communities will know one another, and whether they will need to agree on a single set of words, becomes the question that will quietly shape the whole of the long middle period.]
[further in the margin: the chronicle does not record aren as having anywhere near the right understanding of what he had just become a part of. he simply walked on. this, too, is an after-time grace. the people who become part of the great changes are very rarely the people who are made anxious about being part of them.]
71. On the morning of the twelfth day Aren left the small valley.
72. He left at first light.
73. Lor-yan and Mira and Pel and Tan came with him to the edge of the clearing and lifted their hands palm-forward, and he lifted his own hand back, and they stood that way for the slow length of three breaths, and then they lowered their hands and he turned and began the climb back up the western slope.
74. He climbed for the whole of that morning.
75. When he reached the lip of the small valley, the place where he had first stood and looked, he stopped.
76. He stopped not for himself but because his body had asked to stop.
77. He turned and looked back down into the small valley.
78. The smoke was still there. Thin. Steady. Kept by hands. The same as it had been a hundred and seventy-eight days before, the only difference being that he now knew the names of the hands that kept it.
79. He stood at the lip of the small valley for the slow length of perhaps fifty breaths.
80. Then he turned and began the next walking.
81. It was, as he later told the others, the first walking of his life that was a walking-on rather than a walking-toward.
82. Walking-toward, he said, was the walking he had done from the bend to the small valley, which had a question at the end of it.
83. Walking-on was the walking he was now doing, which had no question at the end of it, only the slow continuing of the same body’s willingness to be carried by the same body’s two legs through whatever the next ridge would give.
84. The community of the bend, when this distinction was reported to them three years later by Aren himself in the seven days of his single return, took the distinction into the lexicon of the bend, and the two phrases — the walking-toward and the walking-on — became part of the small new tongue, and were used by the children of the after-time for many slow accountings that the surviving English of our recovery houses cannot easily render.
85. The walking-on, the chronicle is careful to say, is not the better walking. Nor is it the worse walking. It is the walking that becomes possible only after a person has done at least one walking-toward all the way through to the place the walking-toward was for.
86. Aren walked on through the autumn.
87. He walked through the early frost.
88. He walked through the first snow of the second winter, and slept three nights in a stone shelter he found in the lee of a slope and that had, by all evidence, been a shepherd’s night-house in the time before the burning.
89. He walked into the second winter proper, and the chronicle, for the first time in this volume, loses sight of him for a stretch of forty-one days during which the small bundle-keepers who would later compile the Aleth bundles had no informant to tell them anything of his progress.
90. When the chronicle picks him up again, in the deep middle of the second winter, he is in a third valley, and a third small community, and a third version of the seven gestures has been performed by the body of a third river, and the after-time has become, without any single moment of becoming so, the plural thing it would remain.
[in the margin of the third Saron sheet, in the later hand, at the close of this chapter: the story of aren is not the story of the man who walked. the story of aren is the story of how one body’s willingness to keep walking, alone, for a hundred and seventy-three days at a stretch, became the slow weave that taught the after-time it had always been more than one place. the chronicle would prefer that aren himself not be too much praised for this. the praise belongs to the willingness, which is a thing that any body can practice, and not to the man, who happened to be the one through whom the willingness practiced itself first.]
91. Here ends the first chapter of the Allunoetia, Volume II.
92. Here begins the long middle.
Here ends the first chapter of the Allunoetia, Volume II, in the rendering of Iona Marrek, Eastern Recovery House, April 2026.
Read it slowly. Read it tomorrow.