Before The First Word-Chapter 57: Ch-: Of Conversations Long in the Past

She looked up at him -- he was tall in the way of the garden, in the way of something built for a scale the room was slightly too small for -- and whatever moved through her face was not performance.

Not the composed expression of a being delivering a moment. The expression that arrived before the decisions did.

The face of someone standing in front of the whole point of everything, and finding the point to be exactly what they had believed it would be, which was not a small thing to find.

She put her arms around him.

He went very still.

Not the lesson-stillness. Not the catalogue-building attention of the forty-five degrees.

The stillness of something that has just encountered a category of experience it has never had access to and is receiving it with every available part of itself because no part of itself knows what to do except receive it completely.

The warmth came through the contact.

Not the garden’s warmth -- he knew the garden’s warmth. He had known it since before he opened his eyes.

Cool in its sourcelessness, the warmth of something prepared for him rather than generated by anything alive. This was different.

This warmth had a source. It came from her and it came through the contact point and it moved into him the way fire moved through dry wood -- not violently, with the ease of something that had been waiting for the right material.

It reached the place in him where the garden’s warmth lived and the two things did not compete. They occupied the same space. Different registers of the same fact.

Amara, watching from across the garden, went completely still.

He raised his arms...Slowly.

The deliberate motion of something making a decision about what its own body was doing as it was doing it -- not directing the arms, accompanying them. They came up around her the way the tide came up -- not decided, simply resuming.

The weight of his hands settling at her back with the specific care of something that had never done this and understood, without being told, that the doing of it required care.

She did not let go.

He did not let go either.

The garden breathed around them. The sourceless light held. The seventh tree’s canopy spread its gold over the whole northern end of everything.

The crew stood in their various positions and did not speak and the garden received the silence the way it received everything -- as simply another thing that now lived here.

Something was moving through his face. Not the forty-five degrees. Not the almost-smile, the filed-for-later smile that had been building toward itself for twenty days.

Something earlier than that. The face a thing made before it had assembled the vocabulary for what it was experiencing.

Before it understood what the experiencing was called, or that it could be called anything.

The face of something encountering emotional warmth for the first time -- not the word, not the concept, not the filed entry -- the thing itself.

Arriving through the arms of someone who had been carrying it across all the long years of the world specifically for this moment.

Rania looked at Amara. Amara looked at the garden. At Vothanael. At his face.

Her pen was somewhere on the grass. She had not noticed it fall at all.

. . .

They sat near the ember-copper tree.

Gabriel had moved there with the ease of someone who had been watching this tree warm the back of a specific woman for twenty nights and had developed, at distance, an affection for it.

She sat in the grass with her hands in her lap and Amara sat across from her and the crew had understood -- without anyone asking -- that this conversation had a radius to it.

They had moved to the edges of it.

The garden was not quiet. The wildflowers moved in the impossible wind. The six trees held their flowers. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

What the garden had was not silence but a specific quality of attentiveness, the feeling of a room that understood something important was being said inside it and had arranged itself accordingly.

"I was there," Gabriel said, "when your great-great-grandmother was given the texts."

Amara opened her mouth.

"Not the ones Kinvara has," Gabriel said.

"Earlier. Before the copies were made. Before the language the copies were made in existed."

She looked at the Wall. "There was a woman in your line, seven generations back by my count -- I have been counting -- who lived in a city that no one would remember for another four hundred years because the historians who came after had reasons to forget it.

She was a midwife. She could not read. She received the texts orally, from a man who was dying and had no one else."

Gabriel’s eyes came back to Amara. "I carried the word to her."

The sourceless light. The amber flowers. Amara’s hands flat on her knees.

"You told her about --"

"I told her that a garden existed," Gabriel said.

"That something was sleeping in it. That the words needed to be kept." A pause. "She laughed at me."

Amara looked at her.

"She thought I was someone’s servant delivering a madman’s errand."

The warmth in Gabriel’s voice carried something specific -- the specific warmth of someone who had been laughed at by the right people and had found it, across the long years since, entirely appropriate.

"She asked me whose house I served. I told her I served no house." A beat. "She laughed again."

"Did she keep the words anyway?"

"She memorised them that night. Every one. She couldn’t keep the physical texts -- she had nowhere to put them, nothing to write with. She kept them in the only place she could."

Gabriel looked at the Wall. "She passed them to her daughter while the daughter was still in the womb. Sung them. Your line has been carrying these words before the women carrying them knew they were carrying them."

Amara was quiet for a moment. The weight of seven generations settling in her chest, finding the shape of itself.

"Why her?" she said.

"She had the right kind of stubbornness." Said Gabriel plainly.

The way Gabriel said things that were true -- without drama, because drama was what you added when the truth wasn’t sufficient on its own.

"The kind that doesn’t argue. That simply proceeds. She didn’t need to understand why the words mattered to decide they mattered.

Some people are built for keeping things they don’t fully understand. Your line has consistently produced them."

Amara thought about her grandmother. About the kitchen table. About twelve handwritten pages sent to a Vatican archive and returned with the words insufficient institutional affiliation.

"She never knew she was right," Amara repeated.

"The first woman. She kept words she couldn’t read, about something she had no proof of, for a purpose she didn’t understand."

"Yes."

"And seven generations later --"

"Yes," Gabriel said again. Still warm. Still not performing it.

"Seven generations later you descended forty-three metres into the Negev and held out your hand in the dark and he took it."

She looked at Vothanael -- still with the seventh tree, now sitting again, the gold of the canopy above him and the deeper green of the grass below him and the quality of someone sitting inside something they have no language for yet, simply sitting in it because it is the right place to sit.

"That is what seven generations of not understanding looked like when it arrived at its destination."

Amara looked at him too.

At his hands flat in the grass. At the marks at his knuckles. At the face that was not the same face it had been an hour ago -- that had something in it now that had not been there before, something that lived in him the way a word lived after it had been given, as part of the cumulation of what he was.

"Can I ask you something," Amara said.

"Yes."

"Did you know -- when you came to that woman -- did you know I was the one it was building toward?"

Gabriel was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of someone giving a question the respect of a real answer.

"I knew what the line was carrying toward," she said.

"I knew the morning. I knew the garden. I knew a hand reaching into a dark chamber and something taking it."

She paused. "I did not know your face. I did not know the name Adjei-Levi. The instrument that arrived at this garden was shaped by everything that happened between the first night and this one -- and I was not present for all of it."

Something moved through her face then. "I wish I had been."

Amara sat with that.

"I ran out of kitchens," she said finally. "Every kitchen my grandmother tried to teach me in. I ran out of all of them."

"I know." Gabriel’s voice was warm. "You arrived anyway."

Those words sat deep in Amara as she looked at the Entity their conversation was built upon...

To be continued...

[Dearest Readers, please support me if you like my work:

10 powerstones/100 coins will make me give a unique reference to the sender in my Chapters.

20 powerstones/1000 coins will have me giving a shoutout to the sender in the top of the Chapter of the 3 subsequent Chapters]