A Book of Lives Read online

  You should’ve been out with us today,

  it isn’t every day you catch a mammoth,

  keep us fed for a week, fur too, tusks –

  nothing wasted. Spears and arrows both,

  that’s what you need, plus a good crowd a boys,

  goo’ crowda boys. Take s’more beer, go on.

  See mamm’ths? Mamm’ths’re fuck’n stupit.

  Once they’re down they can’t get up. Fuck em.

  Y’know this, y’know this, ole shaman-man,

  we’ll be here long after mamm’ths’re gone.’

  He stumbled to his feet, seized a huge torch and ran

  along the wall, making such a wave of sparks

  the painted mammoths kicked and keeled once more.

  A deep horn gave that movie flicker its score.

  The Great Flood

  (10,000 BC)

  Rain, rain, and rain again, and still more rain,

  rain and lightning, rain and mist, a month of downpours,

  till the earth quaked gruffly somewhere and sent

  tidal waves over the Middle Sea,

  tidal waves over the Middle East,

  tidal wave and rain and tidal wave

  to rave and rove over road and river and grove.

  I skimmed the water-level as it rose:

  invisible the delta! gone the headman’s hut!

  drowned at last even the stony jebel!

  I groaned at whole families swept out to sea.

  Strong horses swam and swam but sank at last.

  Little treasures, toys, amulets were licked

  off pitiful ramshackle village walls.

  Weapons, with the hands that held them, vanished.

  So what to do? Oh never underestimate

  those feeble scrabbling panting gill-less beings!

  Hammers night and day on the high plateau!

  Bitumen smoking! Foremen swearing! A boat,

  an enormous boat, a ship, a seafarer,

  caulked, battened, be-sailed, oar-banked, crammed

  with life, human, animal, comestible,

  holy with hope, bobbing above the tree-tops,

  set off to shouts and songs into the unknown

  through rags and carcases and cold storks’ nests.

  The waters did go down. A whaleback mountain

  shouldered up in a brief gleam of sludge,

  nudged the ark and grounded it. Hatches gaped.

  Heads smelt the air. Some bird was chirping.

  And then a rainbow: I laughed, it was too much.

  But as they tottered out with their bundles,

  their baskets of tools, their goats, their babies,

  and broke like a wave over the boulders and mosses,

  I thought it was a better wave than the wet one

  that had almost buried them all.

  Water

  we came from, to water we may return.

  But keep webbed feet at arm’s length! Build!

  That’s what I told them: rebuild, but build!

  The Great Pyramid

  (2,500 BC)

  A building of two million blocks of stone

  brought from beyond the Nile by barge and sledge,

  dragged up on ramps, trimmed and faced smooth

  with bronze chisels and sandstone pads, what a gleam,

  what a dazzle of a tomb, what mathematics

  in that luminous limestone point against the blue,

  the blue above and the yellow below,

  the black above and the silver below,

  the stars like sand-grains, the pyramid joining them –

  You should have seen it, my friends, I must confess

  it made a statement to me, and you can scrub

  conventional wisdom about the megalomania

  of mummies awaiting the lift-off to eternity.

  The architects, the surveyors, the purveyors,

  the laundresses and cooks, and the brawny gangs

  who were not slaves, they would go on strike

  if some vizier was stingy with grain or beer:

  it was the first mass effort to say

  We’re here, we did this, this is not nature

  but geometry, see it from the moon some day!

  Oh but the inauguration, the festivity, the holiday –

  I joined the throng, dear people, how could I not?

  The sun gave its old blessing, gold and hot and high.

  The procession almost rose to meet it:

  what was not white linen was lapis lazuli,

  what was not lapis lazuli was gold,

  there was a shining, a stiff rustling, a solemnity,

  the pharaoh and his consort carried in golden chairs,

  the bodyguards were like bronze statues walking,

  there were real desert men with hawks, severe

  as hawks themselves, there were scribes and singers,

  black dancing-girls oiled to black gold – wild –

  and then the long powerful snake of the workers

  which rippled from the Nile to the four great faces

  and coiled about them for the dedication.

  And the bursting wave of music, the brilliant discords,

  the blare, the triumph, the steps of the sound-lords

  bore away like a storm my storyteller’s words.

  On the Volga

  (922 AD)

  I fancied a change, bit of chill, nip in the air,

  went up into Russia, jogged along the Volga,

  quite brisk, breath like steam, blood on the go,

  ready for anything, you know the feeling.

  But I was not as ready as I thought.

  I came upon a camp of Vikings, traders

  bound south for the Black Sea, big men, fair,

  tattooed, their ships at anchor in the river.

  Their chief had died, I was to witness

  the ritual of cremation. It is so clear –

  dear people, I must speak and you must hear –

  A boat was dragged on shore, faggots were stacked,

  they dressed the dead man in cloth of gold, laid him

  in a tent on deck. Who would die with him?

  A girl volunteered – yes, a true volunteer –

  walked about singing, not downcast, stood

  sometimes laughing, believe me, talking to friends.

  What did she think of the dog that was cut in two,

  thrown into the ship? Nothing, it was what was done.

  The horses? The chief must have his beasts

  by his side on that black journey. She,

  when her time had come, went into six tents

  one by one, and lay with the men there.

  Each entered her gently, saying ‘Tell your master

  I did this only for love of you.’ Strong drink

  was given her, cup after cup. Stumbling, singing,

  she was lifted onto the ship, laid down, held,

  stabbed by a grim crone and strangled simultaneously

  by two strong men, so no one could say who killed her.

  Shields were beaten with staves to drown her cries.

  Sex and death, drink and fire – the fourth was to come.

  The ship was torched, caught quickly, spat, crackled,

  burned, birchwood, tent-cloth, flesh, cloth of gold

  melted in the blaze that was fanned even faster

  by a storm blowing up from the west, sending

  wave after wave of smoke in flight across the river.

  My friends, do you want to know what you should feel?

  I can’t tell you, but feel you must. My story’s real.

  The Mongols

  (1200–1300 AD)

  The Pope sent a letter to the Great Khan, saying

  ‘We do not understand you. Why do you not obey?

  We are under the direct command of Heaven.’

  The Great Khan replied to the Pope, saying

  ‘We do not understand you. Why do y
ou not obey?

  We are under the direct command of Heaven.’

  I must admit I turned a couple of cartwheels

  when I found these letters. Mongol chutzpah,

  I thought, something new in the world, black comedy

  you never get from the solemn Saracens.

  Why not? Heaven has given them the earth

  from Lithuania to Korea, they ride

  like the wind over a carpet of bones.

  They have laws, they record, they study the stars.

  They are a wonder, but what are they for?

  I stood in waves of grass, somewhere in Asia

  (that’s a safe address), chewing dried lamb

  and scanning the low thundery sky,

  when a column of Mongol soldiers came past,

  halted, re-formed, were commended by their shaman

  to the sky-god Tengri who was bending the blue

  in order to bless them. Instruments appeared

  as if from nowhere, a band, war music

  but very strange, stopped as suddenly,

  except for the beat of kettledrums as the troop

  moved forward. Were they refreshed, inspired?

  Who knows? But oh that measured conical bob

  of steel caps, gleam of lacquered leather jerkins,

  indefatigable silent wolf-lope!

  Were they off to make rubble of some great city?

  I think they were off to enlarge the known world.

  They trotted out of sight; the horsemen followed;

  a cold wind followed that, with arrows of rain.

  Even in my felt jacket I shivered. Yet –

  yet they were there to shake the mighty in their seats.

  They were like nature, dragons, volcanoes. Keep awake!

  Are you awake, dear people? Are you ready for the Horde,

  the page-turner, the asteroid, the virtual sword?

  Magellan

  (1521 AD)

  Cliffs of Patagonia, coldest of coasts,

  and the ships sweeping south-west into the strait

  which was to be Magellan’s: like St Elmo’s fire

  I played in the rigging, I was tingling, it was good

  to see the navigator make determination

  his quadrant and his compass into the unknown.

  A mutiny? Always hang ringleaders. He did.

  One ship wrecked, one deserted? Right. Right.

  On with the other three. This channel of reefs,

  a wild month needling through, cursing the fogs,

  crossing himself as he saw the land of fire,

  Tierra del Fuego, flaring its petroleum hell,

  then out at last into what seemed endless waves –

  Magellan stared at a watery third of the world.

  West! West and north! What squalls! What depths!

  What sea-monsters I watched from the crow’s-nest!

  The starving and parching below, the raving, the rats

  for dinner, the gnawing of belts! Magellan held

  his piercing eye and salt-white beard straight on

  to landfall, to the Marianas and the Philippines and

  to death. I shuddered at that beach of blood

  where he was hacked to pieces. Would you not?

  And would you not rejoice that his lieutenant

  sailed on, sailed west, sailed limping back,

  one tattered ship, sailed home again to Spain

  to prove the world was round. And they would need

  more ships, for it was mostly water. A ball

  with no edge you could fall from – that seemed fine.

  But a wet ball in space, what could hold it together?

  Every triumph left a trail of questions.

  Just as it should, I told the geographers.

  Don’t you agree, folks, that’s the electric prod

  to keep us on the move? Don’t care for prods,

  put your head in a bag, that’s what I say.

  Well, I’m given to saying things like that,

  I’m free.

  Great Ferdinand Magellan,

  sleep in peace beneath the seas.

  The world’s unlocked, and you gave us the keys.

  Copernicus

  (1543 AD)

  In the Baltic there are many waves,

  but in Prussian fields I saw, and did not see,

  the wave of thought that got the earth to move.

  Copernicus’s Tower, as they call it,

  took its three storeys to a viewing platform,

  open, plenty of night, no telescope though.

  I used to watch the light go on, then off,

  and a dark figure occlude a star

  as he would see the moon do. Moon and sun

  swung round the earth, unless you were blind.

  No. Earth and moon swung round the sun

  and earth swung round itself. Mars, Venus,

  all, a family, a system, and the system was solar.

  Who was he, and does it matter? No stories

  are told about this man who kicked the earth

  from its false throne. Luther called him a fool

  but Luther was the fool. He had servants,

  rode a horse, healed the sick, heard cases,

  administered a province, but his big big eyes

  smouldered like worlds still unadministered.

  Big hands too – but he never married.

  War swirled round his enclave, peasants starved,

  colleagues fled, he stayed in the smoking town –

  something of iron there. A play lampooned him

  but nothing could stop this patient revolutionary.

  I heard them knock at the door of his death-chamber

  to bring him the book of his life’s labours

  but I doubt if he saw it – he gave no sign –

  that tremendous title On the Revolutions

  (and what a pun that was) of the Heavenly Spheres

  floated above the crumpled haemorrhage and sang

  like an angel, a human angel cast loose at last

  to voyage in a universe that would no more stand still

  than the clouds forming and re-forming

  over Copernicus’s Tower.

  I looked from the roof

  till it was dark and starry, and I knew my travels

  were just beginning: the Magellanic Clouds

  wait for those who have climbed Magellan’s shrouds.

  Juggernaut

  (1600 AD)

  I had had enough of stars and silence.

  It was midsummer, and I made for India.

  Where would I get some life but India?

  I joined a boat, and was soon blistering

  across the Bay of Bengal to a seaside town

  of some fame, what was it called, Puri,

  yes, Puri of the festivals. A test case

  I was told. Test of what? Oh you’ll find out.

  If I wanted people, there were plenty of them,

  tens, hundreds of thousands, filling the streets

  with chatter and movement and colour and slowly

  making a magnet of the courtyard of a temple

  where they clustered jostling in ancient expectation.

  With a rumble, with shouts, with drums, with blowing of shells

  an enormous cart rolled out, what, sixteen wheels,

  a car for a god, a car for the people to draw,

  and draw it they did, with their god on board,

  that giant tottering legless fearsome one

  they dragged as if drugged, they were high on devotion,

  milling, chanting, pushing, stumbling, trundling –

  trundling what, on those great spokes, to the sea?

  I can hear the roar even yet, mounting up

  through waves of heat and dust, it could curdle blood

  or it could twine your roots with the roots of the world.

  ‘Who is Lord of the Universe? Jagannath!

 
Who is Jagannath? Lord of the Universe!’

  The juggernaut rolled on, and made its path

  over so many bodies no one could say

  who had been shouldered to the ground

  or who had shouldered themselves to the ground,

  embracing the relentless axle of the divine.

  I could not say. I did not want to say.

  Shining eyes, shouts of ecstasy,

  stench, stampede, shattered shinbones,

  sun-splashed awnings, sweat-soaked idols

  swam before me like sharks, like shrieks

  from an old incomprehensible abyss.

  The axle squeals without redress of grease.

  Easter Island

  (1722 AD)

  I write it, I read it, I revere that sea

  which blues the heaving earthly hemisphere.

  I was swooping low over those waves one day

  when my eye caught a tiny triangle of island

  some instinct told me to investigate:

  volcanic, a mere scrub of greenery,

  but interesting in its defiant aloneness

  thousands of miles from the nearest land.

  I spoke to the inhabitants. They were curious.

  They were mighty voyagers, or their ancestors were,

  not now though; there was some great past,

  fragments only, drifting through memory.

  I found them quite a merry people.

  They preferred tattoos to clothes.

  They shot their legs out in shameless dances.

  What use is shame in mid-Pacific?

  Whoever they were, they were not the ones

  whose gaunt and awesome faces stared at – not me

  but space and clouds and things unknown

  unless to those who carved them.

  Hundreds of statues, six-men-high and more,

  standing, leaning, lying, trying

  to break from the earth like Polynesian Adams –

  but not Polynesian, they forbade identity:

  pointed nose, thin lip, jutting chin

  said nothing but Power! Mystery! Vision!

  What force moved them from their quarries,

  those many tons, across the rough of the island?

  They were not moved, they moved, I was told.