Aur Child

Village Elder Muddear Gallia-Tiul paused at her doorstep that same morning to drink in the colors already saturating the typically flat earth tones of the hillside community. Preparations to celebrate the previous night’s rainfall could be heard in Hill Village since before dawn. Nearly every hive-shaped home, formed from sequentially stacked slabs of hewn coquina shell, displayed a tight bundle of freshly picked garden flowers hung at eye-level from its plastic panel door. The dog-tongue pinks, crab-shell blues, and citrus yellows of those bouquets bounced off sun-bleached planks, casting cheer onto an otherwise salt-crusted street. Villagers called to one another from the rooftops as they worked to drape the steep hillside with strings of banners emblazoned in the village’s colors. The sharp triangles stretched across a cloudless sky, racing down to the quayside from the bases of the wind towers perched upon the village’s namesake hill. After months of banal green plantings, the thick-walled plastic cisterns, wedged between the curved facades of each home, now boasted rainbow bonnets of the so-called “signal blooms” that had burst open at the touch of daylight this very morning, a result of their tendrils being submerged overnight in the rising rainwater.

Gallia could also smell the sweetness of confections wafting through windows flung open to capitalize on the early morning coolness. The tinge of citrus squeezed into countless cups – undoubtedly decorated by playfully spiraled peels – reached her nostrils. She caught an echoing swish of wood and plastic bars from a mallet orchestra truing their stands in the nearby market square for the evening concert. Enshrouding all of this was the periodic shower of metallic tones coming from the village’s bell tower, which bathed every villager in the aural signals of a momentous day. The bustling villagers, the band, the bells, and the ambient calls of seashore birds all echoed through the narrow lanes that switch backed down to the busy harbor.

The old woman tucked a small pendant behind her shirt and started down the street that delivered travelers directly to the forest trails. The blessing of the storm and all the resultant fanfare seemed lost in her frown and fixed stare. A villager passing by her stopped to present the mudra greeting – hands gently pressed together against the chest, fingers pointed upward, head bowed – and said, “Won’t you be with us for the celebrations, Elder Tiul?”

“An aged woman like myself must get her exercise, you know,” Gallia replied with lax ambiguity. Of course, she would rather stay in the village and prepare for the celebrations, but she couldn’t shake her anxieties about the Aur children, their sacred souls hidden away for centuries, and she knew she must check on them before she could share in the village’s joy. She still quaked from the conversation earlier this morning with one of the village fishermen, Gorian.

A man who relished the private dominion of his boat, Gorian had shied from stepping into her small apartment, choosing instead to hover at the threshold suspended in his mudra with the tawny haze of dawn his backdrop and apologizing for interrupting her first mug of rainwater. How was it that she had anticipated his strange news? She had remained seated with the thin metal scriptleaf, from which she regularly studied the texts of Our Order, flat upon the table before her.

“There were no crabs in any of the traps, and I found that kind of funny, Elder Tiul,” he had said. “I was just goin’ a tell Elder Nemla, but I saw a glow in your window and thought how you always walk about that end of the forest, and that maybe you should know about it too, since it never happened before.”

A line from the ancient psalms came to her lips in a calming tone. “Our star exists quietly within our midst, gently reminding us of our connection to it.”

Gorian had been appeased, or perhaps confused, but Gallia had felt the tug in her gut. She reflexively grabbed for the metal pendant. She must go immediately; the safety of the Aur children was a clan elder’s primary responsibility. Tucked away in a remote cave, the cubes that served for centuries as bastions for their blessed ancestors had remained unmolested all that time. Surely, she thought to herself, they still lay peacefully. But the oddity of empty crab traps and the pull she felt inside could not be ignored.

“Please don’t tire yourself too much, Elder Tiul,” the villager said, placing a hand on her thin shoulder. “We wish to enjoy special moments together.”

Gallia nodded with a forced smile. Let them see you walk. An elder must not conceal her movements. Concealment might lead to suspicion, and then distrust. But it was better – it had always been better – for the elders to keep the fact and whereabouts of the Aur children hidden from the villagers. For their safety. Let other elders in other villages do what they will; at Hill Village, for generations, the Aur children were not to be relied upon for their energy or anything else other than the vague notion of ambiguous icons of spirituality in the texts of Our Order.

Gallia blinked her hazel eyes with renewed confidence that attenuated their watery sheen and depth encased in a wrinkled, somber face. Her natural pose of a kindly expression could make this frown look like pain, but Gallia did not suffer from her many decades of age; instead, her erect posture defied it.

“Our star shares its warmth, its light, its energy. So too, Our Order,” she said, in her patient style.

The villager nodded thoughtfully and presented a departing mudra. Gallia moved briskly to touch the woman’s shoulder despite the physiological complications of being alive for over thirteen decades.

“Missing the celebrations would be like salt in a cistern,” she reassured the villager as she carried on. “I won’t be long gone.” Gallia edged herself forward and mumbled what she always said to villagers who suggested she might be weak in her old age, “Activity readies the body and the mind.”

She stepped steadily down the worn village street towards the forest, her gray linen frock hanging lazily about her frame. The plain outfit of a village elder ornamented only by the pendant suspended from her neck. With her wrinkled hand, she occasionally reached up and clutched at the pendant by its leather lanyard. Her movements were executed in a floating way, navigating around the groupings of villagers, aloof to the energetic goings on around her, distracted by the Aur children. But before she took too many steps, another villager approached her with a beaming smile and the respectful mudra.

“Good day, Elder Tiul,” the villager said cheerfully, juggling a bouquet of red flowers and a loaf of bread. The greeting was enough to catch her attention.

“You might need a basket, Chomre-Tiul.” Gallia attempted to maintain her forward momentum, yet she knew it would not be easy to get to the forest without some delays from the bubbling villagers. After all, the holy patron of the Tiuls, the largest clan in Hill Village, could not expect to escape the center of the village without expressing a few words of care, advice, teachings, preachings, and above all else, understanding and empathizing with the pains and struggles of village life. She had lived the longest, seen the most, and most importantly, mastered the training of Our Order.

Chomre-Tiul pointed his chin toward the harbor. “A rich night of rainfall behind us and a rich day of trade ahead.”

“Indeed!” Gallia replied, and with a hope to a swift conclusion she added, “Our star comforts and contents us with its gifts.”

Her sullen gaze down the road competed with the cheer in the villager’s voice. Her hand trembled. Is a loss truly upon us? Have they come for ours at last?

“That’s a fast ship.” The villager motioned again toward the ocean-going vessel moored in the middle of the harbor. Gallia nodded silently as she looked out over the rounded tops of the beehive village homes stacked in rows along the steep hill. The sky had already abandoned its bronzed hints of morning as she observed the harborscape, a tranquil frame of stillness. She counted two, triple-masted coastal merchant ships held to the main quay by thick warps. Their wing sails had been lowered and carefully bundled along each boom.

“Both managed to beat the storm,” Chomre said, and when she didn’t reply, he added, sheepishly, “A new ship always thrills me.”

The rains, the ships: exciting. If only I could share that thrill right now. Merchant vessels entering port with massive decks and enormous planes of sail flushed villagers’ imaginations with thoughts of courageous, long-distance journeys and salty, rough-spoken sailors wobbling into town on their sea legs. Even last night, despite the unparalleled excitement of imminent rain, children shrieked with glee at the arrival of the Marlin, a four-master – each of those massive trunks styled to mimic the ribbed contours of the wind towers atop the hill.

She could see crewmembers of the ship stealing glances at the odd, pointed tops of Hill Village’s hive homes lined along the hill as they went about their preparations on deck. “And them as well.”

“Yes. I guess for some of them it’s their first glimpse of our famous Hill Village.”

Chomre beamed with that curious affliction of hometown pride; the kind derived from generations of sailors instantly familiar with the silhouette of one’s village. A pride that comes from knowing the hallways of homes of countless families on countless coasts were decorated with a dreamy souvenir sketch of this very village, inspiring the adventurous spirit of children and adults alike far, far away. Those sailors aboard the Marlin surely yearned to abandon their deck chores and explore the village as soon as they were given leave. They anticipated good meals, good drink, and good trade in a fabled haven.

“A spectacular time for them to see our village,” she said, and then mumbled, “Our star reminds us daily of its massive presence.”

“What was that, Elder Tiul?”

“Oh, nothing, dear. Just my mind leading my mouth as usual.”

“Let’s hope they’ve come to pack their holds with plenty of salt fish and take our advice on where to cut the coquina.”

Gallia smiled at the brief thought of the lucrative trade in salted fish and coquina slab that had made Hill Village so prosperous. The hard labor of removing coquina had been, until recent decades, a prerequisite to trade. But the village elders abhorred the presumption of a right to deplete a resource of the Earth, let alone the labor involved in its extraction. In her first years as an elder, Gallia had realized that the careful selection of suitable coquina from the shoreline was more valuable to its trade than the work of its extraction. That is what we should provide, she had argued at the time. In this way, Hill Village had adapted to selling their unique skill of selection, leaving the hard labor of extraction to the crews of visiting ships. The lives of Hill Villagers and respect for the Earth’s gifts had improved while the controversial presumption of rights to those resources had been eliminated.

“Only a fool would attempt to extract coquina without our guidance,” she muttered more to herself than to Chomre, repeating the line she oftentimes spoke to merchant vessel captains. She looked at him and added with a clever smile, “and our fees, of course.”

“And let’s hope they have fine goods to trade for it. I myself need another pump for our greenhouse. And,” Chomre continued, seemingly recounting his mental list, “some spices from Gjoa would also be nice.”

“We will see what they have when they come ashore later this morning. But now, I must have my walk before the festivities begin.”

“Return to us soon, Elder Tiul.”

She again noticed herself clutching at the pendant. Its round shape represented the Earth. The circle within, a moon. The hexagon inside that, with each corner connected to another by a line, an Aur child. The center of these representations had been rubbed down by her weathered thumb, but she didn’t forget the ancient text once written there. “Protect the children of the sun,” she whispered as she descended the hill at the rear of the village.

Through the long shadows of a morning sun, she skirted past the market square at the junction of several streets and staircases scaling the hill. The square buzzed, a mess of half-assembled stalls and decorations. Multi-story folds of sailcloth, retired from merchant ships, sagged in lazy bows at the corners of the space, ready to be hauled across taut cords to shade the market. She heard the percussionists of the band discussing an arrangement. Upon the extended ringing of the noontime bells, she thought, trade and celebration shall soon burst forth from this place.

“Elder Tiul,” a younger villager named Minjla-Hoenria called from the threshold of her home, motioning a mudra under the shade of her porch, “welcome for a glass of water.”

Gallia smiled politely, resigning herself to the fact that the offer of rainwater must not be refused. She walked up to the porch, where Minjla held out a mug to her. Just for a moment, she thought. Not far now from the forest.

“Thank you, dear.” She accepted the mug; the freshly sliced citrus nipped at her nose. Holding the cup towards the woman, she said in the solemn voice reserved for blessings, “Our Order is the fount of love that glows in every heart.”

They sipped in unison.

Gallia’s lips smacked. “You are very generous to offer me a drink.”

“But it is an honor to our home, Elder Tiul.” After another moment, a glimmer of curiosity appeared in Minjla’s eye. “Are you off for a walk on such an important morning?”