Notebooks of Dwi At-Kerr, Seventeenth Envoy to Salah. Envoy At-Kerr passed on 5 Tarha 8254. Her notebooks were received by Kalih’ar University 34 Taliss 8256. Her successor, Ejiran Af-Basant, left for Saliyan 12 Garan 8256.
8191, 17 Garan.
There is shit on the path again. Human shit. I know it is human shit because since I arrived in Salah I have come to know animals and their shit very well. Salafi society revolves around farming and fishing. Salafi agriculture, like ours, revolves around soil. Unlike us, the Salafim have no concept of waste. Their land is too small for such a concept. Here shit is a resource. One puts one’s shit and one’s animals’ shit in the proper places, to be turned into soil by the attentive, patient human orchestration of microorganisms and heat. Too much shit in one place is poison; it means disease, parasites, eutrophication—death. Shit spread apart, processed and distributed with care, means fertility, growth, life. In their long isolation the Salafim have come to know who they are and what they are made from. They know that in placing their shit rightly they care for their land and their seas; in caring for their land and their seas they care for themselves, for their children, for their place in the universe. Shit is a step in a cycle. If the cycle is broken the consequences may be dire. The disposition of shit is a matter of life and death—biologically and cosmologically. Most Salafim work in or close to food production; Salafi farmers and fishers are ecologists by training and experience and process philosophers by temperament. A Salafim who misplaces her shit has gone long ago down a wrong path.
This shit on my path was not left by a Salafim. But Kariyah is a small town. There are only three non-Salafim here; the rest are mostly in Saliyan or on the coast. I am the only Uddiyim on all Saleh; the Envoy has always been. The others are from Harpana—convicts, dissidents. Imprisonment breaks them; they become Harpana’s human shit. The rulers give them a choice: live out their lives imprisoned on Harpana; go to the Empty Continent and wage a silent, meaningless struggle for survival alone against the desert; or come here. Most choose imprisonment; on Harpana, at least, they can see their families. The loners choose the desert; the dreamers come here. But the sea journey is long and the wardens cruel; many fall diseased into delirium. Those who cannot stand are killed before landfall. The survivors, rarely more than a hundred, are left on the beach south of Saliyan. The Harpani rulers have left their shit on this beach for a thousand years.
This shit on my path is Dayin’s shit. She was dumped on the beach six months ago with fifty other Harpani convicts. I was told that she spent three months in Saliyan recovering and that as soon as she could make the seven day walk she came to Kariyah. This is all I know of her and until today I did not care to know more. This is the third time she has shit on the path between my cabin and the town. I thought the second time a coincidence and assumed it would be the last.
Unlike us, the Salafim have no great institutions—no universities, no prisons, no hospitals, no factories, no great halls of government. Their technologies are made by hand, matters of collective interest settled face-to-face. Their shared knowledge of their land and waters and their place in them affords this. Deviants are handled with patience and care. Joined to the great imaginative apparatus of practical and cosmological interconnectedness in the mind of every Salafim is a model of human development. There are specialists among the Salafim, but each too is a generalist: farmer, fisher, maker of homes, teacher, planner, mediator. The skills to integrate the Harpani into Salafi society are everywhere among the people.
I have not yet learned these things, though I know it is expected that I shall. I have spent the first 33 years of my life inside—in buildings, institutions. School, like all Uddiyim; then, at 20, I was chosen Seventeenth Envoy. I spent the next thirteen years in Kalih’ar Library, reading the notebooks of the first fifteen and waiting for the Sixteenth to die. Seven hundred years of notebooks. Mine too will be returned after my death. The Envoys—our notebooks are our fertilizing shit, our work. I could grow neither a cucumber nor a human soul. Poor broken Dayin is beyond me, somebody else’s shit to care for, to turn into compost.
I leave the shit on the path and walk into town. I sit on a chair in the sun in the gathering place, relaxed, drinking water and lime. I have time. I am learning to garden. I have worked three hours today; the rest of my task is to wait. Sometimes waiting is harder than working. Sometimes the mind will not rest.
Dayin is here, huddled under a tree, her hair covering her face in ragged strands. She is eating and writing. I ignore her and enjoy the warmth of the noon sun and the cool of my water and lime. I stare into space. I do nothing. I watch the thin clouds move slowly across the sky. I wait.
I stand and stretch. I have drunk all I have brought. I walk over to Dayin, slowly, unthreateningly.
“Dayin,” I say, clearly, unmistakably, but not sharply or unkindly. She looks up at me. I do not look Salafi, and I see this on her face. She does not know what I am, or how I could know her name. No Uddiyim has been to Harpana in eight hundred years. On Harpana we have faded into myth.
“I am Dwi,” I say. I reach out my hand for her to clasp, the one gesture common to all Uddiya, Salah, and Harpana. “I am from Uddiya.” Her eyes go wide as she understands, and she sits up and reaches for my hand.
M. Six Silberman, 2016
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