The Girl Who Could Talk To Landscapes - David Carey
Once, a long time ago, while the mountains were still growing and the sea was still deciding on its colours, there was a girl who could talk to landscapes. She had always been able to. When she was very young she used to sit by the edge of her village and listen to the trees argue with each other in the Old language.
All places converse in the Old language. The Old language is the language the world speaks. It is the language the wind whistles in and the pebbles chatter in. Her mother used to tell her that the world was simply a whisper, a secret exchanged between two gods, and the Old language was the language it was whispered in.
All this was well-known back then. Many linguists at the time believed that the Old language was the source of all communication – that in a conversation, every word is translated through the Old language to imbue it with meaning, because the Old language is the place from which all meaning derives.
They believed that everyone knows the Old language, somewhere deep inside them. But no-one spoke it, or understood it when it was spoken.
No-one except her.
The village people first found out about her peculiar circumstance when she was six years old, and started singing in the village market while her parents were trading goods. No-one could make out the words, but the tune was both mesmerising and terrifying. It sounded the way leaves feel when they're dying.
When asked where she'd heard the song from, the girl replied simply,
"I've always known it. Hasn't everyone always known it?"
That night the clouds sang back to her. There was a torrential rainfall, and the Village flooded. An old man drowned in his home.
This became a pattern: the girl would often sing while out on errands, old tunes that no-one had ever head before, and yet everyone would swear blind that they recognised when recounting it; and after she sung bad things would happen. Not always on a similar scale, but always bad. Naturally the people grew afraid of her.
In due course, the village linguist was sent for, and she listened to the girl sing and asked her questions and, finally, delivered the diagnosis that her parents had been fearing.
"I believe she can speak the Old language," the linguist told them.
Her parents were devastated. The Old language was not meant for people to speak. That was well-known. Some of the more religious members of the village would see its use as a kind of blasphemy.
Most people would see it as a kind of betrayal. Nature was wild and dangerous back then, even more so than it is now. Everyone knew the stories of explorers who had travelled to the wilderness on the other side of the mountains that enclosed the eastern side of the village, and never came back. Nature was the enemy, and she could speak its language. To many this would be seen as a pledge of allegiance.
"How did this happen?" asked her father.
"Sometimes people just come out wrong," said the linguist, and gave the girl a brief glance, which was both apologetic and fearful.
Most people avoided her after that, though some of the other village children would call her names from a distance.
"Broken girl!" they'd shout. "Cloud-whisperer! Flood-friend!"
And another name too. One that doesn't translate very well into more contemporary langauges. The most apt translation nowadays would be 'savage', but this is only an approximation, and loses a lot of the sting of the original word. It meant someone primitive, someone dangerous and uncivilised; but it also meant someone who sided with nature over people, who made alliance with the weather and the wild against their own kind.
She spent a lot of time by the edge of the village after that, trying not to cry as she explained her problems to the surrounding forest. The forest was sympathetic in its way, but the intersection of their respective experiences was limited, and it did not understand her predicament. Its musings provided her little comfort. The forest understood only life and death. It spent its days watching predators kill prey in a constant battle for survival. That was the lens through which it saw the world.
Why do you care if they call you names? It asked her once in a voice of birdsong and rustling leaves. Their words have no power. With your words you can call the sky to drown them, or the mountains to bury them.
She stopped talking to the forest after that.
It was a problem she had more and more with landscapes as she grew older. She liked to listen to them talk – their interactions had a kind of beauty to them that was lacking in her interactions with people (particularly given her newfound status as social pariah) – but their understanding of the world was so at odds with hers. She was as fluent in the Old langage as they were, and yet she often had trouble following the thread of their conversations – not the precise content of what was being said, but the chain of reasoning that led from one point to the next; the baffling landscape-logic that underpinned their discourse.
It was a dangerous logic, to a person. It was a logic that led them to sing to her in monsoons, or knock down houses in lieu of a polite greeting. Such conversation techniques would never put her in harm's way – after all, it would rather defeat the object of talking to her if the act of doing so rendered her unable to reply – but they would often cause irreparable damage to the people around her.
In the end she stopped replying to them, stopped acknowledging them. She even taught herself not to sing to them, which was very difficult, because she had known the Old songs as long as she could remember, and they were her favourite songs. They were songs that yearned to be sung, that writhed inside her when she wouldn't let them out. But she knew she had to keep them there, because if they were out in the world the weather might try to harmonise with them. And she knew the damage that could do.
It made no difference to the way people treated her. The adults still avoided her; the children still called her names. They probably still thought she talked in the Old language: after all they all knew that she still went to the edge of the village on a daily basis, and sat by the river at the entrance to the forest or by the foot of the path leading up into the mountains. They had no way of knowing that she only listened to them talk now, never joined in herself.
Her parents still talked to her of course, but even they regarded her with caution. They tried not to show it, but she could tell.
Everyone was on guard around her, except the landscapes. They were the closest thing she had to friends, and she had forbidden herself from talking to any of them.
It was a very lonely existence. And it didn't change for a very long time.
When she was fifteen, a team of explorers (three brash young men with more bravery than brains) decided to leave the village and venture over the mountains to conquer the wilderness. No-one had tried that for longer than she had been alive – the cautionary tales told to children about the fates of these men's predecessors were usually sufficient to stem any desire they might have of following in the same footsteps.
But these men were not so easily put off, and they left the village one day to find the other side of the mountain, and make their mark on it.
Predictably they didn't return. A fortnight passed, and then another, and then another. Eventually, a village meeting was called to decide whether they should send out a search party. The village chief suggested it, and, of course, the young men's families campaigned for it strongly. But no-one would dare volunteer themselves. A long heated argument ensued.
Late into that evening, when the argument had all but dried up, the linguist spoke up.
"The wilderness beyond the mountains is a killer," she said, "it's savage and untamable. We've already lost countless people to it over the years. There's no point sending another party out there so we can lose them too. We won't solve our problems by repeating the same mistakes."
"Then how do you propose we solve them?" asked the father of one of the explorers, bitterly.
"The same way we solve any problem," said the linguist, "Discourse."
"We can't engage the wilderness in conversation!" the same explorer's sister protested.
"No," agreed the linguist, "We can't. But we know someone who can."
The girl was sent out to converse with the wilderness the next morning. It was an act of diplomacy, of sorts: a request for the release of three hostages. The village chief had decreed it, so she didn't exactly have a choice in the matter, though if she'd had one she would probably have chosen to go anyway. There was nothing for her here in the village.
Her parents were apprehensive at the thought of her travelling over the mountains, but the rest of the village were acutely relieved when she left.
And so was she. Because now that she was out of town she could sing again without consequence. She started to do so as soon as she'd reached the foot of the mountains. The song lept from her almost involuntarily. It felt as though she'd been underwater for years, and had only just come up to take a breath.
The song she sung was a melancholy one about the birth and death of mountains. The mountain range started to sing with her as she walked. Over the next few days, the people from the village could hear it singing. And though they didn't understand the words, they took comfort from it – particularly her parents – because it meant she was still up there, still alive, still climbing.
Her journey was remarkably painless. The mountain made sure of that. It guided her to rivers, and found her easy paths, and, every now and again, it shifted a little, to shorten her journey.
Then she reached the top and started the descent into the wilderness on the other side, and the mountain spoke out in alarm.
You're heading to the wilderness! It said.
Of course I am, she replied. She found it a little odd that it had only just realised: the wilderness was the only place this route could take her. She thought it would have been obvious that that was her destination. But then, what was obvious to a human and what was obvious to a landscape were two very different things.
Don't go down there! said the mountain. It's not safe down there. Stay here and sing with me.
Why isn't it safe? demanded the girl, growing increasingly anxious.
There's something not right about it, said the mountain, It's wild and dangerous.
So are you, the girl pointed out, and I've managed to climb you.
No! insisted the mountain. The ground around her shook as it spoke. The wilderness isn't like me. It's different.
What's so different about it? She asked.
The mountain was silent for a moment, and then replied in a voice of granite and gravel:
Sometimes places just come out wrong.
Though it unnerved her a great deal, this last warning actually strengthened her resolve to reach the wilderness. It reminded her of what the linguist had said about her, all those years ago when she was giving her diagnosis. It was spoken in a different language of course, but the sentiment was the same: some things are just different, unnatural, savage. And normal things should stay clear of them.
Maybe, she thought, such things could find solace in each other's company.
She started to feel a deep affinity with the wilderness as she began her descent, an affinity that grew deeper the closer she got to it.
She didn't get to it for a fairly long time though: her journey down took almost three times as long as her journey up, and it was much rougher. The mountain refused to sing with her, though it told her frequently to turn back. Often her path was blocked by fallen rocks. Sometimes when she reached a stream, it would twist its course away from her so she couldn't drink from it.
But she persisted anyway, and eventually she reached the bottom of the mountain, and set foot into the wilderness.
She could see what the mountain had meant almost instantly. She hadn't noticed it from a distance, but it was very clear now. There was something wrong with the wilderness. Something hard to pin down. Something a little bit off about its geography: paths with no end and no beginning weaved in and out of it in ways that the eye couldn't follow; strange plantlife jutted out at odd angles. The whole place seemed disjointed, discontinuous; like there was some fundamental law of existence that it was having great difficulty in adhering to. Its entire topology felt impossible.
And yet here it was, and she was inside it.
Hello, she said timidly.
The landscape twitched and groaned.
Who are you? It asked.
She took a moment to respond. She was about to say she was a villager, but the label wouldn't fit. The village was not her home. It never had been. Still, it was the village that had sent her here, and they'd sent her for a purpose, which she had to explain.
I came here from the village, she settled on at last (because it was technically true, and avoided the connotaional baggage of other less careful phrasings), They want their people back. Three of them came here about six weeks ago, and never returned.
I remember them, said the wilderness, they're still here.
Why haven't they left yet? she asked, surprised.
People don't often leave, it replied, They get lost. I try to help them find their way but they don't understand me.
To her shock, it sounded genuinely upset as it said this. In her experience landscapes usually regarded people and other animals as an irrelevance. Sometimes they took a liking to her, but she suspected that was only because they liked the songs she sung. She had certainly never heard a landscape spare a thought for any of the other creatures that travelled through them.
But then, as the mountain had warned her, this was not a normal landscape. This was a landscape that had come out wrong.
I can understand you, she said, and they can understand me. Show me where they are, and I can guide them back.
The wilderness was eerily silent for a few seconds, perhaps in consideration. Then it replied,
Yes. I can do that.
And it did. It began to give her directions, and she followed them.
Even with it guiding her, the wilderness was an extremely difficult place to navigate. It just didn't make sense, didn't fit together the way it should do. But still, she found the three men. They were in the middle of something that was very definitely a clearing, even though it didn't seem to have a forest around it.
They were near their wits' ends when she found them, and greeted her with tears induced in equal parts by relief and exhaustion. They were extremely thankful, but far too tired to express it coherently. She didn't mind. The jumbled expressions of gratitude they managed were more than she had ever gotten from anyone in the village before.
With a certain amount of trouble she led them out again, under the wilderness' instructions, until they were at the foot of the mountain once more. The mountain was overjoyed when it saw her, and started to sing, hoping she would join in.
But she ignored it and turned to face the wilderness again.
Are you going? it asked. There was a hint of disappointment in its voice.
Yes, she said, I need to bring these three back to the village.
Will you come back? It asked.
She thought about it briefly.
I can do, she replied.
The wilderness shifted, and suddenly looked a little brighter.
You know, said the girl, most places don't care whether people come back to them.
The wilderness paused.
I'm not like most places, it said.
It sounded a little wistful about that, but the thought made the girl smile.
I'm not like most people, she replied, so that makes two of us.
Once, a long time ago, while the mountains were still growing and the sea was still deciding on its colours, there was a girl who could talk to landscapes. She had always been able to. When she was very young she used to sit by the edge of her village and listen to the trees argue with each other in the Old language.
All places converse in the Old language. The Old language is the language the world speaks. It is the language the wind whistles in and the pebbles chatter in. Her mother used to tell her that the world was simply a whisper, a secret exchanged between two gods, and the Old language was the language it was whispered in.
All this was well-known back then. Many linguists at the time believed that the Old language was the source of all communication – that in a conversation, every word is translated through the Old language to imbue it with meaning, because the Old language is the place from which all meaning derives.
They believed that everyone knows the Old language, somewhere deep inside them. But no-one spoke it, or understood it when it was spoken.
No-one except her.
The village people first found out about her peculiar circumstance when she was six years old, and started singing in the village market while her parents were trading goods. No-one could make out the words, but the tune was both mesmerising and terrifying. It sounded the way leaves feel when they're dying.
When asked where she'd heard the song from, the girl replied simply,
"I've always known it. Hasn't everyone always known it?"
That night the clouds sang back to her. There was a torrential rainfall, and the Village flooded. An old man drowned in his home.
This became a pattern: the girl would often sing while out on errands, old tunes that no-one had ever head before, and yet everyone would swear blind that they recognised when recounting it; and after she sung bad things would happen. Not always on a similar scale, but always bad. Naturally the people grew afraid of her.
In due course, the village linguist was sent for, and she listened to the girl sing and asked her questions and, finally, delivered the diagnosis that her parents had been fearing.
"I believe she can speak the Old language," the linguist told them.
Her parents were devastated. The Old language was not meant for people to speak. That was well-known. Some of the more religious members of the village would see its use as a kind of blasphemy.
Most people would see it as a kind of betrayal. Nature was wild and dangerous back then, even more so than it is now. Everyone knew the stories of explorers who had travelled to the wilderness on the other side of the mountains that enclosed the eastern side of the village, and never came back. Nature was the enemy, and she could speak its language. To many this would be seen as a pledge of allegiance.
"How did this happen?" asked her father.
"Sometimes people just come out wrong," said the linguist, and gave the girl a brief glance, which was both apologetic and fearful.
Most people avoided her after that, though some of the other village children would call her names from a distance.
"Broken girl!" they'd shout. "Cloud-whisperer! Flood-friend!"
And another name too. One that doesn't translate very well into more contemporary langauges. The most apt translation nowadays would be 'savage', but this is only an approximation, and loses a lot of the sting of the original word. It meant someone primitive, someone dangerous and uncivilised; but it also meant someone who sided with nature over people, who made alliance with the weather and the wild against their own kind.
She spent a lot of time by the edge of the village after that, trying not to cry as she explained her problems to the surrounding forest. The forest was sympathetic in its way, but the intersection of their respective experiences was limited, and it did not understand her predicament. Its musings provided her little comfort. The forest understood only life and death. It spent its days watching predators kill prey in a constant battle for survival. That was the lens through which it saw the world.
Why do you care if they call you names? It asked her once in a voice of birdsong and rustling leaves. Their words have no power. With your words you can call the sky to drown them, or the mountains to bury them.
She stopped talking to the forest after that.
It was a problem she had more and more with landscapes as she grew older. She liked to listen to them talk – their interactions had a kind of beauty to them that was lacking in her interactions with people (particularly given her newfound status as social pariah) – but their understanding of the world was so at odds with hers. She was as fluent in the Old langage as they were, and yet she often had trouble following the thread of their conversations – not the precise content of what was being said, but the chain of reasoning that led from one point to the next; the baffling landscape-logic that underpinned their discourse.
It was a dangerous logic, to a person. It was a logic that led them to sing to her in monsoons, or knock down houses in lieu of a polite greeting. Such conversation techniques would never put her in harm's way – after all, it would rather defeat the object of talking to her if the act of doing so rendered her unable to reply – but they would often cause irreparable damage to the people around her.
In the end she stopped replying to them, stopped acknowledging them. She even taught herself not to sing to them, which was very difficult, because she had known the Old songs as long as she could remember, and they were her favourite songs. They were songs that yearned to be sung, that writhed inside her when she wouldn't let them out. But she knew she had to keep them there, because if they were out in the world the weather might try to harmonise with them. And she knew the damage that could do.
It made no difference to the way people treated her. The adults still avoided her; the children still called her names. They probably still thought she talked in the Old language: after all they all knew that she still went to the edge of the village on a daily basis, and sat by the river at the entrance to the forest or by the foot of the path leading up into the mountains. They had no way of knowing that she only listened to them talk now, never joined in herself.
Her parents still talked to her of course, but even they regarded her with caution. They tried not to show it, but she could tell.
Everyone was on guard around her, except the landscapes. They were the closest thing she had to friends, and she had forbidden herself from talking to any of them.
It was a very lonely existence. And it didn't change for a very long time.
When she was fifteen, a team of explorers (three brash young men with more bravery than brains) decided to leave the village and venture over the mountains to conquer the wilderness. No-one had tried that for longer than she had been alive – the cautionary tales told to children about the fates of these men's predecessors were usually sufficient to stem any desire they might have of following in the same footsteps.
But these men were not so easily put off, and they left the village one day to find the other side of the mountain, and make their mark on it.
Predictably they didn't return. A fortnight passed, and then another, and then another. Eventually, a village meeting was called to decide whether they should send out a search party. The village chief suggested it, and, of course, the young men's families campaigned for it strongly. But no-one would dare volunteer themselves. A long heated argument ensued.
Late into that evening, when the argument had all but dried up, the linguist spoke up.
"The wilderness beyond the mountains is a killer," she said, "it's savage and untamable. We've already lost countless people to it over the years. There's no point sending another party out there so we can lose them too. We won't solve our problems by repeating the same mistakes."
"Then how do you propose we solve them?" asked the father of one of the explorers, bitterly.
"The same way we solve any problem," said the linguist, "Discourse."
"We can't engage the wilderness in conversation!" the same explorer's sister protested.
"No," agreed the linguist, "We can't. But we know someone who can."
The girl was sent out to converse with the wilderness the next morning. It was an act of diplomacy, of sorts: a request for the release of three hostages. The village chief had decreed it, so she didn't exactly have a choice in the matter, though if she'd had one she would probably have chosen to go anyway. There was nothing for her here in the village.
Her parents were apprehensive at the thought of her travelling over the mountains, but the rest of the village were acutely relieved when she left.
And so was she. Because now that she was out of town she could sing again without consequence. She started to do so as soon as she'd reached the foot of the mountains. The song lept from her almost involuntarily. It felt as though she'd been underwater for years, and had only just come up to take a breath.
The song she sung was a melancholy one about the birth and death of mountains. The mountain range started to sing with her as she walked. Over the next few days, the people from the village could hear it singing. And though they didn't understand the words, they took comfort from it – particularly her parents – because it meant she was still up there, still alive, still climbing.
Her journey was remarkably painless. The mountain made sure of that. It guided her to rivers, and found her easy paths, and, every now and again, it shifted a little, to shorten her journey.
Then she reached the top and started the descent into the wilderness on the other side, and the mountain spoke out in alarm.
You're heading to the wilderness! It said.
Of course I am, she replied. She found it a little odd that it had only just realised: the wilderness was the only place this route could take her. She thought it would have been obvious that that was her destination. But then, what was obvious to a human and what was obvious to a landscape were two very different things.
Don't go down there! said the mountain. It's not safe down there. Stay here and sing with me.
Why isn't it safe? demanded the girl, growing increasingly anxious.
There's something not right about it, said the mountain, It's wild and dangerous.
So are you, the girl pointed out, and I've managed to climb you.
No! insisted the mountain. The ground around her shook as it spoke. The wilderness isn't like me. It's different.
What's so different about it? She asked.
The mountain was silent for a moment, and then replied in a voice of granite and gravel:
Sometimes places just come out wrong.
Though it unnerved her a great deal, this last warning actually strengthened her resolve to reach the wilderness. It reminded her of what the linguist had said about her, all those years ago when she was giving her diagnosis. It was spoken in a different language of course, but the sentiment was the same: some things are just different, unnatural, savage. And normal things should stay clear of them.
Maybe, she thought, such things could find solace in each other's company.
She started to feel a deep affinity with the wilderness as she began her descent, an affinity that grew deeper the closer she got to it.
She didn't get to it for a fairly long time though: her journey down took almost three times as long as her journey up, and it was much rougher. The mountain refused to sing with her, though it told her frequently to turn back. Often her path was blocked by fallen rocks. Sometimes when she reached a stream, it would twist its course away from her so she couldn't drink from it.
But she persisted anyway, and eventually she reached the bottom of the mountain, and set foot into the wilderness.
She could see what the mountain had meant almost instantly. She hadn't noticed it from a distance, but it was very clear now. There was something wrong with the wilderness. Something hard to pin down. Something a little bit off about its geography: paths with no end and no beginning weaved in and out of it in ways that the eye couldn't follow; strange plantlife jutted out at odd angles. The whole place seemed disjointed, discontinuous; like there was some fundamental law of existence that it was having great difficulty in adhering to. Its entire topology felt impossible.
And yet here it was, and she was inside it.
Hello, she said timidly.
The landscape twitched and groaned.
Who are you? It asked.
She took a moment to respond. She was about to say she was a villager, but the label wouldn't fit. The village was not her home. It never had been. Still, it was the village that had sent her here, and they'd sent her for a purpose, which she had to explain.
I came here from the village, she settled on at last (because it was technically true, and avoided the connotaional baggage of other less careful phrasings), They want their people back. Three of them came here about six weeks ago, and never returned.
I remember them, said the wilderness, they're still here.
Why haven't they left yet? she asked, surprised.
People don't often leave, it replied, They get lost. I try to help them find their way but they don't understand me.
To her shock, it sounded genuinely upset as it said this. In her experience landscapes usually regarded people and other animals as an irrelevance. Sometimes they took a liking to her, but she suspected that was only because they liked the songs she sung. She had certainly never heard a landscape spare a thought for any of the other creatures that travelled through them.
But then, as the mountain had warned her, this was not a normal landscape. This was a landscape that had come out wrong.
I can understand you, she said, and they can understand me. Show me where they are, and I can guide them back.
The wilderness was eerily silent for a few seconds, perhaps in consideration. Then it replied,
Yes. I can do that.
And it did. It began to give her directions, and she followed them.
Even with it guiding her, the wilderness was an extremely difficult place to navigate. It just didn't make sense, didn't fit together the way it should do. But still, she found the three men. They were in the middle of something that was very definitely a clearing, even though it didn't seem to have a forest around it.
They were near their wits' ends when she found them, and greeted her with tears induced in equal parts by relief and exhaustion. They were extremely thankful, but far too tired to express it coherently. She didn't mind. The jumbled expressions of gratitude they managed were more than she had ever gotten from anyone in the village before.
With a certain amount of trouble she led them out again, under the wilderness' instructions, until they were at the foot of the mountain once more. The mountain was overjoyed when it saw her, and started to sing, hoping she would join in.
But she ignored it and turned to face the wilderness again.
Are you going? it asked. There was a hint of disappointment in its voice.
Yes, she said, I need to bring these three back to the village.
Will you come back? It asked.
She thought about it briefly.
I can do, she replied.
The wilderness shifted, and suddenly looked a little brighter.
You know, said the girl, most places don't care whether people come back to them.
The wilderness paused.
I'm not like most places, it said.
It sounded a little wistful about that, but the thought made the girl smile.
I'm not like most people, she replied, so that makes two of us.