Below the Wooded Ridge

Below the wooded ridge, the stone house crouches against the valley
floor. The land is high, riven by long, meandering valleys. The trees
and plants reflect the sub-alpine climate and the winds never seem to
cease completely. Tonight, the moon has risen above the black, skeletal
trees, piercing the frosted, crystal night with its sparkling light.
From the house, a light glimmers fitfully in the curtained window as a
shambling figure appears and re-appears briefly in the shaft of light.
A man is stumbling round the grassy area near the gate. Silver flecks
glint in a frost-rimed mane of hair as the man calls out, breath
steaming clouds into the night air.

The man rages at the sky. His calls are those of a distressed animal,
calling for help that never comes.

Within the house there is a woman. She sits at a table, isolated and
calm, smiling gently as she remembers her life before.

The man cries out, the woman remembers, and the valley moves on in
time, leaving each second behind as it ticks its existence in and out
of being.

Before the exodus, the valley was full of bright flowers and people
spilled along the roads into the valley from the narrow passes. People
filled the village; children sang, played and went to school. Painted
wagons travelled the roads, hawking wares to the houses and farms along
the way. The mill was bright and busy, horse-drawn carts arrived and
left at regular intervals, bearing grain and flour. Men, young and old,
toiled at the business of making white flour from the golden wheat, and
the women picked the fruit and cooked the food.

The pacing man has hair like white flour in the moonlight; the woman
momentarily gazes at the pictures of the fruit on the tablecloth. But
that fruit never grew here, and that hair has never known the clouds of
flour puffing from the sacks and the working machines. The mill is
dead. The wood is rotten, the machinery abandoned and rusting. The
winter is hard each year and the mill dies again, cell by cell. As each
year turns, the questing wind and searing rain penetrate just a little
more, the cells collapse, the stone weakens, and wood turns to dust.
Sinking in its own dry sea, its reality slips slowly away, dispersing a
little of its life as the valley slips down its ticking funnel of time,
shedding its substance as it moves.

The clock ticks. The valley moves, the moon is left behind and darkness
fumes from the hillsides, blanketing the scene.

1943

Boots crunch in unison on the stony road - soldiers are marching to the
village in their grey uniforms. They stare at the people and stand
nervously when they reach the square. The valley is still. It is warm,
flowers bloom and the trees are full. But there is no joy today.
Stillness hangs in the air. Outside the village, the mill and the house
stand, clean and busy. Wagons come and go, flour is ground. Of the
family that own the mill, two sons went to the war and one came
home.
Each day an officer arrives to check the consignments, to ration the
deliveries.

It is evening. In the village, the children stand. The school burns as
the grey soldiers watch. The children watch, the teachers watch. Behind
the houses, the men move. Quietly, they move. Roving up the ridge
behind the village, up the valley and across to the next, they move in
the night, white wolves in the shining moonlight.

At the mill, a woman sits. Night has come, the meal is over and the
soldiers are gone. By a flickering light, she reads. A smile passes
across her face and she gazes out into the dark, through the window
across the valley, where her husband roams.

The valley moves on, the thread strung tight as the past and future
combine.

Time before

The valley is empty. Wandering tribes were here, but moved on to lower,
warmer, places. There are rudimentary earth huts and enclosures of
piled stones to contain domesticated animals, but each winter defeated
the earth-builders. Where the mill will one day stand, a goatherd has
set up a summer enclosure. Marked by stones, the area begins to claim
its own identity in the valley. Time moves, and now the land around the
mill begins to move with it, accelerating to the distant future.

Later, people settle. The summer grazing is good, and many have elected
to stay through the hard winter by storing food. Harsh though the
winter is, they have found a shelter, a cleft in the ridge where the
wind does not reach. There is water, and material for shelter. They
have the goats, and they can store vegetables and fruit from the
autumn. There are berries, and the people harvest the food that they
find in the slopes and shaded hollows of the land.

Much later, the people grow crops on the flat, fertile plain. Water
streams in abundance down the hillsides, funnelling through the valley,
coursing across the valley floor. They grind grain, store wheat, make
bread and so their life goes on.

1910

There comes a time when there is a need for a mill. Outside the
village, at the head of the valley, they divert the flow of water into
a pond, and build the mill.

The mill is grand, new and modern. The proud owners stand to have their
pictures taken, and later that evening, the man paces in pride around
the new mill. He tells his son 'this will be yours'. His son nods, he
takes responsibility, he owns, is owned, by the mill.

The valley moves, the mill flourishes. In the house, a woman
sits.

Time to come

The tribe were driven from lower lands by newcomers. There are ruins
here in this valley and the people know that someone was here before.
There are many marks in the ground, and stones fashioned by unknown
hands, piled in ways that they do not understand. Where the people
camp, on the flat, well-watered plain at the head of the valley, there
are few remains. Ancient earthworks, empty now, would have led the
stream here. To what purpose? As night falls, the people light their
fires and settle in this new country.

The man paces through the woods. The people have to live, and that
means finding a way to live. They had escaped the terror in the
lowlands and now they had to settle. Here there are fruits; there are
grasses with grain, and animals. The climate is warm and many trees
grow. There had been a settlement further down the valley, and there
could be again. For now, this would serve.

He gazes up into the clear, sparkling sky, and the wooded ridge under
which this new place lies. The moon is high and silver frost rimes his
beard. As he gives his prayers to the gods, he raised his head and
calls to the moon for blessing for him and his people.

At the campfire, the woman overhears his calls, and smiles gently. The
firelight glimmers fitfully as she takes some fruit, wrapped in a blue
cloth, which she had brought on the journey. She offers some to her
young daughter. She knows they will be safe here.

And the valley moved on.