Today we had a small meeting at Maureen’s to discuss next month’s activity to celebrate NZ Book Month – a timed flash fiction/poetry challenge (watch this space for more details). We decided to have a test-run. Maureen gave us a quote from Torchwood to inspire us, and ten words were chosen at random from the dictionary. The quote was: “A million shadows of human emotion” and the words were: primitive, thousand, strip, inundate, proxy, irrespective, mutiny, retract, zero, embryo.
This took me exactly 57 minutes – 15 minutes staring into space and eating a chocolate brownie while I decided what to write about (I came up with three ideas and didn’t use any of them!), half an hour of actual writing, and the rest of the time checking, editing and realising I’d spelled one word incorrectly.
The title is unashamedly stolen from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the final inspiration was the Terracotta Soldiers of the First Emperor of China.
The Well of Souls
They came out of the earth, as naked as the clay itself. The land here is primitive, unchanged in a thousand years. Farmers work each strip of ground with hoes and spades of iron as corroded and worn as their bodies. They dig at their neighbours’ land, irrespective of ownership. The world is too cruel for them to care; they help each other.
One day, the village well runs dry. A group of friends walk a short distance into the fields, kick over the marks left by the plough, and dig in the shadow of the conical hill that dominates the plain. The day is warm and their sweat runs freely, as if by their effort alone they can inundate the earth with the water of their bodies.
A spade strikes rock. The men grumble, turning to one another in complaint. They must dig around it in order to lever out the boulder and set it aside. They scrape and scratch, chipping at the earth as it hardens, then softens with the orange-red of clay. The men nod in satisfaction, knowing they can line the new well with the clay. Lower they go, slipping off their shirts and taking it in turn to clamber into the hole, digging for water.
The men standing on the surface smoke cigarettes and swap old gossip. Suddenly a shout rings out from the pit. The old farmer inside scrambles upwards, his fingers stained red with mud.
“A man!” he cries, his eyes wide, his expression stricken. He points into the hole. “A man, buried alive – covered in clay!”
His friends scoff at him, but he doesn’t retract his statement. They laugh: how can he know it’s a man? After all this time, a man buried alive will be nothing but bones.
“Go down. See for yourself.” He grabs the rope and hauls himself from the well. He crouches away from the pit and takes a cigarette. His hands shake as he lights it.
The youngest of their group, the most vocal dissenter, swings himself into the hole. The others crowd above him, darkening the light. “Back,” he calls, his voice flat and without echo. “Get back.”
Slowly, they retreat, ten of them down to zero. Now he can see around him. The walls run with dust, striped red and orange, and there at the bottom of the pit is a face.
He drops to his knees, breathless with horror. The face is his own: smooth-cheeked, almond-eyed, a half-smile on sculpted lips. He reaches out and touches it, this embryo of humanity buried within the earth, caught fast in clay. The skin beneath his fingers feels warm. He leans closer, thinking he can see tears leaking from the perfect sightless eyes.
“What is it? What have you found?” his friends call from above. They cluster together, blocking out the sunlight again.
This time he doesn’t tell them to get back. He digs in the shadows, using his fingers like claws, struggling to free the man – his simulacrum – from the clay. As he works, his gasps fill the well like water. Panic fizzes through his brain; he is a proxy for the figure below him. To free himself, he must free the man amidst the clay.
His friends call out a second time. He can hear the worry in their voices like the squawking of birds. He continues to dig, and then clamps a muddied hand across his mouth as a second face is revealed.
He tastes the clay on his tongue. He swallows without thinking, taking into himself the very essence of the figures beneath him.
A third face emerges, breaking from the earth to smile at him. He works feverishly now, desperate to free them all as they mutiny from their common grave. The more he digs, the more men are revealed. He sees legs and arms, hair carefully arranged in topknots, bodies clad in armour. The men are painted, but the colour fades as he touches them. He is making them disappear, making them slip back into the earth and obscurity. He is not equal to this task, and he cries for help.
“What is it?” shout his friends on the surface, ten feet away, two millennia away.
“An army,” he says, the pit scraped open, a dozen – a million – faces waiting beneath him. “An army of clay men.”
His friends throw down the rope and pull him out. They peer into the well. Staring back at them is the past – their past. They recognise themselves in the clay faces, their emotions laid bare.
Shaken, they withdraw from the field. Victorious, the army gazes up from the shadows and meets the challenge of the sun.
- Sian Williams
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