Descending Star

SONG OF THE FALL OF EDEN

My first living memory: my family's exodus from ancient
Bactra, city with unnumbered fountains, endlessly abandoned
to the east and west since its foundations first arose upon a
river valley long since buried under ice and ever flowing
time, seen from the distance as a single sloping hill ascending
at its center to a tower in the clouds, yet from within its
limits seen as not a pyramid at all, but rather twenty-
one concentric walls, constructed of enormous cyclopean
stone, each block cut taller than the gates and thrice as long, built up from
bedrock, cut and placed by giants from a past epoch who toppled
serac towers that calved off of the frozen massifs to the north, the
towers of ice that groaned and shifted at the feet of glacial cliffs, past
rough unfinished termini of dry and dusty viaducts that
wended upward, desiccated arteries across the arid
stark moraine, the aqueducts that fed the city's fountains, ever
in construction, ever raised up higher, for the dwindling run-off
from the ice cap's slow retreat, a project forever unfinished,
just as everything must be, for this place has always persisted,
and it will exist forever. On clear mornings, Bactra's massive
walls shone brightly on the arid plain below the cloud line, as seen
from atop the ice cap. From above, the walls resembled tree rings,
each great ring a mile apart; the vast expanses in between the
walls were populated by collectives named for harvests, goods and
skills they traded. Each concentric ring wall had just one gate, open,
never barred or barricaded, for the city had no doors. The
gates were staggered randomly, nonlinear, according to the
whimsy of the builders, and the residents and visitors could
freely walk from end to end, upon encircling roads, from the first
gate of entry, at the outer wall, and through the inner layered
rings, and all the way within to Bactra's central fountain. We had
holidays, more than a dozen: legends told of heavenly Gate
Road parades, with costumed children dressed as silver Seraphim, who
towed their combed and decorated animals on ornate litters,
archons riding golden palanquins borne down the road by thralls, and
fire jugglers shadowed overhead by birds that burst to flame, and
millions traveled on great pilgrimages to our city; they would
form lines down the Gate Road's long concentric shells to see the passing
of the spectacle, from Bactra's epicenter to the outer
Gate and to the emptiness beyond, where the procession at long
last would dissipate to nothing. I recall the legends told in
stories from my infancy, and that was where they lived, for in my
childhood we still had anemic holidays, all meaningless, yet
neither I nor anyone had witnessed a Gate Road parade in
living memory, not for an age, not since the days before the
viaducts and aqueducts, when ancient Bactra's thousand fountains
were replenished by a river. Over the perpetual, slow
rise and fall of Bactra, people have been forever arriving
and departing, such that when it came our turn to join a convoy
that had started somewhere deep within and had grown to a horde of
locusts on its way out through the wending Gate Road, naught remained but
trees all rotted from within, and blighted fields gone fallow, arid
chalky soil, and fountains dry and brackish, though we clutched the legend
of fair Bactra's central fountain, in its oldest garden, which still
sang in couplets with its crystal waters that arose, a tendriled
trunk that towered high above the heads of children, broke apart through
endless bifurcations into branches, leaves and falling orbs of
liquid sunlight, a resplendent tree that bore upon its branches
golden apricots and silver medlars, borne of water giving
life, though I had never seen it, nor my father, nor my mother
and nor anyone they knew, despite there being no restrictions
to their going, no impediments apart from time away from
work and practicality, because the journey to the city's
center took four days, each way, with no access to water on the
road; all other fountains had gone dry so many years ago, through
countless emigrations. Legends said that Bactra once had fountains
by the tens of thousands, each named for the year of its construction,
but they'd all gone dry in ages past and had been looted for their
tile and copper plumbing, by the time my parents consented to
join a convoy and commence our exodus. Did people live in
Bactra's center? No law stopped them, yet neither my father nor my
mother could imagine it, and nor could I. The way was far too
long, and too abandoned, most of Bactra's inner rings long emptied,
desolate, abandoned over ages, and the hangers-on who
lingered held the custom that the central fountain, if it still existed,
bore its tree of sun and water, in its pool for weary travelers
who faced arduous travails, for their return back to the living.