The Woman has no name, not one member of her clan does, names have not come into being yet. Words are spoken. Words have always been spoken, in some form, ever since the coming of the Word that forced the world from darkness, the Word that forced the light. The Woman, who we will, for simplicity’s sake call Eve, lives a difficult life made easier by the fact that she does not know it. Her family travels through the plains, making the tools they need from day to day, curing hides, hunting, foraging and retaining few possessions. This is normal.
Things are hard. She struggles to find enough food to feed herself and her children, but she makes do, from the sweat of her brow. She has not yet discovered how to make bread, but she does grind the grain that she scours fields for in the basin and boils it inside of a skin held over the communal fire and filled with water. She eats the resulting gruel without noting the lack of flavour since she has not yet discovered salt, though the crystals surround her. She will, given world enough and time, but the land is still young, even if Eve is not, her species, still young, barely through the dawn.
Look at her a moment. Don’t worry. Get as close as you want. She can neither hear, nor see you. Your scent is covered in layers of time. You are, in fact, invisible. Look at her thick hair. She lets her daughter groom it and the adolescent five year old has plaited it so that it rises up like serpents from her head. See it shine? That’s the palm oil that her daughter used to dress it and to prevent the hairs from breaking.
She is familiar, isn’t she? She reminds you of someone in your family, your mother, perhaps, or your grandmother. Something about her eyes. The similarity has to be in the eyes because her coloration is wrong. She resembles no race walking the earth today. Though her skin is clear and healthy, her features have a thick look about them, somewhat rough, as though unfinished. She is like a sculpture still being formed.
See the stretch marks on her stomach? Though she would, by our standards, be considered quite young, she is barely twenty five, by the rules of her community she is leaving middle age. Her last child, the one she carried inside of her until two days ago, will be her last. She knows this and is saddened by it. She has had five altogether, of which only her daughter and her almost-man son survive. The baby she gave birth to the day before yesterday died last night, in her sleep. She woke with it blue and silent beside her on their skin this morning, and she burnt the body in the fire and let the ashes scatter. By the reckoning of her people, the spirit had not formed yet. Each child lost has scarred her and, because she cannot conceive of any sort of life after death, the scars have stayed fresh and close to bleeding.
Her breasts ache with useless milk. No other woman in her clan has had a child recently, although some are obviously expecting, so there is nothing for her but to wait until the flow stops. Until then her breasts will throb, and throb, with every beat of her heart.
This woman, this Eve, comes from a people who have only just begun to have a history. It happened, what the Tellers call the Great Wind, the dawn of true language, only a few generations before Eve was born. Her people emerged from a thin grey haze of rough existence into culture. Her grandmother, before she died, told of the coming of the great wind, after a storm, when there were fires in the sky, the sounds her people had always made began to form a meaning, and with the sounds, came God.
The people became aware. They looked into a silent river and saw themselves. With this new awareness came the Word, and the Word was the beginning, and the Word took the people and set them aside from all of the other peoples in the world, and the Word took Eve’s people and made them his own. With the words, with the great gift, with the knowledge that they were themselves and not alone, came prayer, and the prayers were thanks--and only thanks, because the people had not yet learnt to ask for anything.
