Coffins Have No Place in Paradise
To every tribe from Arapaho to Xhosa, worldwide, much love to every one of you.
Hopefully I do you justice here in borrowed words, imagination and adventure.
Peace and love.
-W.J. Jackson
I.
The Tale...
Achgeket, the Mother we all walk upon, cycles life and death. We live, breathing in her breast milk air, gratefully eating the blessings of game and crops. But we must all die. Every one of the People is pulled out of the womb by her right hand and rocked into the final sleep by her left. Each of the Tribes in Rokoana, the Land, handles their dead in their own way. The Heneyanesh along the coast bury them, only to pull them out within two summers to scrape the bones clean and preserve them in the mounds of those who came before. This is the same with the Abiak to the north, who fight the Heneyanesh, but they first raise the body on a platform for up to two seasons. The Barikka on the isles of the Rokoana Sea carry the dead into the jungles, and lower them into bright blue lagoons, where the bottoms are filled with the bones of elders.
There are many ways the dead are cared for in Rokoana. I have wandered the world and witnessed them all, for I, waabijiiyaa kiááyo, the Gray Bear, had eyes set to see all and to know how things in the world were. I saw the Tribes, Great Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Pearl Sun who holds his hand across the sky, the hundred galleons on fire plummet into the sea with their many strange peoples and talking beasts who ruled over them. I saw these and many treacherous things.
But I had never seen a coffin, until that one day.
"A warrior of your caliber has never seen a coffin, Grey Bear?" my old friend in black asked me. He said he now had another title to go with the others, 'undertaker'. I believed him, for there was no reason not to.
"No, Cloudfire, I have not," I told him, one of my rugged hands, thick fingers ran down his five-sided box of death. "Why the trouble?"
He stood up from a polished desk, for the Favored loved their polish and shine and people working always for the little coins they threw at them in purses or from banks. Chomlis the Fire Eared, undertaker, rose to a head above me, not as tall as Mehunwey, the giants who molded the first of us from Mother's hide. He belonged to the Favored, overlords who fell from the sky. They told me after the Fall that they lost a war while searching for the Last Gift. I know of no such thing, but Chomlis called me that day for he thought I could help him to find it.
"Trouble? Well, we can't just shove bodies in pits or burn them. We need them preserved for the day when we find the Gift, my old associate. I cannot endure this ragamuffin world of yours much longer, I do declare! The density of the forests, their pollen, plays havoc on my sinuses! Havoc!" Chomlis spoke through his small mouth and thin nostrils, so it sounded like a man when he speaks into a conch shell, real but hollow at the same time. This said much of Chomlis. So real with his fire amber skin and two pairs of curved horns around a mane of white hair. Words often spoken, eloquent, and most of them for display or cunning falsehoods.
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