I was five years old when we crossed the Great Salt River. My people are skilled navigators, fearless explorers, but no one had ever come to these shores and returned to tell about it. They say there is no way back. Your great-grandmother held me, singing and crying as they played those haunting, melancholy ballads from the Old Land on the deck, looking at the receding shores to the north. They say they never played those songs again. We were shushed if we even hummed them, and once I got a beating for writing some snatches of lyrics I remembered.
The pilots took us into the Liths, then, and many were lost. There is no safe passage south, only skill and timing and luck.
At first I hated it here, living in the tents and digging, digging, and more digging. I cried for our villa with its riotous gardens and glassy pools, for the warm breeze that blew under the colonnades and the sun-warmed plazas where we would play for endless lazy days. Back home, it was the same everywhere: the tranquil and shady woods, the rose-sand beaches, the cool lavender waters lapping gently under the mulberry skies of perfect evenings.
Here it is dry and dusty. It gets cold, like the lands of the nomads who live where the snow flies, but also unbearably hot and humid. The grasslands go on forever to the south, dark-leafed and dotted with red, orange and green. Storms can last days, when the sky gets moody and the clouds are red as blood. Some of us got sick, and some of us lost hope. Why, I asked, Did we have to leave our home? Your great-grandmother would just bless herself and my father would say something cryptic about “the scourge,” and find more things that needed digging.
For months they sent foraging parties in every direction, and the pilots explored the coasts tight to the land so they wouldn’t get swept out and lost. They tell me they went as far as the mountains. They found game. They found fresh water. They found predators. We had to practice running into the cellars we had dug. They woke us up once in the middle of the night with shouting and banging on pots and we had to run down into the dirt and breath that stale, muddy air for hours until they let us out to squint at the mauve light of dawn. It was worse after a rain, because they would be half full of water and my mother said if we ever had to flee in a rainstorm, we’d all drown.
Then one day my friends and I could tell something big was happening. Our classes were canceled and we were all shooed away to amuse ourselves. Even our chores were forgotten. All the adults were talking, and my older brother went, too, though he was barely twelve. A short time after that day we all moved. We left the earthworks and rough gardens, packed whatever we had onto sleds and carts, and put the sea to our backs. Three weeks we plowed into the savanna.
I had just turned nine when we moved to Pomera, into this very house. It makes me laugh to think that for years I assumed our people had built the city. We Palaji are so good at everything we do - art and architecture, music, crafts with wood and steel and stone. It made sense that we should build such a glorious city on these new shores, that we should build gardens in the desert, that we should find fresh water a hundred days’ march in the mountains and ferry it to the cities through cunning engineering.
But when I turned twelve, I asked my father about it and he just laughed. Of course we didn't make them. It would take centuries and hundreds of thousands of people to have built such grand works. So I asked him where they came from, and he just shrugged. Heartbreakers, he said. Why ‘Heartbreakers’? I asked. Because, he said, we knew when we looked at these buildings and walls and gardens, that they were greater than anything we had ever done. Pomera had been abandoned since before his grandfather had been born, according to the surveyors, and yet everything still stood as if it had been left only yesterday.
We call them The Builders, but we know no more about them than when we first set boots on these shores. I got Clepha to ask his father why nobody lived here, because I was afraid your great-grandfather would laugh at me again. But no one knows the answer to that question. No one knows why none of the Kellekyn Nations ever occupied any of the cities of The Builders, nor why no explorer from Nymolia ever convinced their people to move in.
These are our cities now. I spent my life working stone, as did my father, learning everything he knew and teasing secrets from the city. But so many things are lost. There are so many techniques that we cannot reproduce. Eventually, we found the quarries, but we cannot understand how the stone was fashioned before it was moved. We don’t have the tools for some of the inlays. We don’t understand how the seams in the walls could be assembled with the locking grooves, as if the stone had grown that way.
I am at the end of a very long and blessed life. I know that, given the proud history of our people, every last secret will be pried loose from the past and will become part of our glorious heritage. Some of that will be your task - though not with stone, I know that is not your trade. Some you will have to leave to your own grandchildren, I suspect. But maybe not. You and your sister are smart, smarter than I ever was. Maybe you’ll figure it all out, and learn who The Builders were and why they left.
But there will be enough time for that tomorrow and tomorrow. Now, to bed!
