The Natural Order

The salt air burns her eyes.

The cold wind lashes at her face, and the ocean waves assault her nose, her ears, the back of her throat, with their smells and sounds. The sand beneath her is soft between her toes, and the sky above is infinite and cloudless, studded with a thousand distant, blinking lights.

This then, is Nature.

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The people of Tyl live by a single tenet: ‘Do not disturb the natural order.’

It shows in their every action, in the homes that they build among still living trees, in the food that they refuse to farm. Their children are taught it from birth, and it lives within the heart of every resident.

There is a second mantra, less central, and more of a guideline than a hard rule. ‘Nature will look after you, as long as you look after Her.’

Aaliz has little to do these days, except think, and so she has thought a lot about both of these principles, and has concluded that they are bullshit. She watches the ocean, in its beautiful belligerence, its tides ever changing, its moods ever shifting, raging and calm, enticing and hostile, generous with its gifts and endlessly destructive. She watches the ocean, in all its contradictions, and knows that disruption is the natural order of things. Chaos, unbridled and untamed.

As she sees it, the natural order can mean two things. It is the way of the world as it stands, cycles of lifes and deaths doomed to repeat ad infinitum, to no effect, as the sky keeps turning around them, uncaring and unmoved by the beings it watches over. And it is the ignorance of this first order, of that truth - a refusal to let life simply wash over you, an acknowledgement that your existence is of importance to you if no one and nothing else, a determination to make something of it.

The people of Tyl laugh and they love, they make each other gifts and tell stories, they are alive in a hundred other ways, and the natural order does not grant them any of them. The people simply took it for themselves.

Surely that is all living is. Demanding something from a universe that does not owe you, happiness or safety or purpose, and taking it when it cannot be simply given to you. Seeking out your place in the world, and carving yourself a new one if you cannot find it.

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When she is being fair, she supposes that seeking to live with nature is not such a bad philosophy to have. When she is being fair, she can acknowledge that her true quarrel lies not with the words themselves, but their interpretations.

Her left hand aches at her side, angry and throbbing and just slightly swollen. Her fingers are hot and heavy, and they no longer all point in the same direction.

She doesn’t feel much like being fair, these days.

The issue is, that at some point the natural order became conflated with fickle, human tradition. At some point, it became the natural order of their people, and all the imbalances and hierarchies that come with it.

The issue is, that people continue to claim to worship Nature without ever bothering to understand what She truly is.

Mother, they call her. Mother, as if She exists to tend to their feeble, pitiful needs. Mother, as if She is a protector, and not the many many dangers they need seek refuge from. Mother, as if she is only the giver of life, and not also its taker.

It does not escape her notice, that it was when they called Nature Mother, woman, nurturer, that they found themselves forgetting the terrifying power She wields.

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She is angry, and she doesn’t know why.

She is angry, and she doesn’t know why no one else is.

She is fifteen, and so full of emotion, desperate, pent-up rage, with nowhere for it all to go. People watch her with wary eyes as she keeps to the edge of her community, because she is sure that if she ventures in any deeper, she will drown.

Her palms are scarred from her own nails biting into them, because she is fifteen and her father’s friends have been commenting on her body for years but now they turn slowly to her sister, nearly twelve, and her hands clench into tight fists with every mention of widening hips, of a pretty, maturing features, of a shy, gentle demeanour.

Aaliz had never been called shy.

She had taught herself to be loud, to be rude and brash. She modeled herself after the boys she grew up with, back when her curiosity was still a source of odd amusement, and not a character flaw. She has very few memories of her mother, but the little she can recall is always quiet, so she taught herself to make noise, to be impossible to ignore, because she thought perhaps the secret to being unwanted lay in being seen.

She wants to be unwanted. She had grown up hearing stories of her mother, tales of her beauty and her many admirers. She had grown up reconciling them with the image of her mother in her mind, formed from what little she recalls of her: long hair, youthful face, sad eyes, and no smile.

When the loaded praises persisted, she’d changed tacks. She marred her face and scarred her skin - her arms, her wrists, her stomach - and told herself that if she could not be seen as herself then she would settle for crazy instead. There is, after all, a certain respect that people afford what they do not understand.

There is a certain respect found in people’s fear.

For a time it was enough, but she is fifteen and she knows her father’s patience is drying up, and she is sure she will not survive if she leaves, but she is not sure she can live if she stays, and either way she is terrified of leaving Elize behind. 

She is angry that she has to choose, and she is angry that no one else seems to even know that there is a choice. She wonders if the problem has lied with her all along.

So she spends her days. Alone, with fear and panic and a constant, seething anger.

But for now, her nights are still hers. She has claimed them as such, demanded them from a universe that does not care enough to deny her.

And so she walks to the bay when the moon is bright, when the tides are high and the waves crash against rocks and sand. She witnesses Mother Nature, in all its raging power and potential, and knows that she is right.

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Mother is something of a misnomer. Nature does not nurture. She is cold. Unpredictable. Changing. Not cruel, never cruel, because to be cruel to a person you have to care about them in some manner, to some degree, and Nature at her most fundamental is uncaring.

Cold and uncaring and constantly changing hardly seem like appropriate descriptors for a figure that is deemed motherly. But then, Aaliz is hardly an expert in the matter. She’d barely had time to know her own mother, who’d she’d died giving birth over a decade ago.

Her mother, like countless others, died in childbirth, the one purpose a woman is said to have, performing the one duty Nature had supposedly designed her to do, and yet people have the gall to think that She cares for them.

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The wind is picking up, and Aaliz brought only a thin shawl to shield herself, so she retreats to the cover of the trees.

Branches creak and crack ahead, and goosebumps prickle her skin. Creatures lurk in the dark, and she is alone with only Nature to protect her, and Nature only saves the strong.

She is alone, but not unarmed. Her right hand closes around a cool hilt, and she takes a perverse pleasure in drawing out the stone blade. It is not her blade, not really, but she thinks she has more than paid for her right to use it.

Her third and fourth fingers are slowly healing, but they still bend at awkward angles -she thinks she splinted them wrong. They pull away from each other, crooked and antagonistic. Unnatural.

She snorts. So much for not disrupting Her order.

Here is where Nature’s order and the natural order of the people conflict: in nature, it is every being’s duty to work to survive; for Tyl, it is merely the concern of men.

This is not to say that women do not aid the community’s survival, simply that they are not acknowledged as doing such.

They sit together and tend to fires, weaving fabrics to keep people warm and watching over new generations, but it is the men who hunt for food, though it is the women who cook it, and the men who build the homes the women then work to maintain, and so it is the men who can take credit for their people’s survival.

It angers her that no one seems to think that is wrong.

She had once asked Beatriz, who had seemed so worldly at the time though she’d been no older than Aaliz is now, why the High Council held only men. Beatriz had laughed, fingers trailing colour as they danced across her loom, and said it was to help them feel important.

Aaliz helps in mending circles, and has done so for years, and the people around her joke together, and gossip, and complain. They laugh as they discuss how their sons and fathers and partners would be lost without them, how they struggle with the most mundane tasks, how none would last a eight days on their own, and yet are content to allow them that illusion of worth, that sense of superiority, and Aaliz cannot understand why.

A few months ago, she and her father had fought, which is rare only because they both tend to favour ignoring each other entirely. But she had come in late, her clothes muddy and her chin dripping blood, and he’d been there staring at her, and one or the other had snapped and soon they were screaming at each other with no regard for the late hour.

Elize had been watching wide-eyed when Aaliz finally went to bed.

She cannot remember precisely what had been said, but she does know that at some point she must have threatened to leave for good, because her father had yelled at her to go, for all the good it would do. “The beasts out there would tear you apart by dawn,” he’d said, and “You wouldn’t stand a chance on your own, you can’t defend yourself. You’ve never learned how.”

Aaliz knew that boys her age had been learning to throw spears while she’d studied weaving patterns through observation, but that was when it had first hit her that maybe aiding and maintaining a physical imbalance between men and women was deliberate. A failsafe, of some sort.

Some days later, she’d found the knife.

Someone had clearly lost it. It had lain, forgotten on the ground, and so she took it, and deemed it a sign when no one announced it as missing, and taught herself how to use it.

They still don’t know about the knife, and keeping it secret is almost as great a rush as having it in the first place.

Iza makes needles from bone sometimes, that are too long and wide to serve any real purpose, though they are sharp enough to pierce hide. She makes them for the girls who grow inexplicably quiet, who start to shy and startle away from unexpected movement, whose forearms and wrists are more often than not reddened and bruised. But Aaliz knows of no woman or girl other than her, who keeps a weapon so blatant.

Perhaps there are others, and they simply hoard their own collections better than she did her own.

The knife had been easy. Her hands were strong and deft, each as able as the other, and they adapted quickly. But a knife is an instrument of last resort, with little reach. She had tried a spear next, perfecting her throw with any suitable stick she could find before she went searching for the real thing.

Her father found the one she’d stashed beneath her bed within two days.

The women of Tyl should not have any need for spears; Aaliz’s possession of one was a disruption to their natural order.

The natural order of the people of Tyl, was to follow the traditions of their people, and in the past the punishment for theft had always been to simply take that which committed the crime.

Any secondary effects of decommissioning her stronger arm were purely coincidental, she’s sure.

In the name of preserving order, the headman laid a heavy beam across her left hand, and broke only two digits, in an act of mercy.

Mercy.

Her fingers throb.

She does not know if her punishment would have been different had she stolen something else - something real, something more valuable than a badly made spear. She doesn’t know if the theft was simply an excuse to discipline her for her true crime, of failing to comply.

She doesn’t know if they’d have broken all her fingers, if she was a boy, and somehow that angers her even more.

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Her time is running out.

Light is slowly gathering at the horizon. Daybreak comes; her night is drawing to a close. It is a stark reminder.

She doesn’t not know what she will do, or how long she has to decide, before the extra time she has stretched and scavenged for herself finally comes to an end. She does not know how long it will take for the sun to peek above the line of ocean. All she knows is that both of things will happen eventually.

Perhaps if she stays still, time will simply wash past her and leave her behind.

Perhaps if she stays still and does not fight, Nature will come and erase and erode her very being away.

She really ought to be heading back, before people start to grow suspicious of where she goes.

But perhaps she can take just one more minute.