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of my daughters living with his kind and bearing children of the trees. Theirs was the dominion over the forests, now and in the future, and the tree tops were their thrones. The breed of the man from the sky, he said, would never be large in number and strong enough to create their kingdom on earth. The animals and the plants had the sun and the rain clouds on their side: they sucked the juice of fertility from both. Your grand-daughters will empty their wombs before the tenth child, Eve, and who in the next generations will inhabit those low earth-mounds you built for yourselves wherever you sleep. They are homes, I said, and no son of man will ever live with a she-ape in her tree nest. Wait, he answered, till all your women go to mate with the treemen, and then where will your sons spend their seed?

    ‘In earth, in earrth, in . . .’ the beaky screech went on and on. I had to cover my ears not to hear any more of it, and tried to punish him with a blinding gaze. But the treeman’s eyes were safe inside two hairy caves, under his forehead wisps.

    ‘Treeman has Eeve speech, Treeman thinks Eeve, Treeman wants. . . .’ The voice was still coming through my fingers. I felt a weight on my right shoulder and sent my hand there. It touched a soft thing, warm as the hollow of a nest. I screamed, heard my own noise before his, and then a wing brushed my face, scratching the skin under my eye.
    Now the bird was flying around the ape’s head, faster and faster, and the head moved too, turning itself dizzy. He couldn’t pretend any longer about standing upright. The long arms dropped and trailed in front of the bending legs.

    ‘Go! jump! fly! go!’ The hooked beak was all colour, red with panic. The bird had stopped speaking for the treeman: he was shrieking and fluttering for his own sake. What had he seen in the distance that made him so frantic?

    ‘Go-oo—shshsh—chtcht!’ The listening bird couldn’t shape human words any more, my speech had left him for good or for this darkening moment of fright.

    They departed as they had come, suddenly, the ugly toes of the treeman splitting the bark as he clambered the palm-tree, a mock-ape and a mock-male.

    Then the air seemed empty of motion. A hush fell on the shadows. Each time this happened, it surprised me anew, sending my eyes to the sky for the signs of a whirlwind on its way. Then I knew. And again the animals reminded me of his near presence by their behaviour. I walked to the stone gate, stepped on the plank over the ditch that Amo had dug out before the last torrent, and stood in the meadow by the path leading to my lake.

    And they stood, watching. Lions, giraffes, elephants, spiked eels, water-pigs and the ancient dragons with jewels on their fins. He had light steps, but they heard each of them and moved aside to make room for him. Whichever animal he passed, he touched its head between the eyes, and blessed the eyes, the head and the whole body. The tall beasts with swaying necks held them down in readiness for that sacred gesture.

    Such a moment, only a moment like this brings tears to my eyes, as if the useless tears could shed the feeling of loss.

    3

    ‘Do you see much change in me?

    We always ask each other the same unimportant question. I mean my age, growing older and riper for death while he, I think, means his kind of change which makes us both separate, less knowing and more thinking.

    ‘No, Eve, you still have the sky reflected in your beauty.’ His answer was the same. But he meant more than my son Amo who saw in me the light of that sky which stood over his head, not the earlier sky. To my husband I reflected the beauty that had belonged to us both and in spite of the change and the loss, could shine through my features.

    ‘You walk with shorter steps, Adam.’ But he knew I was looking at his grey hair and thinking of the stoop, not the length of steps. And he wouldn’t grow a beard, unlike his sons and grandsons; it was his mouth,