The Purple Path: a story
By: Gareth Davies
Tags: Allegory, Fiction, Maps, Art

Fansi The Cartographer

The shining path pushed through the grass with the incorrigibility of a river. Many had come this way before, and many would follow, their progress drawn by the companionship of ancestors, thought Fansi. He paused for a moment and put down his two goatskin bags, flexed his fingers, thumbed his right palm, rotated his shoulders against the ache in the long muscle across them, turned, picked up the bags again so the heavier one was now in his left hand to give his right a rest, turned back to the shining path and continued on his way.

The grass soon became so long in places that it arched over and formed a dappling canopy, shielding the earth from the sun, which even at this late hour would draw sweat from those at work. Fansi squatted, his legs folded under him, and stalked forward like a lioness keeping below the horizon. He slung his goatskin bags onto his shoulders, where they aggravated his sunburn, to free his hands for investigation. His fingers read the ground for archives of the recent. It was certainly becoming damper, the mucous bubbly in places, although crisping into film where the sun cooked it like eggwhite. A few places on, he found it: like a drop of iron at the prow of its own molten path slithered the latest snail to have used this route.

About the size of a kola nut, its shell, although unremarkable, bore the swirl of mauve that marked it as a useful thing in Fansi’s craft. He picked it up and watched as the two extremities of its body clung pathetically to the shining path before it surrendered to the last resort of its shell. Fansi took a gourd from one his bags, unstoppered it and dropped the snail in along with the others he had collected that day.

By the time Fansi returned to his house, the sky had shed its bright dry skin and lay upon the earth as damp and drowsy as a newly sloughed snake. His senior wife had prepared a good fire and a meal of roast yam awaited him. Ignoring it, he took a handful of herbs from a bang hung on the rafters, tossed them into the fire to ward off biting insects and perfume the air, and began to work.

The calfskin had taken him a week to prepare. He scraped off the fat with a bone comb, split it, soaked it in a solution of lime from the quarry, skudded off the remaining hair with his moon knife, and then tied it to a wooden frame to dry. Running his fingertips over it now, it was as soft and downy as a woman’s belly. The water had left it and the wooden frame creaked occasionally with the tension.

He removed the lids from his six clay bowls of pigment. There were the five colours of his people, used for everything from whitening walls to painting warriors for battle and women for their presentation with the dowry. To these, Fansi had added a brilliant red ink made from blue mountain flowers, the manufacture of which involved incantations only effective during Peace Days and which was therefore attended by bad magic.

Fansi had to trade for the blooms from another people, and had once been caught doing so and was beaten badly by the outraged The Long House, who forbad such things. Since then, he had used the red only sparingly and had put it about that it was made from his own blood, cured by a secret method to prevent it from browning. He would smuggle the dried flowers into his village in the early afternoon while most were asleep, hidden in his mouth or about his body in some other way, even though the foreign apothecary he traded with had warned him they were a little poisonous and should be carefully handled. In addition to the risk of poisoning and discovery and punishment, the fiction of blood required him to give himself fresh scars with a knife now and again. Yet still, Fansi could no more steal honey and complain of beestings than use the beautiful red ink in his maps and bemoan the trouble and risks it took to obtain it.

In this way, Fansi had increased his palette from the main five colours, and the few that could be mixed between them that weren’t just like mud, to six. Tonight, he would add a seventh, a deep purple he had only seen once: on a crown of stained ostrich feathers decorating the head of a king who had, in the days of his childhood, ruled the whole world, and which his father had told him was made from the mauve-shelled snails. The world was too big to be ruled by one king now, a fact Fansi understood more than most men as it was he who charted the continents that were daily being invented with machetes and sweat from the raw chaos of the forest.

Fansi started, as always, with the references that everyone knew to make this new map speak in the language of his people. The first thing he drew on the calfskin was a white semicircle, its flat edge towards the bottom of the map, which was always the west were the sun set. This stood for a house, and by synecdoche for the whole village. Fansi fell upon it because of the impossibility of drawing the whole village on a chart of useful size, especially as the building of new houses and compounds reduced any attempt at representation to ephemera. There grew around that symbol a kind of conspiracy of representation, though. As more hunters and explorers hired his maps, as his larder grew fuller with the palmwine they brought him as payment, so the new houses become whiter and more perfectly domed. Fansi once joked with his brothers of circumcision that if he ever earned enough palmwine to afford a third wife the village would be a forest of bleached tits to the eyes of the gods.

He smiled at the memory of the joke as he lay down his brush for the white paint and changed to the soot ink. He let the black paths, which were as much in his head as in the world, pull his quill pen along. This map would show how one could travel to the new pastures in the valley near the cave where the witch lived, without ever letting one’s herd get so close to her that their milk would sour. Fansi drew with no real though of scale, because either you could cover the distance on a map in the cool daylight hours or you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t you’d just find shade and rest or make fire and rest and then continue the journey. Even the word “day” had the meaning of a long distance to Fansi’s people. Happy with the orientation and relationships of the black paths, he lay down his pen and took up the brush for the green paint and painted in the trees along the routes that were distinctive enough to be recognized from a picture. Those trees came into being for Fansi’s people; the others remained undiscovered, if perfectly plain to see. Fansi’s maps were like the conversations of his language: full of pauses where silence was measured against what could be said, and where silence was usually found preferable in both use and ornament.

The white, the black and the green changed colour as they dried and as the firelight took the office of the sleeping sun. They’d change once again once fixed on the hide by the final preparation, which was to pounce the calfskin with a round, flat stone lubricated with a little beef fat clarified by boiling. Fansi wrapped his white and his green brushes in cloth made of beaten bark, soaked in water and some of the paint itself so they would not dry and become stiff, flicked the ink off his quill. Then he washed his hands with water from the big gourd hanging on the wall and a little of the beef fat, as the white pigment irritated the throat if swallowed, and ate the yams his senior wife had roasted for him. He washed them down with the sober first gulps of a gourd of palmwine, and sat back to look at his map. The tender astonishment of creation inhabited him. The map formed the aches in his limbs as much as the aches formed the map, his imagination staring back at him from the world like a cloud reflected in the pool of its own rain. Fansi left his house and went into the bush for a piss, pleased by the sparkle and warmth of its escape in the moonlight, and he drew squares on the earth with the stream, chucking to himself. Then he returned to paint in the blue, to show where water could be had along the route, and the ochre to show notable rocks.

He left the red and the purple of his map until last not from expediency but simply out of respect for his own craft. The red had two purposes, both new to the cartographer’s science. Firstly, it signified places where food could be had out of the ground or from the branches of the trees. Fruits, roots, edible fungi and bees’ nests all had their own recognized shape and even a child knew the right time of year to look for each. Secondly, the route’s destiny was always marked with a red square. Fansi had invented the square, which did not have a name among his people, as it was an accident of geometry found neither in the natural world, nor in the architecture and decorations of his people. He had decided upon it because it felt reliable and strong. Investigations into its properties with sticks and thong lashings proved that it was both, particularly when supported with a cross composed of a fifth and sixth stick running corner to corner. It was, evidently, something new and good, which made it the only form to represent new and useful things on maps. Many years after Fansi was executed, the remnants of these investigations of the symbolic world via the physical were discovered and nobody ever built a domed house again.

Once the square of the new pasture, which was of course an outline square quartered by a cross, was rendered to his satisfaction, Fansi began to manufacture the purple ink. It was, in fact, a simple business that Fansi made up as he went along, knowing from his father that the pigment was made of crushed snails. It involved neither magic nor the risk of poisoning, quite unlike the production of red. All that had to be done was to remove the bodies of the snails from their shells with thorned stick, and macerate them into a paste, using an expensively hardfired clay mortar and stone pestle.

It was only as the paste reached the right consistency that the mapmaker realized something awful: purple didn’t mean anything. He felt almost nauseous, although perhaps that was from the red ink. The other six colours, even the red so lately added, all had their proper purpose, but purple on a map would be nothing more than a stain. Fansi heard, as if at a great distance, the sound of his pestle cease. He began working at the paste again, but to no object as it was fine as it was. He stopped and sat completely still for a while, then looked across at his new map and explored the model of the route in his head for something that needed representing in purple. There was nothing. Purple was utterly without use.

This was an experience alien to Fansi. His talent was for the transformation of the chaotic and ineffable into the ordered and conceivable. Yet, suddenly, the tools available to him demanded that he beat an entirely new path. There was no question of a man like Fansi disinventing purple, and the alternative was to invent a meaning, as there was nothing left in the world to be meant.

He stared at the map for an immeasurable period. His eyes ached with the strain of looking under a new regime, pushing at the elastic surface of perception like a lotus about to attain the air. And then, as a word repeated disassociates itself from meaning and becomes music, as a face stared upon ceases to be a face and becomes instead a rhythm of features, so the map ceased to be a map and become a composition. Glory and terror had not faced each other in Fansi’s mind with such intensity since he first came to understand, as a tiny child, that crying did not make milk as surely as sucking in makes blowing out. He looked at the calfskin. He took a fresh brush and painted in one broad stripe of purple, exactly where it was needed. He looked again. The composition he had made was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The fire in his hearth was quite cold by the time sleep claimed him.

Many months later, Fansi was amused to learn of a curious misinterpretation of his new map. It was a true map to the pioneer pastures, as the villagers’ fat cows and his own full larder attested, but in it too were directions to another place of interest, inscribed on the map purely by the diktats of beauty. News came to Fansi that the purple stripe, which was without practical meaning as far as its creator was concerned, insisted on it all by collocation. Readers of the map, for reasons Fansi could understand but somehow despised, simply could not embrace purposelessness, no matter how beautiful. The stripe of purple became a path to be followed, and clearly an important one, so broadly and vividly was it drawn. Privately embarrassed by their lack of skill in the exegesis of maps, travellers to the new pastures investigated the part of the forest that seemed to correspond to the purple path. Everyone knew the goal of the path, but no-one would share that knowledge with his companions until it become obsolete, because that would spoil the surprise. As scale had yet to become a feature of maps and few had time for potentially fruitless diversions, the first pioneers on the path which didn’t exist turned back before they reached its destination which didn’t exist. But with each pair of feet that trod it, the path hauled itself further into the real. It became longer and more defined. And, soon enough, it found a destination.

A little less than a year after Fansi drew the path, the path drew Fansi. The village was quite astonished with his discovery, but not his discovery of beauty for its own sake, but of the destination of the path that he had hacked out of the wilderness unaided. Partly out of egotism and partly out of an understanding that such an enterprise would be doomed to failure, Fansi did not explain that, whatever path there was, it was nothing of his doing. He knew, in his own way, the importance of his purple stripe; he also knew that, to his people, hacking out a route to a wonder was a far greater thing than daubing a thing of use with a useless colour.

And a wonder it certainly was: Fansi barely had the facilities to consider what it meant. It could be that a random path leading in any direction from any point, given its length is indeterminate, will lead eventually to an astonishing thing. He toyed with the possibility of furnishing his people with a new world, a whole orchard of miracles, by simply manufacturing a great cauldron of purple ink and pouring it or flicking it off a stick onto every map he had. But that would certainly be an insult to whichever god had arranged the serendipity that the first purple path had wrung from the forest.

The tree, just as Fansi had heard, was venerable, vast and as gnarled as the knotted-rope legs of elders who went about with two sticks or not at all. It was plainly long dead, riddled with the paths of grubs but still as hard and strong as iron, and yet from a hole in the great bole of its trunk a sinuous sapling peaked, its fresh green leaves like water in the desert. There was no question of it being new growth from the old tree: the two plants were of different kinds. The younger one was one of those whose bark could be mashed to make a painkiller for women troubled by their monthlies, and the dead one was of those which, in life, bore fruit which tasted bitter and were poisonous to men and cattle. Somehow, by a method that many discounted from chance and ascribed to magic, the seed of the young had fallen into the bosom of the dead, set roots and found an aphercoptropic path up into the light. The Long House had declared the tree sacred and barren women would come and rub their privates on it because it clearly had something to do with fecundity.

Fansi was unwilling, despite his enjoyment of the prestige now awarded him, to credit himself with the discovery of this wonder. Yet he clearly had discovered it: his stripe was not random. He had placed it with the utmost care and an ecstatic understanding of its importance, even of the idea of birthing something new. So, he accepted the same accidental fame accorded to those happening across acts of great courage by the hazards of war.

Although Fansi no longer had to work for a living, because nearly all births were partly down to the medicine of his tree now and he received tribute thereby, and even though certain magicians were jealous of him and cursed him regularly, his life continued much as before, or at least so it would appear to anyone not intimate enough with him to know the changes in the basis of his perceptions. That was until Crazy Biongo finally did what everyone feared he would one day do, namely kill some people. It would have been of no special concern to Fansi, of course, had the site of the murder not been his medicine tree, and the murder weapon a fallen branch of it.

The circumstances of Crazy Biongo’s arrival in the village were as sodden with bad magic as storm clouds are sodden with rain. He’d been nothing but trouble all his life: there was little doubt that the cattle blight which had wiped out a quarter of the village’s combined herd three years previously had been down to Crazy Biongo, who had been seen pissing in the waterhole just before it all started. Mad dogs that attacked people got the foam around their mouths because Crazy Biongo had kissed them. If you tripped over a stone on a welltrodden path, you could be pretty sure Crazy Biongo had put it there for his own sadistic amusement. Still, despite all the bad talk about him, Crazy Biongo was tolerated by the village because of his terrifying and pathetic history.

Crazy Biongo had been discovered as an infant by a pair of hunters in an unfamiliar part of the forest. They first thought an unmarried woman had given birth to him there in shame and exile, for he was smeared all over with blood. However, this innocent explanation soon had to be abandoned: an investigation of the area discovered two bodies, or the remains of two bodies, so badly had they been dismembered that it was impossible to tell even what sex they were. Blood was caked and pooled about, in unthinkable quantities and impossible places. Blowflies had made a sour hive out of a mess of viscera slung from a treebranch. The story of the infant’s discovery turned the stomachs even of men who had slaughtered dozens in war. Nobody dared visit the place, and it was a marvellous thing that the hunters had survived such bad magic and kept their sanity.

Crazy Biongo was adopted by the village on the implicit understanding that he would one day be sacrificed to whichever god needed propitiating or fobbed off to another village in reparation for a crime committed against it, which was a common way to prevent war demanded by honour but not by convenience. He was supported by charitable donations and the scraps dogs were not interested in. A senile old magician once thought he saw the eye in him and attempted to teach him the business, but his apprenticeship was shortlived as Crazy Biongo was as stupid as he was strange. It was generally agreed that Crazy Biongo was one of the breed of malicious spirit children who allowed themselves to be born only to die shortly afterwards to delight in the grief this generated in the world of men, but was unique amongst these imps in being so stupid that he had killed his parents and brought pain on himself, rather than the other way about.

The one useful thing about Crazy Biongo was his native affection for children, his bottomless pity for their plight. Left to care for a baby, he assumed a matronly air and would minister to the infant’s every need with the gentleness and dedication of a lioness. He talked to children in a bizarre but mellifluous dialect that only he and they seemed to understand, and he soon came to be employed throughout the village as a babysitter. The only way to get a child back off him was to threaten the child with violence if Crazy Biongo continued to hold it in his embrace. This was distressing for the mothers at first, but it soon accrued the familiarity of a ritual act: when you wanted Crazy Biongo to give you back your baby, you went up to him as he sat in the shade cradling it, mewling and mumbling, placed the point of your knife on its belly, said, “Crazy Biongo, return my baby or I’ll skewer it in your arms,” and there you were. Crazy Biongo may have been the most feared and despised man in the village, but he was also the most utterly trusted.

Fansi knew of the destruction of his tree before he knew of Crazy Biongo’s execution and the double murder that had occasioned it. He was out in the forest collecting his pigments when he smelt the smoke, and knowing that a fire is a dangerous thing, climbed a tree to determine where it was and whether it was likely to come his way, driving terrified pigs and other dangerous beasts before it. Once he saw the smoke, he knew immediately that it was his tree that burned: he was a man with a natural aptitude for the whereabouts of things and the location of his tree, the tree that had brought him wealth and fame, had become for him the centre from which he reckoned all other points. He climbed down and made straight for it at a dead run, not stopping once to regain his bearings from a vantage above the canopy.

The air on his path, the path he had hacked out of the forest with a stroke of his brush years before, was rare with smoke and the metallic stink of fresh blood. The heat of flames and angry voices engulfed Fansi as he rounded a curve and confronted his tree, made a hornets’ nest by the riot of dozens of villagers. It was like the horror of the warriors’ return, when the women and children and old men made wailing avenue to receive the mutilations war had wreaked on their husbands and fathers and sons.

Lying at the base of the burning trees were the bodies of two young people, a couple barely old enough to breed who had been married less than a month before. Their skulls had been cracked open and their brains oozed out like the meat of an egg. There lay also a pile of red pulp the texture of mashed yam, out of which protruded a forest of bloodied spears and machetes and farming implements.

Crazy Biongo’s death had been as violent as his birth. The villagers had ensured that Crazy Biongo was sent back to the spirit world in the shadow of the tree, the crooked womb, the dead thing which brought forth life which everyone now realized had pushed him into this world in the first place. Although few were wise enough to see it, magic always had as much symmetry as the nature it was a perversion of.

Fansi could hear nothing but the crackling of the burning tree and his own laboured breath. Although by no means unaccustomed to the horror of violent death, the knowledge that a dismembered man is no different from a dismembered animal and all that implies, he was no warrior and carnage on this scale impelled a retreat into dreams. None of it was real to him: he felt himself dislocated from his own body, a ghost that happened by accident to be peering out of the absurd turret of a man’s head. As with all the most important events of his life, Fansi had changed in a manner so deep that he no longer had reference to what he was before, and could therefore not even decide what had happened to him.

All of what he saw was as it was, though. He could only hear the burning tree and the breath that had something to do with the body he was in because those were the only sounds to be heard. The riot had stopped, as the avengers saw what lay behind the evil. Who could say how many spirit children had been born to the village under the curse of the tree this trickster had insinuated into their ritual life? Fansi vaguely felt the fear and the hatred as he vaguely felt the heat of the fire. The idea of running visited him, but it was utterly hypothetical.

Just then, the crowd parted and silhouetted against the flames, Fansi saw a dreadful and familiar sight: a tall and rangy figure, naked and smeared in white ashes and with a fearsome wooden head. The Long House, fragrant gum smouldering above his eyes, sending vertigo into the air. A voice spoke from the depths of the wooden head.

“Here is he who brought this purple blood of our youth with his purple path, the path from hell. Here is he who soured our children with bad magic. It is right that he should die in this place and at this time.”

Fansi forced himself to know he must defend his body. He reached into his goatskin bag and took out his knife. The crowd immediately tightened their grip on their machetes and spears; several men even retrieved weapons from the pulp that had once been Crazy Biongo, but none dared to move to Fansi until word to so do came from The Long House. But Fansi turned the blade of his knife into his own left hand, gripped it tight with his right and in one jerk filled his palm with blood.

Fansi held up his hand to the crowd. “Red,” he said. He pointed to each of the three corpses, “Red, red, red,” he repeated. “I meant none of this by my map, not this path, not that tree. They are as they are because they got that way. This came to happen without me. My ink was purple, blood is red. The Long House is wise and merciful. The demon is already dead.” Fancy approached the spirit, still with his knife. Twenty weapons instantly aimed at his heart. The Long House held up his palm, and fearing that any attempt to protect him would be an insult, Fansi was allowed to walk on.

He moved deliberately past The Long House, his head respectfully low, and crouched over the remains of the demon Crazy Biongo. He cleaned the blade of his knife on his loincloth, plunged it into the bloody mess, then held it out to The Long House, still crouching in a show of piety and fear. “Red,” he said again. Then he and held up his free hand, “Red,” he said again. Then he pointed to the corpses of the young couple, “Red, red! My ink was purple. This is none of my work. The justice of The Long House has already answered the evil here.”

The Long House’s great wooden head tilted to one side, waiting for more words but outraged that Fansi had even tried to defend himself with anything but the blind violence appropriate to a demon like him. The Long House waited a while longer, savouring the dry tension that would make a decree of whatever he said next.

“Purple,” said The Long House, pointing to the remains of Crazy Biongo. “Purple,” Fansi’s knife, “purple,” Fansi’s hand, “purple,” the remains of the couple. Then The Long House jerked into a crouch, its movements like an insect’s. Eyes never leaving Fansi’s, its hand reached for the hand of the young wife. No-one had noticed that she had been carrying a rolled sheet of vellum. The Long House plucked it from her fingers, stood, unrolled it, showed it to the crowd. The spirit indicated the path, darker under the general stain of blood. “Purple.” Static hatred flickered in the crowd that could only be grounded by a flash of violence.

The Long House took a single step towards Fansi. His ashen arm rose, crowned in a fist that ended in a pointing index finger. He lowered it to point at Fansi’s heart. He closed his eyes as twenty weapons were raised against him.

“Purple!” cried The Long House.

And so it was.