About a certain return

Part 9

– Dart, I said, pointing at myself...

I've been such an idiot for a while, until I found a shadow of memory and frenetically dug to open a collapsed gallery in my brain.

– You're a quick learner, laughed at me Dirac. Let me introduce you to the rest of the clan!

I liked my master Dirac, from the very first moment. He seemed a bland fellow; he gained my confidence with two or three words. I knew he will protect me.

– Staniel, he pointed out to me a chap that was coming towards us. Staniel, he shouted at the chap, and this one answered: Dariel.

They didn't look each other in the eye, but carefully searched each other and I didn't find any display of empathy.

– Staniel, I said.

The chap was probably expecting to be greeted by me, I thought. But he didn't know me, so I went on:

– My name is Dart.

The other one laughed.

– Staniel's clan is occupied with mining. They are providing the raw material to be melted, Dirac told me after we left.

Nothing seemed strange, everything seemed fair to me, I was integrating in a new world, I was born a second time. I felt later it wasn't my world. The chaps in my visual field were short but sinewy, with swift motions, almost jerky. They had some sort of transparency that I couldn't understand, mostly because I couldn't compare them with anything from my wretched memory. But life goes on, in an unknown but indisputable way. I followed Dirac to the site of the clan. Before entering their territory, we bathed in the sacred Destiny Lake, where, said master Dirac, before any event, a general ablution takes place, it's the place where the magi holds a divinatory service and tells the future. We got to a large opening with countless dwellings carved in the rock, where a lot of small men were waiting for me. I felt quite important and brushed aside all my fears and my torments. As I entered, they started to shout with astonishment.

– Dart, said an old man, I am Daniel, the Father. Be welcomed. You'll be part of the clan from now on. The clan's sons will teach you which are the ordinances, the tokens, what is most holy, who are our enemies, and all you need to learn quickly and well. Then you will be initiated in the art. The help is important. First of all, you will be married. A single man is miserable and dangerous. He will catch manias that do not take into account the ancestral common sense.

He was wonderful, the Father. Clever, lively, with his white hair and beard... What a nice little fellow!

– Which of you, my girls, want this remarkable man, asked him the group of women? (Not even one said: me). There will be favors created for you, tried he to seduce them. You will receive a larger dwelling, you will be able to choose all the needed tools, and even if he is a "Dart" your will be judged for what you are now.

So I wasn't Dart but "a Dart". This is where I had to start from. Then I met Diana, a little fairy. She came to me and holds my hand: I will look after him, she said.

And we started our life together in a not very big room, in my opinion. Her opinion was different. I even needed to give a finish to the walls, to enlarge the holes that stood for windows and entrance, eventually to set up shelves, to build chairs, a bed, a table... There was something this community was lacking, and later I understood it was wood. They used for fire a black, rocky material called coal. We received all sorts of tools, dishes and cups, clothes materials. After we settled in, Daniel the magi came and gave us a speech with magic words and meanings understood only by him, he gave us some wax puppets that we set in a niche in the wall, specially dug for this purpose, finally there was been a party celebrating our union, and the food served by these little men was various but with an impossible to guess origin. Then I felt the disgust and missed a delicious meal with tastes and flavors nostalgically coming back to me from another existence I then didn't know about. So it has been a feast, and the men got dizzy after drinking a sweet, alcoholic drink, that gives you hallucinations. I drunk it from a pot and everything around me become different, that the people were tall, shaved, covered in peculiar clothes, all the houses were built in a different way and I couldn't understand what's the use of all these changes... I couldn't move forward, I couldn't move away from a fat woman who stretched out her hand to me and said something terrible. She said something that thrilled me, it was the unspoken name, the name of four consonants, and its sound fall upon me like a hammer knocking the drum of my ears, got inside my head through its broken gates, and settled inside my intelligence palace, later overrunning my whole body and got control over all my body. I am not myself. "I am not myself", I started to shout this nonsense and left the dwarfs' feast. "Who am I?" I asked. But the little men went away and left me with Diana that didn't have much to say: "You are Dart. I met only one before you. A Dart's life is short but the dariels try to make it more pleasant, if possible. It's known the fact that a Dart that ended up in a staniels or luciels clan consumed his existence in a terrible agony." Diana was willing to do anything for me. It was a duty, not a feeling whatsoever, it wasn't, and not even pity, I noticed. She kept the dariels' tradition. A tradition strongly included in whatever they were doing, an ancient and unchangeable automatism. "This tradition is our power, it hardens us when we're down, it keeps the bounds between us and brings the joy of living. The principal duty of the dariels was to hand down the art. Referring to their work, she named in fact the men's work, the women being housewives.