The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,36
like, what color their skin had been, or even whether they had had fur. It was possible to imagine that they had been green creatures, an adaptation designed to camouflage them against the green of grass and trees, as some archeologists held, or that they had been blackish like the bats of today, the only non-water mammal to have survived the floods (and often kept as pets by the whale ducks). In the traditional shadow theater, however, the views of archeologists were predated and later ignored—the impulses that had given rise to a theater of the dead were much older and more ingenuous than would allow for scientific influence. So the puttied skeletons were painted in many colors, exactly as the whale ducks in their earliest powwows had imagined that humans, the chief recipient of the ducks’ tireless fascination, might have appeared. They were given false hair, not only on their heads but protruding from points all down their spines. The hair was traditionally black or white, although villains were sometimes blazing green.
Because the humans were tiny by the standards of the ducks, their remains were also easy to maneuver. In the shadow theater, the joints of the humans—every finger, every vertebra—were articulated by white threads that hung from the ceiling. The skeletons became something very similar to marionettes.
The stories that the ducks made the humans tell were often tragedies of the distant humans’ lives, and usually in lyrical, exaggerated motion, projected into much larger sizes with light and magnifying lenses so that the audience would not be forced to strain its eyes. The ducks were wont to enjoy shadow theater while sitting in semi-darkness, under the influence of an herb that made them more susceptible to extremes of emotion.
The ducks liked best that which was farthest away but which was capable of seeming the nearest.
The skeleton that had been discovered in Botuun’s venerable stomach was a narrow, dainty piece, and gloriously, blindingly intact. There was a symmetry to its godly rib cage, a swoop of the cheekbones, a set of teeth that gleamed with pearly winks of light. It was clear from the moment it was removed from Botuun by the surgeon that it would one day be a celebrated shadow piece, perhaps famous throughout the nation of the whale ducks. After her convalescence, Botuun saw to it that the skeleton was taken to the workshop of a master shadowist, and made into an object of great beauty, and with pride she turned the skeleton over to her theater.
The first piece that the new skeleton was made to perform was an old standby, an opera, The Magistrate of Naragir. All the whale ducks were familiar with the story.
In the country of Lon, the tale begins in a time of relative peace. The intermittent wars with the enemy country to the north are in abeyance. The eponymous magistrate begins not as any kind of magistrate at all, but as the ninth of thirteen impoverished children—a family so poor they live in a clay cave they have hollowed out of the side of a cliff. To add insult to the situation, the young man who would become magistrate, by the name of Hans, is born with a deformity: his arms are short and twisted: his hands join directly with his elbows. At his birth his mother weeps; she believes he will be useless as a laborer. He will starve or live off the charity of relations for the rest of his life.
But the boy grows, and slowly he proves himself: he is good-hearted. He is loving to his sisters and brothers. He is constant, reliable. But above all, he is tenacious: he has an extraordinarily tenacious temperament. He is so stubborn that we see him as a youth of thirteen or fourteen, working tirelessly for only his dinner as a hireling at one of the farms in the valley. He has been leading a bull, when a wasp bites it in the rump! And the boy refuses to let go of the tether around the neck of the bull, even as the animal bounds through a rocky field. Two of his sisters shout and scream at him to let go of the rope. They think he will die; they scream in fear. But he holds on to the rope with his left hand and his teeth, and his sisters will always remember the gleam in his face as he is pulled by the bull—his eyes rolled up into his head, only