Radiance

In the Land of Milk and Desire, everything is always wet. Everywhere you might want to step has, at the least, a river running through it; or a rich, golden-blue swamp; or a sweet-green suckling bog; or a bright, rosy lake; or a deep, quiet pond; or a fragrant, iridescent bayou; or one of the many seas, which are all as red as longing. The boy grew up in a little village on the shore of one of these seas: the very biggest one, the Qadesh. He played on the beach, collecting whelks (which are not really whelks, but rather rough, smoky crystals with frilly, fragile, florescent creatures living inside) and driftwood (which is not really driftwood, but the petrified bones of wily, whopping, woolly beasts that once roamed the Land of Milk and Desire before time woke up with a sore head and started ordering everyone about) and listening to the strange yelping songs of the seals (which are not really seals, but two-horned candy-striped aquatic ungulates with whiskers as long as tusks and as fuzzy as your father’s moustache). And he stared out to sea, past headlands cluttered with thick, dripping jungle that smelled like salt and cinnamon and cocoa, past the lights of the boats in the harbour, past the pink breakers and the heavy mist, and out to the long, dark shapes that floated in the deeps of the Qadesh like islands, like places you could get to and climb, explore, lie down on, and dream up at the many, many stars.

But they were not really islands, and no child born in the Land of Milk and Desire could remember a time when he or she thought they were. For in the sea of Qadesh lived the callowhales, as mysterious as they were magical. The callowhales never said a word nor came out of the water, did not sing like the seals which were not really seals, nor leave their shells behind like the whelks which were not really whelks, nor behave carelessly with their bones like the driftwood that was not really driftwood. And from the time he was so small that he did not know what a lie was, the boy had one secret, silent, singular wish—a wish so secret he never once said it out loud: to see the face of a callowhale.

Now, for a long while, the boy did not know that he had the gift of wishes that never came true. He thought himself no different than any other boy or girl in Adonis. Adonis was the name of the village he had lived in since the beginning of the world, which, in his case, was July the third, when his mother gave birth to him in a cacao-hut with three rooms, while her husband and her midwife held her hands and told her she was doing very well indeed. She named him Anchises, who was the lover of Venus in a very old story.

Anchises was born in the morning, which in the Land of Milk and Desire is the same thing as saying he was born in the springtime, for on that wonderful planet, a day is as long as a year. The world takes as long to move on its murky-vivid golden path round the sun as the whole of the Land of Milk and Desire takes to turn itself around, though Venus manages both of these in two-thirds of the time that Earth takes, the old dawdler. This means that the morning lasts as long as springtime and it is morning for ages and ages; until the bright, glassy, humid summer brings the afternoon; which stretches on and on into the crisp, windy autumnal twilight that seems as though it will never end—until winter brings a night as long and dark as memory.

July the third was a kind year. There was plenty of rain in the morning, and in the afternoon the cacao (which is not really cacao, but a dark, dusty, dizzyingly tall tree that gives fruits which are not really dates and nuts which are not really cashews) produced thickly, the cows (which are not really cows, but four-hearted fern-eating fire-red brutes that give good meat and have reasonably even tempers) chewed cud and grew fat, and the divers brought back many groaning amphorae of milk from the callowhales. In the pale rosy melancholy fall of evening the children gathered so many cacao-nuts and cassowary eggs (which are not really cassowaries, but grumpy, green-blue, gobbling flightless lizard-birds with black marks on their breasts like human hands) that a Nutcake Festival was declared and held every autumn twilight thereafter. Even the interminable winter night was not so cold that anything froze, but not so warm that the plants that needed cold to thrive could not get their healthful midnight sleep.