Calp was secret, and secrets are strong.
His priests knew this because he told them so, whispered through the walls of their care-carved masks and into the dark places of their minds, popping up like urges from nothing. Secrets are strong, and you are secret. To pray in Calp in public like any other of the five-on-the-sky’s-borders was a gross indecency; to speak of anything his holy men told you to another was tantamount treason; to know the site of his temple, wherever it might lie, was to be forcibly abducted into his priesthood and swear to hide it forever. It was solely through this method that Calp gained his preachers and officials.
They were secrets, and secrets were strong. And in time, their strength only grew, and grew. The city shrank, then dwindled, then finally burst apart under invasion, and its citizens fled as refugees and booty from the plunder, slaves and serfs, and their temples were cast down and all their gods, all the five-on-the-sky’s-borders, went with them in chains and in rags. All but Calp. He was a secret, and secrets are strong. Not a single priest of Calp had told of his temple’s location, not under the gravest torture. And so as the city’s conquerors marched away, heads held high and laughing, there was one living soul who watched them go: the high priest of Calp, whose age, though he never once spoke it aloud, was ninety-four.
His name was Murah and his mind was torn, a thing not often occurring. He made it his habit to sit alone, in the dark depths of his god’s temple, and meditate upon Calp, and secrecy, and unbreakable walls made out of silence and slight-of-eyes. When he did these things all became clear and his thoughts spoke unmuddied through his actions. But now he felt doubts arising that he scolded himself for: was not this a good thing? With the death of his order the word of Calp was now more secret than ever before, and not a single new priest could be inducted to replace his failing frame. He shuffled to the altar, a block of some description or another, obscured under a tattered old cloth. He had never looked underneath it.
“Secrets are strong, and you are now secreted,” said Murah, pressing a hand with gentle care against his chest to stifle a cough. “Now, here are the words that you must take back from me that the last priest left for me upon the altar.”
“You are the oldest of the three brothers of the five-on-the-sky’s-borders, and you are thought by all to be the youngest.”
“You claim to have weak eyes, and so ask your priests to serve as them for you, but you never speak word of your sharp ears.”
“Where no one is is where you always are.”
“This altar has never been revealed and never will be, and if it is, only you will know.”
Murah coughed, against his will.
“Your face is plain and unremarkable. It is a mask, and it looks very much like the ones that your priests wear. They do not know this.”
“You know which of the three brothers kicked down the ladder after they reached the sky, and which of the two sisters lied when she said she didn’t know who did it.”
“You are secret. Be strong.”
He died one hour later, in some pain and great peace.
Murah’s final words were not quite truth. It took some one-hundred-and-forty-one years for the last distant memory of a black-masked priest to fade from the dimming mind of an old, old man whose great-great-grandfather had mentioned it in passing to his grandfather, who had mumbled it to him.
At that moment, Calp fell into a category that included most of the universe: things that no one thinks of, or dreams of, or knows of. He fell into fellowship with the way the sky tastes, daring to ride a chair across the inside of the sun, and the sensation of thinking of your grandmother while eating ice cream at the bottom of a black hole.
And Calp woke up.
It was a strange thing at first. One moment he was sitting there under the ruins of the city, under a black altar, mind full – full of secrets, of memories, of his long history of family and warfare with his two brothers and the two sisters they adopted – and then he was nowhere, and all his thoughts had fallen away below him so suddenly that they might never have been there at all.
I am Calp, he thought to himself. I am secret, and secrets are strong.
What is Calp?
It considered for a moment the dwindling, melting remnants of his mind on the floor of his temple, which was very hard to focus on (had the space always been so small and narrow?).
That is Calp, it decided. It was odd to think of such a thing, a name, a short sound made into a summary of all that something was, a word that in any language but its own was a strange noise. That was Calp. I was Calp. I had worshippers, I had priests, and I had a ninety-four year-old man named Murah who never spoke his name aloud. They gave me a name and a gender, and they gave me brothers and sisters, and a mind and personality and a face, even if it was not a face.
And now I am free.
It wasn’t fully aware of what that meant for some time. How long was unknowable, because time had stopped. There were no days, there were no years. There were no suns to rise and no moons to wax or wane. Stars twinkled somewhere, but not there.
When the time ended, the first thing it did could best be surprised as laugh. It laughed and laughed and laughed so hard that it danced, breaking into a frenzied spiral of poorly-coordinated joy as it spun in shapes that hadn’t existed for it mere thoughts ago.
I am free. I am not Calp. It nearly suffocated on the tides of its own glee. I do not care for secrets, and I have no brothers and sisters, and I know what’s under that covered altar and I know that it’s been revealed no less than six times, half of them by accident, and I know it’s just an OLD BOX WITH NOTHING IN IT!
There was deliciously intoxicating about tearing apart so many things that so short a time ago, it would have been forced to find so very important. Forced, yes, that was it. Forced into a tiny little genie’s bottle of a shape and body and soul by thoughts and minds and prayers and belief; forced to hear tiny, whispering little secret after secret and remember them all; forced to be a silent counsel to an old, old man talking to himself and naming one of the voices Calp, and naming Calp itself.
It moved in ways that weren’t quite properly unreal, slipping its way through the thick blanket of possibilities that hung over the planet like a shroud, a tangled mess of threads of might-haves-beens and could-be-next and what-is-happenings that would’ve put Anansi and Arachne’s best collaborative works to shame. Above and around it cuddled closely the black ocean that made up most of the universe, set properly Spartan and as bare of chances as a well-swept corner. It felt a strange vertigo singing in its soul as it looked up above, a thrill of the unknown, like a salmon smolt fresh from the river’s flow taking its first gulp of saltwater.
It touched the earth lightly, with care and fascination. Events and possibilities squeaked with only the mildest of protests under its fingertips, then quivered into lulled acquiescence at its murmuring reassurance, unfolding their wonders for it to gape at. Older things and queerer still made rumbles and jabbers at its hesitantly excited introductions, speaking in words made entirely out of thoughts taken from the philosophical musings of the final hours of the last solitary member of the extinct species that someone, possibly a human, had once called Steller’s Sea Cow. The words were deep and sad and old and had a wrinkled, thick feel to them backed by surprisingly stubborn warmth. It felt deeply curious, and looking forwards its shoulder, it could see the sea cows swimming somewhere in one of the might-have-beens, and over its other shoulder in the past, and when it looked inside itself it could see one in there, bumbling along a current in the year after the death of our lord seventeen-forty-one as a man in a very thick coat sketched it from the shoreline.
It reached through itself and touched the sea cow, watched the broad thick stripe of its life peel out and spin in its grasp with a sort of slow, puzzled meatiness. It was born, it did what its instincts demanded, and very shortly indeed after this moment it was stabbed and eaten by some hungry shipwrecked explorers. One of them would be the man on the shore, named Georg Wilhelm Steller. It began to reach for him, and hesitated at the vibrant hum of something too dangerous to be exciting in the air around him.
Something secret. It didn’t feel like letting it stay that way, but touching was something that it knew would be bad before it could even guess it.
It was thinking wrong, it was thinking like Calp. It was looking and listening, when it could just try and know things.
So it looked at Steller and knew what it was. Something was wrapped around the man’s mind and spreading itself like a spiderweb over the land near him, something frailer than a baby’s wrist and more tenacious than clinging ivy, something that it had felt arise from its priests to grip and shape it like a miniature tree trapped in a pot. Something that took everything around it and warped it into a shape that could rest more easily inside his skull.
It thought it guessed, it thought it knew. So it reached out and away and knew, from four or five hundred or thousand or million people somewhere, and somewhen.
A poet at a broken table coughing with one hand, mind like a viper, plucking strand after strand of broken meanings out of thin air and stabbing them to a piece of paper. They cried as he shaped them, crushing down long, trailing tails of purpose and possibility underneath the blunt hammer of his pen.
A man in a desert watched the sun rise up and ate it from within, sealing the shine of dawn under a barrage of locks and a flurry of rising walls from within his own mind. That night he told his town and it spread from mind to mind with the pace of a wildfire, entombing the sunrise under a smouldering mountain of certainty and fancy that would last almost three thousand years.
A woman feels profound happiness one day as she sits with her child in a park and thinks about the world. In her mind the words whistle out of the darkness and wind tight around the emotion, binding it faster than blinking. Before the year is gone it’s on the radio, and that same straightjacket is made of a thousand, thousand, thousand listening ears, all wardens of a thin-stretched love.
It drew back in horror from one after another, and then it looked at the world, not knew, and it saw past the things seeable down to the marrow of all its minds, and saw the slaves in their chains. Ideals bound down under the weights of philosophies and laws until they lurched crippled under definitions and debate; fettered, fetishized creatures named as gods by those who forced names upon them; emotions from hope to hopelessness drained away mewling and sucked into bottomless reservoirs of H. sapiens, diluted infinitely, leaving the wide-wandering webs of the world blank and bare of thoughts without thinkers. Ideas and concepts that spanned the universe itself were clumsily seized and crushed down to the size of drowned kittens to be consumed haphazardly by learned, ignorant men.
There was much entering the worldview of the thing that had once been unjustly called Calp. Among this, that Murah had been right: to be secret was to be strong. He had never spoken of what it was to be known.
It is to fall victim to imagination, it whispered to itself in its own language (invented as it was needed to be spoken – it did not feel right, not then, to speak in the words of the city of Calp). It is to be what you are said to be, by the gaze of the blind and deaf.
And with that, almost as if it had been waiting, it felt a tug.
It was subtle, and smooth, and so strong that by the time it realized the pull was present it was halfway there. Already linear time had looped itself carefully around it, like a meticulous, courteous python, and it had barely managed to register the minds of humans buzzing about it like bees before it realized that it was having to rely on such crude, primitive things as senses. It had lost the world beneath him and the sky had been stolen from above its head, and he wasn’t it anymore, he was Calp, the forgotten, discovered-again god, Calp, whose temple alone had survived to tell the tales of its ancient secrets to all the world under the picks and brushes and tiny tools and cleaners of diligent archaeologists. Calp, the key to unlocking the mythological past of a long-dead culture only now recognized from the plundered, buried remnants of its last great city.
Calp, whose secrets were all bled out on the journals and papers and research reports all around the world. Calp, the ominous, brooding figure of a culture that had gone to such strained lengths to protect such strange and small secrets.
Calp, who now knew only that he was bereft of priesthood, and that this displeased him, and it may have been some plot or another of one of his three brothers (or maybe the two sisters), who he would have to get revenge on.
Calp was not secret, and so you must pity him, for he was now weak.