The Song That Shapes the Clay

The river had been singing for three hundred years before anyone thought to give the song a body.

Not anyone, precisely. The willows did it—six of them leaning over the water's bend, their roots conversing in the dark silt, their branches conducting rhythms they had learned from listening. They shaped the clay with patient increments of current and eddy, and when the form was ready—something between human and stone, broad-shouldered, hollow-eyed—they poured the river's oldest song into it like water into a vessel.

The golem woke to music. Not the memory of music, but music as substance, music as the architecture of consciousness. Where other such creatures bore words of power carved into forehead or palm, this one carried melody in the chambers of its chest, harmonies threaded through the clay of its limbs. It rose from the riverbed trailing weed and silt, and it had no name because the willows had not thought to give it one, and the river did not deal in naming.

For a season it simply stood, learning what the song wanted. The song wanted motion—the rhythmic placing of feet, the steady circulation through forest paths. The song wanted witness—eyes that could see what the river could only hear. So the golem walked, and the walking became a kind of prayer, and the prayer kept the song alive, and the song kept the golem alive, and for a time this was sufficient.

The forest knew it as one knows a change in weather. Something new was moving through the old places, something that smelled of river-bottom and rang faintly with water-music when the wind struck it right. The deer grew accustomed. The foxes revised their pathways. The trees, who had known the willows' plan from the beginning, simply waited.

The golem had been walking for eleven years when it discovered the oak.

Not discovered—the oak had been there longer than the river, longer than the forest itself, a survivor of the time when this land had been otherwise. The golem had passed it perhaps a thousand times. But on this morning, in the pearl-grey light that comes before true dawn, the golem stopped. Placed one clay hand upon bark that had been drinking sunlight since before the willows learned to sing. Felt, for the first time, something the song had not prepared it for.

The oak was dreaming. All trees dreamed, the golem had learned, but this dreaming was different—deeper, slower, shot through with colours that had no names because the human eye had never needed words for them. The golem stood in that dream-shadow and understood, with the part of itself that was still river-clay, still remembering the patient dark, that it was touching something older than song itself.

It visited the oak each dawn after that.

The men came in spring, when the forest floor was soft.

There were five of them, carrying axes and saws, carrying also the particular confidence of people who have been paid to do a thing and therefore believe the thing is justified. They wore canvas jackets. They smelled of tobacco and coal-oil. They had measured the oak in winter and returned now with ropes and wedges and a profound absence of hesitation.

The golem watched from the hazel thicket as they made their preparations. It understood axes—had seen trees felled before, the small ones, the ones the forest could spare. The forest was generous with its dead and dying. But the oak was neither dead nor dying. The oak was a library of centuries, a concordance of storms and silences, and the men were sharpening their axes.

The golem's song faltered.

Something gathered behind its eyes—not tears, for it had no capacity for tears, but a thickness, a pressure, as though the river itself was trying to rise through the clay. The feeling had no name in the song's vocabulary. The willows had shaped it for walking and witness, not for this urgent weight, this sense of wrongness so profound it threatened the melody that held the golem together.

One of the men swung his axe. The sound it made entering the oak's flesh was a sound the golem would carry forever.

It stepped from the hazel thicket.

The men saw it and stopped. One crossed himself. Another reached for something in his jacket—a flask, perhaps, or a charm. The golem stood before them trailing last year's leaves, its eyes hollow as wells, and the song in its chest had become something else, something the willows had not intended, something vast and grieving and utterly without words.

"Christ," one of the men said. Just that.

The golem placed itself between the oak and the axes. It had no language they would recognize, no gesture in its repertoire for please or mercy or this matters more than whatever you have been paid. It simply stood. The song shivered through it, audible now, a low vibration the men could feel in their teeth.

"It's some kind of—what is that? Clay? Someone's trick?"

But the oldest of them, the one with silver in his beard, he heard the song. Really heard it. His face changed. He took three steps back, and the others, seeing him retreat, retreated also.

"We can't—" one began.

"We can find another tree," the silver-bearded man said. His voice was quiet. Definite. "We can go back and tell them we can find another tree."

They left. The golem heard their voices fade between the beeches, heard the forest resettle into its rhythms. It stood before the oak as dawn strengthened into day, and the pressure behind its eyes had become a flowing, and the flowing had become the first tears anything made of river-clay had ever wept.

The tears ran down its face and dripped onto moss. Where they fell, small flowers appeared—not immediately, but over the course of hours, white and star-shaped, a species the forest had not seen in three hundred years, not since the river last flooded high enough to leave clay in the oak's roots.

The golem understood, then. The song had changed because it had been meant to change. The willows had shaped it for walking and witness, yes, but also for this: the moment when witness becomes choice, when choice becomes grief, when grief becomes the particular beauty that only breaking makes possible.

It was dissolving. Slowly, but certainly. The song that held it together had been disrupted by the new song, the grief-song, and clay without song is only clay. The golem could feel itself softening, feel the river beginning to reclaim what the river had lent.

This seemed right. This seemed, in fact, like the only correct ending.

The golem placed both hands against the oak's wounded bark. It stood there as the sun rose fully, as the forest woke around it, and it poured what remained of its song into the tree—a gift, a gratitude, a recognition between old things. The oak received it. Drew the melody down into roots and heartwood, where songs could live for centuries, where the river's music would become part of the dreaming.

By evening, the golem was clay again, a rough human shape slumped at the oak's base.

By morning, even that was gone—reclaimed by rain, by beetles, by the patient entropy of seasons.

But the oak remembered. And the river, flowing past the willows' bend, began—very quietly, very slowly—to hum a slightly different song.