A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (11 page)

“You don’t believe in what you’ve just said—Angels of Persecution.”

Her eyes held mine, steady and clear. “No, Jevick.”

“Then how can you explain it? And don’t say madness.
Don’t
.”

A tiny sigh escaped her, slight as a memory of breathing.

I shifted away from her, facing upward toward my plaster sky. But she sat so still, for so long, that at last I turned back again. She was gazing at the foot of my cot, intent. “It would be too easy,” she murmured. “Angels. For the gods do not speak as we speak.”

And how did the gods speak?

In patterns; in writing.

But sometimes it seemed she could not hear them. Her manner was sharp and nervous; she banged the door behind her. She pressed her pen hard above my eye, scowling into my skin, locked in a fruitless effort to prove Ura’s Conclusion. She thought there should have been some change, an increased heat in my bloodstream, an expansion of the brow, however slight.

“Do you
listen
when I read? Do you, Jevick?”

Once a tear dropped from her eye and landed on one of my cuts. It stung.

The Gray Houses are not cruel. They are kind. Each day begins with an outing for those not too distraught to stand and walk. Down the wide hall, where the lamps are always lit, each in its netting of wire, then out the big double doors into the garden. The garden is rough, a mere slope of grass surrounded by a wall. The sea is invisible but seems to be reflected in the sky. The air lively with iodine, strong. Once, at the bottom of the slope, the woman with bandaged hands found a gull with a broken wing.

Tialon came to see me there one morning. I sat against the wall with a book, and her long shadow darkened the page.

“Jevick,” she said. “How are you?”

I squinted up at her. “As you see.”

She sat beside me and laid her box in the sparkling grass.

“You’re early,” I said.

“It was so lovely outside, I couldn’t stay in.” She was in a blithe, expansive mood, leaning back to look up at the sky. “Everything is starting to smell of autumn, though it’s still warm. It smells like stone, like in the old song. Do you know it?

Autumn comes with a whisper, smelling of stone.

I grow sad.

The days are coming when we will make a tea

of boiled roots.

Losha, Losha!

What have you done with the flower

that was my heart . . .”

She gasped with laughter: “At this point the song grows mawkish, really terrible! I only like the first lines, autumn, whispering, smelling of stone. . . . What are you reading?”

I held up my copy of
Olondrian Lyrics
.

She gazed at it for a moment without speaking. Then she advised me
in a taut voice: “That’s a rare copy. Old. You must take good care of it.”

She sat with her back to the wall, suddenly subdued. I was not used to seeing her in such brilliant light. Her eternal dark wool appeared dusted with radiant powder; the chain of her spectacles dazzled me. I could not tell whether her lips were trembling or whether it was a trick of the sun.

All at once she said: “Tell me about your island.”

“My island.” The question was so unexpected, I stammered.

“Yes. What do you eat. What are your houses like.” She counted on her fingers, not looking at me. “Who are your lords. What are the names of your seasons. How do you dance. Anything. Tell me anything.”

“My island is called Tinimavet.”

“Go on.”

“We are farmers and fishermen, for the most part. Some of us grow tea. To be a tea-picker, you must first prove that your hands are as tender as flowers. For this reason it is usually work for young girls. . . .”

I faltered into silence. She had put her face in her hands; her shoulders were shaking.

After a moment she bent to her writing box. She took out a handkerchief, wiped her eyes, then crumpled the handkerchief back among her books and papers.

Still she did not look at me. Her profile looked peeled and wet. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No—It is—”

She held up a hand, cutting off my words. “Inexcusable,” she said. “It is inexcusable, and I have no excuse. Let me ask—how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two.” She looked at me, her eyes wet and green as celadon. “You are very young. I think that you have not built anything yet?”

I thought of my life: lessons, a journey, an angel. I shook my head.

“No,” she murmured. “I thought not. It is dangerous to build. Once you have built something—something that takes all your passion and will—it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness.You don’t realize that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom—something which, later, will make you suffer.”

She shifted position on the grass, yanking her skirt into place. “Some would say it was built for me,” she muttered. “And it is true, or partially true. I have never had a silk dress. Since I was eleven I’ve made all my clothes myself. Not even my nurse was allowed to help me. You should have seen some of my clothes—the skirts crooked, the armpits sagging or too tight. . . . And no one laughed. They did not laugh, because they were afraid. Afraid of my father and the Telkan. That made it worse for me. I was more alone. . . .”

She twisted a finger in the chain at her neck. “I don’t know anything about it,” she whispered. “All that I reject. Those things forbidden by the Stone. Fine clothes, dances, wine, the season of bonfires. I’ve never been to a ball. I’ve never been anywhere but the Library of Bain. Or yes—I went to the Valley once. Once! To the city of Elueth, where my grandfather had died. I was thirteen years old, and so frightened! So frightened I hardly remember the ride in the wagon, the look of the country. We had to relieve ourselves in the grass—it terrified me! And since then, never. I have no jewels but a necklace my mother left me. And I have never worn it, Jevick—not ever. Now you will ask: what does it mean? What have I built? If I’ve never decided—if I’ve only agreed with what was decided for me—”

I shook my head, but she seized my wrist and squeezed it fiercely, twice. “
Don’t pretend
.”

Then she released me. The blood flowed into my wrist; it throbbed.

“Ura’s Conclusion!” she said with a harsh laugh. Tears filled her eyes again. “My father was right. It’s nonsense. I only thought if I had something of my own . . . I’ve never been to sea. I’ve never been to a foreign country. I’ve only read about it. I’ll never go now. Do you hear me? I’ll never go. But I have built something. You—you—”

She pointed at me, trembling. Her anger shocked me. “Where did you learn Olondrian?” she snapped.

“Olondrian? At home. I had a tutor.”

It was as if I had dashed her with water. For a moment she froze; then she seized her writing box and got up.

“Tialon!”

She walked away swiftly over the dewy grass. She did not come to see me the next day, or the next.

Time unrolled in the Houses, monotonous as a skein of wool. I was known as the Islander and was almost a model patient. I ate my food. I took the required walks. The nurses liked me, and so did the patients: once the man with the scarred head gave me an autumn crocus.

So much for the days—but the nights, the nights. Sleep, we are often told, is the sister of death; for my ghost, it was more like a doorway hung with a silken curtain. She twitched the veil aside with her finger; I jerked like a fish on the line. Then lightning, screams, the swift feet of nurses in the hall.

I fell out of bed so often they pulled the mattress onto the floor and I slept there as if on one of the pallets of the islands. A nurse sat on a chair outside my door, the same reddish, blunt-nosed man who had come to my aid on my first night in the Houses. When I asked his name, he said I might call him Ordu, which means “Acorn.” Once, when I lay exhausted, watching him clean my vomit from the floor, I asked if he believed in angels. He dropped his rag in his bucket, not looking at me. “I’ll bring you some ginger tea,” he said.

I wrote letter after letter to the Priest of the Stone, explaining my case and begging for mercy. I wrote to Tialon, asking her to come back. Ordu saw that my notes were delivered; he was an honest man; he told me frankly that no letter of mine would ever reach the mainland. Neither the priest nor his daughter answered my letters, but I went on writing them, for the act kept my mind from veering toward wild thoughts: a pencil pushed into a wrist. I paced in my chamber, barefoot and straggle-haired in my borrowed clothes, constructing logic, arguing with my own thin shadow.

Some nights the angel did not come, and I slept until Ordu opened the door and called me. After a time, only those mornings could make me weep. Having steeled myself to suffer, I had no defense against the simple light of day. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed.

All that could calm me then was my two-color copy of the
Romance of the Valley
. The flaking gilt on the spine, the woodblock illustrations.
Felhami Fleeing the Fortress of Beal. The King Encounters a Lion.
The creature’s mane deep rose and symmetrical as a wheel. I crawled down into the story, immersed myself in the looping and formal plot, the wintry battles and magical transformations, the witch Brodlian like a slug in the forest surrounded by her four white swine, and Felhami, slain, stretched out on a bed of rue. “
Long he rode, and darkness fell, and the moon was his companion
.” The lines unchanged for eight hundred years, arrayed in their princely clarity.

Then one day a card fell out of the book, marked with a line in a hand I did not know. It said: “
Watch for us at midnight
.”

C
hapter Ten

Midnight in the Glass Forest

A hiss woke me.

I sat up, hands clawed, every muscle taut, preparing to do battle with the ghost. But she was not there. Instead a shuttered lantern hung before me, emitting a single copper-colored ray.

I could just make out the fingers that held the light, and beyond them a shadow in a cloak.

The figure tossed something onto my mattress. “Put these on,” it whispered.

I felt what had fallen beside me: trousers, a tunic, a pair of woven slippers.

“Who are you?”

My visitor raised the light to show me his face. His eyes were shadowed, but his smile was pleasant enough. “A friend,” he said, his voice a breath. “A friend to you, and to the Goddess Avalei.”

I asked no more questions, but dressed in the dark as quickly as I could.

When I was ready I stood, and the stranger leaned close to my ear, bending slightly because, like most Olondrians, he was taller than I. “Follow me, and don’t talk until I tell you.”

“Should I bring my things?”

He gripped my shoulder briefly. “Not tonight.”

I followed him out. In the passage, tiny night lamps lined the wall, pale as fireflies. Ordu sat awake in his straight-backed chair. I stopped, but my companion took my arm and drew me onward, saying under his breath: “It’s all right.”

The nurse averted his eyes. It struck me that he had not answered when I asked him about angels, and I realized that he might have put the card with the strange handwriting into my book. The thought startled me, like a window opening in a dark house.

My companion led me through the common room, the dim beam of his lantern passing over the low ranks of deserted couches. We went down a corridor to the door, not the one that led to the garden but the other, the gateway to the Holy City. It was unlocked. We passed through like a wayward draft. My guide pulled the door behind us just so far that it appeared shut, but did not allow it to latch. Then we mounted a flight of lightless stairs and emerged onto a walkway where the night air met us, redolent with jasmine.

My companion threw back his hood. “Ah!”

He turned to me and grinned, opening his lantern so that the light swelled up between us. Then he held out his hand.

“Miros of Sinidre,” he said. “Disgraced nobleman, temporary valet, and general layabout.”

I took his hand. “Jevick of Tyom.”

“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” he said, lifting the lantern and peering at my face. “And a battered-looking one, too. What have they been doing to you in the Houses? You look hag-ridden.”

I glanced behind me. “I’ve been locked up. Shouldn’t we be moving?”

Miros shouted with laughter. “
Vai!
” he swore. “Thank you for reminding me of my duty. It’s easy to forget such things on a night like this. Right. Here’s the official message: Mailar, High Priestess of Avalei, greets you and requests your presence at her salon.”

I hardly knew what to make of him: his grin, his unkempt curls, the mixture of wariness and mischief in his manner. But his cheerfulness was as welcome to me as the breeze on that open walkway, and the Priestess of Avalei, I knew, was an enemy of the Priest of the Stone.

“I shall be pleased to attend,” I said.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Well done. The formalities are over. This way—and don’t go to close to the edge. The railing, I warn you, was probably made in the days of worshiping milk, and it’s a nasty drop into the garden.”

We moved through the night palace. We walked across bridges, through halls where the painted statues looked startled in Miros’s light, as if surprised in acts of darkness. Sometimes we found sentries drowsing in stairwells, leaning on their spears, or pacing the battlements with a weary stride. None of them stopped us to ask about our business. With some of them Miros exchanged envelopes or tobacco, and once a small bottle of
teiva
; but he seemed to receive as many gifts as he gave, so that the ritual looked less like bribery than like an arcane form of politeness. The night was cool and fresh, and on the terraces the wind came, lifting my hair, spreading the scent of nocturnal flowers. Between the towers where windows were lighted or lamps shone in the elevated gardens, bats veered fleet and precise in the light. We passed walls of whispering ivy, entered the peaked arch of a doorway. In the halls beyond, my sense of direction failed me. I knew only that we walked through one vast silence after another while the lamplight slid over frescoes and gilded floors.

At length we reached an indoor garden, its branches awash in moonlight. The only sound was the dripping of hidden water, and the ruddy glow of the lantern seemed indelicate, almost enough to wake the whorled flowers from their sleep. The waxy leaves of rhododendrons touched my hair in the scented gloom as we made our way down the tiles of the little path. At the end of this artificial jungle stood a door of dark wood flanked by tulip-shaped lamps, and Miros opened it for me with a bow.

“Here we are at last.”

I stepped past him into an antechamber. A lamp burned on a table just inside, guarded by a retainer in the last stages of senility whose thin, silvery hair hung over his shoulders. He looked at me doubtfully and then immediately lost interest and stood plucking at the loose rosettes on his jacket. Miros greeted him, clearly without expecting a response, left his lantern on the table, and hung up his cloak.

In the next room, night had been dispelled. The globes of the lamps diffused a light that artfully mimicked the beaming of the sun; they shone, glazed and bulbous, from the sweetly scented tangle of flowering vines coaxed to grow across the ceiling. This canopy of dark green life melted into the verdure that covered the walls, winding among the branches of trees growing in pots, trees that glittered with a subtle life which I soon realized was not life at all: we were entering a forest of colored glass. A bird’s wing flickered; the flowers around it tinkled. We crossed a bridge over a miniature canal that gleamed with carp. In the parlor beyond it a circle of figures sat or reclined on couches, enveloped in laughter, smoke, and the notes of a lute.

We approached them, and they grew quiet and looked at me. Their faces were proud, impassive, some of them beautifully painted. I knelt before them. Then a voice said: “Rise, dear boy!”—and I knew before I raised my head that it was the voice of the woman on the pink couch. Splendid, stupefying, she had already dazzled me with her breasts, almost completely uncovered, framed in a window of black silk. She was perhaps forty years old, her full throat powdered, encircled with diamonds and jet. Narrow eyes slumbered in her marmoreal face.

I rose, and she held out her arm. I stepped forward and took her perfumed hand. The curls of her armored coiffure shone like lacquer.

“Welcome, precious boy,” she said in her deep voice, without smiling. “I am the High Priestess. You may kiss my shawl.”

The High Priestess of Avalei was a prisoner on the Blessed Isle. She had not been to the mainland for over a decade. Yet she maintained a dignified, even a sumptuous, salon, entertaining guests from the noble families who still supported her failing cult. She made sacrifices to the goddess in one of the hillsides of the Isle; she was permitted the use of a ballroom in the Tower of Mirrors on feast days. Her shawl was of a silk so rare it felt heavy, like a live thing. When I pressed it to my lips, it left a flavor of mulberries.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sank in the yellow upholstery of the chair she indicated. I found it difficult to meet her intelligent, faintly lascivious gaze. She said in a slow and liquid voice, each word a stone dropped into a pool: “You are safe here, my child. Don’t be frightened. Someone bring him a drink.”

A sullen girl stepped out of the decorative forest and lowered an object made of glass and silver filigree into my hands.

“Thank you,” I said, holding it gingerly. It looked something like a lamp, having a round belly and four silver feet. Several others like it stood on the low table inside the circle; from each rose a curving pipe of glass.

“Have you drunk
los
before?” asked the High Priestess.

I shook my head.

“How fortunate you are to be trying it for the first time! Such is the priviledge of youth!”

A wire-thin, avid young lady opposite me, her skirts adorned with a fortune in peacock feathers, took one of the round vessels from the table, put her lips to the pipe, and sucked, winking a painted eye. A line of golden liquid filled the tube. I followed her example and took a cautious sip from my own vessel, drowning my tongue with the thick, sweet, and potent peach liquor which is the refreshment of the Olondrian aristocracy. Its flavor and fiery texture were overpowering: I felt as if I had drunk undiluted perfume. However, after a brief wave of sickness, energy charged my veins. I thanked the High Priestess a second time, and she gave a low gurgle of laughter, barely parting her lips, which still did not smile.

The room dissolved in
los.
The lute player took up his instrument again and the unctuous air filled with its sorrowful notes, while the guests fell into conversation, laughed and sipped their drinks, too polite or too scornful to notice my existence. The lady who had come to my aid with the drink beat her hand against her flat chest so that her gold bracelets jingled, emitting a series of helpless shrieks, while beside her an odd-looking man, young but with spiky, dead-white hair, punctuated his story with disdainful shrugs. One youth was trying to set his boot on fire; another, flushed and handsome, lounged on the floor with his head pillowed on a hound. A furtive monkey curled up in the lap of a gilded beauty, and she scratched its ears with her whitened fingernails. There was a slender courtier in peach-colored silk, a middle-aged lady with bunches of violets above her ears whose cheeks collapsed with every swallow of
los
, and among the servants on the floor a Nissian slave of searing beauty, her cheek against the arm of an empty chair.

It was a pause in the room’s noises, rather than any specific signal, which revealed the mystery of the tenantless chair. The gathered company took a breath and the player’s lute fell silent, though only for a moment, a gap between notes. When the moment had passed, the music and laughter resumed, but by then I had seen him, the silent figure standing outside the circle, his back to us, one hand held behind him, covered up to the knuckles in the foamy lace that poured from his dark sleeve. He was bending forward to feed a monkey perched among the leaves of a potted tulip tree encumbered with glass fuchsias. He seemed as though he might have been there always, in the uncertain territory of the ornamental glade.

Then he turned, and an ugly chance, combined with the fumes of
los
, made me believe I recognized him. In the way he turned toward me, his feral mouth, his preoccupied gaze, I thought I saw the Kestenyi dancer of Bain. The ghastly shock made me choke; my skin was awash in sweat; I thought I saw him as he had been in the brothel, with his cruel handsomeness and lunatic air, somehow transported to this dainty chamber full of aristocrats. In another moment the dreadful resemblance dissolved, and I breathed again, as the dark-clad figure advanced and joined the circle, retaining no likeness to the dancer except for a certain purity of feature and striking grace and height.

He flung himself into the velvet chair and lit a cigarette. He was instantly the focus of darted glances and covert whisperings: conversation faltered, and an almost imperceptible depression entered the room, spoiling its atmosphere of an enchanted treasure chest. The young man who had caused the disturbance leaned back in his chair. He looked less and less like the dancer who had so unnerved me: his hair, though long, was tied in a knot on his neck; he wore a black skullcap, and the circle of glass in his right eye gave him the look of a jeweler or a young scribe. He seemed an arrogant, studious, slightly corrupt young man, well-born and long accustomed to being obeyed. Yet he shared with the Kestenyi dancer an electricity: the combination of beauty and the suggestion of menace.

“Refreshments!” the High Priestess intoned in her dark and somnolent voice. Four servant girls rose and melted into the forest. The priestess had drawn herself up, the light gleaming on the swelling expanse of her breasts, and was looking at the strange youth in the black skullcap. The servant girls returned with a cart, and cries of appreciation greeted the towers of candied passion fruit it carried, the pears poached in wine, the segments of preserved ginger impaled on peppermint swords, and the little swans carved from white chocolate. This fare dispersed the gloom which had arrived with the weary stranger. It was served with a different wine, sweet and red, poured in tiny golden cups and strewn with jasmine petals, and followed by a hot drink made from cocoa beans. Under the influence of these confections the guests grew even merrier than before, rose from their chairs, and changed places, balancing their glass plates on their knees and waving their little forks, to which there clung pale flecks of whipped cream. They spoke to me at last, and complimented me on my Olondrian. I learned the word for the
los
-vessel:
alosya
. The white-haired youth came to sit on the arm of my chair, and I told him about the island of Jennet, the world’s greatest producer of chocolate.