A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (31 page)

And then I went upstairs, and read to the angel.

I opened
Lantern Tales
again, old highland stories retold by Ethen of Ur-Fanlei. This time I read not the angel’s tale but the story printed there. Its ornate diction recalled an earlier time, before the war in the east. Ethen at the window of her room above the river where she spent several years as the guest of the Duchess of Tevlas, the tall floor lamps on the balcony after dark, burnt
nath
to keep away the mosquitoes, Ethen barefoot, massaging her perennially swollen ankles.
This tale was told to me by Karth, a gaunt manservant with a lazy eye, who claims to have seen the White Crow himself on more than one occasion.
I read aloud, haltingly, translating as I went. Each time I glanced up the angel was looking at me, resting her cheek in her hand.

I read. I read her
My Chain of Nights
by the famous Damios Beshaid, Elathuid’s
Journey to the Duoronwei,
Fanlero’s
Song of the Dragon
. Limros’s
Social Organization of the Kestenyi Nomads
, which calls the east “this vast theater of miserable existences.” She listened, a moth at a window. I read
On the Plant Life of the Desert,
by the great botanist of Eiloki, who succumbed to thirst in the sands, with its spidery watercolors of desert flowers such as
tras
, “whose yellow spines are lined with dark hairs like eyelashes.” Sometimes she stopped me with questions. I created new words in Kideti: the Olondrian water clock was “that which follows the sun even after sunset.” Some books she attended to more closely than others. She grew so still she almost faded away while I read Kahalla the Fearless:

What do they say of the desert? What they say of it is not true. What do they say of the dunes, the salt flats, the cities of broken gravel, and the fields of quartz and chalcedony thrown down by the majestic volcanoes of Iva? Nothing. They say nothing. They speak shrilly of the
feredhai,
and they smile and add more pounded cloves to their tea. They are unacquainted with heat and cold, they are utter strangers to death, they speak like people who have never even seen horses. . . .

I looked up. She was still there, her light pale as a fallen leaf. “I’ll have to stop,” I chattered. “I’m too cold to go on.” She nodded, sighing. “It is a great magic, this
vallon.
” My lips cracked when I smiled; the evening light was rarefied with cold. My breath poured out of me as whiteness, traveling on the draft. I felt it go like an ache, a tearing of cloth. I moved to the balcony doors and saw, in the instant before I closed them, the stars of the desert branching like candelabra.

I read to her from Firfeld’s
Sojourns
, too: the two of us wandered together among the fragrant trees of the Shelemvain, and encountered on the fringes of the forest Novannis the False Countess, smoking her beaded pipe among the acacias. We dined at the court of Loma, where women wore tall coiffures made of hollyhocks, and sampled, in the dim greenness of the oak forests, the brains of a wild pig fried with chicory in its own skull, a delicacy of the soft-spoken Dimai. We shivered as we read of the nameless desert in the center of the plateau, which the
feredhai
call only
suamid
, “the place,” where no water comes from the sky, not even the snow that falls near the mountains, “and one lives under the tyranny of the wells.” And we read of our own islands, of Vad-Von-Poi, the “city of water-baskets.” Jissavet’s fingers flared above the page. Later, when I was almost asleep, she spoke to me suddenly out of the dark.

“I know what the
vallon
is,” she said. “It’s
jut
.”

The gods must have loved her, and they had taken her.

In Pitot they say the elephant god, Old Grandfather, is jealous. He steals children, he steals wives. This much, he says, and no more. He is the Limiter, the controller of human happiness. He must have seen her; they all must have looked at her, even when she was a child, when she paddled her tiny boat made out of skins. They must have seen her bold eyes and her arms, dark, sunlit, polished, reflected in the brown mirrors of the pools. This girl, small and already so headstrong, with hair in those days of an iridescent black. But with the eyes, the mouth, the expression, with the waywardness and audacity which I would come to love when it was too late, when the gods had claimed her for themselves.

Those years, the years she lay in the doorway: every one of them hurts me, and every hour has an individual pain. Lost hours, irretrievable, hours that I would have taken up and treasured and which were scattered abroad in the mud. Hours in which she lay alone and deserted by her friends. But had I been one of her friends, had I eaten those stolen fish in the fields, had I been blessed, like them, with that inconceivable good fortune—nothing could have parted me from her. Not the
kyitna
, not that hair with the color of poisonous berries, which I would weave into ropes to bind me close to her side, not the hatred of all the world, not the danger of sickness, contamination, which I would have welcomed with tears of joy. Yes, I would have clasped that hair, that waist, and inhaled her frightened breath in the hope that the curse would swell to make room for me, that we might be together, safe, removed from everyone else in the honor and preference which death had shown for us. To be, like her, an aristocrat of death, who would bury us under his scarlet blossoms. To suffer, like her, from torrid fevers. To clutch her hand as I struggled for life, to hear her words of comfort gathering the transparent coolness beyond the stars.

For the first time in many months I prayed to the god with the black-and-white tail, incoherent and extravagant prayers. I prayed that once, just once, the laws of time might be suspended and I might find myself, ten years ago, in Kiem. I prayed that she would stay with me forever, that somehow we would enter the magical, intimate purlieus of her book. And I called down terrible punishments on the playmates of her childhood: that they might first love her memory, and then perish. “Let them die,” I begged, “but only after they’ve suffered as I’m suffering.” It seemed to me that the whole world must know of her, must recognize that with her death the universe had altered and the fields, the forests, the rivers were full of ashes.

Is
kyitna
the sign of the hatred of the gods? Or of their love?

Fading, exhausted, she lay in the open doorway. The heavy light, falling across her stomach like a wave, seemed too much for her body to support. Fragile, she was fragile and impermanent as salt. Like salt she would dissolve, lose her substance. And like salt she would flavor everything with a taste that was sharp and amniotic, disquieting and unmistakable. The gods saw. They saw what I had seen aboard the
Ardonyi
, this girl with her piquant, pleasing oddity, her lips from which such strange utterances fell, such as when she had said to her mother, “He has the long face of a fish.” They saw the dark and vibrant eyes in which all of her life was concentrated; they knew her erratic moods, her mysterious will, her loneliness which she could not explain to anyone, and her violent rage which had given me so much pain. And they knew more. Into her brain they went, and into her heart. They probed those elusive gardens, those nocturnal roads. They knew the black and sinister wells, the mazes, the sudden traps, and the floating, limpid, inaccessible evenings. Had they not simply recognized, in her, one of themselves? One who, through some cosmic accident, had come to reside on the island of Tinimavet, lost like a star which finds itself, all at once, far from the others. And then the cry had gone out from the Isle of Abundance. And they had crouched, anguished, watching this one who had fallen somehow from the skies. And then with slow and careful gestures, so as not to startle her, they had led her back, and she had departed with them.

“When I was alive, even when I was alive,” she whispered to me, “I didn’t want to live as I do now.”

We went out into the orchard, through the rusty gate, the great flat country glittering before us and the wind rising. The wind, the Kestenyi wind. I called it “four hundred knife-wheeled chariots,” but Jissavet called it “the soldiers of King Yat.” It drove the thin snow writhing over the cracked earth of the plain and set the prayer bells jingling on the goat-hair tents. “That one.” She pointed. “They’ve just traded for some lentils and only the eldest of the sisters is there, the one with the kindest heart.” I called at the tent flap, hoarse in the wind, and a pair of startled eyes peered out from under joined brows like an island hunting bow.

She exclaimed in Kestenyi, a clatter of sounds. I gestured at my loose jacket. “Please,” I said in Olondrian. “Please, my lady, I’m hungry.”

“
Kalidoh!
” she breathed and pulled me in where a low fire burned in the center of the floor, sending up a sweet, rough scent of dung. “Sit,” she said in a mangled Olondrian, forcing me down on a woven stool. Her gestures were quick, her long, large-knuckled hands in perpetual motion. She adjusted her mantle over her shoulder, flicking its beaded hem out of reach of the fire, and squatted to prod at a bubbling pot balanced in the coals. She said something in Kestenyi, her voice raised. I heard the word
kalidoh
.

“There’s another,” Jissavet said. “Beside you. Her grandmother.”

I looked more closely at the pile of skins on the floor. A thin face watched me, clear-eyed, ringed with fine gray hair.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“No,” the granddaughter advised me. “No Olondrian.”

The grandmother lay still, staring.

“Look at her eyes,” Jissavet whispered.

“I know.”

“She isn’t dying. She only looks like she’s dying. She isn’t, though. She’s going to live for a long time.”

The granddaughter served me lentils and dried meat in a leather bowl. I ate half and showed her my empty satchel: “I need some for my friend.” She threw her hands up, scolding as I made to put the remains of the food in the satchel, snatched the bag away and filled it with dried lentils.

“No,” I said. “Too much.”

She waved her hand dismissively, her face turned away. “For the
kalidoh
. For the
kalidoh
. Not too much.”

On her bed the grandmother gazed at me with stricken, watchful eyes. A gold earring curled beside her cheek, lavish as spring.

“Sick?” I asked the granddaughter.

She shook her head.

“No, not sick,” Jissavet said, almost in a whisper.

“Jissavet.”

A warning in the air, an electricity. Grief.

“Jissavet.”

She burned beside me, a bright tear in each eye.

I sank to my knees on the floor, her pain going through me like fire in the grass. “Jissavet.”

“Tell her he’s dead,” she choked. “Her boy. He’s not coming back.”

I looked up, the fires fading. The granddaughter stared, mouth open, the satchel in her hands.

“I’m sorry,” I panted. “The boy is not coming back. He’s dead.”

She dropped the satchel. “Mima,” she cried. A string of Kestenyi words, and then a keening. She drew her mantle over her head.

The old woman did not weep, did not cry out. She lay so still she seemed to be calcifying, turning into stone before my eyes. The light of the low fire sprang back from her cheek, which the terrible hardness descending on her body had turned to mother-of-pearl.

“Grandmother.”

Frightened, I crept to her and took her skinny hand. Her eyes were knots of amber that did not blink. Then, unthinking, I whispered to her in Kideti. “There, daughter. It’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.”

The angel, outside my vision, grew still. The weeping granddaughter too; though she whimpered, there was no harshness in her cries.

The air of the room seemed lighter. I heard the gentle crackling of the fire, and a wind sent ripples along the wall of the tent. Just as my straining muscles relaxed, the old woman squeezed my fingers in a vicious grip and burst into a passion of weeping. The granddaughter, gulping, took my place at her side and dried the old woman’s eyes with her mantle. The two wept quietly for a long time.

At length I rose, trying not to disturb them, and picked up my satchel.

“Wait,” the granddaughter cried, beckoning me back.

The old woman fixed her large light eyes on me. She reached down to the earth and dug a series of careful lines with her fingernail. A wolf took shape, coming into being as I watched, alive in snout and limb, the hairs on its belly distinct. She nicked its teeth into place with a few deft twists and lay back, closing her eyes.

The granddaughter motioned at the drawing. “Gift,” she said. “For the
kalidoh
.”

I gave her a snake she could not understand, and she gave me a wolf I could not take away. It’s fair, I thought, shouldering my satchel over the plain. The wind had fallen; the snowy earth was lighter than the sky, holding the murky luminosity of a coin.

“Jissavet,” I said, and she was there, her smile a garland. We walked slowly homeward under the darkening sky.

When I swung the gate open, its creaking seemed to echo.

“What’s that?” Jissavet said, and I looked up, sensing a change in the air.

“Thunder.”

In the desert a rain of five minutes is like a carnival.

The rains fell in short, sharp bursts, and ephemeral meadows sprang up on the plateau; the snow melted, leaving great empty patches of shining earth and tender flowers of concentrated gold that froze and died in the night. The vines of the
yom afer
turned green and sprouted all over with saffron-colored blooms, giving off an insipid scent, and frayed like pumpkin flowers; the eerie plant called
laddisi
burst forth with its flowers like pungent white stars and its green, obscenely swollen sacks of formicative blue milk. The rains washed the marble terrace of Sarenha-Haladli; I skated across it barefoot, laughing after the angel, the rose trees snagging my shirt. Water lay in the bowl of the fountain like a forgotten hand mirror, and all the trees were studded with buds like knobs of brass.

In a month or less it would all be blown away, replaced by scorching sand, the thorn trees withering through the sapless days; but for now it was ours and we reveled in it, elated by the sudden perfumes, the transitory carpet of the meadows.
And the hills of Tavroun, she wears them like a necklace
. “Show yourself,” I said, and she turned for me like a lamp in the ringing fields. The wind blew through her, fresh and startling, spiced with the odor of the plateau, an animating fragrance like crushed pepper. And her laugh went dancing in sparks of light when I told her how I loved her and how silken and volatile she was, and haughty like a black flower. Her arms encircled me, full of the essence of spring. She was so alive, so alive I forgot that the name of the life she lived was death.