The Glass Mountains

The Glass Mountains

Cynthia Kadohata

Copyright © 1995 by Cynthia Kadohata.

Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

www.ereads.com

for my husband

Part One

1

The range of climates on my planet—Artekka—is staggering, but in the sector where I was born dust rises like steam from the fields, and the dogs groan all night from the painful dryness in their throats and from the bites of legions of sand fleas. We take for granted the sounds of their groans filling the night, just as we take for granted the sound of the wind blowing across the plains and the sound of sand raining on our homes. The founders named my sector Bakshami: “dustfire.”
 

As a young girl I’d learned to accept the land of dustfire and to feel safe there, but I never thought about whether I loved my homeland. I lived there the way all my ancestors before me had, and the way I assumed all my descendants would. That was just the way it was.
 

During the driest season the dryness ate at my eyes until they itched so much I couldn’t stop myself from scratching, even if I’d already scratched my lids bloody. My lips cracked, and the air I breathed bore a mix of sand and dust so light and buoyant it seemed almost capable of levitation on a windless day. The only time I’d ever seen a person—a stranger—cry, the sight amazed me because I couldn’t believe that water from his eyes could be wasted in such a way, over nothing.
 

Bakshami was not without charms. By day the long, sleek dust clouds with edges as sharp as razors circled the sky like the rings of certain planets, and at night the moons illuminated the sand dunes and lit up the dusty clouds in the air and shone on the fervent faces of the storytellers as they regaled us with tales of worlds beyond even the faintest stars in the sky. The leaves of the dry but regal tansan trees would rustle prettily as we listened to stories, and my youngest sister, head in my lap, would smile in her sleep.
 

One languid evening while my family relaxed at the storytelling, I looked up and saw a wave of sand in the distance rise and swallow a man. The man, a stranger, had been walking with difficulty near a dune; the wave devoured him and then settled down immediately. The man disappeared, and all was peaceful, the moons gleaming off the still sands just like always.
 

I jumped up: Everybody looked at me, surprised. Nobody ever interrupted the storytellers.
 

“I saw a stranger get buried by a sand wave!” I pointed, and all of us ran across the sand toward the point where I thought I’d seen the man.
 

Much later, under the light of lanterns and two full moons, we finally found him buried in the desert. Though he wore clothes similar to ours, he was not a native—his skin was pale and his face long—and even the most experienced among us could not guess his origin. He carried trinkets in his pockets, though trinkets meant nothing to my people. You couldn’t eat or drink them, and they were heavy to carry. In my hot, wretched village we rarely saw any strangers at all, let alone dead ones.
 

I couldn’t understand this man who had broken the rules of rationality and visited my sector, where the heat and sand could kill a stranger. I lived in a world where we each followed the rules of tradition. The traditions possessed their own type of rationality, a rationality proven by time. I understood that perhaps the dead man’s traditions might include traveling, but if so, then why not travel to a sector like, for instance, Artroro?
 

As a child I’d heard often of Artroro, lush and green and filled with sweet waters and ripe fruits. I’d heard tales at the nightly storytelling, listening to the way those
R
s rolled off the tongues of the storytellers and the way the storytellers’ eyes grew greedy as they spoke of that paradisiacal sector’s wet splendors. We all felt excitement imagining a place where no one among us had ever set foot. If I were ever to leave Bakshami, I supposed Artroro was where I would go.
 

Because it was the second largest sector, and because Artroro’s army was renowned for its fierceness and courage, Artroro dominated many of the other sectors, and many sectors paid it fees for their “freedom.” Bakshami, which didn’t interest the Artrorans, paid no fees. Artroran was the planetary language, the language all children on Artekka learned after they’d mastered their native tongue. Many people spoke the language as well as they spoke their own tongues. In this one way, my otherwise fragmented planet was united.
 

The inhabitants of Bakshami had never needed an army—who would want to take over a land of such dryness and desolation, a land filled with a peaceful populace whose greatest talent was reproducing and whose greatest joy was their evening storytelling? Our people owned no valuable resources, and Bakshami had never held any particular strategic value in the constant push and pull among the largest sectors. Although I say our greatest talent was reproducing, most of our children died young, and many of our elders possessed a talent that the rest of Artekka revered and envied. The residents of Bakshami lived to around two hundred—short by the standards of Artekka—but while not long-lived, our elders were wise, even those, maybe even especially those, who seemed crazy. In reality they possessed wisdom; however, in legend they possessed powers of seeing and knowing. Inhabitants of other lands traveled for years to seek advice from our wise men and women. Of course in other sectors they’d invented fancy contraptions to fly across the skies and between the stars, but we never used mechanical transportation in Bakshami.
 

The elders asked no payment for their services, but they did require outsiders to follow the policies and customs of Bakshami. The policies forbade weapons, and the customs allowed for no fancy contraptions. So the outsiders journeyed by foot through the dustfire to learn from one of the elders what the future might hold. Some of the wealthiest left behind enormous riches, riches that would mean something in their own lands but meant little to the elders, except perhaps as decoration for bare walls. Any Bakshami who wished could travel to the hotlands—the hottest part of our sector—and the elders would give them whatever riches they desired. But few wished to waste their time in this way.
 

Because life in Bakshami didn’t change much, the seeing and knowing powers didn’t ignite the ambitions of my people. On Bakshami so little was hidden or unpredictable that most of us saw and knew our futures from birth. We went about our simple lives. Our elders believed that our goodwill, and our neutrality in planetary wars, would protect us indefinitely.
 

That night after the village had fallen asleep, I sat with my dog in the sand in front of my house. My dog, Artroro, or Artie, was bigger than any dog I’d ever seen, and fiercer by far than anyone in my quiet sector. Artie’s white fur grew fairly long, and for some reason it stood straight up on the top of his head, making him appear even bigger than he was. Artie was my best friend, and to sit with him in the sand usually made me at peace. But this night I felt fear.
 

The sun started to rise, but still I did not go in. Instead I fell asleep with Artie, dreaming of strangers raining down from the sky like rocks.
 

The next day, we heard rumors that strangers had been spotted in a number of other villages. We heard they wanted to barter, trading trinkets, food, or jewels for items we owned. They apparently eyed my people as if we, too, were items for barter. And no one knew why. My people held a number of meetings about the sightings, but no one knew what to do. When approached, the strangers used sleight of tongue to avoid direct answers.
 

We didn’t speak of the distrust that set in among us; outwardly, we went on as we always had. We were a culture of habit, one of the oldest continuous cultures on the planet. We had been happy and unchanging for the whole of our history and had no intention of letting one dead man and a few strangers alter that.
 

At the time the sands buried the long-faced stranger, I was almost a young lady, no longer quite a child. I’d always been much like other children. On the other hand, my adored oldest brother had always been different. The seeing and knowing powers of the elders did indeed ignite his ambitions, inflaming his. He wondered obsessively what it would be like to travel to the hottest regions of Bakshami where the wisest elders lived and speak to someone who could tell him what would become of him if he left the sector. I was born adoring him, and it was as if I was born with a pain in my heart, a pain I assumed came from his ambitions to leave our family and travel. Those few who did leave rarely returned and were rumored to have become corrupted, which meant that when they got old they would certainly not develop the seeing and knowing. But instead they got to see forests and to know the taste of fresh fruits every day, instead of once a year when we celebrated the sun’s farthest point from Bakshami.
 

My brother had the blackest and most lustrous eyes on Artekka. Thus his name, Maruk, “black-bright.” My eyes were almost as black and as bright as his, and from babyhood I clung to my brother. Thus my name, Mariska: “little black-bright.”

2

I was born into the Ba Mirada clan. There were about seven hundred of us. It was a new clan, founded by my grandfather Samarr when he left his old clan to form his own, as was traditional for the most legendary elders, the wisest ones. There were thousands of clans, millions of people in Bakshami, and not one of us had ever murdered another.
 

Discussion at night was often of things past, while discussion at morning meal was usually of the present. Not long after the sand ate the stranger, breakfast talk revolved around this: The sector of Forma, which adjoined Bakshami, had invaded and annexed a neutral sector on another Forma border. Such invasions weren’t particularly unusual in other parts of the world, but Forma had always been an ineffectual and unimportant sector not prone to expansion.
 

Every morning, my parents would discuss Forma with each other and then, even having asked him the same question yesterday and the day before, they would ask my grandfather what the chances were that Forma might invade Bakshami. And always Grandpa Samarr would say the same thing: The chances were what they were, and nothing he could say would change that. And so I realized that knowing and seeing had limited power.
 

Grandpa was a thin man who steadily grew thinner, and every morning he grew more impatient with my parents’ questions. We expected him to die at any time. When I was born he lived deep in the hottest areas of Bakshami, and he’d already reached the unprecedented age of three hundred.
 

I was twenty-four and a half; Bakshami come of age and set out on their own at twenty-six. I’d lived a typical Bakshami childhood. My brothers, sisters, and I played with dolls as many Bakshami did even into adulthood, and most nights we sat outside to join the audience at the nightly storytelling. We were happy children, plagued by the heat but comforted by our family.
 

Like all children with grandparents in the hotlands, we’d looked forward to our grandfather’s return. I had still been entrenched in childhood when he came to our home, a wizened old man with the darkest skin I’d ever seen, a sort of bluish brown. He’d left the hotlands because he believed he would die soon, and, following tradition, elders always left the hotlands to come home to die.
 

I had not yet started the great ritual, or education. My parents decided that since their children were fortunate enough to live with a legend, he would lead our education ritual. Usually, parents educated their children, and grandparents only helped. Unfortunately, my parents couldn’t admit that by the time Grandfather came to live with us, much of his brain was battered by age. He insisted that he could soak up the meaning of a book by turning each page and looking at it quickly, or, when he was in a hurry, simply riffling through the book, first backward, then forward, and even, for full effect, upside down. Out of respect for him, we accepted his way of reading.
 

In a supposedly lucid moment, Grandfather told me that over my lifetime I would have several important guides, as well as some lesser guides, and that the most important guide would live in a place opposite from the village in which we lived. He did not say whether this guide would come to me, or whether I would go to my guide. Elders were famous for such cryptic remarks, remarks in which lay whatever truths one might find. After he spoke, my grandfather happily returned to skimming through a favorite tome upside down.