The Glass Mountains (17 page)

We walked into the kitchen, the walls of which were lined with all manner of knives. I could see where my brother Maruk would fit in easily with this culture of knives. Someone had hand carved each one. Some possessed carved faces, others a series of faces, others faces with bodies, others animals. There were trees, flowers, insects, anything you could find in nature. I took out my knife to show him.
 

“I sleep with this each night,” I said.
 

“What for? I can see you don’t know how to use it from the way you handle it.”
 

“Someone once told me that surprise is more important in war than skill.”
 

“That was no doubt someone who had never fought a war.”
 

“Can you teach me?”
 

“There’ll be a price.”
 

“What price?”
 

“I haven’t decided yet.”
 

“I think I have a lot of money.”
 

“Yes. I’ve counted. But let’s eat. We can discuss this and other matters later.”
 

He took out some kitchen knives and adroitly skinned the furrto while I peeked out back and saw what appeared to be human skulls sitting on a low wall at another house.
 

“Those skulls out there look human.”
 

He raised his head briefly. “Huh?” he said absently. “Oh, those, that’s correct. Human.”
 

“Whose are they?”
 

“People killed in war by my neighbor.”
 

“Not Bakshami?”
 

“Of course not. We have never been at war with Bakshami.” He smiled, and I felt fear of him, that he could smile over a subject like skulls. And yet I myself had chewed on human bones I found in the sand.
 

“If someone were trying to integrate into Soom Kali, and this person failed, might this person’s skull eventually end up in a line on such a fence?”
 

He looked at me strangely. “Of course not. What a question. We feel no triumph when someone fails to integrate.”
 

He pressed a button, and a cross of fire lit up. In a moment the delicious smell of fresh furrto cooking filled the air. My friend fried all manner of vegetation and starches with the meat. And in this way, in this kitchen of knives with a fence of skulls beyond, I came to eat the most delicious meal of my life.
 

My friend’s name was Moor-Ah Mal. He was one of the best knife throwers in the Soom Kali army. After our meal he put me in one of the rooms in his large dwelling and told me to bathe while he spoke with his father. He told me he got dispirited thinking about his sick father too much, which happened when he spent too much time at home. Yet the only thing that lifted his spirits was the time he spent talking to his father. “And watching you,” he added reflectively to me. “Every night after my father fell asleep I used to sit up in my room, thinking about his pain and his impending death. Sometimes I don’t sleep at all. When I discovered you it took my mind off my father for the first time in three years.”
 

He was blunt, like many Bakshami, but his bluntness made me shy.
 

He left me alone, and I sat with the dogs. Feeling both out of place and immensely satisfied, I explored the bathroom, where water poured out of the faucets without benefit of a pump, and I took a real bath for the first time since I left the hotlands. There were many pretty things in the bathroom, but they all had an aura of age about them, and an aura of having once belonged to someone else. The embroidered linens gave off an exquisite aroma hallucinatory in its vagueness, and the carving on the soap was slightly worn, as if someone had used it just once or twice. On a counter lay a beautiful silvery comb with eyes painted on it, and in the prongs I found a single pale orange hair. Moor’s hair was very dark brown, almost as dark as a Bakshami’s; perhaps the comb had belonged to his mother. The lamp in the bathroom reflected off the window as I pulled a wet dead flea out of my hair. I felt the weariness of all the walking in my past, and also the weariness from whatever walking might lie in the future.
 

I got in bed, where huge stone beasts rose on the headboard behind me, and I remembered drowsily that I ought to bathe the dogs, or at least fill up the bath for them. But they had fallen asleep, and as the room darkened with night I slept also.

2

I awoke to the sounds of phlegmy coughing and spitting. The sounds came from the room. A man’s tall, wasted shadow blocked what little light reached through the crack in the curtains. I didn’t close my eyes, but neither did I move. After a long while the shadow moved with some difficulty out of the room. I didn’t hear the dogs breathing, and I jumped out of bed.
 

The dogs’ absence panicked me. I always knew where they were, and they were rarely out of sight. The coughing, phlegmy shadow man hadn’t shut the door all the way, so before going outside my room, I laid my ear softly against the crack where the door met the cool stone wall. At first I heard nothing, and then I heard the muffled voices of two men. When I pushed the door open, the dogs greeted me from the other side. They licked me passively and then settled in as they had been. Now I could hear more clearly Moor’s voice, probably talking to his father. That must have been his father who had come into my room. Now it was my turn to spy on him.
 

I followed the voices down the hallway, my feet falling on the stone floor. The hallway stretched before me, the voices growing louder with each step. At the final door I stopped.
 

First I heard Moor, speaking in a hybrid of Soom Kali and Artroran. He seemed to be asking whether his father needed another blanket.
 

“No, it’s warm tonight,” said a raspy voice.
 

“Did you see her? Was she still asleep?”
 

“Yes. Maybe she isn’t well,” said the raspy voice. “You should wake her up.”
 

“She’s just tired. I feel very alert to her. I think I would know if she was sick.”
 

Moor’s father spoke sharply in Soom Kali. Then, “Kill her and eat her dogs before you fall in love.”
 

I couldn’t make out anything for a while, and then Moor spoke the words “brave” and “lucky.”
 

“Brave and lucky. That’s a good combination, I admit. But it doesn’t explain why you want to help her.”
 

“Because she’s come all this way. I can’t find the words...”
 

There was a long silence. There was an intensity to their silence as there had been to their speech. The silence and speech were, after all, between a dying father and his son. Maybe it was Moor’s intensity that prevented him from discerning my presence despite his excellent hearing. Then the raspy voice spoke. “Have I kept you here in the village too long, Moor? Will you help the girl escape as you wish you could?”
 

“I’m glad to stay here with you. But in return can you understand that I plan to help her? I don’t believe she can find her parents without my help. It’s harder than she realizes. Her bravery won’t change, but her luck might.”
 

“And are you so powerful that you can control a person’s luck?”
 

He spoke sharply to his father for the first time, but I couldn’t understand what he said. He continued sincerely, without the sharpness. “The borders are dangerous today. If Forma declares war on Soom Kali, the borders will grow more dangerous still.”
 

“War has been a constant since as far as even I can remember. The presence of war doesn’t change the borders. If she got this far, she can get farther.”
 

“Why do you resist me?”
 

“Because I have no wife, no brothers and sisters. I have only a son. And my son wants to help a foreigner from a sector whose people don’t have even the courage to fight their own wars. And you call her brave. If she’s so brave, why does she run from protecting her sector?”
 

“You should see her standing up. She’s about my age, but she’s the size of a child.”
 

“If you want a child, have a child.” But he spoke with resignation this time, and a sort of fatigue such as I had never heard anywhere, his voice wasting away just like his body. “I have some influence left,” Moor’s father almost whispered. “Perhaps I can get you out of your army commitment.”
 

There was more silence, and I understood that they were both in despair. I sneaked back to my room and pulled the drapes open. It couldn’t have been very late because here and there people still walked outside, huge strong people with knives hanging by their sides. Once I suspected someone was looking straight at me, and I froze, such was the power in that gaze. The Soom Kali were legendary for their savageness, and yet my friend Moor seemed as gentle as anyone I’d ever met.
 

The door knocker tapped softly, and Moor called my name. “Mariska? Are you awake?”
 

I pushed open the door. “Yes, I was just looking out the window.”
 

He peeked out with annoyance and pulled shut the drapes. “I could get in trouble for having you here.”
 

“And what would happen?”
 

“You might have no more trouble ever again.”
 

“Sometimes I’ve wished for that.”
 

He stepped into the room and lowered his voice. “You must take these rules more seriously. They have ways to make you feel they’re killing you once each day for a thousand days.”
 

“But what would happen to you?”
 

“Trials in Soom Kali can result in only two outcomes: death or freedom. I would be free but would have to go through the trouble of the trial.”
 

As he spoke I again felt the heat radiating from him, and this time I seemed to be absorbing it, my face growing so flushed I felt I should look away. I turned my head toward the closed drapes. “Nobody could see me,” I lied.
 

“You should be more careful just the same,” he said gently.
 

He’d caught more fresh meat, and we ate another sumptuous meal. The dogs, too, ate like kings. Moor had taken them hunting earlier while I slept. He said they learned very fast and deserved good meals. After our meal he sat across from me and showed me how to hold a knife, so when I held the knife, it felt like an extension of my hand. “Most people like to hold it here,” he said. “But I like to hold it this way.” He moved his hand almost imperceptibly. It was quite a science, holding a knife. “I once knew a man who liked to hold the handle even when he threw his knife. It seems impossible, but he was actually a passable knife handler. So in the end you must find your own way. But you must start out the right way. If I teach you nothing else, at least you may be able to protect yourself.”
 

“Can a knife protect me from my future?”
 

“A knife can change your life, at least in my sector.”
 

So while he worked around the house I sat in that kitchen of knives and practiced holding mine. I moved my hand up and down the blade and the handle. But still the knife felt alien to me.
 

When Moor finished with his chores he took me for a walk in a forest. Later in my travels I saw other fine forests, but at the time this grove in Soom Kali was the biggest I’d seen. Even this close to the driest parts of Soom Kali, there was a sense of moisture and life in this forest. In Bakshami, even the lakeshores and woods seemed dry and devoid of any life but for the life of the ubiquitous fleas. Here, the moisture of the trees and the heat I felt emanating from Moor made me feel something there was no word for in Bakshami, but what I later learned to call bliss. In Bakshami we might feel a serenity as we sat at storytelling in the warm tranquil nights beneath the clearest sky on the planet, but I had never felt bliss before. In the same way, I sensed that Moor had never felt serenity. We shared with each other a tumult in our hearts—that pain I was born with was his pain as well.
 

I touched his arm as we sat quietly in the forest. “How long has your father been sick?” I asked.
 

“For three years. The doctors told him he would die several times now. It’s a degenerative disease. It taunts him. A death this slow is the worst kind.”
 

“As if there were a best kind.”
 

“Old age, of course. In Soom Kali only four in ten die of old age. Two in ten are killed in skirmishes with Artroro.”
 

“In Bakshami many children die of dust viruses. But we have no wars.”
 

“You fight no wars, perhaps, but you have them anyway.”
 

“Is it true the only reason Forma doesn’t invade the hotlands is because Soom Kali forbids it?”
 

“It’s true. We don’t want Forma as neighbors. We have no love of Bakshami, but we liked a neutral country next to us. We were willing to let others pillage your towns and bomb your refugees because we didn’t really care what happened to your towns and refugees. But if they destroy the hotlands, they destroy Bakshami. And as I said, we liked your people as neighbors. We always took for granted what good neighbors you made. Now we see how neighbors who can’t protect themselves can prove troublesome.”