A Stranger in Olondria

Chapter One Childhood in Tyom

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call “the breath of angels” and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing. I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards.

My name is Jevick. I come from the blue and hazy village of Tyom, on the western side of Tinimavet in the Tea Islands. From Tyom, high on the cliffs, one can sometimes see the green coast of Jiev, if the sky is very clear; but when it rains, and all the light is drowned in heavy clouds, it is the loneliest village in the world. It is a three-day journey to Pitot, the nearest village, riding on one of the donkeys of the islands, and to travel to the port of Dinivolim in the north requires at least a fortnight in the draining heat. In Tyom, in an open court, stands my father’s house, a lofty building made of yellow stone, with a great arched entryway adorned with hanging plants, a flat roof, and nine shuttered rooms. And nearby, outside the village, in a valley drenched with rain, where the brown donkeys weep with exhaustion, where the flowers melt away and are lost in the heat, my father had his spacious pepper farm.

This farm was the source of my father’s wealth and enabled him to keep the stately house, to maintain his position on the village council, and carry a staff decorated with red dye. The pepper bushes, voluptuous and green under the haze, spoke of riches with their moist and pungent breath; my father used to rub the dried corns between his fingers to give his fingertips the smell of gold. But if he was wealthy in some respects, he was poor in others: there were only two children in our house, and the years after my birth passed without hope of another, a misfortune generally blamed on the god of elephants. My mother said the elephant god was jealous and resented our father’s splendid house and fertile lands; but I knew that it was whispered in the village that my father had sold his unborn children to the god. I had seen people passing the house nudge one another and say, “He paid seven babies for that palace”; and sometimes our laborers sang a vicious work song: “Here the earth is full of little bones.” Whatever the reason, my father’s first wife had never conceived at all, while the second wife, my mother, bore only two children: my elder brother Jom, and myself. Because the first wife had no child, it was she whom we always addressed as Mother, or else with the term of respect, eti-donvati, “My Father’s Wife”; it was she who accompanied us to festivals, prim and disdainful, her hair in two black coils above her ears. Our real mother lived in our room with us, and my father and his wife called her “Nursemaid,” and we children called her simply by the name she had borne from girlhood: Kiavet, which means Needle. She was round-faced and lovely, and wore no shoes. Her hair hung loose down her back. At night she told us stories while she oiled her hair and tickled us with a gull’s feather.

Our father’s wife reserved for herself the duty of inspecting us before we were sent to our father each morning. She had merciless fingers and pried into our ears and mouths in her search for imperfections; she pulled the drawstrings of our trousers cruelly tight and slicked our hair down with her saliva. Her long face wore an expression of controlled rage, her body had an air of defeat, she was bitter out of habit, and her spittle in our hair smelled sour, like the bottom of the cistern. I only saw her look happy once: when it became clear that Jom, my meek, smiling elder brother, would never be a man, but would spend his life among the orange trees, imitating the finches.

My earliest memories of the meetings with my father come from the troubled time of this discovery. Released from the proddings of the rancorous first wife, Jom and I would walk into the fragrant courtyard, hand in hand and wearing our identical light trousers, our identical short vests with blue embroidery. The courtyard was cool, crowded with plants in clay pots and shaded by trees. Water stood in a trough by the wall to draw the songbirds. My father sat in a cane chair with his legs stretched out before him, his bare heels turned up like a pair of moons.

We knelt. “Good morning father whom we love with all our hearts, your devoted children greet you,” I mumbled.

“And all our hearts, and all our hearts, and all our hearts,” said Jom, fumbling with the drawstring on his trousers.

My father was silent. We heard the swift flutter of a bird alighting somewhere in the shade trees. Then he said in his bland, heavy voice: “Elder son, your greeting is not correct.”

“And we love him,” Jom said uncertainly. He had knotted one end of the drawstring about his finger. There rose from him, as always, an odor of sleep, greasy hair, and ancient urine.

My father sighed. His chair groaned under him as he leaned forward. He blessed us by touching the tops of our heads, which meant that we could stand and look at him. “Younger son,” he said quietly, “what day is today? And which prayers will be repeated after sundown?”

“It is Tavit, and the prayers are the prayers of maize-meal, passion fruit, and the new moon.”

My father admonished me not to speak so quickly, or people would think I was dishonest; but I saw that he was pleased and felt a swelling of relief in my heart, for my brother and myself. He went on to question me on a variety of subjects: the winds, the attributes of the gods, simple arithmetic, the peoples of the islands, and the delicate art of pepper-growing. I stood tall, threw my shoulders back, and strove to answer promptly, tempering my nervous desire to blurt my words, imitating the slow enunciation of my father, his stern air of a great landowner. He did not ask my brother any questions. Jom stood unnoticed, scuffing his sandals on the flagstones—only sometimes, if there happened to be doves in the courtyard, he would say very softly: “Oo-ooh.” At length my father blessed us again, and we escaped, hand in hand, into the back rooms of the house; and I carried in my mind the image of my father’s narrow eyes: shrewd, cynical, and filled with sadness.

At first, when he saw that Jom could not answer his questions and could not even greet him properly, my father responded with the studied and ponderous rage of a bull elephant. He threatened my brother, and, when threats failed to cure his stubborn incompetence, had him flogged behind the house on a patch of sandy ground by two dull-eyed workers from the pepper fields. During the flogging I stayed in our darkened bedroom, sitting on my mother’s lap while she pressed her hands over my ears to shut out my brother’s loud, uncomprehending screams. I pictured him rolling on the ground, throwing up his arms to protect his dusty head while the blows of the stout sticks descended on him and my father watched blankly from his chair… Afterward Jom was given back to us, bruised and bloodied, with wide staring eyes, and my mother went to and fro with poultices for him, tears running freely down her cheeks. “It is a mistake,” she sobbed. “It is clear that he is a child of the wild pig.” Her face in the candlelight was warped and gleaming with tears, her movements distracted. That night she did not tell me stories but sat on the edge of my bed and gripped my shoulder, explaining in hushed and passionate tones that the wild pig god was Jom’s father; that the souls of the children of that god were more beautiful, more tender, than ordinary souls, and that our duty on earth was to care for them with the humility we showed the sacred beasts. “But your father will kill him,” she said, looking into the darkness with desolate eyes. “There is flint in his bowels. He has no religion. He is a Tyomish barbarian.”

My mother was from Pitot, where the women wore anklets of shell and plucked their eyebrows, and her strong religious views were seen in Tyom as ignorant Pitoti superstition. My father’s wife laughed at her because she burned dried fenugreek in little clay bowls, a thing which, my father’s wife said with contempt, we had not done in Tyom for a hundred years. And she laughed at me, too, when I told her one morning at breakfast, in a fit of temper, that Jom was the son of the wild pig god and possessed an untarnished soul: “He may have the soul of a pig,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean he’s not an idiot.” This piece of blasphemy, and the lines around her mouth, proved that she was in a good humor. She remained in this mood, her movements energetic and her nostrils clenched slightly with mirth, as long as my father sought for a means to cure Jom of his extraordinary soul. When the doctors came up from the south, with their terrible eyes and long hats of monkey skin, she served them hot date juice in bright glazed cups herself, smiling down at the ground. But the dreadful ministrations of the doctors, which left my brother blistered, drugged, and weeping in his sleep, did not affect his luminescent soul and only put a shade of terror in his gentle pig’s eyes. A medicinal stench filled the house, and my bed was moved out into another room; from dusk until dawn I could hear the low moaning of my brother, punctuated with shrieks. In the evenings my mother knelt praying in the little room where the family janut, in whose power only she truly believed, stood in a row on an old-fashioned altar.

The jut is an external soul. I had never liked the look of mine: it had a vast forehead, claw feet, and a twist of dried hemp around its neck. The other janut were similar. Jom’s, I recall, wore a little coat of red leather. The room where they lived, little more than a closet, smelled of burnt herbs and mold. Like most children I had at one period been frightened of the janut, for it was said that if your jut spoke to you your death was not far off, but the casual attitudes of Tyom had seeped into me and diluted my fear, and I no longer ran past the altar room with held breath and pounding heart. Still, a strange chill came over me when I glanced in and saw my mother’s bare feet in the gloom, her body in shadow, kneeling, praying. I knew that she prayed for Jom and perhaps stroked the little figure in the red jacket, soothing her son from the outside.

At last those unhappy days ended in victory for my brother’s soul. The doctors went away and took their ghastly odor with them; my father’s wife reverted to her usual bitterness, and my bed was moved back into my room. The only difference now was that Jom no longer sat in the schoolroom and listened to our tutor, but wandered in the courtyard underneath the orange trees, exchanging pleasantries with the birds.

After this my father took a profound and anxious interest in me, his only son in this world; for there was no longer any doubt that I would be his sole heir and continue his trade with Olondria.

Once a year, when the pepper harvest was gathered and dried and stored in great, coarse sacks, my father, with his steward, Sten, and a company of servants, made a journey to Olondria and the spice markets of Bain. On the night before they left we would gather in the courtyard to pray for the success of their venture and to ask my father’s god, the black-and-white monkey, to protect them in that far and foreign land. My mother was very much affected by these prayers, for she called Olondria the Ghost Country and only restrained herself from weeping out of fear that her tears would cause the ship to go down. Early the next day, after breakfasting as usual on a chicken baked with honey and fruit, my father would bless us and walk slowly, leaning on his staff, into the blue mists of the dawn. The family and house servants followed him outside to see him off from the gateway of the house, where he mounted his fat mule with its saddle of white leather, aided by the dark and silent Sten. My father, with Sten on foot leading the mule, formed the head of an impressive caravan: a team of servants followed him, bearing wooden litters piled high with sacks of pepper on their shoulders, and behind them marched a company of stout field hands armed with short knives, bows, and poisoned arrows. Behind these a young boy led a pair of donkeys laden with provisions and my father’s tent, and last of all a third donkey bore a sack of wooden blocks on which my father would record his transactions. My father’s bright clothes, wide-brimmed hat, and straw umbrella remained visible for a long time, as the caravan made its way between the houses shaded by mango trees and descended solemnly into the valley. My father never turned to look back at us, never moved, only swayed very gently on the mule. He glided through the morning with the grace of a whale: impassive, imponderable.

When he returned we would strew the courtyard with the island’s most festive flowers, the tediet blossoms which crackle underfoot like sparks, giving off a tart odor of limes. The house was filled with visitors, and the old men sat in the courtyard at night, wrapped in thin blankets against the damp air and drinking coconut liquor. My father’s first wife wept in the kitchen, overseeing the servants, my mother wore her hair twisted up on top of her head and fastened with pins, and my father, proud and formidably rich after four months in a strange land, drank with such greed that the servants had to carry him into his bedroom. At these times his mood was expansive. He pulled my ears and called me “brown monkey.” He sat up all night by the brazier regaling the old men with tales of the north; he laughed with abandon, throwing his head back, the tears squeezing from his eyes, and one evening I saw him kiss the back of my mother’s neck in the courtyard. And, of course, he was laden with gifts: saddles and leather boots for the old men, silks and perfumes for his wives, and marvelous toys for Jom and me. There were musical boxes and painted wooden birds that could hop on the ground and were worked by turning a bit of brass which protruded from under their wings; there were beautiful toy animals and toy ships astonishing in their detail, equipped with lifelike rigging and oars and cunning miniature sailors. He even brought us a finely painted set of omi, or “Hands,” the complex and ancient card game of the Olondrian aristocracy, which neither he nor we had any notion of how to play, though we loved the painted cards: the Gaunt Horse, the Tower of Brass. In the evenings I crept to sit behind a certain potted orchid in the hall which led from the east wing of the house into the courtyard, listening to my father’s tales, more wonderful than gifts, of terraced gardens, opium, and the barefoot girls of the pleasure houses.

One night he found me there. He walked past me, shuffling heavily, and the moonlight from the garden allowed him to spot my hiding place. He grunted, paused, and reached down to pull me upright. “Ah—Father—” I gasped, wincing.

“What are you doing there?” he demanded. “What? Speak!”

“I was—I thought—”

“Yes, the gods hate me. They’ve given me two backward sons.” The slap he dealt me was soft; it was terror that made me flinch.

“I was only listening. I wanted to hear you. To hear about Olondria. I’ll go to bed now. I’m sorry. I wanted to hear what you were saying.”

“To hear what I was saying.”

“Yes.”

He nodded slowly, his hands on his hips, the dome of his head shifting against the moonlight in the yard. His face was in darkness, his breathing forced and deliberate, as if he were fighting. Each exhalation, fiery with liquor, made my eyes water.

“I’ll go to bed,” I whispered.

“No. No. You wanted to hear. Very good. The farm is your birthright. You must hear of Olondria. You must learn.”

Relief shot through me; my knees trembled.

“Yes,” he went on, musing. “You must hear. But first, younger son, you must taste.”

My muscles, newly relaxed, tensed again with alarm. “Taste?”

“Taste.” He gripped my shirt at the shoulder and thrust me before him through the hall. “Taste the truth,” he muttered, stumbling. “Taste it. No, outside. Into the garden. That way. Yes. Here you will learn.”

The garden was bright. Moonlight bounced from every leaf. There was no light in the kitchen: all the servants had gone to bed. Only Sten would be awake, and he would be on the other side of the house, seated discreetly in an alcove off the courtyard. There he could see when the old men wanted something, but he could not hear me cry, and if he did he would let me be when he saw I was with my father. A shove in my back sent me sprawling among the tomato plants. My father bent over me, enveloping me in his shadow. “Who are you?”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

A burst of cackling rose to the sky from the other side of the house: one of the old men had made a joke.

“Good,” said my father. He crouched low, swaying so that I feared he would fall on me. Then he brought his hand to my lips. “Taste. Eat.”

Something was smeared on my mouth. A flavor of bitterness, suffocation. It was earth. I jerked back, shaking my head, and he grasped the back of my neck. His fingers tough and insistent between my teeth. “Oh, no. You will eat. This is your life. This earth. This country. Tyom.”

I struggled but at last swallowed, weeping and gagging. All the time he went on speaking in a low growl. “You hide, you crawl, to hear of Olondria. A country of ghosts and devils. For this you spy on your father, your blood. Now you will taste your own land, know it. Who are you?”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

“Don’t spit. Who are you?”

“Jevick of Tyom!”

A light shone out behind him; someone called to him from the house. He stood, and I shielded my eyes from the light with my hand. One of the old men stood in the doorway holding a lantern on a chain.

“What’s the matter?” he called out in a cracked and drunken voice.

“Nothing. The boy couldn’t sleep,” my father answered, hauling me up by the elbow.

“Nightmares.”

“Yes. He’s all right now.”

He patted my shoulder, tousled my hair. Shadows moved over us, clouds across the moon.

Chapter Two Master Lunre

My father’s actions were largely incomprehensible to me, guided by his own secret and labyrinthine calculations. He dwelt in another world, a world of intrigue, bargains, contracts, and clandestine purchases of land all over the island. He was in many ways a world in himself, whole as a sphere. No doubt his decisions were perfectly logical in his own eyes—even the one that prompted him, a patriotic islander, to bring me a tutor from Bain: Master Lunre, an Olondrian.

The day began as it usually did when my father was expected home from his travels: the house festooned with flowers and stocked with coconut liquor. We stood by the gate, washed and perfumed and arrayed in our brightest clothes, my mother twisting her hands in her skirt, my father’s wife with red eyes. Jom, grown taller and broad in the shoulders, moaned gently to himself, while I stood nervously rubbing the heel of one sandal on the flagstones. We scanned the deep blue valley for the first sign of the company, but before we saw them we heard the children shouting: “A yellow man!”

A yellow man! We glanced at one another in confusion. My mother bit her lower lip; Jom gave a groan of alarm. At first I thought the children meant my father, whose golden skin, the color of the night-monkey’s pelt, was a rarity in the islands; but certainly the children of Tyom were familiar with my father and would never have greeted a council member with such ill-mannered yells. Then I remembered the only “yellow man” I had ever seen, an Olondrian wizard and doctor who had visited Tyom in my childhood, who wore two pieces of glass on his eyes, attached to his ears with wires, and roamed the hills of Tinimavet, cutting bits off the trees. I have since learned that that doctor wrote a well-received treatise, On the Medicinal Properties of the Juice of the Young Coconut, and died a respected man in his native city of Deinivel; but at the time I felt certain he had returned with his sack of tree-cuttings.

“There they are,” said Pavit, the head house servant, in a strained voice. And there they were: a chain of riders weaving among the trees. My father’s plaited umbrella appeared, his still, imposing figure, and beside him another man, tall and lean, astride an island mule. The hectic screams of the children preceded the company into the village, so that they advanced like a festival, drawing people out of their houses. As they approached I saw that my father’s face was shining with pride, and his bearing had in it a new hauteur, like that of the old island kings. The man who rode beside him, looking uncomfortable with his long legs, kept his gaze lowered and fixed between the ears of his plodding mule. He was not yellow but very pale brown, the color of raw cashews; he had silver hair, worn cropped close to the skull so that it resembled a cap. He was not the leaf-collecting doctor but an altogether strange man, with silver eyebrows in his smooth face and long, fine-knuckled hands. As he dismounted in front of the house I heard my mother whispering: “Protect us, God with the Black-and-White Tail, from that which is not of this earth.”

My father dismounted from his mule and strutted toward us, grinning. I thought I caught an odor off him, of fish, seasickness, and sweat. We knelt and stared down at the bald ground, murmuring ritual greetings, until he touched the tops of our heads with the palm of his fleshy hand. Then we stood, unable to keep from staring at the stranger, who faced us awkwardly, half smiling, taller than any man there.

“Look at the yellow man!” the children cried. “He is like a frilled lizard!” And indeed, with his narrow trousers and high ruffled collar, he resembled that creature. My father turned to him and, with an exaggerated nonchalance, spoke a few foreign words which seemed to slip back and forth in his mouth, which I later learned were a gross distortion of the northern tongue, but which, at the time, filled me with awe and the stirrings of filial pride. The stranger answered him with a slight bow and a stream of mellifluous speech, provoking my mother to kiss the tips of her fingers to turn aside evil. Then my father pointed at me with a gesture of obvious pride, and the stranger turned his piercing, curious, kindly gaze on me. His eyes were a mineral green, the color of seas where shipwrecks occur, the color of unripe melons, the color of lichen, the color of glass.

“Av maro,” said my father, pointing to me and then to himself.

The Olondrian put one hand on his heart and made me a deep bow.

“Bow to him,” said my father. I copied the stranger ungracefully, provoking hilarious shrieks from the children who stood around us in the street. My father nodded, satisfied, and spoke to the stranger again, gesturing for him to enter the cool of the house. We followed them into the courtyard, where the stranger sat in a cane chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his expression genial and bemused.

He brought new air to our house: he brought the Tetchi, the Wind of Miracles. At night the brazier lit up his face as he sat in the humid courtyard. He sat with the old men, speaking to them in his tongue like a thousand fountains, casting fantastic shadows with his long and liquid hands. My father translated the old men’s questions: Was the stranger a wizard? Would he be gathering bark and leaves? Could he summon his jut? There were shouts of laughter, the old men grinning and showing the stumps of their teeth, pressing the stranger to drink our potent homemade liquor and smoke our tobacco. He obliged them as well as he could, though the coconut liquor made him grimace and the harsh tobacco, rolled in a leaf, sent him into a fit of coughing. This pleased the old men enormously, but my father came to his rescue, explaining that allowances must be made for the northerner’s narrow ribcage. In those days we did not know if our guest were not a sort of invalid: he vastly preferred our hot date juice to the liquor the old men loved; he ate only fruit for breakfast and turned very pale at the sight of pig stomach; he rose from his afternoon sleep with a haggard look and drank far too much water. Yet his presence brought an air of excitement that filled the house like light, an air that smelled of festivals, perfume and tediet blossoms, and drew in an endless stream of curious, eager visitors, offering gifts to the stranger: yams baked in sugar, mussels in oil.

My father swelled like a gourd: he was bursting with self-importance, the only one who was able to understand the illustrious stranger. “Our guest is tired,” he would announce in a grave, dramatic tone, causing his family and visitors to retreat humbly from the courtyard. His lips wore a constant, jovial smirk. He spoke loudly in the street. He was moved to the highest circle of council and carried a staff with hawk feathers. Most wonderful of all, he seemed to have lost the capacity for anger and ignored annoyances which formerly would have caused him to stamp like a buffalo. The servants caught his mood: they made jokes and grinned at their tasks, and allowed Jom to pilfer peanuts and honeycombs from the back of the kitchen. Even my father’s wife was charmed by the northerner’s gift of raisins: she waited on him with her smile drawn tight, an Olondrian scarf in her hair.

My mother was most resistant to the festival air in the house. On the night of the stranger’s arrival she burned a bowl of dried herbs in her room: I recognized, by their acrid smoke, the leaves that ward off leopard ghosts. They were followed by pungent fumes against bats, leprosy, and falling sickness, as well as those which are said to rid human dwellings of long-toed spirits. Her face as she moved about the house was exhausted and filled with suffering, and her body was listless because of her nightly vigils by the clay bowls. My father’s wife, strutting anxiously about in her Bainish pearl earrings, lamented that my mother would shame us all with her superstition, but I think she secretly feared that the stranger was in fact some sort of ghost and that my mother would drive him away, and with him our family’s new status. “Talk to your nursemaid,” she begged me. “She is making a fool of your father. Look at her! She has a ten-o’-clock face, like somebody at a funeral.” I did try to speak to her, but she only looked at me mournfully and asked me if I was wearing a strip of charmed leather under my vest. I tried to defend the stranger as nothing more than a man, though a foreigner, but she fixed me with such a dark, steady look that my words died out in the air.

The Olondrian tried, in his clumsy way, to set my mother at ease, knowing that she was the wife of his host—but his efforts invariably failed. She avoided his shadow, kissed her fingers whenever she heard him speak, and refused his raisins, saying in horror: “They look like monkey turds!” Once, in the courtyard, I saw him approach her, at which she hurriedly knelt, as we all did in the first days, being unfamiliar with his customs. I had already seen that the northerner was disturbed by this island tradition, so I hid myself in the doorway to see how he would address my mother. He had learned to touch the servants on their heads to make them rise but seemed reluctant to do the same with my patiently kneeling mother; and indeed, as I now know, to his perplexed Olondrian mind, my mother was in an exalted position as a lady of the house. A sad comedy ensued: the northerner bowed with his hand on his heart, but my mother did not see him, as she was staring down at the ground. Evidently he wished to ask for something, but knowing nothing of our language, he had no means of making himself understood but through gestures and facial expressions. He cleared his throat and mimed the action of drinking with his long hands, but my mother, still looking down at the ground, did not see, and remained motionless. At this the Olondrian bent his long body double and mimed again, trying to catch her eye, which was fixed studiously on the flagstones. Seeing my mother’s acute distress, I emerged at this point from the doorway. My mother made her escape, and I brought our guest a clay beaker of water.

It was proof of the stranger’s tenacious spirit that, through his friendship with Jom, he convinced my mother that he was, if not of this earth, at least benevolent. In those early days it was Jom, with his plaintive voice of a twilight bird, with his small eyes of a young beast, who was at home in the stranger’s company. Jom was my mother’s child: he wore strips of leather under his clothes, iron charms on his wrists, and a small bag of sesame seeds at his waist, and she had so filled his clothes and hair with the odor of burning herbs that we thought our guest would be blown back into the sea if he went near my brother. Yet Jom was excited by the stranger and sought every chance to speak to him—of all of us, only he did not know that our guest could not understand. And the stranger always met him with a smile of genuine pleasure, clasping his hand as Olondrians do with their equals and intimates. In the green bower of the shade trees with their near-transparent blue flowers, the two spoke a language of grunt and gesture and the eloquent arching of eyebrows. Jom taught the northerner his first words in the Kideti tongue, which were “tree,” “orange,” “macaw,” “finch,” and “starling.” My brother was fascinated by the stranger’s long, graceful hands, his gold and silver rings, his earrings set with veined blue stones, and also, as we all were, by the melodies of his speech and his crocodile eyes: another of Lunre’s early words was “green.” One afternoon Lunre brought a wooden whistle from his room, brightly painted, with three small pipes like the flutes of western Estinavet. On these he could play the calling notes of the songbirds of the north: music which speaks of vineyards, olive trees, and sacred rivers. At the strange music my brother wept and asked, “Where are the birds?” The stranger did not answer him but seemed to understand: his smooth brown face was sorrowful, and he put the whistle away, brushing the leaves with his fingertips in a gesture of despair.

I do not know when my mother first joined them under the flowering trees. She must have begun by watching to see that no harm came to her son; sometimes I saw her pause, a tall pitcher balanced on her hip, staring into the trees with alarm in her lovely eyes of a black deer. Bird sounds came from the shadows, the Olondrian’s low chuckle, the sound of my brother’s voice saying patiently: “No, that one is blue.” Somehow my mother entered the trees, perhaps to protect her son—and somehow the Olondrian’s humble expression and sad eyes softened her heart. In those days she began to say: “May good luck find that unfortunate ghost! He sweats too much, and those trousers of his must keep his blood from flowing.” She no longer knelt when she met him, but smiled and nodded at his low bow, and one morning pointed firmly to her chest and said: “Kiavet.”

“Lunre,” the stranger said eagerly, tapping his own narrow chest.

“Lun-le,” my mother repeated. Her sweet smile flickered, a feather on the wind. Soon after this she presented him, shyly, yet with a secret pride, with a vest and a pair of trousers she had sewn for his lanky body. They were very fine, the trousers flowing and patterned with rose and gold, the vest embroidered in blue with the bold designs of both Tyom and Pitot. The stranger was deeply moved and stood for some time with his hand on his heart, his silver head bowed, thanking her earnestly in the language of raindrops. My father’s wife did not fail to sneer at my mother’s kindness to her “ghost,” but my mother only smiled and said serenely: “The Tetchi is blowing.”

When the miracle wind had blown for a month, my father dismissed my old tutor, a dotard with hairy ears who had taught me mathematics, religion, and history. The Olondrian, he explained to me as I sat before him one morning, was to take the old man’s place, tutoring me in the northern tongue. His eyes contracted with pleasure as he spoke, and he waved the stump of his narrow cigar and patted his ample stomach. “My son,” he said, “what good fortune is yours! Someday, when you own the farm, you will feel at ease in Bain and will never be cheated in the spice markets! Yes, I want you to have a Bainish gentleman’s education—the tall one will teach you to speak Olondrian, and to read in books.”

The word for “book” in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, “chamber of words,” the Olondrian name for that tool of enchantment and art. I had no idea of its meaning but thanked my father in a low voice as he smoked his cigar with a flourish and grunted to show that he had heard me. I was both excited and frightened to think of studying with the stranger, for I was shy around him and found his green gaze disconcerting. I could not see how he would teach me, since we shared no common language—but I joined him dutifully in the schoolroom that opened onto the back garden.

He began by taking me by the wrist and leading me around the room, pointing to things and naming them, signing that I should repeat. When I had learned the names of all the objects in the schoolroom, he took me into the kitchen garden and named the vegetables. If there were plants he did not know, he pointed and raised his gull-gray eyebrows, which meant that he wished to learn the Kideti word. He carried with him always a leather satchel of very fine make, in which he kept another leather object, dyed peacock-blue; when he opened it, sheets of rich cotton paper spread out like a fan, some of them marked with minute patterns which he had made himself. The satchel had a narrow pocket sewn to an outside edge, fastened shut with a metal clasp and set with bits of turquoise, and in this my new master kept two or three miraculous ink pens, filled only once a day, with which he made marks in his vallon. Whenever I told him a word in our language, he took out his blue leather book, wrote something in it rapidly, and thanked me with a bow. I was puzzled, for though I admired the book as more cunning than our wooden blocks, I could not understand why he wished to keep track of the number of words he had learned.

At last one morning he brought a wooden box with him into the schoolroom, a splendid receptacle covered with patterns in gilt, paint, and mother-of-pearl. Orange flowers danced on its dark blue lid, and in a cloud of golden stars a pair of ivory hands floated: the hands of spirits. I knew that the box had come from my master’s heavy, ornate sea chest, with which my father’s servants had toiled through the damp forests of the island, in which he was said to keep the awful trappings of a magician, as well as the bones of his wife, her skull as flawless as a bride’s. He set the box on the round, flat stone that served us as a table. I knelt on my mat with my elbows on the stone, cupping my chin in my hands. My master preferred to sit on a stool, hunkering over the table, his legs splayed out, his crooked knees rising above the level of the stone. He did so now, then removed his satchel and set it on the table, and drew from it a slim book bound in red leather.

“For you,” he said in Olondrian, sliding the little book toward me.

I felt a rush of excitement and a tightness in my throat. I took up the book and tried to put my gratitude into my eyes, while my master grinned and cracked his spider’s knuckles, a habit he had when pleased.

The schoolroom was already warm. The long light came in through the garden archway, and the voices of the servants reached us from the kitchen next door. I turned the little book tenderly in my hands, fingering the spine, and at last, with a sharp intake of breath, I opened it. It was empty.

I touched the blank paper and looked at my master reproachfully. He chuckled and squeezed his knuckles, apparently charmed by my disappointment. I knew enough of his speech to ask at last: “What is it, Tchavi?”—addressing him, as I always did, with the Kideti word for “Master.”

He held up a finger, signaling for me to wait and pay attention. He opened the book before me at the first page and smoothed the paper. Then he unlatched the ornate box, revealing a neat shelf suspended inside the lid, flecked with diamonds of yellow paint. Humming cheerfully to himself, he removed several small clay jars, each with a tiny cork in it, and a little red cut-glass bottle. His fingers hovered over the shelf for a moment before selecting an engraved silver pen from an ivory case. Swiftly, with fluid, dexterous movements, he unstoppered one of the jars, releasing the dark odor of rust and aloes. He added a few drops from the glass bottle, which made the room smell of pollen, and stirred the resultant brew with a slender reed. The reed came out very black, and he rested it in a shallow dish. Then he filled the pen from the jar by turning its tip. He wiped its nib on a silken cloth much stained by streaks of ink; then he leaned toward me, bent over my book, and wrote five intricate signs.

I understood now that my master meant to teach me the Olondrian numbers, and how to record accounts, as he did, in neat, small rows in a book. I leaned forward eagerly, imagining how it would please my father when he saw his son writing numbers on paper just like a Bainish gentleman. I had my own secret misgivings, for though the book was easy to carry, much more so than the blocks on which we wrote with a piece of hot iron, it seemed to me that the pages could be easily ruined by seawater, that the ink could smear, and that this was a flimsy way of keeping records. Nevertheless the strange signs, fluted like seashells, captivated me so that my master laughed with pleasure and patted my shoulder. I moved my finger slowly under the row of graceful figures, memorizing the foreign shapes of the numbers one through five.

“Shevick,” my master said.

I glanced at him expectantly at the sound of his familiar mispronunciation of my name.

“Shevick,” he said again, pointing down at the signs on the page.

I said to him proudly, in his own tongue: “One, two, three, four, five.”

He shook his head. “Shevick, Shevick,” he said, tapping the paper. I frowned and shrugged, saying, “Forgive me, Tchavi. I don’t understand.”

My master put up his hands, palms outward, and pushed gently at the air, showing that he was not angry. Then he bent forward patiently. “Sh,” he said, pointing with his pen at the first sign on the page; then he moved the pen to the second sign and said distinctly: “Eh.” But only when he had described all the signs several times, repeating my name, did I understand with a shock that I was in the presence of sorcery: that the signs were not numbers at all, but could speak, like the single-stringed Tyomish harp, which can mimic the human voice and is called “the sister of the wind.”

My back and shoulders were cold, though a hot, heavy air came in from the garden. I stared at my master, who looked back at me with his wise and crystalline eyes. “Do not be afraid,” he said. He smiled, but his face looked thin and sad. In the garden I heard the sound of the Tetchi disrobing herself in the leaves.

Chapter Three Doorways

“A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Fanlewas the Wise, the great theologian of Avalei, writes that Kuidva, the God of Words, is “a taskmaster with a lead whip.” Tala of Yenith is said to have kept her books in an iron chest that could not be opened in her presence, else she would lie on the floor, shrieking. She wrote: “Within the pages there are fires, which can rise up, singe the hair, and make the eyelids sting.” Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. “For they have gone into the Pit, into which they descend on Slopes of Fire, but when they rise they climb on a Ladder of Stone.” Hothra of Ur-Brome said that his books were “dearer than father or mother,” a sentiment echoed by thousands of other Olondrians through the ages, such as Elathuid the Voyager, who explored the Nissian coast and wrote: “I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.” And the mystic Leiya Tevorova, that brave and unfathomable soul, years before she met her tragic death by water, wrote: “When they put me into the Cold, above the white Lake, in the Loathsome Tower, and when Winter came with its cruel, hard, fierce, dark, sharp and horrible Spirit, my only solace was in my Books, wherein I walked like a Child, or shone in the Dark like a Moth which has its back to a sparkling Fire.”

In my room, in my village, I shone like a moth with its back to a sparkling fire. Master Lunre had taught me his sorcery: I embraced it and swooned in its arms. The drudgery of the schoolroom, the endless copying of letters, the conjugation of verbs—“ayein, kayein, bayeinan, bayeinun”—all of this led me at last through a curtain of flame into a world which was a new way of speaking and thinking, a new way of moving, a means of escape. Master Lunre’s massive sea chest did not hold the bones of a murdered wife, but a series of living lovers with whom he lay down voluptuously, caressing the hair of each one in turn: his books, some written by hand and some from the printing press, that unearthly invention of the wizards of Asarma. I soon understood why, when I went in to call him for the evening meal, my master could always be found stretched out on his pallet in the same position: his head on his hand, his bare chest gleaming, a thin sheet over his hips, his earrings glinting, his spirit absorbed in the mists of an open book. I, too, soon after I read my first book, Nardien’s Tales for the Tender, succumbed to the magical voices that called to me from their houses of vellum. It was a great wonder to me to come so close to these foreign spirits, to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of those I had never known, to communicate with the dead, to feel that I knew them intimately, and that they knew me more completely than any person I knew in the flesh. I confess that I fell quite hopelessly in love with Tala of Yenith, who was already an old woman when the printing press was invented. When she heard of it, she is said to have danced in ecstasy, crying out, “They have created it! They have created it!” until she fell down in a dead faint. Her biographer writes: “When she rose she began her rapturous dance again, shouting ‘They have created it!’ until her strength was wholly exhausted. She continued like this, beyond the control of the people of her House, who feared to subdue her with force, for seven days, whereupon she died…”

The books of my master’s sea chest were histories, lyrics, and romances, as well as a few religious texts and minor philosophical works. In their pages I entered, for the first time, the tree-lined streets of Bain, and walked in the Garden of Plums beside the city’s green canal. I fought with the rebel Keliadhu against Thul the Heretic, and watched the sky fill with dragons, unfurling fires like cloth of gold. I hunted mushrooms in the Fanlevain and fleet wild deer on the plains, and sailed down the swift Ilbalin through the most radiant orchards on earth; I stood in a court in Velvalinhu, the dwelling place of the kings, and watched a new Telkan kneel to receive the high crown of black and white silk. My dreams were filled with battles, haunted woods, and heroic voyages, and the Drevedi, the Olondrian vampires whose wings are like indigo. Each evening I lay on my pallet, reading by the light of an oil lamp, a tear-shaped bowl made of rust-colored clay—a gift from Master Lunre.

My master’s gifts to me were those whose value cannot be reckoned. The education he gave me was erratic, shaped by his own great loves; it was not the traditional education of wealthy Olondrians, which consists of the Three Noble Arts of riding, music, and calligraphy. It was more like the education of novices dedicated to Kuidva, yet still it deviated, rejecting some classics for more obscure texts: I knew almost nothing of Telidar’s seminal Lectures on Poetry but had read many times a small volume entitled On the Nine Textures of Light. Thus, while my father imagined that I was becoming a Bainish gentleman, I was in fact ignorant of almost all that such gentlemen know. I had only seen horses in pictures, I could not play the flute or guitar, my handwriting was neat but uninspired, and I knew only five classic writers. What I knew, what I learned, was the map of a heart, of the longings of Lunre of Bain: I walked in the forests of his desire and bathed in the sea of his dreams. For years I walked up and down the vales of his heart, of his self-imposed exile, familiar with all he loved, looking out of his eyes, those windows of agate.

He was as reticent as a crab. Or he was reserved about certain subjects: there were things of which, in the course of nine years, I could never persuade him to speak. One of these was his former trade, the one he had followed in Bain: he would never say what he had been—a tutor, a printer, a merchant, a thief? My boy’s mind dreamed up fierce romances for him, but he would not be baited and only laughed when I said he had been a sorcerer or a pirate. When I asked him why he had left, he quoted Leiya Tevorova: “I was spoken to by a god, and I found myself unworthy of Him.”

His face, neither old nor young, grew dark as an islander’s with the sun, and his brows and close-cropped hair were bleached like sand. With his gangly limbs, in his island clothes, he resembled a festival clown, but he had too sad an air to be truly comical. He grew to love our valleys and forests and spent many hours outdoors, roaming the slopes with a staff of teak wood or exploring the cliffs by the sea. He would come home with completely ordinary flowers or shells and force me to look at them while he praised their inimitable loveliness. “Look at that!” he would say, elated. “Is it not finer than art? Is it not like a woman’s ear? Its curves are like notes of music…” On subjects such as the beauties of nature, books, and the colors of light, he spoke with an unrestrained passion which often drove me to groan with exhaustion. He spoke to my mother as well: he studied our language doggedly, until he could praise the trees and the play of light and shade in the courtyard. When my mother explained how the shadows echoed the pelt of my father’s god, he rubbed his hands with delight and jotted some notes in his private book. “Let me tell you,” he said to me once, resting a hand on my shoulder after drinking a glass of our liquor, to which his tastes had become accustomed: “Let me tell you about old men. Our appetites grow like vines—like the hectic plants of the desert, which bear only flowers and have no leaves. You have never seen a desert. Have you not read Firdred of Bain? ‘The earth has a thousand thirsty tongues.’ That is what old age is like.”

He never seemed old to me, though he certainly had a great appetite—for sights, for the sounds of birds, for the smell of the sea, for the words of our language. And sometimes, too, he would take to his bed, his body wracked with fevers, with the stricken expression of one who has not long to live and whose life is unfinished. I nursed him through his fevers, reading aloud from the Vanathul because he believed words had the power to cure all ills. I loved him as if we were partners in exile, for only with him could I speak of books, enjoying that conversation which Vandos calls “the food of the gods.” And yet there was something unyielding in him, something unconquerable, an unknown center which he guarded with care, which was never revealed to me, so that, while I knew him best, he seemed to hold me at a distance. Even in his delirium he let fall no shining thread.

In the islands the old word tchavi, by which I always called my master, originally referred to a teacher of ancient and cryptic lore. The tchanavi were few, and their houses were built on mountains so that those who sought them could only reach them after prolonged struggle. They were strange, solitary, at home in forests, speakers of double-voiced words, men without jut, for they cast their janut to the sea, a symbolic death. Their disciples passed down laments in the form of sighing island chants, bemoaning the dark impenetrability of the tchanavi’s wisdom: a Kideti proverb says, “Ask a tchavi to fill your basket, and he will take it away.” They were difficult spirits, and made men weep. Yet the greater part of their pupils’ laments do not mourn the enigma of wisdom but rather the failure of the disciples to find their masters at all: for the tchanavi were known to melt away into the forests, into the mists, so that those who had made hard journeys discovered only the mountain and silence. These songs, the “Chants of Abandonment,” are sung at festivals and express the desperate love and grief of the followers of the tchanavi. “Blood of my heart, on the mountain there is no peace in the calling of doves/ My master has pressed a blossom into the mud with the sole of his foot.”

My people called Lunre “the yellow man” or “the stranger.” Their stares in the village hurt me, the old men’s grins, the shouts of the children who followed us through the streets. Sometimes they even called him hotun—a soulless man, an outcast, a man without jut. I coaxed him away from them, away from the broad clean roads. He knew it, regarding me amused and compliant as I led him through knotted patches of jungle and onto the dangerous cliffs, through heavy forests where cold air rose from the earth, where I breathed raggedly, striking dead vines away from us with a stick. Leaves split under my weapon, spraying milk. When we broke through at last and emerged on the cliffs, my vest was so wet the sea wind chilled me. About us the crags lay tumbled and white with guano, and beyond them a sea the color of spittle moved in regular heaves.

“How do you bear it?” I muttered.

Lunre stood calm in the midday glare, chewing a shred of ginger root. “I am not sure what you mean.”

“You know what I mean. This place.”

“Ah. This place.”

“You’ve been to Bain, to the great library. You’re Olondrian. You’ve been everywhere.”

“Everywhere! Indeed not.”

“Other places.”

“Yes.” He shrugged, looking out to sea. The breeze was growing cooler, and fat clouds blocked the sky. In places the sun shone through them, silver, making them glow like the bellies of dead fish. Every day, I thought, every afternoon, this rain.

Lunre slapped my back, chuckling. “Don’t be so gloomy. Look!” He darted back to the edge of the forest and plucked a bell fruit from the undergrowth. “Look around you!” he went on, returning to wave it under my nose, dispersing a sickening odor of hair oil and liquor.

I batted his hand away. He laughed as if it were a game but at once regained his usual pensive look, his hair standing up in the wind. The sky turned the color of dust while in my mind there were porcelain tiles, medallions embossed with the seals of Olondrian clans, monuments of white chalk. I longed for wide streets loud with the rumble of carriage wheels, for crowded markets, bridges, libraries, gardens, pleasure houses, for all that I had read of but never seen, for the land of books, for Lunre’s country, for somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Thunder broke in the distance, and the afternoon darkened around us. Lunre spat out his scrap of ginger root, and it whirled on the wind. We hurried home beneath the shrieks of agitated birds, arriving as the storm fell like an avalanche of mud.

At home the archways were full of sound. In the hall I looked at Lunre, barely able to see him in the rain-dark air. He lifted one pale hand and spoke.

“What?”

“I’m going to read,” he repeated, louder.

“Me, too,” I lied and watched him melt away in the south wing.

When he had disappeared, I went to the stone archway that gave on the courtyard. A low gleam pierced the storm from a window on the opposite side: my father was in the room where he kept his accounts. I dashed across the courtyard, soaked in seconds, and pounded on the locked door.

A click, then a juddering sound as the bolt slid back. Sten, my father’s steward and shadow, opened the door and stepped aside to let me in. I rubbed my hand over my face, throwing off water, and blinked in the dull radiance of the little brazier at my father’s feet.

He was not alone. Two elderly men from the village sat with him beside the brazier, men of high rank with bright cloaks on their shoulders. Their beaky faces turned to me in surprise. My father sat arrested, an iron rod in his hand, its tip aglow. A servant knelt before him holding a sturdy block of teak wood; similar blocks were stacked beside him, ready for use. Behind the little group, silent and ghostly, arranged in rows as high as the ceiling, were other blocks, my father’s records.

I threw myself on my knees on the sandy floor. “Forgive me, Father!”

There was a pause, and then his expressionless voice: “Younger son.”

I raised my eyes. He had not touched my head, but he was too far to reach me, the brazier and the kneeling servant between us. I scanned his face for anything I could recognize: anger, acceptance, disappointment. His eyes were slivers of black silk in the fat of his cheeks.

I waited. He lowered his iron rod to the brazier, turning it in the coals. “This is my son Jevick,” he explained to the old men. “You’ll have forgotten him. He doesn’t compete in games. I brought him a foreign tutor, and now they spend all their time gossiping like a pair of old women.”

One of the men laughed briefly, a rasp of phlegm.

“Father,” I said, my arms taut at my sides, my fists clenched: “Take me with you when you go to Olondria.”

He met my eyes. My heart raced in my throat. “Take me with you,” I said with an effort. “I’ll learn the business… It will be an education…”

“Education!” he smiled, looking down again at the rod he was heating. “Education, younger son, is your whole trouble. That Olondrian has educated you to burst in on your father in his private room and interrupt his business.”

“I had to speak to you. I can’t—” I stopped, unable to find the words. Rain roared down the roof, pounding the air into the ground.

“Can’t what?” He lifted the rod, the tip a ruby of deep light, and squinted at it. “Can’t speak to your age mates? Can’t find a peasant girl to play with? Can’t run? Can’t dance? Can’t swim? Can’t leave your room? What?” He turned, drawing the burning iron briskly across the block his servant held. Once, I remembered, he had slipped, searing the man’s arm, leaving a brand for which he had paid with a pair of hens.

“I can’t stay here.”

“Can’t stay here!” His harsh, flat laugh rang out, and the old men echoed him, for he had too much power ever to laugh alone. “Come now! Surely you hope and expect that your father will live for a few more years.”

“May my father’s life be as long as the shore that encircles the Isle of Abundance.”

“Ah. You hear how he rushes his words,” he remarked to his companions. “It has ever been his great failing, this impatience.” He looked at me, allowing me to glimpse for the first time the depths of coldness in the twin pits of his eyes.

“You will stay,” he said softly. “You will be grateful for what you are given. You will thank me.”

“Thank you, Father,” I whispered, desolate.

He tossed the hot iron aside, and it fell with a thud. He leaned back, searching under his belt for a cigar, not looking at me. “Get out,” he said.

I do not know if he was cruel. I know that he was powerful; I know that he loved power and could not endure defiance. I do not know why he brought me a tutor out of a foreign country only to sneer at me, at my tutor, and at my loves. I do not know what it was that slept inside his cunning mind, that seldom woke to give his eyes, for a moment, a shade of sorrow; I do not know what it was that sprang at last at his heart and killed him, that struck him down in the paradise of the fields, in the wealth of pepper.

The morning was cool and bright. It was near the end of the rains, and the wind called Kyon rode over us on his invisible serpent. The clustered leaves of the orange trees were heavy and glistened with moisture, and Jom stood under them, shaking the branches, his hair dusted with raindrops. His was the voice we heard, that voice, thick with excess saliva, calling out clumsily: “There is a donkey in the courtyard!” His was the voice that brought us running, already knowing the truth, that hoofed animals were not brought into houses except in cases of death. I arrived in the doorway to see my mother already collapsing, supported by servants, shrieking and struggling in their arms, whipping her head from side to side, her hair knotting over her face, filling the air with the animal cries which would not cease for seven days. In the center of the courtyard, under the pattern of light and shade, stood a donkey, held with ropes by two of my father’s dusty field-workers. The donkey’s back was heaped with something: a tent, a great sack of yams, the carcass of an elephant calf—the body of my father.

The body was lashed with ropes and lolled, dressed in its yellow trousers, the leather sandals on its feet decorated with small red beads; but the ceremonial staff, with its arrogant cockscomb of hawk feathers, had been left behind in the fields, as none of the field-workers could touch it. I brought that scepter home, resting its smooth length on my shoulder, climbing the hill toward Tyom as the wind came up with its breath of rain, followed by the fat white mule who had been my father’s pride, whom the field-workers had abandoned because a death had occurred on its back. When I reached the house, I stepped through an archway into the ruins of the courtyard, where every shade tree had been cut down and every pot smashed on the stones. I stood for a moment holding the staff in my arms, in a haze of heat. From the back rooms of the house came the sound of rhythmic screaming.

That screaming filled my ears for seven days and seven nights, until it became a drone, like the lunatic shrilling of cicadas. The servants had gone to the village to fetch eleven professional mourners, ragged, loose-haired women who keened, whipping their heads back and forth. Their arrival relieved my mother, who was hoarse and exhausted with mourning, having screamed unceasingly ever since she had seen my father’s body. The mourners sat in the ravaged courtyard, five or six at a time, kneeling among the broken pots, the dirt, the remains of flowers, grieving wildly while, in our rooms, we dressed in our finest clothes, scented our hair, and decorated our faces with blue chalk.

Moments before we left for the funeral I passed my mother’s room, and there was a tchavi there, an old man, sparse-haired, in a skin cloak flayed by storms. He was crouching by my mother where she lay face-down on her pallet, and his thin brown hand was resting on her hair. I paused, startled, and heard him say: “There now, daughter. There, it’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.” I hurried back down the passage, guilty and frightened as if by a sign. My mother appeared soon afterward, unrecognizable under the chalk. I could not tell if her grief was eased by his visit, for she was like a shape etched in stone. As for the tchavi, he left the house in secret, and I did not see him again.

The women keened, their voices mixed with the raucous notes of horns, as we walked through the village slowly, slowly, under the gathering clouds, we, my father’s family, blue-stained, stiff as effigies, with our blank, expressionless faces and our vests encrusted with beads. We walked in the dusty streets, in the cacophony of mourning, followed by the servants bearing the huge corpse on a litter. Master Lunre was with us, in his Olondrian costume, that which had caused the village children to call him a “frilled lizard.” His face, unpainted, wore a pensive expression; he had not mourned, but only clasped my hand and said: “Now you have become mortal…”

He sat with us for the seven days in the valley, beside the ruined city, the city of Jajetanet, crumbling, cloaked in mists, where we set my father’s body upon one of the ancient stones and watched his flesh sag as it was pelted by the rain. “Where shall I go to find the dawn?” the hired singers chanted. “He has not pricked his foot on a thorn, he leaves no trail of blood.” My father’s jut was beside him, potbellied like him, kept bright through years of my mother’s devoted polishing, its feathers drooping.

Because of my father’s high position, the mourning was well-attended: most of the people of Tyom were there, and some had come from Pitot. The green and gentle slope that led down into the ruined city was covered with people sitting cross-legged on mats under broad umbrellas. Harried servants walked among them bearing platters of food, begging them not to refuse nourishment in the ritual phrases of mourning. The people turned their heads away, insisting, with varying degrees of vehemence, that they could not eat; but at last they all accepted. “May it pass from me,” we said, swallowing coconut liquor, sucking the mussels from their shells, the oil dribbling down our chins.

Before us rose the ancient ruins of Jajetanet the Desired, that city so old that none could remember who it was that had desired it, that city of ghosts inhabited by the ashes of the dead, where damp mists crept along the walls and a brooding presence lingered. At night when the fires were lit and the mourning rose to a frenzied pitch, the women with their knotted hair imitating the throes of death, Jajetanet rose above us, massive, blocking out the stars, She, the soul of loss, who knew what it was to be forgotten. The mourners shrieked. My father’s body lay on a block of stone, surrounded by lighted torches, in his gold trousers and beaded sandals. Did his hands still smell of pepper? I thought of him, inspecting the farm, while within his ribs his death was already waiting, coiled to spring.

All at once, through the shadows of drink, I realized that I had not wept, and recognized the strain in my heart as the secret elation of freedom. I saw, looking into the blur of fires in the night, how it would be, how I would descend like a starling into the country of guitars. I trembled with excitement as, on the block of crumbling stone, my father’s jut was consumed by a burst of flame; I felt within me the moment when I would bid my mother good-bye and canter down into the drowning valley, riding toward the north. I had that moment within me, and many other moments as well: the moment of touching my father’s wife on the top of her head as she knelt, weeping and imploring me not to cast her out of the house; the solemn moment of taking snuff with the old men of the village; the moment when I would pack my satchel, moths about my lamp. My journey was already there, like a word waiting to be written. I saw the still, drenched forest and the port of Dinivolim. The ship, too, that would bear me away, arresting as a city, and beyond it, like light rising up from the sea, the transparent coast of the north.

The one thing I had not foreseen was that Lunre, my foreign master, would refuse the chance to return with me to the country of his birth. He shocked me when, with a small, hard smile, he shook his head and said: “Ah, Shev, that way is barred. ‘I have cast my helmet into the sea.’”

“Ravhathos the Poet,” I murmured numbly. “Retiring from the wars… secluding himself in a cottage made of mud, in the Kelevain…”

“You have been a fine student,” Lunre said. I glanced up at him. He was shadowed, leaning, framed in the archway, the bright kitchen garden behind him. A touch of light caught one earring with its blue stone, a silver eyebrow, the steady green of an eye, a shade of expression: resigned, resolute.

“I am still your student,” I said.

He laughed and made a light, uncertain gesture, opening one pallid palm in the glow that came in from the garden. “Perhaps,” he said. “I have been a student of Vandos all my life, and I believe your tchanavi tended not to release their disciples.”

His teeth flashed in a smile; but seeing my still, crestfallen look he added gently: “I will be here when you return.”

I nodded, recognizing the secret iron at my master‘s core, the adamantine vein that never yielded to my touch. I narrowed my eyes, looking into the sun, my lip between my teeth. Then I asked: “Well—what can I bring you from Bain?”

“Ah!” He drew in a sharp breath. “Ah! For me? Don’t bring me anything…”

“What?” I cried. “Nothing? No books? There were so many things you wanted!”

He smiled again, with difficulty: “There were so many things I spoke of—”

“Tchavi,” I said. “You cannot refuse a gift, something from your homeland.”

He looked away, but not before I saw his stricken expression, the anguish in his eyes, the look he wore in the grip of fever. “Nothing,” he muttered at last. “Nothing, there’s nothing I can think of—”

“It can’t be, Tchavi, there must be something. Please, what can I bring you?”

He looked at me. He wore again his grim, despairing smile, and I saw in his eyes the sadness of this island of mist and flowers. And I thought I saw, as well, a tall man walking along a windy quay and spitting the stone of an olive into the sea.

“The autumn,” he said.