A Stranger in Olondria

Chapter Four At Sea

The ship Ardonyi—in Olondrian, “the one who comes out of the mists”—bore me northward along the coast of Jennet, the still hours punctuated by the sound of the captain’s gong announcing meals of odorous fish stew clotted with bones. I stood at the front of the line with the other paying passengers while my steward, Sten, and our laborers waited behind, shifting their feet and snacking on the crescent-shaped rolls the sailors called “prisoners’ ears,” which were abandoned, rather than served, in a row of sacks. A great heat came from the galley next door, a rough voice singing, the clanging of metal, a creeping odor of rot and a reddish glow, while outside, on the smooth sea, which was both dark and pale in the moonlight, the Isle of Jennet floated by with its peaks of volcanic stone. We took no passengers from that tortured island of chasms and ash, where double-tongued salamanders breed among flowers shaped like pitchers, and where, according to island lore, there dwells Ineti-Kyan, the Devourer of Mouths, who runs up and down the black hills with his hair in the wind.

I had almost fought my way through the stew by the time Sten joined me with his own bowl. He set it down with the tips of his fingers, his nose creased in distaste. About us the walls vibrated with the movement of the ship, the old wood gleaming in the light of whale-oil lamps.

I nodded in greeting and spat a collection of bones into my hand. “Come,” I laughed, “it’s better than what we had at the inn.”

“At the inn there was breadfruit,” Sten replied, looking gloomily into his bowl.

“Breadfruit dulls the brain. Try this—there’s eel today.”

“Yes, Ekawi,” he said. The title, uttered in a quiet, resigned, and effortless tone, made me start: it was the way he had addressed my father. That title now was mine, along with the house, the forests, the pepper bushes, the whole monotonous landscape of my childhood. And it means nothing to me, I thought, crunchy spiny morsels of fish, my momentary unease absorbed in a rush of exultation. The sacks of pepper we’ve stuffed in the hold, the money we’ll make, the farm—to me all this weighs less than the letter fi pronounced in the sailors’ dialect…

They pronounced it thi; they whistled their words; they sang. They hunched over other tables, tall rough men, their ruffled white shirts stained dark with sweat and tar. Some wore their hair cut short in the Bainish fashion, but others left it to fly out over their ears or knot itself down their backs. They raised their bowls to their bearded lips and threw them down again empty, and when they turned their heads their earrings flashed in the light. They were nothing like my master: they told coarse stories and wiped their mouths on their sleeves, and laughed when one of their fellows struggled against a bone in his throat. “The Quarter,” I heard them say. “You drink with the bears. Gap-toothed Iloni, the smell in her house.” In their speech ran the reed sounds of Evmeni and the salty oaths of the Kalka; they used the Kideti words for certain fruits and coastal winds, and their slang throbbed with the sibilant hum of the tongue of the Kestenyi highlands. At last they rose, one after the other, spitting shells on the floor. As they passed our table I lowered my head to my dish, my heart racing, afraid they might notice me and yet longing to be one of them, even one of the galley slaves who wore their crimes tattooed underneath their eyes.

When I looked up, Sten was watching me.

“What?”

He sighed. “It is nothing. Only—perhaps you would ask the cook if there is fennel.”

“Fennel! What for?”

“Prayer,” he replied, raising his spoon to his lips.

“Prayer.”

“The old Ekawi was accustomed to pray while at sea.”

“My father prayed.” I laughed, flicking my bowl away with a finger, and Sten’s narrow shoulders rose and fell in a barely perceptible shrug. The light of the lamp shone on the implacable parting in his hair and the small white scar that interrupted one eyebrow.

I rested my elbows on the table, smiling to put him at ease. “And where will our prayers go?”

“Back to the islands. To the nostrils of the gods.”

“My poor Sten. Do you really believe that a pinch of dried fennel burned in my cabin will keep the gods from crushing this ship if they choose?”

Again his shoulders moved slightly. He drew a slender bone from his mouth.

“Look,” I argued. “The Kavim is blowing. It blows to the north, without turning! How can the smoke move backward?”

“The wind will change.”

“But when? By that time our prayers will have disappeared, inhaled by the clouds and raining over Olondria!”

His eyes shifted nervously. He was not hotun, after all, not one of that unfortunate class who live without jut: he had jut at home, no doubt in one of the back rooms of his strong mud house, a humble figure of wood or clay, yet potent as my own. Naturally it would not do to bring jut northward to Olondria: to lose one’s jut in the sea would be the greatest of calamities. Burnt fennel was said to make the gods favorable to keeping one’s jut from harm; but it shocked me to think that my father had held any faith in such superstition. Sten, too: his iron features were softened by dejection. He looked so forlorn that I laughed in spite of myself.

“All right. I’ll ask for fennel. But I won’t say what I’m going to do with it. They’ll think they’ve picked up a cargo of lunatics!”

I stood, took my satchel from the back of my chair, and left him, swinging myself up the steep stairs to the deck. The wind tossed my hair as I emerged into the sunlight where the great masts stood like a forest of naked trees. I walked to the edge of the gleaming deck and leaned against the railing. As the wind was fair, the rowers were all on deck, slaves and free men together, the slaves’ tattoos glowing like blue ornaments against their flesh, their hands sporting rings of carefully worked tin. They crouched in the sails’ shadow playing their interminable game of londo, a complex and addictive exercise of chance. The planks beneath them were chalked with signs where they cast small pieces of ivory, first touching them to their heads to honor Kuidva the God of Oracles. Some went further: they prayed to Ithnesse the Sea or to Mirhavli the Angel, protectress of ships, whose gold-flecked statue stood dreaming in the prow. The Angel was sad and severe, with real human hair and a wooden trough at her feet; as a prayer, the sailors spat into the trough, calling it “the fresh-water offering.” When a man ran off to perform this ritual, the soles of his bare feet flashing chalk-white, the others laughed and called merry insults after him.

I drew a book from my satchel and read: “Now come, you armies of glass. Come from the bosom of salt, unleash your cries in the conch of the wind.” All through that journey I read sea poetry from the battered and precious copy of Olondrian Lyrics my master had sent with me. “Come with your horses of night, with your white sea-leopards, your temple of waves/ now scatter upon the breast of the shore your banners of green fire.” I read constantly, by sunlight that dazzled my eyes, by moonlight that strained them, growing drunk on the music of northern words and the sea’s eternal distance, lonely and happy, longing for someone to whom I might divulge the thoughts of my heart, hoping to witness the pale-eyed sea folk driving their sheep. “For there is a world beneath the sea,” writes Elathuid the Voyager, “peopled and filled with animals and birds like the one above. In it there are beautiful maidens who have long, transparent fins, and who drive their white sheep endlessly from one end of the sea to the other…” Firdred of Bain himself, that most strictly factual of authors, writes that in the Sea of Sound his ship was pursued by another; this ship was under the sea, gliding upon its other surface, so that Firdred saw only its dark underside: “Its sails were outside of this world.” In Tinimavet there are countless tales of sea-ghouls, the ghosts of the drowned, and of magical fish and princesses from the kingdoms under the sea. I wondered if I would see any of them here, where the sea was wildest—if at night, suddenly, I would catch in the depths the glow of a ghostly torch. But I saw no such vision, except in my dreams, when, thrilled and exhausted with poetry, I stood on deck and watched the glow worm dances of the ghouls, or caught, afar off, the rising of a dreaded mountain: the great whale which the sailors call “the thigh of the white giant.”

Above me, on the upper deck, the island merchants sat: men of my own rank, though there were none as young as I. There they yawned through the salt afternoons under flapping leather awnings, drank liquor from teacups, predicted the winds, and had their hair oiled by their servants. The Ilavetis, slowly sipping the thin rice wine of their country, also had their fingers and toes dyed a deep reddish-brown; the smoky scent of the henna drifted away with the fog from their Bainish cigars, while one of them claimed that the odor of henna could make him weep with nostalgia. I despised them for this posturing, this sighing after their forests and national dishes mingled with boasts of their knowledge of the northern capital. None of them knew as much as I; none of them spoke Olondrian; their bovine heads were empty of an appreciation of the north. The Olondrian boy who knelt on a pillow each evening to sing for their pleasure might as well have sung to the sails or the empty night: the merchants would have been better pleased, I thought, with a dancing girl from southern Tinimavet, plastered with ochre and wearing mussel-shells in her hair.

The boy sang of women and gardens, the Brogyar wars, the hills of Tavroun. He knew cattle-songs from Kestenya and the rough fishing songs of the Kalka. The silver bells strung about his guitar rang gently as he played, and the music reached me where I sat beneath the curve of the upper deck. I sat alone and hidden, my arms clasped about my knees, under the slapping and rippling of the sails, in the wind and the dark. Snatches of murmuring voices came to me from the deck above, where the merchants sat under lamps, their fingers curled around their cups. The light of the lamps shone dimly on the masts and rigging above; the lantern in the prow was a faint, far beacon in the darkness; all was strange, creaking and moving, filled with the ceaseless wind and the distant cries of the sailors paying their londo forfeits in the prow. The boy broke into his favorite air, his sweet voice piercing the night, singing a popular song whose refrain was: “Bain, city of my heart.” I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

Halfway through the voyage a calm descended. The galley slaves rowed, chanting hoarsely, under a sky the color of turmeric. The Ardonyi unrolled herself like a sleepy dragon over the burnished sea, and sweat crept down my neck as I stood in my usual place on deck. The pages of my book were limp with heat, the letters danced before my eyes, and I read each line over and over, too dull to make sense of the words. I raised my head and yawned. At that moment a movement caught my eye, an object beetle-black and gleaming in the sun.

It was a woman’s braided hair. She was climbing up from below-decks. I closed my book, startled by the strangeness of the image: a woman, an island woman with her hair plaited into neat rows on the crown of her head, aboard an Olondrian vessel bound for the city of Bain! She struggled, for she grasped a cotton pallet under her arm which made it difficult for her to climb the ladder. Before I could offer to help, she shoved the pallet onto the deck and climbed out after it, squinting in the light.

At once she knelt on the deck, peering anxiously into the hole. “Jissi,” she said. “You hold him. Jissi, hold him.” I detected the accent of southern Tinimavet in her speech, blurred consonants, the intonation of the poor.

Slowly, jerkily, an elderly man emerged from below, carrying a young girl on his back. The girl’s head lolled; her dry hair hung down in two red streams; her bare feet dangled, silent bells. She clung to the old man’s neck with a dogged weariness as he staggered across the boards of the deck toward the shadow of an awning.

Several sailors had paused in their duties to stare at the strange trio. One of them whistled. “Brei!” he said. Red.

I turned my back slightly and opened my Lyrics again, pretending to read while the woman dragged the pallet into the shade and unrolled it. The girl, so slight, yet straining the arms of the others like a great fish, was set down on it, the end of the pallet folded to prop up her head. Her thin voice reached me over the deck: “There’s wind. But there aren’t any birds.”

“We’re too far from the land for birds, my love,” the older woman said.

“I know that,” said the girl in a scornful tone. Her companion was silent; the old man, servant or decrepit uncle, shuffled off toward the ladder.

Ignorant of my destiny and theirs, I felt only pity for them, mingled with fascination—for the girl was afflicted with kyitna. The unnatural color of her hair, lurid against her dark skin, made me sure of her malady, though I had never observed its advanced stages. She was kyitna: she had that slow, cruel, incurable wasting disease, that inherited taint which is said to affect the families of poisoners, which is spoken of with dread in the islands as “that which ruins the hair,” or, because of the bizarre color it gives, as “the pelt of the orangutan.” Not long ago—in my grandfather’s time—the families of victims of kyitna, together with all of their livestock and land, were consumed by ritual fires, and even now one could find, in the mountains and wild places of the islands, whole families living in exile and destitution, guarding their sick. Once, when I was a child, a strange man came to the gate of the house, at midday when the servants were sleeping, and beat at the gate with a stick; he was grimy and ragged and stank of fear, and when I went out to him he rasped through his unkempt beard: “Bring me water and I’ll pray for you.” I ran back inside and, too terrified to return to him by myself, woke my mother and told her that someone was outside asking for water. “Who is it?” she asked sleepily. “What’s the matter with you?” I was young and, unable to name my fear, said: “It is a baboon-man.” My mother laughed, rose, rumpled my hair and called me a dormouse, and went to the cistern to fill a clay pitcher with water for the strange man. I kept close to her skirts, comforted by her smell of dark rooms and sleep, her hair pressed into her cheek by the pillow, her gentle voice as she teased me. I felt braver with her until, just outside the courtyard, she started and gasped, kissing her fingertips swiftly, almost upsetting the pitcher of water. The man clung to the gatepost, looking at us with a desperate boldness. His smile was a grimace and had in it a kind of horrible irony. “Good day to you, sister!” he said. “That water will earn you the prayers of the dying.” My mother gripped the clay pitcher and hissed at me: “Stay there! Don’t move!” Then she took a deep breath, strode toward the man, handed him the pitcher, turned on her heel without speaking, walked back to the house, and pulled me inside. “You see!” I cried, excited to see my fear confirmed in hers: “I told you it was a baboon-man! He stank, and his teeth were too big.” But my mother said sadly, gazing out through the stone archway: “No, he was not… He was one of the kyitna people who are living on Snail Mountain.”

The thought of any kind of people living on Snail Mountain, where the earth breathed sulfurous exhalations and even the dew was poisonous, shocked and terrified me. How did they live? What did they eat? What water did they drink? But my mother said it was bad luck to think of it. Later the empty pitcher was found standing beside the gate, and my mother had the servants break it in pieces and bury it in the back garden. And some days after that we heard that a party of men from Tyom, armed with torches and spears, had driven the kyitna people away: “They had a small child with them,” whispered the women in the fruit market: “Its hair was red, they could see it in the torchlight—as red as this palm nut!” I wished, at the time, that I had been able to see the kyitna child. Now I studied the girl who lay motionless in the shade of the awning, who took up so little space, who seemed without substance, a trick of the light, who flickered under the flapping shade like the shadow cast by a fire.

She was not as young as I had thought her at first. She was not a child, though from a distance she appeared to be so—she was small even for an islander. But her waist, showing between her short vest and the top of her drawstring trousers, was gently curved, and the look in her face was too remote for that of a child. She seemed to be wandering, open-eyed; her skin was dark, rich as silt; the crook of her elbow, dusky in the shade, was a dream of rivers. She wore a bracelet of jade beads which showed she belonged to the far south, to the rice-growers and eel-fishers, the people of the lagoons.

I think she had spoken to me twice before I realized it. She struggled to raise her voice, calling: “Brother! You’ll get sun-sick.” Then I met her gaze, her tired, faintly mocking smile, and smiled back at her. The older woman, no doubt her mother, hushed her in a whisper.

“It’s all right,” said the girl. “Look at him! He wouldn’t harm anyone. And he isn’t superstitious. He has the long face of a fish.”

I strolled toward them and greeted the mother, whose eyes darted from my gaze. She had the flat, long-suffering face of a field-laborer and a scar on her forehead. The young girl looked at me from inside the fiery cloud of her hair, her lips still crooked in a smile. “Sit down, brother,” she said.

I thanked her and sat in the chair beside her pallet, across from her mother, who still knelt stroking the girl’s long hair and would not meet my eye. “The fish,” said the young girl, speaking carefully, her breathing shallow, “is for wisdom. Isn’t that right? The fish is the wisest of the creatures. Now, most of our merchants here are shaped just like the domestic duck—except for the fat Ilaveti—the worst of all, he looks like a raven…” She paused, closing her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and fixed me with a look of such clarity that I was startled. “Ducks are foolish,” she said, “and ravens are clever, but have bad hearts. That is why we came up here now, at noon, when they’re asleep.”

I smiled. “You seem to have had ample time to study all of us. And yet this is the first time that I have seen you come out of your cabin.”

“Tipyav,” she answered, “my mother’s servant, tells me everything. I trust him absolutely. He has slow thoughts, but a very keen eye. My father—but I am talking too much— you will think me poorly behaved—”

“No,” I said. But she lay very still and silent, struggling for breath.

“Sir,” said her mother in a low voice, looking at me at last, so that I saw, surprised, that she had the deep eyes of a beautiful woman: “My daughter is gravely ill. She is—she has not been well for some time. She has come here for air, and for rest, and this talking taxes her so—”

“Stop,” the young girl whispered. She looked at me with a trembling smile. “You will forgive us. We are not accustomed to much company.”

“It is I who should ask forgiveness,” I said. “I am intruding on you—on your rest.”

“Not at all,” said the girl, in a manner peculiarly grave and formal. “Not at all. You are a very rare thing: a wise man from the islands. Tell me—have you been to this northern ghost-country before?”

I shook my head. “This is my first visit. But I do speak the language.”

“You speak their language? Olondrian?”

“I had an Olondrian tutor.”

I was gratified by the older woman’s look of awe; the girl regarded me silently with an expression I could not read.

“We have heard that one can hire interpreters,” her mother said.

“I am sure one can,” I answered, though I was not sure of it at all. The woman looked relieved and smoothed her dark dress over her knees, moving her hand down to scratch discreetly at her ankle. Poor creatures, I thought, wondering how they would fare in the northern capital. The woman, I noticed, was missing the two smallest fingers of her right hand.

The girl spoke up abruptly. “As for us,” she said in a strange, harsh tone, “we are traveling to a place of healing, as you might have guessed. It is called A-lei-lin, and lies in the mountains. But really… She paused, twisting the cloth of her pallet. “Really… It’s foolish of us…”

“No, not foolish,” her mother interrupted. “We believe that we will find healing there. It is a holy place. The temple of a foreign goddess. And perhaps the gods of the north—in the north there are many wonders, son, many miracles. You will have heard of them yourself…”

“It is certainly said to be, and I believe it is, a place of magic, full of great wizards,” I said. “These wizards, for example, have devised a map of the stars, cast in brass, with which they can measure the distance of stars from the earth. They write not only in numbers, but words, so that they may converse across time and space, and one of their devices can make innumerable replicas of books—such as this one.”

I held out the slim Olondrian Lyrics bound in dark green leather. The women looked at it but seemed loath to touch it.

“Is that—a vallon?” the girl asked, stumbling slightly over the word.

“It is. In it there are written many poems in the northern tongue.”

The girl’s mother gazed at me, and I guessed that the worn look in her face came not from hard labor but from an unrelenting sorrow. “Are you a wizard, my son?”

I laughed. “No, no! I am only a student of northern letters. There’s no wizardry in reading.”

“Of course not!” snapped the girl, startling me with her vehemence. Her small face blazed, a lamp newly opened. “Why must you?” she hissed at her mother. “Why? Why? Could you not be silent? Can you never be silent even for the space of an hour?”

The woman blinked rapidly and looked away.

“Perhaps—” I said, half rising from my chair.

“Oh, no. Don’t you go,” said the girl, a wild note in her voice. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me! My mother and I—we are too much alone. Tell me,” she went on without a pause, “how do you find the open sea? Does it not feel like freedom?”

“Yes, I suppose—”

“Beautiful and fearsome at the same time. My father, before he stopped talking, said that the open sea was like fever. He called it ‘the fever of health’—does that not seem to you very apt? The fever of health. He said that he always felt twice as alive at sea.”

“Was your father a merchant?”

“Why do you say that—was? He isn’t dead.”

“I am sorry,” I said.

“He is not dead. He is only very quiet.”

I glanced at her mother, who kept her head lowered.

“Why are you smiling?” asked the girl.

My conciliatory half-smile evaporated. “I’m not smiling.”

“Good.”

Such aggression in a motionless body, a nearly expressionless face. Her small chin jutted; her eyes bored into mine. She had no peasant timidity, no deference. I cast about for something to say, uneasy as if I had stepped on some animal in the dark.

“You spoke as if he were dead,” I said at last.

“You should have asked.”

“I was led astray by your choice of words,” I retorted, beginning to feel exasperated.

“Words are breath.”

“No,” I said, leaning forward, the back of my shirt plastered to my skin with sweat. “No. You’re wrong. Words are everything. They can be everything.”

“Is that Olondrian philosophy?”

Her sneer, her audacity, took my breath away. It was as if she had sat up and struck me in the face. For an instant my father’s image flared in my memory like a beacon: an iron rod in his hand, its tip a bead of fire.

“Perhaps. Perhaps it is,” I managed at last. “Our philosophies differ. In Olondria words are more than breath. They live forever, here.”

I held out the book, gripping its spine. “Here they live. Olondrian words. In this book there are poems by people who lived a thousand years ago! Memory can’t do that—it can save a few poems for a few generations, but not forever. Not like this.”

“Then read me one,” she said.

“What?”

“Jissi,” her mother murmured.

“Read me one,” the girl insisted, maintaining her black and warlike stare. “Read me what you carry in the vallon.”

“You won’t understand it.”

“I don’t want to understand it,” she said. “Why should I?”

The book fell open at the Night Lyric of Karanis of Loi. The sun had moved so that my knees were no longer in shadow, the page a sheet of blistering light where black specks strayed like ash. My irritation faded as I read the melancholy lines.

“Thank you,” said the girl.

She closed her eyes.

Her mother took her hand and chafed it. “Jissi? I’m going to call Tipyav.”

The girl said nothing. The woman gave me a fearful, embarrassed glance, then stumped across the deck and called down the ladder.

“Brother.” The young girl’s eyes were open.

“Yes,” I answered, my anger cooled by pity. She is going to die, I thought.

A puff of air forced itself from her lungs, a laugh. “Well—never mind,” she murmured, closing her eyes again. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her mother returned with the servant. I stood aside as the old man knelt and the woman helped the girl to cling to his curved back. The old man rose with a groan and staggered forward, his burden swaying, and the woman rolled up the pallet, avoiding my eye… I pulled my chair farther into the shade of the awning and opened my book, but when they reached the ladder the girl called back to me: “Brother!”

I stood. Her hair was vibrant in the sun.

“Your name.”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

“Jissavet,” said the dying girl, “of Kiem.”

In my twenty-ninth year, having lost my heart to the sea, I resolved to travel, and to come, if I might, into some of the little-known corners of the World. It was with such purpose in mind that I addressed myself to the captain of the Ondis, as she lay in the harbor of Bain; and the captain—a man distinguished, in the true Bainish style, by an elegant pipe and exquisitely fashioned boots—declared himself very able to use the extra pair of hands on board his ship, which was to go down the Fertile Coast. We would stop at Asarma, that capital of the old cartographers, and go on to fragrant, orange-laden Yenith by the sea, and finally travel up the Ilbalin, skirting the Kestenyi highlands, into the Balinfeil to collect our cargo of white almonds. The arrangement suited me perfectly: I planned to cross into the mountains and enter the formidable country of the Brogyars. I little knew that my wanderings would last for forty years, and bring me into such places as would cause many a man to shudder.

I will not, O benevolent reader, spend time in describing Bain itself, that city which is known to lie in the exact center of the world—for who, indeed, who reads this book will be unfamiliar with her, incontestably the greatest city on earth? Who does not know of the “gilded house,” the “queen of the bazaars,” where, as the saying goes, one can purchase even human flesh? No, I begin these modest writings farther south and east, at the gates of Asarma, which, seen from the sea, resemble a lady’s hand mirror…

I lay on my pallet, surrounded by the rocking of the sea, reading Firdred of Bain in a yellow smear of candlelight. But I could not keep my mind on the words: the letters seemed to shift, rearranging themselves into words which did not exist in Olondrian. Kyitna. And then, like a ruined city: Jissavet of Kiem. I laid the book aside and gave myself up to dreams of her. I remembered the clarity of her eyes, which were like the eyes of Kyomi, the first woman in the world, who had been blessed with the sight of the gods. I thought of the city whose name she had said so carefully, A-lei-lin, Aleilin, Leiya Tevorova’s city, the city of violent seasons. What I knew of that city was Leiya’s story of how she was declared mad and shut up there for the winter in a great tower of black bricks. I looked at the city on Firdred’s map, which, like all Olondrian maps, showed painted cities of exaggerated size. Aleilin: a city like the others. The Place of the Goddess of Clay. And near it the moon-colored oval of the Fethlian, the lake where Leiya had drowned, where a nurse, as I knew from the preface to her autobiography, had found her with her shoe caught in the weeds. There, after long torments, the girl from Kiem would die—for was it not futile to struggle with kyitna, the just punishment of the gods? “And perhaps, the gods of the north—” the mother had said, hesitant, desperate; but what had the gods of the north to do with us? They were tales, pretty names. I turned on my side, restless, thinking of the strange girl with sadness. The bones of her face as she lay beneath the awning like a jade queen. She came from the south, from the land of doctors, wizards, and superstition, from the place which we in Tyom called “the Edge of Night.”

At length I blew out the candle and slept, but did not dream of the girl, as I had hoped I would; she had fled with the tiny light of the candle. I dreamed instead of the sea, raging, crushing our fragile boat, drowning the spices, splintering planks and bones with its roaring hands… And then of the monkey, leaping from tree to tree, weighing down the branches. The way it looked over its shoulder, the way its tail hung, teeming with lice. And last of all the courtyard, patches of sunlight, the sound of hurried footsteps, closer now, the sound of breath. Jevick. My mother’s voice.

Chapter Five City of My Heart

Bain, the Gilded House, the Incomparable City, splits the southern beaches with the glinting of her domes. On either side the sands stretch out, pale, immaculate, marked with graceful palms whose slender figures give no shade. Those sands, lashed by rain in the winter, sun-glazed in the summer, give the coast the look of a girl in white, the Olondrian color of mourning. Yet as one approaches the harbor this illusion is stripped away: the city asserts itself, Bain the exuberant, the exultant. And the vastness of the harbor mouth with its ancient walls of stone, with its seemingly endless array of ships, blocks out the southern sands.

From this raucous, magnificent port the Olondrian fleet once set out, adorned with scarlet flags, to conquer the land of Evmeni; from this port, ever since the most ancient times, “before the Beginning of Time,” long merchant ships have embarked for the rivers, for apples, for purple, for gold. Still they come, laden with copper and porphyry from Kestenya, with linen and cork from Evmeni, with the fruits of the Balinfeil, ships that have sailed north as far as the herring markets of the Brogyar country and south as far as the jewels of the sea, as far as Tinimavet. Here they gather, so many that the sea itself is a city, with rope bridges thrown between ships so that sailors can visit one another, with the constant blasts of the brass horns worn in the belts of the harbor officials, the sinsavli weaving among the ships in their low yolk-colored boats. “Forward!” they cry. “Back! You, to the left, a curse on your eyes!” And before them, around them, rises that other city: a glittering mosaic of wind towers, terraces, flights of whitewashed steps, cramped balconies and shadows hinting at gardens of oleander.

Bain is, of course, the name of the Olondrian god of wine, whose eyes are “painted like sunflowers,” who plays the sacred bone flute. “Come before him with honey,” exhorts the Book of Mysteries, “with fruits of the vine both white and red, with dates, with succulent figs.” Perhaps it was the presence of this strange god with the ruddy cheeks, who bewilders men with his holy fog, that dazzled my eyes and brain—for though I thrust myself against the rails and gulped the air, though I looked wildly about me, staring as if to devour the harbor, my first few hours in Bain—and indeed, the whole of that first day—I dwelt in a cloud pierced now and then by images like sunbeams. There was the great neighborhood of ships, most of them almond-shaped, blue and white, the Olondrian river boats with their cargoes of melons; there were the shouts, the clankings, the joyous, frenzied activity as we made our way to the bustling quay and the gangplank rattled down; there was the heat, the brilliance of the light, the high white buildings, the shaking of my legs as I stood at last on the quay, on land, the way the stone seemed to roll beneath my feet, the shifting trees, and the sudden, magical presence of what seemed more than a hundred horses. Olondrians love these noble beasts and harness them to carriages, and the city of Bain is full of them—their lively, quivering noses, the ammoniac smell of their hides, their braided manes, their glittering trappings, the clop of their hooves, and the piles of their dung steaming on the cobblestones. My fellow Kideti merchants and I disembarked under jostling umbrellas with our clusters of servants and porters, eyeing the carriages anxiously, and at once a number of slit-eyed, disheveled youths with leather knapsacks descended on us, crying out “Apkanat,” the Kideti word for “interpreter.” One of them clutched my arm: “Apkanat!” he said eagerly, pointing to himself and breathing garlic into my face. When I shook my head and told him in Olondrian, “There is no need,” he raised his eyebrows and grinned, showing a set of narrow teeth. For a moment there was the vivid sight of his black, greasy curls, his head against the blinding white of the sunlit wall behind him—then he was gone, bounding toward the others of his mercenary trade who crowded around the gangplank, shouting.

The success of our journey lay entirely in the hands of Sten, who seemed immune to the charms of that exotic capital. While I stood gazing stupefied at the towers, the glazed windows, he arranged for one of the large open wagons to carry us and our merchandise. When he plucked at my sleeve I followed him numbly and climbed the wooden steps into the wagon where my fourteen servants crouched among sacks of pepper. The wagon driver leaped into his seat and snapped the reins on the backs of his horses. “Ha!” he cried, and the tall vehicle lurched into life. I came sharply out of my daze for a moment, long enough to gasp, long enough to think, now it is true, we are leaving the harbor, long enough to turn and look back at the elegant Ardonyi, floating against the quay, her gangplank thronged with interpreters. Another ship was unloading fruit; the air reeked of oranges. In the crowd I made out the Tinimaveti woman: she was arguing with the interpreters. And there, being borne away on a sort of litter, the sick girl with the coppery hair…

The wagon turned a corner and the ship disappeared from view. The harbor receded after it, shrinking between the walls of the buildings. Sten, sitting at my side, neat, drab, and unruffled as ever, touched my knee. “Ekawi, you will soon be able to rest. Your father always frequented a particular hotel, not far from the harbor and also conveniently near the spice markets. I hope that it will suit you as well. The price is not overly high, and nearby there are smaller inns, very cheap and, I think, ideal for the men…”

I stared at him and muttered: “Of course, of course.” His face was the same, dark, triangular, with the pale scar over one eye; yet it was framed by the passing white walls, the walls of the city of Bain with their wrought-iron gates, their carved doors crowned with amaranths. We rattled under narrow stone bridges connecting these high, solemn buildings, raised walkways with curved parapets above the echoing street, we passed under balconies trailing languid white and indigo flowers, through sunlight and abrupt shadows cast in that stone-paved passageway. With a shock that came over me as a physical chill, making me feel faint, I recognized the moment in which the imagined becomes visible. For these were the streets, despite their carefully cultivated blossoms, of which Fodra had written: “There it is autumn, and always deserted.” The old iron gates were eaten by rust, the walls streaked with green moisture, the buildings encircled by empty alleys too narrow for carriages; these were the streets which that doomed, exalted, asthmatic youth from the Salt Coast, whose poetry seduced a nation, called “the unbearable quarters.” “O streets of my city,” I whispered, “with your walls like faded tapestries.” Sten glanced at me swiftly with a trace of alarm in his eyes. I clutched the rough material of the sacks on either side of me and breathed the hot, dry, scented air of the passageway. Eternal city of Bain! We turned a corner, the street went on, we burst into a secluded square with walls of rose-colored stone; a flock of swallows, disturbed by the wagon, lifted into the air; and the statue of a young girl watched us go by, her arms stretched out.

The Hotel Urloma, the “Arch of the Dawn,” stands in the Street of Copper, in the lively mercantile district to the north of the Great Harbor. Here the walls of the buildings are thin, so that one can hear voices and thuds from inside, feet clattering up and down the stairs, flute-playing, the cries of cats. The hotel is a tall old building of wood and stone with a roof of coppery slate, one of those roofs, turned greenish now, which gave the street its name. As we drew up before its wide, pillared porch flanked by a pair of cypresses, a fresh burst of sweat bloomed over my skin like a cool dew, and I shivered.

“The hotel,” said Sten, looking at me with veiled eyes, gauging my approval. I nodded and tried to smile, my dry lips cracking. Then the door flew open and a tall, portly Bainishman emerged and hurried down the steps, clumsy in loose leather slippers.

“Welcome, welcome!” he cried out in abominable Kideti, waving his arms in their billowing white shirtsleeves. He hastened toward the wagon as the driver took down the wooden steps and placed them at the side for our descent. “Welcome,” shouted the gentleman. His mild, gold-colored eyes flickered nervously across my servants’ faces. “Apkanat?” he asked, again mangling the word in Kideti. “No apkanat? You have no apkanat?” Meanwhile the driver, ignoring the gentleman’s impatient cries, looked up at me with black and steady eyes, reached out his hand, and stamped one boot on his steps with an almost scornful confidence, as if declaring that I might trust them absolutely. I gripped his hand and rose, swaying, surrounded by worried murmurs, the sound of the servants and Sten, who placed his hand on the small of my back; the strange hotel and the dark, bristling spears of the cypress trees seemed to leap and swing in the sunlight as I clambered down from the wagon. When I reached the ground and the driver released me, I stumbled. The portly gentleman supported me with a large hand on my shoulder. “Welcome,” he said; and then, in Olondrian, shaking his head as he spoke to himself: “Poor soul! Nothing but a boy! And he calls himself an interpreter!”

I felt that I should correct him but could not find the words in his language. I looked up into his ruddy face and compassionate topaz eyes; his gray hair, sculpted so that a curl lay precisely on either temple, exuded a powerful odor of heliotrope. I felt that sensation of smallness which our people must feel in the north: my head barely reached the scented gentleman’s shoulder. I was fascinated by his great hands, so moist, with their moon-white nails, on which he wore several rings set with aquamarines.

“Apkanat,” he said slowly, peering down into my face. I cleared my throat and opened and closed my mouth. He sighed, turned, then rolled his eyes in despair at the sight of Sten and the wagon driver, who were communicating with energetic gestures. This method, however, seemed to succeed, for Sten hurried toward me and said: “Ekawi, I will escort the servants to their own inn. After some days you may wish to see their accommodations yourself—but for now I suggest you rest and await me here…” He looked at me uncertainly, then glanced at the Bainish gentleman, who was looking at us both with intense interest. I felt, like a heavy blow, the shame of being unable to speak—of proving, at the great moment, such a poor student.

I summoned my courage and nodded. “Of course! I shall see to our rooms.” Sten looked relieved and hurried back into the wagon, but I saw him kiss the tips of his slender fingers as he went, and his lips moved rapidly as if in prayer.

The reins struck the backs of the horses. I turned to the Bainishman beside me, squared my shoulders, and said: “Good afternoon.”

His gold eyes widened. “Good afternoon! What!” He reached out his hand, smiling, and enveloped mine inside it. “Good afternoon to you, telmaro!” He leaned in closer, searching my face for any sign of comprehension. “Do you speak Olondrian? Are you the apkanat?”

I laughed and answered him clumsily enough, but with delight: “I am a merchant from the Tea Islands. My father—he used—he was coming—”

“Yes, yes!” said the gentleman. “But come in out of the sun.” He ushered me toward the hotel along a pathway of pink slate. “So you are the son of the bald gentleman! Yes, I expect him every year! I hope no misfortune…” He trailed off as we went up the stairs to the porch.

“He is dead,” I said.

“Ah!” The gentleman’s brow was creased with such a look of pain that I was sorry I had not spoken with more delicacy. “That is dreadful, dreadful! And he no older than myself! But forgive me—I am called Yedov of Bain.” He put his hand on his heart and bowed, showing me the round patch of pink skin at the top of his skull; when he had risen I bowed also, saying: “Jevick of Tyom.” At this he gave a rich, merry laugh. “Marvelous! Such an education! Ah, but your father was shrewd! Come, step inside.”

He clasped the brass ring on the door and pushed it open, leading me into a vast, cool room, empty but for a vase of white roses on a table. His leather slippers smacked on the tiles, and the tails of his light-green morning coat fluttered as he passed through this hall and into the gloomy corridor beyond. The entire hotel possessed, like its owner, an odor of cedar, old carpets, and heliotrope. Somnolent parlors yawned on either side of the passage, each with a high, marmoreal fireplace gleaming in the shadows and shapeless pieces of furniture pushed against the walls. At length we came through a set of peaked double doors onto a veranda flooded with sun, and I stood blinking in the robust sea light of Bain. “I’m here,” I murmured in the tongue of the north, gripping the ornate curves of the balustrade. The iron was cold on my palms, unyielding, foreign, delightful.

My host offered me a chair—a long, low object covered with a green silk shawl—and hurried off to fetch me “a drop of the country.” I reclined on the chair, breathing in the scent of the garden, the perfume of exhausted pansies mingled with the odors of dust and ancient plaster. The sky was deep blue, the balconies like necklaces. I lowered my gaze: the arm of my chair with its cover of pear-green cloth seemed to pulse in the tireless light. There was my hand, narrow, dark, languid. In Olondria. When my host returned with the wine, I had drifted into a blissful sleep.

I awoke rumpled and sweaty and sat up, evening light on my face, thinking of books. It was the kebma hour, named for the bread that is eaten at dusk: across the garden I could see lights in the windows, and in one overgrown yard a woman’s voice called insistently: “Valeth, come in.” I started up, turned, and went into the hotel, knocking against furniture in the gloom until a light in the corridor led me to my host. He sat at a table laden with food, his face and oiled hair shining in the rays of a splendid table lamp in a netting of pink crystal.

“Come in, come in,” he cried, beaming and standing up so swiftly he bumped the table, provoking a gentle clatter of glass. “I didn’t like to wake you, but I’m glad you’ve arrived at last. I don’t mind telling you that our conversation has been strained!”

With a wave of his hand he indicated his sole dinner companion: my steward, Sten. Colorless, doleful, looking shrunken beside the tall Bainishman, Sten sat before a plate heaped with an array of foreign delicacies, rose-colored claws and forbidding blobs of aspic.

“Sten,” I said, trying not to laugh.

“Ekawi,” he returned in a mournful tone. “The gentleman insisted I sit. I felt I could not refuse.”

“No, no, you did right. Listen, Sten, I need money, Olondrian money. Just give me half of what you’ve got in the purse.”

The Bainishman, still standing, resting both hands on the table, glanced from me to Sten and back again with a look of indulgent good humor, but when he saw Sten pull out the purse and count a number of bright triangular coins into my hand, his brows contracted in dismay.

“What! What’s this? What do you want with money? You don’t need money in my house,” he exclaimed, either forgetting that his house was a hotel, or overcome with native hospitality to the extent that he intended not to charge me for the meal.

“I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”

“But where are you going? I have sefdalima, real sefdalima from the country, either with or without anchovies! Come, telmaro, I beg you, you haven’t eaten!” And at last, in despair, as I opened a door: “Not that way! The other door, if you want the street…”

“Thank you,” I called out over my shoulder, hurrying down the passage, my pockets jingling. I soon came out into the antechamber with the white roses. Then all I had to do was open the door, and there it was: sea air, long cypress shadows, the racket of carriage wheels, Bain.

I ran down the front steps of the hotel and into the light of the evening, dazed as a moth released from a dark bedroom. Strangers jostled me, merchants in short cloaks with well-fed, shaven cheeks, students in colorful jackets and the tasseled shirts of scribes. The glad spirit of the kebma hour was awakening under the trees: the cafés were crowded with diners laughing through clouds of cigar smoke, tearing the flat, oily loaves of kebma, rinsing their fingers in brass bowls, clapping their hands to call the waiters. I darted across the street, dancing to keep away from the carriages, and pressed my face to a window where books lay blanketed in dust. There they were, just as I had imagined, open, within easy reach. I pushed the door, setting off a soft bell, and entered the shop.

Then it was like those tales in which there are sudden transformations: “He found himself in a field, and felt that it was a very vast country.” It was like the story in which Efaldar awakes in the City of Zim: “There were walls of amethyst round him, and his couch was upon a dais.” In the shop there was a dim, ruddy light and little space to move, for the shelves rose everywhere, filled with books with their names written on the spines: The Merchant of Veim. Lyrics Written While Traveling on the Canals. The Secrets of Mandrake Root and the Benefits Derived Therefrom. I ran my fingers over the books, slid them from the shelves, opened them, turned the pages, breathing in line after line of mysterious words, steeped in voluptuous freedom like Isvalha among the nymphs of the well, a knot in my throat with the taste of unswallowed tears. There were so many books. There were more than my master had carried in his sea chest. The shop seemed impossible, otherworldly, a cave of wonders; yet it was not even a true bookshop like the ones I would discover later, lining both sides of the Street of Poplars. It was one of those little shops, tucked into various corners of Bain, which sell portraits of popular writers and tobacco as well as books, whose main profits come from the newspapers, whose volumes are poorly bound, and which always seem to be failing, yet are as perennial as the flowers. It is unlikely that anyone before or since has experienced, in that humble establishment, a storm of emotion as powerful as mine. I collected stack after stack of books, seizing, rejecting, replacing, giddy with that sweet exhalation: the breath of parchments.

At last I found a leather-bound copy of the Romance of the Valley with which, once they had touched it, my hands refused to part. It was a “two-color copy”: the chapter titles were ornamented with elaborate flowers in blue and crimson ink. The cover was also embossed with a pattern of blooms; the paper, though not of the best quality, was of pressed cotton beautifully textured; and through the pages danced the mysterious tale, the enchanted hawks and the sorrowful maiden transformed into a little ewe-lamb. Clutching this prize I approached the bookseller’s desk, that hallowed region central to every bookshop, however lowly, in Olondria. This one, like many others, was piled with books and scattered papers, and behind it, in the glow of a lamp, sulked a young girl of great beauty. She had the amber skin of the Laths, the people of Olondria’s wine country, and masses of coarse brown hair that snaked among the towers of books. Her hands, grimy and capable with broken fingernails, wrapped up my purchase and clenched my fifteen droi with frank eagerness. I thanked her, but she did not look up. Instead she yanked a curl of hair impatiently from among her charm necklaces. I walked out into the last light of the evening. Bells tolled in the Temple of Kuidva, and over its dome the first stars were coming out.

If you love Bain as I have loved it, then you will know its spell, a heady mixture of arrogance and vitality, which has in it a great sigh, as of an ocean that has been crossed, the sigh of its terrible age from the depths of its stones. You will know the arcades underneath the Golden Wall where the old men sit, playing at londo and sipping their glasses of teiva, that colorless, purifying fig alcohol which has no scent, but whose aftertaste is “as chewed honeysuckle.” You will know the wood-sellers, the midnight trot of the horse of the nightsoil wagon. You will know also the great glow of the Royal Theater, huge as a castle and lit for its gala events like a temple on fire, with its wide tiered terraces going down to the canal. And you will know the white walls, the smell of sumac, the smell of dust, of coffee roasting, of eggplant fried in batter, the “unbearable quarters” where there is the feeling that someone has been interred, that people cannot live among such ancient towers. All of this I discovered in Fanlei, the “Month of Apples,” one of Olondria’s happiest and most careless months. There may still be a few in Bain who remember me as I was then: an aristocratic young foreigner in a gray silk suit.

My days began with a carriage ride through the humid morning streets to the great spice markets. Housed on the site of ancient horse and cattle auctions, the vast covered markets, with their arched leather roofs made to keep out the rain, form a jumbled labyrinth that stretches almost to the harbor. Here in the shadows the lavish, open sacks display their contents: the dark cumin redolent of mountains, the dried, crushed red pepper colored richly as iron ore, and turmeric, “the element of weddings.” One wanders among the cramped, odorous, warren-like enclosures, among elderly men and women, fresh from the country, who sip glasses of tea as they sit beside their wares, their hands smelling perpetually of cinnamon. There are younger merchants, too: slow-voiced men, gentlemen farmers, who dab at their eyes with muslin handkerchiefs; and in one corner a Kalak woman, one of Bain’s old fishing people, sells the wind out of a great brass bell. There are herbs, fresh and dried—mint, marjoram, and basil; there are dark cones and mud-like blocks of incense; there are odors in the air that seem to speak to one another, as though the market were filled with violent ghosts. Wandering vendors offer tea and odorless “water of life,” which revives those who succumb to the spice madness: for here there are treacherous substances, ingredients for love-philters, and spices used in war and assassination. I have seen them selling the powder called saravai, the “hundred fires,” with which prisoners are executed for treason; and there is also the nameless spice which, carried on the wind, infects one’s enemies with the falling sickness. There is crushed ostrich eggshell, the “beckoner of women.” It seems as if the odors cloud the air—as if, in the half light, the breath of spices rises up like smoke and wreathes the faces of the merchants.

Here I sat with Sten, bargaining, arguing, and laughing, pouring pepper into sacks for my customers, awaiting with growing impatience the hour of noon, the end of the market day, when I would walk out alone into the city. When that moment came, and my servants tied up the sacks and rolled down the door of the stall, I stood and brushed the pepper from my clothes, and with hardly a word I left them, walking out with the last of the Bainish citizens, mingling with them, no longer a foreign merchant.

It was the season of sudden rains. The wild summer storms came out of the west, pouring on the slate roofs and the white wind towers, swaying and bowing down the poplar trees in the Street of Booksellers and rolling in sheets from the awnings of the cafés. These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider. In this way I was thrown together with students or dockworkers or tradesmen, or the huvyalhi, the peasants in their old robes, with their belts of rope and tin earrings and tough shoes caked with dung, and the pipes they smoked carefully in their cracked misshapen hands. As the rain poured down outside, we leaned together over our drinks, and there was always the weather to talk about for a beginning, and everyone was glad for the sudden excuse to have a drink and for the wild release from the stillness of the air. The cafés smelled of cider, wet clothes, steaming hair, and tobacco. The lamps burned valiantly in the storm’s darkness; often there was someone playing the northern violin, which is held upright between naked feet and moans like the wind in the towers.

After the rains the city was tranquil and glittering, freshly washed, the high roofs shining, the trees iridescent with moisture, and all seemed calm and quiet because of the passing of the storm. The clear air sparkled with the cold light of diamonds. The winds coming off the sea were cool, and there was no dust in the city; it had all been washed away with the heat and discomfort, and the sky had been washed as well and rose in pale, diaphanous layers of ether, streaked with gauzy clouds in blue and gold. Slowly the cafés emptied and the waiters sat down to play londo. Children came out to race painted boats in the gutters; they laughed and shouted down the wet streets in the opalescent air, while above them white-shawled grandmothers dragged chairs out onto the balconies. In these transparent hours I would set off again on my walk, down the Street of Booksellers or toward the intricate trees of the Garden of Plums, often with a girl on my arm, perhaps a student drawn to my strangeness or one of the city’s cheerful lovers for hire.

There was never an end to Bain. I never felt as though I had touched it, though I loved the book markets under the swinging trees, the vast array of books on tables, in boxes, stacked on the ground, and the grand old villas converted into bookshops. I loved the Old City also, which is called the “Quarter of Sighs,” with its barred windows and brooding fortified towers, and I loved to watch the canal winding below the streets and bridges and the stealthy boats among the shadows of trees. Laughing, replete, I raised a glass of teiva in a café, surrounded by a bold crowd of temporary companions, a girl at my side, some Ailith or Kerlith whose name I no longer recall, for she was erased like the others by the one who followed.

“Perhaps I’ll stay,” I shouted over the singing from the next table. “Perhaps I won’t go home. I’d like to know every corner of Bain.”

The girl beside me giggled and tossed her hair, her earrings jangling. “Bain!” she said. “You won’t know Bain until you’ve been to the Feast of Birds.”

Chapter Six The Feast of Birds

I think I still do not know Bain. The Feast of Birds taught me of no city on earth, but of another, deeper territory.

It began as all holidays begin, though stamped with the special gaiety of Olondria: the city prepared for the celebration for two days. Revelers spilled from the overcrowded cafés and thronged the streets; when the outdoor tables were filled they sat on the curbs, uncorking bottles of teiva. From the balcony of my hotel room I looked down on garden parties, women in brilliant clothing laying tables among the oleanders, stout grandfathers bellowing for more wine, and children everywhere shrieking, trampling the marigolds, chasing one another. All the children held flexible wooden wands with tissue-paper birds attached to the ends, their gauzy feathers strengthened with copper wire; when the children played, these magical creatures trembled as if about to take flight for the trees, and at night they lay discarded on the lamplit grass. Many houses, I noticed, were dark, without a sign of joy; I once saw a child who was watching the streets pulled in from a balcony and scolded. But the streets were alive, flamboyant, crowded with vendors, vintners, and flower girls who had burst all at once from the markets to conquer the world.

On the day of the procession I put on a clean shirt with a pearl button at the throat and went downstairs, curious to observe the famous holiday. Yedov was in the antechamber, peering out a window, and he turned toward me with a grave look as I entered.

“Where are you going, telmaro?”

“Out to see the procession,” I answered cheerfully.

He frowned. I observed that he was not dressed to go out himself: he wore a plain white morning coat, a modest jasper in one ear, and what we in Tyom would have called a ten-o’-clock face.

“Oh, you don’t want to go out today,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s the Feast of Birds, telmaro. The streets will be full of nasty people, thieves! Your father always took my advice and stayed indoors on the Feast.”

I needed no more encouragement. “Good-bye!” I laughed, flinging the door wide.

The Feast of Birds is dedicated to Avalei, the Goddess of Love and Death, of whom my master had said: “Not all that is ancient is worthy of praise.” In my readings, Avalei’s shadow had passed most often at moments of crisis; I thought she must be like the vegetable gods of the islands, mute and beyond appeal. Yet her great feast day appeared to involve no sacrifice or grief. The cafés were crowded with groups of students pounding the tables and singing, and a boisterous crowd of country people possessed the Garden of Plums, dressed in shades of blue and smelling of charcoal fires.

When the procession began, the musicians scrambled down from their makeshift stages and the crowd pressed eagerly toward the Grand Promenade, and I went with them, forcing myself among the straining spectators opposite the gray façade of the Autumn Palace. Drums boomed, deep and solemn. In the gardens of the palace, where in the last century a famous general had hanged himself for love, people climbed up the bars of the wrought-iron fence for a better view, waving banners above an aviary of tissue-paper macaws. “Can you see it?” someone shouted near me, almost into my ear. “No!” I replied. There was the dark march of the drums. Both sides of the street were thronged with people watching from under the trees, and stiff-legged soldiers patrolled the edges of the crowds.

The procession came down the street, heralded by a trembling sigh, a sigh released all at once by the waiting crowd, and then by bursts of music which erupted along the street like waterspouts, and by loud cries and the waving of scarves. The women were waving their scarves in the air, slow flags of colored silk, waving them with their bare arms, even from the balconies, and singing strange, exhilarating songs that rose and throbbed in the heated air like melodies from the depths of the earth. The drums came into sight, huge, decorated with bells, made from the skins of sacred bulls raised in the temples, creatures fed on wheat and basil and turned to face the west before they were slaughtered, their massive horns preserved in bronze. The drummers wore masks of painted wood and nodded their heads as they struck. Behind them walked young eunuchs with silver censers, their mellow, eerie voices entwined in ethereal cadences, mingling with the dark fumes that billowed around them… The air was filled, all at once, with a strong smell I could not place, an elemental odor like frankincense and charred bone, and under the influence of this scent, more powerful than that of the spice markets, I saw the priests strutting in their skin skirts. They were naked to the waist, and their chests were shaved and painted with ochre; they were crowned with the bronzed horns of the slaughtered bulls, and behind them came the priestesses in cloaks of lion skin, bearing lilies and decked with garlands of cornflowers.

So sang the priestesses, and with them the women among the crowd. And the goddess came into view, she or her image, hewn from a great stone and borne by twenty men on a litter, a vast figure spangled with old gilt.

This was the song of the priests, which the men around me sang with them, the notes lifting into an impassioned thunder, pleading and terrible and underscored by the bells and drums. The air was erased by the odor of incense and flowers. The goddess passed slowly, a thing of such unbearable weight, of such gravity, that I could scarcely look at her and could not read the expression in her face of indifferent stone. She was a moon: there was nothing animal about her. Her litter was heaped with lilies, jonquils, anemones, and narcissi amid flames which were barely discernable in the sunlight; they were the flames of scented candles, and there were urns about her, and carpets, and the men who bore her sweated a scarlet ooze through dyed faces. Behind her came another, smaller litter borne by hooded priests, in which, underneath seven layers of sumptuous brocades, the Book of Mysteries slept in its silver casket as if under the sea, in its dim and fragrant grotto studded with pearls.

All at once the women sang: “The hunting knife is within my heart, the hunting knife is the ornament of my heart.” And the music swelled, the voices of men and women together now, the men asking Where is the hunting knife, and the women answering them in ardent notes like shot arrows: The hunting knife is the ornament of my heart. Faces twisted with ecstasy. A woman near me looked toward the trees, arching her back, her bright face wet with tears; and other women opened their mouths and flung hard, trilling melodies at the procession, songs that jarred with the sacred music. Elsewhere there were cries, sobs, the chattering shrieks of someone who was speaking in a language without words; and as the goddess passed away, a great convulsion of weeping wracked the crowd, pierced with inarticulate cries.

My own cheeks were wet. I was still gazing at the disappearing goddess, Avalei of the Ripened Grain, when a second tremor went through the crowd—not as profound as the first, but signifying some change, some new excitement. “The Wings!” someone cried. At once the shout was taken up; people were running, but not closer to the procession. They were running back into the square, into the garden, into the alleys, pressed together and laughing, glancing behind them. Children were snatched up quickly and borne away, women picked up their skirts, and a few men climbed the trees of the Promenade, while the balconies above the street grew crowded with curious figures looking eagerly downward, half laughing and half afraid.

“The Wings!”

I stood looking at the street. My face was strangely warm, as if I had drunk a pitcher of new wine. The crowd had grown thin; there were only a few of us who watched, transfixed as if by the track of an errant comet. And we saw them come: young men, running, roaring, linked together, their arms interlocked so that they moved like a wave, like a thick tumultuous flood or else like a dragon, some single beast of a hundred parts, deranged, obliterating the pavements. They moved as if they were running downhill at the mercy of gravity, as if they could crash through forests, armies, stone, and as they came they shouted and some were singing and others wore grimaces of pain, or else of an alien ecstasy. The street performers began to scatter belatedly toward the alleys, but the youths came into their midst with the force of a deluge, and those whom they could touch they seized and drowned in their living river, compelling them to run or be crushed underfoot. I watched them, shivering, feeling something like terror, or perhaps longing, seeing their sweat-dampened hair as they came closer, and seeing also that some of them had blood smeared on their foreheads and others were soaked as if they had come through a sheet of rain. Near me a man, his face radiant with tears, released a fearsome cry and plunged like a diver into the moving mass. I saw myself for a moment, a small figure under the trees; and then they cracked over me, and I was with them.

They were students, poets, and lovers of the goddess Avalei, and they were mad with the love that drove them through the streets. Love made them bound up and down among the walls in a rhythmic dance, clinging to one another, chanting hoarsely: “Riches and glory I do not desire, nor do I wish to be king; I ask nothing more than to be your lover and slave, to remain with you; only stay with me in the hills and you shall fulfill all my desire…” Their dance was like those which are danced on the eve of battle. They tore through the streets with the savagery of an inferno until their passion exhausted itself like a sheaf of lightning among the alleys, and they stumbled, still clutching one another’s arms like frightened children, into the shelter of an ill-lighted café. Then I saw for the first time the faces of those who had been my companions in terror, and they were thin and drawn, their expressions stunned, and their bodies wore the shabby clothes of those who drink under the bridges, and their gestures were vague, and they held one another’s hands. They were true devotees of the goddess and had spent the day in the temple drinking heady liquors made from fermented flowers, and some of them had made love to the temple harlots behind the screens and wore the lost and shimmering look of new-slain warriors. The café where we found ourselves, fatigued and sore, our lungs aching, was a great stone room with a domed and blackened ceiling, with smoky lamps along the walls which made me realize that the sun had set and only the blue dusk came through the doorway. Evidently the “Wings” were known there, for a fire was quickly kindled and sleepy girls materialized from the darkness, one with a large pewter basin from which she splashed the face of a boy who had fainted. We looked at each other in the firelight.

“Where are we?” I asked the slight, grimy youth who was holding my hand.

He shrugged. “Somewhere in the Quarter.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said, looking at me as if I had asked an odd question, though there was blood mixed with the dirt on his brow and hair. We sat at a table with some of the others on wooden chairs strengthened with twine, and the girls, moving as silently as witches, brought us wine and teiva and held out their hands which we pressed with coins, and then melted away, yawning, into the gloom. “I need a drink,” said the boy who sat opposite me in a trembling voice. Tears welled up in his eyes, though he was smiling… The others patted his back, and one of them said, “Yes, by the gods, I’ve a dragon’s thirst!” and there was a light pattering of laughter. Outside, in the streets, beat the music of fifes and drums, the continuing festival, which we had stepped out of, if only for a moment; and I found myself wishing fervently, with desperation and sadness, that these strange youths would let me remain among them.

We were young and had been through a fire, and so we were shy.We did not exchange names, but after a time we began to behave like young men, and our talk grew louder in that dim room where pork and rabbits crackled above the hearth and the drowsy girls went dragging their feet. Our eyes shone; a boy took a violin from against the wall, removed his boots, and began to play, cradling the instrument; when the meat was done we ate it ravenously, grease on our lips, and the strength it gave us was potent like that of the wine. I found myself in an earnest conversation with two of the youths, explaining things to them I had not known myself, connections between the poets I had never seen before, a clear architecture rising out of excitement and teiva. The youths who listened were students at the School of Philosophy, and they argued eagerly, with fiery humor. They rolled cigarettes for me and we bent close together, smoking, their eyes alive and sparkling in the dimness. I had answers to all of their contradictions; they looked at me admiringly, they laughed, they began to call me the Foreign Professor. And I felt myself at the height of human bliss as I protested, “No, not foreign. I’ve been raised on the northern poets…”

The night brought music. A band from the festival invaded the café, armed with raucous pipes, guitars, and swollen drums, filling the room with a reek of sweat, demanding money and wine, releasing a deafening, jaunty cacophony of sound. The whole room glittered with girls, perhaps the same ones who had served us earlier, but now they wore long earrings and shrieked with laughter, and the young men caught them and whirled them about the floor in popular dances, their shadows huge in the redness of the firelight. The music called in a troupe of Kestenyi dancers from the street, who were greeted with ragged cheers from the drunken students—they were lithe young men with rouged cheeks and hats that were round at the brim and square on top, made of the piebald skins of goats. They wore long purple tunics that reached to their boot-tops and were slit at the sides to show their voluminous embroidered trousers, and they skipped wildly on their heels and toes, their bodies motionless from the waist up, their faces fixed in sublime hauteur. I watched everything through the deep, resplendent mists that surrounded me, watched the rise of an arm, the toss of a head, watched even the shoulder of the girl who had come to sit on my lap through a starry haze—it was cool to the touch, as if made of enamel. She turned her head to look at me. I was happy and exhausted, feeling as I had felt on the open sea: as if the world had drowned and something new had taken its place, a ringing brilliance, fathomless and transparent.

The cool girl moved her lips, saying something I could not hear. I told her that no, she was not heavy at all. My desire for her had no beginning; I felt it had always been there, blind and torrential like my desire for the city. She took my arm and led me into the rooms, the elusive corridors, the hanging stairs, the ineluctable darkness, into a room with walls as thin as if they were made of cardboard, where a single candle winked crazily in the gloom. There was music from downstairs. I believe the girl was talking to me, but I could not understand anything she said, not until she drew close to me and I heard her voice distinctly as she whispered: “Cousin, this is what the gods eat.”

I awoke to glare and silence. And then, beyond the silence, sound—the sounds from the street which I realized had awakened me, sounds of talk and footsteps, a burst of laughter, the whine of a door, the scrape of a wooden table across the pavement. My mouth was dry, but I felt no pain until I tried to move, and then I began to ache in every limb, the agony concentrated in my skull, which throbbed rhythmically as if in time to the ringing of my ears. With the pain came the realization that I was in a strange room, and that the silence of the room was the first thing I had heard, a blankness that made me uneasy because it was not like other silences: it was the dead sound of abandonment and squalor. I opened my eyes. I lay on a narrow pallet that smelled of ammonia and mice, wearing only my shirt, on a floor of wooden slats that had long ago been green, in a very small room dazzlingly lit by the sun. There was no sign of the girl, and no sign that the room belonged to anyone. I sat up, groping weakly for the trousers lying over my feet. I saw my boots against the wall, but my waistcoat had disappeared, and I soon realized that my purse was gone as well. The single pearl button that had once closed the throat of my shirt had been removed, plucked away with a surgeon’s skill.

Trembling, my body clammy with a poisonous film of sweat, I opened the door and limped into the hall, a twilit region down which there echoed a shriek of coarse laughter. A door opened to my right, and a girl stumbled out. She slipped and fell, naked but for a green shawl clutched about her, turning her back to the wall, screaming with laughter, facing the open door at which she yelled: “Don’t you do it!”—and a pair of slippers was flung at her from inside. I stood, swaying, sick with rage, wondering if it was she, and about to demand the return of my belongings, when she looked up at me and shouted in a flatly insulting tone: “Vai! If it’s not the camel of Emun Deis.” Her own witticism sent her into transports of braying laughter. I turned away, walking unsteadily down the hall, refusing to believe that this could be my companion of the previous night, and lacking the strength for a fight.

As I turned a corner I nearly walked into one of the Kestenyi dancers, who stood urinating calmly against the wall. He wore the long split skirt but was missing the trousers underneath, and the front of his skirt was looped up over his arm. He was very tall, and he turned to stare at me with his hot black eyes, a stare of vivid and terrible attentiveness which made me stop short, looking back at him, my heart racing. He looked like one whose thoughts are not those of others. There was something in his eyes, a look both vacant and profound, which made me certain he was no mere lunatic; his gaze of inspired singleness of purpose, combined with his handsome, bestial face, gave him a look of precise evil. I opened my mouth but could not find anything to say to his stare. At last he shook himself and released his skirt, which swirled below his knees, a voluptuous and dusky purple, and turned away, swaggering down the hall.

“Horrible!” I whispered, unable to help myself. I was now shivering violently with fever, and the ringing in my ears had grown into a persistent whine. I moved on down the empty passage. This hall seemed narrower, more constricted than the others, and it was quiet, as though at the center of the building. I was shaken by my encounter with the dancer and glanced back often, making sure that I was not being followed. Soon you will be outside, I told myself, but I did not believe it, no longer believed anything that I told myself, no longer believed that there had been sunlight, festivals, screens of poplars beside a canal. The air was dancing before my eyes. A stairway opened in front of me, and I shuffled down, trying to cling to the wall, which was smooth and cold and offered me no support; and at last, overcome by exhaustion, I sank to my knees and leaned back against the stairs, my mind reeling in the stillness.

And then, suddenly, she was there. She did not appear, as a person would, but at once the world became aware of her presence. With a violence, a blinding rupture, she was there at the foot of the stairs, and the air opened, trembling, to receive her. The city wept. I cried out from the intense pain in my head, throwing up my arms to protect my face… But she was there, I could still see her, just as she had been on the ship, with her childlike shape, her long red hair, and her face, unclear in the brilliance. The air shuddered, flashing with the strain of having to hold her, humming like sheets of steel, like sheets of lightning. There was the chaos in the hall of a disturbed geography, of a world constrained to rearrange itself.

She raised her small hand. There was the shock of opening vistas, of landscapes over which I hurtled, helpless; and she said, in a voice as intimate as if she were pressing her fingers on my brain: “Rise! Rise, Jevick of Tyom!”

Chapter Seven From a Somnambulist’s Notebook

Our islands are full of ghosts.

I wrote those words. I scribbled them down after I had found my way back to the Hotel Urloma, after waking on the steps of a brothel in the city of Bain, a haunted man. Three words in Olondrian. In Kideti, they are five.

I wrote in a paperbound record book, a book I have with me still. Soft leather covers, a string to wrap around the whole and keep it shut. I had purchased the book to keep track of my transactions in the market, and I used it for this purpose for several weeks. So there are pages with lines of Kideti numbers, bold compartments, rows of accounts. And then on the last few sheets this eruption, this disorder. Newspaper clippings stuffed inside, hurried copies from the books in Yedov’s library. A true mirror of my life in Bain.

Our islands are full of ghosts. They come from the flowers and from the water. They are those who are always waiting, outside on the paths. There are the Sea Dead and the Rotted Dead whose bodies have never been burned, the Poisoned Dead, and the Animal Dead—the ghosts of the sacred beasts. They are the reason we walk under trees, avoid the shapes made by the moonlight, never toss seeds carelessly over our shoulders in the darkness. They haunt the hills and crossroads and are implacable on the beaches where the Sea Dead hold their ragged, ungraceful dances at festival time. If you see one you must kiss your fingers and pray, you must back away slowly, and above all you must never ask its name. Your house must be purified with smoke, and you must have smoke in your hair, wear strips of charmed leather about your ribs, underneath your clothes, rub your chest and neck with peppermint oil, avoid the ocean, keep fires burning close to you, and chew dried pumpkin-flower. If you are pursued, then you must consult the doctors, who will treat you with hot needles, purges, the constant rattling of gourds. I have heard them chanting from a nearby house: “Take back your beads, Ghost, take back your fan, take back your sandals.”

I have seen her three times—perhaps four.

First, on the steps. Then in the warren of streets where I wandered, asking strangers the way to the canal. She bloomed into life in a nearby wall, like a cancer of the stone. I threw myself backward, screaming, and collapsed in a gutter.

I must have lost consciousness for a time. The stealthy hands of a beggar woke me. He abandoned my pockets when I sat up, and showed me his broken teeth. His eyes were crushed dried figs. “Tobacco,” he hissed, tugging the hem of my shirt. “Tobacco for the beloved of the gods.”

In the Street of Owls I saw her again: the ghost of the Kiemish girl. She looked at me with the eyes of one born into the country of herons. With a lift of her hand she dispelled my reason; I gibbered into the sunlight; I ran, shrieked, struck my head against walls, seeking the merciful dark. My terror was stronger than shame. When I awoke again, a couple were passing me, and the woman twitched her skirt away from my prone body. Her dress was pale pink, her hair secured with pins. “Shocking,” she said, and her companion replied: “It is to be expected, after the Feast.”

Is there some connection between the Feast of Birds and this apparition? I wish I could find one of my companions from that night—one of the Wings. Are they all haunted like me? I cannot believe it. There were so many of them. Even here in the hotel I would hear their screams.

I said I had seen her “perhaps four times.” Now I must call them five.

I was not sure, at first; I thought it was only a nightmare caused by the horrible events of the Feast. Now I know she pursues me when I sleep.

I have seen her again. There is no escape. I pace the room, boil coffee, drink glass after scalding glass. I speak to myself in the mirror. I say: “Wake up. Open your eyes. Look at me. My curse on you if you bow your head.”

Sten has told Yedov that I am suffering from a fever.

Sten knows all. I told him at once. I said: “It is a jeptow.”

He kissed his fingertips at the word. Jeptow — a wild spirit, a ghost, a citizen of the ghost country, jepnatow-het. But he is not superstitious. He keeps to the quiet and ordered religion of his forefathers who have served my family since the War of the Crows. As I write he is tending a fire in a clay bowl, burning fenugreek against ghosts, and rosemary, “the salt herb,” a prayer to the winds.

What is she?

She arrives in chimes. The air tolls and bellows. Now I understand that light has a sound. She is an absolute stranger to me: she is stranger than the effulgent sea, more alien than the pale coast, the foreign city. In vain I sob: “Ghost, begone, your hair is under the mountain”—the chant of frightened children under far trees.

“Help,” I scream. To no one.

And the ghost answers: “No. You help me.”

Her voice metallic, a harp of light.

“You help me.” What does she want?

I have asked her. I cried: “How? Tell me how.”But I cannot bear her voice and presence for very long. Her small mouth opens and closes, a cave of light. And night falls down around me like a temple of broken glass.

What does she want? I think—

I write left-handed. The right is bandaged: last night I put it through the window. I woke to find Sten bending over me, winding strips of a torn sheet around my hand, two tears on the burnt leather of his cheek. He told me he had tried to turn me before I reached the window, but I moved suddenly and he was too late. I told him not to blame himself. He has guarded me well on my dream walks, kept me from falling into the brazier or the fire.

He says we are going home today.

He is too weary to smile fully, his face a mask. Poor Sten—

I have not opened this book for three days. I have not had the strength. But I must think. I must act, or perish. I am alone. Sten and the others have gone back to the islands without me.

Some buried part of me suspected the truth. A hidden intuition whispered: “She will not let you get away.” I ignored it. I concentrated on the coming voyage, on our plans for keeping my ailment secret until we arrived in Tyom. I was to board the ship wrapped in a cloak—for I know that my face reflects my suffering, and I appear to have aged ten years in as many days. Sten would take me quickly into the hold. We did not reveal my condition to the other servants, for fear that the tale of my haunting would reach the captain.

It was when Sten asked me what Olondrians think of ghosts, and how they manage in such cases, that I realized I did not know. Indeed, to my knowledge there is no word in Olondrian for “ghost.” There is only the wordnea, which means “angel.”

And so we resolved to take no chances. There are few Kideti captains who would willingly allow a ghost on board, and I assumed an Olondrian captain would feel the same.

I am not sure of this, now. But in the end I was not permitted to see for myself.

It began in the Street of the Clocks. First, a tightness in my forehead. Then nausea, against which I clenched my teeth and prayed. Then headache, then loss of reason. Before we reached the harbor and the ship, pain cracked my mind like a pair of silver tongs.

“No,” she said. A single word, a stab of pure and agonizing light.

The time that followed is vague in my mind, flickering like a storm. I know that I fought to get out of the carriage. I fought Sten, my good Sten. I said: “Let me out. She’ll kill me.” These words I remember well.

When I had come out of the carriage, she faded, and I could see again. A crowded street, curious dockworkers gathered around the scene. The horses stamped and rolled their eyes. Sten took me by the shoulders.

Even now I cannot believe that he is gone.

I must believe it. He is gone, and it was I, his Ekawi, who sent him away. I know that I did right. It is only a matter of weeks before the winds change and Olondrian ships stop sailing for the south. What would happen to the farm, to my mother and Jom, without Sten? He would have missed two full growing seasons had he stayed too long. He knew it, but still he tried to stay. He said: “We’ll book a new passage next week.” I told him it was no use. I said: “The ghost will not let me go.”

The ghost will not let me go. I came back to the Hotel Urloma alone. I walked through the room of white roses and down the hall. Yedov looked up from his newspaper when I entered the dining room. A cigarette before him, a glass of tea.

I told him I was too ill to travel. He brought me here, to this room on the roof of the hotel.

He said he had already rented my former room. He did not look at me when he spoke. He unlocked the door to a cramped stairway and led me up to this chamber, the “student’s quarters.” It stands alone on the roof. He has not used it for some time. “Students, you know,” he said, “furniture broken, strange women at all hours.” I told him yes, I saw, I understood. I was suddenly anxious for him to leave. Unsure of how much he knew. Afraid.

“You help me.”

I remember coming back through my beloved Bain. Passing the Street of the Saints, the Street of the Baths, where the air is perfumed with myrrh. The Street of Acacias, the Street of Red Eaves. The Street of Prince Kelva’s Mistress. The Street of Harps, populated with echoes.

“Oh streets of my city,” writes Fodra, “how you depart when I enter you.”

I passed the Street of the Dead, the Cemetery of Bain. Its whitewashed ramparts glitter like spun sugar. There stand the miniature homes of the dead, tiled fantasies, like houses for children.

Beneath them Olondrian bones are falling to dust.

Somewhere, she is like that too. She must have died here, in Olondria, in the north. She was buried, then, not burned as is our custom in the islands. She is one of the Rotted Dead.

She must desire what all such dead desire: to be consumed. To be released.

“You help me.”

“Do you want me to find your body?” I screamed.

My own voice frightened me: too harsh, too much. As I slipped into darkness, I heard swift feet downstairs. Dogs barked from a neighboring yard.

From The Starling, a Bainish newspaper, just after the Feast of Birds:

The Feast of Birds is over, to the relief of all upright citizens. Small fortunes were lost, glass broken, reputations irreparably soiled—but this will hardly come as news to longtime residents of the capital. What is more alarming is that, contrary to popular belief, the so-called Feast is no mere invasion, attended solely by outsiders. This writer observed, from a convenient window, a person very like Lady Olami of Bain wailing before the effigy of the Goddess.

Such displays are proof that despite the best intentions of the Telkan, whose wisdom in the matter is undeniable, the cult of Avalei persists in its more unworthy forms, and can be expected to do so for some time. Those who thought that the Telkan’s decision to prevent the High Priestess of Avalei from attending the Feast would crush it, must admit themselves in the wrong. It seems that as long as Avalei’s priests, bulls, eunuchs, and peasant hangers-on exist, chaos will clog our streets every Month of Apples.

But is there no solution, nothing to be done? Is our only response to be a sigh, and the sweeping of broken glass and refuse from our doorsteps? No! For it has been reported that letters are flooding the Blessed Isle, complaining of damages and requesting more guards. Respectable Bainish hearts must not lose hope! We must add our voices to the Telkan’s, until the Red and White Councils answer our demands! Citizens, make your wishes known: no more harlots’ festivals in Bain, no thieves’ holidays, no Feast of Birds!

Letters respond in the next several issues. Agreement, approval, reports of crimes committed during the Feast. No challenge. No defense.

The windows in the student’s quarters are all covered with boards. They must have been broken long ago. Prepared for me.

A door leads onto the roof, where herbs and vegetables grow in pots. Sometimes I step out for air. I lock the door at night.

A table. A candlestick so dented it looks as if it was used in a brawl. A fireplace wreathed in grinning figures, some missing a nose or a horn.

My satchel, my books. Olondrian Lyrics, the binding stained with seawater. the Romance of the Valley, beginning to curl with use. Newspapers, pens. I have no talents, but unless my master failed, I am a decent scholar. That scholarship must serve me as sword, and shield, and friend.

From The Lamplighter’s Companion, the Olondrian almanac and general encyclopedia, the entry on angels:

Angels. Hallucinations.

Once believed to be the spirits of the dead, and to possess knowledge of the Land Beyond, the angels are now understood to be merely products of human minds which have become unbalanced through illness, shock, or intrinsic abnormalities. In the days of widespread ignorance and the reign of the cult of Avalei, diseased individuals were adored as saints rather than treated and returned to health. Suffering and folly ensued. The worship of angels, like geomancy and reading the taubel, was outlawed and registered as a crime in 939.

939. Three years after my master left Olondria.

A fruitless trip to the Library of Bain.

There are no books about angels. I countered my weakness with coffee and seared beef at a café and took a carriage to the great pillared edifice. How often I walked its halls in happier days! Now I clung to the banister as I climbed the stairs to the seventh floor. Here, in the Collection of the Rare and Unseen, I paged through discourses on magic and theological textbooks. Sometimes I found a word, a line, that seemed to promise discovery. “Breim may have been led to his profession by his mother, who was visited by an angel for six years.” “According to the Angel of Berodresse, as reported by his mouthpiece Gerna, there will never be a machine capable of flight.”But I found no treatises, no arguments, no explanations. Only a little white volume, Jewels from a Stone, for the Edification and Uplifting of Eager Hearts, which repeated what I had read in the Companion—there are no angels, only sick minds—and appended several prayers to restore order to the spirit.

Even Leiya Tevorova’s autobiography was absent.

I asked for it at the scribe’s desk on the first floor. The scribe on duty, a dark, angry-looking girl with deep red cheeks, stared at me so coldly her lashes seemed to bristle.

What did I want with such a book?

I told her I had heard it praised as one of the greatest prose works in the language.

“Oh?” she said, her pen raised. “And who said so?”

“I don’t know his name,” I said. “I met him in the spice markets.” And I turned around and left her.

I wish my master were here.

I wish Sten were here.

I don’t want to be alone.

A pile of old cotton lies before me on the table. Yedov let me have the hangings on the skeletal bed in the student’s quarters, which had fallen into rags. Each night I read till I feel the chime, the quiver in the air, that signals the ghost. Then I close my book and blow the candle out. I lock the door, force a wad of cotton into my mouth, and bind it in place with another strip to muffle my cries.

I ask myself: How long? How long can I bear it?

It is not only the light. The light brings pain, but the pain is not everlasting. When the force of it grows too strong, I drop into darkness. No, the pain is not the worst thing. The worst thing is the sense of wrong, like the uncovering of a crime.

Our two worlds scrape together like the two halves of a broken bone.

My world has changed forever, tainted by that touch. Jissavet, my countrywoman, is dead. She is now as vast as a cavern, as small as a bead on a woman’s scarf, indifferent like a landscape. She has died in the city and in the gardens and in the unnameable forests, and in all the great plains and seas of the earth her death lies like a corruption.

She brings me images from her past, like a diabolical dowry. A window. A street.

I writhe against them. They are not mine.

From The Lamplighter’s Companion:

Jewels from a Stone, for the Edification and Uplifting of Eager Hearts. A book of wisdom collected by Ivrom, Second Priest of the Stone, and published by the Imperial Press in 931. The book has been reprinted six times to date. Of particular interest are the chapters on the evils of luxury, idleness, and wine. The chapter on reading includes the verse “And I am helpless before thee like a child,” which is said to have made the Telkan weep.

Ivrom, Priest of the Stone. The second to hold this holy office. Ivrom was born in Bain in 883. On the death of his predecessor, the First Priest of the Stone, in 928, he accepted the leadership of the cult at the Telkan’s request. He has published over fifty books and pamphlets explaining the wisdom of the Stone his predecessor found in the desert of Ludyanith, including the popular and influential Jewels from a Stone. A widower with one daughter, he resides with the Telkan on the Blessed Isle.

Locked gates. Empty roads.

Leiya Tevorova. A deranged woman and moderately gifted writer. Her preposterous autobiography, used in schools for a century after her death, was denounced by the Priest of the Stone and banned in 934.

When I am too ill to go downstairs, Yedov brings me a bowl of soup on a tray. He never forgets me. I am grateful for this, and wary. At the sound of his foot on the stair I peel myself from the floor, clamber onto the bed, touch my head to find any bruises I must explain.

He enters, stiffening slightly at the smell of the chamber pot. He will send the scullery boy to take it down.

Thank you. Thank you for the kindness. Thank you for the soup.

Do not expose me. Do not send me away.

“Human minds… unbalanced through illness, shock, or intrinsic abnormalities.”

A lie. She is no illusion.

Avalei. The Goddess of Love and Death, one of the Gods of Time. According to her legend she is the daughter of Leilin, the Goddess of Healing, and Heth Kuidva, the Oracle God. Her brother Eliya compared her in beauty to the goddess Roun, for which both he and his sister were banished to the Land of the Dead. Avalei is said to return every spring. She is called the Ripened Grain, and rules the summer according to the understanding of simple minds. Fanlewas the Wise, in his book The Serpent and the Rose, describes her in the following terms:

“The Goddess Avalei is a most mysterious figure, perhaps even more enigmatical than the Moon. She is the presence of grain, of the cultivation of the earth. She was there when first we put our hands into the soil. She is all laughter and love, she is the agreement of the wild things, the acquiescence of earth in our endeavors… And like her mother, Leilin the Mother of us all, she has the strangeness of having been human clay before she was made divine. And yet—O wondrous mystery!—she is also the Queen of the Dead, who possesses, instead of hands, the paws of a lion. It is she who sits on that dark throne. Yet she also walks in the orchards. She is the mother of both kings and vampires…”

The cult of Avalei flourished during the reign of the House of Hiluen, until the ascendancy of the current Telkan. The goddess was worshipped in many forms, called Velkosri, the “Plague-Lily,” in the north, and in the far south Temheli, the “Queen of Flutes.” The crimes of this cult, their fleecing of the peasants, their lust for political power, and the gross wealth of their temples, are notorious. In recent years their influence has happily lessened, particularly since the outlawing of one of their most offensive practices, the courtship and worship of angels.

I have been to the Horse Market.

In the Street of Tanners a stinking breeze made me retch, and I drank the trickle from the mouth of a carved bat near the Architects’ Prison. In the Market the painted beasts, half-tamed, driven out of the west, reared and snorted in the dread smell of skin become leather.

Merchants argued with dust-streaked horsemen. Horses and cattle jostled together, gazelles, wild ostriches, and the camel, that descendant of the dragon. At the Carriage House I reserved a seat in a coach bound for Ethendria. The first step on a journey toward the body.

I remember the name of the place she was traveling to: Aleilin. Named for the Goddess Leilin, patroness of healers.

Yedov: “Will you not have a doctor, telmaro? I know a most gifted and discreet lady. It appears to me that your illness is a stubborn one.”

No. No doctors.

“Come, telmaro. Try to be reasonable. Put yourself in my hands. Your suffering makes me suffer.”

He pulled a rickety chair to the table, set his bulk down carefully. His eyes like melted caramel in the candlelight.

“Trust me.”

A curl on each shining cheek. An odor of heliotrope.

Tears filled my eyes. The desire to confide in him made me tremble.

“What is your trouble?” he whispered.

“A dead thing. Something dead.”

He leaned close, urgent. “An angel?”

Yes. Yes, I said. An angel.

I hope I have not done wrong. I fear

The last words in the book.

They came for me the following afternoon. Yedov walked in first, twisting his hands in the strings of his morning coat. “I’m sorry,” he blurted, stepping aside to make way for the soldiers.

There were two of them, one silver-haired, one young. Both wore the dark-blue coats and embroidered sashes of the Imperial Guard.

The silver-haired man moved toward me. His eyes, behind his enormous hooked nose, were not unkind. He cleared his throat, and the beads clacked on his plaited beard.

“What is your name?”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

“Your trade?”

“I am a pepper merchant.”

“Your business here?”

“The same that brings all manner of merchants to Bain.”

He smiled, his eyes growing colder, green lakes in a glacial wind. “We have been told of a disturbance. Noise. Screaming. Can you explain?”

The younger soldier was writing in a book. He raised his head, expectant.

My mouth was dry. “I,” I said, glancing at Yedov. He was busy examining the frame of the ancient canopy bed, running his finger along the wood as if checking for dust.

“You told me to trust you,” I said.

“Pay attention, please,” said the silver-haired soldier. “You are under suspicion of illegal acts. Be so good as to collect your things. You are to come with us to Velvalinhu on the Blessed Isle, to be examined by the Priest of the Stone.”

“What sort of examination?”

“Come,” said the soldier. “Our time is short.”

Then, as I did not move, he added: “Nothing’s been proven yet, you know. The priest may dismiss your case altogether. But if you force us to take you in chains, it will make an unfortunate impression.”

The younger soldier was trying to unclasp a length of chain from his belt.

“What are you doing?” snapped his superior. “That won’t be necessary.”

“I thought,” the young man said, blushing.

“Nonsense,” the older soldier snorted as I gathered my belongings. “You can see he’s perfectly docile.”

I stuffed my books and clothes into my satchel, adding Yedov’s Lamplighter’s Companion without a qualm.

“And what about me?” asked Yedov.

“You!” said the soldier. “You’ll hear from the Isle.”

“But I acted in good faith! I informed you the moment I suspected—”

“You can appeal if you don’t like it,” the soldier said.

I stood up and put my satchel over my shoulder. Outside the day was growing darker, light rain falling among the towers of the city. When the gray-haired soldier saw me looking at him, he flashed his teeth. “That’s right!” he said. “We shall go together, as the lid said to the pot!”

Then, as if my expression touched him, he added: “Come, have courage. On the Isle we have two blessings. One is music. The other is clarity.”

Clarity. “We have the sea, the forests, the hills,” he said. “It is holy country. And ours is the Holy City.”