A Stranger in Olondria

Chapter Eight The Tower of Myrrh

The Holy City: a city of pomegranates, of sounding bells. An incandescent city, a city of plumage. By day its lofty balconies are haunted by tame songbirds, and at night by cavorting bats and furred owls. It is peopled with silent figures painted on the walls and ceilings, or hunting elusive game through tapestries, or standing at the end of a passage: blind, with stone curls, but dressed in sumptuous robes with a coating of dust. Solitary, a young gazelle comes skittering down a hall, its dark eyes wide, wearing a ruby collar. It noses its way behind a curtain to eat its meal of mashed barley served in a dish of rare blue porcelain.

When Firdred of Bain was named to be cartographer to the Telkan, he wrote: “And so, in the way of the ancient sages, I retired at last from my weary life to a house perfumed with incense, in the land to the north of which all journeys end.” This reflects the Olondrian belief that the dead dwell in the north, that the dead land is “the country north of the gods,” and thus that the Blessed Isle is the gate between two holy empires, between Olondria and the place which “is not earth, and is not void.” At certain times of the year the king and queen go to the northernmost tip of the Isle, there to make sacrifices of an unknown nature, on an altar within a hill so sacred that birds do not land on it. At such times it is customary to say: “They are meeting with the Grave King.”

Perhaps it is the nearness of death, or the northern obsession with it, which gives the place its peculiar, drowning languor. The rich halls seem embalmed, and the air is saturated with scent. The beds are enclosed in boxes, like carven tombs… And the extravagance, the gorging voluptuousness of court life, the nobles dreaming in baths of attar of roses, the dishes of quails’ brains or of certain glands of polar bears, suggest a greed for life at the gateway of death. There are rooms of painted concubines sleeping in wanton poses. Behind the gardens the iloki, the saddlebirds, squat: those massive fowls the Telkans ride to war, riddled with parasites and stinking of death, whose wild cries ripen the fruit.

And is it death that gives the festive nights their vibrancy? Is it death that makes the ballrooms echo with laughter, adding a touch of fascination, as a piquant sauce of his enemies’ eyeballs spiced the meat of Thul, the nineteenth Telkan? For sometimes the rooms explode with color, as if in a storm of tulips, and laughing faces are passed among the mirrors; the fountains in the square run gold with fermented peach nectar, and pleasure boats illuminate the lake. Courtiers smoke in the stairwells, their faces ruddy with wine and feasting, and princesses throw lighted tapers from the balconies. Everywhere there are handsome figures, drenched in scent and lavishly costumed—only the loveliest, only the brightest stars, gain this society.

And perhaps it is this, and not the nearness of death, which exhausts the atmosphere. Perhaps it is simply the grandeur, the over-refinement, the febrile nature produced by centuries of mingling a few exalted bloodlines, the oppressive stamp of the divine. Cries of rage echo down halls where antique paintings glitter. A marmoset is found strangled in an arbor. Two hundred years ago an anonymous court poet prayed: “Defend us from the persecution of our superiors.”

And they, the superiors, the nobility—they are drunk with freedom, indulging their various tastes without restraint, riding out to hunt before dawn, whipping their favorite servants, or feverishly copying manuscripts in the library. The passions of the aristocrats are famous: there was Kialis, the princess whose experiments poisoned more than a thousand birds; there was Drom, who insisted on lancing his peasants’ boils himself, and Rava whose craving for opals beggared the provinces. There have been Telkans who relished army life and filled the banqueting halls with soldiers who picked their teeth at the bone-strewn tables; there have been patrons of dramatists and musicians, patrons of guilds. And innumerable princes infatuated with roses.

The light slides down the corridors of that “City of Five Towers.” In the east it strikes the Tower of Pomegranates, with its copper spires and gardens of flamboyant scarlet peonies, where the Teldaire dwells with her children and attendants. It passes on to the Tower of Myrrh, which houses shrines and temples, and gilds it with a pale marmoreal splendor; then it plays over the central Tower of Mirrors, turning the battlements dusky pink and flashing brilliantly through the galleries. In the west it drowns itself in the heavy jade of the Tower of Aloes, where the scribes sit at their desks in the Royal Library; lastly it warms the blue of the Tower of Lapis Lazuli, and the fragrant, shuttered chambers of the Telkan.

In a moment the sun has dropped behind the hills, like a lamp extinguished. In this city they say “the darkness falls like a blow.” The gazelle looks up, then trots away down an avenue of brocades, leaving a trail of pellets like dark seeds.

They took me to that city, to Velvalinhu. We traveled on one of the barges of the king, a funereal-looking vessel lined with cushions. A black leather awning provided some protection from the rain, though the soldiers suggested I store my satchel in the hold. I sat with them on damp cushions while the bargemen, wearing dark hats trimmed with silver bells, poled their way down the canal. At the sea they exchanged their poles for oars. They sang: “Long have I carried the king’s treasures. But the corals of Weile are not so red as your mouth.”

Bain drew away from me, vague in the mists. Then the rain stopped, the sky lightened, and the bright sea spread around me on every side. As Ravhathos writes in his Song of Exile, “I turned my face to the north”—and like his, my heart was “shivering like a stringed instrument.”

Islands dotted the sea. The imperial barge slid past them in silence: the white, uninhabited knob called the Isle of Chalk, the lovelier islands with mountains and streams, where palaces stood in groves of cypress, the Isle of the Birds, the Isle of the Poet’s Daughters. “Fair are the isles of Ithvanai,” writes Imrodias the Historian, “but fairest of all is the Blessed Isle itself, the fallen star which all the waters of Ocean could not extinguish, the fragrant island, the asphodel of the sea.” It glimmered, at first an indistinct shadow, a gathering of mists, then more solid, its pier a pale ray on the sea and its mountains cloaked in olive trees. We left the other islands behind, and it stood in serene majesty, like a white horn or an amethyst crown, like a city of alabaster.

A carriage met us at the pier, and we rumbled down the smooth Eagle’s Road, the soldiers smoking, the windows obscured by an anise-flavored fog. I slid open the pane beside me for air. A clement countryside rolled past, its vineyards bedecked with grapes like beads of glass. The thought of the coming “examination” distracted me from those tidy fields, but I gasped when I saw Velvalinhu at last, forgetting everything for a shining instant in the iridescent glow of its pillars of Ethendrian marble.

In the islands we do not pierce the clouds, for fear of the goddess of rain. But the northerners are prey to no such dread. The pinnacles of Velvalinhu rose to heights I had never seen in the capital, and never imagined even in nightmare. They were varied, no two alike, formed by the separate wills of kings: smooth walls rose beside walls puckered with carvings, marble figures leaned from the balustrades and adorned the towers where spires of obsidian sprang up, somber, drinking the light. Mirrors flashed from conical roofs, jade dogs snarled on the battlements, flights of steps hung shimmering in midair, and ornamental trees grew in the gardens, impossibly high, that peeked from between the richly tiled walls. We crossed the magnificent square in front of the palace, as vast as a desert, and rumbled down a slope into a subterranean carriage house. I thought of the words of Tamundein’s ode: “O lamp of the empire, forest of marble, caravan of the winds, Velvalinhu!”

In the carriage house our coachman opened the door, holding up a lamp. “What news?” he asked.

“All bad,” the old soldier answered cheerfully as he stepped out. “Low pay, high taxes, and no prospect of war outside Brogyar country.”

“I’d like to go to the Brogyar country,” the younger soldier said.

“You!” his companion exclaimed with a laugh. “They’d pickle you like a herring.”

The coachman chuckled appreciatively and tilted his head toward me. “What’s this one for?”

“The Tower of Myrrh.”

The coachman stepped away from me, and the soldier bade him good-day with a grim smile.

I followed him down a torchlit tunnel, the young soldier walking a pace or two behind me. We entered a hall with the dimensions of a temple. Three, perhaps four houses like my own in the islands might have been stacked inside it. Light filtered through its high windows, ladders of floating chalk. Such space, such silence. On one wall hung the triumphant painting of Elueth’s wedding, one of the last masterpieces of Fairos the Divine, its gold paint mellowed by centuries of smoke. I knew the picture: I had seen it reproduced in my master’s copy of The Book of Time. The human girl knelt in the foreground, wearing a smile of celestial happiness. Each fold in her dress was large enough to contain me. Her hair was “smooth as a shadow,” and she held one palm turned outward, showing where she had been burned by the skin of the god.

A second hall. A third. The soldiers’ boots clicked in the stillness. Each window let in, like a secret, a halo of misty light. We climbed a marble staircase, then another. No one accosted us, no one passed. It was as if the great palace were utterly deserted. Only when the halls narrowed and began to fill with an acrid smoke did we see a few figures, preoccupied men and women in long robes. They flitted past us without a word, like moths. At last, in an ill-lit room where urns smoked in the corners, the old soldier stopped with a cough.

“Well,” he said, “we will leave you.”

I nodded, my fingers tight on the strap of my satchel.

“Don’t look so frightened,” he advised me. “It never helps.”

He turned to his young subordinate and jerked his head toward the door. “Come on. They’ll give us bread and tea in the printer’s shop.”

They went out, the young soldier’s chain clanking softly at his belt, and left me alone in the eerie and stifling darkness. I heard a rustle and turned. A tall, slim figure was moving toward me across the carpet, carrying something white in both hands.

I do not know what I expected: perhaps a priest in a belted robe or a green-cloaked scholar with the smug air of Olondrian medical men. Certainly not this tall woman in a dark dress, her delicate features lit from below by a lamp in a globe of frosted glass.

“Are you the petitioner?” she asked.

“Teldarin,” I answered, “I am a stranger.”

She gazed at me closely. “But you have come to see my father.”

“Is he the Priest of the Stone?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am—I think—he is to examine me.” I paused, unable to trust my voice.

“Welcome,” she said. She balanced the light on one hand and held out the other; I clasped her fingers warmed by the lamp like heated wax. “My name is Tialon,” she said. “My father is the Priest of the Stone. He’s waiting for you; we received the letter yesterday.”

“The letter.”

“Yes. From someone called Yedov. You were staying with him, I think.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, compassion softening her gaze.

I laughed: a short, hard sound.

“Your name?”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

“Jevick. Come with me. He’s waiting for you in his study.”

I followed her. She was taller than I, and her curls were cropped short, as if she had been ill. There was nothing elegant in her cloth slippers, her plain wool dress; had she not introduced herself as the daughter of a priest, I would have taken her for some sort of superior servant. Yet she had a certain distinction, an air not of loneliness but of self-sufficiency. In the next room, where gray light filled the windows that dripped with returning rain, I saw that she was older than I had thought, perhaps thirty years old. Her left temple was tattooed with the third letter, against insomnia.

“Father,” she said.

I did not see him at first; the room was crowded with desks, each covered by a landslide of books and papers. I only noticed him when he cleared his throat: a bent old man in a black robe, seated by the fire on a high-backed chair.

The knob of his head gleamed in the grainy light as he gazed at me. At the sight of his carven features my heart gave a throb of hope: he had the same arrogant, solitary look as the doctors of my own country, men who cured illnesses of the spirit, men who banished ghosts. Ivrom, Second Priest of the Stone—a holy man. “Greetings, veimaro,” I said. “My name—”

I stopped, taken aback, as he moved toward me. He did not rise: the chair itself was moving. As it drew closer, I noticed the delicate wheels at its sides, spider-webbed with spokes.

The old man advanced with a slight ticking sound. When he reached me, his gaunt hand, resting on the arm of the chair, gave a barely perceptible twitch, and the vehicle stopped. He tilted his head back to read my face. His eyes were startling, large and light, rich signal lamps still burning in a shipwreck.

“So,” he said. A single word, yet my heart sank at the sound. His voice was thick with phlegm, disdainful, the voice of a tyrant.

“Jevick, please sit down,” his daughter murmured, pushing a stool toward me. I glanced at her and she nodded, her eyes giving back the light from the windows. Something in her gaze, so steady and frank, encouraged me, and I sat down.

“So,” said the priest again. “You claim to have seen an angel.”

“I claim nothing. It is the truth.”

“So you say.” He cocked his head as if observing a process of nature. “But it’s original,” he said. “A ludyaval.”

Ludyaval—an “unlettered one.” Illiterate: a savage.

“I can read and write,” I said, stung, “and speak Olondrian fluently.”

“Ah! And you are proud of yourself, no doubt.” He shook his head, smiling so that his lips whitened, drawn against his teeth. “Well, well. Come, there is no need for this. The matter is a simple one. Tell me who has sent you, and you may go.”

“No one sent me. I was brought here by soldiers.”

“Do not toy with me,” he said more softly. “Give me your master’s name.”

I swallowed. Rain rapped sharply against the windows, the fire stirred in its bed. The old priest watched me, clutching the arms of his enchanted chair. “I,” I said. My blood sang in my ears; a strange sea, white and full of stars, seemed to be rising about me, filling up the room.

“A name!” barked the priest.

I blinked fiercely to clear my vision. His arm in its black sleeve flashed through the mists around me like a wing. Parchment crackled. He spread a map on his knees and jabbed it with a yellow fingernail. “Where did you go in Bain? Where were you corrupted?”

“Corrupted—”

“Yes! Was it Avalei’s priests? I doubt it; they are too cunning for that these days. Was it a merchant? Was it the proprietor of your hotel? What was his name?”

“Yedov,” I whispered.

“Was it he?”

“No—that is—I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t know what you mean.”

The priest turned to his daughter, who had drawn up a stool and sat near us, her chin in her hand, her expression thoughtful and tinged with pity.

“You see?” he said. “That’s why they chose this ludyaval. He can claim he doesn’t know anything, and we cannot prove he does.”

“But perhaps he’s telling the truth,” she said.

“I am,” I interrupted, seizing on this spark of hope. “Veidarin—”

“I am not a priestess.”

“Teldarin—”

Again she shook her head, frowning. “No. Call me by name.”

“Tialon, then—by the gods you pray to, help me!”

My cry hung in the air. The priest’s daughter seemed moved by it: her cheeks grew pale, and she sat up straighter, setting her hands on her knees. “I will,” she said. Her father groaned, wrinkling his map in a gesture of impatience. “I will,” she repeated firmly, “but you must help me too.”

“Anything. Anything you ask.” I rubbed my eyes with a trembling hand. The mist of my faintness had receded, the room growing clear again. Beneath the windows, blue in the rain, Tialon leaned forward, her hands clasped, a streak of firelight on her cheek.

“Jevick,” she said in a slow, earnest voice, “this is a serious matter. You have been brought here under suspicion of a crime. Do you know what it is?”

“No.”

“Pretense of sainthood,” she said and paused to watch me.

“Sainthood.”

“Yes. The crime of claiming contact with the spirits of the dead.”

“But I claim nothing,” I said. “I have claimed nothing. I told no one but the keeper of the hotel, and he sent me to you.” I turned from her clear green eyes to the glittering orbs in her father’s face. “I am no saint. I would not call anyone with my affliction saintly.”

“You see, Father,” Tialon said.

“I see nothing,” he snapped. “Nothing but a new ruse of the pig-worshippers of Avalei.”

Tialon sighed and turned to me. “Tell us about your island. Tell us—”

“Tell us,” the priest broke in with a sneer, “do your people worship angels?”

“No,” I said. “That is—we have good spirits which we call angels. But they are not dead. They are not the same as the dead—that is something different…”

My voice sounded very small in the room, but the priest leaned forward, intent, transfixing me with his pitiless gaze. “Not the same?”

In my mind there were vast forests, my mother’s hands, smelling of flour. There were bowls of burning rosemary and janut on their dark altar. The wind sighing in the jackfruit trees, the sound of the doctors chanting, the sound of my elder brother being beaten behind the house. I struggled to put these images into words, looking at Tialon rather than the priest, strengthened by the candor of her gaze. The room grew slowly darker as I spoke. The rain had ceased, but there was a sound of distant thunder over the sea.

“In the oldest time,” I said, “there was only the sea. There were no islands. At this time, the gods were there, but under the sea. And with them were their servants, the lower spirits, who are the angels, who are like the gods, always the same, neither increasing nor decreasing… After the world was divided, they went to live on the Isle of Abundance, which is where we go after death—those of us who die well. Those of us who do not die well—belong to another place.”

“Another place? Which place?” the priest demanded.

“Jepnatow-het,” I said softly. “The angel—no, the dead country. Of those who are dead, yet alive. The one place that cannot be reached by sea.”

“And what does it mean—to die badly?” Tialon asked.

“To die unburnt. To die at sea, or to rot, or to die in the midst of an evil passion. This angel, the one who haunts me, died in Aleilin in the north. Her body was never burned, and so she cannot rest.”

Tialon nodded. “I have read, in the books of one of our scholars, a man called Firdred of Bain, about the island people burning their dead—”

“Yes!” said the priest testily. “My daughter adores the geographers. But let me ask you, ludyaval—do you communicate with the dead?”

“No.”

“He shudders!” the priest exclaimed, sitting back and raising his eyebrows. “Well, that is something! That is out of the ordinary, at least! So your people do not seek to reach the dead; they are not grave-lovers. A splendid, a sensible people, you ludyavan! But our own people, as you may know, have a terrible passion for angels. At one time, one could scarcely dream of one’s dead grandfather without being dragged to the temple. Those who claimed they could speak with the dead were revered, and people came to them with all sorts of questions, as if they were oracles. How will the maize crop be, where is the necklace my mother gave me, whom will I marry, who stole my brown horse—all nonsense, chicanery, a farce! Yes, the love of angels was once a canker of this country, and I am the physician who removed it.”

We had arrived at a moment I must not lose. “If you are a physician,” I said, “then cure me. Help me to find my countrywoman’s body. I need to go to Aleilin, or to have the body exhumed and sent to me here. And I must burn it on a pyre.”

The old man stared at me. For a moment a look of surprise and respect flitted across his face of a bleached old cormorant battered by the snows. Then he looked at Tialon, returned his gaze to me, threw back his head, exposing a skinny throat, and laughed.

“Marvelous!” he crowed. There was no true mirth in his laugh; it was a cruel sound, like the sharpening of a beak against a stone. “He asks me to send people traipsing across the country, to dig up graves, to make summer bonfires as our peasants do when the haymaking is over. What a festival it would be! And you, I suppose,” he went on, bringing his head level to fix me with his predatory glare, “you, no doubt, would lead the procession, loved and revered by all, and we would not hear the end of it for a hundred years. No, ludyaval, it shall not be. I will not have my people duped. I will have them clean, and honest, and able to read the Vanathul. Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.”

He turned to his daughter. “The Gray Houses, I think.”

“Yes, Father,” she murmured. She crossed the room and struck a gong, sending out a clang like a spray of ice. She remained in the shadows, her face like a wafer of stone, the firelight touching only her ankle and the black nap of one of her slippers.

Her father folded his map on his knees, pressing down each crease.

“Veimaro,” I said, but he did not look up.

A moment later we heard the tramp of feet, and I stood so abruptly my stool toppled over as the guard arrived to take me to the Houses.

Chapter Nine The Gray Houses

The Gray Houses. A hospital for the mentally afflicted, located at Velvalinhu, on the southern side of the Tower of Myrrh. Built in 732, it was reserved for members of the Imperial House until 845, when, having stood empty for some time, it was opened to other noble families. At present any person, noble or common, admitted by a priest or priestess not of the cult of Avalei may receive treatment there. The Houses are run according to the philosophy of Muirn of Feirivel, who emphasized light, air, and silence in the management and cure of lunatics.

I closed the book and looked up.

White walls, a white floor, a ceiling painted like the sky.

I remembered hearing the words before: The Gray Houses. A crowded café in Bain, scattered talk of an artist everyone knew. “Shut himself in the kitchen,” they said. “Almost bled to death.”

The young woman drinking with me waggled her head. “Poor boy! He’s for the Houses.”

“The what?” I said.

“The Gray Houses,” she replied. Again that curious sideways waggle of the head, the roll of the eyes, the laugh. At the back of her dazzling smile, a single blue tooth.

I returned the book to my satchel—The Lamplighter’s Companion, stolen from Yedov’s library at the Hotel Urloma. The nurse who had brought me in had told me to use the shelves if I liked, but I would not. I would not make a home for myself in that white room. My books stayed where they were. The nurses had taken away my clothes: I wore the pale robe and sash of the Gray Houses. They had taken my purse, “for safekeeping,” my pens and ink. But writing was encouraged. They gave me a soft pencil with a rounded tip.

There were other books on the shelf. I crossed the room in four steps and bent sideways to read the titles. Kankelde, the Soldier’s Discipline. The Evmeni Campaign. A Concise History of the War of the Tongues. Fat tomes in brown calfskin, no doubt donated by some aging former soldier.

I looked up. I scratched at the wall with a fingertip, and some whitewash came off. I walked around the room for exercise, and to forget I was a prisoner. I could have gone out to the common room, where stained white couches lined the walls, but I recoiled from the society of the other patients. At kebma two of them had looked at me and whispered and giggled together: a man with a scarred head and a woman who wore a neat bandage on each fingertip. The woman had bright green paint on her eyelids, a smear of red on her mouth. When she caught my eye she waved those mysterious cotton-tipped fingers…

No, I would not go there. I walked around and around, hopelessly, in an effort to tire myself before night arrived. A lamp burned above me on the lofty ceiling, too far to reach, enclosed in an iron cage so that no one could break the glass.

The door was locked, but the angel still came in.

I burst from sleep with a cry.

She was there, a rust-colored glow, her garment on her like a liquid.

I arched my back and writhed on my cot, the whole room suddenly a grave, my heart a mad instrument beating too hard to be borne. My fear was still an animal fear, immediate and unconquerable like the scream of a donkey that catches the smell of blood.

She said many things before I could hear her over the pounding of my heart. I think that she was speaking to me of the cold. But I only saw her moving hands, her head tilted to one side, the light from her picking out the lines of the volumes on the shelf. I watched her lips as they opened and closed, unreal, a trick of her light. I imagined her hollow inside, or filled with ashes or perfume. She had an earnest look, though her eyes were still inhuman, unreadable. She moved the way I imagined eels would, under water.

Her thoughts, her images, invaded me: I was as open as a field. I saw her mother’s face, then a street corner somewhere in Bain. I knew it was Bain by the shape of the lamps. A lopsided carriage passed me in blue light. Rooftops, a midnight sky so cold the stars rang with it.

I rolled on the floor, threw myself into the walls, to escape that vision. The room went silver and tossed me to and fro like a boat. I fainted, and woke lying on the floor. A light moved above me: the mundane, greasy light of an oil lamp, so steady and natural it brought the tears to my eyes.

“There, he’s coming back.”

One of the nurses, the servants of Leilin, put his arm around my shoulders and helped me sit up. Another nurse held the lamp. The one beside me dabbed my temples with a cold handkerchief, filling the air with the odor of bruised ivy.

“There,” he said. He helped me into bed. His companion watched us, her worried face lit from below, her mustache a thumbprint.

“Can we bring you anything?” she asked.

“You can bring me a dead girl’s body.”

“What’s that?” said the other nurse, bending down.

“Nothing,” I said.

“O benevolent reader,” wrote Firdred of Bain from the road above Hadellon in the northern mountains: “Do not think that a man has ever finished his creation. A soul may always be forged in a new shape; and the fiery hand of Iva now took hold of me in earnest—nay, he even set upon me with his hammer… Ah! you ladies of Bain, lovelier than mimosa flowers, what will you think if I tell you that I bent down, and crawled on my belly into the wretched hovel of a mountainside magician, who wore a cap made out of sheep’s bladders? Only desperation caused me to submit to him, for the wound in my thigh now gave off an evil odor. I looked into his eyes smeared round with fat and told myself: A day has dawned that never was foretold…”

I, too, was set upon with a hammer; and in the clash of it I was ready, like Firdred, to seize any hope of healing. And so when the priest’s daughter, Tialon, came to my room and told me she thought she could ease my pain, I sat up on my cot and said: “Do it.”

She paused. “You are very persuadable. Don’t you want to hear my proposal?”

“I don’t need to,” I mumbled. My lip was swollen, cut by a fall in the night.

She pulled over a bredis, a scribe’s stool covered with leather, from the wall, and sat, one slippered foot crossed on the other.

I lay down again. Her face was just above the level of mine, and I gazed at the whorl of her ear and the blue tattoo on her temple. She had brought a battered writing box with her, and now she opened it on her knees and took out a small book bound in white.

She cleared her throat. Her hands were very brown on the little book. Bars of shadow from the cage of the lamp passed over her when she moved. “It’s really too early for this,” she said, glancing at me, “but I thought it would help you understand the treatment I have in mind.”

She opened the book and read: “For you are following a thread. For you are cloaked in dawn. For in a field you have found a hidden treasure. Kneel, traveler, and take it. It is a word. Now stand, take up your staff, and travel on until you find another.”

She closed the book, smoothed the cover.

“That’s your father’s book,” I said. “Jewels from a Stone.”

She looked at me and smiled. “You know it.”

“I saw it in Bain.”

“Did you read it?”

“Only a line or two. I read what it says about angels.”

A faint color warmed her cheeks. “Well. I’ve just read to you from the chapter on reading.”

Reading, she said: this was her proposal. The passage she had read to me had dropped from the mouths of gods. The words were etched in the Stone her father’s late master had found in the desert, where he had traveled at the bidding of a dream. To read the Stone, to take down the words, was her father’s life’s work, and her own work was to assist him. The chapter on reading was one of the first they had written down. She told me her father had groaned when he understood it, curled on the floor, as if in labor with the beauty of the blessing.

She said she would read to me.

“A fine idea,” I said. “What is it supposed to do?”

She frowned, not offended but examining the question. Her face wore an inward look, as if she were listening. “I think,” she said at last, “that what troubles you is an imbalance, a lack of order. And written words possess order, much more so than the words we speak. I believe you should read without stopping, read everything you can. And when you are tired, I will read to you. The method has had some success. I’ve tried it with others. One of them has now returned to her family.”

“I haven’t known many who read more than I,” I told her. But I lay on my back, and she stood up and bent over me with a gilded pen.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. She made two dots above my brows and measured the space between them with a piece of tape. Her lips pressed together in concentration. The touch of her hands was firm, though she was so thin. Her clothes had a dry smell, like earth heated by the sun. When she had finished, she jotted a few lines in a notebook from her box. “Ura’s Conclusion,” she explained. “On the effect of thought on the blood. It’s never been proved.”

She went to the bookshelf and crouched to read the titles. “Have you read any of these?”

“You’re not going to read prayers? To guide me in the ways of the Stone?”

She smiled at me over her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter what we read, but I’d rather not bore you.” She looked at the titles again. “Let’s try this. A Soldier’s Memoir.”

She brought the thick volume with her to the bredis. The print was too small for her to read comfortably, so she took a pair of spectacles out of her box. They dangled from a chain she wore like a necklace. She pressed them onto her nose, opened the book at random, and began.

Of course it was an honor to fight under her, for which I thank Him Whose Face Is Hidden. I remember the midnight watch and how we would see that the lamp was still burning in her tent, or in the tent of one of her concubines. She took all forty-seven of them with her wherever she went, and they did not complain, although some of them were just boys, and their skin was chapped like ours was in the winter and if there was no wood to heat water they went without bathing just like we did… But Ferelanyi was never the same after Drunwe died that spring, although she still had forty-six concubines to console her, which is why we soldiers say, if something in life has lost its savor, “it is just like the forty-six concubines of the general”…

Naturally, the treatment was a failure.

Still Tialon’s voice filled up the hours, and I waited for her with more impatience every day. I never heard her coming. She always knocked, then peered around the door, smiling and hesitant, carrying her box.

Clarity, I thought. Clarity and music. Her voice was low, expressive, not bell-like but vibrant like the limike, the Olondrian dulcimer. She read me the lyrics of Damios Beshaid and the letters of Skendho the Literate, the Brogyar chieftain who had asked to be buried under the Telkan’s library. She read me the plays of Neavandis the Poet with great animation, altering her voice and features to suit the characters. She was disappointed to see no change in me. After a week I no longer needed to shake my head. She could read my face.

“Don’t give up,” I whispered.

She smiled. Her hand strayed toward my pillow, toyed with a wayward string. Propriety or shyness prevented her from touching my hair. Instead she tugged at the string until it broke. She brushed it against her skirt, where it clung, a strand of white against the black.

“Tell me something,” I said, afraid she would go—afraid she would slip away to the place where she lived the rest of her life, a happy and structured region built of bookshelves, enlivened by colored ink, far from the drab misery of the Houses.

“All right,” she said.

She spoke of Neavandis, the great poet-queen. “One of her legs was shorter than the other. Only slightly, but still, she never walked. Her servants carried her in a special chair—it’s in the treasure vaults here. It’s called the Chrysoprase Seat. The Old Teldaire used to bring it out on the date of Neavandis’s death; I saw it several times as a little girl. It’s covered with bright green gems, the color of sour apples. It’s very lovely.” She paused, pulled the bredis away from the cot, and faced me.

“They say she had a lover,” she went on, thoughtful, her arms about her knees. “A groom from the Fayaleith. He was hanged for laming one of the king’s war-horses. Now, of course, everyone says he was hanged out of jealousy—the king was Athrin the Pallid, famed for his cruelty. But they also say that Neavandis poisoned one of the king’s dancing girls, the one called ‘Feet like the Palm-Leaves.’ So who can say? ‘For there are more things under the Telkan’s cloak,’ as my nurse used to put it, ‘than one could name from now to Tanbrivaud Night.’”

She pushed a tawny curl behind her ear and smoothed it down. Strips of shadow hung about her face. “It was on Tanbrivaud Night,” she said, “that they hanged Neavandis’s lover. He had been granted a last request, according to custom. He asked that he might be executed on Tanbrivaud Night. It was a severe blow to the king, who was superstitious—for those who die on Tanbrivaud Night, they say, can easily pass from the Land of the Dead to this one, and many of them become Angels of Persecution.”

“And did he persecute the king?” My voice was very soft.

“It is not known. It is more likely that he persecuted the queen. For though she wrote several more plays, including The Young Girl with Flowers, and a ninth volume of poems after his death, she began to chew milim leaves—a hereditary vice—and died at the age of fifty, as you know.”

“You don’t believe in what you’ve just said—Angels of Persecution.”

Her eyes held mine, steady and clear. “No, Jevick.”

“Then how can you explain it? And don’t say madness. Don’t.”

A tiny sigh escaped her, slight as a memory of breathing.

I shifted away from her, facing upward toward my plaster sky. But she sat so still, for so long, that at last I turned back again. She was gazing at the foot of my cot, intent. “It would be too easy,” she murmured. “Angels. For the gods do not speak as we speak.”

And how did the gods speak?

In patterns; in writing.

But sometimes it seemed she could not hear them. Her manner was sharp and nervous; she banged the door behind her. She pressed her pen hard above my eye, scowling into my skin, locked in a fruitless effort to prove Ura’s Conclusion. She thought there should have been some change, an increased heat in my bloodstream, an expansion of the brow, however slight.

“Do you listen when I read? Do you, Jevick?”

Once a tear dropped from her eye and landed on one of my cuts. It stung.

The Gray Houses are not cruel. They are kind. Each day begins with an outing for those not too distraught to stand and walk. Down the wide hall, where the lamps are always lit, each in its netting of wire, then out the big double doors into the garden. The garden is rough, a mere slope of grass surrounded by a wall. The sea is invisible but seems to be reflected in the sky. The air lively with iodine, strong. Once, at the bottom of the slope, the woman with bandaged hands found a gull with a broken wing.

Tialon came to see me there one morning. I sat against the wall with a book, and her long shadow darkened the page.

“Jevick,” she said. “How are you?”

I squinted up at her. “As you see.”

She sat beside me and laid her box in the sparkling grass.

“You’re early,” I said.

“It was so lovely outside, I couldn’t stay in.” She was in a blithe, expansive mood, leaning back to look up at the sky. “Everything is starting to smell of autumn, though it’s still warm. It smells like stone, like in the old song. Do you know it?

She gasped with laughter: “At this point the song grows mawkish, really terrible! I only like the first lines, autumn, whispering, smelling of stone… What are you reading?”

I held up my copy of Olondrian Lyrics.

She gazed at it for a moment without speaking. Then she advised me in a taut voice: “That’s a rare copy. Old. You must take good care of it.”

She sat with her back to the wall, suddenly subdued. I was not used to seeing her in such brilliant light. Her eternal dark wool appeared dusted with radiant powder; the chain of her spectacles dazzled me. I could not tell whether her lips were trembling or whether it was a trick of the sun.

All at once she said: “Tell me about your island.”

“My island.” The question was so unexpected, I stammered.

“Yes. What do you eat. What are your houses like.” She counted on her fingers, not looking at me. “Who are your lords. What are the names of your seasons. How do you dance. Anything. Tell me anything.”

“My island is called Tinimavet.”

“Go on.”

“We are farmers and fishermen, for the most part. Some of us grow tea. To be a tea-picker, you must first prove that your hands are as tender as flowers. For this reason it is usually work for young girls…”

I faltered into silence. She had put her face in her hands; her shoulders were shaking.

After a moment she bent to her writing box. She took out a handkerchief, wiped her eyes, then crumpled the handkerchief back among her books and papers.

Still she did not look at me. Her profile looked peeled and wet. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No—It is—”

She held up a hand, cutting off my words. “Inexcusable,” she said. “It is inexcusable, and I have no excuse. Let me ask—how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two.” She looked at me, her eyes wet and green as celadon. “You are very young. I think that you have not built anything yet?”

I thought of my life: lessons, a journey, an angel. I shook my head.

“No,” she murmured. “I thought not. It is dangerous to build. Once you have built something—something that takes all your passion and will—it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness.You don’t realize that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom—something which, later, will make you suffer.”

She shifted position on the grass, yanking her skirt into place. “Some would say it was built for me,” she muttered. “And it is true, or partially true. I have never had a silk dress. Since I was eleven I’ve made all my clothes myself. Not even my nurse was allowed to help me. You should have seen some of my clothes—the skirts crooked, the armpits sagging or too tight… And no one laughed. They did not laugh, because they were afraid. Afraid of my father and the Telkan. That made it worse for me. I was more alone…”

She twisted a finger in the chain at her neck. “I don’t know anything about it,” she whispered. “All that I reject. Those things forbidden by the Stone. Fine clothes, dances, wine, the season of bonfires. I’ve never been to a ball. I’ve never been anywhere but the Library of Bain. Or yes—I went to the Valley once. Once! To the city of Elueth, where my grandfather had died. I was thirteen years old, and so frightened! So frightened I hardly remember the ride in the wagon, the look of the country. We had to relieve ourselves in the grass—it terrified me! And since then, never. I have no jewels but a necklace my mother left me. And I have never worn it, Jevick—not ever. Now you will ask: what does it mean? What have I built? If I’ve never decided—if I’ve only agreed with what was decided for me—”

I shook my head, but she seized my wrist and squeezed it fiercely, twice. “Don’t pretend.”

Then she released me. The blood flowed into my wrist; it throbbed.

“Ura’s Conclusion!” she said with a harsh laugh. Tears filled her eyes again. “My father was right. It’s nonsense. I only thought if I had something of my own… I’ve never been to sea. I’ve never been to a foreign country. I’ve only read about it. I’ll never go now. Do you hear me? I’ll never go. But I have built something. You—you—”

She pointed at me, trembling. Her anger shocked me. “Where did you learn Olondrian?” she snapped.

“Olondrian? At home. I had a tutor.”

It was as if I had dashed her with water. For a moment she froze; then she seized her writing box and got up.

“Tialon!”

She walked away swiftly over the dewy grass. She did not come to see me the next day, or the next.

Time unrolled in the Houses, monotonous as a skein of wool. I was known as the Islander and was almost a model patient. I ate my food. I took the required walks. The nurses liked me, and so did the patients: once the man with the scarred head gave me an autumn crocus.

So much for the days—but the nights, the nights. Sleep, we are often told, is the sister of death; for my ghost, it was more like a doorway hung with a silken curtain. She twitched the veil aside with her finger; I jerked like a fish on the line. Then lightning, screams, the swift feet of nurses in the hall.

I fell out of bed so often they pulled the mattress onto the floor and I slept there as if on one of the pallets of the islands. A nurse sat on a chair outside my door, the same reddish, blunt-nosed man who had come to my aid on my first night in the Houses. When I asked his name, he said I might call him Ordu, which means “Acorn.” Once, when I lay exhausted, watching him clean my vomit from the floor, I asked if he believed in angels. He dropped his rag in his bucket, not looking at me. “I’ll bring you some ginger tea,” he said.

I wrote letter after letter to the Priest of the Stone, explaining my case and begging for mercy. I wrote to Tialon, asking her to come back. Ordu saw that my notes were delivered; he was an honest man; he told me frankly that no letter of mine would ever reach the mainland. Neither the priest nor his daughter answered my letters, but I went on writing them, for the act kept my mind from veering toward wild thoughts: a pencil pushed into a wrist. I paced in my chamber, barefoot and straggle-haired in my borrowed clothes, constructing logic, arguing with my own thin shadow.

Some nights the angel did not come, and I slept until Ordu opened the door and called me. After a time, only those mornings could make me weep. Having steeled myself to suffer, I had no defense against the simple light of day. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed.

All that could calm me then was my two-color copy of the Romance of the Valley. The flaking gilt on the spine, the woodblock illustrations. Felhami Fleeing the Fortress of Beal. The King Encounters a Lion. The creature’s mane deep rose and symmetrical as a wheel. I crawled down into the story, immersed myself in the looping and formal plot, the wintry battles and magical transformations, the witch Brodlian like a slug in the forest surrounded by her four white swine, and Felhami, slain, stretched out on a bed of rue. “Long he rode, and darkness fell, and the moon was his companion.” The lines unchanged for eight hundred years, arrayed in their princely clarity.

Then one day a card fell out of the book, marked with a line in a hand I did not know. It said: “Watch for us at midnight.”

Chapter Ten Midnight in the Glass Forest

A hiss woke me.

I sat up, hands clawed, every muscle taut, preparing to do battle with the ghost. But she was not there. Instead a shuttered lantern hung before me, emitting a single copper-colored ray.

I could just make out the fingers that held the light, and beyond them a shadow in a cloak.

The figure tossed something onto my mattress. “Put these on,” it whispered.

I felt what had fallen beside me: trousers, a tunic, a pair of woven slippers.

“Who are you?”

My visitor raised the light to show me his face. His eyes were shadowed, but his smile was pleasant enough. “A friend,” he said, his voice a breath. “A friend to you, and to the Goddess Avalei.”

I asked no more questions, but dressed in the dark as quickly as I could.

When I was ready I stood, and the stranger leaned close to my ear, bending slightly because, like most Olondrians, he was taller than I. “Follow me, and don’t talk until I tell you.”

“Should I bring my things?”

He gripped my shoulder briefly. “Not tonight.”

I followed him out. In the passage, tiny night lamps lined the wall, pale as fireflies. Ordu sat awake in his straight-backed chair. I stopped, but my companion took my arm and drew me onward, saying under his breath: “It’s all right.”

The nurse averted his eyes. It struck me that he had not answered when I asked him about angels, and I realized that he might have put the card with the strange handwriting into my book. The thought startled me, like a window opening in a dark house.

My companion led me through the common room, the dim beam of his lantern passing over the low ranks of deserted couches. We went down a corridor to the door, not the one that led to the garden but the other, the gateway to the Holy City. It was unlocked. We passed through like a wayward draft. My guide pulled the door behind us just so far that it appeared shut, but did not allow it to latch. Then we mounted a flight of lightless stairs and emerged onto a walkway where the night air met us, redolent with jasmine.

My companion threw back his hood. “Ah!”

He turned to me and grinned, opening his lantern so that the light swelled up between us. Then he held out his hand.

“Miros of Sinidre,” he said. “Disgraced nobleman, temporary valet, and general layabout.”

I took his hand. “Jevick of Tyom.”

“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” he said, lifting the lantern and peering at my face. “And a battered-looking one, too. What have they been doing to you in the Houses? You look hag-ridden.”

I glanced behind me. “I’ve been locked up. Shouldn’t we be moving?”

Miros shouted with laughter. “Vai!” he swore. “Thank you for reminding me of my duty. It’s easy to forget such things on a night like this. Right. Here’s the official message: Mailar, High Priestess of Avalei, greets you and requests your presence at her salon.”

I hardly knew what to make of him: his grin, his unkempt curls, the mixture of wariness and mischief in his manner. But his cheerfulness was as welcome to me as the breeze on that open walkway, and the Priestess of Avalei, I knew, was an enemy of the Priest of the Stone.

“I shall be pleased to attend,” I said.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Well done. The formalities are over. This way—and don’t go to close to the edge. The railing, I warn you, was probably made in the days of worshiping milk, and it’s a nasty drop into the garden.”

We moved through the night palace. We walked across bridges, through halls where the painted statues looked startled in Miros’s light, as if surprised in acts of darkness. Sometimes we found sentries drowsing in stairwells, leaning on their spears, or pacing the battlements with a weary stride. None of them stopped us to ask about our business. With some of them Miros exchanged envelopes or tobacco, and once a small bottle of teiva; but he seemed to receive as many gifts as he gave, so that the ritual looked less like bribery than like an arcane form of politeness. The night was cool and fresh, and on the terraces the wind came, lifting my hair, spreading the scent of nocturnal flowers. Between the towers where windows were lighted or lamps shone in the elevated gardens, bats veered fleet and precise in the light. We passed walls of whispering ivy, entered the peaked arch of a doorway. In the halls beyond, my sense of direction failed me. I knew only that we walked through one vast silence after another while the lamplight slid over frescoes and gilded floors.

At length we reached an indoor garden, its branches awash in moonlight. The only sound was the dripping of hidden water, and the ruddy glow of the lantern seemed indelicate, almost enough to wake the whorled flowers from their sleep. The waxy leaves of rhododendrons touched my hair in the scented gloom as we made our way down the tiles of the little path. At the end of this artificial jungle stood a door of dark wood flanked by tulip-shaped lamps, and Miros opened it for me with a bow.

“Here we are at last.”

I stepped past him into an antechamber. A lamp burned on a table just inside, guarded by a retainer in the last stages of senility whose thin, silvery hair hung over his shoulders. He looked at me doubtfully and then immediately lost interest and stood plucking at the loose rosettes on his jacket. Miros greeted him, clearly without expecting a response, left his lantern on the table, and hung up his cloak.

In the next room, night had been dispelled. The globes of the lamps diffused a light that artfully mimicked the beaming of the sun; they shone, glazed and bulbous, from the sweetly scented tangle of flowering vines coaxed to grow across the ceiling. This canopy of dark green life melted into the verdure that covered the walls, winding among the branches of trees growing in pots, trees that glittered with a subtle life which I soon realized was not life at all: we were entering a forest of colored glass. A bird’s wing flickered; the flowers around it tinkled. We crossed a bridge over a miniature canal that gleamed with carp. In the parlor beyond it a circle of figures sat or reclined on couches, enveloped in laughter, smoke, and the notes of a lute.

We approached them, and they grew quiet and looked at me. Their faces were proud, impassive, some of them beautifully painted. I knelt before them. Then a voice said: “Rise, dear boy!”—and I knew before I raised my head that it was the voice of the woman on the pink couch. Splendid, stupefying, she had already dazzled me with her breasts, almost completely uncovered, framed in a window of black silk. She was perhaps forty years old, her full throat powdered, encircled with diamonds and jet. Narrow eyes slumbered in her marmoreal face.

I rose, and she held out her arm. I stepped forward and took her perfumed hand. The curls of her armored coiffure shone like lacquer.

“Welcome, precious boy,” she said in her deep voice, without smiling. “I am the High Priestess. You may kiss my shawl.”

The High Priestess of Avalei was a prisoner on the Blessed Isle. She had not been to the mainland for over a decade. Yet she maintained a dignified, even a sumptuous, salon, entertaining guests from the noble families who still supported her failing cult. She made sacrifices to the goddess in one of the hillsides of the Isle; she was permitted the use of a ballroom in the Tower of Mirrors on feast days. Her shawl was of a silk so rare it felt heavy, like a live thing. When I pressed it to my lips, it left a flavor of mulberries.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sank in the yellow upholstery of the chair she indicated. I found it difficult to meet her intelligent, faintly lascivious gaze. She said in a slow and liquid voice, each word a stone dropped into a pool: “You are safe here, my child. Don’t be frightened. Someone bring him a drink.”

A sullen girl stepped out of the decorative forest and lowered an object made of glass and silver filigree into my hands.

“Thank you,” I said, holding it gingerly. It looked something like a lamp, having a round belly and four silver feet. Several others like it stood on the low table inside the circle; from each rose a curving pipe of glass.

“Have you drunk los before?” asked the High Priestess.

I shook my head.

“How fortunate you are to be trying it for the first time! Such is the priviledge of youth!”

A wire-thin, avid young lady opposite me, her skirts adorned with a fortune in peacock feathers, took one of the round vessels from the table, put her lips to the pipe, and sucked, winking a painted eye. A line of golden liquid filled the tube. I followed her example and took a cautious sip from my own vessel, drowning my tongue with the thick, sweet, and potent peach liquor which is the refreshment of the Olondrian aristocracy. Its flavor and fiery texture were overpowering: I felt as if I had drunk undiluted perfume. However, after a brief wave of sickness, energy charged my veins. I thanked the High Priestess a second time, and she gave a low gurgle of laughter, barely parting her lips, which still did not smile.

The room dissolved in los. The lute player took up his instrument again and the unctuous air filled with its sorrowful notes, while the guests fell into conversation, laughed and sipped their drinks, too polite or too scornful to notice my existence. The lady who had come to my aid with the drink beat her hand against her flat chest so that her gold bracelets jingled, emitting a series of helpless shrieks, while beside her an odd-looking man, young but with spiky, dead-white hair, punctuated his story with disdainful shrugs. One youth was trying to set his boot on fire; another, flushed and handsome, lounged on the floor with his head pillowed on a hound. A furtive monkey curled up in the lap of a gilded beauty, and she scratched its ears with her whitened fingernails. There was a slender courtier in peach-colored silk, a middle-aged lady with bunches of violets above her ears whose cheeks collapsed with every swallow of los, and among the servants on the floor a Nissian slave of searing beauty, her cheek against the arm of an empty chair.

It was a pause in the room’s noises, rather than any specific signal, which revealed the mystery of the tenantless chair. The gathered company took a breath and the player’s lute fell silent, though only for a moment, a gap between notes. When the moment had passed, the music and laughter resumed, but by then I had seen him, the silent figure standing outside the circle, his back to us, one hand held behind him, covered up to the knuckles in the foamy lace that poured from his dark sleeve. He was bending forward to feed a monkey perched among the leaves of a potted tulip tree encumbered with glass fuchsias. He seemed as though he might have been there always, in the uncertain territory of the ornamental glade.

Then he turned, and an ugly chance, combined with the fumes of los, made me believe I recognized him. In the way he turned toward me, his feral mouth, his preoccupied gaze, I thought I saw the Kestenyi dancer of Bain. The ghastly shock made me choke; my skin was awash in sweat; I thought I saw him as he had been in the brothel, with his cruel handsomeness and lunatic air, somehow transported to this dainty chamber full of aristocrats. In another moment the dreadful resemblance dissolved, and I breathed again, as the dark-clad figure advanced and joined the circle, retaining no likeness to the dancer except for a certain purity of feature and striking grace and height.

He flung himself into the velvet chair and lit a cigarette. He was instantly the focus of darted glances and covert whisperings: conversation faltered, and an almost imperceptible depression entered the room, spoiling its atmosphere of an enchanted treasure chest. The young man who had caused the disturbance leaned back in his chair. He looked less and less like the dancer who had so unnerved me: his hair, though long, was tied in a knot on his neck; he wore a black skullcap, and the circle of glass in his right eye gave him the look of a jeweler or a young scribe. He seemed an arrogant, studious, slightly corrupt young man, well-born and long accustomed to being obeyed. Yet he shared with the Kestenyi dancer an electricity: the combination of beauty and the suggestion of menace.

“Refreshments!” the High Priestess intoned in her dark and somnolent voice. Four servant girls rose and melted into the forest. The priestess had drawn herself up, the light gleaming on the swelling expanse of her breasts, and was looking at the strange youth in the black skullcap. The servant girls returned with a cart, and cries of appreciation greeted the towers of candied passion fruit it carried, the pears poached in wine, the segments of preserved ginger impaled on peppermint swords, and the little swans carved from white chocolate. This fare dispersed the gloom which had arrived with the weary stranger. It was served with a different wine, sweet and red, poured in tiny golden cups and strewn with jasmine petals, and followed by a hot drink made from cocoa beans. Under the influence of these confections the guests grew even merrier than before, rose from their chairs, and changed places, balancing their glass plates on their knees and waving their little forks, to which there clung pale flecks of whipped cream. They spoke to me at last, and complimented me on my Olondrian. I learned the word for the los-vessel: alosya. The white-haired youth came to sit on the arm of my chair, and I told him about the island of Jennet, the world’s greatest producer of chocolate.

When we were drinking our chocolate, the priestess announced abruptly: “Enough!”—and, still laughing and talking, the guests rose to their feet, carrying their steaming cups, and went out through the forest, the ladies shrieking when their hair caught in the glass buds. The servants followed them. The lute player straightened his supple legs, picked up his cushion, and departed with the confidence of one who makes his living by skill. Soon there were only five of us: the High Priestess, Miros, the courtier in peach-colored silk, the dark stranger with the lace cuffs, and myself.

The priestess arranged her skirts on the couch. An invisible monkey chittered.

“Well,” said the courtier in a peevish, strangely querulous voice: “If we’re going to hold a secret council, must we do it in such glaring light? My head has been throbbing for the past hour.”

At a sign from the priestess, Miros brought out a fantastically ornate lamp, encrusted with claws and tendrils of old brass, and set it on the table. He climbed on a stool to extinguish the ceiling lamps, jumped down, and retired among the jingling leaves. In the newly mysterious room, the company looked theatrical, hollow-eyed. Faint laughter reached us from beyond the trees.

The courtier shook himself; the dimness seemed to restore his energy. He gave me his small pale hand and said: “Auram, High Priest of Avalei.”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

He laughed. His hair was so dry and black it reflected no light at all, his lips stark red in his powdered face. “I know who you are. We all know who you are. We expended some effort to see you in person, however. Delighted to meet you at last.”

“Delighted,” the priestess echoed. I looked at her. In the gloom she had grown, her breasts and throat monumental above her black dress. Her hair was like the ramparts of a city. “I have heard,” she said, “that you have spoken with an angel.”

Her features wavered in the light cast upward from the lamp. I wished fervently that I had not drunk so much. I wanted to ask the name of the strange youth in the dark suit but decided to concentrate on saving myself. “It is true,” I said.

“Tell us,” said the priestess. And I leaned forward and blurted out the tale of my haunting, my captivity, and the ways of the Rotted Dead.

When I had finished, the priest turned to the others and clutched the arms of his chair. “If it is true, we may hold a Night Market again!”

“Yes,” said the priestess. “Still, it is too early to speak of that now. We must examine him thoroughly first. We must be sure.”

“Of course,” said Auram.

“What is a Night Market?” I asked.

The priestess turned to me, fingering the jet beads at her throat. In the sculptured mask of her face only her eyes, long and black, the lids painted with two streaks of apple-green, lived and brooded. “The Night Market, my child, is one of Avalei’s multitude of blessings. It is held in the provinces, in the countryside. People come from far away to buy and sell, to eat and drink, to be merry together if only for a night. And always at the center of it there is the avneanyi, to answer their questions and comfort them in their distress.”

Avneanyi—a mystic, a saint. “One ridden by angels.”

My blood slowed. “What sort of questions do they ask?”

“All sorts of questions, my child. The angels know all.”

“But I can’t speak to her. I don’t want to speak to her. I only want to be rid of her and go.”

“Yes,” she said. “Naturally you would like to return to your homeland. As we say, the fire of home is brighter than any other fire. And we also say, the cold of home is colder than any other. But an angel must be honored before it departs.”

“Yes,” the priest put in, in his soothing, quavering voice. “Like the Snow Child, whom we summon to cure fevers. It never departs without an offering. When the patient is cured we give it basil leaves and grain, and then it melts…”

Sweat gathered on my brow. “I can’t talk to her.”

“Not yet,” said Auram. “That is natural enough. You have not tried. Our lady will aid you in your first attempt. After that, slowly, it will become easier.”

“No,” I said.

The priest and priestess glanced at one another. As for the young man with the glass in his eye, he chuckled, lit another cigarette, and, with an ugly movement of his throat, blew smoke rings toward the glittering trees.

“But I think you will,” the priest said then, smiling, his teeth perfect as a bar of silver. The black thatch of his hair whispered as he turned his head. He gazed at the priestess, repeating: “I think you will. For my lady is powerful. She has the power to do what you wish. Did you not say that your countrywoman died in the mountains? How will you retrieve her body unless we help you? But with our assistance everything becomes simple, as in a play. Our enemies are strong, but our lady is stronger.”

The priestess drew herself up. A gleam passed through the murky depths of her eyes. “It is true,” she said. “I am a woman of no meager power. I have been since childhood a favorite of the goddess. I say this not, as another would, to frighten you, but to persuade you to accept my offer of help. You are far from home, and the attentions of an angel are at first difficult. You require guidance, guidance that Avalei can provide. You are unlikely, in these evil times, to escape the notice of those who shut you up in the Gray Houses, those whose blasphemous cult is becoming—”

I followed her gaze, for she was no longer looking at me, and saw the youth in the skullcap make a slight gesture. It was almost nothing: his hand, which had been relaxed on the arm of his chair, lifted an inch, the fingers spread out in warning. At once the priestess fell silent, and I wondered at the power of this stranger, who was only half her age. “But you know all that,” she said. “You have already met them. It is I who can help you, I who can bring you the body of the angel.”

Expectancy charged the air. They were waiting for me to speak.

“How will you do it?” I asked.

The priestess gave her low, heavy laugh. “If what you say is true, then while you hold the Night Market I will send my servants northward to Aleilin. They will obtain what you seek. They will come down into Kestenya, into the highlands, where it is easy to hide from the soldiers of the king. You will meet them there, in the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Our Prince,” she said with a soft, caressing glance at the silent youth, “has a house nearby.”

The prince. His gaze met mine. One of his beautiful eyes was larger than the other, slightly magnified by the glass. His expression was at once disdainful and sad: yes, filled with regret. Seed pearls nestled in the lace at his throat.

I turned to the priestess. “If I do this for you—if I hold your Night Market—you’ll give me the body.”

“Yes,” she said.

“How can I be sure?”

“You cannot be sure,” she answered. “Nor can you be sure that in the end you will want the body destroyed.”

I laughed. “I will burn it, I promise you.”

“In the Book of Avalei,” the priestess said, “it is written: ‘Like a wind upon the valley, like a dragon, like a sea of ambergris, and like the striking of a hammer: so is every spirit among the dead.’”

Among the dead.

They took me through the trees, the way the others had gone, and we entered a pillared veranda filled with night. Steps led down to a terrace under the stars, where four lamps burned on brass posts, diffusing a freshening scent of resin. The terrace overlooked a small lake among the towers, a captive pool where lamplight and starlight played. There were other terraces bordering it, and balconies above it, but the others were all deserted, the lamps dark.

There was a shout from the water. I saw pallid bodies swimming there, the hard young bodies of Miros and the other gentlemen. Their clothes were strewn on the terrace along with the gowns of some of the servant girls, who were shrieking and splashing each other in the shallows. There was no furniture on the terrace but a table, and so the company sat above it, on the steps leading from the veranda, but they often rose to go to the table, where there was a bowl of sparkling liquid which they poured into their mouths with a ladle. The notes of the lute quivered. My heart, soaked in los, expanded at the sight of the two young ladies dancing on the terrace, their faces flushed in the lamplight, their beautiful gowns awry, their hair disheveled, hanging about their ears. They were singing a popular song of the type called vanadel whose refrain was: “Gallop, my little black mare.” The white-haired nobleman, luminous in the dark, had stepped into the trees beside the terrace and was gathering berries to pelt them as they whirled. He wore no shirt.

I entered that delirium. Later I would remember images but lose their chronology in the delusional air: someone shouts, another laughs, a wind disorders the quince trees—but I cannot place the events in their proper sequence. I see again the sharp, witty, mocking face of the lady in peacock feathers as she holds me by the collar, forcing my head back to empty the ladle into my mouth, the cold, tingling liquid soaking my clothes. She wears a bracelet of natural pearls which breaks during this struggle, the precious pellets scattering on the tiles. A rose-colored slipper drifts away on the water and slowly sinks. A servant girl is weeping among the pillars.

I see the High Priestess with her extravagant body raising her arms to release her hair, which springs outward in inky tendrils. The mask of her face is lifted. She bares her teeth, shrieks, runs, and plunges herself, still clothed, in the black water. Her arms rise, flinging drops. The company call her by her title, but also by the name Taimorya, which is the Queen of the Witches. The white-haired youth breaks the lake’s surface, his hair a matted gray, and his arms encircle her astral shoulders. A naked servant girl slips in a puddle on the tiles; she falls to her knee with a cry, her dull flesh jiggling. And the prince is holding the Nissian slave by the wrists in the shadow of the veranda. They do not speak.

The last image, and the most powerful, concerns this enigmatic youth. It must be the end of the night, for the air is gray. He announces that he is leaving us. Slowly the revelers gather on the terrace, sopping, staggering, some of them naked. The youth has lost his curious single eyeglass and his skullcap. His face is sad; his hair falls on his shoulders. The assembled guests begin to bow. One by one they approach him, kneel, and touch their foreheads to the tiles. With each prostration the young man’s face twitches, as if he is wincing, and an insufferable pride touches his plummy lips. The High Priestess kneels in a single arc, her wet gown clinging to the vastness of her hips. She cries out: “Father!”

I kneel too, close to his gleaming boots, almost swooning with my brow on the aching coldness of the tiles.

I do not remember returning to the Gray Houses. I woke with bile in my throat and a scrap of paper knotted in my hair.

Chapter Eleven The Girdle of Avalei

We return on Tolie before the sun rises. Bury this note in the garden.

The angel did not come to me for two nights. Two whole nights, slow and splendid, undisturbed by the sound of light. The first was painful; on the second hope grew in me like a branch of thorns. She knows, I thought. I felt that some of my hope belonged to the ghost, that she was watching, that she knew I had set our destiny in motion, that she understood how I intended to save her. And those two nights, after so much suffering, filled me with a strength that came close to elation. I buried the little note I had pulled from my hair by the garden wall. Afterward I walked, spoke with a patient, tried to learn the words of a vanadel. I touched the cracks in the wall. I touched the trees. A crow took flight with the sound of a handkerchief in the wind. I could hear the world.

Three hours before dawn. The glade of the goddess, called the Girdle of Avalei, deep within the hills of the Blessed Isle. In the austerity of the Olondrian night, the olive trees painted black, we descend on thick uneven turf to the entrance of the shrine.

The hill is humped against the stars, covered with grass and small weather-beaten flowers that catch the lantern light. Facing us is the door, a jagged crack in the chalky stone, in that crumbling sand-colored rock with its channels of dust, its piled offerings. Leeks, a bird’s nest, bundles of sweet hay tied up with ribbons. A flask of olive oil, a small white harp. We walk past the seashells of supplication, the mulberries of remorse, and enter the long slit in the wall of the hill.

One must turn sideways to enter. We wear the dust of the hill on our clothes. We: the Priestess of Avalei in her jeweled lionskin cloak, her lissome attendants with dilated eyes, carrying wreaths of bells, the nine silent priests in their masks of shrunken hide, their ivory beaks. And I. Clad in a white silk robe with turmeric on my cheeks, I scrape through the stone and am eaten up by the hillside. At the last I feel a tearing anguish, the agony of departure. Never have I been so far from home.

Darkness. The darkness of the old gods, gods who though foreign are like my own: gods of discord, pathos, and revelation. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness. A blackness where something lives. I breathe in precious, pampered air, antique dust, the starveling ghosts of incense. Motionless, I feel the empty space around me tingle. There is a rustle, the loud rasp of a match. Then the darkness blooms: a dazzling light that makes me cover my eyes, and when I can open them a fire, a garden: a beauty that makes me cry out because it is lavish and unexpected, a bower of midnight roses, a cascade of gems. The cave is small and the walls are rough: its beauty is that of color. One by one the great pine torches are lit. They stand in iron brackets, lighting the orange of poppy fields and the scarlet of festive displays of lights and the gold on the walls. Under this glory the priests and the painted girls sit in a circle on the stone floor, crossing their legs in sublime silence. The high priestess stands before the crude altar hewn out of the wall with its flagrant, red-brown splashes, its smell of hot salt.

Our shadows are huge, unnatural; they seem to move more quickly than we. The priestess bids me kneel in the center of the circle. She takes the stone pitcher from the altar and pours something into a bowl: it is oily and oyster-colored, and tastes very sweet. After two swallows I gag. They wait in silence for me to finish. I hand the rough stone bowl back to the priestess. She dips her hands in another bowl on the altar and smears something rancid-smelling over my face and neck: clarified butter.

“Anavyalhi,” she says. “I waited for thee in the snows of the mountain and thou didst not come, O dove with the crimson feet.” Her voice is low, caressing and sad, as if she means the words, though she is only reciting from the book of her mind.

“Anavyalhi, my love with red feet, aloe tree, cloud of saffron. Lost voice over the water, oh lost voice of my love! Will I never again hear the strings of thy throat, O moon-guitar? Nay, say the waters; for she has departed forever into the dark country…”

The priestess steps back from me, her palms gleaming thickly with butter. Chrysolites wink among the coarse hairs of her robe. Above it her face is blank, heavy, watchful, the eyes like soot. Her gaze never wavers from me as she reaches a hand toward one of the girls.

A bird, a large dove violently beating its wings, is suddenly with us, drawn from the velvet bag in the girl’s lap. It is a white fire in the hands of the priestess as she holds it toward the roof of the cave and thunders something in an unknown, dreadful language. Then she holds it over the shallow depression in the altar and removes a small stone knife from her plaited hair. The bird struggles; some of its feathers are stuck together with butter. She slits its throat with a smooth, voluptuous movement.

At that instant the cave is filled with sound: the girls are singing, chanting, beating their wreaths of bells on their bent knees, and the priests, their voices muffled by the stiff hide of their masks, are droning too and shaking beaded rattles. Some of them have small ceremonial mortars and pestles of stone, which they wear at their belts, and now beat rhythmically. I am too fascinated to understand what they are singing. The sound is that of furious bees, cicadas, rattling chains. The priests inspire horror in me with their yellowed beaks, their invisible eyes, the brittle antlers or ragged hares’ ears sewn to the sides of their masks. They are like our doctors; they mean me ill. I look back toward the priestess and see blood running down a channel into a trench around the altar.

“And wilt thou never return?” she says, entreating me with her eyes, stretching out her hands, which shine darkly in the torchlight. “Nay, say the snows; for the earth which spills the delights of her lap for thee is but a shade unto thy love, and the shadow of a closed door. Could my love not keep thee, Anavyalhi, body of water… the way of the sword, or the path of the deadly unguents.…”

In a moment of pure lucidity I know that the liquid I have drunk is affecting my mind. Everything is clear in that moment. My vision is sharpened: I see the small hairs in the rigid mask of a priest, imagine how the hide would feel, hard and buckled, dried fruit. I see the bodies under the dark red dresses of the girls, secretive bodies, the ribs shuddering as they jangle their bells. I see more than it is given to the human eye to see, the sweat on their stomachs, their fear of the dark cistern, their fear of the dark. I see them washing their faces, becoming childish, pink, defenseless, crawling into their beds and speaking in code by touching fingers, passing gossip down the long row of beds, these girls called Feilar, Kialin, Kerelis, these young girls far from home. I can count the glimmering beryls scattered across the robe of the priestess, like copses in a field of tawny wheat. I think I can even catch the scent of them: they smell of mint. But the chalcedony smells like the bark of trees. I see her, Taimorya, the Queen of the Witches. I know that every night she eats a plate of snails, for eloquence. I see her sitting up by the lamp, painting a china apple. The prince is asleep in the shadow of her bed.

Then, as suddenly as it arrived, this clarity vanishes. My mouth goes slack; it is hard to keep my eyes from fluttering closed. The monotonous music, which never flags, which is now like a great company on horseback jingling and pounding through a gap between mountains, confuses me like a mist. It is the dust raised by the hooves. And far away, the echo of falling stones. I see the high priestess: only her face, beautiful, heartless, exalted. Her long black eyes reflecting the sparks of the torches. “My love,” she says. Her voice is deep inside my ear, so deep that I do not know if it is she who has spoken or I.

“Where are you?”

Now I am sure that I am the one who has spoken. But it is also she; I feel her speaking through me. I struggle weakly against her, suddenly terrified, trying to rise, lifting my heavy eyelids to see the dove’s body on the altar. I fight against the darkness but only think to myself, stupidly: They have put something on the torches. The smoke is strange… Then it becomes too easy to sink, to abandon myself to oblivion. The slide to the bottom is effortless, enchanting. There, at the bottom, I see unimagined valleys of white fish. There are deserts too, dotted with blackened rose trees.

“Where are you?” I ask, or the priestess asks with my voice. “Why don’t you come to me? Can’t you hear me? I’ve been looking for you for so long. I’m lost…”

Silence. A ripple of water which might be, far away, the bells of the girls in the cave.

Then I see her. And for the first time and the last, I know that I am seeing her when she is alone, before she knows I am there. She walks uncertainly, sometimes pausing as though she has dropped something. She is far away, and her progress is very slow. She wears the same short, colorless shift, and her hair lies on her thin shoulders. She turns her head, bewildered, filling me with the desire to weep.

“I’m here,” I say.

She looks up sharply and sees me. Her gaze burns. In the air, the insistent ringing, like flashes of light. “Jevick,” she says.

“Yes.”

She comes close to me, almost blinding me with her ocean of light, making me cry out, my eyes on fire; then she grows dim and looks at me anxiously and hungrily through the whirling cloud. “Jevick, you’re here. You’ve come to find me…”

“Yes,” I whisper.

She frowns. “But you’re strange. There are two of you.”

“Yes. I have asked the aid of a northern priestess. Together we have come to find what it is that you desire. We have—I have done this for love of you—”

A blaze of scorn makes me scream again. My eyes are bleeding. “You do not love me,” the angel says.

“Forgive me. It was the love which all of the living must have, for those who come from beyond the narrow grave, of which I spoke.”

“Beyond the grave,” the angel says. “That is northern talk.”

“Yes,” I whisper. I feel the words echo inside me. I am listening, and speaking, in two languages at once, translating. The mouth and ears of the Priestess of Avalei.

“Very well,” says the angel. She looks at me in bitter disdain, and I grovel, writhing before the flame of her face. “This boy is weak,” she says contemptuously. “He will not last long. You have asked what I desire, and I will tell you.” She pauses, her indrawn breath a conflagration. Then she says: “Write me a vallon. Put my voice inside it. Let me live.”

She draws close to me. “Write me a vallon, Jevick. Like what you read to me on the ship that day. You said they last forever.”

Her voice is suddenly fragmented, broken with tears. She weeps like one who is dying of grief, and yet she cannot die; she weeps like one who has lost her dearest possession, her only love. “Jevick, my mother left me alone. Do you hear me? They buried me there, in the north. She was weak. She let them put me into the earth. In the graveyard—faugh!—in the huge graveyard on the hill. She let them put me there, to have my bones sink into the earth, and—oh, Jevick! I am one of the Rotted Dead.”

Her face is transformed by the horror she feels—the horror that grips us both. In its clutches and for one moment she looks devastatingly human. Her face is close to mine, the eyes wide, the mouth aghast. I think I can see the pores in her skin, the beads of sweat, the terror… But of course it is an illusion, a wraith: her body is underground, sinking and putrefying, her youth and beauty mere bubbles of gas. As if she has read my thought, she shrieks, begins to wail, whipping her red hair to and fro, in mourning for herself.

“Jissavet,” she cries. “Jissavet.”

The priestess plucks the translation from my mind. Island of the White Flowers.

But I am falling now. I cannot speak for her, to answer the foolish question: “Yes, angel? What do you mean?” I know what she means, I think to myself, and the priestess does not hear me because I am already too far away, my body shivering, slick with sweat, riding the river of pain which bears me away to a new depth where I will not hear the grief-maddened shrieking of the angel. It is as if she moves away from me, weeping over the valleys. “Jissavet, Jissavet.” Then silence. Then I know nothing, until I wake again in the holy cave and see the face of Auram bending over me.

“Don’t sit up,” he said. I looked up at him, at the thick locks of his hair in disarray against the craggy ceiling. His face was shadowed, but I could see that it did not have its usual chalky pallor: the skin was mottled, tense, excited. There was a sour odor: I guessed it came from his short leather skirt. An odor of ancient cabinets, ancient sweat. His mask was slung around his neck, and it looked at me too, leering downward, its hide in the torchlight criss-crossed with fine wrinkles.

“Brave one!” he said ecstatically. He caressed my hair; his palm was damp and heavily scented with musk. I lay motionless on the bare floor of the cave, close to his crossed legs, his plucked-looking, almost hairless shins, the brief flap of his skirt. Voices resounded in the air, the murmuring of the girls, and huge shadows moved to and fro on the walls. “Avneanyi,” Auram whispered. His fingernail snagged my skin as he traced a circle on my brow with his index finger.

The shadows leapt and shrank to nothing, staggering drunkenly over the walls, those visions of glorious color. I lay still, my throat aching. The cavern throbbed, a forest fire, the lanterns of a carnival, a blossoming sky emblazoned with rare tulips.

At last Auram and another priest helped me sit up. My face felt stiff; the clarified butter had hardened. I looked about me dully. The girls, their beaded anklets rattling, were clustered around the high priestess, who lolled unconscious before the stone altar.

“Don’t worry,” Auram said. “With her it is always like this. You have had a splendid success, splendid! Ready! Up we go!” He chuckled, overflowing with high spirits. The girls were rubbing scented oil into the white temples of the priestess. One of them chafed her feet, her slender hands dwarfed by those great slabs of flesh. Another sponged the blood from her hands.

The priests wheeled me around and dragged me through the crack in the hillside, and we stumbled out into the cold, fragrant night. The moon was full and the shadows of trees lay black on the ghostly sward. Beyond them, a meadow furrowed like a pale sea. Auram crowed. He and the other priest told jokes, supporting me as they strode through the long grass toward the lights of the palace. The other priest was called Ildo; he told me about his niece who was a baker in the kitchens of the Telkan. Her brown-flour breasts. The two priests roared over their bawdy stories, like men returning from a hunting party. The masks bounced on the ropes around their necks. In the palace gardens among the yew trees we saw deer feeding on the grass.

Inside again, in the parlor, Auram served me a cup of chocolate without sugar. He wore a robe now, a lustrous garment of orange silk. “Avneanyi,” he whispered.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Drink,” he soothed me. “All will be well.”

He watched me drink, perched on the corner of his chair.

Write me a vallon, I thought. And I laughed, my muscles slow and sore. The priest had washed the clarified butter from my face with a rag, but I still felt as if I wore a mask. I laughed with stiff, uncooperative lips, with a raw ache in my throat, at the monstrousness of it, the sublime absurdity. Write her a book, set her words down in Olondrian characters! This ghost, this interloper, speaking only Kideti!

“No,” I said aloud, gritting my teeth. I would not do it. I would not mingle the horror of death with what I most loved.

The chocolate was bitter as iron, the parlor gray in the dawn, the beaded lamps burnt out. “Drink,” said the priest. “You need it after your supplication. But how brave you were! How fine! You have the makings of a priest of Avalei!”

“You will forgive me if I am not comforted.”

He smiled. His flat, peculiar, blurred-looking features were lanced by the glittering points of his eyes. “I will tell you a story,” he said. “Yes, before we return you to the Houses. Just a homely little story. Something to help you sleep.

“I was in Asarma at the time of the cholera. Not many years ago—a few years—a terrible time for us. I was only a child then. I was studying astronomy, and while I was at school they were throwing the bodies into the sea… And the carts, the dead-carts were everywhere. You could see them from the windows. There was no place that did not have the smell of death. When we went out at night to read the stars, we choked on the smell of the city, and behind the sea wall the corpses floated and gave off their phosphorescence… Well. There was a colleague of mine, a boy from the Fanlevain, a clockmaker’s son, very clever and somewhat—lonely. That is, he kept to himself. We shared a room in the dormitory, and I used to hear him talking in his sleep… Ah! Later I cursed myself for not having listened to him, for burying my head under the pillow! For you see, this boy—this boy was a saint. But it was not known until later. Who knows what we might have learned from him, had his power been known?”

The priest paused and turned up the palm of one hand despairingly. “Who knows? You see, telmaro, I was too slow. Only after strange things had happened—after he fell into trances at school, after I found a sheaf of poems he had written—only then did I mention what I had seen to one of our masters, and only then was the youth taken into the temple. But by that time the sign of the plague was on him. When he said good-bye to us he was already weak; as he went down the stairs he was clutching his stomach. And within the week he was dead. He had taken his wisdom into the grave. He had taken the angel’s blessing away with him.”

Auram leaned forward. The dawn in the window glowed on his shaven cheek. He gave me a long, deep glance, as of recognition. “I remember one night,” he whispered, holding my gaze. “This young boy, telmaro, this boy conversed with a statue, alone in the dark.”

My cup was empty; I passed it to him in silence. Then I said slowly: “Your story means nothing to me. Nothing. Do you hear?”

My voice gathered strength as he dropped his eyes and toyed with the enameled clasps on his robe. “Nothing. Your angels, your drugs, your filth, your Avalei! I want only to be rid of the spirit and go.”

“But we can help,” he said, raising his eyes. “We can give you the angel’s body.”

“In exchange for your Night Market. Where I’ll be arrested again, no doubt, and dragged back to the Houses for impersonating a saint.”

He laughed merrily. “Do you think my lady powerless? Oh, no. She has many friends still. Many friends. Day is breaking, and no one has reported your disappearance from the Gray Houses. And when you go back, it will be as if you had never left.”

He slid forward, his eyes still bright with mirth, held my shoulder and rasped into my ear. “You will leave the Isle in a week or less.” His smile had a childlike sweetness, and it struck me that he was, to some degree, mad—as our island doctors are mad, with the potency of transcendence. As the Priest of the Stone was mad: as I was mad. Such spiritual power was always capricious, not to be trusted, likely to scar. But latched to the power of this priest, clinging to Avalei’s mantle, I might claw my way out of the Houses and to freedom.

I was grateful that he said nothing of the angel’s ringing words: Write me a vallon. Perhaps he had not heard. Or perhaps what mattered to him was not what she said, but that I could communicate with her, that I was a true avneanyi. He took my arm and led me to the door, a dim heat in his fingers, a dark note in his breathing like a hidden sob. Long after I had returned to the Gray Houses, his stinging odor clung about me like the ghost of a struck match.

Chapter Twelve Tialon’s Story

I was cold the next day—so cold my teeth knocked together. Ordu touched my brow and removed the iron chamberpot after I vomited thin gray liquid. I did not join the others for the daily walk in the garden, but curled up and hid my face, wrapped tight in the sheets. When I slept I dreamt of the islands, my brother whistling, the shadows of birds, and when I woke I counted the minutes as if it could make my chills subside. Cries came from behind the wall: the groans of the mad, inarticulate and frayed at the edges, like prayers.

There Tialon came to see me. It was her first visit in several weeks. She carried her writing box and an umbrella beaded with moisture, for it was raining over Velvalinhu. Her hair was tightly curled and powdered with drops where the wind had blown rain under her umbrella. She placed her things against the wall and came unasked to sit on the edge of my mattress, bringing cold air that had gotten caught in the folds of her clothes, and smiled at me—a fragile smile, for her face was drawn and sickly and great shadows marred the skin under her eyes.

“Jevick,” she said.

“Tialon.”

“Are you unwell?” she asked softly.

“Are you?” I returned.

At that her smile grew warmer and tears came into her eyes. She patted my wrist with a freezing hand. “No. I am very well. Are you still reading Olondrian Lyrics?”

“Yes. And the Romance of the Valley.”

She nodded. Her eyes shone with the transparent light of the sky, as if the rain had washed them. “I’m reading, too. I’ve read your letters. I’m sorry I didn’t answer. I’ve come to you instead. I won’t stay long. I’ll go back to my real life. You remember I told you I’d built something… This is what I have built. This life.”

In the fractured light of the lamp her face looked young, determined, unhappy. There was a recklessness in the way she lifted her chin. “I read. I take notes for my father. I sit in the shrine of the Stone, always reading, watching, gazing into the depths of mystery. The Stone… I wish I could show it to you. Perhaps then you would understand. It is black, heavy, miraculous, covered with writing…” She raised her hands, arms wide, delineating a vague shape in the air, then shrugged her shoulders and let them fall.

“I can’t describe it. But Jevick—it is a very great thing. Our hope. My father is only the second to attempt to interpret its message. For this reason…” She paused and bit her lip, then looked at me and went on quietly: “For this reason it is easy for us to make mistakes. Do you understand? For us, for our cult, it is the beginning. We are still vulnerable—still laughed at, and still hated… We have the support of the king, but of no one close to him. Indeed, his son is one of those who seek most persistently to discredit us. And there is also Avalei’s cult. They hate us because we reject what they love: luxury, harlotry, the pursuit of angels.”

She smiled at my flushed face. “I know you’ve met the High Priestess of Avalei. I know everything. We have spies.” A tear dropped down her cheek to her lap. “Yes. Spies. We listen at doors, we follow people. My father receives reports every morning at dawn. It’s disgusting…”

Reading alarm in my face, she laughed, brushing back tears with the heel of her palm. “Don’t worry. You’re safe. You believe that, don’t you? You know I am your friend.”

I looked up into her wistful eyes, her eyes of immense candor. “Yes,” I said. “I know it. But I don’t know why.”

“That’s what I’ve come to tell you,” she said. “The reason I am your friend. The reason I won’t betray you, even though I know you’re running away. The reason for everything.” She gazed at me with a frightened smile, and swallowed. “It’s strange—now I’m here, I don’t know how to begin.”

But she did. She did know how to begin. She took a deep breath and looked down at her fingers clenched together on her dark wool dress. Then she raised her head and met my eyes. She leaned toward me like a sister, while the rain closed the Isle behind its resonant palisades.

She told me of the village of Kebreis, the village of Flint, with its roofs of broken slate and latticed windows. A village of cold water and hard rock wedged among the hills of the west, the Fiaduoron, the Dark Mountains. Kebreis: hunched in a fiercely beautiful landscape of clear streams and brilliant skies and the snow-bright pinnacles of the mountains, a landscape whose glitter hurts the eye, whose cold air stings the lungs, its people withdrawn and silent, craving isolation. Many of the men had once worked in the mines. These had tattoos under their eyes where, as they lounged in the café, one might read “Thief” or “Pirate.” Among them there was one man who was marked with the blue word “Poacher”—for he had been caught hunting boar in the Kelevain, the Telkan’s wood.

He spent six years in the mines, and when his sentence was over he came down from the mountains into the solitude of Kebreis. Like many of the men there he discovered he could live most peacefully in the hills, where his tattoo brought him not calumny but respect. So he settled there and smoked with the others in the little café, drinking sour red wine in the patch of dust under the awning, and he married the schoolteacher’s only daughter against her father’s will and took her to live in his one-roomed house among the peaks.

The schoolteacher’s daughter wore tough cotton clothes like the other women of Kebreis, and in winter a pair of boots trimmed with otter skin. And despite her father’s predictions of disaster she never longed for fine linen or servants, never complained when she had to break the ice in the buckets. She kept goats and was sunburned and caught trout and ate potatoes and refused to take even a radish from her father, and the children came one after the other, all of them wild, lanky, singing, adventurous, and strong-hearted like their parents. They were all well-suited to life in Kebreis and free from unhappy dreams. And then there were two girls who died in infancy; and then the last, a boy, whom his mother called Lunre, because he was born in the month of the purest light.

Tialon told me this. She spoke with a trembling eagerness, sometimes pulling at the collar of her dress. She held up her hand when I opened my mouth and went on telling me, hurriedly, as if rushing to catch the story before it escaped. She told me of the thin and lonely boy with the red knees who was plagued by coughs, who cried when he was ill, who lay against the wall under wool blankets with his brothers in the single room divided by a frayed curtain, who suffered in that smoky room and suffered as well outdoors, where he was pelted with snow and unable to run quickly, where his father took him on long walks to improve his constitution and forced him to wade in the furious, icy trout streams. She told me of how he suffered everywhere except in the school where his grandfather, that severe and well-dressed gentleman, who had despaired of all the boy’s brothers and sisters, was interested, hardly daring to hope, in this last one, the one with the chronic cough. Lunre. Dressed in the patched clothes of his brothers, and a wool scarf. Lunre who sometimes could not go to school but lay in the corner, pale and languid, watching the frost that formed along the edge of the door when the fire had gone out. It was his grandfather who came to him, leaning on his cane, still muffled in a fur cloak although it was spring, and the streams were rushing bright and cold, and here and there the first of the crocuses peeped through the muddy traces of melting snow. It was his grandfather who came and sat on a stool by the hearth, looking too large and princely for the small room, and offered to pay for the boy to go to school in the capital where the milder climate would give him a chance at survival. Yes, he would go to stay there with a merchant, his grandfather’s brother, in the house where his mother had lived for two years long ago, where she had learned to paint and sew but never to speak Olondrian without peppering it with phrases of mountain slang. Lunre’s parents agreed, not for the gain, the future prestige, but because Kebreis was killing their last child. And his mother wept over him as though he, the difficult one, the one who was the least like her, was the dearest of them all.

“So Lunre went to Bain,” Tialon said. “He was ten years old. Do I need to tell you what happened to him after that? Do I need to tell you of the house of his great-uncle the glass merchant, where they slept outside on the balcony in summer? And his schools—the private boys’ school, the University of Bain—do you need to hear of them, of his passion for reading? You have read Firdred of Bain, On the Nine Textures of Light, the Lyrics of Karanis—and so you know. Is it not enough for you to know that at the age of twenty-one he went to a poorly attended evening lecture and saw my father’s elderly predecessor, emaciated and fierce, exhorting young students to join the work of the Stone? And to know, also, that he felt distaste at the sight of that gaunt figure and joined him not because he believed in the dream, but because he could not resist the temptation to go to the Blessed Isle and to walk the halls of the library drenched in myth… It was only later that he became intrigued by the work of the Stone, through the debates held by the scholars who had gathered to serve the old priest. They used to meet in a roof garden full of lavender, at dusk. It was their passion that drew him. And later it was his friendship with my father.

“He was our only friend,” she said, touching her hand to her throat. “He was our friend, my father’s only friend. Do you understand what that means? He could make my father laugh. He could even make him play the violin. He was the only one who could ever persuade my father to sing—even I couldn’t do that, although I loved it. He used to come to our rooms when I was small. He had a special knock, so that we would recognize him and let him in. He would bring a fish or beef heart and cook it over the coals on the balcony. He could make my father eat anything, even drink wine… When he—when Lunre was there my father would sigh and say, ‘Why not?’—you see, he would lose his stiffness and become generous. He pretended that it annoyed him, but I could see how happy he was, that it was happiness that made him give in to pleasure… Sometimes when Lunre was there, when I was too little to understand, I would grow so filled with joy I had to scream; I would leap around the house, too drunk with relief to contain myself, and have to be sent to bed early or even punished. You see, our house was so solemn. There was so little room for play. And so during Lunre’s visits I would grow wild: I pushed everything too far, I laughed too loudly, I wanted each joke to continue forever. Later I always felt so ashamed…”

She smiled, glancing down at her hands, tracing the lines in her palm, the smudges of old ink. Then she looked up and said: “That friendship was inexplicable. Here was this man, my father—so dour, so shy, so easily insulted—who had recently lost his wife, who had only me. He was in his own type of mourning, which involved a strained sensitivity, an anger which erupted on any pretext, yet somehow he invited this young man to visit him, this student sixteen years younger than himself. How did it happen? I imagine it began in the garden outside the shrine, that high garden with its statues, its narrow parapet, where the followers of the Priest of the Stone used to meet and look down on the battlements of this city in the hour after sunset… The student must have said something, or followed some line of reasoning, which hinted at his solitary nature, his love of classical poetry or his ability to suffer silently, all traits my father admired in him. In him: this youth of twenty-one with the thin veneer of city cultivation over the sadness of Kebreis, with the anxious, slightly affected way of carrying himself which he used to cover his villager’s awkwardness. Perhaps that was part of it: they were both awkward, although in Lunre, who was good-natured, this quality was endearing. In my father the awkwardness was cruel. But when they were together it disappeared: they were both completely at ease…

“In those days, Jevick, I truly believe there were more stars in the sky. They used to come out all at once, like a field of snow. And we would sit on the balcony, the three of us, looking at them, and I would listen to my father and Lunre talking. Sometimes they told old stories or Lunre recited part of the Vanathul, which he had learned from his father in Kebreis, or my father brought out the limike and sang in his clear voice one of the sacred songs, or old lullabies from the country.

That was the saddest song he sang, the one with the simplest words. It was composed long ago on the road called the Trail of Wolves. I remember hearing that song, lying half-asleep on the balcony with my cheek on the tiles in the warmth of the summer night… I could smell so many flowers and also the coals, still red from our supper. We stacked the plates in a corner of the balcony. And later, when I sat there alone, when I was nineteen years old, I could see that there were fewer stars in the sky.

“I have heard that there are people who live happily alone. But I myself have not found it to be possible. I told you that I have built something, and since you came I have realized that what I have built is the shadow of happiness. But true happiness: that is what we had when we were together, my father and Lunre and I, sometimes with my nurse, when I was old enough not to scream with the wild sensation of joy but to sit, ecstatic, to let it wash over me… We cooked, sometimes we went for a drive in one of the palace carriages and picnicked in the woods or walked in the hills, we went to plays organized for the king, and sometimes we wrote plays ourselves and performed them for my nurse on the balcony. By this time Lunre had come to believe in the message of the Stone, and he too had woven and sewn his own robe, although he did not change his name as my father had, which was good, his name suited him: he was with light, and I hope that he has always remained with light. But he had changed in himself. He had developed an intense gaze and the melancholy of hours immured in mystery. Once, from the balcony, I saw him far below in the rain, and I think that he had not realized it was raining.”

Tialon paused. She looked wan and remote, as if carved on a fountain. Her eyes were lowered; the lashes cast a shadow. She said: “I used to lie awake at night out of pure happiness, because of an apple, because we had seen butterflies, because he had laughed at my jokes and for a thousand other foolish reasons, while slowly, inexorably, our lives were breaking. They had begun to quarrel, you see—Lunre and my father. They had disagreed on certain interpretations, and my father, who could not bear contradiction even then, had forced Lunre to burn some of his notes. Yes—you do well to look shocked. But worse things happened afterward. One of my father’s enemies perished in the Telkan’s dungeons—not murdered outright, but imprisoned until his death. And there was—”

She stopped, then went on with an effort, her lips barely moving: “There was a school burned in the Valley.”

A breath. Then she went on in the same flat tone: “They were teaching banned books. None of the children could read. Avalei’s eunuchs were teaching them by recitation. They were teaching the autobiography of Leiya Tevorova, who claimed to have been haunted by an angel. My father sent them three warnings, and then the Guard, the Telkan’s Guard. He told us later that he did not know they were going to burn the school. Lunre called him a liar—my father, a liar. Three children died when the school was burned. Two of them were my age.

“Perhaps it was then that the stars began to disappear from the sky: for I believe whole constellations have been extinguished. They slipped away from us as we were lying awake or sleeping, and they have never come back, not even for a moment. Perhaps they were fading even as I walked back from the library with Lunre, the two of us arm in arm in the dark, in our somber clothes that made us call ourselves ‘the two ravens,’ laughing in the dim hallways and under the trees. I felt a surge of that wild joy which I had known as a child, and he saw it in me, my excited voice and laughter, and in the turning of one of the halls he suddenly grew still and said to me: ‘You should not laugh so; it is too much.’ He had never said such a thing to me and I took my arm away from him and we walked in silence back to the Tower of Myrrh. And as we passed through a garden I saw his face in the light of a lamp and it was grim and pained, and unlike the face of my friend.

“The quarrels between my father and Lunre continued and grew worse. My father discovered that Lunre kept secret notes, and as for Lunre, his matchless ability to suffer quietly, which he had developed in the small house in Kebreis, which my father had so admired in him, proved to have its own limits. They shouted at one another, stormed out of the shrine. My father was afraid that Lunre would take his notes to the Telkan, or publish them on the mainland, destroying my father’s own work. And Lunre was tormented by his betrayal of his friend, by the burned school, and by the other, unspeakable thing.

“Yes,” Tialon whispered, “by the other, unspeakable thing, which I did not discover until he had gone, though I must have sensed its presence without admitting it to myself and without even understanding what it was. I only knew that something, some threat, was hovering over us on that night in the hall when he had told me not to laugh, and again in one of the gardens when I caught my hair in the thorns of the hedge and he, releasing it, stroked my cheek. That was how it appeared: first like that and then on the hill overlooking the sea when we fell silent for no reason, afraid in the light of that threatening sky with the storm coming over the sea; and then at night on the balcony; and then everywhere. Yes, soon this fear, this desolation was everywhere, and I could not look at him without feeling my face grow hot, and he looked at me searchingly and submissively and without hope, and then one day, after eighteen years, he was gone.

“He left my father a letter,” Tialon said quietly, “and my father, in his rage, forced me to read it. And so I read how Lunre was going away, was leaving Olondria, but did not know whether he would flee to the north or south of the world. And I also read of his reasons: that he was not worthy to study the words of the gods, as he had betrayed both them and himself. And that, he wrote, he was in the grip of a dishonorable passion. Those were his words: ‘a dishonorable passion.’”

The sighing echo of those words hung in the air of the room, the echo not just of what Tialon had said, but of what she had read in the letter on that remote afternoon under the quivering and furious eye of her father. There was a burnt smell from the hills. In the evening she sat on the balcony with her back against the wall, staring into the dark, and when her nurse came out and asked her why she wept she told her that she had only now seen that some of the stars were missing.

“He was twenty years older than I,” she said to me in that stone cell in the Gray Houses, seated on the edge of my low bed. “He was—but why am I telling you how he was? You must know.” She looked at me, her gaze penetrating, direct.

“Yes,” I whispered.

I had thought that she would weep, but she did not. She was like a queen, sitting very straight, her hands quiet in her lap. Only her voice wavered, and a shudder crossed her throat when she said: “Yes. I knew. And how could I not? I did not spend those years, the years of my childhood, listening to him read in the evening light, only to forget the books he loved, the books we loved together. I knew when I saw you with his Olondrian Lyrics.”

She nodded as if to herself and looked around the room, the rickety shelf with its useless volumes, the bareness and the squalor. The room had grown colder. Her face, turned away from me, was cast in shadow so that I could not see her expression when she said: “And how is he?”

“He is well,” I said.

Tialon nodded again. She had the flawless dignity of one sentenced to death. Her story seemed to have drained everything out of her, her terror and wildness and even the resolution that had forced her to tell it. I knew she had told it because she could not give up the chance to say his name, aloud, in the hearing of another, of one who had known him. I sensed this in the way her lips curved to form the word, lingered over it—that it was a forbidden sound in her house. Lunre: the call of a water bird, and then the fall of water. A name that means “with light,” the last month of the year. She said it now with the sigh of the closing year and then she stood and faced me, her face pale and severe in the cold lamplight.

“I have something for you.”

She went to the door and picked up her writing box. She carried it back to the mattress and sat beside me, the box in her lap. Then she sprang the catch and the box yawned open, and she took from it two oily-looking packages tied with string.

“News from the past.”

A shrill note in her voice. She set the packages on the sheet. Each was as solid and dense as a cheese. They were bundles of paper covered with a closely written script, discolored with the passage of the years.

“Take them with you,” Tialon said. I looked up at her, speechless. Her smile trembled; her eyes were very bright. She clasped her hands in front of her face and looked down, hiding her mouth behind them. “I wrote him over a thousand letters, I think.”

“I’ll take them.”

She swallowed. “Thank you. I’ll try to make it easy for you to get out of the Houses.”

“And if you want to know more about him,” I murmured, “I can tell you—”

She shook her head, closed her writing box, and stood, not looking at me as she whispered: “I have built my life without knowing where he was.”

I often think of her like that: with her head half turned away, the curls gleaming at the nape of her thin neck, one hand already reaching down to pick up her umbrella, the other gripping the writing box like an anchor. She seems to hang before me, wavering like the light of a candle, suspended in that breathless, fragile instant. Then the candle is blown out and she is gone, the room is empty, she leaves only a fleeting warmth and a trace of smoke.

After she had gone I remained staring at the door, thinking of the young figure of my master: dark-haired, but with the same steady, piercing, quartz-green eyes, in a black robe that would make his skin seem paler. I thought of him standing among the trees with the rain falling through his cloak in the oblivion of religious contemplation, and cringed with the feeling that I had wronged him by picturing him thus, in his other life which he did not want me to know. But now it was too late: my master, Lunre of Bain, had been irrevocably replaced by Lunre of Kebreis. And the small boy who lay in the corner and watched frost form on the door had replaced all the fantasies of my master’s childhood.

There is a courtyard where I imagine my master and Tialon, the tortured man and the adolescent girl: an illusory place with flowers of mother-of-pearl in the swaying almond trees whose leaves are spangled with drops of a recent rain. It is a place of tears. And yet their laughter echoes against the stones, this tall man with the slightly abstracted air, with the solitary smile, in the unseasonable dark wool, and the girl in the short, straight frock of the same material. They are talking under the trees. The girl has hair of dark honey, bound into four fuzzy plaits harassed by the leaves. She is knock-kneed, with the lighted eyes of an evening after a rainstorm and the shapely, fluted ankles of a deer. Again they laugh. Her eyes are quick and lively under thick lashes, and his eyes, answering, wrinkle at the corners. This girl speaks excitedly and precociously about the classics, but she still sleeps in the same room as her old nurse… And he watches her, watches the dazzling light slide on and off of her shoulder, changing as she moves beneath the trees, turning her skin from the color of pale sand to the color of autumn and in the shadows to the color of old silver. Her resplendent skin, which is still the skin of a child. He notices that it is almost the same color as her hair. The difference is infinitesimal: yet in that difference of hue there are desert armies, cities of marble in conflagration. The air is rarefied by the sound of her laugh and the smell of the trees, and then by the sleep and meadows which her arms smell of, as she puts them around his neck and prostrates him with a chaste kiss. A burning memory crackles in his hair. Later, while they are walking, she will wonder why they are suddenly sad, and he will not be able to explain; he will say: “We should not have eaten the mussels. They smell of death…” And they will both want to weep in the dark air.

I see him with the sweat on his brow which has turned the color of tallow and imagine how he will flee to the ends of the earth, putting the fathomless sea between himself and this sweet, incautious girl, interring himself in a country of alien flowers. And never, not even in the delirium of his island fevers, will he allow himself to pronounce the lost child’s name. And as for her, she will say his name only in solitude, hugging herself in her small bed, her tears shining in the moonlight.

Tonight the house is quiet. The old nurse sits by the hearth, muttering to herself, half-asleep. The young girl is collecting their soiled plates from the table and carrying them away to the dark kitchen. Suddenly she looks outside. The balcony doors are open, the night soft and humming with the insects of summer. Then there is her startled cry, and the crash of a plate on the floor. She has noticed the disappearance of the stars.

Midnight. The door creaked open and I was instantly awake, fearing as always the witchlight of the ghost. But there was only the dull glow of a lantern, and a hand like an iron scepter prodding me urgently in the neck. “Rise. Rise.” It was Auram, High Priest of Avalei, cloaked and hooded. His sleeve was damp and carried an odor of salt. He had already crept down to the shore where a boat rocked on the waves, hushed and lightless, awaiting its cargo: a fugitive saint.