A Stranger in Olondria

Chapter Nineteen Bonfire

But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

Nothing could have prepared me for the silence that was to follow. Had I been told of it, I would not have believed. Such silences, such griefs, no one can predict them, they come like the first red gleams of kyitna, unimaginable until they are suddenly there.

The morning was bright and still. A few white clouds hung on the edge of the sky, a frail scaffolding of mist above the hills. Snow lay in the cracked bowls of the fountains, but already the trees cast denser shadows, bristling with tentative leaves. I swept a space in the orchard clear of snow, built up a heap of broken chairs, and placed on them the pink box Auram had brought with him: a wooden confection adorned with carved rosettes in which the bones of my love had been folded and put away like a musical instrument. The sound of something shifting inside the box knocked at my heart; my hands were sweating, and when I had positioned the coffin I wiped them on my coat. The house observed me, silent. Miros and Auram were there, but no one looked out; they had left me to complete this ritual alone.

I am the last thing you will see, I said in my heart. I am the last, I have carried you in my arms, I have brought you home.

“This is Jissavet of Kiem,” I said aloud, my voice taut and strange. “And we release her into the Isle of Abundance.”

I crouched beside the pyre and touched it with the flame of an oil lamp, now on the left, now on the right, north and south. At first it would not burn. Black feathers of smoke curled around the delicate pink of the box, and I gritted my teeth, impatient now for a conflagration. An annihilating transcendence like the death that lovers feel. She was waiting for it, glowing with absolute desire, and her desire made a desolation of the garden, turned the sparkling trees to ash, blackened the marble of the fountains. The books that held her anadnedet were stacked nearby on the ground. If the book was her jut, then let it go with her. Let it burn, as we burned janut in the islands. “Burn, burn,” I whispered. “Burn, scorch this garden, flicker in tongues…”

The smoke increased in density: it rolled on the wind, stinging my eyes, smelling of dust, dark libraries, burning cloth. Then a low glimmer, faintly orange in the sun. I tossed my little lamp on the pyre, and the oil hissed up in a ribbon of light.

A startling crack as the wood split. The odor of burning varnish, sparks of livid blue and green along the box. The gilded roses blackening. More loud cracks, making me start. The paint destroyed, flaring up, turning to soot. And then the flames, eager, crackling, devouring. Tears poured down my face. The flames were eating their way to the heart of the box. What was left there, Jissavet, my love. Your broken, delicate bones. Fragile fingers, ankles like cowrie shells. And a ball of hair, perhaps that ball of flame which burst up suddenly like a star, with a coarse, tragic, appalling odor. Other odors were there, despoiling the freshness of the day: something like resin, spices, a tainted revolting sweetness. I covered my eyes with my hands and sobbed, sitting on the ground, one hand pressed on that sad collection of volumes spotted with ink like blood. She’s going, I thought in panic. And she was. She lifted away from my heart, tearing it as she vaulted into the sky. Her foot snagged in my veins, ripping away, floating free. She was climbing that dark and trembling ladder of smoke. “Jissavet!” I cried. I snatched up the books and held them to my chest, unable to burn them now, gazing up at the sky. There, where the smoke was fading. Where the sky was the purest, most tranquil blue. Where she had gone alone, no jut to take her hand. Lighter than snow or ashes. Where she had entered at last the eternal door, leaving me inconsolable in the silence.

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It’s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it’s merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

Chapter Twenty The Sound of the World

When the pyre was a tent of smoke, I walked away.

I walked through the prince’s gate and far out over the vastness of the plain. There was no angel to keep me from losing my way. But there was a signal behind me, a smudge of darkness rising to the sky. And at dusk, I knew, there would be a glimmer of light. I walked with my hands in my pockets, listening to my footsteps and my breath. This is the sound of the world. When I turned back at last, the prince’s house stood outlined against the bounty of the stars.

Candles burned in the dining room. Great swaths had been cleared in the dust that covered the table. When I entered, Auram rose, throwing back his cape. He bowed, then raised his head again, triumphant and austere. A ghostly bandage glimmered on his wrist.

“Avneayni,” he said.

Miros, seated beside him, rose.

“Surely I no longer deserve that title,” I said.

“You will deserve it always, my friend!” said Auram. “But come, sit. There is wine, and my manservant has prepared a meal.”

I glanced at Miros.

“Not me!” he said with a hard smile, raising his hands. “I’ve changed professions. I’m going into the army.”

“The army,” I said. For a moment I was lost; then I recalled the words of his delirium, his dream of the secret army of the prince.

“Come,” Auram invited me, extending his good hand. And for the first time I noticed the papers on the table. Bainish newspapers. I walked over and touched the cheap stuff darkened with print, and the ink clung to my fingers like moth dust. At first I could not make sense of the letters: they were too bold, too contrastive, too crude after weeks of the gracefully written books in the library. Then they sprang into meaning like a mosaic seen from a distance, and I sat and huddled over them with Miros.

We read of the Night Market. There were reports of the fire, of the Guard’s attack on unarmed huvyalhi, of the trampled corpses. There was a report of an avneanyi, denied in the next issue of the paper, then revived the following week. I read: “The hand of the Priest of the Stone, too long gripping the fair throat of the Valley.” I read: “The freedom to worship.” I read: “Shame.” There were pages of angry letters, so fierce the paper seemed hot to the touch. It was clear that the winds had turned against the Priest of the Stone.

I looked up. Auram sat jewel-like in his impenetrable disguise, glowing from the exotic stimulant of the Sea-Kings. He smiled. “You see, avneanyi, you have given the prince and his allies what they most desire.”

“What is that?” I asked, suddenly fearful.

“War.”

Miros leaned over the papers, absorbed. The fire hissed, sending up sparks.

“War,” I said.

“Yes, avneanyi. A war for the Goddess Avalei. A war of revenge, for those who perished in the Night Market, for the feredhai, for all of Olondria’s poor and conquered peoples.”

He lifted his head proudly. Now Miros was looking at him too. “The Priest of the Stone has ruled Olondria too long,” Auram said. “Our people can no longer bear it. They cannot bear, anymore, to be kept from all unwritten forms of the spirit.”

An edge came into his voice. “It will be a great war, avneanyi. You ought to stay for it. To see the libraries fall.”

My heart shrank. “Must they fall?”

He shrugged, his eyes an impersonal glitter. “What can be saved will be saved. We are not criminals, but the protectors of those without strength.”

“Those without strength,” I repeated. My blood ran hot; I stood. I could have struck his face there in that funereal dining room. I could have seized the back of his head and brought that beautiful, bloodless mask down again and again on the oaken table. I could have torn down the portraits on the walls, where the prince’s accursed ancestors smirked through the dust with overfed red lips. “But you caused this. You. You knew the Guard would come to the Night Market. You set a trap with those you claim to serve. And with me.”

“I did,” he answered calmly.

“Jevick,” Miros murmured, rising and touching my arm.

“I did,” said Auram, piercing me with his knife-point eyes. “I did. I am not ashamed. You do not know, perhaps, of the schoolchildren of Wein, who were attacked by the Guard nearly fifteen years ago.”

“I do know of them,” I said, shaking with anger.

He opened and closed his mouth, off balance for a moment. Then he said: “Well. If you know, then you know that those children were never avenged. No one was punished for their deaths. That is the leadership of this butcher, the Priest of the Stone. And I will not have it.”

His narrow chest moved under his brocade tunic; his eyes were horribly steady, holding rage as a cup holds poison. “I will not have it. Now all Olondria knows the truth. The Night Market showed them. I bleed for those who fell there, but not more than I bleed for the schoolchildren of Wein. Not more than I bleed for the province where we now sit, occupied and mutilated for a hundred years, not more than I bleed for Avalei’s people, the huvyalhi of the Valley. And do not forget that I risked my own life to start the war that will save them. And yours,” he added before I could remind him. “And yours.”

I sat down and put my head in my hands. I heard the shifting of Miros’s chair as he sat, the susurration of the newspapers. I raised my head and looked at him. “And you agree with this, Miros.”

His face was stubborn, though his voice shook as he said: “I am Avalei’s man.”

I stood up again. I walked around the table. My body would not be still. Firelight glimmered on the empurpled walls. I spun to face the priest. “But the libraries, Auram—you need them too! Leiya Tevorova’s book, The Handbook of Mercies—you saved it from the Priest of the Stone! If the libraries burn—”

“Yes,” he said. “Much that we love will be lost. But the memories of Avalei’s people, as you know, are long. And the choice that faces Olondria now is a simple one: Cold parchment or living flesh? And I have made my choice.”

I shook my head. “That is no choice. No choice one should have to make.”

“I agree. But it was forced upon us the moment the Telkan sided with the Priest of the Stone. The moment Olondria chose the book over the voice. Now we must balance the scales.”

“The price is too high.”

He smiled. “Come. Let me tell you a story.”

I shook my head again. My lips trembled. “No more of your stories.”

His smile grew softer, more encouraging. He patted the chair beside him. “Come, one more. A story about a price. You will not know it, for it is very seldom told. The tale of Naimar, that beautiful youth…”

The story bloomed inside him, inhabiting his body, a kind of radiance. I saw that nothing would stop him from telling it. All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

“Naimar was raised in a palace in a wood,” he began in his throaty voice, “the only child of his father’s only love. His mother had died in birthing him; the palace was dedicated to her, and it was called the Palace of Little Drops. Those drops were the tears she shed on the newborn brow of her only child, when she held him in the instant before her death. The boy was raised among mournful paintings and images of her: the statues in the garden all bore her likeness. Sculptors had fashioned her sitting, weaving, walking, leading her favorite stallion, caressing the hoods of her beloved hawks. The child was strikingly like her, with his wide eyes and parted lips, his black hair and the anemones in his cheeks! And because of this he came to brood over her, and over death—for he was soon the same age as the lady in the garden.”

Slowly I walked around the edge of the table, returned to my chair between Auram and Miros. The priest turned to keep his eyes on me as he spoke. “Then the world lost its savor for him,” he went on with a sigh, “and he found no delight in it, neither in hunting, wine, music nor concubines… His father despaired of pleasing him, and Naimar wandered in the woods, wild and woolly haired, and of savage aspect. One day he went to bathe in a stream, and as he was bathing there a Lady appeared to him, clad in saffron-colored robes and beautiful as a rose. ‘O youth,’ said she, ‘stand up from the water, that I might see thee plain, for I am already half in love with thee.’ ‘Nay,’ said the boy, ‘what wilt thou give me?’ ‘What is thy desire?’ said she. And he said: ‘To escape death, to become immortal!’

“Then the Lady smiled and said, ‘That is easily granted.’ And he stood, and the water fell from him in streams. And the Lady admired him greatly, and a blush spread over her cheek; but Naimar said: ‘Now grant that which thou promised.’ ‘Willingly,’ said the Lady. And she plucked a handful of lilies which were growing by the stream, and took the bulbs, and washed them in the water, and she bade the boy to eat them. And taking them in both hands, he did so.

“‘Will I become immortal?’ he asked. ‘Surely thou wilt,’ she said. And as she spoke, the boy cried out, and fell; and the Lady, who was Avalei, looked down at the beautiful corpse that lay on the bank and smiled. ‘Thou art immortal,’ she said.”

In the aftermath of this virulent tale I looked at the priest, aghast. And his red lips parted in his most childlike smile. I sat up straighter, pushed my chair back and turned from the priest to Miros as I spoke, so that both of them could see my face.

“I will tell you the truth,” I said, “and if you think me a wiser man than you, and you listen to me, so be it, and if you do not, so be it. Your prince will be a tyrant. He will not hesitate to burn libraries or palaces or radhui. He will set Olondria aflame.”

Auram inclined his head slightly, a gesture of acceptance. “You may be right. But he will save a future, a way of life. For those who cannot read, he will save the world.”

I knew it was true. A certain world would be saved, but it would no longer contain the Olondria I knew.

No more battles, I thought, no more arguments. I held out my hand to the priest, and he placed his own inside it, white driftwood barnacled with rings. So frail, so cold, with a bandage on the wrist.

His dark eyes questioned me. “Forgiveness?” he said.

“No,” I answered. “Farewell.”

A night of desert stars and silence, poignant as a breath. I sat on the bed and watched the open window. No angel tore the air. The sky was motionless, complete above the sleeping mountains, seamless as a glass. I did not close my eyes, because when I did I saw Miros screaming in battle, blood-streaked mares, Olondria on a pyre. I saw war come, and I saw myself far away, in a courtyard of yellow stone, with no one to bring me messages from the dead.

The heavens turned. A dark blue glow came to dwell on the windowsill. Slowly the shapes in the room emerged from the dark as if rising from the sea. There was the mantelpiece, there the door. There was the wrought-iron table and the stack of books that held the anadnedet. And there was my satchel, rescued by the priest, with all my books inside: Olondrian Lyrics, the Romance of the Valley. The record book where I had scribbled my agony in Bain. And the packets of Tialon’s letters, heavy as two stones.

He had brought them for me. When his Tavrouni allies had killed the soldiers in Klah-ne-Wiy, he had had the presence of mind to collect my things, this precious satchel and the angel’s body, and he had hired a servant and suffered his broken wrist to be tied in place by a local doctor. A group of soldiers met him when he came out of the little mud clinic. Auram smiled at them, his disdain as gray and icy as the sky. They took him to Ur-Amakir, the nearest city, where he was to be tried for treason and the murder of the soldiers. He would be very glad to oblige, he said. News of the Night Market had reached the city; crowds gathered chanting outside the jail where he was held. Realizing that his oration in court might spark riots, the Duke of Ur-Amakir accepted his claim of innocent self-defense and released him.

And he came to Sarenha-Haladli with the body, as he had promised. He was, after all, a man of honor.

I stood. My bones ached with a sorrow older than myself. I went to the table and put my hand on a book to feel something solid. It was Lantern Tales, in which Jissavet’s words murmured like doves. I remembered her telling me: I know what the vallon is. It’s jut. Now she had helped start a war in a far country to liberate those who could not read, the hotun of Olondria. I wondered, for an unguarded moment, what she would have said. But I knew that this was not her war. Nor was it mine.

I packed the books, put on my boots, and set the strap of the satchel on my shoulder. There was already enough light to see the steps. Downstairs in the dining room, where the shadows of the rose trees streaked the windows, Auram’s Evmeni manservant was boiling coffee. Soon Miros came in, supporting the arm of the hooded priest with a new tenderness, a reverence. We sat together in the lightening air. The servant gave me a glass of coffee clouded with white steam. Its flavor was earthy, stinging, coarse: the taste of Tyom.

Miros sang as we traveled in the priest’s carriage along the cart-tracks, the country altering slowly, kindling with the sparkle of orchards in flower. Soon the track grew wide and level and bordered with fragments of brick, and there were more sheep and fewer cattle in the fields. Far away to the south waved the blue fringes of a forest. Birds filled the air, geese and swans flocking around the reservoirs. Honeysuckle drowned the balustrades of the country houses, and bildiri villages smoked in clouds of alabaster dust.

The sun brought the color back to Miros’s face; the meals we ate in the villages filled out his frame. He was almost himself again when we reached the southern Tavroun. As we rolled beneath the ancient aqueduct into the town of Tashuef he was singing a vanadel that made the priest’s servant snigger. And when we went out that evening to a tavern called the Swan, he appeared altogether restored, tall and fresh. We ate a Valley meal of kebma, sour cream, and mountain olives, followed by a dish of apricots and quails. After a bottle of insipid wine we began on the white-hot teiva with preserved figs floating thickly in the bottle, and listened to the Evmeni musicians playing their long guitars and violins among the streetlamps and shadows of trees. It was like an evening in the Valley. Only the dryness of the air, the peculiar echoes of the sounds, and the aloof and solemn propriety of the patrons at other tables, made it clear that we were still among the mountains. We removed the tablecloth and marked the little table with chalk, and Miros taught me the elementary rules of londo and promptly won six droi from the purse the priest had given me and shouted to the waiter: “Another bottle. And bring us some chicken livers.”

Turning to me he grinned and said: “I know I owe you my life. But you owe me six droi.”

“You may have the droi,” I said, “if you will take care of your life.”

His face grew pensive, showing its new hardness under the lamps, a touch of age. “I will care for it, body and spirit,” he said.

Afterward we walked through the stiff brick streets of the town, passing doors where the names of the owners hung in brass, singing vanadiel to the barking of chained mastiffs and the tolling of a bell in the temple of Iva. We saw no rubbish pits or decaying backstreets. All was trim, definite, contained. The shadows lay very straight and black. We compared the town to the nomad camps where refuse fell haphazardly, submitting to the purification of sand.

Under an old arcade he said: “This is a city of emptiness. Look, there’s no one awake in the whole square. No late-night carousers, not even a soldier. Look at the benches, all alone. And that house with all of its shutters bolted. This is a place you could bring a woman to with complete discretion. She’d wear a Kestenyi mantle in the streets. I don’t think anyone would question you, or even notice…”

“Would she come here with you?”

“Never,” he laughed.

He did not mention her again. And now we stood at the inn where lamplight fell on the whitewashed steps, the sleeping geraniums. He gripped my shoulders and saluted me with kisses on both cheeks, calling me bremaro beilare, “my poor friend.” I was already forlorn, thinking of traveling without him. A grumbling servant answered our knock at the door. Dawn was breaking as we walked to our rooms, and Miros’s outline seemed to waver in the cinder-colored air.

And in the morning I left the town of Tashuef, I left Kestenya. I boarded a riverboat called She Lies Weeping and leaned on the railing squinting at the wharf, the merchants and soldiers swearing, the crates of fish being swung overhead on ropes. There was the carriage, Miros seated on the box with the driver, both of them waving. Miros had wrapped his head in a scarf, Kestenyi-fashion. I saw rather than heard his good-byes, his mouth open and shouting. Of the priest I saw only a bony hand at the window.

“Good-bye,” I yelled back, knowing they could not hear me. The river swelled beneath the vessel, wide and full, a milky blue beneath the sky. The hills rose smothered in grass and flowering thorn on either side, and over them the peaks of snow hung shining like foam.

We passed the Land of Gum, the Land of Willows, the Land of Mice. Far off in the pallid east glimmered the Sweet and Bitter Lakes. The villages had names like Weam, Lilawu, Elwianab—Evmeni syllables rounded and dropping like honey. South of Wun there were camels imported from the desert of Waob; at Welawion I saw the first elephants. And yet the effect was not one of excitement, but of fatigue, for the land continued gray, mud-hued, and oppressed by a salty wind. Often I saw men asleep in their boats, their lips white with salt. In coastal pastures enervated sheep chewed colorless grasses. In the distant east the fringes of the Dimavain waved like flags of dark blue silk, exuding the same refreshing seduction as the mountains.

Orange trees, date palms, the colocynths Fodra called “the flowers of sleep.” At Ur-Brome I boarded a ship for Tinimavet. My satchel, my clinking purse, and my sore heart. It was trying to live again, that heart: it throbbed in me like a scarlet bruise. Ur-Brome reeked of smoke and sewage, in full sun but somehow failing to absorb the light, its flattened squares preserving the dullness of fog. As we pulled away from the shore a feeble clamor went up from the crowd on the quay and a woman beside me wept beneath her parasol.

Inscrutable country of the north—ravishing Olondria! Suddenly, as we pulled away on the sea, she unveiled the beauty of that coast with a limpid gesture of the light which seemed to contain a coy and voluptuous smile. A wash of blue poured over the sea that had been so thick and gray, a blue of dazzling, ineffable tenderness. And the city took on the delicate colors of a bed of roses on the brink of death, those exquisite pinks and whites. The ivory of worn seashells glowed in its walls, and the faded gold of tapestries, and another, elusive color, the gray of chalk—a frail and etiolated color, more precious to me than the rest because it seemed to contain the essential Olondrian sadness. The woman beside me sobbed with renewed despair, throwing back her head, her sunshade drooping, two bright tracks descending from under her lashes. While on the waves the Salt Coast grew still whiter, more fragile, more luminous—and at last it was only a nimbus on the sea.

Chapter Twenty-One Jissavet’s Alphabet

“Ah!” my mother said. “What’s this? You’re thin. And you have a completely different face.”

We sat in the courtyard in the soft air of the evening. The sky was a dark turquoise and the first stars already floated, detached and pale, as if they were not real stars but only reflections. It was the end of a day which I had spent on the back of a gaunt and sullen donkey I had purchased at Dinivolim, coming down through the forests and rubber plantations into the shimmering tea country, and at last to the cliffs of Tyom. My household was not expecting me; Jom saw me first, bellowed, charged, and crushed me to his heart in the front courtyard, and my mother ran out to meet me with a look of fear, her hair disheveled, her hands still gleaming with the grease of the kitchen. A servant was sent to fetch Lunre, who was away; others hurriedly prepared a reception for me, filling the courtyard with flowers. Now we sat there on cane chairs in an atmosphere of relaxed festivity which I recognized as the absence of my father.

“I’ll soon get fat again,” I said, holding up my empty plate. A servant took it and held the cloth and the bowl for me to wash.

“Fat again!” she said. “You were never fatter than a little mouse. And all of your fat, you carried it on your whiskers…”

“Yes, we must fatten you,” said my father’s wife, wiping her narrow hands on the servant’s cloth, smoothing her long skirt. She sat very straight in the growing darkness, not bending into the shape of the chair. The last rays of the sky shone on her high and polished plaits. Her face was a lean shadow. “How else can we find you a bride?” Her laugh clattered, an old spoon falling on metal. “Not that it stopped your foreign tutor. He’s still as thin as a cricket, and we celebrated his wedding during the Sea Days!”

I turned to Lunre, shocked. He wore an abashed, uncomfortable smile, and I imagined that he was grateful for the darkness. “True,” he said in a low voice, in Kideti, glancing away at the trees.

I stared at him. “But where is she?”

He rubbed his jaw.

My mother answered gently: “Lunre lives in his own house now, on Painted Mountain.”

“You moved away,” I said in Olondrian, dismayed. And he answered in the same language, his hands moving in the dark like drifting leaves. “I couldn’t stay here forever, with no one to teach. I would have told you later, but…” He shrugged, eloquent in silence. The servants brought two braziers from the kitchen, and the reddish light revealed a demure smile on the face of my father’s wife.

“Congratulations,” I told Lunre in Kideti.

He looked at me, his face serious, filled with gratitude in the dimness. “Thank you,” he said. He reached and grasped my hand, then patted my arm as if to feel that I was real, was here beside him. “Jevick,” he murmured. His voice hummed out in the twilight, his same voice. I had forgotten how thin it was, ragged in the upper register. Had I described his voice I would not have said that it had that worn quality, as if its fabric was stretched, on the verge of tearing. I would have told of another voice, smoother, nobler, more restful, yet when he spoke it was this voice I recognized: this weather-beaten voice, shredded by winds like the voice of an old sailor, brought him close to me in a dazzling instant. I knew him through his voice, despite his hair, grown longer and bleached salt-white, tied at the nape of his neck in the island fashion, and despite his vest with the Tyomish designs, his drawstring trousers and leather sandals, the costume of a fisherman of the cliffs. His voice was the same, his lanky body, the way he sat with his elbows on his knees, his sad necromancer’s eyes. He played with a leaf, burning it on the coals, and the redness lit his fingers until they were incandescent with hidden blood.

We spoke. We spoke of nothing, fish and fruit trees and the gossip of Tyom, an old man’s death, a number of betrothals. My father’s wife, loyal to her bitterness, made only comments whose innocence concealed their essential cruelty. She was a dagger thinly sheathed, as always, only slightly subdued by the thought that I, the Ekawi, could send her away. And only this gnawing fear, evident in her strained and watchful pose, made her pitiable and therefore bearable. Her laugh rang out unnaturally, so that Jom whimpered with distress and my mother looked at her co-wife with concern. My mother, incapable of malice, even in self-defense, who humbled herself in order to soothe the first wife: “Look at your son’s clothes,” she said, teasing, and my father’s wife, not unaware of the kindness, sniffed coldly. “Ridiculous attire,” she said. “Even his tutor doesn’t dress like that.” A smirk twisted her iron face in the moonlight.

It was my mother’s genius, this passionate sensitivity that made her capable of knowing others better than they knew themselves. When Lunre was ready to go, we walked with him to the arch of the courtyard, a servant following with a Tyomish lamp, a bowl of oil. The light was florid and agitated, a light by which one could never read, its nervous color bouncing in all directions, lighting up my master’s smile and then, leaning against the wall, the pole which he took in his hand, grasping it firmly. It was a bolkyet, a stick in which a narrow blade was hidden. He twisted the handle, revealing a streak of white. “In case of thieves,” he grinned, snapping it closed, and my mother said approvingly: “Yes, Painted Mountain is far.” I looked at her and saw, by her earnest eyes in the transient light, by the tender curve at the corner of her mouth, that her thoughts were the same as mine: she knew that Lunre would never have occasion to use the bolkyet he leaned upon so proudly. For any islander coming upon my master in the dark, even the most brutal and wayward criminal, would flee from his spectral countenance and supernatural height and from the pallor that indicated a lack of blood. Yet I saw that, since he had moved away, my mother had flattered him for his brusque courage in going armed among the forests, and that Lunre, who would never have admitted to physical vanity, was pleased to be seen as a man to be reckoned with. This glimpse of their new lives, so full of grace and generosity, affected me like the sight of a beautiful painting, like one of those dark and melancholy paintings of Olondria in which only a tiny corner is laden with light. There they stood, surrounded by darkness under a distant moon, lit by the thick and glancing rays from the bowl, the white-haired man with his pale and gentle eyes as changeful as water, and the woman, black-haired, barefoot, lambent with smiles. Then he put his free hand on my shoulder and kissed me on both cheeks, saying in Olondrian: “Welcome, friend of my heart.” He squeezed my shoulder and turned, the servant lighting his way out to the gate, his angular shadow sliding over the path.

“He is a good man,” my mother said when he had gone. “You should be happy that he has found a wife.”

“I am happy,” I said.

She linked her arm through mine, turning with me to walk back to the chairs. “My little mouse…”

The words affected her suddenly; it was clear she had not expected it. I heard the catch in her voice, and she fell silent. Then she laughed tearfully: “How silly I am! And look, Jom’s taken off his vest—it’s getting colder, he’ll be chilled…”

Jom had indeed removed his vest and stood before the orange trees with his powerful chest and shoulders lit by the moon. My father’s wife walked toward me with her brisk, constricted steps and knelt on the flagstones to receive the touch of my hand. I touched her formidable hairstyle, which was barbed like a sea urchin, and she rose, muttered good night, and walked stiffly off to her room. We could hear her scolding one of the servants. Footsteps pattered, a light flashed. Then the house was dark, submerged in silence.

“Jomi,” my mother said. “First One, what have you done with your vest? No, leave him,” she said to me, touching my arm. “He likes it. And he’s only happy because his brother is home. Aren’t you, Jomi. Aren’t you, my little squirrel…”

Her little squirrel, her little mouse. When she spoke to us her voice overflowed with love, a love that was naked, glowing, transparent, the same pure ardor that poured from her eyes when she looked at us, that lit up the curve of her cheek, inexhaustible, never flagging in strength. This love existed only to give itself, an eternal fountain. And now, it seemed to me, that my father was dead, she was free to bestow her love without the fear of being mocked or of exposing us to the danger of his jealousy. Moonlight fell in the courtyard, a white rain, immobile, diaphanous. Jom put his hands into it and rubbed his face. He went through all the motions of washing, scrubbing his hair and the definite, vivid contours of his bricklayer’s physique. Soft moans escaped from him, and his laugh which was quiet and strangely flat, devoid of all but the most private emotion. A laugh like the chuckling call of a dove. He was still far from me, so far, whitening in the moonlight like a statue.

The following morning I rode to Painted Mountain.

My mother had described the secluded spot where Lunre had chosen to live. I rode up through the vivid and varied greenness of Tinimavet, the dark green of the mango trees, the yellow-green of the coffee bushes. The canna lilies, not yet in flower, had leaves of a cool and opaque green; the papayas, throwing their white trunks toward the sky, were crowned with a green that was almost blue. Lunre’s house stood alone at the end of a dusty path, its thatched roof sheltered by an enormous flame tree.

I dismounted in silence, my satchel a weight on my shoulder. The house was small, isolated, looking across the valley, surrounded on all sides by trees and dwarfed by the heavy arms of the flame tree kindling its myriad torches in the shadows. It was strange to see my master emerge smiling from the doorway, stooping to pass underneath the hanging thatch. He clasped my hand and greeted me in Olondrian, and the daylight showed how tanned with the sun he was, how white his hair.

“A beautiful morning,” he said. “As always, here on the edge of the valley! Often I stand here, just looking out, just looking…” And he put his hands on his narrow hips and squinted over the valley where the sunlight poured on the misty green of the farms. “Beautiful!” he repeated. “Sometimes I can see all the way to Snail Mountain. Ah, but come—come in.” He motioned me toward the open door, wearing a bashful, unfamiliar smile. I ducked inside and he followed me, pulling shut a door of unfinished bark.

“A shame to cut off the view,” he said. “But Niahet says it lets in the flies.” The room was dim and cool, with screens of woven reeds on the windows; but even in the poor light I caught the anxious glance he darted at me, his sudden firmness of purpose in saying “Niahet.” I did not know what to do with myself and stood holding my satchel in front of me while Lunre urged me repeatedly to sit down and finally seated himself on one of the woven mats on the swept earth floor, hunched and awkward, all gangly arms and legs. It was clear that he was not yet accustomed to sitting on the floor, but he managed to make himself comfortable by leaning against the wall. I sank down on the mat across from him, my back to the door, the satchel beside me. “So, here I am,” he said.

He smiled at me, his teeth white in the gloom. Flecks of sunlight clung like gold dust to the screens in the three windows. Aside from the mats there was no furniture in the room but the old sea chest, its blue paint peeling, set against one wall. A few books were stacked on top of it and, I saw with a curious throb of the heart, a simple jut, veiled to the waist, its spraddle-legs fashioned of copper. It must belong to the wife. It presided over my master’s books in squat, enigmatic silence: one external soul watching the others.

“Welcome,” said Lunre, cracking his slim knuckles in the old manner but with an overattentive air, a suppressed agitation, and I knew that he was nervous and sought my approval, that for him this visit of mine was of the most profound importance. The brilliant green of his eyes was flecked with shadows of uncertainty, bits of flotsam dulling the flashing waters. And his gaze was no longer quiet and direct: it moved, glancing here and there, at the bare walls or the attenuate streaks of light.

“Ah, Niahet,” he said abruptly. His voice was unusually loud. She came in, pushing the curtain aside with her shoulder, holding a wooden tray. She was not beautiful, nor very young, though she was twenty years younger than he. She knelt before me with practiced grace.

“Hot date juice in the morning,” Lunre said, still in that strange loud voice, and switching into his accented Kideti. “I know it’s unusual, but I find it so—I like it so much.”

I kept my eyes lowered. My face was hot.

“Ah, thank you,” he said as the woman turned and knelt before him and he took his cup of date juice from the tray. I sat holding mine: its smell was heavy, dark, nostalgic, it reminded me of childhood fevers and sleep. The woman rose. I realized that I knew her, only by sight, as one knows almost everyone in Tyom: she was the daughter of small farmers, the pudgy one, the quiet one. Her brother worked as steward on a neighboring estate. She did not speak to me, of course, though Lunre gazed at her hopefully, and also, I noticed, with a mild affection. She went out with her back erect, planting her solid, bare feet on the floor, her heels glowing like yellow soapstone.

“A wonderful,” Lunre said. His voice was hoarse and would not rise. He cleared his throat. “A wonderful woman,” he said.

I sipped the sticky drink. My courage almost failed me; like Lunre, I did not know where to look. Here he was, married to an illiterate islander, having discovered a richness in the soil of Tyom. Once you have built something—something that takes all your passion and will—it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. There was no way to begin, so I began clumsily.

“Thank you for lending me books for the journey,” I said. “But you might have suggested Leiya’s autobiography.”

He raised an eyebrow, maintaining his smile though his gaze was very still. “Ah?”

My laugh clattered. “A joke. Of course you wouldn’t have sent it with me. You knew it was banned, like her other books. The Handbook of Mercies, for example. I had a chance to read that one, while I was away.”

He set his cup down on the tray and sat with his head bowed, frowning at it. When he raised his eyes, the pain in them went straight into my heart.

“I gathered from Sten that something had happened to you,” he said quietly. “Something I may not have prepared you for. I am very sorry.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t want to complain. I just didn’t know how to say—I met someone. She gave me something for you.” I clawed at the satchel, tore it open, and pulled out the two pink packages tied with string. “She gave me these. She asked me to bring them.”

Lunre looked at the packages. He blinked at them. He touched them. For a moment he seemed not to understand their significance. More than this: it appeared that he did not know what the letters were, what writing was, that he had forgotten how to read. Then, without warning, his breath caught and his face went pale to the lips. He grasped at the packages with feeble fingers. And as I stared, my heart pounding, I heard him groan: a low and terrible sound, ghastly and grating, a sound to chill the blood.

He groaned. He clutched his side as if I had stabbed him, crumpling so that his head lay on the mat beside the fatal letters. His cries desecrated the homely innocence of the little house, profaned the green tranquility of the hill. They were ugly, bestial, appalling, their anguish obliterating all kindness, all decency. His hair was against the letters, his hands covering his face. When I crawled to him and took his shoulders, he fought me. “No. You have done enough,” he shouted, thrashing in my arms.

“Hush. Hush,” I said. I did not release him until his first torment had passed. Then I lowered him gently to the earthen floor. The woman, Niahet, did not emerge; I imagined her pacing her humble kitchen in an agony of fear.

“Hush,” I said. He lay on the floor, still shaking, and I placed my hand between his shoulder blades in quiet authority. I willed him to endure the pain with a wisdom born of the desert, of the winter, of the evenings of the dead. Yet tears rolled down my cheeks, and my heart struggled. It seemed to me that I was a servant of death, that desolation followed wherever I passed. I remembered Tialon’s brave despair, the bodies burning in the Night Market, Olondria lying under the threat of war. I had drawn that line of destruction across the north, and now I had brought it home with me to Tyom, to Lunre’s house. A curse, I thought. A curse. And then I seemed to hear the angel’s voice. Stop, Jevick. It’s over now. It’s finished.

“I shall never be able to speak of it,” Lunre whispered.

“I know.” The glinting screens on the windows wavered; I blinked to clear my vision. “You do not need to speak of it. But you will read the letters.”

“I can’t. I can’t go back.”

“I know. But you will read.”

Then he sat up slowly like an old man and drew his knees in close. A superstitious terror in his face. He stared at the letters before him on the ground. “I never thought this would happen to me. It’s like looking at a noose…”

“No,” I said. “A door.”

“A door,” he repeated. New tears slipped from his lashes and down his cheeks, but I think he did not know that he was weeping. Where was he looking now with his bright eyes, devoid of color in the gloom, shot with a hard, abstract brilliance? Into his old world. Where in the days of triumph and certainty he had walked in a dark robe through the gleaming halls, carrying his writing box, and rain had fallen among the trees of the roof gardens, melting the light of the lamps. There he had walked with an angel at his side. And now he looked at me. “Tchavi!” he said. One word, half a whisper and half a cry. It carried wonder and an anguished plea. He took my hand, bent over it, pressed it to his brow. “Tchavi. Tchavi.”

I imagine his departure from the palace. He’s in a room, one of those small clean rooms of the Tower of Myrrh, a pallet on the floor, a few gnarled, half-melted candles, the open windows showing the sleeping fields. The first birds have begun to sing, and the fields are blue with mist, but he still has a candle lighted, on a chair, and by its light he is carefully turning books over in his hands and then packing them in tall, scuffed leather bags. He has not yet acquired the legendary sea chest he will purchase in Bain, perhaps in the Chandler’s Market. The candlelight caresses his silver hair, then sinks and loses its way in the folds of his voluminous dark robe.

It is the same robe that filled with rain under the trees when the priest’s daughter watched him from a high window, and now he reaches behind him and clutches its fabric in two handfuls and pulls it smoothly off over his head. It lies on the pallet, crumpled like a skin. It smells of the earth, of the wild roots he used to make its dye, of the winter rain that fell while he wove its cloth, of the wicks of lamps, of the dusty curtains in the shrine of the Stone. He stands naked, his ribs lit by the flicker of candlelight, and looks outside at the fields where the shadows are deepening. Then he bends to untie the knot of the limp cloth traveling bag which has gathered dust in the corner for nine years.

The knot will not untie. He snatches at it with icy fingers. Finally he severs the string with his teeth. It leaves the taste of ash in his mouth, and he reaches into the bag at last and pulls out the clothes, the white shirt, the tapered trousers. He is still thin as he was years ago and the clothes fit him well enough, but he does not fit them: his body is awkward. From the bottom of the cloth bag he removes, and puts on with clumsy movements, the rings and the earrings set with veined blue stones.

By the time he reaches the southern pier the hills will be blazing with light, and his earlobes, unaccustomed to the jewelry, will be sore. But now as he touches the earrings tentatively they do not feel painful, only heavy, with the dull weight of any stone. Soon he will not notice them at all, as when he stands in our courtyard and the sun of the islands fills them with liquid radiance, and the boy who converses with birds reminds him suddenly of their presence by reaching out for them and crying “Katchimta”: Blue.

And I, too, I changed my clothes. I put away my Bainish suit and slipped into my Kideti trousers and vest. A cloak against the rains, though it was still bright and hot outside when I went to the altar room and reached out for my jut. A shiver of dread went through me in the instant before I touched it, and I laughed because I had never cared for my jut, that little claw-footed shape with the jade handles. I had never cleaned it, never oiled it, never prayed over it. “Come,” I told it, smiling, and hefted it in one hand. It was heavier than I had expected, as if its insides were solid clay. When I turned I saw my mother in the doorway, and she gasped and put her hands over her mouth, her eyes filling.

“Don’t go,” she cried.

I held the jut close to my side, my cloak falling over it. “I’m glad you’re here. I was going to look for you before I went. I knew you’d miss my jut, if no one else did.”

She was not listening, could not hear me. “Don’t.” She rubbed my shoulder, tears bright on her cheeks.

“I’ll come back,” I said. “Soon. In a fortnight, perhaps. I’ll always go, but I’ll always come back.”

“I shouldn’t have let you go.” She gripped my collar, her eyes fierce. “I know something happened to you there. I’m not a fool. When Sten came—he said you were ill. What kind of illness? He wouldn’t tell me—he didn’t know, he said…”

I put my arm around her and kissed her hair.

“And now you’re going. With your jut. And I should be proud… It’s a blessing, a tchavi in the family…”

Her tears soaked into my vest. I waited, knowing that at last she would raise her head, push back her hair and try to smile. And when she did I smiled down at her and told her again that I would come back when I could, soon, perhaps before the long rains. And I walked out with my jut under my cloak. I crossed the farm, greeting the laborers who waved to me from the fields. This happy land, I thought, this happy land. I passed the row of storage rooms, secluded under calamander trees, their doors chained shut. I went on walking, far from the village, out to the cliffs where I used to go with Lunre, the briny rocks like spines under my sandals. My jut fell soundlessly, the sea too far for the splash to reach me. About me mountains hung like palaces of cloud.

Tchavi, they call me now. Not Ekawi, never Ekawi. They follow me through the village when I come down from the mountain. Children, precious as water after my months among the peaks. Breathless women begging me to come into their homes for a meal. Tchavi, Tchavi. A ragged procession follows me down the road, and people glance at one another and say: “He is going to his jut.” And others say: “He has no jut.” But no one knows for certain. I stride toward the yellow house, leaning on my staff. There, for a short time, I will stay. At home. I sit with my family, I walk, I read. I exchange the books I took into the mountains for new ones. I visit Lunre and Niahet his wife. I talk with many people, whole and hotun. And I remember Jissavet.

No, she will not come again.

I look for her on the evening paths the color of mist, at the corner of the house where moisture trickles. At this corner, behind the bushes where direct sunlight never falls, this corner of permanent shadows, mildew, decay. I breathe the dense nocturnal odor of jasmine, the smell of the rain-soaked wall. “Autumn comes with a whisper, smelling of stone…” But there is no autumn here, and there is no angel, no dark butterfly on the roof, no glancing and inexplicable light.

I walk under the dripping trees. Across the sky the blood of my heart is spread in the shape of her fine, receding footprints. Like doors of fire, opening and closing. While in the courtyards of Tyom the braziers are lit and the old men wheeze with laughter.

I lean on the fences, looking for her. A lamp is lit in a nearby house and a dark shape moves from the grass to the little pathway of broken bricks: a clay jar in her arms, she passes, one leg and then another leg. Her queenly back, the oblique light on her heel. I am ready to cry out; I make a movement and she turns. Her face is surprised in the dusk, no more than eight or nine years old. Of course, I recognize the house, it’s Pavit’s youngest daughter. I have always known those windows smothered in leaves.

Afternoons of Tyom. Drunk with the heat I stagger up from the hour of rest, my head throbbing, my mouth dry. I stumble into the courtyard, already vaguely looking for her in the water jar, the cup held to my lips, the heavy light on the stones. Flies buzz around me, rumors of her in the shadow of the wall. I narrow my eyes, gazing into the sunlight, and the heat and sweat on my lashes make me believe I see her incipient form, radiating luster among the hibiscus. But she does not come, she never arrives. She is always on the point of being, never crossing over again into life. When the storms roll in from the sea, I sit in the doorway of the hall while the rain unleashes its demons in the darkened courtyard.

And now, how glad I am that I did not burn this stack of books, this poor vestige of her, pathetic as a stray hair! For I am like those lovers who keep obscure and grotesque charms, a maize-cob gnawed by the loved one, a tick scratched from her ankle. Such is the angel’s anadnedet. I kneel at the table in the schoolroom, reading in the oily gleam of my lamp, for the light that enters from the garden is not enough, only the faded light that penetrates the curtain of rain. In the resonance of the downpour I review her passionate language. “There’s thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.” The poverty of the words does not deprive them of significance: sometimes I think they are almost, almost enough… almost enough to call her up again, real, before me, with her flashing eyes, her sumptuous, unreachable skin. So the lover invents his own religion, praying over his treasure of discarded fingernails. The anadnedet has no more power than these—perhaps less. Yet I adore it; to touch its pages gives me joy. There, at the corner, a stain of ink shows where I started when she suddenly spoke to me in the midst of my hurried writing. Wonderful stain, peaked like a star. And all these creased and dirty pages, dry and porous in the light of my lamp. I bend down close: they smell of smoke as they speak to me of a watery temple, maps “curled at the edges,” “immense fruit bats.” Jissavet does not live within these words, she is not contained by them. What would she say of this rainstorm, had she lived? No, I will never know how she would respond to this crash of thunder, if she would start, laugh, or run outside into the garden. Still, I read. When the rain stops I can hear the sound of the pages turning, a sensuous sound like a woman turning in bed. A whisper beneath the dropping of water from the wet leaves of the garden hedge and the echoing clamor of the disturbed cockatoos.

I am like no other tchavi in the history of the islands. When I visit Tyom, children come to me in the old schoolroom. They come with pens of tediet-wood, with hibiscus-flower ink in leather bottles, with stiff paper lifted out of a slurry of leaves. These are made by the yellow man who lives on Painted Mountain, a mad old codger who gives them to anyone who asks. Only the children ask. In the schoolroom they show me the words they have written during my absence, whole stories in Kideti, embryonic poems. This alphabet was developed in Olondria, I tell them, but it is our own; it was used to pen the first work of written Kideti literature. The Anadnedet, by Jissavet of Kiem. This is why we call it Jissavet’s Alphabet. At the end of each lesson I read aloud from this seminal work. And I introduce them to others, books I have translated from Olondrian in the most violent and sacrilegious form of reading. And I tell them: This is a journey to jepnatow-het, the land of shadows. Do not mistake it for the country of the real.

Perhaps even the land named in the books is no longer real. Terrible rumors reach us from the north: libraries burning, devotees of the Stone dragged into the street. Perhaps, one day, Tyom will become the last refuge of books. I do not know. I read. I take the children of Tyom hunting with Firdred, spearing boar in snowy Olondrian forests. Together we enter the dark-shuttered castle of Beal. And Fodra takes us to Bain, to the white walls overlooking the sea, the eternal flavor of olives. Then I look up: the light has changed, the children are restless with hunger, we have all lost another afternoon of our lives, gaining nothing but an enigmatic glow: for the cup I lift now is not merely a cup but carries on its glazed surface the shadows of sails. And this lintel, suddenly it’s darker, as if magically aged. And the flowers of the courtyard, exhausted with heat, hang on their stalks like handkerchiefs forgotten after a midnight ball, like sashes lost at romantic assignations. In the same way, perhaps, I am still influenced by the angel, subtly, hazily, as the tide responds even in the dark of the moon. Sometimes she comes to me in dreams, and it is as if I have been permitted to enter the huge and vanished doors of childhood.

My lost rose, my distant bell! What was that feeling of happiness, welling up unexpectedly under the sorrow? I was in the schoolroom after a lesson; my mother was there; the room was hot and bright, the walls yellow with light from the open doorway. I stood, shaken with joy, concentrating on the feeling as if analyzing a new and delightful taste. It was the angel: the pure heat, the warbling doves in the sunny garden, my mother’s golden face lit by the walls.

“What is it, younger son?” she asked me, laughing.

What is it? Yes, what is it? It is the reason I walk the mountains after dusk, unable to bear even my tattered shelter of dried grass, and watch the fireflies pulsing over the forest. Oh, will she not come? Can they not call her, those roving lamps? No: I am alone in the sultry air, in the faintly violet darkness, in the odor of damp leaves. But I go on waiting for her. I look for her still.