She says, Twenty years ago the streets of Khalem were crowded with stalls. Every rounded fruit and root and vegetable had a carver, adorning the produce that grows on the slopes of Khalem. They were jewelers of everyday, for all they often argued. What did not sell was diced and stirred in burnished bronze pots, and then cooked low and slow while the cooler air spread its blessed breath over the tired city, the sellers swapping tales and ladling soup under the bejeweled net of the stars.
And the onion stall belonged to your family? I ask.
Nayra turns to me, and her eyes are golden like story, like childhood. One of the onion jewelers was my father, she says. There were many more. I no longer remember.
I, too, don’t remember much—not of Raiga, not even of Khalem. There is the ship, the semi-dark glowing closeness of it, and abovedecks, the fog and he wind.
Give the onion to me, Nayra says. You don’t need it. But I do.
Abovedecks at night
I find a spot on the open deck from which to watch the sea. Nobody bothers me here. Not much can be seen in the darkness, but I listen to the incessant language of the waves. Above me, the stars dive in and out of clouds. In the depths of the sea I imagine its life—giant fish, red and gold and almost as round as an onion.
I take my onion out, cradle it in my hands. It has not begun to soften or rot. It shines like it shone in the dark sideways market. Its jeweled ridges feel soothing under my fingers—the streets and markets and homes of Khalem. My fingers trace the past of Nayra’s story: stalls that line the streets, people selling all manner of things that are round and bejeweled—onions, figs, the purplish globe artichokes; oranges, not needing to be carved or otherwise adorned, for their skin has drunk from the sun.
My onion is glowing golden between my palms; I am occupied by its secrets. Only later, lying awake on my berth and trying to fall asleep, I wonder if I have heard, from a distance, a sigh coming up from the bottomless sea.
Night after night
Night after night I climb up to the deck and let my onion shine. In calmer weather, I hear the sigh from the sea, more pronounced now, and sometimes a shadow, as if of wings, rising and falling like a breath cradled and diffused by the wave. On stormier nights I hear nothing, and the deck hands send me below.
I have eaten my fill every day. I am not used to this—to eating this much, to eating so much dry bread, to not having anything stolen.
The shadow ray
It is raining. The night sky adorns itself in the sideways stitching of rain. The deck hands are sheltering elsewhere. I take out my onion—a familiar gesture by now—and raise it to my chest. My palms cradle the houses and streets of Khalem as its light ventures forth, golden and warm like a beacon.
Out of the sea, triangular wings rise, darker than the onion-gilt wave. Flitting between the ship and the water. It is a sea animal, a ray. It traverses the boundary space between the ship and the sea, the boundary space which is softened by spray and the sideways stitching of rain. Our eyes meet; it is human; human like me and like Nayra, and I do not know why I think this.
What is your name? I shout to the shadow in the sea. It sprays me with water, or maybe it is the ship’s sudden movement, lurching away, and then it is gone.
The Maid of Murur
Later that night, lying on my berth, I count breath after breath to a hundred, but sleep does not come. I count the number of berths in this corner of third class, I count the people fast asleep, the wooden beams above my head. I count the knots on the beams and their patterns, I count the wet sound of steps coming closer and closer.
I stop counting and turn to see a pale-blue hand draw back the curtain. There are three more people asleep nearby, but the stranger is quiet; only the water trickling down their breast and hip makes a sound, like a sigh.
I am called the Maid of Murur. Her naked skin is pale blue, like the wave. She holds her ray skin neatly folded across the elbow. And you?
I am.... I am.... I turn my eyes away. I can tell you what I am called in my documents?
What would you like to be called? Her voice shivers. I sit on my berth and pat the place next to me, push the blanket towards her.
My mouth opens. Belezal. I have not expected this, never imagined that name could be mine. It is a Khalem name, the name of the great mythic artisan who fashioned the first bejeweled globe of Khalem out of gold; before everyone took up this form, before onions and figs and artichokes were carved to resemble his craft. It is said that his golden coffin hangs from the central chain of Khalem and balances it with its weight.
Are you a man?
I shake my head. Neither this or that, you know. I heard I can be whatever I want in Islingar.
My father wouldn’t understand. The thought pains me, that I kept it a secret from him for so long, that he’d think I was hurt in the war, that he failed to protect me. But I lost his knife and his pot, and that pains me much more than losing the name he had given me.
I stare at the small puddles on the floor, uncertain when the ray-person slipped away.
Hunger of a different kind
In the third-class commons, the rations-people mock me when I ask for more. The words are almost soft at first, but after a few days it intensifies; they call me a growing boy and a vulture of dry bread and they laugh with their I’ve-always-eaten-my-fill mouths. Nayra nods at me from the other side of the room. Her tireless arm stirs the pot.
You’re hungry again, she says when I make it over. She is cooking onions today—onions sliced into thin rings and cooked translucent and golden with turmeric and cardamom. As I stand there transfixed, my mouth watering, she grimaces. It’s not the same. The onions that grow on this ship taste like water. Not like the ocean even, for that is full of salt and life. The water of the ship is sanitary and still, and it bloats these onions, steals any life and taste from within. What you smell is the spice.
They grow onions here? It is hard for me to imagine, but she nods.
Even deeper within the bowels of the ship there are gardens tended by those of us who will never land.
Nayra stirs the pot, a familiar motion by now. Today the handle of her ladle is a bird made of silver, its feet transformed into chains wrapped around the wood of the spoon.
No matter how much spice I add, it will never taste like Khalem.
Nayra’s gaze slides over my bulging pocket. I wait for her to ask again, but the only sound she makes is the stirring, stirring, stirring the simple pot on the stove which is not connected to anything.
You said that you will never land?
She sighs. Not now. Not ever, perhaps.
Islingar is not receiving?
Oh, I have the documents, Nayra says. Documents for Islingar, a land where onions soak up even more water, a land that is tasteless and smells like nothing I know. No, child, I want to go back to Khalem.
Belowdecks on my berth, I eat everything in the ration packet, but I am not full. I want to eat all the dry bread that scrapes the insides of my mouth and slides down my throat like a gravelly lump. I want to devour Nayra’s onions, their bloated, watery taste softened by spice. I want to taste the ocean, drink the brine and the seaweed until we are safe on dry land. No matter how much I eat there is an emptiness in me, the weight of Khalem that can never be balanced by chains.
Words of Murur
I climb abovedecks that night. It is windy, and the ship lurches; but I have become stealthier. I hide from the deck hands, my clothing blown this way and that by the wind. I am huddled in dreary cold wrappings against the gusts of water and wind. When I take out the onion, I doubt anyone will see me. Not the maid of Murur; not the ship hands, not even the stars in the overcast, punishing sky. Not even Nayra. You do not need the onion, she said. My father was among the last onion jewelers of Khalem. Every rounded fruit and vegetable had a carver, adorning the pliant flesh with the slopes and streets of Khalem, adorning the graveyards and markets and chains that hold it aloft. You do not need it, but I do.
I should have tol
d her, my father, too, used to carve—with his paper-thin knife made from my grandfather’s razor, and with his big carver’s tools. There is no natural magic remaining in Raiga, but the artists make it out of the fallen forests, out of memory. Out of wood they shape birds and streets and houses, carve protections and lions into the corner beams. But he found no wood in Khalem. It is a city of gold and chain, of stone and carved onion. When my father sickened—
The maid of Murur is here. She sits heavily on the wet wooden boards by my side. Her naked human skin is glowing blue; her slippery ray-skin folded once more over her arm.
Your onion glows like a beacon.
I do not need it, I say.
Not even to call me out of the turbulent sea?
Maybe. To call you. I smile despite myself. Why are you at sea?
Because Raiga is at war.
I know very little about Murur. A small country neighboring Raiga from southeast, for centuries swallowed and spat out by Raiga’s conflicts.
Murur was pretty once. She shakes her head, and droplets of water fall on my hands from her seaweed-braided dark hair. Pretty before all the wars. Now everything is rigid—the clothes, the words, the people. They do not want someone like me, and I’d rather be in the ocean than anywhere with my family. Her voice goes mocking, shrill with pain. You say you can love a person of any shape—then why can’t you marry a boy?
The way she says the word ‘boy’ makes me clench inside. She asked if I was a boy, but I am neither this nor that, at least not yet.
She looks at me, worried. Clasps my hand. I do not mean you. They would not want you, just like they do not want me.
Her hand on mine is warm and wet, and my feelings churn like the storm. At least she told her family who she was. I did not tell my parents, when I left. I was hungry and alone, and it did not seem possible to have that conversation in Khalem. I just hoped to be free in Islingar.
I say, You can be whatever you want in Islingar.
I do not have the documents. I am not even alive anymore, not in a way you are alive, Belezal. I do not even have a human name. I traded all that for the ray-skin. I did all that to be free.
She no longer has a human name; but my name—my name!—my name on her lips is like gold and salt water. The name Belezal is Khalem’s heavy chain weighted with the shores that I wanted to reach all my life, as warm as a carved golden onion.
It is cold here, I whisper. Are you not cold?
A little. She scuttles closer to me, and I put my shaking arm around her shoulders.
It is cold here, I say again. My lips, too, are like ice. Soon we will wrap a single ray-skin around us and plunge into the sea. But I do not want to go there. I mumble, Would you like to come down—to my berth?
She does, and we do, and we drape her ray-skin over the berth’s opening so that nobody can look.
The pot of empty water
You smell like the sea, Nayra says. Like seaweed. It’s morning, and I’ve wandered over to her stove again after the rations-people refused me any extras. Back in the berth, my lover ate the last of my dried bread—stale and too salty, still better than sea snails and worms. Then she left. I am hungry again, hungry always and as long as I can remember.
Nayra gives me a knowing look. Ah, youth.
I look away. She cannot come ashore with me.
Nayra’s wrinkled hand stirs a pot of empty water. The ladle is plain wood with no adornment, its handle worn thin by decades of work.
No documents?
I nod. No documents. Where we come from, they do not want people like us.
But they wanted you in Khalem. And my father—my father—Nayra’s voice runs thin and bitter. Runs out.
My father, too, was a carver. I have thought of this moment, practiced the words, but I cannot quite say them now. My father—in Raiga he was a carver of wood; he could have carved ships if he lived closer to the coast. But the ships of Khalem are hammered out of sheet brass; they cannot venture far into the open sea.
This ship, Nayra says, was made before Raiga and Islingar, made in the great isle of Selei before it sunk underwave, made when Khalem as we know it was only beginning, when Belezal forged the streets and the chains.
That’s my name. Belezal. A name made real last night on the lips of the shapeshifting ray of Murur.
A weighty name to carry, Nayra says. A legacy of chains. She is silent for a moment. We were exiled from the city, my father and I, so your people could balance the weight of Khalem.
She is bitter, but I stay by her side. I want to say, I had nothing to eat there. We barely survived. My father is very ill, and even the knife he gave me was stolen. In Khalem, I could not be who I am.
I do not say these words. They will not help.
I love the city, too. I do not say this either. I did not love it when I came and left.
I say, I do not understand why the city needs to be balanced with our bodies. Our weight.
Because it hangs in the balance.
Nayra relents and releases a small pouch that hangs around her neck; warms the spices before crushing them into the boiling water. They float, dissolving in that heat. She stirs the empty soup as I watch, and she ladles it—hot water, just water from the secret bowels of the ship, first sanitary-still and then vibrant, alive with Nayra’s spices.
I take a sip, and it is the city: its markets and birds and crowded streets— For the briefest moment, I see it as it was in peaceful times. The jewelers of fruit and root and vegetable in their festive embroidered robes under aprons, and my father—my people—carving birds and reindeer into housebeams made of stone and wood; and small-statured people I have never seen carving jewels out of spice berries. All around are shouts and argument and song; good-natured cries and little brass-bells calling the market to dinner. Even the honey-seller is there, with his wax candles carved like the onion, carved like the city. I swallow, and it goes away.
Who are the jewelers of spice? I ask, and Nayra nods.
These people are called Khidi. They say they founded Khalem. It was their city before it was hung suspended in the air, before the weight of the world was balanced in it.
You do not believe it?
I do not know. She shrugs. The city is always changing.
I am sorry, I say. I am sorry for everything. My father’s sickness, the war that spat us out of Raiga and into Khalem, the tumult and din of Khalem, the churning of the sea and this ancient ship that traveled it before our countries were real, before Belezal spun the chains of Khalem. I’m sorry we can come together only in memory shared with a spoonful of empty soup. I’m sorry my lover won’t come ashore with me. I’m sorry I took a name too large for me to carry. I’m sorry that I am and am not a boy.
I tell Nayra, I’m sorry you cannot go home. I cannot, either. I do not know where it is.
Tide
The maid of Murur comes back in the night, when I am asleep in my berth. I blurt, you do not need the onion to find me.
I don’t, she says. But it is good to have the light.
Her lips latch to mine, and the sea of her swallows me.
An Offering
I bring the onion to Nayra the next day, proffer it in both my hands as I would give her the city. The strongest light.
I do not need it, I say, but you do.
She turns towards me. Away from the stove. The ladle is poised in her hand. It is ebony, crowned in a golden bulb of an onion. Did she hold it before I spoke? I don’t know.
What made you change your mind?
I swallow. I don’t know.
My lips move, soundless. The onion jeweler gave me a gift; he did not need to give it. I can choose to give, too.
And, I am no longer sure this is mine.
And, You have been on this ship for decades. You cannot return to Khalem.
This is Khalem.
Aloud I say, I did not know you before.
The ladle shakes in Nayra’s hand. She kept asking me for the onion, but now I know that sh
e did not think I would give her anything.
What about your lover?
I shrug, pretending indifference. She can find her own way to me.
Are you absolutely sure? But Nayra is already stretching out her hand.
I let the golden globe go. It is a gift, this Khalem of Gold, a gift I did not have to receive, or to give. But I did, and I am, because each jeweled onion contains the city and is reflected in it, and each carver carves the city and gifts it to those who need to remember it and pass it on for others. We may not understand Khalem and its chains and its weight, but we can remember it, so the city can never be destroyed.
Nayra lays down her ladle and takes up a paring knife. With slightly shaking hands she peels the city—its golden skin and the streets and its bridges and the curve of the royal palace. Memory sloughs off, revealing the white flesh inside. Her motions are sure now. She carves that up too, the onion beneath the skin, the meat and heart of the city, its hidden mechanical core—now only, and ever, an onion. My eyes blur. The smell in my nostrils is sharp and triumphant for a brief, bright moment.
R B Lemberg - [BCS300 S04] Page 2