Meanwhile oceans of time slopped slowly by: oceans which had flowed by once already.
I tried counting the nights (they're more distinctive than days) but I soon lost count.
And I still couldn't come to any conclusion other than: keep silent! Keep mum. Whilst Mum kept me.
One day she lifted me on to a rug to practise rolling and crawling and holding my head up. Other highlights: I started to eat mash and hash and broth and custards. Presently I was given rusks to suck and grind my gums on.
Oh but wasn't I just a cute child! Hardly any bother at all. And oh shit, wasn't I bored! But I sure as hell wasn't going to liven things up prematurely.
After goodness knows how long, the stairs got carpeted in my honour.
One night I seemed fretful. I was, too. So Mum carried me out into the garden to see the stars. "Look, Narya: little lights all over! They're called stars. Can you say stars? Stars, darling, stars." She was worried because I wasn't yet babbling or lisping. I stayed mute. I knew what my first word had to be.
Swaddled in her arms I gazed straight up, wondering which of those little lights I had visited personally. Which was the sun of the world where the birdpeople flew? Which, the suns that shone on the wench with snails on her legs? Oh the ludicrous indignity of it, when I'd been to those goddamn stars myself! I definitely deserved a star—a gold one—for patience.
Fearing a chill, Mum took me back inside and tucked me in, to dream sweet dreams.
Hi there, Yaleen: where have you got to by now? My older, younger sister; my self. As far as Edrick's house at Manhome South, is it? Or as far as the conclave at Spanglestream?
Edrick! Well, at least I wouldn't have to bother with that sod ever again; he was dead.
Oh no he wasn't. Must keep events in their proper order, mustn't I? Edrick would have to pop up in my life once again like a bad fin-coin.
I was losing touch with the order of events. I had to go back over everything; just as if I were rewriting The Book of the River entire, from memory, having lost the manuscript. Which I had. Since it hadn't been written yet.
I was finding it increasingly hard to figure on Yaleen as a real person, or as the same person as myself. When she finally arrived, wouldn't she seem like some sort of living fiction? There she would be, saying her piece and doing her thing just as if she were the author of those words and deeds (which she was), yet with a few choice words of my own I could edit her life savagely and alter the whole story line!
If I did that, perhaps I would simply vanish out of her life, and her story. Then she would indeed be the free author of her destiny, and I would be ... a blank. A page unwritten. Try as I might, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to vanish. But I surely wasn't going to take any chances on it!
About this time I realized that it wasn't sufficient for Yaleen just to turn up and get herself killed a bit later on. Before I could speak out, The Book of the River would have to be published, otherwise my words mightn't have the same impact. They wouldn't carry as much weight; so I told myself. (Weight to do what? Aha! If only I'd known the answer to that.)
Besides, what with Yaleen seeming so unreal, I felt that I needed the tangible reality of the book before I could become Yaleen again. It was as though her life was stored in there and could only become available to me when the book was issued. Ordinary memories grow fuzzy and mixed-up. Ordinary memories aren't the same as the experience of reliving a life in the Ka-store. Yaleen was a part of me which had fallen into the pool of time-past. She could only be hauled to the surface and regained, in the shape of her book.
Her reality had become the pages she would write. Meanwhile my own reality had shrunk to even less than book-size—down to matchbox-size. And all this while the whole cosmos was crashing silently and ever so slowly about me. Oh how the aeons flowed downstream, with me no more than a dayfly on a ripple.
Frankly, I'd say I deserve a bit of credit for not going crazy during this long waiting period. I merely seemed quite odd to my parents; rather out of step. (I'd started to take a few lurching steps.)
One day it rained. It poured, it bucketed. This was most unlike the usual Pecawar weather.
So I said, “Wain.,”
My parents were delighted. They were over the moon. (Ah, but we had no moon here, did we?)
So I obliged them with a few more ill-uttered words. But then I shut up again. I had to, hadn't I? Otherwise I might have spoiled everything. Still, Mum and Dad seemed satisfied with small mercies. For the time being they appeared relieved.
Whom did I pity more: them, or me? Them, I suppose. Myself, I was almost beyond self-pity. At times this whole charade even struck me as weirdly amusing. Yet how cruel of me—how cruel to Mum and Dad—to feel amused by it. What's more, if I let myself become too amused I might go mad, I feared.
So I soldiered on (as people would say, once the not-yet war was over). I spent my days wrapped in memories. I devoted less time to trying to chart uncharlable options and alternatives, which in any case I didn't dare opt for.
"Wain." Big deal.
Oh, but I'll make up for my silence by and by, Mum and Dad, I promise. Yet will that make you any happier?
Problem: I knew how Yaleen had reacted to Narya. I remembered, albeit fuzzily. But how had Narya reacted to Yaleen?
And what had happened in the house after Edrick murdered Yaleen? I had no idea. If only I knew! If only Edrick had dropped some hint when we were in Eeden.
But no, no, no! Here yawned a trap into which I mustn't fall—and now I realized that I'd been sliding into this trap for months. The name of the trap was foreknowledge—the paralyser of initiative. It was me who was in peril of becoming a puppet, by following the story line exactly. Not Yaleen, but me! No wonder my parents often looked concerned, as though their Narya were missing some spark or other essential element of life: wilfulness, originality, whatever.
I made an effort to be more spontaneous and affectionate. I laughed and clowned a bit. Dad took me out for rides around town on his shoulders; I chirped appreciatively. I was sleeping in Capsi's old room by now. Dad added giant baby animals to Capsi's panorama of the west bank and coloured them in. I cooed and chortled.
Time sludged by.
We celebrated my second New Year's Eve with caraway cake and candles and gifts. Amongst other presents received by me—with wordless cries of delight—was a toy pussy-cat, which I could pull after me on a string. The cat wore a collar of tinkly silver bells.
Shortly after that party, Mum and Dad were discussing in hushed tones the amazing withdrawal upriver of the black current. Soon invasion was on their lips—and war. . . .
Mum's other cousin Halba came to town on business at this time, when Pecawar was a-buzz with fearful rumours. She owned a spice farm up-country, and had never been especially close to Mum; though Halba did pay us a number of visits over the years, and when I was twelve years old Capsi and I spent several weeks' holiday with her—a vacation which I wasn't likely to forget in a hurry, since Halba had fed us growing kids quite meanly and had made us toil for our keep.
Take the spice mace. Nutmeg balls, so sweetly smelling, come from little trees with yellowy blossoms. The blossoms are followed by a fruity "droop" the length of your little finger—inside which is a stone, the kernel of which is nutmeg. But an outgrowth from the base covers the nut with a crimson network called the "aril"—like a sort of thread fungus—which has to be picked off by hand, oh so carefully and painstakingly. And that's mace. Little fingers can get quite weary and knotted, unpicking the aril for a good few hours.
Take cloves. Cloves are simply the dried, unopened flower buds of a tree related to the nutmeg. Halba had a little plantation of these, and every bloody one of the blood-red buds had to be picked by hand, up ladders, double quick, before they could open.
Luckily, while Capsi and I were visiting, the vanilla orchids were still in bloom and hadn't yet set pods, or we might have been in for the treat of burying them in hot ashes and subsequently
digging the shrivelled brown fingers up to rub them individually with olive oil. The comer of Halba's farm, where the vanilla orchids grew, did intrigue me, though. Hot water bubbled up from underground into rocky pools, so that the climate in that one particular spot was uniquely moist and steamy, unlike anywhere else for leagues and leagues. It was ideal for vanilla; Halba was the only local supplier of this spice.
Oh, and I'm forgetting the gentle art of peeling cinnamon, supposing that we had any spare time from unthreading aril and plucking clove buds. Capsi and I really needed those hot orchid-ringed pools to soak our feet in after a few happy hours spent rubbing the bark from the young cinnamon shoots with the soles of our feet, Halba's preferred method of unpeeling.
Halba was a stout, bustling woman who seemed jolly and was actually downright mean; and on those occasions when she visited us she brought nothing by way of a visiting gift yet always heartily ate her fill and generally contrived to carry something off with her— an ornament, a bag of fruit, some dried fish, a book, anything which she fixed upon and decided was surplus to our requirements. The time when she bore Capsi and me off was, of course, designed to save wages at harvest time. And did she resent the waste of a day to bring us home again to Pecawar afterwards, with a bag of her best dried brittle quills of cinnamon which we had "earned"! (We had, needless to say, eaten her out of house and home; as I recall my mother felt obliged to press some expensive candied blue-pears on Halba, which she accepted as her right.)
Anyway, Halba turned up in the midst of all the pother about the war—mainly to pump Dad about the likely long-term effect on prices and exports, a topic which he had no wish to discuss. (More about this anon.) After feeding herself generously at our house, and having commandeered a bed for the night, she then took herself off for the evening to visit "her friends" (which presumably we weren't).
Mum immediately buttonholed Dad.
"How lucky that Halba's come!"
"Is it?"
"Yes, don't you see? You and me and Narya should be ready to quit Pecawar at a moment's notice—in case those savages invade here next. This new local militia of ours mightn't be able to cope. We could go and stay with Halba, where we'd be safe. Nothing must harm Narya! That would kill me."
Dad sighed. I could see him weighing which argument was best, to pit against this folly. If he pointed out the truth about our "friendship" with Halba—and how little she would want us roosting on her in the country—this might make my mother stubborn. It might stir her to prove that nobody could not want Narya and her. Likely she would accuse Dad of a failure of love; of not wanting to bother disrupting domestic routine even to save his family from peril.
Dad hummed and hawed for a while—till Mum grew quite peeved—before he found the right tack.
"Look, if there's an invasion, the riskiest thing would be to take to the roads Supposing there's trouble—I don't say there will be, but supposing—if we stay indoors here at home, villains would have to make a deliberate decision to break in and harm us. But if they caught us out in the open, harming us would be the most casual thing. In fact, if you're an invader that sort of behaviour makes sense. It spreads fear and disorder. Don't you see? We'd be mad to flee up-country."
"Maybe we should go right now, before those brutes have a chance to invade. Narya and I could leave with Halba tomorrow. You could sort out some leave and follow on."
"I really don't advise isolating ourselves out there. Look at it statistically. In a place as big as Pecawar there's no reason why we especially should be harmed. But on a lonely farm, with fewer people thereabouts, it's more dangerous. Not less! Don't you see? If the enemy turns up there, you'll be in real peril. . . ."
The argument rambled on for a while, without any direct references to Halba herself, and in the end Dad won. No request for sanctuary was put to the woman.
Yaleen was also mentioned that evening; speculatively, not too fretfully. Never once did I hear my parents refer to Capsi. Maybe they spoke of him in private.
No invasion came, of course. But came the day when Dad bore me out, shoulder-high, to see the rump of the junglejack army trudge into town.
Hitherto Mum had refused to let him take me to watch boats unload weapons or to view the advance guard of the army—the river-virgins, the first arrivals—performing their drill. She thought that the sight might scare me and upset my peace of mind. I, who was responsible for half of this! When it came to greeting the 'jacks who had tramped such a long way to our aid, Dad put his foot down. Both feet, in fact: one in front of the other, and me on his shoulders.
We took up station on Molakker Road—our southern approach— amidst quite a crowd, and Dad gave me a bright red kerchief to wave. Presently the troops tramped into view and did their best to put on a show for us. Oh, the glamorous, smelly, travel-stained warriors twirling their swords and axes, pikes and spears.
"Soldiers," said Dad. "Those are soldiers."
"So-jers," I repeated. I cried the word over and over as we watched the rather weary parade. How delighted he was with me.
Alas, there was an accident. As the rearguard made their way by, a 'jack with the build of a bull whose black hair was curled into horns by sweat tossed an axe right up in the air, to catch it by the handle. At that moment an older man in front, who must have been exhausted, stumbled. In an effort to recover step and poise, he pranced backwards. The two men collided. The toppling axe caught the older man on the side of the head. He screamed, fell, writhed in the dust clutching at his injury. Blood pumped from the ruin of his ear, bright as the kerchief I was waving.
Dad hastily reached up and clapped a hand over my face. With a groan, he whirled me away. When he set me down and let me see again, we were behind the high brick wall of a builder's yard hidden from the commotion in the road.
"See so-jers," I said cheerfully, and flapped my red flag.
"Yes, soldiers. But we'll have to get on home now. Your mother will be wondering where we are. It was good seeing the soldiers, wasn't it?"
"Mmm. Mmm!"
There were other outings in addition, though never by way of the quayside itself. On this score Dad heeded Mum's wishes. Maybe he didn't want another daughter of his to be prematurely intoxicated by river life. Or maybe he was worried in case I might lisp some indiscretion when we got back home. Not that I had betrayed him regarding the soldier's mutilation; but he may have believed he had acted so promptly that slow, strange Narya noticed nothing horrid.
These were outings to Dad's place of work; and if I've never before mentioned the fact that Dad worked, or at what, there's a good reason—though I've only become aware of it now!
The truth is that during all the years while Capsi and I were growing up at home, we knew in the abstract that our Dad worked as a spice clerk, yet never once did we get close to his actual work; neither physically close nor mentally close.
Dad's job certainly left its aroma on his clothes and on his skin. However, this was no more and no less than the aroma of Pecawar town itself, fainter or stronger depending on wind direction, but always pervasive. Thus Dad seemed like a distillate of Pecawar, the centre of things, the origin. The spice warehouses, the drying and crushing and blending sheds and whatnot, were relegated to the edge of our mental horizon, as an effect rather than a cause.
Dad always held his work at arm's length, well away from our home life. Presumably he and Mum discussed work and money matters together; but we kids heard nothing of it. Nor did Dad hobnob in his spare time with any colleagues from work; we kids saw nothing of them or of their kids. We didn't mix. As a result there was simply no sense of connexion between our home and the place to which Dad went during the day. The work side of Dad's life was a blank. It was something carefully screened away. Yet the screen hid no vital secret or romantic mystery. It just concealed something boring, something which didn't involve us.
Nor was the episode of our hardship holiday at Halba's farm an exception to this general rule. Dad neither escorted us to the farm
nor brought us back. He worked in town, at the merchanting end of the spice business, and though he must have known all about arils and droops, when Capsi and I had recounted our harvesting experiences Dad had merely raised an eyebrow and soon changed the subject. I only remember him tousling our heads and saying, "Well, you're home again; that's the main thing."
Looking back, I believe this is one of the main reasons why I was so keen to sign on a river boat as soon as possible. And I guess this is what made Capsi scan the further shore in an effort to fill in its much more interesting blanks. Dad's workaday life didn't exist for us. By extension the workaday world of Pecawar wasn't for us either (a prejudice amply confirmed by our visit to Halba). It had no meaning.
Do you know, I'm not even sure whether Mum, in her youth, had brought Dad home from Sarjoy itself or from somewhere smaller on the way to Aladalia! No doubt we kids enquired, at the age when kids ask such things. No doubt Dad told us. Yet the notion of him being from somewhere else made very little impression. He went nowhere, to work. He must have come from nowhere too. Capsi and I had no desire to devalue those other magical exotic towns by overly identifying Dad with one of them.
As Capsi grew up, he of course came to understand that he could only ever visit foreign towns once in his lifetime—in the same manner that Dad had once voyaged to Pecawar as a young man to wed Mum. To do what thereafter? To tot up accounts or inventories or whatever. This realization turned Capsi against all of our shore, in favour of the other.
But then—so much for youthful rebellion!—what did Capsi do but run away to the Observers? To those who spent all their time totting up the account and compiling the inventory of the blank west bank, filling in the ledger of our ignorance. Capsi may have been rebellious, yet in a fateful way he was still the son of his father! Had it not been for me he might have spent the rest of his days up that Spire in Verrino, as a clerk of a different stripe.
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