let us seek solace in the desert.
FROM “THE DESERTED CITY,” A KAKRI LAMENT
When the storm passed, Baileya climbed from the cleft of the rock and disappeared for over an hour, checking the surrounding area for the Scim army. “I can find no sign of them,” she said. “I do not think they will find us again.”
The sunset painted the desert. Baileya led Jason down from the stones they had hidden in. “It is the night of the third and fourth spheres’ meeting,” she said. “It is a festival among my people. I hoped we would make it in time. Turn and look.”
The rocks they had hidden among were not stones at all but the remnants of an ancient city. Broken towers and fallen walls protruded from the shifting sands. A statue of a Kakri couple stood above them. The woman’s right arm encircled the man, and her left arm was raised to the sky. Or Jason assumed that’s what it would be doing—it had broken long ago. A series of fountains remained, all filled with sand rather than water.
“What is this place?” Jason asked.
“It was called Ezerbin. Once it was the greatest city in the world. The Court of Far Seeing is a pale shadow of Ezerbin’s glory.”
“In the middle of the desert?”
“It was no desert then. Canals crossed the city. Fountains, irrigated fields. There were cisterns, too, yes, but mostly the water was plenteous.”
Jason could barely imagine. The place looked like dried bones stacked in the sun. “What happened?”
“The city grew vile. The people oppressed their neighbors. In time they became horrible, filled with lies. The Kharobem came. They encircled the city and pronounced there would be no more water. The rain stopped. The river dried up. The people of the city had to leave or die. It is said a crow came to my ancestor and taught her to live in this new land, the desert. Others in the city denied this offer, for it was too much to humble themselves to a bird. They could not learn from such a lowly creature. But my ancestor believed it was no shame to walk with crows. So were born the Kakri, the ones who left the city and embraced the desert as our home.”
Jason’s mouth fell open. He had assumed the Kakri were some sort of nomadic tribal people, and maybe they were. But Baileya was telling him that they had once built the greatest city in the Sunlit Lands. “Whoa,” Jason said. “Are they planning to rebuild it one day?”
Baileya leaned on her staff. “In the desert there is no room for a lie, Jason. You must walk either with truth or with death. The truth tells us that we cannot rebuild unless the water returns. It is not the choice of the Kakri people whether to rebuild. We must allow the Kharobem to tell us if such a time returns. In the meantime, every year at the meeting of the third and fourth spheres, my people congregate here and sing about the fall of old Ezerbin and tell stories.” They rested in the shade of the fallen wall, and Baileya showed him where the Kakri would gather, near the statue.
Night settled in. The stars, strangely, did not appear like at home, the brightest first, in the darkest parts of the sky. They climbed up from the eastern horizon, bright and multicolored, a blanket of galaxies being pulled over the world. From the north came a small, warm moon, faster and brighter than Earth’s, racing ahead of the stars at an angle like a surfer before a wave.
Somehow, while Jason had been watching the stars rise, the Kakri had entered quiet as breath and gathered before the statue. Half stood beneath the oncoming stars, the other half beneath the moon. Jason’s breathing quickened. These silent warriors terrified him.
“Do not fear,” Baileya whispered. “On this night there is no violence among the Kakri. It is a night of mourning our lost city and celebrating our marriage to the desert.”
When the stars and the moon met, a song began among the moonside Kakri. “Where is the fountain which brought joy to the city, clean and clear at its heart?” There were no instruments, just voices.
The starside Kakri answered, also in song, “It has been carried away, the water spilled to the sand, the water given to the sun.” The song, beautiful and strange, reached out to Jason like the tendrils of a plant opening in the morning dew. He felt himself alive, transported, and filled with a deep, melancholy sadness.
When the song ended, a woman ran among the singers, dressed as an enormous crow. She invited them into the desert. She told them they could become a part of it, that she would teach them how to thrive. She would teach them, she said, how to become people again, and not the corrupted creatures which had come to live in this city. They must leave everything behind—their houses, their possessions, their friends or family members who would not embrace the desert and the wisdom to be found there.
As the crow said these words, those near her cheered and embraced. They threw off their dull capes and coverings, revealing beautiful, brightly colored outfits beneath. They turned to their neighbors and shouted the news, inviting them to the desert, and color rippled through the crowd. Baileya threw off her own cloak and grabbed Jason’s hand. “Come! Now we dance!”
Musical instruments came out (Jason’s favorite was a stringed instrument Baileya said was called a bitarr), and the Kakri danced in a whirling, leaping style. Those who jumped highest and whirled fastest moved toward the center of the crowd. Jason tried to imitate them but found himself on the outer limits of the dance with the smallest children and most infirm elders. At times a Kakri man would appear, laughing, and try to teach him how to leap higher. A drink that tasted like honey and goat’s milk was passed around, and a crowd gathered to watch Jason take his first sip. When he held the bowl to his lips, Baileya pushed it higher, and he took in several gulps of the drink, which burned and left him sputtering and gasping. The people cheered, applauding and laughing, and a trio of muscled women lifted him up on their shoulders and began to jump in place, tossing him higher each time. “Spin!” they called to him, and he did his best, trying to spin as they had in their dances. When he reached the ground again, there were many hands clapping his back and arms thrown over his shoulders.
Sweating and exhausted, he sat down between two old women who rested on the edge of the deserted fountain. They wore bright clothes, but a chill had set in without the sun, and their dun-colored cloaks were over their legs.
“Hello,” Jason said to them, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“Greetings, Wu Song, slayer of tigers,” the old woman to his left said.
His heart immediately started pounding again. How did this old woman know the story of Wu Song? Back home only people with Chinese family knew the story. “Forgive me, but I don’t know your name.”
The old lady on his other side chuckled. “She is Mother Crow. Do you not see her feathers?”
He looked more closely at her cloak. It did have black feathers sewn into it. She must have been the one in the play who invited the people into the desert. Mother Crow smiled at him, her face wrinkled and aged as the desert itself. “Would you leave behind all to learn the wisdom of the desert?”
“Uhhhh.” Jason’s mouth twitched. “I don’t think so. I have things to do. My friend Madeline . . . I have to protect her.”
“Indeed,” Mother Crow said. “I suspected you would say so.”
The other old lady patted his hand. “You cannot protect another person,” she said. “Not in truth. Death comes for all. Your friend Madeline, too.”
“But there’s value in keeping people safe until that time,” Jason said. “You can’t save people forever, but if you can do it today, you should. People are . . .” He paused. He wasn’t sure how to say the next bit. “People are the most important thing in the world. Anything else can be replaced, but people . . . Each one is unique, and when a person dies, they never come again. They’re gone forever. Other people might come but not that one. So we have to protect them while we can. And if it’s someone you love . . . you should protect them no matter what.”
Mother Crow smiled. “You see? He has some of the desert in him. I see why she likes you.”
“Who, Madeline?”
Both the ol
d women laughed, and one pointed at Baileya, who leapt and spun near the center of the crowd, her bright-blue smock flying around her like wind. She caught his eye as she twirled, and she smiled, looked away, and kept dancing. He noticed the gold armband she wore. She had rolled her loose sleeves up so you could see it, glittering on her muscular arm.
Mother Crow said, “Wu Song. May I see the mask?”
Baffled that she knew so much, Jason pulled the mask from his sack. Mother Crow held it up, studying the mirrored surface as it flared and shone in the starlight. “The Knight of the Mirror asks that you keep it safe from the Scim.”
“The Scim made it,” the other old lady said.
Mother Crow nodded and said, “They could make another if they chose. No, we will not hold this mask for you, Wu Song. It has too little of the truth in it. This mask is deception. To live in the desert one must embrace who one is. This mask does the opposite. It tells the world you are who they desire you to be. It is a small death to cover your face in such a way.”
“So I came all this way for nothing.”
The old woman’s eyes widened in surprise. “You gained a story, did you not?”
“Now,” Mother Crow said. “When the sun rises you must leave this place. So long as you hold that mask, you are not welcome among our people. If one day you desire to leave all and learn from the desert, come and seek what you may find among the sands.”
Jason tucked the mask away, disappointed. How did they know all these things before he told them? What was he meant to do now that their entire mission had failed? And of course he had been the one to fail, not Baileya, who was good at everything. He paused. “Is there, perchance, a Father Crow I could speak to?”
The old women cackled with laughter. “Sweet child, go along now. How can you protect your Madeline when she is so far away?”
He wasn’t sure what to do. He wandered out beyond the new firelight flickering up near the elders. He stood and looked at the moon, now completely enveloped in stars. The music and joyful cries of the people faded as he considered all that had happened since coming to the Sunlit Lands.
After a while, Baileya leaned up against his shoulder, handing him a chunk of roasted meat. “Hare,” she said. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until she put it in his hands, and he ate it gladly.
He told her all that the old women had said. She listened carefully. When he was finished, she said, “I will go back with you to Far Seeing.”
“You’re not upset?”
“It is foolish to be upset about what is. Let us instead attempt to shape what will be.” She shivered, as if suddenly cold, and pulled her dun cloak over her shirt. “Why have you tied yourself to Madeline?” she asked. “Why do you seek to protect her even from Death, should she come?”
Jason and Baileya sat down on the edge of a broken piece of statuary. It looked like it had been a group of people sitting at a long table. The table was flat and smooth and broken in such a way that they could lean up against it like a chair. “I haven’t told anyone this story,” Jason said.
Baileya jumped up. “Then why tell it to me? Such a story is priceless. An unknown, untold tale?”
He had forgotten how stories were money here among the Kakri. Huh. That meant that she had shared something valuable with him when she told him the story of the crow inviting the Kakri people into the desert. “You deserve to know. You’re my friend,” Jason said. She looked skeptical. “It would help me to tell someone.”
Her face softened, and she sat down again, legs crossed, facing him. She put her hands on her knees and said, “I will listen attentively.”
“I had a sister once. Her name was Jenny. She was three years older than me.” Jason cleared his throat. He hadn’t said her name in a while. His eyes burned. “You have to understand that my parents . . . They meant well, I think, but they did things differently. They weren’t like the other American parents, you know, even though my mom came to the United States when she was young. My dad thought the best way to encourage someone to work hard was to never be satisfied with their work. If we got straight As, he would barely acknowledge it. He’d say things like, ‘Grades in middle school do not count.’ But if you got terrible grades, they suddenly counted quite a lot.”
“I do not know what this means, grades and As.”
“Right. Think of it like . . . lessons. If we did well at our lessons, he didn’t say anything, but if we did poorly, he had a lot to say. So Jenny and me, we were like a team. When I got my grades, I’d go to her bedroom, and we’d close the door, and she would look at them and tell me what a good job I was doing. She’d show me her grades, and I’d tell her how proud I was. We talked about everything. It was us versus my parents in everything, and we always stuck together.”
“It is not a good way to live as a family.”
Jason laughed cynically. “I don’t think it’s what my parents intended, but it’s what happened. Well, after a while Jenny started dating this guy named Marcus. He was Korean.”
“What does ‘dating’ mean?”
Jason stopped, trying to think of the right way to say it. “More than friends, I guess?”
“Like you and Madeline. More like siblings than friends.” She raised an eyebrow, as if asking whether she had understood his relationship to Madeline correctly.
Jason ran his hands through his hair. “No . . . like husband and wife, but they weren’t married yet.”
“They were betrothed?”
Jason debated whether to explain the entire process in modern-day America, but decided it would cause more questions and misunderstandings. She didn’t need to get it perfectly, anyway. “No, they weren’t engaged. They wanted to be engaged, though.” That seemed close enough.
“Ah,” Baileya said. “He had not yet told her his story. I understand now.”
He wasn’t sure she did, but he couldn’t spend forever on this little detail. “Right. So Jenny and Marcus, they were . . . they were spending a lot of time together. My parents didn’t like him, though. They kept saying he was irresponsible. They wanted Jenny to date a Chinese boy, not a Korean one.”
“What does this mean?”
Huh. What did that mean? “He came from another . . . like, another tribe than us.”
“Like you and me,” Baileya said.
Close enough. “Right. Yeah. So . . . my dad had a big fight with Jenny, and he told her she couldn’t see Marcus anymore.”
Baileya leaned forward. “She did not obey him.”
Jason shook his head. “Jenny would say she was going to a friend’s house or that she was working on her lessons. One night she didn’t come home. She had told my parents she was meeting someone at the library, but as the hours went by, my dad started to suspect she was with Marcus.”
“Your mother killed the boy,” Baileya said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“What? No! My dad started asking me where Jenny was. She told me everything, and Dad knew that. I knew Jenny and Marcus had driven to a mountain near our house to watch the sunset. She had texted me from there.”
“Texted?”
“Sent me a message. My dad got more and more angry as the night went on. He shouted and screamed. My mom tried to get me to tell her what was going on. I kept sending messages to my sister telling her to get home quickly. At last my dad grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me to my sister’s room. He threw me on the floor and told me he knew she was seeing Marcus. That it didn’t matter now, that it was three in the morning and he needed to know where she was. I was so tired. I hadn’t slept. My whole body hurt. I told him what I knew. He called the police, and then he and my mother and I went to the mountain in my father’s car.” Then he had to explain about police and cars.
“The . . . police . . . they found your sister?”
“No,” Jason said. “At sunrise my mom noticed skid marks on the road. There were broken trees. My dad stopped the car in the middle of the road, grabbed me by the neck, and dragge
d me to the edge of the cliff. Marcus’s car was down there. My father was yelling, and I didn’t know what to do, so I climbed down. By the time I got to the car, I was bruised and covered in mud. My clothes were torn.”
“Did your father follow you?”
Jason shook his head. “Jenny was . . . The car was upside down. Broken. Marcus was dead. Jenny, though. She looked at me. She tried to speak. I couldn’t get the door open. She said . . .” Jason couldn’t get the words to come out. His lips trembled, and his throat closed tight. His hands shook, and tears spilled from his eyes. “She said, ‘Didi, I was waiting for you.’”
Baileya did not say anything, but she reached across and took his hand in hers.
Jason explained to her about doctors and ambulances. “When the ambulance came, they said that Marcus had been dead for six hours. Jenny had been there beside him that whole time. If they had been able to get to her even an hour sooner, they could have saved her.” He hung his head. “If I had only told them the truth.”
“You have not lied since that day?”
“One lie. I told my parents that Jenny had said she loved them, and she was sorry she disobeyed.”
“What did your father say?”
Jason stared into the distance. “He said I had killed my sister. He hasn’t spoken to me since the funeral.”
Baileya sat still, her hand resting in his. “You did not kill her,” Baileya said.
“I—” Jason could not handle Baileya saying that. Even Jenny had blamed him. I was waiting for you, she had said. And he hadn’t come, not in time. He had never told anyone that part of the story, he had only turned it over and over in his own mind. Jenny had wished he had told the truth, that he had let his parents know where she was. If he had told them right away, or even if he had told them sooner, Jenny would still be alive. “I can’t let someone else die,” Jason said. “I have to protect Madeline. If she were to . . . to pass, and I could have stopped it . . . I can’t live with that.”
Baileya said, “I have heard your story, and I will consider it carefully. It is a good story, Wu Song.” She pulled the gold armband from her arm and placed it on Jason’s. “I will keep the story safe.” She stood. “Come, the sun is rising. Bring the mask and we will return to Far Seeing.” She took his hand and helped him to his feet. “I understand now why you must protect Madeline, and I, too, will protect her. Wait for me at the fallen gate of the city, and we will begin our journey soon.”
The Crescent Stone Page 36