He chuckled softly. “I also saved them a pear.”
I rolled onto my side, my back to him.
“Up in Hunza, they have a proverb. Beware the guest one does not feed.”
What the hell did that mean? I shut my eyes. I wasn’t going to let anything spoil what was turning out to be a sublime afternoon.
Queen of the Mountains: Pagan Rituals
Maryam stood up from the fire and glanced at the water’s edge. Her fingers drifted to the braid around her face, feeling the tightness of the weave. This morning, her daughter Kiran had again refused to have her hair braided, despite being shown both styles, a single braid around the cusp of the face, like Maryam’s, or a cluster of braids down the back, the way Maryam’s mother had preferred. Still Kiran insisted on wearing it loose. She had worn her hair loose all summer, ever since they had left the plains down near Balakot, if you could call the mess on her head a way of wearing it.
Pushing her frustration aside, Maryam said a quick prayer for her dead mother, and for every mountain, and for every name her mother bestowed on every mountain. The black door, the white door, the abyss. And the single peaks, like the ones soaring before Maryam now, the ones that could become windows or footholds, allowing you to scale a void. Her mother’s two beloved peaks, Malika Parbat and Nanga Parbat. Though some might say it was not possible to see him from here, how well he lived up to his name today! He was a naked white spear towering high above the Queen, breathing down the nape of her neck, the slope of her thighs. Not surprisingly, their snowmelt was thick today. Like her daughter when she tried to comb her hair, the lake could barely hold still.
There was a jinn here too. She could feel it. The Prince Saiful Maluk, the Princess Badar Jamal, Malika Parbat, Nanga Parbat, and the jinn. They were all here today. If she were her mother, she would smoke some juniper leaves and see deeper into the void. But she was not her mother. Visions did not come to her. Misgivings, well, that was another thing. She had felt them all summer long, ever since leaving the plains in a hurry, when she had removed all signs of the lowland shrine in a manner unbecoming to a shaman’s daughter. She had even failed to cleanse her lowland home according to the ceremony. She had not blown into its sacred spaces the smoke of juniper leaves. Partly, this was because she could not wait to come up here, to these highland pastures, where her past was left behind. Partly, because her husband discouraged it. “Pagan rituals for a pagan wife,” the others said, so he asked her to stop. These were difficult times, he said. The valley was crawling with men who wanted proof of innocence, and pagan rituals were not innocent.
Up here in the mountains she could do as she pleased, and the curses of the sedentary folk were forgotten, if she only let herself forget. There was a line between the highland and the lowland that the troubled times could not see, let alone cross. Only those who came in peace could cross this line. And they would find that up here, everything moved—the mountains, the clouds, the fairies and the jinn, even the caves—but one thing did not move. The thing that did not move here was time.
It gave Maryam a kind of solace, knowing that she could reach time, even sit on it as she might sit on a horse, while all around her, the world was spinning. And for Maryam, solace came in many shapes. For instance, the shape of a cave. Like the one she used as her summer shrine (and much preferred to the one she had covered in haste down in the plains). It was over the hill and downaways and a man had once told her it led all the way to Tashkent. It was a cool womb of rock her mother believed their people once sheltered in, on their way down from the Caspian steppe. They’d come on horseback, though no one could say exactly when—they could not even say roughly when, it was two, maybe three thousand years ago—and they’d come from a faraway place that lay on the shores of a great sea surrounded by land. The sea was deep and it was black. The cave was cool and it was safe.
Two, maybe three thousand years later, her family still piled clothes, matkas, and tents onto the backs of their horses for green velveteen pastures every summer and for cold colorless plains every winter. Always on the move. Like the sea. Like the footholds in the sky, or the void down below. Like Lake Saiful Maluk, especially on this afternoon, as Maryam now watched her son take his time returning to her after carrying the gift to the two men from the city and the two Angrez from even farther away than the steppes of her imagination. Honey, bread, potatoes. The honey, of course, the most valued item they had carried on the horse. Her husband approved. Guests must be made welcome.
One of them, Irfan was his name, was not unknown in these parts. He was as much a friend as a man from the city could be. He spoke their tongue. He knew about the cave. He hid in it for days after his wife had died, wanting to live alone from now on, he said, like a gypsy. Her husband had told him gypsies did not live alone. “We have our families and our animals,” he said. “Only saints live in caves, and there has not been a saint around here for some time.”
Irfan had answered with a proverb—a Gujjar will sleep where no man will walk—which made her husband smile, before he replied, “Many men have walked and slept in that cave. I assure you, none became saints.” He sat so tidily, this Irfan. Even when trying to inflict penance on himself in the cave, his shoes still looked polished. He had eventually returned home to the city. But now he was back, and Maryam could see he had not recovered. His cheek had sunk; his eye was dim. She was glad they had momentarily lit up when he walked toward their tent earlier this afternoon, to embrace her husband again.
The other—Irfan had pointed him out in the distance, she had not caught the name—had apparently also been here before, but Maryam found no recollection of him. He seemed to her to have no tongue. He followed Irfan’s lead while his eye drifted constantly, toward her tent, toward the lake, toward the Angrez woman reaching for Kiran’s hand.
The woman walked like a goat. She was too eager. Maryam had seen it before, good-hearted foreigners wanting to be friendly with local folk. They often selected the children, as that woman did now. Perhaps these Angrez needed to feel differently about themselves when they came all the way across the seas and all the way up the glacier to see the lake. She was not unfamiliar with the need. The lake seemed to inspire it. When you looked in the mirror of its surface you wanted to see something you wanted to see. And Maryam had seen the two looking in the lake, the friend of Irfan and the woman, when they first arrived. Though she was too far away to know, she took a guess. They were pleased with whatever else the lake had given.
Maryam also wanted to see something else whenever she peered inside, though she could never say what. Still or ruffled, the water’s surface only heightened her desire but never sated it. Perhaps it was because she came—two, maybe three thousand years ago—from a landlocked sea. If a sea has nowhere to go, it must go in circles, like this lake at the foot of Malika Parbat, churning round and round in a bowl, the clouds reflected in dizzying speed, stirring up some limitless need. Yes, it was like that, she thought, watching Kiran chase her goat up a hill while the woman who walked like a goat chased her. In Maryam there was no simple need, such as the need to be charitable with the children of the poor. She had nothing to repent, or correct, really. It was more the need to, to … She frowned, unable to speak the word, or even put her finger on it.
She went back to fingering her braid, back to thinking of the cave, the one that could change shape.
If her grandmothers had once sheltered in it on their way down from the steppe, earlier this year, her children had sheltered in it on their way up from the plains. The cave was low and stained black from a million fires, including her own. But only she knew about that—she, and Ghafoor. The man who first showed her the cave, telling her it led all the way to Tashkent. She shook her head. No, she would not think of him now.
Her husband believed the cave was unsafe. Instead of becoming saints, the men who slept in its bowels became thieves. They saw the telltale sparkle in the seams of the rock and, over time, had scraped it clean. Crude attempts at hol
ding the ceiling up still remained; wooden pillars were jammed haphazardly everywhere across the uneven floor. Her children had played with the pillars, shaking them like salt. She let them. She knew the ceiling would hold. They asked for the story every spring, on their way up to the lake, the story of Prince Saiful Maluk and Princess Badar Jamal. If it rained and they needed to step into the cave for a time, as had happened this year, the story grew even more magical because it grew even more real: this was the cave that had cradled the lovers as they fled the terrible jinn who lived by the lake. And when at last her family had continued on their way, a thirsty herd lowing and bleating beside them, shepherded by two gaddi dogs, when they had reached the lake this April, as on every April, the story became even more deliciously terrible: this was the jinn’s lake. He lived along its shore—this shore!
But he had never hurt them, the jinn. Not in all the springs and summers they had camped at Malika Parbat’s feet. He had blessed the lake where the fairies came to bathe at full moon. He had blessed these hills where Maryam could roam as freely as the goats and horses. He had blessed the peak of Malika Parbat, who was a pari khan, a ruler of all fairies, and who entrusted him with the task of keeping the fairies in check. He had blessed Maryam’s secret shrine too, so that Maryam could pray undisturbed in its womb. He had even blessed her taste buds, so that everything here tasted true, the fruit and the honey.
Then why the misgivings? Perhaps it was the wind, again.
A little honey stuck to her flesh from the food wrapped for the guests. Licking it clean, she watched the clouds drift and Malika Parbat scatter into segments in the lake like the rungs of a ladder. What else did she want to see? She could still find no word for it, though the ladder was there, at the bottom of the lake, and if she wanted, she might step right into the void.
TWO
Queen of the Mountains: A Land Outside Land
Her earliest memories were of movement. On horseback, in her father’s arms, on her brother’s back. She could not say if it was her own crossing she remembered, or that of her mother, grandmother, or some woman whose name she would never know. What she did know was that theirs had always been a fight for mobility. They could only be governed if they stayed. For every way of limiting movement, there was a way to move.
No one knew this better than Ghafoor.
So, she could no longer push thoughts of him away.
Maryam walked to the far side of the lake, which was free of boats. Though the scent lingered, her fingers were licked clean of the honey. The water swayed.
The first time she saw him, she saw through him. He was the tunnel in the mountain, the break in the hill, the hand in the hollow. He was the air that teased the braid circling her face, the cloud that yawned apart in the lake. He was a door to the other world, the world outside the mountains. And he had left her a sign in the cave.
She had seen the sign on their way up from the plains, when her family took shelter from the rain, but she had not dared acknowledge it in their presence. Her husband might say the cave was dangerous, turning would-be saints into thieves, but to her it was many things, and none were dangerous. It was, for instance, a shrine. And a messenger. Because of the cave she knew he was coming. In the months since camping here at the edge of the lake, each time she withdrew to the shrine in secret, she fingered the sign.
Now Maryam’s footsteps hastened as she reached the far shore. When she thought no one was looking, she climbed up the hill furthest from the boats and tents, looking over her shoulder one last time for just the briefest moment. Their tent, made of plastic sheeting, was still sagging at one corner. Earlier today, she had told Kiran to fix the stick that propped it, but Kiran was with that Angrez woman, the one who walked like a goat, and her other two children were playing with the children of a neighboring tol. No one noticed Maryam. This was her window.
She walked briskly. Far to the north, hidden behind clouds, hidden from those who could not imagine him, Nanga Parbat kept watch while Malika Parbat admired her reflection in the lake.
He had come to her, at first, like a prophet. Honey on his fingers and a tale to tell. There was a land outside land, outside mountains, even, and it was where she had come from, and where a part of her would return. Over the Pamirs. That far.
They lingered outside the cave, that first time, and he walked with her, at her child’s pace, this friend of her brother’s, this prophet. He held out his hand. “If it crystallizes, it’s pure,” he said. She sucked his finger clean of the honey. Dark amber crystals conjoined in a hard knot, oozing into a muddy slush around the edges, from his heat. Though young, she was not too young. She looked up, twice, hot and cold sugar in her eyes. He had to tell her to hurry up. He had work to do.
She fed her own children honey in the same way. Kiran, especially, who pulled her finger like a nipple. But that would happen later.
Maryam’s mind fled the shores of the lake and even the mouth of the cave to inhabit subsequent days with her brother’s friend, the one who could see the world, and through whom she could see it too. The one she had loved as a not-too-young child. Underneath the honey was the taste of his skin, which, though not pleasant, made something inside her turn to slush. It made her hold the crystals on her tongue a little longer so she could melt them with her saliva and hold his taste of young, green garlic a little longer too. The crystals were cold as ice and grazed her teeth. His finger was always cold. The body heat was not his but hers.
He said to always be proud of the legend she was named after. She had been concentrating on the taste on her tongue so intently she had to ask him to repeat it. He pulled his hand away.
“I said, haven’t you heard of Maryam Zamani? Others will say you were named after her. Don’t believe them. She was named after you.” And Maryam giggled, because Maryam Zamani was famous, she was a legend, while Maryam was only Maryam.
And Maryam who was only Maryam was more interested in stories from beyond the mountains than the stuff of legend. She already knew all the legends of the valley. She knew about the princess and the jinn and the prince who came from far away, perhaps with honey on his garlic-scented skin. She knew about Kagan, after whom the valley was named. Kagan had never appeared to Maryam, but she had, apparently, appeared many times to her mother, who could see her particularly well after smoking juniper leaves and drinking juniper brandy. And then she would show her things. Future things. And help her mother change shape. Even after death. She knew that Kagan, like her own mother, flew in vehicles in the shape of owls. She knew that Kagan had shrines devoted to her all over the valley, and that, at one time, her devotees had left her offerings in temples decorated with ram horns and yak tails. She knew that most of these shrines had now been abandoned, and that Kagan’s wrath was far worse than the jagged spear of Naked Mountain. She knew that her wrath was especially reserved for those who broke the line: the clumsy children of devotees, the ones who, when their mothers were dead, performed the cleansing ritual sloppily each spring, before leaving the plains for the mountains. Maryam knew these legends.
So she was not terribly interested in this other legend, the one about Maryam Zamani, which she had also heard before but did not consider worth remembering now. Instead, she asked, “What is it like over there, in the north, where the women wear tall hats and walk alongside men?”
“Over there, they have all heard about you. The girl who moved the rock.”
Well, perhaps the legend was worth hearing again. Infused with his pride, she dwelled on it a while, the one about the Gujjar girl whose name was Maryam Zamani, who would go with her friends to Balakot to bring water from a stream. Every day, the girls had to cross a huge stone of uneven, sharp surfaces. Every day they cut themselves, returning home with feet bloodied and knees ragged. It occurred to Maryam Zamani one day that they could simply remove the stone instead. The others asked how. “With courage,” she replied. And the stone rolled away.
She did not believe it, of course, the legendary Maryam had no
thing to do with her, nor did she believe the legend itself (how could a stone roll away on its own?) but if she pretended to be impressed, Ghafoor, the traveler, the trader, the garlic breather and honey carrier, would tell her what it was like over there.
And he did. He showed her the nugget of white jade he had traded in the higher highlands, from a Chinese merchant who told him that every color of jade changed the one who wore it. White jade made you calm and helped you focus on a task, such as the moving of a stone. He grinned. He was a higher highland Gujjar, unhemmed in by the lowlands where she was stuck, with legends. She worried, briefly, that this business with the jade and the merchant too was unreal, that it too was the stuff of legend. She was perfectly able to concentrate already, without the jade, on the taste on her tongue. All she needed was his finger and the honey. He was laughing. “Never let anyone make an old woman of you.” He paused. “Even when you marry. My travels will keep me young and I never want to see you old.”
When they entered the cave, he teased that her prayers were pagan prayers, what with all the burning of juniper branches and the smoke staining the cave walls and the visions she claimed to have. (A lie Kagan would surely forgive. She could never admit to him that though a shaman’s child, she never had any visions.)
“Not to mention all the offerings of food,” he looked around.
“Silly,” she said with a frown, “the food is for you.” And from a crack in the rock she removed a small stash of rice and misri (hoping again for Kagan’s forgiveness, for these were indeed offerings to the goddess).
And then he sang for her, the same song that would be sung on her wedding, and when each of her three children were born. First Younis, then Kiran, then Jumanah. It was the poem called Saiful Maluk, about the prince who fell in love with the fairy princess of the lake. And again she saw them as one. Like Ghafoor, the prince had come from over the mountains, though, in the song, the prince was bow-legged and tied his turban all wrong. Moreover, he lost his sword when he saw the princess bathing in the lake. The song made her laugh, it made her blush.
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