She looked at me with inconsolable eyes. “I can’t. I told you. There’s a void between—it’s horrible. And they are not people like me.”
“They are.”
She shook her head. “No. You are people like me. You are my people.” And again her voice, light and eerie, rose in song. This time she sang of the valleys and plains of Tinimavet, the estuaries where the great rivers rolled in mud to the sea. She sang of the fishermen whose bodies grew accustomed to the air, who could not, like other men, be driven mad by the constant wind. And she sang the long story of Itiknapet the Voyager, who first led the people to the islands.
And when they came upon the risen lands
they found them beautiful,
newly sprung from the sea
with rivers of oil.
She sang of those lands. The Risen Lands, fragrant with calamus. Kideti-palet: the Islands of the People.
“And this shall be the place where the people live,” the angel sang. “This shall be the home of the human beings.”
I remembered it, I felt it—home, with all its distant sweetness—I remembered it through the high voice of the dead girl. One memory in particular came back to me when she sang: that early memory of how I had tried to teach a song to my brother. “My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!” He said: “My father.” “Is a palm,” I insisted. But he would not answer. He gazed into the trees, rubbing the edge of his sandal in the chalky groove between the flagstones. As always when he was pressed, he seemed to recede behind a protective wall of incomprehension and maddening nonchalance.
I saw him clearly. How old was he? Six, perhaps seven years old. He was already unable to learn, but my father had not yet noticed. He wore a short blue vest with fiery red-orange embroidery, just like mine. His trouser leg was torn. If I asked him how he had torn it he would not know, or he would not tell me, though the edges of the tear were stained with blood. He would not even complain he was hurt, though he must have cut his knee, somewhere, in a place that would never be named.
“My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!”
I had seen other children play the game. I had learned it from them, copied the intricate clapping—this was what I had brought for my brother. When I shouted at him a wariness went flitting across his gaze like the wing of a bird.
“You say it,” I snarled through clenched teeth, glaring, trying to frighten him—to break through his simplicity and reach him.
He looked away, his eyes uncertain. Did he know what was coming?
My two fists rammed straight into his chest, and he sprawled on his back, howling.
And now, years later, in a strange land, to the sound of an angel’s singing, I relived that moment of despair, that attempt to bridge the divide, that terrible reaching, desperate and cruel, when love swerved into violence, when I would have torn the skin from his face to discover what lay beneath.
“Jevick,” the angel whispered.
Her eyes met mine, black, secretive, moonless. Her luminous gaze. “Why don’t you answer me? Why don’t you write?”
Grief and rage, a gathering ocean.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Listen to me!” she screamed.
And the waves fell in a rush.
The silence struck me like a blow. I sat up, sweating and panting, and looked into the lighted face of a demon.
It hovered above me, a deformed face with elements of the human and of the iguana. Its fleshless lips were parted, showing tiny teeth. I shrank toward the wall, cold with terror, and babbled a snatch of Kideti prayer: “From what is unseen . . . from what is afoot before dawn . . .”
“You had a bad dream,” the demon said in the language of the north. Its voice was husky and childish, with a slight lisp.
“God of my father,” I whispered, trembling. I wiped my face on the sheet. The shapes in the room began to resolve themselves: I recognized the window and marked the position of the screen, and knew that the figure before me was no monster, but the scarred child. She was dressed in a tattered blue shift, made no doubt from a worn-out robe, and her soft hair, unplaited, stood up around her head. She was holding a saucer of oil in which a twist of cotton was burning with a light that fluttered like a dying insect.
“You shouted,” she said.
“No doubt I did,” I muttered.
“What did you dream about?”
“An angel,” I said. I looked up into her face, trying to focus on her beautiful eyes with their vibrancy, their sweet directness. She looked back at me curiously.
“If you have a bad dream, you should never stay in bed. You should get up. Look.” She set the saucer of oil on the floor, took my wrist, and pulled until I got up from the pallet. Then she stretched her arms above her head. “You do this. Yes. Now you turn around.” Slowly we rotated, our hands in the air, our shadows huge on the walls, while the child recited solemnly:
I greet thee, I greet thee:
Send me a little white rose,
And I will give thee a deer’s heart.
“There,” she said, letting her arms fall. She smiled at me, brightness brimming in her eyes. “You ought to say it around a garlic plant, but we’re not allowed out at night. The others are on the roof. Do you want to go up?”
I nodded and put on my shirt, and the child picked up her meager light and glided soundlessly into the hall. The rooms were black and vacant; we surprised rats in the corners. The air was chill, with the odor of moldy straw. I saw that a radhu—often so bright, so cheerfully domestic—could also be a place of stark desolation. The bare feet of the child were silent on the cold stone floors, and the light she held up trembled under the arches.
At last we came to a narrow stairway where the air was fresh and the stars looked down through a triangular hole in the roof. The stairs were so steep that the girl crawled up and I followed the soles of her feet, already hearing soft voices outside. We emerged onto the roof, into the immeasurable night. The sky was littered with sharp, crystal stars. A sliver of moon diffused its powdery light onto the ruined house and the consummate stillness of the surrounding fields.
“Jevick!” Miros cried in a voice so heavily laden with feeling that I knew he was drunk even before I saw him. “Thank Avalei you’ve come. This is terrible. It’s been terrible.”
I moved toward him. Vines rustled about my ankles.
“Amaiv!” said a sharp voice. “What are you doing with that light? Put it out, and don’t spill the oil.”
The little girl blew out the light obediently. “He had a bad dream, yamas.”
“A bad dream.” Miros sighed. “Even sleep is dangerous. . . .”
They sat against the low wall along the edge of the roof, where the vines made a thick curtain over the stone. Miros was holding a bottle and looking down, his face in shadow; the girl with the obstinate chin rested her head on his shoulder. A little apart from them sat the tall girl in the scarf, her legs splayed out and her toes pointing inward. I supposed she was half-witted. I stumbled over an empty bottle as I approached them and then sat down among the vines.
“Careful,” Miros said. “If you fall off the roof, vai, I’ll have killed an avneanyi on top of everything.”
The girl leaning against him began to giggle and could not stop. Miros held the bottle unsteadily toward me. “There, my friend,” he said. “Drink. I’ve given it all to Laris. We are drinking through her hospitality now.”
I drank some of the cleansing teiva and handed back the bottle. The scarred girl, like a deft little animal, curled up her legs beside me.
“You should be in bed,” the girl with Miros reprimanded her, suddenly recovering from her giggles.
“I can’t sleep,” the child protested, wheedling.
“You’ll sleep soon enough, and then who’s going to carry you downstairs?”
“I’ll sleep on the roof,” said the child decidedly.
“You can’t sleep on the roof.” The sister had lowered her head like an angry cow. It was th
is, along with the dogged way she spoke, and her slurred consonants, which showed me that she was very drunk as well.
Miros had one arm around her. He caressed the top of her head, and she nestled back into his shoulder with a sigh. He raised his head and looked at me, and the moonlight showed his features blurred with drink. “This is Laris,” he said brokenly. “This is Laris, a true daughter of the Valley. I’ve already given her two bottles of teiva. It was all I had. I’m going to give her everything I own. It will never be enough. Never enough for the Night Market.”
“Everything?” said Laris slyly, tugging the neck of his tunic.
“Ah gods,” Miros groaned. “You see how it’s been, my friend. Drink again. Don’t take such little sips; it won’t do anything. Let no one reject her hospitality.”
“That’s right.” Laris smirked.
I drank, more to dispel my own embarrassment than from a real desire for teiva. The drink made the stars look brighter, cut out of the sky with a tailor’s scissors. Dogs bayed away in the long fields.
“Laris, Laris,” Miros said sadly. “You don’t know who I am.” He rested his head on the wall, his features smooth in the delicate light. “Nobody knows who I am,” he murmured. “Except perhaps my uncle. Not even Jevick knows, and he is my best friend east of Sinidre.”
“I know who you are,” said Laris.
“No.” Miros shook his head wearily, rolling it back and forth on the wall. “No one knows. Not one of you. Jevick.” I felt him looking at me, though his eyes were lost in shadow. It was his cheek that shone, his brow. “You think I’m a gentleman, Jevick,” he said hoarsely. “But you are wrong. I have no honor. I forget everything, everyone. I will even forget the Night Market one day. I will forget it long enough to laugh again. It makes me hate myself. . . . I tried to go into the army once. To be sent to the Lelevai. Everyone said I wouldn’t go through with the training. And they were right. I drank too much—you know, when you’re wearing a sword, they give you credit everywhere—and the way I gambled! Well, I had to give back the sword. For a year I thought I would die of shame. I had proved them right, my brothers, my uncles, everyone. . . . But then—” He shrugged. “I didn’t have the courage to kill myself, either. It seemed so much more sensible to go hunting. . . .”
He laughed, but even the moonlight showed the stiffness around his mouth. “The truth is, I have only been good for two things in my life: and those are hunting and londo. Even in love I have been a failure. Even in serving a goddess. And that is why, my Laris, I sleep alone.”
He kissed the top of her head. “No, no,” the girl said dully, clawing vaguely at the neck of his tunic. “I know who you are. You are the man foretold to me in the taubel, the man with the long shadow.”
“No,” said Miros. “I am no one.” He leaned forward and pressed the teiva bottle into my hand. Then, with some difficulty, he pulled himself away from Laris. He disengaged his arm from around her shoulders with infinite tenderness as she grabbed at his tunic with her blunt little hands.
“It’s a mistake,” she said, drunk and sorrowful, when at last he had made her hands return to her lap. “You should have loved me, lammaro. In this house we have no shame. All of us lost our shame when we lost our brothers.”
“Look.” She pointed to her sister, the tall girl in the scarf, who sat mesmerized, opening and closing her hands in the dust of moonlight. “She wears a brodrik, but she’s not a widow. She’s not even married.” The girl’s voice sank to a whisper: “She had a baby, though. We buried it. . . . I know she’s prettier than me, but still, my time is coming. Mun Vothis read it for me in the taubel. A man with a long shadow, she said. He’s supposed to come on a Tolie. But today isn’t Tolie, is it?” She looked around at us, her face brightening.
“It’s Valie.” Miros’s voice was muffled, his face in his hands.
“Ah! That’s good. Look, Amaiv is sleeping. . . .” We all looked down at the child, who was curled up in a ball at my side.
“She would have been the most beautiful,” said Laris.
The next day when we were ready to leave, as I was climbing into my seat, the girl called Laris came rushing out to me. She had not combed her hair, and her scraggly plaits jangled about her face with its broad outlines, its firm, determined jaw. She caught my arm in the shade of a spindly acacia tree by the barren court. “Are you really an avneanyi?” she asked breathlessly. And without waiting for an answer she pressed my palm against her stomach, closing her eyes, in a long, sensual movement. She smelled strongly of teiva and old sweat, and I recoiled. Laris released me, giving her wild laugh. “Thank you, avneanyi,” she said, the shadows of the acacia branches jagged across her smile. “When the time comes, it will quicken me.”
Chapter Sixteen
The Courage of Hivnawir
Loneliness was descending on us: we were reaching the end of the country.
It was not, of course, the end of the known world: that place, marked on maps by the dire word Ludyanith, “without water,” lay on the other side of the desert, beyond the mountains of Duoronwei. Yet the starkness of the hills of the Tavroun, rising about us, dazzled me after the delicacy and warmth of the Valley. For the first time, the road appeared ill-kept. Go on if you like, its pitted stones seemed to say. It is no longer our affair.
One afternoon we left our horse and carriage at the stable in a wayside inn and walked down to the river to board the ferry. Stones rolled beneath our feet and clay-dust rose on the wind, a single-minded and nameless wind, colder than anything I had known before I entered that wilderness. The priest was now able to walk, but he would not speak or remove his cloak, and clung to Miros’s arm with his frail hand as we slipped down to the water’s edge. The ferry was manned by slaves. A young girl on the boat, a bride, wept as we pulled away from the shore, trying to hide her face in her dark mantle.
Across that river, the great Ilbalin, I was to meet the angel’s body. The river, bordering the highlands like the beads on a woman’s skirt, was as sacred to me as it was to the ancient Olondrians and the Tavrouni mountain people, who called it the river of Daimo the God. That water, shining with subdued lights under the gray sky, would carry me to Jissavet and freedom. It stank of fish and rottenness, like the sea. On the deck an Evmeni in a black turban sold images of the gods carved from boars’ teeth.
On the other side stood the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Mud walls, windy alleys, carts and donkeys, cider in the single unhappy café. The walls and floor were black with smoke, and dried venison was sold on strings, and the villagers did not know how to play londo. Miros brought out his own ivory pieces and tried to teach them, but they looked at him with suspicion and sucked their pipes. Later he burned his hand trying to turn the spit on the wayward fire and one of them treated him with the juice of an aloe.
Auram crept into one of the narrow bedrooms, beckoning for Miros to follow with his trunk. Then Miros came out again, leaving his uncle alone. I did not see Auram again until the kebma hour, when he swept into the common room, his wig purplish in the light of the coal-oil lamps. He wore a dark red costume with a spiked collar and gold-lined cape, and smiled at me coldly with artificial teeth. His eyes blazed. He was splendid, beautifully made like an image of worship. One could believe that he would never die.
After we had eaten, Miros went to sit by the fire. Auram rubbed his waxen, shapely hands so that his rings clicked softly. “You have begun,” he said to me. “Have you not?”
“Begun what?” I said, although I knew.
“You have begun to speak to her. I see it in your face.”
“I do not know what you see,” I said, looking back at him boldly, knowing how my face had changed, become sterner, less readable. But the priest smiled as if he saw only what he had most hoped for, though the light in his eyes, I saw with a start, was made of tears.
“Ah! Avneanyi, it is a privilege to watch you—you have discovered, I think, the courage of Hivnawir. You do not know the story?” He laughed, shaking his head
so that the black horsehair of his wig rustled. As he spoke he chased the shadows with his hands, his narrow wrists turning in the thick lace at his cuffs. “Hivnawir,” he breathed, his eyes sparkling, “is a legendary character, one of our greatest lovers. His story comes from the great era of Bain, when the clans of the Ideiri slew one another in the streets. . . . The time when the Quarter of Sighs was built with its sturdy barred windows, when it was known as the Quarter of the Princes. Bain was a city of vicious noblemen and hired assassins, yes, in the very age of its highest artistic achievements! You must imagine, avenanyi . . . carriages studded with iron spikes, and women who never emerged from their stone palaces. . . . Darvan the Old, who was struck through the eye with an arrow in his conservatory, and Bei the Innocent, who had his ears filled with hot lead! Hivnawir was born in that quarter and little is known of him but that, and the tale of his passion from the beautiful Taur, who was forbidden to him not only because she was promised to another but because she was the daughter of his uncle. Our painters adore this story: they have represented Hivnawir as a beautiful, fiery youth with broad shoulders, often on horseback; somehow he has become associated with oleanders and goes wreathed in white and scarlet flowers through centuries of fine art. As for myself, I have always wondered if he were not wan and petulant, a mediocre young man who simply stumbled into a legend! Perhaps he had a drooping lip or wheezed when he ran too fast. But never mind! The goddess forbid we should dabble in sacrilege! We know no more of the beauty of Taur than we do of the splendor of Hivnawir—her portrait was never painted, despite the fashion of the times. Her tyrannical father, Rothda the Truculent, locked her up in a series of stone chambers, like a poor fly in an amber pendant. It is said that she was too beautiful to be looked upon by men: there is the tale of a Nissian slave who cut his throat for love of her. No man was allowed close to her, not even her own relations: Rothda himself did not visit the little girl for years on end! It was the scandal of the city, as you can imagine; they said it was barbarous, and several young men were killed or maimed in their efforts to rescue the damsel. Soon after she was promised in marriage to one of her father’s creditors, her cousin Hivnawir became inflamed by the thought of her.
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