“It is said that he was passing down a hall in his uncle’s palace when he heard a girl’s voice, sweet and sad, singing an old ballad. He was alone, and he searched the corridors for the source of the music and, unable to find it, finally called out. As soon as he spoke, the music ceased. Then he thought of his cousin Taur; he was certain that he had happened upon the regions of her prison. Knowing this, he could think of nothing else and returned there every day, carrying a taper and pounding vainly on the walls. The more he searched, the less he found, the more he craved a meeting. After all, he reasoned, she is my cousin; there can be no impropriety in my meeting her just once, simply to congratulate her on her engagement! But his determination was more than that which a kind relation would feel. He was stirred by the rumors of her perilous beauty. And Taur, in her carpeted prison, heard the faint cries of the unknown man and drew her shawl about her, trembling.
“At last his persistence began to drive her mad; she was cold around the heart, afraid to play her lyre or even to speak. And her curiosity, too, began to grow like a dark flower, so that her breath was nearly cut off by its thorns. Her women saw how she languished, losing her aspect of a bride, which they had tended so carefully by feeding her on almond paste. ‘O teldamas,’ they cried, ‘what can satisfy your heart?’ And she answered weakly: ‘Bring me the name of the man in the corridor.’
“So it began. Once she knew his name, she became captivated by the thought of her cousin, as he was by the thought of her. The poet says that she ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them. Taur began to harass her women, demanding that they arrange a meeting, which they refused with exclamations of terror. She became moody and would not eat, but played her lyre and sang, so that the shouts of her distant lover grew in their inarticulate frenzy. ‘Bright were her tears, falling like almond blossom’—that is Lian. Who knows where she discovered such bitter strength? Where did this secluded girl develop the strength to threaten to kill herself—to attempt to dash her brains on the wall? One supposes that she inherited the truculence of her father, along with his cunning of a teiva merchant . . . for just as he had satisfied a prince to whom he had lost everything at cards by promising him this pure and unseen girl as a bride, so Taur entangled her women in a net of lies and threats so that they lived in dread of the tales she might tell her father. They wept: she was a cruel girl; how could she threaten to say that they were thieves, so that their eyes would be put out with a hot iron? How could she force them to risk their lives, how could she endanger her cousin whom she loved—that unfortunate youth in the corridor? But she would not be dissuaded, and at last they reached a compromise: they would allow her to meet with the young man on the condition that they did not see one another: the women themselves would hold a silk scarf between them, so that the youth would not be deranged by the sight of her.”
Auram paused. Outside the sleet was whispering in the stunted trees by the road; a donkey cart went by, creaking. The priest looked dreamily at the lamp, his painted eyes glowing deeply, slowly filling up with the tale’s enchantment. “One wonders,” he said softly, “how it was. One can imagine her: what it would mean, the voice in a distant passageway. She had books, after all. So no doubt her cousin became the symbol of what she lacked: the sky, the trees, the world. But he . . .” The priest gave me a brilliant, significant glance. “What of Hivnawir? He had everything. Everything: riches, women, horses, taverns, the stars! That is why I said ‘the courage of Hivnawir.’ It is the courage to choose not what will make us happy, but what is precious.
“Well, the cousins met. They knelt on either side of the silken scarf, neither one touching it. They spoke for hours. For days they met like that, weeks, months, speaking and whispering, singing and reciting poetry. A strange idyll, among the servant women tortured by dread, the lover risking with every meeting a sword in his reckless neck! In the stone room with its harsh outlines disguised by hanging tapestries, in the perfumed air of the artful ventilation . . . The love of voices, naturally, produces the love of lips. Imagine them pressing their ardent mouths to the silk. The poet tells us that Hivnawir outlined her shape with his hands and saw her ‘like a wraith of fog in a glass.’”
The priest sat silent now, tracing a scar in the dark old table, his face still haunted by a fluttering smile. He sat that way until the sleet stopped and the night crier passed outside, wailing “Syen s’mar,” which is in Kestenyi: “The streets are closed.”
At last I asked: “And what happened to them?”
“Oh!” The priest looked startled and then waved his hand, conjuring vague shadows. “A series of troubles—a muddled escape, an attempt on the life of the girl’s intended—at last, a sword in the back for the tragic youth. And Taur burned herself in her apartments, having chosen to meet her love and to wound her father by destroying her wondrous beauty. The barb went deep, deep! For Rothda hanged himself in the arbor where, in other times, he had played omi with the princes of that cruel city. A famous tale! It has been used as a warning against incest and as a fanciful border for summer tablecloths. But think, avneanyi—” He touched my wrist; his teeth glinted. “They never saw one another face to face.”
Village of Klah-ne-Wiy, I remember you. I remember the shabby streets and the cold, the Tavrouni women in striped wool blankets, the one who stood by her cart selling white-hot odash and picking her ear with a thorn, the one who laughed in the market, her dark blue gums. I remember her, the flyaway hair and strange flat coppery face and the way she tried to sell us a string of yellow beads, a love charm. She pointed the way to the sheep market, and Miros and I bought sheepskin coats and caps and leather sleeping-sacks to survive the cold of the inn.
Cripples begged for alms outside the market. A great bull was being slaughtered there, and expectant women stood around it with pails. One of them clutched Miros’s arm and quoted toothlessly: “The desert is the enemy of mankind, and the feredhai are the friends of the desert.” Geometric patterns in rough ochre framed the doorways, turning violet in the pageantry of dusk. By the temple smoked the lanky black-haired men called the bildiri, those whose blood mingled the strains of the Valley and the plateau.
Only once we saw the true feredhai, and they were unmistakable. They came through the center of Klah-ne-Wiy in a whirl of noise and dust. There were perhaps seven of them and each man rode a separate skittering mount, and yet they moved together like an indivisible animal. They drove the dogs and children into the alleys, and women snatched their braziers out of the way, and someone shouted as baskets overturned, and yet the riders did not seem to notice but passed with their heads held high, men and ponies lean and wiry and breathing white steam in the cold. The men were young, mere boys, and their long hair was ragged and caked with dust. Their arms were bare, their chests criss-crossed with scabbards and amulets. They passed down the road and left us spitting to clear the dust from our teeth and disappeared in the twilight coloring the hills.
Then the gloomy inn, the barefoot old man shuffling out of the rooms at the back carrying the honey beer called stedleihe, and the way that Miros made us pause before we drank, our eyes closed, Kestenyi fashion, “allowing the dragon to pass.” And the way we banged on the table until the old man brought the lentils, and later heard a moaning from the kitchen and learned that there was a shaggy cow tied up among the sacks of beans and jars of oil, with garlics around her neck to ward off disease. And the old man seemed so frightened of us and waved his hands explaining that he kept her inside to prevent the beshaidi from stealing her. And later we saw him taking snuff at a table with some Tavrounis; he was missing all the teeth on one side of his mouth.
Darkness, smoky air, the dirty lamps on the rickety tables and outside a mournful wail and a rhythmic clapping, and we all went to the door and watched the bride as she was carried through the streets in a procession of brilliant torches. The wind whipped the flames; the sparks flew. The bride was sitting on a chair borne on the shoulders of he
r kinsmen. I supposed she was the unhappy girl who had traveled with us on the ferry, though her face was hidden beneath an embroidered veil.
But I waited for another, as impatient as any bridegroom. And at last she came. We had then spent six days in Klah-ne-Wiy. She came, not carried by eunuchs and decked with the lilies sacred to Avalei but packed in a leather satchel on a stout Tavrouni’s back. They slunk to the door, two of them, looking exactly like all the others except perhaps more ragged, more exhausted, their boots in stinking tatters. They had walked a long way, through the lower hills of Nain, where it was already winter and freezing mud soaked halfway up their calves. And now they were here, at home, in Klah-ne-Wiy. They sat down at a table, and the one with the satchel laid it on the floor beside his feet. Auram put his hand on my arm and nodded, his eyes drowned in sadness. I swallowed. “It’s not her.”
“Oh yes! Oh yes!” whispered the priest.
My insides twisted.
“Here,” said Miros, alarmed, his hand on my back. “Have some stedleihe. Or perhaps something stronger. You! Odashi kav’kesh!”
“No,” I said with an effort. “No.” The satchel was small, too small for a human being, unless—and my stomach heaved—unless she was only bones.
“It’s not her,” I repeated. And then, impelled by some mysterious force: “Jissavet.”
“What?” said Miros.
“Quiet!” hissed Auram. “He’s calling her!”
“Jissavet. It’s not you,” I said. The priest whipped his head about, his eyes drawing in light, hoping to glimpse a shadow from the beyond.
“It’s not you.”
“There,” said the priest, alarmed in his turn, “not so loud, we mustn’t appear to notice them.”
He bent close to me, smelling of powder and cloves, his fingers fastened on my sleeve. “When they go,” he whispered. “When they go to bed, in the back. Their room’s in the northwest corner. I know it. I’ll get the package for you. And perhaps . . .” His tongue, hungry and uncertain, darted across his lip. “Perhaps—now that you have grown stronger—perhaps you’ll address her again. Once—or twice. A few words, a few questions. It would mean a great deal to us. . . .”
I laughed. Pure laughter, for the first time since the Feast of Birds. “Oh, veimaro,” I chuckled, seizing his face, wrinkling it in my hands. I brought it close to my own, so close that his great eyes lost their focus and went dim. “Not for an instant,” I told him through my teeth. “Not once.”
I released him abruptly; he fell back against his chair. The odash arrived, a heady liquor made from barley and served with melted butter. I gulped the foul brew down, fascinated by the battered satchel visible in the light from the dying fire. It lay there, stirring sometimes when one of the messengers touched it with his boot. Her body, rescued from the Olondrian worms.
“Jissavet,” I murmured.
And then the door, always bolted, shivered under a volley of blows, and a voice cried, “Open in the name of the king!”
We stared at one another and Auram took my arm, not in panic but with deliberate softness, almost with tenderness. His voice, too, was soft, yet it penetrated beneath the pounding and the shouts at the door, boring straight into my heart. “The road behind the market,” he said, “will lead you to the pass. When you have crossed the hills you will see a small river, the Yeidas. Follow that river and it will take you to Sarenha-Haladli, one of the prince’s old estates. Stay there. Our people will come for you.”
“What are you saying?” I murmured in a daze. The door swelled inward.
The High Priest laughed, shrugged, and brushed the side of his vast brocaded cape. “A marvelous journey. Marvelous and terrible. And perhaps we will go on together. But it is possible that this is, as it were, the last act.”
He nodded to the landlord. “Open the door.”
The old man lifted the bolt and sprang back as four Valley soldiers rushed into the room. Shadows leapt on the walls. All my thought was for the body, the weather-stained leather satchel that held the key to my future. I ducked beneath the table and scrambled toward it over the earthen floor, but it was gone, swept up on the back of one of the Tavrounis. “Sit down, sit down,” the soldiers shouted. But my companions faced them squarely, Auram with his thin hand raised.
“Stand back in the name of Avalei,” he commanded. There was a pause, a slight uncertainty on the part of those fresh-faced, well-fed Valley soldiers. Still on my knees, I grasped the Tavrouni’s belt. “That’s mine!” I hissed. “It’s mine! You brought it for me! Give it to me, quickly!”
One of the soldiers looked at me, frowning; Auram stamped his foot to draw his attention. “What do you mean by harassing a High Priest and his men? What has the king to do with me? I am Avalei’s mouthpiece. I am prosperity. And, if the hour requires it, I am evil itself.”
Even in my dread I admired the old man. Straight as a young willow-tree he stood, his head thrown back, his nostrils curling with disdain. One arm was drawn across his chest, upholding the carmine brilliance of his cape. The hand behind his back, I noticed, clutched a knife.
The soldiers glanced at one another. “We mean no dishonor to Avalei or your person, veimaro,” one of them grumbled, scratching his neck. “But we have come for a man, a foreigner.” He scanned the group and pointed to me with his sword. “That one. The islander. We’ve come for him.”
“That man is my guest,” Auram said icily. “An insult to him is an insult to me and through me to the Ripener of the Grain.”
“Our orders are from the Telkan,” said another soldier, not the one who had spoke first, his dark face swollen with impatience.
Auram smiled. “Our speech begins to form a circle, gentlemen.” His finger twirled in the air, its shadow revolving on the ceiling. “Round and round. Round and round. You invoke the king, and I invoke the goddess. Which do you think will prove the stronger?”
“Priests have committed treason before,” shouted the dark-faced youth. And it was then that one of his fellows gave a start and dropped his sword. The weapon landed with a thud, and as if a spring had been released a whirr split the air and Auram’s knife lodged in the dark soldier’s eye.
“Run, Jevick,” Miros shouted. “It’s over now.”
He raised a chair in the manner of one accustomed to tavern brawls. One of the soldiers struck it with his sword, and the light wood cracked and splintered. Miros ducked, fine chaff in his hair.
I sprang to my feet and seized the satchel on the Tavrouni’s back. “Give it to me!” He stood his ground, splay-footed, stinking of curdled milk, and we hovered, locked together, for a long moment before I realized he was helping me, attempting to lift the strap over his head. I released him and he whipped off the strap, dropped the satchel, and drew his dagger. His companion sat on the floor, holding his stomach. One of the soldiers had fallen, his head on the hearthstone; in a moment the room filled with the sickening odor of burnt hair.
“Miros,” Auram cried. He shouted a few words in rapid Kestenyi and Miros sprang to my side, using the remains of his chair as a shield. “Hurry!” he panted. “Go through the back, there’s a door. I’ll go with you, I know the house. Ah.”
I reached for the satchel, then turned to him as he groaned.
He sank to the floor. A shadow loomed over us, a healthy and carefree shadow with crimson braid adorning its uniform. It advanced to strike, to kill. I dove for its legs and it toppled over me, its sword all slick with Miros’s blood slapping on the floor.
The soldier kicked, getting his feet under him. I rolled. A Tavrouni was there, his gray teeth bared, a knife gleaming between them. He sprang on the soldier like a panther. And I—I ought to have taken the angel’s body, risked everything for it, my life and the lives of others. But suddenly I could not. I thought: Too many have died for this. I thought: Not what will make us happy, but what is precious. And I did not lift a dead body from that chaos. Instead I reached for Miros. I seized him with both hands. I took my friend.
> I clutched him under the armpits and dragged him into the dark kitchen where a scullery boy with a withered arm lay whimpering in the hay. The large, mild eyes of the cow observed me through the gloom, reflecting the beams of a coachlamp standing outside in the courtyard. The soldiers’ coach, no doubt. Miros was breathing fast, too fast. “Miros,” I said.
“Yes,” he gasped.
“I’m taking you outside. Somewhere safe.” I kicked the door open and dragged him into the alley. His bootheels skidded across the hard earth, leaping whenever they struck an uneven patch in the ground. He groaned with every jolt. In the dark I could not see where his wound was, how bad it was, but I saw he clutched his side, and his hands were black in the moonlight. He threw his head back, teeth clenched.
“Miros. Is it—can I—”
“Nothing,” he panted. “Nothing. I’ve had—worse—on a hunting trip.”
His words comforted me, although I knew they must be false. I glanced up: another corner among the mud houses. I rounded it, pulling my friend. A crash sounded somewhere behind us, breaking glass. It must be the window of the soldiers’ coach, for the inn had only shutters. Auram, I thought. Or perhaps one of our taciturn allies from the Tavroun. I hauled Miros up to grip him more surely, provoking a cry of pain. Faster. Another corner, more silent houses, sometimes behind the thick shutters a fugitive gleam like a firefly in the dusk. My goal was to put as many of those winding turns as possible between myself and the soldiers of the king. They could not track our movements in the dark, and I hoped the earth was too hard for them to gain much from it even in daylight.
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