Tati! Tati! she shrieked.
I saw her stumble, burning her hands in the bright embers.
To the end, yes, she was still the same, incompetent, clumsy, bewildered. She babbled and wept in the light of the small oil lamp. I wonder what she saw when she looked at me, if I possessed, for her, the face of the red-haired torturer of the caves. I tried to steady her hand, but my arms wouldn’t move. She was tipping the lamp, not paying attention. The tiny flame shrank and crinkled. I heard her calling down the hall in Kideti, a fool to the end, enough to make you weep. Hold the light, I said.
Chapter Eighteen
Spring
I wrote all through the winter. I wrote, paused, went out and walked far over the snowswept plains, a derelict wrapped in a carpet. The crone in the hillside left for her winter quarters in the village, where I could not go for fear of discovery, and I had to search elsewhere for help. The angel flickered above me in the falling snow. She showed me how to hide, when to crawl through the ditches, squirming on my elbows, how to avoid being seen from the grounds of the fortress, where prisoners worked at repairing a crack in the wall, clamped in their wooden shackles. She led me to encampments of feredhai, ephemeral villages of women, children, and ancients, the tents pegged fast against the wind. The men and boys were away; they had taken the cattle farther east. When I called out, a woman would raise the tent flap cautiously, shielding her lamp. And they never recoiled from the gaunt foreigner with snow in his long beard but looked at me curiously with their scintillant black eyes, and pulled me inside, exclaiming to one another in birdlike voices, and gave me medicinal herbs and what they could spare of butter and rice. Children watched from raised pallets, muffled in furs, playing with dolls made of tallow. Sometimes my hosts tried to make me stay, pushing me down with hard fingers. “Kalidoh, kalidoh,” they repeated. I asked Miros what it meant, and he told me it is the highland word for avneanyi.
I smiled. “So they know.”
He nodded, head lowered, shoveling rice into his mouth. “Not hard to see,” he mumbled.
“No. I suppose not.”
He gave a grunt which might have been laughter. His hand on the side of the bowl was so pale it was almost blue, but its grip looked firm and sure. He ate, as he always did that winter, as if someone might take the food away at any moment, as if each meal were a matter of life and death. And of course this was not far from the truth. I had watched him hover for weeks in the indeterminate territory of the angels.
Now he scraped the last grains of rice from the bowl and handed it to me, meeting my eyes. “Thank you.”
I nodded. “You look like a true Kestenyi. A bandit.”
He grinned, his features almost lost between the hanging locks of his hair and the chaos of his beard. “My uncle won’t know me.”
The words brought a chill to my heart. I took the bowl and spoon and left him. I know that he had grown used to my strange behavior, my abrupt entrances and disappearances, my shouts in the library upstairs at night, my frequent failure to answer him when he spoke. The angel was closer to me than he: I took her with me everywhere, as the hero of the Romance carried a spirit in his earring. I knew her through her close, urgent, volatile, night-breathed voice, the tales she told, her songs with their borders of salt. She whispered to me, she leaned her arms on my shoulders, she pressed her cheek to mine—so that the inconceivable temperature of the eastern winter, the cold I had never felt before, shocking, wondrous, disturbing, seemed to me like the body of the angel. Like her, sometimes, it revitalized my blood on the brisk mornings when the early light was splintered by the icicles; and also, like her, it numbed me when I had sat too long in the dark library, forgetting myself in our otherworldly colloquies.
Now I went up the stairs, to that neglected and shadowy room where the carpet glittered with frost in front of the balcony door. Light came through the doorway, the implacable iron light of the winter plateau, the only light in the room until I called her. I sat in the chair at the desk before my broken pens, the ink-bottle filled with ash and water, the stack of books with her story in the margins. My hand on the stiff leather bindings gray with cold, my shadow faint on the wall. I drew in an icy breath. “Jissavet,” I said.
Her voice. Its wistful texture, unrefined silk. “Jevick.” Her lights, a series of enigmatic gestures among the bookshelves. And there she was, barefoot in her shift: the black and wary eyes, the childishly parted amber-colored hair.
“You stare like a witch,” she accused me with a smile. “If you did that in Kiem, I would spit.”
“You wouldn’t spit,” I said. “You’re not superstitious.”
“No,” she said with a quiet laugh, turning her hair in her fingers. “No, I’m not superstitious. I never was.
“Is that my vallon?” she asked then, looking over my shoulder; for she, like me, was now an adept at passing between the worlds.
“Yes,” I said, my hand on the books protective, for I could not help but be proud of those lines, wrung as if from my heart. I opened the first one, Lantern Tales. “This is Olondrian,” I said, pointing to the printed text, “and on the sides—this is Kideti.”
“No one can read Kideti,” the angel laughed.
“I can,” I said. I showed her how I had used Olondrian characters for the sounds the two languages shared. Sometimes I used a letter for a neighboring sound in Kideti: so our j sound was the Olondrian shi. And sometimes I altered the characters to make new ones: our tch sound was also a shi, but one that carried a plume-like curve above it.
“Listen,” I said. The sun was sinking, flooding the desert with scarlet. It seemed to blaze up unnaturally, casting a threatening glow on the book in my hands. I fumbled with the pages. Suddenly my chest felt tight; distress seized me as I read the opening lines:
I already know about writing. We made maps: maps of the sea, of the waters between Tinimavet, Sedso, and Jiev. And maps of the rivers, the great ones, Dyet and Katapnay and Tadbati-Nut, the ones that made our country of mud on their way to the girdling sea. . . .
“Stop,” she whispered at last.
I had not finished the anadnedet. My voice faded uncertainly from the air.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve hurt you.” I felt the distress again, more intensely than before. My fingers curled around the page.
“No,” she said hoarsely. She was weeping somewhere far away, inconsolable, beyond my reach. The pain it gave me, the sense of helplessness, was so exquisitely sharp I closed my eyes.
“It’s a terrible story,” she sobbed.
“No,” I said. “No. It’s a beautiful story. Jissavet? Can you hear me? You’ve told it beautifully.”
“I miss him,” she said. “I think he’s dead, but I can’t find him anywhere.”
“You’ll find him,” I said. “You’ll find him, I’ll help you to find him. . . .”
Still she wept, devastating me with a flood of grief. So I spoke to her, willing her to be comforted. I snatched my words from anywhere, from the poetry of the desert and the Valley, from the songs of Tinimavet. I imagined I had met her at home in the south. I told her about this meeting, how she rowed her boat on a languid tributary of Tadbati-Nut. I evoked the tepid light, the bristling stillness of the leaves. “And I was riding a white mule,” I said, “bringing pepper to sell on the hill. . . .”
And Jissavet, you drove your oar into the shallow stream, arresting the movement of your little boat, and you looked at me with startled eyes, those eyes which have the strange power to penetrate anything: a stone, a heart. I reined the mule in sharply. Can I deny that I was riveted by those eyes, with their low light, their impalpable darkness? By that shoulder, thin and flexible, that flawless skin on which the unctuous light fell, drop by drop, like honey? We were engulfed in the forest, the opaque air was hard to breathe. Your expression altered subtly but unmistakably. You were no longer surprised. You sat up, quickly withdrawing the light of your glance, and faced me instead with a look of offended hauteur. . . .
Then I thought, my stare has insulted the daughter of a chief. But what chief’s daughter is this who, bold and careless, paddles her boat through the forest alone, regardless of her beauty which must attract the unwanted notice of her inferiors? And I greeted you, emboldened by the fact that you had not rowed away. Then your expression, so mutable, changed again. In it were all the hidden laughter, the irony, and intelligence which, now, you allowed to sparkle for the first time. . . .
Her misery had grown silent. Now she interrupted bitterly: “That’s all nonsense. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
But I told her that I knew. “I remember it,” I said. “I saw everything that day, aboard the Ardonyi.”
I told her, too, of the days before the Ardonyi, my days in Tyom. In the ossified glitter of the abandoned garden, where the immobility of the trees was as deep and abiding as winter itself, I spoke to her of my parents, my brother, my master. My breath made clouds of fog as if my words had condensed in the air; and when the angel spoke, her breath made light. I told her that I agreed with her father, that sorrow was everywhere, and I described the rain, the frustration, my father’s wife. I think she saw Tyom then. She imagined, vaguely, the house of yellow stone on its hill overlooking the deep green of the fields. She imagined my father observing his quiet farm, monumental on the terraced hillside under his reed umbrella. “He must have looked like Jabjabnot,” she said. My laughter rang in the frozen air, making the blue trees tremble. “He was,” I said. “He was, he was like a god. We lived in terror of him. He was disappointed in us to the day he died.”
She did not speak. I saw that I was alone. “Show yourself,” I whispered.
There she was, seated on the rim of the fountain, coming into being like the letters drawn in a magical northern ink which is revealed only when held close to a flame. She rested her hands on the edge of the fountain’s bowl; her feet dangled.
“Not like that,” I said. “In something else. In—a coat. You couldn’t sit outside like that, half naked.”
She raised her eyes and looked at me gravely.
“I know,” I said with a harsh laugh. “You don’t feel the cold. You couldn’t do this small thing just to please me? You couldn’t—just to make it seem—”
She let me talk until, hearing the foolishness of my words, I fell silent.
“Then I’m all alone,” I said at last.
She smiled, wise and sad. “Tell me more about your tchavi—Lunre?”
“Good pronunciation for an islander,” I muttered. “My mother always insisted on calling him ‘Lunle.’ . . .”
“And was he really from Bain, from that terrible city?”
“That wonderful city,” I said. I tilted my head back, looking up through the trees. I glanced at her, her incandescent darkness against the marble.
“I’ll tell you his love story,” I said.
I told her the story of Tialon and Lunre, and she wept. I told her everything, all of my secret things. I felt myself disintegrating, fading, turning to smoke, becoming pure thought, pure energy, like her. I wanted this dissolution, sought it eagerly. It was never enough. Never, although we clung together like two orphans in a forest. “Now you’re not afraid of me anymore,” she whispered, shivering. “No,” I said, closing my eyes as I reached for her, touching marble.
I could not touch her. And yet she seemed so close, the glow of her skin against my hand, her voice in my ear a private music. I read her anadnedet again and again. I wanted to write there too, to inscribe myself among the Olondrian and Kideti words on the page. My own wild poetry scattered there like grain. I thought of her playing with her friends, and I could see her so clearly: satin-eyed, dictatorial. And it seemed to me that she had been made to answer a desire which I had carried all of my life, without knowing it.
Dark nights of Kestenya. Lamplit hours in the library. And that voice, laughing, restless, proud and forlorn. The voice that inhabited the wind and rang in the sun on the trees of ice and occupied the empty space in my heart. I had not known of this empty space, but now I recognized it, and it bled; and I was wretched, distracted, and happy. I ran in the snow, shouted, and broke the icicles on the gate in the wall, stabbing her nebulous image with those bright knives.
And in the box bed I wept. “Stop,” she said. “Stop, Jevick, it’s over, it’s finished.”
“It’s too late,” I choked. “I’ll never know you.”
“You know me now.”
“But I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything for you. If I’d known I might have done something—found you—”
“Hush,” she said. “Sit up, now. Light the candle.” She asked me to throw shadows on the wall while she guessed their shapes. This was the way to play tchoi, the shadow game of Tinimaveti nights. But as for my angel, my love—she cast no shadow.
Miros was coming back to life. He walked around the garden, first leaning on a stick, then upright, by himself. His face was still gaunt and fierce with beard, but his eyes had regained their brightness and his body the strength to haul water and split wood. To restore his muscles, he had begun practicing kankelde, the soldier’s art, on a horizontal branch of a plum tree in the garden. He startled me when I came upon him swinging upside down, his face wine-dark, in the figure called Garda’s Pendulum.
In the evenings we ate whatever scraps we had in the ravaged sitting room. Firelight flashed on the tangle of his hair. He said: “You saved my life this winter.” He said: “I don’t know how you did it. It’s a miracle.”
I smiled and said softly: “You really don’t know?”
He gave me a guilty glance. “Well. Yes, I know. But I’m not—I’m not like my uncle.”
He tugged at his earring and went on slowly: “Knowing there’s an angel in the place doesn’t make me want to ask it questions. It doesn’t seem right.”
I cleaned the last streaks of yom afer from my bowl and sucked my fingers. “You sound like an islander.”
He shrugged and smiled through his beard. “Perhaps. I don’t know.”
When the meal was over we stood and he clapped my shoulder, and for a moment, grateful, I leaned into his rough, human embrace.
And then I went upstairs, and read to the angel.
I opened Lantern Tales again, old highland stories retold by Ethen of Ur-Fanlei. This time I read not the angel’s tale but the story printed there. Its ornate diction recalled an earlier time, before the war in the east. Ethen at the window of her room above the river where she spent several years as the guest of the Duchess of Tevlas, the tall floor lamps on the balcony after dark, burnt nath to keep away the mosquitoes, Ethen barefoot, massaging her perennially swollen ankles. This tale was told to me by Karth, a gaunt manservant with a lazy eye, who claims to have seen the White Crow himself on more than one occasion. I read aloud, haltingly, translating as I went. Each time I glanced up the angel was looking at me, resting her cheek in her hand.
I read. I read her My Chain of Nights by the famous Damios Beshaid, Elathuid’s Journey to the Duoronwei, Fanlero’s Song of the Dragon. Limros’s Social Organization of the Kestenyi Nomads, which calls the east “this vast theater of miserable existences.” She listened, a moth at a window. I read On the Plant Life of the Desert, by the great botanist of Eiloki, who succumbed to thirst in the sands, with its spidery watercolors of desert flowers such as tras, “whose yellow spines are lined with dark hairs like eyelashes.” Sometimes she stopped me with questions. I created new words in Kideti: the Olondrian water clock was “that which follows the sun even after sunset.” Some books she attended to more closely than others. She grew so still she almost faded away while I read Kahalla the Fearless:
What do they say of the desert? What they say of it is not true. What do they say of the dunes, the salt flats, the cities of broken gravel, and the fields of quartz and chalcedony thrown down by the majestic volcanoes of Iva? Nothing. They say nothing. They speak shrilly of the feredhai, and they smile and add more pounded cloves to their tea. They are unacquai
nted with heat and cold, they are utter strangers to death, they speak like people who have never even seen horses. . . .
I looked up. She was still there, her light pale as a fallen leaf. “I’ll have to stop,” I chattered. “I’m too cold to go on.” She nodded, sighing. “It is a great magic, this vallon.” My lips cracked when I smiled; the evening light was rarefied with cold. My breath poured out of me as whiteness, traveling on the draft. I felt it go like an ache, a tearing of cloth. I moved to the balcony doors and saw, in the instant before I closed them, the stars of the desert branching like candelabra.
I read to her from Firfeld’s Sojourns, too: the two of us wandered together among the fragrant trees of the Shelemvain, and encountered on the fringes of the forest Novannis the False Countess, smoking her beaded pipe among the acacias. We dined at the court of Loma, where women wore tall coiffures made of hollyhocks, and sampled, in the dim greenness of the oak forests, the brains of a wild pig fried with chicory in its own skull, a delicacy of the soft-spoken Dimai. We shivered as we read of the nameless desert in the center of the plateau, which the feredhai call only suamid, “the place,” where no water comes from the sky, not even the snow that falls near the mountains, “and one lives under the tyranny of the wells.” And we read of our own islands, of Vad-Von-Poi, the “city of water-baskets.” Jissavet’s fingers flared above the page. Later, when I was almost asleep, she spoke to me suddenly out of the dark.
“I know what the vallon is,” she said. “It’s jut.”
The gods must have loved her, and they had taken her.
In Pitot they say the elephant god, Old Grandfather, is jealous. He steals children, he steals wives. This much, he says, and no more. He is the Limiter, the controller of human happiness. He must have seen her; they all must have looked at her, even when she was a child, when she paddled her tiny boat made out of skins. They must have seen her bold eyes and her arms, dark, sunlit, polished, reflected in the brown mirrors of the pools. This girl, small and already so headstrong, with hair in those days of an iridescent black. But with the eyes, the mouth, the expression, with the waywardness and audacity which I would come to love when it was too late, when the gods had claimed her for themselves.
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