Those years, the years she lay in the doorway: every one of them hurts me, and every hour has an individual pain. Lost hours, irretrievable, hours that I would have taken up and treasured and which were scattered abroad in the mud. Hours in which she lay alone and deserted by her friends. But had I been one of her friends, had I eaten those stolen fish in the fields, had I been blessed, like them, with that inconceivable good fortune—nothing could have parted me from her. Not the kyitna, not that hair with the color of poisonous berries, which I would weave into ropes to bind me close to her side, not the hatred of all the world, not the danger of sickness, contamination, which I would have welcomed with tears of joy. Yes, I would have clasped that hair, that waist, and inhaled her frightened breath in the hope that the curse would swell to make room for me, that we might be together, safe, removed from everyone else in the honor and preference which death had shown for us. To be, like her, an aristocrat of death, who would bury us under his scarlet blossoms. To suffer, like her, from torrid fevers. To clutch her hand as I struggled for life, to hear her words of comfort gathering the transparent coolness beyond the stars.
For the first time in many months I prayed to the god with the black-and-white tail, incoherent and extravagant prayers. I prayed that once, just once, the laws of time might be suspended and I might find myself, ten years ago, in Kiem. I prayed that she would stay with me forever, that somehow we would enter the magical, intimate purlieus of her book. And I called down terrible punishments on the playmates of her childhood: that they might first love her memory, and then perish. “Let them die,” I begged, “but only after they’ve suffered as I’m suffering.” It seemed to me that the whole world must know of her, must recognize that with her death the universe had altered and the fields, the forests, the rivers were full of ashes.
Is kyitna the sign of the hatred of the gods? Or of their love?
Fading, exhausted, she lay in the open doorway. The heavy light, falling across her stomach like a wave, seemed too much for her body to support. Fragile, she was fragile and impermanent as salt. Like salt she would dissolve, lose her substance. And like salt she would flavor everything with a taste that was sharp and amniotic, disquieting and unmistakable. The gods saw. They saw what I had seen aboard the Ardonyi, this girl with her piquant, pleasing oddity, her lips from which such strange utterances fell, such as when she had said to her mother, “He has the long face of a fish.” They saw the dark and vibrant eyes in which all of her life was concentrated; they knew her erratic moods, her mysterious will, her loneliness which she could not explain to anyone, and her violent rage which had given me so much pain. And they knew more. Into her brain they went, and into her heart. They probed those elusive gardens, those nocturnal roads. They knew the black and sinister wells, the mazes, the sudden traps, and the floating, limpid, inaccessible evenings. Had they not simply recognized, in her, one of themselves? One who, through some cosmic accident, had come to reside on the island of Tinimavet, lost like a star which finds itself, all at once, far from the others. And then the cry had gone out from the Isle of Abundance. And they had crouched, anguished, watching this one who had fallen somehow from the skies. And then with slow and careful gestures, so as not to startle her, they had led her back, and she had departed with them.
“When I was alive, even when I was alive,” she whispered to me, “I didn’t want to live as I do now.”
We went out into the orchard, through the rusty gate, the great flat country glittering before us and the wind rising. The wind, the Kestenyi wind. I called it “four hundred knife-wheeled chariots,” but Jissavet called it “the soldiers of King Yat.” It drove the thin snow writhing over the cracked earth of the plain and set the prayer bells jingling on the goat-hair tents. “That one.” She pointed. “They’ve just traded for some lentils and only the eldest of the sisters is there, the one with the kindest heart.” I called at the tent flap, hoarse in the wind, and a pair of startled eyes peered out from under joined brows like an island hunting bow.
She exclaimed in Kestenyi, a clatter of sounds. I gestured at my loose jacket. “Please,” I said in Olondrian. “Please, my lady, I’m hungry.”
“Kalidoh!” she breathed and pulled me in where a low fire burned in the center of the floor, sending up a sweet, rough scent of dung. “Sit,” she said in a mangled Olondrian, forcing me down on a woven stool. Her gestures were quick, her long, large-knuckled hands in perpetual motion. She adjusted her mantle over her shoulder, flicking its beaded hem out of reach of the fire, and squatted to prod at a bubbling pot balanced in the coals. She said something in Kestenyi, her voice raised. I heard the word kalidoh.
“There’s another,” Jissavet said. “Beside you. Her grandmother.”
I looked more closely at the pile of skins on the floor. A thin face watched me, clear-eyed, ringed with fine gray hair.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
“No,” the granddaughter advised me. “No Olondrian.”
The grandmother lay still, staring.
“Look at her eyes,” Jissavet whispered.
“I know.”
“She isn’t dying. She only looks like she’s dying. She isn’t, though. She’s going to live for a long time.”
The granddaughter served me lentils and dried meat in a leather bowl. I ate half and showed her my empty satchel: “I need some for my friend.” She threw her hands up, scolding as I made to put the remains of the food in the satchel, snatched the bag away and filled it with dried lentils.
“No,” I said. “Too much.”
She waved her hand dismissively, her face turned away. “For the kalidoh. For the kalidoh. Not too much.”
On her bed the grandmother gazed at me with stricken, watchful eyes. A gold earring curled beside her cheek, lavish as spring.
“Sick?” I asked the granddaughter.
She shook her head.
“No, not sick,” Jissavet said, almost in a whisper.
“Jissavet.”
A warning in the air, an electricity. Grief.
“Jissavet.”
She burned beside me, a bright tear in each eye.
I sank to my knees on the floor, her pain going through me like fire in the grass. “Jissavet.”
“Tell her he’s dead,” she choked. “Her boy. He’s not coming back.”
I looked up, the fires fading. The granddaughter stared, mouth open, the satchel in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” I panted. “The boy is not coming back. He’s dead.”
She dropped the satchel. “Mima,” she cried. A string of Kestenyi words, and then a keening. She drew her mantle over her head.
The old woman did not weep, did not cry out. She lay so still she seemed to be calcifying, turning into stone before my eyes. The light of the low fire sprang back from her cheek, which the terrible hardness descending on her body had turned to mother-of-pearl.
“Grandmother.”
Frightened, I crept to her and took her skinny hand. Her eyes were knots of amber that did not blink. Then, unthinking, I whispered to her in Kideti. “There, daughter. It’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.”
The angel, outside my vision, grew still. The weeping granddaughter too; though she whimpered, there was no harshness in her cries.
The air of the room seemed lighter. I heard the gentle crackling of the fire, and a wind sent ripples along the wall of the tent. Just as my straining muscles relaxed, the old woman squeezed my fingers in a vicious grip and burst into a passion of weeping. The granddaughter, gulping, took my place at her side and dried the old woman’s eyes with her mantle. The two wept quietly for a long time.
At length I rose, trying not to disturb them, and picked up my satchel.
“Wait,” the granddaughter cried, beckoning me back.
The old woman fixed her large light eyes on me. She reached down to the earth and dug a series of careful lines with her fingernail. A wolf took shape, coming into being as I watched, alive in snout and limb,
the hairs on its belly distinct. She nicked its teeth into place with a few deft twists and lay back, closing her eyes.
The granddaughter motioned at the drawing. “Gift,” she said. “For the kalidoh.”
I gave her a snake she could not understand, and she gave me a wolf I could not take away. It’s fair, I thought, shouldering my satchel over the plain. The wind had fallen; the snowy earth was lighter than the sky, holding the murky luminosity of a coin.
“Jissavet,” I said, and she was there, her smile a garland. We walked slowly homeward under the darkening sky.
When I swung the gate open, its creaking seemed to echo.
“What’s that?” Jissavet said, and I looked up, sensing a change in the air.
“Thunder.”
In the desert a rain of five minutes is like a carnival.
The rains fell in short, sharp bursts, and ephemeral meadows sprang up on the plateau; the snow melted, leaving great empty patches of shining earth and tender flowers of concentrated gold that froze and died in the night. The vines of the yom afer turned green and sprouted all over with saffron-colored blooms, giving off an insipid scent, and frayed like pumpkin flowers; the eerie plant called laddisi burst forth with its flowers like pungent white stars and its green, obscenely swollen sacks of formicative blue milk. The rains washed the marble terrace of Sarenha-Haladli; I skated across it barefoot, laughing after the angel, the rose trees snagging my shirt. Water lay in the bowl of the fountain like a forgotten hand mirror, and all the trees were studded with buds like knobs of brass.
In a month or less it would all be blown away, replaced by scorching sand, the thorn trees withering through the sapless days; but for now it was ours and we reveled in it, elated by the sudden perfumes, the transitory carpet of the meadows. And the hills of Tavroun, she wears them like a necklace. “Show yourself,” I said, and she turned for me like a lamp in the ringing fields. The wind blew through her, fresh and startling, spiced with the odor of the plateau, an animating fragrance like crushed pepper. And her laugh went dancing in sparks of light when I told her how I loved her and how silken and volatile she was, and haughty like a black flower. Her arms encircled me, full of the essence of spring. She was so alive, so alive I forgot that the name of the life she lived was death.
“You have to go home,” she said.
“Not now. Not yet.”
“Soon,” she whispered. A chilling sound, a brush against my third vertebra.
Rain pattered on the window, touched with light. I could hear Miros downstairs, singing, hacking up furniture for the fire.
“You have to go home,” she repeated, “and so do I. When the time comes, you will release me. I’ve told my anadnedet. I’m tired of the ghost-land. Old.”
She hovered by the lamp. It was true, she had grown old. A century of living in her eyes.
“Please, Jevick. It is the last thing.”
A movement below in the garden. I froze.
“It’s here, isn’t it,” I whispered, staring. “The body.”
Her tears like springtime over the great plateau.
I leaned to the window. Auram, High Priest of Avalei, was coming up the path.
Book Six
Southward
Chapter Nineteen
Bonfire
But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.
Nothing could have prepared me for the silence that was to follow. Had I been told of it, I would not have believed. Such silences, such griefs, no one can predict them, they come like the first red gleams of kyitna, unimaginable until they are suddenly there.
The morning was bright and still. A few white clouds hung on the edge of the sky, a frail scaffolding of mist above the hills. Snow lay in the cracked bowls of the fountains, but already the trees cast denser shadows, bristling with tentative leaves. I swept a space in the orchard clear of snow, built up a heap of broken chairs, and placed on them the pink box Auram had brought with him: a wooden confection adorned with carved rosettes in which the bones of my love had been folded and put away like a musical instrument. The sound of something shifting inside the box knocked at my heart; my hands were sweating, and when I had positioned the coffin I wiped them on my coat. The house observed me, silent. Miros and Auram were there, but no one looked out; they had left me to complete this ritual alone.
I am the last thing you will see, I said in my heart. I am the last, I have carried you in my arms, I have brought you home.
“This is Jissavet of Kiem,” I said aloud, my voice taut and strange. “And we release her into the Isle of Abundance.”
I crouched beside the pyre and touched it with the flame of an oil lamp, now on the left, now on the right, north and south. At first it would not burn. Black feathers of smoke curled around the delicate pink of the box, and I gritted my teeth, impatient now for a conflagration. An annihilating transcendence like the death that lovers feel. She was waiting for it, glowing with absolute desire, and her desire made a desolation of the garden, turned the sparkling trees to ash, blackened the marble of the fountains. The books that held her anadnedet were stacked nearby on the ground. If the book was her jut, then let it go with her. Let it burn, as we burned janut in the islands. “Burn, burn,” I whispered. “Burn, scorch this garden, flicker in tongues. . . .”
The smoke increased in density: it rolled on the wind, stinging my eyes, smelling of dust, dark libraries, burning cloth. Then a low glimmer, faintly orange in the sun. I tossed my little lamp on the pyre, and the oil hissed up in a ribbon of light.
A startling crack as the wood split. The odor of burning varnish, sparks of livid blue and green along the box. The gilded roses blackening. More loud cracks, making me start. The paint destroyed, flaring up, turning to soot. And then the flames, eager, crackling, devouring. Tears poured down my face. The flames were eating their way to the heart of the box. What was left there, Jissavet, my love. Your broken, delicate bones. Fragile fingers, ankles like cowrie shells. And a ball of hair, perhaps that ball of flame which burst up suddenly like a star, with a coarse, tragic, appalling odor. Other odors were there, despoiling the freshness of the day: something like resin, spices, a tainted revolting sweetness. I covered my eyes with my hands and sobbed, sitting on the ground, one hand pressed on that sad collection of volumes spotted with ink like blood. She’s going, I thought in panic. And she was. She lifted away from my heart, tearing it as she vaulted into the sky. Her foot snagged in my veins, ripping away, floating free. She was climbing that dark and trembling ladder of smoke. “Jissavet!” I cried. I snatched up the books and held them to my chest, unable to burn them now, gazing up at the sky. There, where the smoke was fading. Where the sky was the purest, most tranquil blue. Where she had gone alone, no jut to take her hand. Lighter than snow or ashes. Where she had entered at last the eternal door, leaving me inconsolable in the silence.
The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.
Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It’s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it’s me
rely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.
Chapter Twenty
The Sound of the World
When the pyre was a tent of smoke, I walked away.
I walked through the prince’s gate and far out over the vastness of the plain. There was no angel to keep me from losing my way. But there was a signal behind me, a smudge of darkness rising to the sky. And at dusk, I knew, there would be a glimmer of light. I walked with my hands in my pockets, listening to my footsteps and my breath. This is the sound of the world. When I turned back at last, the prince’s house stood outlined against the bounty of the stars.
Candles burned in the dining room. Great swaths had been cleared in the dust that covered the table. When I entered, Auram rose, throwing back his cape. He bowed, then raised his head again, triumphant and austere. A ghostly bandage glimmered on his wrist.
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