Thirty
Uma walked me to her hut, where she pointed to a cot near the window. I sat as she unpacked the medical supplies I had given her. The hut was spotlessly clean, the thick medicinal odor of disinfectant creating a strange contrast to the rough, moss-covered stone ceiling, plants growing from its jointed slabs of granite. The hut had been equipped with three cots, white cotton blankets, kerosene lanterns—all of which must have come from the castle. A man lay sleeping in the last cot, half his face scraped away, his jaw bone exposed, his cheek swollen, a long suture tracking over his collarbone. This was the man who had been hurt hunting, I realized, the reason Aki had needed extra supplies to begin with.
“Are you in pain?” Uma asked. I nodded, too shaken to speak.
Uma put pills in my hand, gave me a glass of water, and gestured for me to swallow them. I recognized the capsules—they were the same pills Vita had given me after my surgery. I swallowed them and watched as Uma went to a stack of clear plastic storage boxes in a corner of the hut and put the supplies away. Bandages and ointments and pills and gauze—Uma looked at each gift carefully before putting it in the box.
There was a row of old medical texts on a shelf. When Uma saw me looking at them, she said, “From Vita. She gave them to me so I could understand your ways of healing.” She said the word “your” with a particular resistance, and I understood how very foreign she found me and my people. She had learned from us, and she had accepted what Vita had given her, but there was a clear line between our civilizations. “Thank you,” she added, as she closed the lids and stacked the boxes back in the corner. “Thank you for bringing these things to us. I am always afraid we will be without them one day. It would make our survival much more difficult. Your kind has created many things we need. Medicine is one of them.”
She went to a basin of water in the corner, wet a cloth, and gestured for me to lie back on the cot, so she could examine the wound.
The rock had left a gash just below the hairline. A warm ooze of blood soaked my hair and dripped over my cheek. I touched the gash, feeling the sting. It was deep. Blood stained my sweater and my jeans. A headache bloomed through my skull, prickling and painful. If Jabi had been given the chance, he would not have stopped. He would have smashed in my head and broken my bones. He would have killed me without a second thought.
“Some time ago, we lost a child to a very bad sickness,” Uma said, as she cleaned the wound with the wet cloth. “The child was covered in small red sores. They became infected, causing him tremendous pain. His skin was hot. His tongue was dry. I tried everything, read everything in those books, but I could not save him. Do you know what illness he could have had, and do you have a medicine for it?” She looked at me with hope. “You have a medicine for everything.”
I tried to place what the disease could have been—measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, a list of possible diseases came to mind. But I only knew these names from the list of immunizations I had as a child. No one I knew had ever suffered from these diseases. I had no idea what they looked like, what symptoms they produced. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I’ve never seen a disease like that.”
“We have lost three children in the last five years. Two in the first month after birth. And the other to sickness, as I just mentioned. He was five years old. Do you know what it feels like to watch a child suffer? It is terrible. I knew if it was one of yours, living below, you could have saved him. You would have medicine to treat the sores. You will look for this medicine when you go back, and when you return, you will bring it to us.”
“I can try,” I said. “But I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what medicine you want.”
“You will find it,” she said confidently. “Since the first kryschia came to us, we have come to understand that your ways can save us. What you do to survive does not always make sense to us. There have been, over the generations, many among us who reject your ways. But I am convinced your people are wise. I have urged all of our tribe to follow your customs of survival, even when we find them strange.”
Uma threaded a needle and closed the wound, pulling three stitches tight before tying off the knot. Then she took a white cotton tunic from one of the plastic boxes and handed it to me. I slipped out of my stained clothes and put on the tunic.
Uma gave me a small mirror, and I saw the black thread holding my skin together, three tight tracks, a crust of blood at the edges. It had been some time since I had looked at myself, and what I saw startled me. My skin was dry, my expression worn, my hair dirty and matted with blood. I was no longer the naïve woman who had received a mysterious letter inviting her to Italy. I was no longer the person struggling to understand her failing marriage and her inability to have children. Pain had hardened me and made me strong. This battered woman was as powerful as any of the noble men staring down from the portrait gallery. As powerful as Vita.
“I am angry with Jabi for doing this to you,” Uma said. “He does not like your kind, but he must not hurt you.”
“Why did he attack me like that?” I asked.
“In the beginning, Jabi went with us to your home. He studied with us, but he became unhappy and left. He admired your kind, once, and wanted to learn everything you knew. But then he changed. He saw the castle and the way your family lived. He became”—she paused, thinking of the word—“jealous.”
I sat at the edge of the cot, trying to understand. “But Vita was trying to help him.”
“He saw that you live while we die,” she said quietly. “He saw that your kind has created unthinkable abundance, while we struggle. He knows that we suffer more than you suffer. And this made him hate you.”
After the pain medication kicked in, and the throbbing in my head receded, Uma took me behind her hut, where a narrow path angled up the side of the mountain. It was late afternoon by then, the light soft in the sky, but so much had happened since that morning that it seemed a week had passed since I had found Aki on the east lawn. The air was colder up in the mountains, swelling with the sound of birds. The peaks surrounding the village were so high that I felt that they were pressing in on me, squeezing the air from my lungs. Chateaubriand’s words—the words Leopold had written in his field notes—rushed back to me: High mountains suffocate me. The altitude was too high. I could not breathe.
Voices grew from somewhere in the distance. We walked for a few minutes, closing in on the sound, until we emerged onto a plateau of rock overlooking the village. At the center of the plateau, surrounded by rocks, stood a hot spring. Water bubbled up from the core of the mountain and reacted with the cool evening air, sending gossamer sheets of steam across the water’s surface.
“This is where we bathe,” Uma said, as she slipped out of her tunic, threw it on a rock, and waded into the water.
Uma joined a group of women at the center of the pool, and I watched her transform from the woman I had spoken with in her hut to one of them: her gestures became forceful, her voice loud and guttural, even the way she stood seemed altered. It was as though by speaking my language, and understanding my culture, she had put on a mask. With the mask gone, I felt our similarities recede.
I studied Uma, and this group of women, looking for one who might be different from the others, a body giving some clue of an inheritance that diverged from the pure Icemen. I found nothing. They all looked strikingly similar, a homogenous group of women, all the same height and coloring, with the same white hair and the same white skin as the rest.
The women paid no attention to me at all. They talked and washed each other, glancing occasionally at a group of children nearby. There were four, all between the ages of five and ten, old enough to be alone in the water, but still young enough to need oversight. They laughed and splashed, behaving like any group of children in any pool of water. When it began to rain, they caught raindrops in their mouths, a game that reminded me how Luca and I had sat on the top of a slide in the playground of our elementary school and caught snowflakes on our to
ngues.
I squatted at the edge of the pool, cupped my hands, and filled them. The water was bathwater warm, thick with minerals, sulfurous, giving the odor of rotten eggs. I brought the water over my face and washed the blood from my forehead. The wound stung. The water ran pink through my fingers. Through the haze of pain medication, a headache thrummed.
“Come, join us,” Aki said, his voice startling me.
I looked up, finding him naked before me. Night was coming, and his skin took on the gray-blue hue of twilight. He was a wonder of nature—the tapering muscles, the impossible height, the span of his arms and chest, the perfect symmetry of his torso. His feet were wide, shaped like mine, the second toe hooked, proof that we were cut of the same ancestral cloth.
“Come in,” he said, smiling. If he had noticed me staring, he didn’t show it. “It is warm. The water will feel good.”
“Okay,” I said, standing and pulling off a shoe, still a bit shaky from Jabi’s attack.
Just then, from the far edge of the pool, I saw Jabi. His gaze was unrelenting, one part fascination and another part disgust. I slipped off my other shoe, then my socks. I knew he was trying to intimidate me, and while I was afraid of him, I held his gaze without blinking. When at last he turned his eyes away, I felt a rush of triumph.
I pulled the white tunic over my head, feeling the cold mountain air pulse against my skin. I was bruised and covered with goose bumps, my thigh scarred pink from the gunshot wound. I was ugly compared with them. Damaged. Broken. But they didn’t seem to notice. Nudity, I would come to understand, was no different from being clothed for the Icemen. There was no sense of shame or embarrassment. They wore clothes for warmth, but in the summer heat, they were often naked. Not one of them watched me as I stepped into the warm, swirling water of the pool.
I started toward Aki when I saw that a woman had joined him. She was pregnant, her hands resting on her stomach. Aki said something in her ear and she laughed. She was beautiful, even taller and more muscular than Aki, with long white hair falling over her shoulders. When she sunk into the water, her hair spread over the surface like tentacles of an octopus.
As I watched them together, a hard pit formed in my stomach. In the shadow of their love, I felt how terribly I missed Luca. All the moments of tenderness we had shared, the intimacy and understanding between us—I wished with all my heart that I could go back and change things. I regretted so much: asking him to move out, the fight in Turin, but most of all asking him to come to Nevenero. He had sacrificed himself for me and there was no way I could ever repay him. A wave of longing came over me. I wanted Luca back.
When I stood before them, Aki slid his arm around the woman. “This is Ciba,” he said.
Ciba looked up, meeting my eye, and everything around me faded: her eyes were dark brown.
Thirty-One
When the sun had set, the Icemen walked up the mountain to a grotto overlooking the hot spring. It was a natural formation, a deep cave that shielded them from the wind and—even more important—from detection from above. A fire blazed at the center of the cave and, as we walked inside, I saw how its flickering orange light glimmered over the walls, lighting up chunks of rock crystal and amethyst, geodes of pink and purple stone that clung to the walls like luminous arachnids. Animal skins had been spread over the stone floor and, one by one, everyone sat on the skins around the fire. A woman ladled brown liquid from a barrel into wooden cups. She passed a cup to me. I took a drink of bitter wine, feeling it warm in my stomach.
When the fire was going strong, some men pulled a skinned ibex onto a spit. The head and horns were intact, the light of the fire playing over its features in a macabre dance, as though they had caught the Krampus himself and were roasting the devil for our dinner. As the beast turned over the fire, its skin crackling from the heat, serpentine shadows cascaded over the crystals of the grotto. The entrance to the cave cut away to reveal the sky, a clear, moonless sheet of darkness. The Icemen talked and laughed. I watched them, fascinated by all that I didn’t understand.
I had been watching Ciba carefully since the hot spring, trying to see if there were other clues to her heritage. There was no evidence that she was any different from the others. Yet, her brown eyes were the only evidence I needed: Ciba, this young woman carrying Aki’s child, was a Montebianco descendant.
Maybe Ciba had noticed how I stared at her, because she gestured for me to join her by the fire. Her manner was friendly, welcoming. She didn’t seem to have any hesitation about me, no fear or prejudice. She moved over, making room on her deerskin for me. It was such a small gesture, this invitation, but it was one I hadn’t been given in a very long time, and I felt grateful to her, the way I had felt grateful when Luca had sat with me at lunch at school when the others rejected me. Ciba’s gesture opened a possibility to me, something that I had not considered: that I might find genuine friendship among the Icemen. That I might feel the same kind of connection that Leopold had felt with these people. That it was not my duty to be there, but my choice.
The smell of roasting meat filled me with hunger. I moved close to the fire, warming my legs and drying my hair. My feet tingled as the chill of the night melted away. How strange it felt, to sit there so openly, my feet exposed. A lifetime of hiding them had made me self-conscious to the point of neurosis. But there was no reason to hide my feet from these people. They were all like me.
Soon, everyone gathered around the ibex. Its charred head strained into the air, its horns curling, its eyes burned away. There were no plates, no eating utensils, nothing but a communal bowl filled with slices of the roasted ibex. The bowl was passed from person to person. By the time the bowl came to me, there was one piece of meat left, grizzled flesh on a knob of joint. I looked at the fat-marbled flesh, a dull brown bone lurking below sinew, feeling nauseated. I noticed that Aki was watching me, so I took the meat and passed the bowl. I couldn’t imagine eating it with my fingers, but when I looked around, I saw that everyone else was doing just that: biting the meat off the bone and washing it down with wine. I reminded myself that Leopold had participated in their rituals, learned their language, ate with them, slept with them, learned their customs. I picked up the meat and took a bite.
“Are you in pain?” Aki asked, gesturing to my stitches. He sat on the other side of Ciba, putting his hand on her leg possessively.
“No,” I said, sitting up straighter, trying to mask how uncomfortable I felt. Everything was so strange and disorienting. It took all of my strength to remain calm. “It’s just . . .” I waved my hand to the others, to the fire, to all of it. “All of this is so strange for me.”
“When I was below,” Aki said, “I felt that way. I did not understand your ways. I felt afraid.”
“How long were you at the castle?”
He gave me a blank stare, as if he didn’t understand the question, and I remembered what Vita had said: the Icemen did not record time the way we did. Years and months and days, all the ways we tracked our experience of living in the world, meant nothing to him.
“You were a child then?” I asked. “When you lived with Vita?”
“I was a child,” he said. “Kryschia brought me down the mountain, to her home. It was warm and dark, without the sounds we have here. There were so many windows in every room. She taught me to speak your language and to eat your food. It was very different from our life here, but I soon liked it.”
I did a quick calculation. Aki looked to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. Basil had come over twenty years before, and Sal and Greta had not been at the castle until more recently. They hadn’t been there when Aki and Uma were living at the castle, but Dolores had been.
“And Ciba?” I asked, fishing for information. “Has she ever seen the castle? Or met Vita?”
He shook his head. “Ciba was not alive when the kryschia last came.”
I glanced at Ciba. She couldn’t be older than twenty, I realized, which explained why Vita had not discovered h
er brown eyes.
Ciba was watching us, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to understand our foreign words. “Does she understand anything we’re saying?” I asked Aki.
Aki shook his head. “She never learned your language. Very few of us want to learn it. Uma must fight, sometimes, to make the group understand that your ways can help us.”
The bowl returned to me, this time filled with thick cuts of meat. I took a piece and ate. It was good, gamey and rich, and I was hungry. I took another bite and washed it down with sour wine. The meat was warm, tender, the skin crunchy, an aftertaste of salt lingering on my tongue. A rush of chemicals hit my blood as I ate. My strength was beginning to return.
We sat together, me and Aki and Ciba, in the warmth of the fire. It was our first meal together, and while I did not understand it fully then, I felt the significance of our meeting deep in my heart: with the three of us together, a perfect configuration had been put in place, a triangle that would form the foundation of my life thereafter.
Ciba leaned into me, and I could smell her wet hair, feel the heat from her body, see the veins snaking through the transparent skin of her hands. Aki poured me more wine and made sure the bowl of meat came to me again. Their proximity made me feel every inch of myself—my arms, my neck, my heart—everything tingled with the pleasure of discovery. Nothing had prepared me for it, that sense of belonging I felt when I was with them, but I knew that this was what Vita had tried to describe. I felt how rare and precious this sense of belonging was, and how much I needed it. For the first time, I understood what drove Vita to protect the Icemen at all costs.
After a while, Ciba stood and walked from group to group around the fire, her hand resting on her belly, laughing and talking as she swam between pools of firelight and shadow. Everyone loved her, and I understood why: she was warm and friendly and beautiful. Every angle of her pale, alien features was exaggerated in the firelight. Ciba must have thought me equally strange. Every so often I caught her staring at me, as if I were the most exotic thing she had ever encountered. The others’ reactions to me fell somewhere between Jabi’s violent dislike and Ciba’s fascination: I was dangerous and invasive and marvelous, something to be watched with fear or wonder.
The Ancestor Page 26