A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (12 page)

When we were drinking our chocolate, the priestess announced abruptly: “Enough!”—and, still laughing and talking, the guests rose to their feet, carrying their steaming cups, and went out through the forest, the ladies shrieking when their hair caught in the glass buds. The servants followed them. The lute player straightened his supple legs, picked up his cushion, and departed with the confidence of one who makes his living by skill. Soon there were only five of us: the High Priestess, Miros, the courtier in peach-colored silk, the dark stranger with the lace cuffs, and myself.

The priestess arranged her skirts on the couch. An invisible monkey chittered.

“Well,” said the courtier in a peevish, strangely querulous voice: “If we’re going to hold a secret council, must we do it in such glaring light? My head has been throbbing for the past hour.”

At a sign from the priestess, Miros brought out a fantastically ornate lamp, encrusted with claws and tendrils of old brass, and set it on the table. He climbed on a stool to extinguish the ceiling lamps, jumped down, and retired among the jingling leaves. In the newly mysterious room, the company looked theatrical, hollow-eyed. Faint laughter reached us from beyond the trees.

The courtier shook himself; the dimness seemed to restore his energy. He gave me his small pale hand and said: “Auram, High Priest of Avalei.”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

He laughed. His hair was so dry and black it reflected no light at all, his lips stark red in his powdered face. “I know who you are. We all know who you are. We expended some effort to see you in person, however. Delighted to meet you at last.”

“Delighted,” the priestess echoed. I looked at her. In the gloom she had grown, her breasts and throat monumental above her black dress. Her hair was like the ramparts of a city. “I have heard,” she said, “that you have spoken with an angel.”

Her features wavered in the light cast upward from the lamp. I wished fervently that I had not drunk so much. I wanted to ask the name of the strange youth in the dark suit but decided to concentrate on saving myself. “It is true,” I said.

“Tell us,” said the priestess. And I leaned forward and blurted out the tale of my haunting, my captivity, and the ways of the Rotted Dead.

When I had finished, the priest turned to the others and clutched the arms of his chair. “If it is true, we may hold a Night Market again!”

“Yes,” said the priestess. “Still, it is too early to speak of that now. We must examine him thoroughly first. We must be sure.”

“Of course,” said Auram.

“What is a Night Market?” I asked.

The priestess turned to me, fingering the jet beads at her throat. In the sculptured mask of her face only her eyes, long and black, the lids painted with two streaks of apple-green, lived and brooded. “The Night Market, my child, is one of Avalei’s multitude of blessings. It is held in the provinces, in the countryside. People come from far away to buy and sell, to eat and drink, to be merry together if only for a night. And always at the center of it there is the
avneanyi
, to answer their questions and comfort them in their distress.”

Avneanyi
—a mystic, a saint. “One ridden by angels.”

My blood slowed. “What sort of questions do they ask?”

“All sorts of questions, my child. The angels know all.”

“But I can’t speak to her. I don’t want to speak to her. I only want to be rid of her and go.”

“Yes,” she said. “Naturally you would like to return to your homeland. As we say, the fire of home is brighter than any other fire. And we also say, the cold of home is colder than any other. But an angel must be honored before it departs.”

“Yes,” the priest put in, in his soothing, quavering voice. “Like the Snow Child, whom we summon to cure fevers. It never departs without an offering. When the patient is cured we give it basil leaves and grain, and then it melts. . . .”

Sweat gathered on my brow. “I can’t talk to her.”

“Not yet,” said Auram. “That is natural enough. You have not tried. Our lady will aid you in your first attempt. After that, slowly, it will become easier.”

“No,” I said.

The priest and priestess glanced at one another. As for the young man with the glass in his eye, he chuckled, lit another cigarette, and, with an ugly movement of his throat, blew smoke rings toward the glittering trees.

“But I think you will,” the priest said then, smiling, his teeth perfect as a bar of silver. The black thatch of his hair whispered as he turned his head. He gazed at the priestess, repeating: “I think you will. For my lady is powerful. She has the power to do what you wish. Did you not say that your countrywoman died in the mountains? How will you retrieve her body unless we help you? But with our assistance everything becomes simple, as in a play. Our enemies are strong, but our lady is stronger.”

The priestess drew herself up. A gleam passed through the murky depths of her eyes. “It is true,” she said. “I am a woman of no meager power. I have been since childhood a favorite of the goddess. I say this not, as another would, to frighten you, but to persuade you to accept my offer of help. You are far from home, and the attentions of an angel are at first difficult. You require guidance, guidance that Avalei can provide. You are unlikely, in these evil times, to escape the notice of those who shut you up in the Gray Houses, those whose blasphemous cult is becoming—”

I followed her gaze, for she was no longer looking at me, and saw the youth in the skullcap make a slight gesture. It was almost nothing: his hand, which had been relaxed on the arm of his chair, lifted an inch, the fingers spread out in warning. At once the priestess fell silent, and I wondered at the power of this stranger, who was only half her age. “But you know all that,” she said. “You have already met them. It is I who can help you, I who can bring you the body of the angel.”

Expectancy charged the air. They were waiting for me to speak.

“How will you do it?” I asked.

The priestess gave her low, heavy laugh. “If what you say is true, then while you hold the Night Market I will send my servants northward to Aleilin. They will obtain what you seek. They will come down into Kestenya, into the highlands, where it is easy to hide from the soldiers of the king. You will meet them there, in the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Our Prince,” she said with a soft, caressing glance at the silent youth, “has a house nearby.”

The prince. His gaze met mine. One of his beautiful eyes was larger than the other, slightly magnified by the glass. His expression was at once disdainful and sad: yes, filled with regret. Seed pearls nestled in the lace at his throat.

I turned to the priestess. “If I do this for you—if I hold your Night Market—you’ll give me the body.”

“Yes,” she said.

“How can I be sure?”

“You cannot be sure,” she answered. “Nor can you be sure that in the end you will want the body destroyed.”

I laughed. “I will burn it, I promise you.”

“In the
Book of Avalei,
” the priestess said, “it is written: ‘
Like a wind upon the valley, like a dragon, like a sea of ambergris, and like the striking of a hammer: so is every spirit among the dead
.’”

Among the dead.

They took me through the trees, the way the others had gone, and we entered a pillared veranda filled with night. Steps led down to a terrace under the stars, where four lamps burned on brass posts, diffusing a freshening scent of resin. The terrace overlooked a small lake among the towers, a captive pool where lamplight and starlight played. There were other terraces bordering it, and balconies above it, but the others were all deserted, the lamps dark.

There was a shout from the water. I saw pallid bodies swimming there, the hard young bodies of Miros and the other gentlemen. Their clothes were strewn on the terrace along with the gowns of some of the servant girls, who were shrieking and splashing each other in the shallows. There was no furniture on the terrace but a table, and so the company sat above it, on the steps leading from the veranda, but they often rose to go to the table, where there was a bowl of sparkling liquid which they poured into their mouths with a ladle. The notes of the lute quivered. My heart, soaked in
los
, expanded at the sight of the two young ladies dancing on the terrace, their faces flushed in the lamplight, their beautiful gowns awry, their hair disheveled, hanging about their ears. They were singing a popular song of the type called
vanadel
whose refrain was: “
Gallop, my little black mare
.” The white-haired nobleman, luminous in the dark, had stepped into the trees beside the terrace and was gathering berries to pelt them as they whirled. He wore no shirt.

I entered that delirium. Later I would remember images but lose their chronology in the delusional air: someone shouts, another laughs, a wind disorders the quince trees—but I cannot place the events in their proper sequence. I see again the sharp, witty, mocking face of the lady in peacock feathers as she holds me by the collar, forcing my head back to empty the ladle into my mouth, the cold, tingling liquid soaking my clothes. She wears a bracelet of natural pearls which breaks during this struggle, the precious pellets scattering on the tiles. A rose-colored slipper drifts away on the water and slowly sinks. A servant girl is weeping among the pillars.

I see the High Priestess with her extravagant body raising her arms to release her hair, which springs outward in inky tendrils. The mask of her face is lifted. She bares her teeth, shrieks, runs, and plunges herself, still clothed, in the black water. Her arms rise, flinging drops. The company call her by her title, but also by the name Taimorya, which is the Queen of the Witches. The white-haired youth breaks the lake’s surface, his hair a matted gray, and his arms encircle her astral shoulders. A naked servant girl slips in a puddle on the tiles; she falls to her knee with a cry, her dull flesh jiggling. And the prince is holding the Nissian slave by the wrists in the shadow of the veranda. They do not speak.

The last image, and the most powerful, concerns this enigmatic youth. It must be the end of the night, for the air is gray. He announces that he is leaving us. Slowly the revelers gather on the terrace, sopping, staggering, some of them naked. The youth has lost his curious single eyeglass and his skullcap. His face is sad; his hair falls on his shoulders. The assembled guests begin to bow. One by one they approach him, kneel, and touch their foreheads to the tiles. With each prostration the young man’s face twitches, as if he is wincing, and an insufferable pride touches his plummy lips. The High Priestess kneels in a single arc, her wet gown clinging to the vastness of her hips. She cries out: “Father!”

I kneel too, close to his gleaming boots, almost swooning with my brow on the aching coldness of the tiles.

I do not remember returning to the Gray Houses. I woke with bile in my throat and a scrap of paper knotted in my hair.

C
hapter Eleven

The Girdle of Avalei

We return on Tolie before the sun rises. Bury this note in the garden.

The angel did not come to me for two nights. Two whole nights, slow and splendid, undisturbed by the sound of light. The first was painful; on the second hope grew in me like a branch of thorns.
She knows
, I thought. I felt that some of my hope belonged to the ghost, that she was watching, that she knew I had set our destiny in motion, that she understood how I intended to save her. And those two nights, after so much suffering, filled me with a strength that came close to elation. I buried the little note I had pulled from my hair by the garden wall. Afterward I walked, spoke with a patient, tried to learn the words of a
vanadel
. I touched the cracks in the wall. I touched the trees. A crow took flight with the sound of a handkerchief in the wind. I could hear the world.

Three hours before dawn. The glade of the goddess, called the Girdle of Avalei, deep within the hills of the Blessed Isle. In the austerity of the Olondrian night, the olive trees painted black, we descend on thick uneven turf to the entrance of the shrine.

The hill is humped against the stars, covered with grass and small weather-beaten flowers that catch the lantern light. Facing us is the door, a jagged crack in the chalky stone, in that crumbling sand-colored rock with its channels of dust, its piled offerings. Leeks, a bird’s nest, bundles of sweet hay tied up with ribbons. A flask of olive oil, a small white harp. We walk past the seashells of supplication, the mulberries of remorse, and enter the long slit in the wall of the hill.

One must turn sideways to enter. We wear the dust of the hill on our clothes. We: the Priestess of Avalei in her jeweled lionskin cloak, her lissome attendants with dilated eyes, carrying wreaths of bells, the nine silent priests in their masks of shrunken hide, their ivory beaks. And I. Clad in a white silk robe with turmeric on my cheeks, I scrape through the stone and am eaten up by the hillside. At the last I feel a tearing anguish, the agony of departure. Never have I been so far from home.

Darkness. The darkness of the old gods, gods who though foreign are like my own: gods of discord, pathos, and revelation. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness. A blackness where something lives. I breathe in precious, pampered air, antique dust, the starveling ghosts of incense. Motionless, I feel the empty space around me tingle. There is a rustle, the loud rasp of a match. Then the darkness blooms: a dazzling light that makes me cover my eyes, and when I can open them a fire, a garden: a beauty that makes me cry out because it is lavish and unexpected, a bower of midnight roses, a cascade of gems. The cave is small and the walls are rough: its beauty is that of color. One by one the great pine torches are lit. They stand in iron brackets, lighting the orange of poppy fields and the scarlet of festive displays of lights and the gold on the walls. Under this glory the priests and the painted girls sit in a circle on the stone floor, crossing their legs in sublime silence. The high priestess stands before the crude altar hewn out of the wall with its flagrant, red-brown splashes, its smell of hot salt.

Our shadows are huge, unnatural; they seem to move more quickly than we. The priestess bids me kneel in the center of the circle. She takes the stone pitcher from the altar and pours something into a bowl: it is oily and oyster-colored, and tastes very sweet. After two swallows I gag. They wait in silence for me to finish. I hand the rough stone bowl back to the priestess. She dips her hands in another bowl on the altar and smears something rancid-smelling over my face and neck: clarified butter.

“
Anavyalhi
,” she says. “
I waited for thee in the snows of the mountain and thou didst not come, O dove with the crimson feet
.” Her voice is low, caressing and sad, as if she means the words, though she is only reciting from the book of her mind.

“
Anavyalhi, my love with red feet, aloe tree, cloud of saffron. Lost voice over the water, oh lost voice of my love! Will I never again hear the strings of thy throat, O moon-guitar? Nay, say the waters; for she has departed forever into the dark country. . . .
”

The priestess steps back from me, her palms gleaming thickly with butter. Chrysolites wink among the coarse hairs of her robe. Above it her face is blank, heavy, watchful, the eyes like soot. Her gaze never wavers from me as she reaches a hand toward one of the girls.

A bird, a large dove violently beating its wings, is suddenly with us, drawn from the velvet bag in the girl’s lap. It is a white fire in the hands of the priestess as she holds it toward the roof of the cave and thunders something in an unknown, dreadful language. Then she holds it over the shallow depression in the altar and removes a small stone knife from her plaited hair. The bird struggles; some of its feathers are stuck together with butter. She slits its throat with a smooth, voluptuous movement.

At that instant the cave is filled with sound: the girls are singing, chanting, beating their wreaths of bells on their bent knees, and the priests, their voices muffled by the stiff hide of their masks, are droning too and shaking beaded rattles. Some of them have small ceremonial mortars and pestles of stone, which they wear at their belts, and now beat rhythmically. I am too fascinated to understand what they are singing. The sound is that of furious bees, cicadas, rattling chains. The priests inspire horror in me with their yellowed beaks, their invisible eyes, the brittle antlers or ragged hares’ ears sewn to the sides of their masks. They are like our doctors; they mean me ill. I look back toward the priestess and see blood running down a channel into a trench around the altar.

“
And wilt thou never return?
” she says, entreating me with her eyes, stretching out her hands, which shine darkly in the torchlight. “
Nay, say the snows; for the earth which spills the delights of her lap for thee is but a shade unto thy love, and the shadow of a closed door. Could my love not keep thee, Anavyalhi, body of water . . . the way of the sword, or the path of the deadly unguents.
. . .”

In a moment of pure lucidity I know that the liquid I have drunk is affecting my mind. Everything is clear in that moment. My vision is sharpened: I see the small hairs in the rigid mask of a priest, imagine how the hide would feel, hard and buckled, dried fruit. I see the bodies under the dark red dresses of the girls, secretive bodies, the ribs shuddering as they jangle their bells. I see more than it is given to the human eye to see, the sweat on their stomachs, their fear of the dark cistern, their fear of the dark. I see them washing their faces, becoming childish, pink, defenseless, crawling into their beds and speaking in code by touching fingers, passing gossip down the long row of beds, these girls called Feilar, Kialin, Kerelis, these young girls far from home. I can count the glimmering beryls scattered across the robe of the priestess, like copses in a field of tawny wheat. I think I can even catch the scent of them: they smell of mint. But the chalcedony smells like the bark of trees. I see her, Taimorya, the Queen of the Witches. I know that every night she eats a plate of snails, for eloquence. I see her sitting up by the lamp, painting a china apple. The prince is asleep in the shadow of her bed.

Then, as suddenly as it arrived, this clarity vanishes. My mouth goes slack; it is hard to keep my eyes from fluttering closed. The monotonous music, which never flags, which is now like a great company on horseback jingling and pounding through a gap between mountains, confuses me like a mist. It is the dust raised by the hooves. And far away, the echo of falling stones. I see the high priestess: only her face, beautiful, heartless, exalted. Her long black eyes reflecting the sparks of the torches. “My love,” she says. Her voice is deep inside my ear, so deep that I do not know if it is she who has spoken or I.

“Where are you?”

Now I am sure that I am the one who has spoken. But it is also she; I feel her speaking through me. I struggle weakly against her, suddenly terrified, trying to rise, lifting my heavy eyelids to see the dove’s body on the altar. I fight against the darkness but only think to myself, stupidly: They have put something on the torches. The smoke is strange. . . . Then it becomes too easy to sink, to abandon myself to oblivion. The slide to the bottom is effortless, enchanting. There, at the bottom, I see unimagined valleys of white fish. There are deserts too, dotted with blackened rose trees.

“Where are you?” I ask, or the priestess asks with my voice. “Why don’t you come to me? Can’t you hear me? I’ve been looking for you for so long. I’m lost. . . .”

Silence. A ripple of water which might be, far away, the bells of the girls in the cave.

Then I see her. And for the first time and the last, I know that I am seeing her when she is alone, before she knows I am there. She walks uncertainly, sometimes pausing as though she has dropped something. She is far away, and her progress is very slow. She wears the same short, colorless shift, and her hair lies on her thin shoulders. She turns her head, bewildered, filling me with the desire to weep.

“I’m here,” I say.

She looks up sharply and sees me. Her gaze burns. In the air, the insistent ringing, like flashes of light. “Jevick,” she says.

“Yes.”

She comes close to me, almost blinding me with her ocean of light, making me cry out, my eyes on fire; then she grows dim and looks at me anxiously and hungrily through the whirling cloud. “Jevick, you’re here. You’ve come to find me. . . .”

“Yes,” I whisper.

She frowns. “But you’re strange. There are two of you.”

“Yes. I have asked the aid of a northern priestess. Together we have come to find what it is that you desire. We have—I have done this for love of you—”

A blaze of scorn makes me scream again. My eyes are bleeding. “You do not love me,” the angel says.

“Forgive me. It was the love which all of the living must have, for those who come from beyond the narrow grave, of which I spoke.”

“Beyond the grave,” the angel says. “That is northern talk.”

“Yes,” I whisper. I feel the words echo inside me. I am listening, and speaking, in two languages at once, translating. The mouth and ears of the Priestess of Avalei.

“Very well,” says the angel. She looks at me in bitter disdain, and I grovel, writhing before the flame of her face. “This boy is weak,” she says contemptuously. “He will not last long. You have asked what I desire, and I will tell you.” She pauses, her indrawn breath a conflagration. Then she says: “Write me a
vallon
. Put my voice inside it. Let me live.”

She draws close to me. “Write me a
vallon
, Jevick. Like what you read to me on the ship that day. You said they last forever.”

Her voice is suddenly fragmented, broken with tears. She weeps like one who is dying of grief, and yet she cannot die; she weeps like one who has lost her dearest possession, her only love. “Jevick, my mother left me alone. Do you hear me? They buried me there, in the north. She was weak. She let them put me into the earth. In the graveyard—faugh!—in the huge graveyard on the hill. She let them put me there, to have my bones sink into the earth, and—oh, Jevick! I am one of the Rotted Dead.”

Her face is transformed by the horror she feels—the horror that grips us both. In its clutches and for one moment she looks devastatingly human. Her face is close to mine, the eyes wide, the mouth aghast. I think I can see the pores in her skin, the beads of sweat, the terror . . . But of course it is an illusion, a wraith: her body is underground, sinking and putrefying, her youth and beauty mere bubbles of gas. As if she has read my thought, she shrieks, begins to wail, whipping her red hair to and fro, in mourning for herself.

“Jissavet,” she cries. “Jissavet.”

The priestess plucks the translation from my mind. Island of the White Flowers.

But I am falling now. I cannot speak for her, to answer the foolish question: “Yes, angel? What do you mean?” I know what she means, I think to myself, and the priestess does not hear me because I am already too far away, my body shivering, slick with sweat, riding the river of pain which bears me away to a new depth where I will not hear the grief-maddened shrieking of the angel. It is as if she moves away from me, weeping over the valleys. “Jissavet, Jissavet.” Then silence. Then I know nothing, until I wake again in the holy cave and see the face of Auram bending over me.

“Don’t sit up,” he said. I looked up at him, at the thick locks of his hair in disarray against the craggy ceiling. His face was shadowed, but I could see that it did not have its usual chalky pallor: the skin was mottled, tense, excited. There was a sour odor: I guessed it came from his short leather skirt. An odor of ancient cabinets, ancient sweat. His mask was slung around his neck, and it looked at me too, leering downward, its hide in the torchlight criss-crossed with fine wrinkles.

“Brave one!” he said ecstatically. He caressed my hair; his palm was damp and heavily scented with musk. I lay motionless on the bare floor of the cave, close to his crossed legs, his plucked-looking, almost hairless shins, the brief flap of his skirt. Voices resounded in the air, the murmuring of the girls, and huge shadows moved to and fro on the walls. “
Avneanyi
,
” Auram whispered. His fingernail snagged my skin as he traced a circle on my brow with his index finger.

The shadows leapt and shrank to nothing, staggering drunkenly over the walls, those visions of glorious color. I lay still, my throat aching. The cavern throbbed, a forest fire, the lanterns of a carnival, a blossoming sky emblazoned with rare tulips.

At last Auram and another priest helped me sit up. My face felt stiff; the clarified butter had hardened. I looked about me dully. The girls, their beaded anklets rattling, were clustered around the high priestess, who lolled unconscious before the stone altar.

“Don’t worry,” Auram said. “With her it is always like this. You have had a splendid success, splendid! Ready! Up we go!” He chuckled, overflowing with high spirits. The girls were rubbing scented oil into the white temples of the priestess. One of them chafed her feet, her slender hands dwarfed by those great slabs of flesh. Another sponged the blood from her hands.

The priests wheeled me around and dragged me through the crack in the hillside, and we stumbled out into the cold, fragrant night. The moon was full and the shadows of trees lay black on the ghostly sward. Beyond them, a meadow furrowed like a pale sea. Auram crowed. He and the other priest told jokes, supporting me as they strode through the long grass toward the lights of the palace. The other priest was called Ildo; he told me about his niece who was a baker in the kitchens of the Telkan. Her brown-flour breasts. The two priests roared over their bawdy stories, like men returning from a hunting party. The masks bounced on the ropes around their necks. In the palace gardens among the yew trees we saw deer feeding on the grass.