A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (13 page)

Inside again, in the parlor, Auram served me a cup of chocolate without sugar. He wore a robe now, a lustrous garment of orange silk. “
Avneanyi
,” he whispered.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Drink,” he soothed me. “All will be well.”

He watched me drink, perched on the corner of his chair.

Write me a
vallon, I thought. And I laughed, my muscles slow and sore. The priest had washed the clarified butter from my face with a rag, but I still felt as if I wore a mask. I laughed with stiff, uncooperative lips, with a raw ache in my throat, at the monstrousness of it, the sublime absurdity. Write
her
a book, set
her
words down in Olondrian characters! This ghost, this interloper, speaking only Kideti!

“No,” I said aloud, gritting my teeth. I would not do it. I would not mingle the horror of death with what I most loved.

The chocolate was bitter as iron, the parlor gray in the dawn, the beaded lamps burnt out. “Drink,” said the priest. “You need it after your supplication. But how brave you were! How fine! You have the makings of a priest of Avalei!”

“You will forgive me if I am not comforted.”

He smiled. His flat, peculiar, blurred-looking features were lanced by the glittering points of his eyes. “I will tell you a story,” he said. “Yes, before we return you to the Houses. Just a homely little story. Something to help you sleep.

“I was in Asarma at the time of the cholera. Not many years ago—a few years—a terrible time for us. I was only a child then. I was studying astronomy, and while I was at school they were throwing the bodies into the sea. . . . And the carts, the dead-carts were everywhere. You could see them from the windows. There was no place that did not have the smell of death. When we went out at night to read the stars, we choked on the smell of the city, and behind the sea wall the corpses floated and gave off their phosphorescence. . . . Well. There was a colleague of mine, a boy from the Fanlevain, a clockmaker’s son, very clever and somewhat—lonely. That is, he kept to himself. We shared a room in the dormitory, and I used to hear him talking in his sleep. . . . Ah! Later I cursed myself for not having listened to him, for burying my head under the pillow! For you see, this boy—this boy was a saint. But it was not known until later. Who knows what we might have learned from him, had his power been known?”

The priest paused and turned up the palm of one hand despairingly. “Who knows? You see,
telmaro
, I was too slow. Only after strange things had happened—after he fell into trances at school, after I found a sheaf of poems he had written—only then did I mention what I had seen to one of our masters, and only then was the youth taken into the temple. But by that time the sign of the plague was on him. When he said good-bye to us he was already weak; as he went down the stairs he was clutching his stomach. And within the week he was dead. He had taken his wisdom into the grave. He had taken the angel’s blessing away with him.”

Auram leaned forward. The dawn in the window glowed on his shaven cheek. He gave me a long, deep glance, as of recognition. “I remember one night,” he whispered, holding my gaze. “This young boy,
telmaro
, this boy conversed with a statue, alone in the dark.”

My cup was empty; I passed it to him in silence. Then I said slowly: “Your story means nothing to me. Nothing. Do you hear?”

My voice gathered strength as he dropped his eyes and toyed with the enameled clasps on his robe. “
Nothing
. Your angels, your drugs, your filth, your Avalei! I want only to be rid of the spirit and go.”

“But we can help,” he said, raising his eyes. “We can give you the angel’s body.”

“In exchange for your Night Market. Where I’ll be arrested again, no doubt, and dragged back to the Houses for impersonating a saint.”

He laughed merrily. “Do you think my lady powerless? Oh, no. She has many friends still. Many friends. Day is breaking, and no one has reported your disappearance from the Gray Houses. And when you go back, it will be as if you had never left.”

He slid forward, his eyes still bright with mirth, held my shoulder and rasped into my ear. “You will leave the Isle in a week or less.” His smile had a childlike sweetness, and it struck me that he was, to some degree, mad—as our island doctors are mad, with the potency of transcendence. As the Priest of the Stone was mad: as I was mad. Such spiritual power was always capricious, not to be trusted, likely to scar. But latched to the power of this priest, clinging to Avalei’s mantle, I might claw my way out of the Houses and to freedom.

I was grateful that he said nothing of the angel’s ringing words:
Write me a
vallon. Perhaps he had not heard. Or perhaps what mattered to him was not what she said, but that I could communicate with her, that I was a true
avneanyi
. He took my arm and led me to the door, a dim heat in his fingers, a dark note in his breathing like a hidden sob. Long after I had returned to the Gray Houses, his stinging odor clung about me like the ghost of a struck match.

C
hapter Twelve

Tialon’s Story

I was cold the next day—so cold my teeth knocked together. Ordu touched my brow and removed the iron chamberpot after I vomited thin gray liquid. I did not join the others for the daily walk in the garden, but curled up and hid my face, wrapped tight in the sheets. When I slept I dreamt of the islands, my brother whistling, the shadows of birds, and when I woke I counted the minutes as if it could make my chills subside. Cries came from behind the wall: the groans of the mad, inarticulate and frayed at the edges, like prayers.

There Tialon came to see me. It was her first visit in several weeks. She carried her writing box and an umbrella beaded with moisture, for it was raining over Velvalinhu. Her hair was tightly curled and powdered with drops where the wind had blown rain under her umbrella. She placed her things against the wall and came unasked to sit on the edge of my mattress, bringing cold air that had gotten caught in the folds of her clothes, and smiled at me—a fragile smile, for her face was drawn and sickly and great shadows marred the skin under her eyes.

“Jevick,” she said.

“Tialon.”

“Are you unwell?” she asked softly.

“Are you?” I returned.

At that her smile grew warmer and tears came into her eyes. She patted my wrist with a freezing hand. “No. I am very well. Are you still reading
Olondrian Lyrics
?”

“Yes. And the
Romance of the Valley
.”

She nodded. Her eyes shone with the transparent light of the sky, as if the rain had washed them. “I’m reading, too. I’ve read your letters. I’m sorry I didn’t answer. I’ve come to you instead. I won’t stay long. I’ll go back to my real life. You remember I told you I’d built something. . . . This is what I have built. This life.”

In the fractured light of the lamp her face looked young, determined, unhappy. There was a recklessness in the way she lifted her chin. “I read. I take notes for my father. I sit in the shrine of the Stone, always reading, watching, gazing into the depths of mystery. The Stone . . . I wish I could show it to you. Perhaps then you would understand. It is black, heavy, miraculous, covered with writing. . . .” She raised her hands, arms wide, delineating a vague shape in the air, then shrugged her shoulders and let them fall.

“I can’t describe it. But Jevick—it is a very great thing. Our hope. My father is only the second to attempt to interpret its message. For this reason . . .” She paused and bit her lip, then looked at me and went on quietly: “For this reason it is easy for us to make mistakes. Do you understand? For us, for our cult, it is the beginning. We are still vulnerable—still laughed at, and still hated. . . . We have the support of the king, but of no one close to him. Indeed, his son is one of those who seek most persistently to discredit us. And there is also Avalei’s cult. They hate us because we reject what they love: luxury, harlotry, the pursuit of angels.”

She smiled at my flushed face. “I know you’ve met the High Priestess of Avalei. I know everything. We have spies.” A tear dropped down her cheek to her lap. “Yes. Spies. We listen at doors, we follow people. My father receives reports every morning at dawn. It’s disgusting. . . .”

Reading alarm in my face, she laughed, brushing back tears with the heel of her palm. “Don’t worry. You’re safe. You believe that, don’t you? You know I am your friend.”

I looked up into her wistful eyes, her eyes of immense candor. “Yes,” I said. “I know it. But I don’t know why.”

“That’s what I’ve come to tell you,” she said. “The reason I am your friend. The reason I won’t betray you, even though I know you’re running away. The reason for everything.” She gazed at me with a frightened smile, and swallowed. “It’s strange—now I’m here, I don’t know how to begin.”

But she did. She did know how to begin. She took a deep breath and looked down at her fingers clenched together on her dark wool dress. Then she raised her head and met my eyes. She leaned toward me like a sister, while the rain closed the Isle behind its resonant palisades.

She told me of the village of Kebreis, the village of Flint, with its roofs of broken slate and latticed windows. A village of cold water and hard rock wedged among the hills of the west, the Fiaduoron, the Dark Mountains. Kebreis: hunched in a fiercely beautiful landscape of clear streams and brilliant skies and the snow-bright pinnacles of the mountains, a landscape whose glitter hurts the eye, whose cold air stings the lungs, its people withdrawn and silent, craving isolation. Many of the men had once worked in the mines. These had tattoos under their eyes where, as they lounged in the café, one might read “Thief” or “Pirate.” Among them there was one man who was marked with the blue word “Poacher”—for he had been caught hunting boar in the Kelevain, the Telkan’s wood.

He spent six years in the mines, and when his sentence was over he came down from the mountains into the solitude of Kebreis. Like many of the men there he discovered he could live most peacefully in the hills, where his tattoo brought him not calumny but respect. So he settled there and smoked with the others in the little café, drinking sour red wine in the patch of dust under the awning, and he married the schoolteacher’s only daughter against her father’s will and took her to live in his one-roomed house among the peaks.

The schoolteacher’s daughter wore tough cotton clothes like the other women of Kebreis, and in winter a pair of boots trimmed with otter skin. And despite her father’s predictions of disaster she never longed for fine linen or servants, never complained when she had to break the ice in the buckets. She kept goats and was sunburned and caught trout and ate potatoes and refused to take even a radish from her father, and the children came one after the other, all of them wild, lanky, singing, adventurous, and strong-hearted like their parents. They were all well-suited to life in Kebreis and free from unhappy dreams. And then there were two girls who died in infancy; and then the last, a boy, whom his mother called Lunre, because he was born in the month of the purest light.

Tialon told me this. She spoke with a trembling eagerness, sometimes pulling at the collar of her dress. She held up her hand when I opened my mouth and went on telling me, hurriedly, as if rushing to catch the story before it escaped. She told me of the thin and lonely boy with the red knees who was plagued by coughs, who cried when he was ill, who lay against the wall under wool blankets with his brothers in the single room divided by a frayed curtain, who suffered in that smoky room and suffered as well outdoors, where he was pelted with snow and unable to run quickly, where his father took him on long walks to improve his constitution and forced him to wade in the furious, icy trout streams. She told me of how he suffered everywhere except in the school where his grandfather, that severe and well-dressed gentleman, who had despaired of all the boy’s brothers and sisters, was interested, hardly daring to hope, in this last one, the one with the chronic cough. Lunre. Dressed in the patched clothes of his brothers, and a wool scarf. Lunre who sometimes could not go to school but lay in the corner, pale and languid, watching the frost that formed along the edge of the door when the fire had gone out. It was his grandfather who came to him, leaning on his cane, still muffled in a fur cloak although it was spring, and the streams were rushing bright and cold, and here and there the first of the crocuses peeped through the muddy traces of melting snow. It was his grandfather who came and sat on a stool by the hearth, looking too large and princely for the small room, and offered to pay for the boy to go to school in the capital where the milder climate would give him a chance at survival. Yes, he would go to stay there with a merchant, his grandfather’s brother, in the house where his mother had lived for two years long ago, where she had learned to paint and sew but never to speak Olondrian without peppering it with phrases of mountain slang. Lunre’s parents agreed, not for the gain, the future prestige, but because Kebreis was killing their last child. And his mother wept over him as though he, the difficult one, the one who was the least like her, was the dearest of them all.

“So Lunre went to Bain,” Tialon said. “He was ten years old. Do I need to tell you what happened to him after that? Do I need to tell you of the house of his great-uncle the glass merchant, where they slept outside on the balcony in summer? And his schools—the private boys’ school, the University of Bain—do you need to hear of them, of his passion for reading? You have read Firdred of Bain,
On the Nine Textures of Light
, the
Lyrics
of Karanis—and so you know. Is it not enough for you to know that at the age of twenty-one he went to a poorly attended evening lecture and saw my father’s elderly predecessor, emaciated and fierce, exhorting young students to join the work of the Stone? And to know, also, that he felt distaste at the sight of that gaunt figure and joined him not because he believed in the dream, but because he could not resist the temptation to go to the Blessed Isle and to walk the halls of the library drenched in myth. . . . It was only later that he became intrigued by the work of the Stone, through the debates held by the scholars who had gathered to serve the old priest. They used to meet in a roof garden full of lavender, at dusk. It was their passion that drew him. And later it was his friendship with my father.

“He was our only friend,” she said, touching her hand to her throat. “He was our friend, my father’s only friend. Do you understand what that means? He could make my father laugh. He could even make him play the violin. He was the only one who could ever persuade my father to sing—even I couldn’t do that, although I loved it. He used to come to our rooms when I was small. He had a special knock, so that we would recognize him and let him in. He would bring a fish or beef heart and cook it over the coals on the balcony. He could make my father eat anything, even drink wine. . . . When he—when Lunre was there my father would sigh and say, ‘Why not?’—you see, he would lose his stiffness and become generous. He pretended that it annoyed him, but I could see how happy he was, that it was happiness that made him give in to pleasure. . . . Sometimes when Lunre was there, when I was too little to understand, I would grow so filled with joy I had to scream; I would leap around the house, too drunk with relief to contain myself, and have to be sent to bed early or even punished. You see, our house was so solemn. There was so little room for play. And so during Lunre’s visits I would grow wild: I pushed everything too far, I laughed too loudly, I wanted each joke to continue forever. Later I always felt so ashamed. . . .”

She smiled, glancing down at her hands, tracing the lines in her palm, the smudges of old ink. Then she looked up and said: “That friendship was inexplicable. Here was this man, my father—so dour, so shy, so easily insulted—who had recently lost his wife, who had only me. He was in his own type of mourning, which involved a strained sensitivity, an anger which erupted on any pretext, yet somehow he invited this young man to visit him, this student sixteen years younger than himself. How did it happen? I imagine it began in the garden outside the shrine, that high garden with its statues, its narrow parapet, where the followers of the Priest of the Stone used to meet and look down on the battlements of this city in the hour after sunset. . . . The student must have said something, or followed some line of reasoning, which hinted at his solitary nature, his love of classical poetry or his ability to suffer silently, all traits my father admired in him. In him: this youth of twenty-one with the thin veneer of city cultivation over the sadness of Kebreis, with the anxious, slightly affected way of carrying himself which he used to cover his villager’s awkwardness. Perhaps that was part of it: they were both awkward, although in Lunre, who was good-natured, this quality was endearing. In my father the awkwardness was cruel. But when they were together it disappeared: they were both completely at ease. . . .

“In those days, Jevick, I truly believe there were more stars in the sky. They used to come out all at once, like a field of snow. And we would sit on the balcony, the three of us, looking at them, and I would listen to my father and Lunre talking. Sometimes they told old stories or Lunre recited part of the
Vanathul,
which he had learned from his father in Kebreis, or my father brought out the
limike
and sang in his clear voice one of the sacred songs, or old lullabies from the country.

Long is the journey homeward,

Weary and worn are we.

Oh, if I fall behind, my love,

Will you look back for me?

That was the saddest song he sang, the one with the simplest words. It was composed long ago on the road called the Trail of Wolves. I remember hearing that song, lying half-asleep on the balcony with my cheek on the tiles in the warmth of the summer night. . . . I could smell so many flowers and also the coals, still red from our supper. We stacked the plates in a corner of the balcony. And later, when I sat there alone, when I was nineteen years old, I could see that there were fewer stars in the sky.

“I have heard that there are people who live happily alone. But I myself have not found it to be possible. I told you that I have built something, and since you came I have realized that what I have built is the shadow of happiness. But true happiness: that is what we had when we were together, my father and Lunre and I, sometimes with my nurse, when I was old enough not to scream with the wild sensation of joy but to sit, ecstatic, to let it wash over me. . . . We cooked, sometimes we went for a drive in one of the palace carriages and picnicked in the woods or walked in the hills, we went to plays organized for the king, and sometimes we wrote plays ourselves and performed them for my nurse on the balcony. By this time Lunre had come to believe in the message of the Stone, and he too had woven and sewn his own robe, although he did not change his name as my father had, which was good, his name suited him: he was with light, and I hope that he has always remained with light. But he had changed in himself. He had developed an intense gaze and the melancholy of hours immured in mystery. Once, from the balcony, I saw him far below in the rain, and I think that he had not realized it was raining.”

Tialon paused. She looked wan and remote, as if carved on a fountain. Her eyes were lowered; the lashes cast a shadow. She said: “I used to lie awake at night out of pure happiness, because of an apple, because we had seen butterflies, because he had laughed at my jokes and for a thousand other foolish reasons, while slowly, inexorably, our lives were breaking. They had begun to quarrel, you see—Lunre and my father. They had disagreed on certain interpretations, and my father, who could not bear contradiction even then, had forced Lunre to burn some of his notes. Yes—you do well to look shocked. But worse things happened afterward. One of my father’s enemies perished in the Telkan’s dungeons—not murdered outright, but imprisoned until his death. And there was—”