A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (19 page)

Afterward she led me to a dank, smoke-blackened room. “Thank you,” I said. The girl turned, careless, bearing away her little lamp. Through an aperture high in the wall the stars showed white. There was a battered screen, a straw pallet on the floor, a cracked washbowl. Such poverty, such unrelenting hardship. I touched the screen, which perhaps contained, as many old Valley furnishings did, scenes from the
Romance
. The forest of Beal, its trees a network of spikes. Or the tale of a saint, Breim the Enchanter or poor Leiya Tevorova, haunted by an angel.

I closed my eyes and touched my brow to the screen. Fire behind my eyelids. Suddenly a storm of trembling swept over me. My mind was still numb, detached, but my body could not bear what had happened. I sank down and curled up on the moldy pallet.

There I thought of the
huvyalhi
of the Market, and of our hosts in this desolate place. I thought of the woman who had wept over me in the tent. I wanted to do something for them, for these abandoned girls, to give them a word or a sign, to carry something other than horror. But I possessed nothing else. And when the angel appeared, shrugging her way through the elements, born in a shower of sparks, I thought that perhaps this horror itself could become something else, could be used, as Auram had said. That I could be haunted to some purpose.

Her light was dim; she looked like a living girl but for her slight radiance, a crimson aura coloring the air. Beneath the jagged hole in the wall she clasped her hands and gazed at me with a seeking look, an expression of abject longing. There was a stealthy force behind that gaze, a ruthless intelligence that sent terror to the marrow of my bones. A will that would not flag though eternity passed; a strength that would not tire. Yet her eyes were like those of a lover or a child.

She loosened her fingers. “Write,” she whispered. A faint smile on her lips. She mimed the clapping of hands with another child, singing an island song.

My father is a palm

and my mother is a jacaranda tree.

I go sailing from Ilavet to Prav

in my boat, in my little skin boat.

I knew the song. The familiar tongue. It occurred to me that only with her could I hear my own language spoken in this country of books and angels. She laughed when she came to the second verse: “
a bowl of green mango soup
.” And I remembered trying to make Jom sing, in the courtyard under the orange trees.

“Jissavet. Stop.”

She paused, her mouth open. A frown: cities on fire.

“Jissavet. I need your help. For these people. I’m in a house in the Valley.”

The air bent, warped about her.

“Stop. Listen. Such cruel things have happened to them. If you could tell them something. Something to give them hope.”

She looked at me with inconsolable eyes. “I can’t. I told you. There’s a void between—it’s horrible. And they are not people like me.”

“They are.”

She shook her head. “No. You are people like me. You are my people.” And again her voice, light and eerie, rose in song. This time she sang of the valleys and plains of Tinimavet, the estuaries where the great rivers rolled in mud to the sea. She sang of the fishermen whose bodies grew accustomed to the air, who could not, like other men, be driven mad by the constant wind. And she sang the long story of Itiknapet the Voyager, who first led the people to the islands.

And when they came upon the risen lands

they found them beautiful,

newly sprung from the sea

with rivers of oil.

She sang of those lands. The Risen Lands, fragrant with calamus.
Kideti-palet
: the Islands of the People.

“
And this shall be the place where the people live
,” the angel sang. “
This shall be the home of the human beings
.”

I remembered it, I felt it—home, with all its distant sweetness—I remembered it through the high voice of the dead girl. One memory in particular came back to me when she sang: that early memory of how I had tried to teach a song to my brother. “My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!” He said: “My father.” “Is a palm,” I insisted. But he would not answer. He gazed into the trees, rubbing the edge of his sandal in the chalky groove between the flagstones. As always when he was pressed, he seemed to recede behind a protective wall of incomprehension and maddening nonchalance.

I saw him clearly. How old was he? Six, perhaps seven years old. He was already unable to learn, but my father had not yet noticed. He wore a short blue vest with fiery red-orange embroidery, just like mine. His trouser leg was torn. If I asked him how he had torn it he would not know, or he would not tell me, though the edges of the tear were stained with blood. He would not even complain he was hurt, though he must have cut his knee, somewhere, in a place that would never be named.

“My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!”

I had seen other children play the game. I had learned it from them, copied the intricate clapping—this was what I had brought for my brother. When I shouted at him a wariness went flitting across his gaze like the wing of a bird.

“You say it,” I snarled through clenched teeth, glaring, trying to frighten him—to break through his simplicity and reach him.

He looked away, his eyes uncertain. Did he know what was coming?

My two fists rammed straight into his chest, and he sprawled on his back, howling.

And now, years later, in a strange land, to the sound of an angel’s singing, I relived that moment of despair, that attempt to bridge the divide, that terrible reaching, desperate and cruel, when love swerved into violence, when I would have torn the skin from his face to discover what lay beneath.

“Jevick,” the angel whispered.

Her eyes met mine, black, secretive, moonless. Her luminous gaze. “Why don’t you answer me? Why don’t you write?”

Grief and rage, a gathering ocean.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”

“Listen to me!” she screamed.

And the waves fell in a rush.

The silence struck me like a blow. I sat up, sweating and panting, and looked into the lighted face of a demon.

It hovered above me, a deformed face with elements of the human and of the iguana. Its fleshless lips were parted, showing tiny teeth. I shrank toward the wall, cold with terror, and babbled a snatch of Kideti prayer: “From what is unseen . . . from what is afoot before dawn . . .”

“You had a bad dream,” the demon said in the language of the north. Its voice was husky and childish, with a slight lisp.

“God of my father,” I whispered, trembling. I wiped my face on the sheet. The shapes in the room began to resolve themselves: I recognized the window and marked the position of the screen, and knew that the figure before me was no monster, but the scarred child. She was dressed in a tattered blue shift, made no doubt from a worn-out robe, and her soft hair, unplaited, stood up around her head. She was holding a saucer of oil in which a twist of cotton was burning with a light that fluttered like a dying insect.

“You shouted,” she said.

“No doubt I did,” I muttered.

“What did you dream about?”

“An angel,” I said. I looked up into her face, trying to focus on her beautiful eyes with their vibrancy, their sweet directness. She looked back at me curiously.

“If you have a bad dream, you should never stay in bed. You should get up. Look.” She set the saucer of oil on the floor, took my wrist, and pulled until I got up from the pallet. Then she stretched her arms above her head. “You do this. Yes. Now you turn around.” Slowly we rotated, our hands in the air, our shadows huge on the walls, while the child recited solemnly:

I greet thee, I greet thee:

Send me a little white rose,

And I will give thee a deer’s heart.

“There,” she said, letting her arms fall. She smiled at me, brightness brimming in her eyes. “You ought to say it around a garlic plant, but we’re not allowed out at night. The others are on the roof. Do you want to go up?”

I nodded and put on my shirt, and the child picked up her meager light and glided soundlessly into the hall. The rooms were black and vacant; we surprised rats in the corners. The air was chill, with the odor of moldy straw. I saw that a
radhu
—often so bright, so cheerfully domestic—could also be a place of stark desolation. The bare feet of the child were silent on the cold stone floors, and the light she held up trembled under the arches.

At last we came to a narrow stairway where the air was fresh and the stars looked down through a triangular hole in the roof. The stairs were so steep that the girl crawled up and I followed the soles of her feet, already hearing soft voices outside. We emerged onto the roof, into the immeasurable night. The sky was littered with sharp, crystal stars. A sliver of moon diffused its powdery light onto the ruined house and the consummate stillness of the surrounding fields.

“Jevick!” Miros cried in a voice so heavily laden with feeling that I knew he was drunk even before I saw him. “Thank Avalei you’ve come. This is terrible. It’s been terrible.”

I moved toward him. Vines rustled about my ankles.

“Amaiv!” said a sharp voice. “What are you doing with that light? Put it out, and don’t spill the oil.”

The little girl blew out the light obediently. “He had a bad dream,
yamas
.”

“A bad dream.” Miros sighed. “Even sleep is dangerous. . . .”

They sat against the low wall along the edge of the roof, where the vines made a thick curtain over the stone. Miros was holding a bottle and looking down, his face in shadow; the girl with the obstinate chin rested her head on his shoulder. A little apart from them sat the tall girl in the scarf, her legs splayed out and her toes pointing inward. I supposed she was half-witted. I stumbled over an empty bottle as I approached them and then sat down among the vines.

“Careful,” Miros said. “If you fall off the roof,
vai
, I’ll have killed an
avneanyi
on top of everything.”

The girl leaning against him began to giggle and could not stop. Miros held the bottle unsteadily toward me. “There, my friend,” he said. “Drink. I’ve given it all to Laris. We are drinking through her hospitality now.”

I drank some of the cleansing
teiva
and handed back the bottle. The scarred girl, like a deft little animal, curled up her legs beside me.

“You should be in bed,” the girl with Miros reprimanded her, suddenly recovering from her giggles.

“I can’t sleep,” the child protested, wheedling.

“You’ll sleep soon enough, and then who’s going to carry you downstairs?”

“I’ll sleep on the roof,” said the child decidedly.

“You can’t sleep on the roof.” The sister had lowered her head like an angry cow. It was this, along with the dogged way she spoke, and her slurred consonants, which showed me that she was very drunk as well.

Miros had one arm around her. He caressed the top of her head, and she nestled back into his shoulder with a sigh. He raised his head and looked at me, and the moonlight showed his features blurred with drink. “This is Laris,” he said brokenly. “This is Laris, a true daughter of the Valley. I’ve already given her two bottles of
teiva
. It was all I had. I’m going to give her everything I own. It will never be enough. Never enough for the Night Market.”

“Everything?” said Laris slyly, tugging the neck of his tunic.

“Ah gods,” Miros groaned. “You see how it’s been, my friend. Drink again. Don’t take such little sips; it won’t do anything. Let no one reject her hospitality.”

“That’s right.” Laris smirked.

I drank, more to dispel my own embarrassment than from a real desire for
teiva
. The drink made the stars look brighter, cut out of the sky with a tailor’s scissors. Dogs bayed away in the long fields.

“Laris, Laris,” Miros said sadly. “You don’t know who I am.” He rested his head on the wall, his features smooth in the delicate light. “Nobody knows who I am,” he murmured. “Except perhaps my uncle. Not even Jevick knows, and he is my best friend east of Sinidre.”

“I know who you are,” said Laris.

“No.” Miros shook his head wearily, rolling it back and forth on the wall. “No one knows. Not one of you. Jevick.” I felt him looking at me, though his eyes were lost in shadow. It was his cheek that shone, his brow. “You think I’m a gentleman, Jevick,” he said hoarsely. “But you are wrong. I have no honor. I forget everything, everyone. I will even forget the Night Market one day. I will forget it long enough to laugh again. It makes me hate myself. . . . I tried to go into the army once. To be sent to the Lelevai. Everyone said I wouldn’t go through with the training. And they were right. I drank too much—you know, when you’re wearing a sword, they give you credit everywhere—and the way I gambled! Well, I had to give back the sword. For a year I thought I would die of shame. I had proved them right, my brothers, my uncles, everyone. . . . But then—” He shrugged. “I didn’t have the courage to kill myself, either. It seemed so much more sensible to go hunting. . . .”

He laughed, but even the moonlight showed the stiffness around his mouth. “The truth is, I have only been good for two things in my life: and those are hunting and
londo
. Even in love I have been a failure. Even in serving a goddess. And that is why, my Laris, I sleep alone.”

He kissed the top of her head. “No, no,” the girl said dully, clawing vaguely at the neck of his tunic. “I know who you are. You are the man foretold to me in the
taubel
, the man with the long shadow.”

“No,” said Miros. “I am no one.” He leaned forward and pressed the
teiva
bottle into my hand. Then, with some difficulty, he pulled himself away from Laris. He disengaged his arm from around her shoulders with infinite tenderness as she grabbed at his tunic with her blunt little hands.

“It’s a mistake,” she said, drunk and sorrowful, when at last he had made her hands return to her lap. “You should have loved me,
lammaro
. In this house we have no shame. All of us lost our shame when we lost our brothers.”