A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (23 page)

He spent the most glorious winter of his life, forgetting everything. And then, in the spring, she asked him to go back. “But it’s almost summer,” he said. He thought he would stay for another season. She refused: her husband was coming back, and her children, for the school holidays. He returned to Sinidre in despair and embarked on the year of torture which succeeded that brief, that paradisiacal winter: a year of secret letters, gifts, jealousy, midnight rides, meetings in parks, in village inns, in temple gardens. He often rode all the way from Sinidre to Ur-Melinei, sleeping in the long grass beside the road, only to be met in the village by her taciturn maid with the lame hip, with a note: “Impossible. Go back at once.” He was certain, by turns, that she loved him, despised him, longed for him, tired of him. He suspected her of taking another lover. He haunted the woods around Brovinhu and was almost shot by the gamekeeper, the arrow lodging in the top of his boot. When she refused to have him back for the winter, he knew she was deceiving him; but she wept and said that she was afraid of her husband: afraid for Miros’s sake. While he wished for nothing better than the chance to kill her husband honorably, in an open duel.

“You would kill him,” she said angrily. “You, an unaccomplished boy, would kill a lord of the Order of the Lamp?”

Miros departed in rage. And then, breaking every rule she had set herself, she came, disguised, to see him in Sinidre.

They had two days. They lived secretly by the docks, in the Kalak quarter, among vendors of raw fish and green tea laden with salt, in the shabby wood houses with nets hung up in the doorways, the shrieking of hungry gulls, the sound of Kalak being spoken everywhere. At the end she looked at him, deadly pale, and said: “Very well. Kill him.” It was all that he had asked for. He was ready to kill, or to die. But other forces opposed him: when he appeared at home he was summoned immediately to a
radmakanid
—a family council.

By this time the scandal had reached dangerous proportions. Anonymous letters had been received by his father and his uncles; even his great-uncle the Priest of Avalei had received one on the Isle, and had arrived in Sinidre in a fierce temper. Everyone Miros loved and respected most was there in the spacious sitting room with the polished wood floor, the tall harp in the corner, the room adjoining his mother’s latticed garden. They had drawn the curtains and lit only one of the lamps, for the priest liked his surroundings dim. Miros’s mother was there, twisting her overskirt in her fine hands, and her brothers, his four successful, strong-willed uncles; her sister, his aunt, who, he thought, looked at him with some sympathy; and his father, and Miros’s three brothers and one elder sister. In accordance with Olondrian tradition, it was his maternal uncles and not his father who headed the
radmakanid
, for Miros belonged to their House and would inherit through his mother’s family. Chief among them, the eldest and most powerful, was the High Priest. Miros sat quietly before them, his face lashed by their accusations as if by blows, and watched his brothers irritably examining their boots. He was given a choice: enter his great-uncle’s service, or join the army. He chose the army, even though soldiers were barred from fighting duels. “I want to be sent far away,” he sobbed, later, to his mother. “To go to the Lelevai, to the Brogyar country. . . .” First, however, he had to complete the training in Sinidre, and he could not stop himself from writing to the baroness. He received a brief, constrained note in which she forbade him to write to her or come to Ur-Melinei, which showed him that she had been threatened. He was certain that his family had warned her, coerced her. He wrote again; her next note swore that it was her own will. And now he entered a terrible time of drinking, brawls, and gambling which resulted in his rejection from the army.

After this there was a year of almost suicidal despair. He drank in his bedroom, spent whole days asleep. And finally the woods called to him, and his horses, and his old friends, other young men, light-hearted, simple, and frivolous. He hunted in the Kelevain, riding closer and closer to Brovinhu. He dreamt he would meet her in the forest. His behavior was marked; the
radmakanid
met for a second time, and he was commanded to join his uncle on the Isle.

Somehow she heard of it. She wrote him a single letter, not long, but it was in her own voice, and he carried it with him still. She said she was glad he was going away; she missed him; there was no hunting at Brovinhu. She had been ill and was convalescent. The letter tore him from end to end with passion, elation, and grief; in this state he went out to drink the bars of Sinidre. There he blinded a man who mocked him, calling him a
balarin
. Only his uncle’s influence saved him from prison.

“You can’t imagine,” he went on in a hoarse voice, “what she is like. The fact that she has been ill . . . She is not like me. My brothers laugh, they say she is too sophisticated for me, that I can’t possibly keep pace with such a woman. Perhaps they are right. But I believe that she did—that she does love me. Perhaps it was for my sake that she fell ill! As I said, she is nothing like me, her emotions are finer, more turbulent, she doesn’t forget anything, she could never forget her sorrow. . . . But I—I am of coarser stuff. I have told you of my unhappiness, but I have left out all my nights at the
londo
tables, the way I could vow to kill myself in the morning and be singing
vanadiel
and laughing in a tavern by dusk. I am fickle . . . my emotions have, I think, no real depth. . . . But hers! She is worth a hundred, a thousand of me. Strangely, this is the one point on which all of us—my brothers, my uncles, myself—on which all of us are agreed.”

His hand relaxed on the blanket. A faint smile touched his lips. The light was fading, the sun sinking into the desert. We sat for a time in silence, and then he sang, very softly, a few lines of a comic song I had heard in Bain:

The balarin, the balarin,

What has he done with his boots?

Oh, they’re under my lady’s bed,

What shall we do?

I had heard the song pouring out of a café, rowdily sung to bawdy laughter and the clashing of cutlery. But Miros sang it lightly, tenderly, in a pensive, faltering voice that broke away at last and was lost in the night.

When it was over, he looked at me. “I’ll never hunt again. Even if I live. I’ll fight for Avalei as I have never fought before. People say the prince is conspiring against his father the Telkan. Some even say he’s preparing an army in secret.”

I hushed him, touching his brow, but he pushed my hand away.

“I hope it’s true. I hope I live. I’ll join him. I will have vengeance for the Night Market.

“If I can’t see Ailin again, I’ll be as I should have been when she was mine. Someone who doesn’t forget. Who keeps faith.”

His sentences dissolved, and soon he was raving. I tried to cool his face with pieces of wet damask: the rotting stuff dropped in his hair. I caught his flailing arms, held him, begged him to be still. At last he stopped fighting and lay with his eyes wide open, moonlight in his tears. I sat with him until he was safely asleep, and then I closed the heavy door of his box bed against the cold. I went to the next room, the one where I
slept, a place of despair like all the others, stale as a charnel house.

“Jissavet,” I said.

“Jissavet.”

She bloomed in the dark chamber, illuminating the walls. But she could not see them. It was clear to me now that she could see nothing but me. A crushing and changeless fidelity, like a perfect love affair or the dark, single-minded devotion of a saint.

“Jissavet,” I whispered.

She stretched out her hands. She was going to speak, to return to the tales of her past, those disembodied memories. But this time I could not listen. There was no time. “Stop,” I said. “Jissavet. Listen to me. I need your help. I must have food and medicine.”

“Listen to
you
! I do not listen to you.”

Her face affronted, steel in a thunderstorm. Olondrian poets speak of the deadly potency of a woman’s frown, but I know what a frown can do, the lowering of a delicate eyebrow, the twist of a lip.

“Don’t do this to me,” I screamed. “I’m dying.”

The light dimmed about me, a shuttered lamp. On my hands and knees I retched, bringing up water and a little bile on the carpet.

“Dying!” she said.

“Yes,” I coughed. “I’m dying. We’re dying. We’re starving. My friend is ill. I need medicine and food.”

“I won’t go back, I told you!”

“Don’t!” I groveled on the floor, a skewered songbird. “Don’t, Jissavet . . . You’ll kill me, and no one will write your
vallon. . . .
”

Again the light dimmed. I had no strength to rise and lay where I had fallen, rolling onto my back to look at her.

She hovered above me, the red ropes of her hair almost touching my face. I thought I caught their scent: mildew and decay.

“You’ll write it?” she demanded, her face ablaze. “If I help you—you and your friend—you’ll write my
vallon
?”

“Yes,” I said.

That was our bargain: a life for a life. A bargain in which we both suffered: she in the crossing over into my world, I in the crossing to hers. That night she led me through the frozen orchard and told me to dig up the fruits of the hairy vine the Kestenyi call
yom afer
, the “hand of the desert.” The snow numbed my fingers; the hard earth broke my nails. I clawed at the ground by starlight like a grave-robber or seeker of buried treasure. The spiny harvest stung my hands, but I soaked the roots in water that night and boiled them at dawn, and they were as soft and nourishing as cream.

She looked at Miros, too: she stepped through the curtain between the worlds and gazed at him. And she guided me out into the foothills of the Tavroun. There, in a cave dug into the hillside and hidden with dried vines, lived a Tavrouni crone with a tin ring in her lip. We shared no common language; I described my friend’s trouble with gestures. She gave me a bundle of fragrant twigs and a poultice of twisted grass. I had no way to pay her and mimed my poverty in distress, but she waved me away with the single Olondrian word: “
Avneanyi
.”

And then, when I had treated Miros and he was asleep, I went upstairs to the library of Sarenha-Haladli. Squeezed in like an afterthought by the dilapidated observatory, the library had felt-covered walls and a balcony closed in latticework like a cage. The prince had built a Kestenyi collection here, only diversified by some Bainish novels and the works of Karanis of Loi, the books leaning on the shelves like broken teeth. I set my candle down on the writing desk and searched it thoroughly, scrabbling in the drawers. The thought that my light might be seen no longer frightened me: the night was so empty, so vast, reaching all the way to the mountains. I discovered a few pens, brittle as old men’s bones, a half-full bottle of ink. I chose
Lantern Tales
from the shelf, for its wide margins.

I sat at the desk in my jacket, dipped the pen in the ink, and steeled myself against the coming light. “I’m ready,” I said.

Yes, I called her. I asked her to come. Come, angel, I said. I called her Visible, the Ninth Wonder, Empress of Sighs. Come, I said, and I will show you magic from the north, your own words conjured into a
vallon
. A book, angel, a garden of spears. I will hold the pen for you, and I will weave a net to catch your voice. I will do what no one has done, I will write in Kideti, a language like you and me, a ghost hesitating between worlds. Between the rainstorms, angel, and the white light of the north. Between the river dolphins and the wolves. Between the far south, the land of elephants and amber, and this: the land of cypresses and snow.

So come. Sing to me of Kiem, speak to me of rivers. Pour your memories into my pen. Tell me your
anadnedet
, your life, your death story, as if you were still dying and not dead. Let me do for you what we do for those who are favored by the gods, and die slowly in the islands: let me sit beside your pallet in the firelight, and listen to the tale you long to tell. The story of a life which is revealed, after many years, to have been all along the story of a death. How one lives and goes on living, how one comes to die, under the eye of the vulture, Nedet, the goddess of ashes.

THE ANADNEDET

(1)

The angel said:

I already know about writing. We made maps: maps of the sea, of the waters between Tinimavet, Sedso, and Jiev. And maps of the rivers, the great ones, Dyet and Katapnay and Tadbati-Nut, the ones that made our country of mud on their way to the girdling sea. We made the maps on skins. First we would draw the lines with ashes and water, and later we traced them with a piece of hot iron. For many seasons our house was full of those maps, hanging on the walls, curled at the edges, dark-faced in the rushlight.

If you want to hear my
anadnedet
then you must begin with a map, and it must be a map of the land of Kiem. Of Kiem, the Black Land, wet and shining, the Jawbone of a Cow. I will draw a map for you like this:

There are three rivers, swollen and fed by a hundred tributaries, brown, enormous, pouring their weight to the sea. At the edge of the sea are the shimmering deltas, the dank-smelling lagoons, a landscape flat and liquid and loved by birds. To the north there are deep forests where the rivers rush in silence. To the west the coastline rises in blue hills, where there are terraced gardens and cool air, and a great temple looking down on the villages scattered in the mud.