A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (5 page)

The thought of any kind of people living on Snail Mountain, where the earth breathed sulfurous exhalations and even the dew was poisonous, shocked and terrified me. How did they live? What did they eat? What water did they drink? But my mother said it was bad luck to think of it. Later the empty pitcher was found standing beside the gate, and my mother had the servants break it in pieces and bury it in the back garden. And some days after that we heard that a party of men from Tyom, armed with torches and spears, had driven the
kyitna
people away: “They had a small child with them,” whispered the women in the fruit market: “Its hair was red, they could see it in the torchlight—as red as this palm nut!” I wished, at the time, that I had been able to see the
kyitna
child. Now I studied the girl who lay motionless in the shade of the awning, who took up so little space, who seemed without substance, a trick of the light, who flickered under the flapping shade like the shadow cast by a fire.

She was not as young as I had thought her at first. She was not a child, though from a distance she appeared to be so—she was small even for an islander. But her waist, showing between her short vest and the top of her drawstring trousers, was gently curved, and the look in her face was too remote for that of a child. She seemed to be wandering, open-eyed; her skin was dark, rich as silt; the crook of her elbow, dusky in the shade, was a dream of rivers. She wore a bracelet of jade beads which showed she belonged to the far south, to the rice-growers and eel-fishers, the people of the lagoons.

I think she had spoken to me twice before I realized it. She struggled to raise her voice, calling: “Brother! You’ll get sun-sick.” Then I met her gaze, her tired, faintly mocking smile, and smiled back at her. The older woman, no doubt her mother, hushed her in a whisper.

“It’s all right,” said the girl. “Look at him! He wouldn’t harm anyone. And he isn’t superstitious. He has the long face of a fish.”

I strolled toward them and greeted the mother, whose eyes darted from my gaze. She had the flat, long-suffering face of a field-laborer and a scar on her forehead. The young girl looked at me from inside the fiery cloud of her hair, her lips still crooked in a smile. “Sit down, brother,” she said.

I thanked her and sat in the chair beside her pallet, across from her mother, who still knelt stroking the girl’s long hair and would not meet my eye. “The fish,” said the young girl, speaking carefully, her breathing shallow, “is for wisdom. Isn’t that right? The fish is the wisest of the creatures. Now, most of our merchants here are shaped just like the domestic duck—except for the fat Ilaveti—the worst of all, he looks like a raven. . . .” She paused, closing her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and fixed me with a look of such clarity that I was startled. “Ducks are foolish,” she said, “and ravens are clever, but have bad hearts. That is why we came up here now, at noon, when they’re asleep.”

I smiled. “You seem to have had ample time to study all of us. And yet this is the first time that I have seen you come out of your cabin.”

“Tipyav,” she answered, “my mother’s servant, tells me everything. I trust him absolutely. He has slow thoughts, but a very keen eye. My father—but I am talking too much— you will think me poorly behaved—”

“No,” I said. But she lay very still and silent, struggling for breath.

“Sir,” said her mother in a low voice, looking at me at last, so that I saw, surprised, that she had the deep eyes of a beautiful woman: “My daughter is gravely ill. She is—she has not been well for some time. She has come here for air, and for rest, and this talking taxes her so—”

“Stop,” the young girl whispered. She looked at me with a trembling smile. “You will forgive us. We are not accustomed to much company.”

“It is I who should ask forgiveness,” I said. “I am intruding on you—on your rest.”

“Not at all,” said the girl, in a manner peculiarly grave and formal. “Not at all. You are a very rare thing: a wise man from the islands. Tell me—have you been to this northern ghost-country before?”

I shook my head. “This is my first visit. But I do speak the language.”

“You speak their language? Olondrian?”

“I had an Olondrian tutor.”

I was gratified by the older woman’s look of awe; the girl regarded me silently with an expression I could not read.

“We have heard that one can hire interpreters,” her mother said.

“I am sure one can,” I answered, though I was not sure of it at all. The woman looked relieved and smoothed her dark dress over her knees, moving her hand down to scratch discreetly at her ankle. Poor creatures, I thought, wondering how they would fare in the northern capital. The woman, I noticed, was missing the two smallest fingers of her right hand.

The girl spoke up abruptly. “As for us,” she said in a strange, harsh tone, “we are traveling to a place of healing, as you might have guessed. It is called A-lei-lin, and lies in the mountains. But really . . . She paused, twisting the cloth of her pallet. “Really . . . It’s foolish of us. . . .”

“No, not foolish,” her mother interrupted. “We believe that we will find healing there. It is a holy place. The temple of a foreign goddess. And perhaps the gods of the north—in the north there are many wonders, son, many miracles. You will have heard of them yourself. . . .”

“It is certainly said to be, and I believe it is, a place of magic, full of great wizards,” I said. “These wizards, for example, have devised a map of the stars, cast in brass, with which they can measure the distance of stars from the earth. They write not only in numbers, but words, so that they may converse across time and space, and one of their devices can make innumerable replicas of books—such as this one.”

I held out the slim
Olondrian Lyrics
bound in dark green leather. The women looked at it but seemed loath to touch it.

“Is that—a
vallon
?” the girl asked, stumbling slightly over the word.

“It is. In it there are written many poems in the northern tongue.”

The girl’s mother gazed at me, and I guessed that the worn look in her face came not from hard labor but from an unrelenting sorrow. “Are you a wizard, my son?”

I laughed. “No, no! I am only a student of northern letters. There’s no wizardry in reading.”

“Of course not!” snapped the girl, startling me with her vehemence. Her small face blazed, a lamp newly opened. “Why must you?” she hissed at her mother. “Why? Why? Could you not be silent? Can you never be silent even for the space of an hour?”

The woman blinked rapidly and looked away.

“Perhaps—” I said, half rising from my chair.

“Oh, no. Don’t
you
go,” said the girl, a wild note in her voice. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me! My mother and I—we are too much alone. Tell me,” she went on without a pause, “how do you find the open sea? Does it not feel like freedom?”

“Yes, I suppose—”

“Beautiful and fearsome at the same time. My father, before he stopped talking, said that the open sea was like fever. He called it ‘the fever of health’—does that not seem to you very apt? The fever of health. He said that he always felt twice as alive at sea.”

“Was your father a merchant?”

“Why do you say that—was? He isn’t dead.”

“I am sorry,” I said.

“He is not dead. He is only very quiet.”

I glanced at her mother, who kept her head lowered.

“Why are you smiling?” asked the girl.

My conciliatory half-smile evaporated. “I’m not smiling.”

“Good.”

Such aggression in a motionless body, a nearly expressionless face. Her small chin jutted; her eyes bored into mine. She had no peasant timidity, no deference. I cast about for something to say, uneasy as if I had stepped on some animal in the dark.

“You spoke as if he were dead,” I said at last.

“You should have asked.”

“I was led astray by your choice of words,” I retorted, beginning to feel exasperated.

“Words are breath.”

“No,” I said, leaning forward, the back of my shirt plastered to my skin with sweat. “No. You’re wrong. Words are everything. They can be everything.”

“Is that Olondrian philosophy?”

Her sneer, her audacity, took my breath away. It was as if she had sat up and struck me in the face. For an instant my father’s image flared in my memory like a beacon: an iron rod in his hand, its tip a bead of fire.

“Perhaps. Perhaps it is,” I managed at last. “Our philosophies differ. In Olondria words are more than breath. They live forever,
here
.”

I held out the book, gripping its spine. “
Here
they live. Olondrian words. In this book there are poems by people who lived a thousand years ago! Memory can’t do that—it can save a few poems for a few generations, but not forever. Not like this.”

“Then read me one,” she said.

“What?”

“Jissi,” her mother murmured.

“Read me one,” the girl insisted, maintaining her black and warlike stare. “Read me what you carry in the
vallon
.”

“You won’t understand it.”

“I don’t want to understand it,” she said. “Why should I?”

The book fell open at the
Night Lyric
of Karanis of Loi. The sun had moved so that my knees were no longer in shadow, the page a sheet of blistering light where black specks strayed like ash. My irritation faded as I read the melancholy lines.

Alas, tonight the tide has gone out too far.

It goes too far,

it stretches away, it lingers,

now it has slipped beyond the horizon.

Alas, the wind goes carrying

summer tempests of mountain lilies.

It spills them, and only the stars remain:

the Bee, the Hammer, the Harp.

“Thank you,” said the girl.

She closed her eyes.

Her mother took her hand and chafed it. “Jissi? I’m going to call Tipyav.”

The girl said nothing. The woman gave me a fearful, embarrassed glance, then stumped across the deck and called down the ladder.

“Brother.” The young girl’s eyes were open.

“Yes,” I answered, my anger cooled by pity. She is going to die, I thought.

A puff of air forced itself from her lungs, a laugh. “Well—never mind,” she murmured, closing her eyes again. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her mother returned with the servant. I stood aside as the old man knelt and the woman helped the girl to cling to his curved back. The old man rose with a groan and staggered forward, his burden swaying, and the woman rolled up the pallet, avoiding my eye. . . . I pulled my chair farther into the shade of the awning and opened my book, but when they reached the ladder the girl called back to me: “Brother!”

I stood. Her hair was vibrant in the sun.

“Your name.”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

“Jissavet,” said the dying girl, “of Kiem.”

In my twenty-ninth year, having lost my heart to the sea, I resolved to travel, and to come, if I might, into some of the little-known corners of the World. It was with such purpose in mind that I addressed myself to the captain of the
Ondis
, as she lay in the harbor of Bain; and the captain—a man distinguished, in the true Bainish style, by an elegant pipe and exquisitely fashioned boots—declared himself very able to use the extra pair of hands on board his ship, which was to go down the Fertile Coast. We would stop at Asarma, that capital of the old cartographers, and go on to fragrant, orange-laden Yenith by the sea, and finally travel up the Ilbalin, skirting the Kestenyi highlands, into the Balinfeil to collect our cargo of white almonds. The arrangement suited me perfectly: I planned to cross into the mountains and enter the formidable country of the Brogyars. I little knew that my wanderings would last for forty years, and bring me into such places as would cause many a man to shudder.

I will not, O benevolent reader, spend time in describing Bain itself, that city which is known to lie in the exact center of the world—for who, indeed, who reads this book will be unfamiliar with her, incontestably the greatest city on earth? Who does not know of the “gilded house,” the “queen of the bazaars,” where, as the saying goes, one can purchase even human flesh? No, I begin these modest writings farther south and east, at the gates of Asarma, which, seen from the sea, resemble a lady’s hand mirror. . . .

I lay on my pallet, surrounded by the rocking of the sea, reading Firdred of Bain in a yellow smear of candlelight. But I could not keep my mind on the words: the letters seemed to shift, rearranging themselves into words which did not exist in Olondrian.
Kyitna
. And then, like a ruined city:
Jissavet of Kiem
. I laid the book aside and gave myself up to dreams of her. I remembered the clarity of her eyes, which were like the eyes of Kyomi, the first woman in the world, who had been blessed with the sight of the gods. I thought of the city whose name she had said so carefully, A-lei-lin, Aleilin, Leiya Tevorova’s city, the city of violent seasons. What I knew of that city was Leiya’s story of how she was declared mad and shut up there for the winter in a great tower of black bricks. I looked at the city on Firdred’s map, which, like all Olondrian maps, showed painted cities of exaggerated size. Aleilin: a city like the others. The Place of the Goddess of Clay. And near it the moon-colored oval of the Fethlian, the lake where Leiya had drowned, where a nurse, as I knew from the preface to her autobiography, had found her with her shoe caught in the weeds. There, after long torments, the girl from Kiem would die—for was it not futile to struggle with
kyitna
, the just punishment of the gods? “And perhaps, the gods of the north—” the mother had said, hesitant, desperate; but what had the gods of the north to do with us? They were tales, pretty names. I turned on my side, restless, thinking of the strange girl with sadness. The bones of her face as she lay beneath the awning like a jade queen. She came from the south, from the land of doctors, wizards, and superstition, from the place which we in Tyom called “the Edge of Night.”