A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (18 page)

Then we moved. We ran as one. Not for long—the moment I stepped outside, a rushing figure slammed into me, and I fell. A taste of Olondrian soil in my mouth. When I scrambled to my feet the people who had been with me were gone and the earth was on fire.

Heat blew toward me, crackling, lifting my hair.

The booths were burning. People writhed on the ground, flame-laced, and the dry grass turned to smoke.

Against the firelight, horses. They reared and plunged in the air, screaming with fear and rage. Their riders wore helmets and wielded clubs and did not fall. Their huge silhouettes struck grimly, without hesitation, again and again. Near me a girl rolled senseless, firelit blood in her hair.

Screams wracked the night.

The horseman who had struck the girl turned his beast, whirling his club above his head. “
E drom!
” he shouted.
The Stone
. His stallion’s hooves knives in the air, his weapon a blur. I ducked, lifted my robe to the level of my knees, and ran.

We were all running, scattered like mice in flood time. We ran for the fields, the nearby woods, and they chased us, exchanging cries like hunters. The history books would tell of the burning of the Night Market of Nuillen, but they would erase the terror, the stench of blood and soot. And the noise—the noise. Running, I struck my foot on a stone and fell with a splash, up to my chin in an irrigation ditch. The sides were steep enough to provide a chance that a horse would not tread on me if I stayed close. I lay flat in the mud, screams in my ears.

I turned myself sideways, wriggled into the side of the ditch, and plastered my body with mud. A little water flowed past me sluggishly, red with fire. Horses flew over like eagles. My eyelids shuddered, stung by smoke. Toward dawn the fire leapt over me, singeing the field, and was gone.

C
hapter Fifteen

This Happy Land

I emerged from the bank, like Leilin the first woman, the Olondrian goddess of clay. The
Book of Mysteries
tells how she rose, “a speaking clod.” She awoke in a world new-formed, but the world I entered was old already, incalculably old, smoke-stained, silent. Its hair had gone gray.

Ashes blew on the breeze. In the fog that rolled from the commons, figures moved, bent over like reapers, searching, sobbing names.

I knelt and scooped up a little muddy water from the ditch. My throat was sore, and the water had a charred taste. Then I stood and set out over the field, barefoot, my slippers lost in my flight. I was going back to the commons.

The great tent where the angel had spoken was gone. Its poles still smoldered on the ground.

I walked among the survivors, crying a name, like them.
Miros
. My throat shut up, my voice a whisper. Every effort to shout, every breath, striped my lungs and throat with pain.

I thought I would never find him. I thought he was dead. I could not see the shape of the carriage anywhere. In the center of the commons, where the Night Market had been most crowded, the burned bodies were unrecognizable.

Somewhere near the center I sat down. A booth had collapsed nearby, festooned with long streamers of blackened lace. Coins lay in the ashes on the ground, dark triangles secretive as letters. Beads had fallen from a wrist.

I put my head down on my knees and wept. I wept for those who had died in the fire, who had come to buy and sell, to make merry, to speak with an
avneanyi
. I wept for those whose loved ones were lost on the other side of the trembling door, who would not come again from the land of the dead. I wept for myself. I wept because I was haunted, hounded into the Valley—the cause, against my will, of a great sorrow. When I looked up I saw a rough youth with a dirty rag tied about his head, and in his pale profile I recognized my friend.

I stood up. “Miros,” I shouted. My voice a creak.

He did not know me at first. His gaze slipped over me, anxious and hurried, searching among the ruins. Then I took a step forward and his eyes returned to my face and he ran toward me and caught me in a fierce embrace.

“Jevick!” he croaked.

“Miros!”

“I thought you were dead—”

“Your uncle—”

“Alive, in the carriage, hard by the wood. Come.” He seized my arm and began to run. I was slower than he, gasping, my lungs tight. He glanced at me. “Sorry,” he panted. “You’ve got to run. The Guard will be back before long.”

“Back,” I wheezed.

“They’ll have to get rid of the bodies,” he said shortly. “Clean the commons.”

We ran, the silence broken only by our breath. The carriage stood at the edge of the forest, spared like the trees by the slant of the wind. Its sides were sooty, and there was only one horse.

“Where are we going to go?” I whispered.

Miros looked up from checking the harness. “East. My uncle’s servants are coming downriver with—what you wanted. We’ll cross on the ferry and meet them in Klah-ne-Wiy.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded, looking bleakly across the burnt commons. “Let’s go.”

I opened the door of the carriage to receive another shock. There on the seat lay a bald old man, unconscious, wrapped in a blanket. “Miros!” I said, and he answered from the coachman’s perch: “Get in, there isn’t time.” And I obeyed him, and pulled the door shut with a shaking hand. I sat on the seat across from the old man and looked at him. His face was a mass of stains, as if he had been pilloried in some brutal ritual. I recognized in that withered face, that flat head and pointed chin, the ravaged features of Auram, High Priest of Avalei.

The hair. The hair was a wig. I pressed back against the seat, my heart thudding. The eyebrows were painted on, the eyes enhanced with black paint and belladonna, the wrinkles disguised with unguents, embalmed in powder. The whole man was a creation, re-created every day. The lips, of course, had always been too red. The hands must be treated too: I shuddered at the thought of their touch, their white, elastic fingers. And everything clarified as if a veil had been ripped asunder: the priest’s hooded cloak, his unusual, querulous voice. I realized that I had never seen his face in daylight till now. And the thought, coming suddenly, made my hair stand up. I felt my skin shrink, prickling all along my arms as if I had seen Dit-Peta, the island demon “Old Man of Youth.”

He did not wake. As we drew away from the fire, into clearer air, the sun shone through the window onto his creased expanse of forehead. For the first time his face had definition. It was human now: touching and impressive as a skull.

He did not wake for five days. Miros cradled the ancient head in his lap and forced a trickle of water between the dry lips. We bought cured meat at a peasant house and built a fire in a meadow and Miros boiled the meat in a metal bowl to make soup. His eyes bright in the firelight, his face drawn. “I told him to die,” he said. “The night of the Market. We had a quarrel. . . . I told him I wished he was dead.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“It’s not yours either,” he countered, watching me sternly through the flames. “I know what you’re thinking.”

I looked away, at the priest. “He’s so old.”

Miros laughed then, tears in his eyes. “How old did you think he was?”

“Forty . . . Perhaps forty-five. . . .”

“Forty!” he shouted, falling on his side. “Tell him when he wakes up. . . .” Then he sat up and stifled his laughter, saying hastily: “No—never mention it.”

“His energy,” I said, dazed. “He walks so quickly, stands so upright—”

“That’s
bolma
. You don’t know it? The Sea-Kings used to take it, down in Evmeni. It’s incredibly expensive. The old man lives on it. Sometimes he chews
milim
, too, because the
bolma
makes him crazy.”

“Is it because he’s a priest?” I asked.

“Ha!” grunted Miros. “It’s because he’s an idiotic old camel.”

He cooled the soup and fed it to the priest, the liquid trickling down the old man’s chin, into the ridges of his neck.

We traveled slowly to spare the horse. The country grew rough and empty. Miros made use of cart tracks, avoiding the King’s Road. We drank at a stream and washed there. I found my satchel in the carriage, with all my books and clothes, and Tialon’s letters. The priest’s big traveling trunk was there too, and Miros’s few belongings, consisting largely of tobacco and bottles of
teiva
. I remembered Auram’s words: “We must expect to be found.” He had lived as he spoke. He had come to the Night Market fearlessly and prepared for flight.

We walked downhill to a stream to gather water. Miros carried the bowl we used for cooking, and I had an empty jar. The jar had once held a preparation belonging to the priest, and when we drank from it the water stung like perfume. Still we filled it everywhere we could. That day the light was tender, and flocks of miniature butterflies hovered in the grass like mist. Suddenly Miros stumbled and sank on one knee. “Oh gods,” he said. Sobbing, undone. Water sloshing over his boots.

That day I took his arm and helped him up, I made him drink, I pulled him out of frenzy. And in the night he did the same for me, for the ghost appeared in the carriage where we slept curled up against the chill and I filled the air with wild smoke-roughened cries. She was close, so close. All the fulgent stars were drawn about her like a mantle, and her face shone clenched and angry, a knot of flame. “Write me a
vallon!
” she said. And a landscape burned across my vision, the coast as flat as the sea: her memory, not mine.

“Write me a
vallon!
”

When she let me go I was outside, on the ground. A dark meadow about me and all the stars in place. Miros held my shoulders to stop my thrashing. “I’m all right,” I gasped, and he released me and sat panting, a clump of shadow.

“What,” he said. “What.”

“The angel,” I said. I was glad I could not see his face.

“Dear gods.”

He was silent for a time, arms about his knees. I sat up, breathing slowly, waiting for the shaking to pass. A wind slipped gently past us, a murmur in the weeds.

Then Miros asked in a low, troubled voice: “Is it always like this?”

“Always. Yes.”

And I thought to myself:
It will be like this from now on
. I had refused the angel; she knew that I would not do as she asked; she would hound me across Olondria like the trace of an evil deed. “I am sorry,” Miros said, and I scarcely heard him. His words meant less to me than his hand, pulling me up and guiding me to the carriage, and his efforts to make the next day ordinary: his jokes about water, his tug at the reins, his cracked lips whistling a broken tune.

On the fifth day we stopped at a huge old
radhu
. The falling dusk had a tincture of violets. I made out a sprawling building in the gloom: broad sections had crumbled away from it, leaving raw holes, and scattered stones lay about the yard along with pieces of rotten beams. The place had an air of decay, yet goats went springing away through the rubble and a girl came out with a yellowed basin of water to wash our hands. She had black eyes, a restless manner and a firm, obstinate jaw. When we had washed she tossed the water into the weeds.

Miros lifted his uncle from the carriage, and without comment, without a single word, the girl led us into the house. There we found a dark, smoky room with a carpet on the floor. Miros laid the unconscious priest down near its edge.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked the girl.

“He’s had a fall,” Miros said curtly. A moment later he paused and met her eyes. “The truth is, we’ve come from the Night Market outside Nuillen.”

Her eyes widened, but she said only: “You are most welcome,
telmaron
.”

Slowly, furtively, the
huvyalhi
came out of the darkness, wearing the faded blue robes of their class. There was a bent, defeated-looking woman, a tall girl with a vacant smile, and an aged man who mumbled incessantly. Last of all came a small girl, perhaps nine or ten years old, whose face had been horribly disfigured by smallpox. There were no men but the demented grandfather, and no infants. The bent woman and the tall girl stared at us with their mouths open.

The black-eyed girl with the firm jaw, who clearly ran the household, brought us wooden bowls of stew and rough tin spoons. She looked no older than sixteen, and her hair hung in four plaits, but she had the capable hands and decided tread of a matron. She arranged the two older women—her mother and sister, I supposed—on a mat and gave them a bowl and spoon to share. Both of them wore white scarves bound tightly around their heads, a mark of widowhood.

The little girl came around with cups of water. She was a lively, graceful creature, with snapping black eyes in her melted face. Miros could hardly look at her, and his hand shook as he spooned stew into his mouth. He asked in a subdued voice about the mumbling old man.

“My mother’s father,” the matronly girl explained. “He has rheumatism and cramp, and is almost blind with cataracts. But in his day, he was a bull! He plowed the fields by hand and built this room when he was already old. He attacked the
dadeshi
with his big knife—men on horseback, imagine! He used to keep their dried-up ears in a box. . . .”

“Until Kiami ate them,” the small girl added wickedly, her lovely eyes flashing at her sister.

The older girl showed her sixteen years in a burst of wild laughter, putting one hand quickly over her mouth.

“Who’s Kiami?” Miros asked.

“One of the cats,” said the younger girl. “Oh! Grandfather was angry! He pulled our hair. . . .”

The child, utterly unconcerned with her sad and monstrous appearance, regaled us with stories of this most incorrigible of animals. She sat with her legs crossed, her back straight and her arms relaxed, sometimes raising a tiny finger for emphasis. Her speech was rapid, her eyes shone with mischief and intelligence; she was all brightness, merriment, and vivacity. Her sister’s black eyes softened as she looked at the slender child with the wonderful strength of character and the rough, reptilian features. The little girl so enjoyed the attention and her own inventiveness that she ended the story prostrated with giggles. Even Miros smiled, and some of the old animation came back to his face as he put down his bowl and said: “A demon, your Kiami!”

When the child went out for more water, her older sister leaned forward and said in a tense whisper: “You’ve really come from the Night Market?”

“Yes,” said Miros.

“The one where so many were killed?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” the girl said bitterly. “That is Olondria these days.”

All at once her mother broke in softly: “We have no men anymore. Ours is a house without windows. He is the last.”

She was pointing her soiled spoon at the grandfather. Her intent gaze, and the strange way she had blurted out the words, cast a pall over the room.

“Yes, Mama,” her daughter answered soothingly. “They know.” She turned to us. “An accident,” she explained. “A part of the house fell on my brothers and killed them, both of them. And my father died before them, of an ague.”

“
Bamai
,” Miros whispered—
Bamanan ai
, “May it go out,” the old Olondrian charm against misfortune.

“Oh, it’s already gone out.” The girl smiled, rising to collect the dishes. “Evil’s gone through this house. We’re safe now. Nothing else can happen to us.”