A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (32 page)

“You have to go home,” she said.

“Not now. Not yet.”

“Soon,” she whispered. A chilling sound, a brush against my third vertebra.

Rain pattered on the window, touched with light. I could hear Miros downstairs, singing, hacking up furniture for the fire.

“You have to go home,” she repeated, “and so do I. When the time comes, you will release me. I’ve told my
anadnedet
. I’m tired of the ghost-land. Old.”

She hovered by the lamp. It was true, she had grown old. A century of living in her eyes.

“Please, Jevick. It is the last thing.”

A movement below in the garden. I froze.

“It’s here, isn’t it,” I whispered, staring. “The body.”

Her tears like springtime over the great plateau.

I leaned to the window. Auram, High Priest of Avalei, was coming up the path.

Book Six

Southward

C
hapter Nineteen

Bonfire

But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

Nothing could have prepared me for the silence that was to follow. Had I been told of it, I would not have believed. Such silences, such griefs, no one can predict them, they come like the first red gleams of
kyitna
, unimaginable until they are suddenly there.

The morning was bright and still. A few white clouds hung on the edge of the sky, a frail scaffolding of mist above the hills. Snow lay in the cracked bowls of the fountains, but already the trees cast denser shadows, bristling with tentative leaves. I swept a space in the orchard clear of snow, built up a heap of broken chairs, and placed on them the pink box Auram had brought with him: a wooden confection adorned with carved rosettes in which the bones of my love had been folded and put away like a musical instrument. The sound of something shifting inside the box knocked at my heart; my hands were sweating, and when I had positioned the coffin I wiped them on my coat. The house observed me, silent. Miros and Auram were there, but no one looked out; they had left me to complete this ritual alone.

I am the last thing you will see, I said in my heart. I am the last, I have carried you in my arms, I have brought you home.

“This is Jissavet of Kiem,” I said aloud, my voice taut and strange. “And we release her into the Isle of Abundance.”

I crouched beside the pyre and touched it with the flame of an oil lamp, now on the left, now on the right, north and south. At first it would not burn. Black feathers of smoke curled around the delicate pink of the box, and I gritted my teeth, impatient now for a conflagration. An annihilating transcendence like the death that lovers feel. She was waiting for it, glowing with absolute desire, and her desire made a desolation of the garden, turned the sparkling trees to ash, blackened the marble of the fountains. The books that held her
anadnedet
were stacked nearby on the ground. If the book was her
jut,
then let it go with her. Let it burn, as we burned
janut
in the islands. “Burn, burn,” I whispered. “Burn, scorch this garden, flicker in tongues. . . .”

The smoke increased in density: it rolled on the wind, stinging my eyes, smelling of dust, dark libraries, burning cloth. Then a low glimmer, faintly orange in the sun. I tossed my little lamp on the pyre, and the oil hissed up in a ribbon of light.

A startling crack as the wood split. The odor of burning varnish, sparks of livid blue and green along the box. The gilded roses blackening. More loud cracks, making me start. The paint destroyed, flaring up, turning to soot. And then the flames, eager, crackling, devouring. Tears poured down my face. The flames were eating their way to the heart of the box. What was left there, Jissavet, my love. Your broken, delicate bones. Fragile fingers, ankles like cowrie shells. And a ball of hair, perhaps that ball of flame which burst up suddenly like a star, with a coarse, tragic, appalling odor. Other odors were there, despoiling the freshness of the day: something like resin, spices, a tainted revolting sweetness. I covered my eyes with my hands and sobbed, sitting on the ground, one hand pressed on that sad collection of volumes spotted with ink like blood. She’s going, I thought in panic. And she was. She lifted away from my heart, tearing it as she vaulted into the sky. Her foot snagged in my veins, ripping away, floating free. She was climbing that dark and trembling ladder of smoke. “Jissavet!” I cried. I snatched up the books and held them to my chest, unable to burn them now, gazing up at the sky. There, where the smoke was fading. Where the sky was the purest, most tranquil blue. Where she had gone alone, no
jut
to take her hand. Lighter than snow or ashes. Where she had entered at last the eternal door, leaving me inconsolable in the silence.

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It’s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it’s merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

C
hapter Twenty

The Sound of the World

When the pyre was a tent of smoke, I walked away.

I walked through the prince’s gate and far out over the vastness of the plain. There was no angel to keep me from losing my way. But there was a signal behind me, a smudge of darkness rising to the sky. And at dusk, I knew, there would be a glimmer of light. I walked with my hands in my pockets, listening to my footsteps and my breath. This is the sound of the world. When I turned back at last, the prince’s house stood outlined against the bounty of the stars.

Candles burned in the dining room. Great swaths had been cleared in the dust that covered the table. When I entered, Auram rose, throwing back his cape. He bowed, then raised his head again, triumphant and austere. A ghostly bandage glimmered on his wrist.

“
Avneayni
,” he said.

Miros, seated beside him, rose.

“Surely I no longer deserve that title,” I said.

“You will deserve it always, my friend!” said Auram. “But come, sit. There is wine, and my manservant has prepared a meal.”

I glanced at Miros.

“Not me!” he said with a hard smile, raising his hands. “I’ve changed professions. I’m going into the army.”

“The army,” I said. For a moment I was lost; then I recalled the words of his delirium, his dream of the secret army of the prince.

“Come,” Auram invited me, extending his good hand. And for the first time I noticed the papers on the table. Bainish newspapers. I walked over and touched the cheap stuff darkened with print, and the ink clung to my fingers like moth dust. At first I could not make sense of the letters: they were too bold, too contrastive, too crude after weeks of the gracefully written books in the library. Then they sprang into meaning like a mosaic seen from a distance, and I sat and huddled over them with Miros.

We read of the Night Market. There were reports of the fire, of the Guard’s attack on unarmed
huvyalhi
, of the trampled corpses. There was a report of an
avneanyi
, denied in the next issue of the paper, then revived the following week. I read: “The hand of the Priest of the Stone, too long gripping the fair throat of the Valley.” I read: “The freedom to worship.” I read: “Shame.” There were pages of angry letters, so fierce the paper seemed hot to the touch. It was clear that the winds had turned against the Priest of the Stone.

I looked up. Auram sat jewel-like in his impenetrable disguise, glowing from the exotic stimulant of the Sea-Kings. He smiled. “You see,
avneanyi
, you have given the prince and his allies what they most desire.”

“What is that?” I asked, suddenly fearful.

“War.”

Miros leaned over the papers, absorbed. The fire hissed, sending up sparks.

“War,” I said.

“Yes,
avneanyi
. A war for the Goddess Avalei. A war of revenge, for those who perished in the Night Market, for the
feredhai
, for all of Olondria’s poor and conquered peoples.”

He lifted his head proudly. Now Miros was looking at him too. “The Priest of the Stone has ruled Olondria too long,” Auram said. “Our people can no longer bear it. They cannot bear, anymore, to be kept from all unwritten forms of the spirit.”

An edge came into his voice. “It will be a great war,
avneanyi
. You ought to stay for it. To see the libraries fall.”

My heart shrank. “Must they fall?”

He shrugged, his eyes an impersonal glitter. “What can be saved will be saved. We are not criminals, but the protectors of those without strength.”

“Those without strength,” I repeated. My blood ran hot; I stood. I could have struck his face there in that funereal dining room. I could have seized the back of his head and brought that beautiful, bloodless mask down again and again on the oaken table. I could have torn down the portraits on the walls, where the prince’s accursed ancestors smirked through the dust with overfed red lips. “But you caused this.
You
. You knew the Guard would come to the Night Market. You set a trap with those you claim to serve. And with me.”

“I did,” he answered calmly.

“Jevick,” Miros murmured, rising and touching my arm.

“I did,” said Auram, piercing me with his knife-point eyes. “I did. I am not ashamed. You do not know, perhaps, of the schoolchildren of Wein, who were attacked by the Guard nearly fifteen years ago.”

“I do know of them,” I said, shaking with anger.

He opened and closed his mouth, off balance for a moment. Then he said: “Well. If you know, then you know that those children were never avenged. No one was punished for their deaths. That is the leadership of this butcher, the Priest of the Stone. And I will not have it.”

His narrow chest moved under his brocade tunic; his eyes were horribly steady, holding rage as a cup holds poison. “I will not have it. Now all Olondria knows the truth. The Night Market showed them. I bleed for those who fell there, but not more than I bleed for the schoolchildren of Wein. Not more than I bleed for the province where we now sit, occupied and mutilated for a hundred years, not more than I bleed for Avalei’s people, the
huvyalhi
of the Valley. And do not forget that I risked my own life to start the war that will save them. And yours,” he added before I could remind him. “And yours.”

I sat down and put my head in my hands. I heard the shifting of Miros’s chair as he sat, the susurration of the newspapers. I raised my head and looked at him. “And you agree with this, Miros.”

His face was stubborn, though his voice shook as he said: “I am Avalei’s man.”

I stood up again. I walked around the table. My body would not be still. Firelight glimmered on the empurpled walls. I spun to face the priest. “But the libraries, Auram—you need them too! Leiya Tevorova’s book,
The Handbook of Mercies
—you saved it from the Priest of the Stone! If the libraries burn—”

“Yes,” he said. “Much that we love will be lost. But the memories of Avalei’s people, as you know, are long. And the choice that faces Olondria now is a simple one: Cold parchment or living flesh? And I have made my choice.”

I shook my head. “That is no choice. No choice one should have to make.”

“I agree. But it was forced upon us the moment the Telkan sided with the Priest of the Stone. The moment Olondria chose the book over the voice. Now we must balance the scales.”

“The price is too high.”

He smiled. “Come. Let me tell you a story.”

I shook my head again. My lips trembled. “No more of your stories.”

His smile grew softer, more encouraging. He patted the chair beside him. “Come, one more. A story about a price. You will not know it, for it is very seldom told. The tale of Naimar, that beautiful youth . . .”

The story bloomed inside him, inhabiting his body, a kind of radiance. I saw that nothing would stop him from telling it. All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

“Naimar was raised in a palace in a wood,” he began in his throaty voice, “the only child of his father’s only love. His mother had died in birthing him; the palace was dedicated to her, and it was called the Palace of Little Drops. Those drops were the tears she shed on the newborn brow of her only child, when she held him in the instant before her death. The boy was raised among mournful paintings and images of her: the statues in the garden all bore her likeness. Sculptors had fashioned her sitting, weaving, walking, leading her favorite stallion, caressing the hoods of her beloved hawks. The child was strikingly like her, with his wide eyes and parted lips, his black hair and the anemones in his cheeks! And because of this he came to brood over her, and over death—for he was soon the same age as the lady in the garden.”

Slowly I walked around the edge of the table, returned to my chair between Auram and Miros. The priest turned to keep his eyes on me as he spoke. “Then the world lost its savor for him,” he went on with a sigh, “and he found no delight in it, neither in hunting, wine, music nor concubines. . . . His father despaired of pleasing him, and Naimar wandered in the woods, wild and woolly haired, and of savage aspect. One day he went to bathe in a stream, and as he was bathing there a Lady appeared to him, clad in saffron-colored robes and beautiful as a rose. ‘O youth,’ said she, ‘stand up from the water, that I might see thee plain, for I am already half in love with thee.’ ‘Nay,’ said the boy, ‘what wilt thou give me?’ ‘What is thy desire?’ said she. And he said: ‘To escape death, to become immortal!’

“Then the Lady smiled and said, ‘That is easily granted.’ And he stood, and the water fell from him in streams. And the Lady admired him greatly, and a blush spread over her cheek; but Naimar said: ‘Now grant that which thou promised.’ ‘Willingly,’ said the Lady. And she plucked a handful of lilies which were growing by the stream, and took the bulbs, and washed them in the water, and she bade the boy to eat them. And taking them in both hands, he did so.

“‘Will I become immortal?’ he asked. ‘Surely thou wilt,’ she said. And as she spoke, the boy cried out, and fell; and the Lady, who was Avalei, looked down at the beautiful corpse that lay on the bank and smiled. ‘Thou art immortal,’ she said.”

In the aftermath of this virulent tale I looked at the priest, aghast. And his red lips parted in his most childlike smile. I sat up straighter, pushed my chair back and turned from the priest to Miros as I spoke, so that both of them could see my face.

“I will tell you the truth,” I said, “and if you think me a wiser man than you, and you listen to me, so be it, and if you do not, so be it. Your prince will be a tyrant. He will not hesitate to burn libraries or palaces or
radhui
. He will set Olondria aflame.”

Auram inclined his head slightly, a gesture of acceptance. “You may be right. But he will save a future, a way of life. For those who cannot read, he will save the world.”

I knew it was true. A certain world would be saved, but it would no longer contain the Olondria I knew.

No more battles, I thought, no more arguments. I held out my hand to the priest, and he placed his own inside it, white driftwood barnacled with rings. So frail, so cold, with a bandage on the wrist.

His dark eyes questioned me. “Forgiveness?” he said.

“No,” I answered. “Farewell.”

A night of desert stars and silence, poignant as a breath. I sat on the bed and watched the open window. No angel tore the air. The sky was motionless, complete above the sleeping mountains, seamless as a glass. I did not close my eyes, because when I did I saw Miros screaming in battle, blood-streaked mares, Olondria on a pyre. I saw war come, and I saw myself far away, in a courtyard of yellow stone, with no one to bring me messages from the dead.

The heavens turned. A dark blue glow came to dwell on the windowsill. Slowly the shapes in the room emerged from the dark as if rising from the sea. There was the mantelpiece, there the door. There was the wrought-iron table and the stack of books that held the
anadnedet
. And there was my satchel, rescued by the priest, with all my books inside:
Olondrian Lyrics
, the
Romance of the Valley
. The record book where I had scribbled my agony in Bain. And the packets of Tialon’s letters, heavy as two stones.

He had brought them for me. When his Tavrouni allies had killed the soldiers in Klah-ne-Wiy, he had had the presence of mind to collect my things, this precious satchel and the angel’s body, and he had hired a servant and suffered his broken wrist to be tied in place by a local doctor. A group of soldiers met him when he came out of the little mud clinic. Auram smiled at them, his disdain as gray and icy as the sky. They took him to Ur-Amakir, the nearest city, where he was to be tried for treason and the murder of the soldiers. He would be very glad to oblige, he said. News of the Night Market had reached the city; crowds gathered chanting outside the jail where he was held. Realizing that his oration in court might spark riots, the Duke of Ur-Amakir accepted his claim of innocent self-defense and released him.

And he came to Sarenha-Haladli with the body, as he had promised. He was, after all, a man of honor.

I stood. My bones ached with a sorrow older than myself. I went to the table and put my hand on a book to feel something solid. It was
Lantern Tales
, in which Jissavet’s words murmured like doves. I remembered her telling me:
I know what the
vallon
is
.
It’s
jut. Now she had helped start a war in a far country to liberate those who could not read, the
hotun
of Olondria. I wondered, for an unguarded moment, what she would have said. But I knew that this was not her war. Nor was it mine.

I packed the books, put on my boots, and set the strap of the satchel on my shoulder. There was already enough light to see the steps. Downstairs in the dining room, where the shadows of the rose trees streaked the windows, Auram’s Evmeni manservant was boiling coffee. Soon Miros came in, supporting the arm of the hooded priest with a new tenderness, a reverence. We sat together in the lightening air. The servant gave me a glass of coffee clouded with white steam. Its flavor was earthy, stinging, coarse: the taste of Tyom.

Difficult, difficult, difficult!

Difficult to carry these blankets

and these curds, threads, skins and splendors

into the Land of Red Sheep.

Maskiha spinning your wool,

spin the sun into blankets for me.

For all night I am lying alone now,

in the shade of invisible spikenards.

I go to where the water is sweet,

and the peaches are of carnelian.

Someone tell me why my road

is eternally strewn with ashes.

And why in the doorways of the sky

there are girls whose palms are rivers of milk,

bursting, flowing, dissolving like snowflakes

over the Land of Red Sheep.

Miros sang as we traveled in the priest’s carriage along the cart-tracks, the country altering slowly, kindling with the sparkle of orchards in flower. Soon the track grew wide and level and bordered with fragments of brick, and there were more sheep and fewer cattle in the fields. Far away to the south waved the blue fringes of a forest. Birds filled the air, geese and swans flocking around the reservoirs. Honeysuckle drowned the balustrades of the country houses, and bildiri villages smoked in clouds of alabaster dust.