The Glass Mountains (12 page)

“Well, what about the war?” said my uncle. “Give us some news, man.”
 

“What about it? The Formans wiped out many villages. They’re trying to reach the hotlands through diplomatic channels. Their diplomats flatter the Soom Kali with new gifts and brilliant new compliments. But we’re safe here. The Soom Kali are too smart to want the Formans as neighbors.”
 

“Hey, hayseed,” said the person who’d insulted me. “Take a bath and come back, I may need a servant.” Tarkahn mumbled, perhaps in reply.
 

“What will happen?” said my uncle.
 

“The Formans are marching through all of Bakshami, destroying villages until the elders give themselves up and come to Forma with their riches.”
 

“Then this is about riches.”
 

“It’s about a thousand years’ worth of accumulated riches, and about servants for the Formans.”
 

“Bakshami should make good servants,” said the insulter. He pronounced it “backshammee” instead of “bahkshahmee.” “They’re hard workers and they don’t like a fight.”
 

The man with the soft voice smiled at us. “Talk to Lokahn.”
 

Tarkahn’s mumbling sounded insane, and he began wrinkling his nose, clearing his throat, twitching his eyebrows, and blowing out his cheeks as he talked. The insulting man looked at Tarkahn and shook his head sadly, as if there were just no hope for Bakshami.
 

Before we left I turned to the man with the soft voice. “Excuse me, sir, why do you work here?”
 

“Every generation of my family all through history has worked here. I’ve never been outside the hotlands. Where else should I work? I’m serving my sector here.” How provincial, I thought, until I realized that before the war I’d traveled little myself, and probably never would have moved from my village in my lifetime, just as my parents had never moved.
 

We walked across to Lokahn’s, where a man groaned when he saw us and said, “What, more? Bevia! Bevia. More refugees.” He walked off mumbling, “Why must I be in charge of them?”
 

Lokahn, like the soft-spoken man, didn’t act like any Bakshami I’d ever seen. For one thing, both of them had shaved their heads though neither were rebels. And when Lokahn’s wife appeared, she, too, had shaved her head. She swept brusquely into the room and because she looked forceful and solid, when she stood on a table her presence hushed us all. “Sit down and listen, we haven’t all day. Here’s the arrangement we’ve made. The elders will give you all the jewels you can carry, and you can try to get out of Bakshami to resettle in another sector. If you wish to stay here, you must help dig wells. The elders claim there are great reserves of water if you dig deep enough, even here in the molten center of the planet. Oh, save us all from destruction, you’re covered in fleas! Get to the baths now, all of you, before you infest my saloon.” She pointed toward the back of the saloon, and we went through some doors to a hot spring, where we bathed with our dogs until our skin wrinkled and the water grew thick with fleas. The dirt and old skin fell off my body in chunks. In the drying-off room I saw my reflection for the first time since we’d left my village. My face, formerly round, now formed an oval, and my eyes, formerly gray-black, had turned pure black like Maruk’s. They were also dull from months of hunger and fatigue. My skin no longer shone as it once had, and my limbs were lean and muscular, like the limbs of Maruk’s wife had been. I was scarcely younger than Maruk had been when we left the village.
 

After our baths Bevia started work in the saloon, and we wandered through the village. The village had come to life. Since the elders didn’t care if their patrons brought money or not, all manner of kings, politicians, robbers, and scum crowded the streets. The kings did bring jewels and money for the elders in case it bought better service, and the politicians pretended to have money or not, depending on how they perceived where the advantage lay. In the saloons, a robber might sit next to a king, and a moral man next to a woman who would slit your throat on a dare. All they shared was wanting advice from the elders. The elders never turned anyone away without giving them as many answers as they wanted to as many questions as they had. As a result some people got addicted to knowing all the trivia of their futures, staying for years asking ever more trifling questions.
 

I even met one lady who’d once spoken to my grandfather Samarr years earlier.
 

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked.
 

“I have so many questions,” she said. “Sometimes I think there isn’t enough time to have them all answered.” She glanced up at the sun. “In fact, I have an appointment with an elder now.” She rushed away.
 

Another day I saw a lady who moved across the sand as gracefully as a Bakshami. She’d covered her hair and half her face with veils, and an entourage attended to all her needs. Lokahn said she’d served as queen of a tiny monarchy I’d never heard of. Her husband had gone off to war with another tiny monarchy nearby and hadn’t returned. So she’d traveled to the hotlands to ask the elders what had become of her king. At first they all refused to answer her question, but finally an old woman told her that her husband had returned from war not long after she’d set out for Bakshami. Finding her gone, he’d waited and waited but then had fallen in love with a princess from an adjoining sector. So now the queen didn’t know where to go or what to do. She belonged nowhere. She wandered around from saloon to saloon covered in veils.
 

That night as I lay in a bed of the softest fur I’d ever felt, I looked out the window at the stars glistening with such clarity off the mountains that they seemed to inhabit the glass rather than hang in the sky; and I thought about how, way beyond those mountains, a queen had walked for longer than any of us to learn her husband’s fate. And about how even now, despite the war, more robbers and graceful queens, more politicians and ambitious scum, were embarking on the journey to the hotlands, pulled here by the elders as the people of my village had been. And I decided that had I been the veiled queen and had I loved my king, I would have done the same thing she did. I wondered whether the people of my village had made a similar mistake by coming here. But before falling asleep I saw the beauty of the stars shining through the swirls of dust above the village, and when I woke up I saw the sun shining through the Glass Mountains. Despite this beauty, or because of it, my heart filled with pain, and I wished Maruk could be lying there next to me, so that I could stroke his beautiful face as he dreamed happily of wars and knives and a violent world I could not even imagine.

3

Later that week, after we’d rested up and feasted every night, sucking the marrow out of fresh furrto bones and eating dried fruit for dessert each night, Tarkahn called a meeting. We met in Lokahn’s saloon, deserted because it was still morning. Some of our stomachs had grown as large as a pregnant woman’s because of our overeating, and I myself never went anywhere without bones and fruit stuck in my pockets. Tarkahn said, “Now I don’t know quite how to say this, because I love you all like I love my wife, which of course is not strictly true since I know my wife much better and we have a much deeper and more complicated love than I’ll ever know with any of you, but nevertheless I do love you all, but that isn’t the point, or rather it’s only part of the point...” My head spun over his words, and when I recovered from my spin I found myself craving food.
 

“...and in conclusion I want to suggest that perhaps it’s time for each of us to go our separate ways, since after all our numbers are small and our needs varied, and since regardless of what you people decide, my wife and I have decided to stay here and start having babies, since the answer to all the deaths the Formans have caused is to have more babies...” His voice grew softer then, either because of emotion or so that others could interject their thoughts.
 

Ansmeea, now of age to make her own decisions, said, “I’ve decided to stay as well. As a matter of fact I’ve found work at one of the saloons.”
 

One by one, everyone, including Jobei, Leisha, and myself, stated a preference to stay. I felt certain my destiny lay in stuffing my mouth full each night, and sleeping soundly among the remaining people of my village.
 

Still, since we were there anyway, several of us decided to make appointments with the elders to get advice. The appointments secretary scheduled a morning appointment for Tarkahna and me to come together.
 

Sometimes patrons of the elders made an appointment and ended up with twelve or more spellbound elders explaining their fate; other times people made an appointment and ended up with just one seemingly indifferent elder.
 

The elders held appointments in a large, elegant building in the center of town, like the hub of wisdom surrounded by spokes made of saloons. The walls inside and out were pinkish rock. Outside the doorway stood worn statues of the mythological blue firebeast and the kind Soom Kali man who was the first settler of Bakshami. A crack ran through the torso of the firebeast, and the first settler’s nose was worn down to a small mound. A man outside the door waved booklets. “Catalogues of the elders! You name the price. Descriptions of all the elders and their specialties. Love! Money! Hate! There’s an elder to predict any aspect of your future. Power! Philosophy!”
 

Inside, about forty people sat, stood, or wandered around the waiting room. Some of them, including me, had brought their pets, and the room smelled faintly of dog. There were no chairs, so Tarkahna and I sat on the floor next to a nervous woman who kept rubbing and scratching her hands and a tranquil, almost sleepy man who stared straight ahead with a slight smile on his face.
 

“Have you come far?” I asked him.
 

“It’s been so long I’ve forgotten,” he said reflectively. “I arrived here a few weeks ago, but now I find I don’t care what the answers to my questions are. I just want to find out how I can get out of here by a simple route. But I can’t let any of these troubles bother me.” And he returned to his smiling.
 

The woman to my left was reading a list of what I assumed were questions, but they were written in a language I’d never seen. She appeared to have hundreds of questions.
 

Someone called our names: “Mariska Ba Mirada and Tarkahna Tarkahna.”
 

We got up and giggled as we followed the appointments secretary. He led us into a large room with several elders, but most of them were playing some game at a table. There were no pieces that I could see on the table, so I couldn’t be certain of the nature of the game that absorbed them. Every so often they would laugh. One old woman paced back and forth. We directed our questions to her.
 

“What is my future?” Tarkahna said.
 

“That question is too vague.”
 

“What will happen to me tomorrow?”
 

“That question is too specific.”
 

I spoke up. “I want to know what has become of my brother Maruk. And of my parents. Please try to be as specific as possible.”
 

“What?” the woman said. “You say you’re in love!”
 

“No, that’s not what I said at all. I said—”
 

“I heard you. But let me ask you something. Why must everyone ask me such questions, the same questions over and over, with the same answers? I don’t mean to offend you, young lady, because you seem very nice, I’m sure you’re quite upstanding. But I feel I’m asked over and over again to break people’s hearts. All manner of people, people you wouldn’t even believe had hearts, the lowest of the rabble that infests the earth with its violence and its selfishness comes in here, and lo and behold, these people have hearts. These sin-encrusted people have hearts! And they come in here asking me to break them. Why not ask me how you can find happiness? Why must everyone ask me how to find what is sad in their lives?”
 

“Those are my questions, please,” I said firmly.
 

“In Soom Kali with a young lady, tomorrow you will do nothing special, both in Forma, one half dead and one a slave, and some good and some bad.”
 

For a moment Tarkahna and I couldn’t get straight in our head which answer went with what question. “One half dead?” I finally murmured. “Can you be sure?”
 

“No,” she said simply.
 

“No?”
 

“No. This isn’t science, you see. But you can be certain that the happiness in their lives lies behind them now.”
 

“But what of the war my parents had hoped to end?”
 

“Haven’t you girls had enough answers for now?”
 

I felt angry. “We’ve walked a very long way, and with all due respect those others are sitting there playing some silly game.” The others looked at me with surprise. I needed to control myself so I wouldn’t yell at an elder. My parents would not have wanted that. But my efforts at control caused my arms to shake and my breath to catch in my throat.