The Ordinary (31 page)

When Erinthal sickened, nearing 220 years of age, he chose Last Cup rites, and invited Malin to give him the cup. This meant she had to oversee the rest, the removal of his life protections and the stripping away of every layer of his control of his own pain, so that he could feel his illness, a twisting tumor of the bowel, for a full ten days before the Cup. She had moved her court to her house Carathon in East Kellyxa, south of Montajhena but close enough that she could maintain her ears and eyes in the capital. Erinthal lay in a tower apartment with a view of gardens and a pond, with spring breezes beginning, shoots showing in the branches of the trees, tender new growth.

She stayed by his side during his days of pain, delegating or delaying her business elsewhere. He had lost weight even under the care of the best doctors among the Prin, and once his protections were lifted, he lost his appetite and grew more gaunt. He sat against cushions, propped against the elegant Viryan frame-carving that served as headboard of his bed, a wooden army of beasts at his shoulders. Against the splendor of the carving and the intricately embroidered pillows, he breathed shallowly, a sack of bones in skin as fine as tissue.

As he weakened, his voice grew thin, and she knew his end was close even without Last Cup. He had rarely been found at a loss for words and still enjoyed a joke, particularly an insult, when he could make one, and when he could, she knew he was still fully conscious, truly present. This morning, after his tea, he asked, “What have you chosen?”

“For the cup? Bootberry and bloz. I want you to shit yourself to death.” She spoke in a matter-of-fact way. He dribbled tea down his chin and shook his bony shoulders as he laughed, hardly making a sound. His dark skin had lost its color, grayed.

When he could speak, he said, hoarsely, “You're an evil woman.”

“I'm certain there are many people who agree with you.”

His eyes were rheumy, thick with mucous at the lids. Dreamy, hardly seeing anymore. “The only thing I hate about you is that you'll still be here when I'm gone.” He spoke the words with some effort, reaching his frail hand to her arm. “There's nothing else to hate.”

She stroked his hair, which felt as if it were dissolving in her palms. “I'm giving you acht,” she said. “The poison the Svyssn make.”

He nodded at her choice. When he fell quiet again, staring dreamily at the window in front of him, she felt her heart sinking. She had grown so attached to Erinthal. She would feel the loss deeply.

“Such an old man,” he said, gloating. “People live such a long time these days.”

“Truly.” Malin was sponging his forehead with cool water and a soft cloth. “Prin medicine is making so many advances. Along with all those new science people.”

“Your uncle changed the sky and that changed everything,” Erinthal said. His voice was dreamy, almost detached. “A sky that runs like a clock. A world that runs like the sky. We like that.”

“You've never been philosophical, Erinthal,” Malin said, touching his dry, sunken cheeks. “Don't start now, you'll strain something.”

“Even I'm entitled to claim to have learned a few things,” Erinthal answered, and then sat silent, holding her hand loosely in his weak fingers, the nails yellowed and brittle but beautifully tended. “We've done a lot of good things since he disappeared. Since Irion disappeared. He'll be pleased, if he ever comes back.”

“Yes, I imagine he will.”

He was studying her fondly now, and for a moment she could have believed the evidence of their bodies, could have believed herself the younger and Erinthal the aged, wizened one. “You're the one who has to pay for all this, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?”

A moment of pain stilled him, and she waited till he could speak again. His eyes had gone glassy, he had become more distant in that moment. “You don't get to leave,” he said. “You have to stay here for God knows how long. I see what that would be like, now.”

She found she had no answer, and simply sat beside him, patting his hand. He looked her in the eye and shook his head. “You know why I asked you to give me the cup, don't you?”

“To torment me.”

“To make you feel it when I go.” He closed his eyes, such a heavy, sluggish motion, as if no power on earth could have held the lids open. “To make you feel it for certain. To make you feel sad again.”

She said, after a while, “Thank you.”

He was smiling, relaxed against his bed pillows, impossible to tell whether he heard. Soon he drifted to sleep, and she stood by the windows for a while, looking down at the work in the gardens, the autumn planting, fresh mulch going down, pruning and cleaning. She was out of kei-state but her senses felt almost as acute as if she were in a choir doing chant. The smell of camphor from a cloth Erinthal used to ease his breathing a bit. The scent of turned earth from below, the dim hint of her own sweat. She felt heavy, rooted to the spot, and looked at Erinthal in the bed, slight and nearly hidden in the bedclothes. What a miraculous creature, she thought, which only made the loss of him all the more acute. She would give him a cup of acht and he would vanish from the world, from all of time from here on out, irrevocably. She no longer thought of death in terms of crossing the mountains. She no longer believed in Zan.

She and Erinthal had been friends, never lovers. How then could the connection feel so strong?

She walked in Old House, the part of Carathon she liked best, which was open to the public in the summer season, an old dwelling of Edenna Morthul's from ancient times. Stones too old to think about. A stone house should stand as long as a mountain, or so say the Tervan. Old House had that kind of feeling. One crossed a garden to a threshold of delicately carved stone, something like lace, and then a vault opened overhead and one walked into an entry court, facing a broad stone stairway. The stone had an airy lightness, though one could see how the steps had worn on the stairway, the edges of the carved balustrade softened with time. Malin had tried to live in these rooms once and found them too inconvenient; the house had no proper plumbing in it, and no floor furnace or other innovations. Most of the furniture was of a type ages out of use, though at the same time nobody could be certain it was anything like the stuff Edenna herself had used; the house had belonged to the House of Imhonyy, a rarely used place under the King, granted to Malin by her uncle. Sometimes she thought it haunted. Today it felt merely peaceful and still.

Edenna's rooms occupied most of the second floor, including a library with a vault in which Malin kept her copy of the King's book during that era. She called for the book and sat with it, touching the wood of the case. She had a feeling, a kind of seeing, which had never come to her before, that someone was calling her. Years too long to count since she had heard from her uncle, closed away in the perpetual clouds of Cunevadrim, learning how to make time run the wrong way. But she would hear from him soon.

On the day of Last Cup, she sat at Erinthal's pillow and held the cup to his lips. He smiled at her with watery eyes and drained the cup. “Good-bye,” he said, and died.

“Good-bye,” she said, and felt a choking fill her, a rage. She closed his eyes. She signaled to the attendants in the room. Two Prin began the Long Chant, Irinhalii, the song for the dead. She lit a candle scented with jasmine and placed it near his head.

As she walked out of the room to let the body-tenders start to prepare him for burning, she felt a heaviness that could not be transcended in any of the ways she knew. She shut herself in her apartments and gave way. She could not have counted the years since she last cried; the grief felt unbearable, as if it were a cave collapsing around her, as if the next second would bring only darkness.

In the evening she drank a good deal and slept. At dawn the next day, the tenders burned his body, and she watched the fire and waited. His smoke trailed upward into nothing. Wind carried the smell away; she spared herself that much. The tenders sang “Crossing the Mountain.” She planted his ashes into the soil around a new tree in the garden, the one she could see from her own windows.

A few days later a messenger presented himself, carrying a letter signed by her uncle and sealed with a ring she knew. The messenger was a fellow from the Onge Forest, a Cardlander, who had been hired by a lord's people to bring the letter, or so he claimed. The letter was signed simply “Karns,” which was short for “Thief of Karns,” one of Uncle's names, the one he used for private correspondence with Malin. “My dear, the time has come for us to talk again, though you will not find me where you expect. I am in Chalianthrothe. I don't believe you have ever been here but you should be able to find the way. I will know when you are coming and my people will find you and guide you into the mountains.”

The paper was of a fine texture, the writing unquestionably Uncle Jessex's, the ink at times muted and at times bold, in the most elegant of styles. She felt frightened and calm at the same time, holding the solid page in her hand: frightened at the thought that he had finished some large stage of the work he described, calm because for the first time since Erinthal died, she had shed the feeling that the world was closing in on her.

Before she left for Cardland and Chalianthrothe, she arranged a choir of a hundred Prin to sing a major seeing-chorus, with her own voice in the pivot. The choir gathered in the Hall of Swallows in the old palace in Montajhena, a room in which she had sung less often than she wished, as she remembered again on this occasion. The hall was oddly rounded, without corners, with baffles and careful treatments on the walls to enhance acoustics. A very old room but one that was kept up to date; its hangings and furnishings quite modern, in the plainer style, the wooden pews straight-backed, clean lines, crisply polished. As the Prin began to sing, the firsts and seconds took up the low line, the sopranos and tenors mixing their harmonies and dissonances, the linguists chanting, and Malin joining with the central ten singers, herself the eleventh, in leading the vocalists through a preparatory high song and then the seeing-chant that would allow Malin to take a look at the real word, beyond the world of substance.

She chose Chafii Makraen, “The Hunter Makes the Mountain,” and allowed the feeling of the kei-space, the word-space, to engulf her.

She meant to study her uncle as best she could, and without his knowing he was being inspected, if she could manage that much. She had succeeded in doing so before, or had no reason to believe otherwise. This required that she move so completely into her consciousness of the present moment that it slowed to nothing, and that she make use of the music of the choir, the part that she could hear with her ears and the part she could feel in the kei, the part that reshaped her senses. For her, these moments were blanks from which she emerged with a kind of knowledge that grew distinct in the same way that a photograph became distinct as it developed. Whatever seeing she performed in that impossibly dense moment of consciousness emerged as she herself emerged from that state. She returned to the seeing-state and emerged from it again and again. A series of images formed over moments, that she could then contemplate.

She saw him in three places. Her uncle's presence was distinct and could not be mistaken for anyone or anything else. Over Inniscaudra he remained, even though he was supposed to have left the Winter House a long time ago; he had gone to Cunevadrim, where she could also see him clearly; and he was also east of her in the Onge Forest, beyond Cardland into the mountains.

Before there had been two of him but now, with the letter to back up what she saw from the vantage of the choir, she understood him to be three. This newest patch of him wanted to talk to her, had sent for her, with a letter unmistakably his own. So when the choir was done, when the voices moved on to other work, she left the pivot with what she had seen in the chant still forming itself in her head.

She called for her new Marshall of the Ordinary, Hegra, and had him begin to organize a traveling party to Chalianthrothe, an old estate in the eastern mountains that had belonged to Jurel Durassa and passed from him to the King in later days. She had heard of the place and sent to the library for books to study what she could during the evening; Hegra needed maps as well.

Nothing could happen quickly in her life; after some days of meetings with people in her government, after detailed preparations by the Marshall and his staff, after she had read a historical study of the various owners of Chalianthrothe along with carefully detailed sketches examining the architecture, after she had endured days of preparing people in Montajhena for her absence, she detached herself from the city with a small army of two hundred retainers, including two tens of Prin. The party traveled south and stopped at hamlets and small towns along the way, some of them very old places, like Karsk, but the majority younger than Malin herself, the product of a world that had begun to change more rapidly. They traveled along the western edge of the Onge, where the new road was being constructed, a mess of mud and Tervan machinery, a gash in the countryside. The old road traced its way into the Onge, and that was where Malin headed.

She rode in a carriage as long as she could, switching to horseback east of the river. Most evenings she settled into an inn or a lodge; occasionally the party spread tents in the old way, though Malin herself found tent living to be uncomfortable and avoided it wherever possible. Each evening she dealt with the messengers who had reached her during the day, pouches full of business to which she attended in the evenings, added to the time she spent with the other Prin, in chant. Now and then she would expect to turn and find Erinthal, and his absence, so persistent, would shock her.

Uncle's people found her when she crossed the river, a trio of riders, two women in leather britches and close-fitting jackets with Uncle's house marks on the sleeves, and a third, a young Anin man who introduced himself as Arvith Indrone. Speaking both his names in the modern fashion, when in the old days nobody except the most honored people had two names. “I'm new in your uncle's service,” Arvith said. He looked impossibly fresh and young, coming up to near Malin's ribs, thickset, eyes black as midnight. He was giving her the freshest looks, as if her age hardly separated them, as if he already knew her. She bristled a bit.