A Stranger in Olondria

Chapter Thirteen Into the Valley

The boat slid swiftly through water and night to Ethendria, a city named for the “Lovely Palace” overlooking the sea. We arrived too early to land without drawing undue attention, and dropped anchor within sight of the city’s lights to await the dawn. The air was cold, the sea restless; the boat danced at the end of her tether like a foal. I breathed in great gulps of salt and darkness, and remembered buying a ticket to Ethendria long ago, in Bain. The memory lightened my heart: I was moving eastward at last, toward the angel’s body. My path was a knot, full of loops and barriers, but freedom lay at the end of it, I was sure. As if to confirm my choice, the angel had withdrawn. She was not far off—I felt her in my heart like a grain of poison—but she had not torn my nights apart since we had spoken in the Girdle of Avalei.

Auram appeared at my shoulder; the spark of my new confidence wavered and grew dim. “Avneanyi,” he said.

“I told you not to call me that.”

“Why not? It is what you are. But never mind now,” he went on smoothly, his voice smiling, his face a hollow in his cloak. The starlight caught his teeth.

“Tell me: are you well?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Excellent, excellent! You have a formidable constitution; or, like me, you are a cricket.”

“A cricket, veimaro?”

“A midnight creature; the foxes’ bard. All night he makes music, but by day he is oh! so tired!”

His hood tilted to one side; he might have been resting his cheek on his hand. I smiled without pleasure, thinking that he was extraordinarily like a cricket: his liveliness and neatness, his black eyes, the extreme fineness of his limbs, even the chirring of his voice.

“As it happens, I prefer the day,” I said.

“A pity. But you may change your mind before long—the night belongs to Avalei.”

“The night, perhaps. But not me.”

“Come, avneanyi.” A soft note of warning crept into his voice. “We must be friends if we are to succeed.”

He put his hand on my arm, each finger precise and delicate as a physician’s lance. His breath smelled faintly of rotting strawberries. “We shall travel light and swiftly. I have but a single trunk, and Miros, my nephew and valet, has been ordered to leave it behind if we are pursued.”

I recognized the name of the careless, engaging young man who had first brought me out of the Houses.

“Miros is here?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Listen. We’ll avoid inns where we can, at least until the village of Nuillen, at the eastern edge of the Valley, where we shall hold the Market. Is this clear?”

“Yes.”

“It may not keep the Telkan’s Guard from us. We are a rather conspicuous party—at least, you and I are easily marked. I say this without either humility or conceit, without wishing to flatter or condemn you. We must prepare to face dangers. We must expect to be found.”

The boat swayed under me, treacherous.

“What about your lady’s friends? What about her power? You said it would be easy.”

“And no doubt it will, it will,” he soothed me, stroking my arm, the edges of his nails catching in the embroidered jacket he’d given me.

I pulled my arm away. “Speak plainly. Will we be found or not?”

“I cast no bones,” he said, laughing. “The Oracle God has no reason to love me. I say that it will be easy, because I believe it. And I say we must expect to be found, because I believe this also.”

The sky had grown subtly lighter while we spoke; his hood was black against it. His hands showed white when he moved to fold his arms.

“And what happens if we are found?” I asked sharply.

“For you: the Gray Houses. Indefinitely. For me…”

He shrugged, his bright laughter a string of pearls. “I fear no dark place.”

Before dawn was full Auram disappeared under the deck, and like day trading places with night, Miros came up yawning and rubbing his eyes. He smiled when he saw me. “Good morning, avneanyi,” he said, awkward with the word, rubbing his hands on the sides of his plain linen tunic.

“Please call me by name.”

“Much better!” he said, visibly relieved. “What was it? Shevas?”

I laughed in spite of myself—shevas is Olondrian for “turnip.”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

“Right! I’ll leave your place name alone, if you don’t mind—too fine a note for my heavy tongue. But Jevick will do very well.”

He pronounced it “Shevick,” as my master had—as all Olondrians did, save Tialon, who had a musician’s ear. He took my arm and pulled me out of the way of the turning sail, and we leaned on the rails at the edge of the boat together and watched the city take shape. Miros did not resemble his uncle: where the priest was pale and black-haired, Miros had the brown curls and golden skin of the Laths, the people of the Valley. He had only recently joined his uncle’s service—to escape some trouble, I understood from his evasions and nervous fumbling with the pearl in his earlobe.

“I don’t know a thing about being a valet,” he added gloomily. “I only hope we get some hunting in the highlands. If I were home I could hunt in the Kelevain with my other uncles… But it’s my own fault. It’s always a mistake to leave one’s home.”

Recalling my own situation, he stammered: “I mean for me, for people like me, uneducated, suited for nothing but idleness…”

I laughed and told him he was right. “I ought to have stayed home myself,” I said. At the end of the sentence sorrow clenched my throat.

After a moment I managed: “But you’re with your uncle the priest, at any rate. You must admire him.”

Miros stared at me, half laughing and half aghast. He glanced about him, then bent to my ear and said in a heightened, roguish whisper like that of a stage villain: “Admire him! I hate him like the cramp.”

“Evmeni is Evmeni, Kestenya is Kestenya: but the Valley is Olondria.” Thus wrote Firdred of Bain, of the Fayaleith, or “Valley”; and his words seemed to breathe in the air that rushed to meet us at the whitewashed steps of the town. My skin tingled at its touch; my spirits rose. It was too great an effort to be unhappy that transparent morning, thrust from the Gray Houses into Ethendria, a town poised between the Valley and the sea, devoted to the manufacture of sweets, where the very plaster gives off a fragrance of almond paste. Miros dashed off to hire a carriage, leaving me under a tamarind tree with the priest, who sat silent on his traveling trunk with his hood pulled down to his lips; apparently unmoved by the glorious morning, he got into the carriage as soon as Miros returned, and closed the door with a bang.

“Is he all right?” I whispered to Miros.

“What? Him? Perfectly. Look at these beauties!”

Miros was in ecstasies over the elegant, milk-blue horses. He begged me to sit with him on the coachman’s box, and I agreed gladly enough. Once he had stowed his uncle’s trunk, we climbed onto the box and set off.

A small boy led his goats under chestnut trees by the canal. A merchant, framed by a window, frowned over his newspaper. A girl with a cart of wilted begonias for sale yawned ferociously and scratched herself underneath her slender arm. And then, suddenly, we were among the markets, the overpowering scent of mushrooms and the wild-looking peasants, the huvyalhi in robes and crude tin earrings, who rushed at the carriage, shouting and gesticulating, holding up lettuces, sausages, baskets of nettles, and wheels of salty cheese. Miros begged two droi from the priest and bought a cone of newspaper filled with tobacco. “Look!” he said, jabbing my ribs with an elbow. And there, gazing at us serenely and with a hint of mockery from among the onions, sat a beautiful peasant girl… In the country both men and women of the huvyalhi wear long straight robes, dark or faded to various shades of blue, belted with rope or leather, and the effect of this strangely provocative dress when worn by lovely women has been for centuries the subject of poetry. The soft cotton, when it is old, reveals the outlines of the body. “Little Leaf-Hands,” runs an old country song, “go to draw water again in your old robe, the one your sister wore before you, the one that follows your breasts like rain.” Miros raised a hand to the girl and she laughed behind her wrist. The carriage jolted forward, pulling through the crowd, the piled radishes, wild irises, hairy goatskins taut with new-pressed wine, and edible fungi like yellow lace. Then we passed the horse graveyard with its blue equine statues and the mausoleum where the dukes’ beloved chargers sleep; and then, cresting a little hill, we came upon the bosom of Olondria, undulant and dazed with light.

We were moving away from the sea. On our left hung high limestone cliffs, topped with turf and a few wind-blasted trees; on our right the country spilled like a bolt of silk unrolled in a market, like perfumed oil poured out in a flagrant gesture. The Ethendria Road, wide and well-kept, curved down into the Valley, into the shadow of cliffs and the redolence of wet herbs. The grape harvest was ended, and the country was filled with tumbled vines, rust-colored, mellowed with age, birdsong, and repose… Everything shone in that sumptuous light which is called “the breath of angels”: the hills flecked with the gold of the autumn crocus, the windy, bronze-limbed chestnut trees and the radhui, the peasant houses, sprawling structures topped with blackened chimneys. The trees and roofs stood out precisely against the purity of the sky whose vibrant blue was a unique gift of the autumn. The dust sparkled over the road, and its odor mixed with the wilder scents of smoke and grasses in the deep places of the fields.

In that lucent countryside, far from any inn, we stopped at a radhu. The priest, entombed in the carriage, seemed to feel no need for refreshment, but Miros and I were famished, having sustained ourselves since morning on white pears and figs bought along the road. “We’re sure to get something to eat here,” Miros said, guiding the horses along the grassy ruts made by a country cart. “Even if it’s only bais and cabbage. You’ve never had bais? It’s what people live on out here: bread made of chestnut flour.”

We approached the great, confused shape of the radhu among its luxuriant lemon trees, passing a garden of onions and cabbages, a number of broken wheelbarrows, a sullen donkey munching grass in the shade. Excited children tumbled out to greet us. “Watch the horses!” Miros bawled at the little boy and girl and the naked infant dawdling behind them. Their piercing cries accompanied us into a sort of open court, devoid of foliage, sun-baked, thick with dust.

We descended from the coach to the sound of rushing and slamming of doors within the lopsided stone structure facing us. In a moment a boy appeared with a clay pitcher of water, which he poured slowly over our grimy hands. This ceremony took place above the lip of a stone trough near the house, which spirited the water away to the garden. The boy worked with great concentration, breathing hard through his nose. He wore tarnished silver earrings shaped like little cows. Drops from our wet hands sprinkled the earth in that homely little court where blue cloth soaked in a scarred wooden basin, where chickens pecked at the roasted maize forgotten by the children in the shadow of the ivy-covered eaves. The tumbled front of the radhu offered a bewildering choice of entrances, arched doorways set at angles to one another: it looked as though a number of architects had disagreed on the plan of the house, each plunging into the work without consulting the others. Indeed, this was not far from the truth, for the radhu is a family project, expanding through the generations like a species of fungus. A stocky, bow-legged man appeared at the largest of the doorways and bowed, pressing the back of his right hand to his brow.

“Welcome, welcome!” he said, stepping out and holding his cracked hands over the trough to be washed by the silent boy. “Welcome, telmaron! You come from Huluethu, I think? From the young princes? It is an honor…”

“No, from Ethendria,” Miros said.

At this the old man’s face fell. He wiped his hands on the sides of his robe. “You are not wine merchants?”

“No, by the Rose!” Miros answered, shouting with laughter. “We serve a priest of Avalei. He’s resting in the carriage. He’ll come out when he’s ready. But we, I don’t mind telling you, are half starved.”

“Ah!” the old man said. His face lit up with a smile again, and he even chuckled as he explained: “I thought you were merchants for a moment—these wine sellers, they squeeze us to death—but Avalei!” He inclined his head and touched his brow. “Greatly is she to be praised. We love her in the Valley, telmaron. My own daughter wished to be one of her women, but the temple takes fewer novices these days…” He jerked his head over his shoulder and cleaned his ear with a thick finger. Then he welcomed us under the arch and into a huge old room, clearly the original room of the radhu, dominated by a blackened fireplace.

That great, smoke-stained room, its walls unrelieved by decoration, would have been gloomy and oppressive had it not been for a trapdoor in the flat roof, lying open to admit a wide flood of the limpid daylight. Beneath the trapdoor was a generous alcove or sleeping loft; several girls peered down from its edge with bright, laughing faces. The room below was furnished with two iron beds, a few straw chairs, and a wooden cabinet adorned with painted cherries.

The old man’s name was Kovyan. He spoke of the grape harvest, spitting into a tin spittoon with such force that the vessel spun in place. A young woman appeared in a dark doorway near the fireplace and called briefly to the girls in the loft. Two of them descended the ladder and skittered away through the doorway, whispering and giving us glances from their immense dark eyes. In a moment they returned with a round mat, laid it on the floor in the middle of the room, and set a stool on top of it. A delicious smell penetrated the air, sweet and hinting at pork fat, and I was embarrassed by the rumbling of my stomach—but Kovyan was overjoyed at this evidence of our hunger and slapped my knee with a gnarled hand as solid as a hammer.

The girls dragged in a wineskin, and Kovyan offered us cups of a powerful, spicy vintage called “The Wine of the White Bees.” As we drank, there came a sound of hurried commotion out in the court, and four young men rushed in with an anxious, expectant air. These were Kovyan’s sons and the sons of his sister: evidently a child had been dispatched to fetch them from the fields. They had washed hastily in the court, and their beards and long hair dripped with water that ran down to darken the shoulders of their robes. With the knives at their belts and the tin jewelry which reminded me of galley slaves, they presented a rough and even feral appearance; but all of their vigor went into making us welcome. Bows were exchanged and more chairs fetched from the recesses of the radhu. The “boys,” as Kovyan called them, made themselves comfortable on the squeaking iron beds, drinking straight from the wineskin because there were no more cups. Into this active, convivial atmosphere walked a pair of proud adolescents bearing a colossal bowl on their shoulders.

Miros, enlivened by wine, cheered and tapped his cup with his ring. He winked at me and whispered: “I told you they’d give us something!” The bearers of the bowl, a boy and girl, trembled under its weight as they lowered it to the stool in the middle of the room. Inside it steamed a splendid stew of pork, mulberries, and chestnuts. Eager children materialized from the darkness of the walls. Last of all came Kovyan’s sister, the matriarch of the household: a heavy woman with mocking eyes in a sun-weathered face.

Conversation flared in every corner of the large room, all the men, women, and children talking at once, but only Kovyan made no attempt to lower his excited voice, and so his talk rang out above that of the others. He urged us to visit Huluethu, the country estate to the north of the road, where the “young princes” enjoyed music and hunting. Huluethu was a hunter’s palace: venison smoked there every day, and the young men practiced swordplay on the flat roof. “Near the White River,” he said, and I asked him if it was the same White River mentioned in the Romance of the Valley.

“Is it in the Romance?” he asked, wide-eyed, and the family gathered around me as I took out my book and read:

“‘A river is there, which is paved with stars. Its surface is covered with almond blossom; it runs through the fields of my dream like a river of snow. The White River, it is called. It is upon the redness of poppy fields, upon the blueness of fields of lavender. Its water is sweet, and the nymphs who dwell in it are the friends of men. All day they sit on its banks, carding wool…” When I looked up, Kovyan tapped his cup in approval. His sister smiled over her coffee, licking her teeth to clean away the grounds.

The light grew etiolated, worn to threads. Kovyan stood and put a match to the little oil lamp on the cabinet. Only when it was dark and stars shone faintly through the skylight did the High Priest of Avalei walk into the room. He strode in without question, without deference, pushing back his hood, his eyes shining, and the huvyalhi went to him and kissed his hands, and the life that had begun to enter my veins died out like sap in a fallen tree, and I recalled the presence of death.

The priest sat, refusing wine and stew, taking only a glass of water, a piece of cheese. His terrible, loving gaze beamed about Kovyan’s house. “Why not a tale?” he said. “We have a stranger with us, an islander. Let us give him a Valley entertainment.”

“Grandmother, Grandmother,” the children cried.

Kovyan’s sister folded her hands, her eyes amused in the light of the oil lamp. “Very well,” she said. “Since our guest admires the Romance of the Valley, I will give him a tale from it.”

She shifted, her chair creaking. She cleared her throat. A child whimpered somewhere at the back of the room and was hushed back into silence. Then the woman told her tale in a voice both throaty and smooth, like new tussore, while a cat wailed at intervals from behind the wall.

People of the House, People of the House! This tale cannot turn anyone’s blood to water.

It is told of Finya the Sorcerer that, sick with illicit love, he journeyed into Evmeni to battle the pirates of the Sea-King; for the people of the archipelago were strong in those days, and proud in their strength, and harassed our people as far as the plains of Madh. So Finya rode to the Salt Coast, where the sea is as white as milk, and the land as poor as ash, and the winds enervate the body. There he destroyed many evil men by the power of sword and magic, and won renown. And this adventure befell him during those days.

It happened that he encamped in an abandoned part of the coast; and with him were Draud, and Rovholon, and Maldar, and Keth of the Spring. When they had passed the night, Finya was the first to see the dawn, and he saw also a white dolphin which had washed up onto the sand. Beautiful was this dolphin as a pearl and well-shaped as a lily, and as it yet lived the youth went down to the shore to rescue it. But as he approached it, the sun, rising over the Duoronwei, struck the dolphin, and it disappeared as if it had been sea foam.

Now Finya was saddened by the fading of such a noble beast, and he hid what he had seen from his companions. Nevertheless, when they wished to press on he expressed the desire to camp in that place a second night: for he said that his wound pained him. At dawn he awoke, and saw the dolphin who seemed at the point of death, and rushed down the stinging sands littered with shells; and a second time the sun rose as he reached the dolphin’s side, and the creature, fixing its eye on him, dissolved into the sea.

Then Finya was saddened more than before and would not leave that place, though his companions all were eager to move on. And Draud said, “Surely the wound of the sorcerer is healed; can it be cowardice that holds him back?” Then Rovholon and Maldar and Keth feared that their fellowship would be split, and that Finya would challenge Draud for the insult; but Finya said only: “The payment shall be deferred, Son of the Horse.” And they camped a third night in that place, in great unease.

But Finya had resolved not to sleep, and he went down to the empty shore and knelt in the place where he had seen the dolphin. All night he watched, and as the sky grew pale the beast washed up on the shore, and Finya grasped hold of it in mighty joy. Then the dolphin spoke to him, saying: “What have I done to you, Child of Woman, that you repay me with such a grave insult?” And Finya asked: “Pray, where is the insult? I saw your noble beauty and wished to save you from perishing with the light.” “Is it no insult then,” said the dolphin, “to seize a king’s daughter?” “Forgive me,” said Finya, “I acted in ignorance.” “Nevertheless,” said the dolphin, “you shall repay me.” “Willingly,” said the youth. “Since you have touched,” said the dolphin, “do not let go.”

Then the dolphin dove into the waves and swam toward the west, and Finya clung to it about the neck. It swam until they reached a beautiful city on a rock, which the sorcerer had never seen nor heard of. Glorious was that city; it covered all of that island of rock, and it was full of good wells, palaces, and gardens, but it was silent: not a soul came out from among its walls, and the chains of the abandoned wells moaned sadly in the wind. “Go up,” said the dolphin, “and pass into the central palace. There you shall find a great hall of stone, in the floor of which there is a small hole plugged with a stopper of vine leaves. Pull out this stopper and see what you shall find.”

“Willingly,” said the youth and clambered from the dolphin’s back onto the white steps which led up toward the city. And she stayed in the water, balancing on her tail, and watched him. So many a hero has gone forth into grief.

As he went up the sorcerer marveled greatly at that city, which was vaster and more graceful than any he had seen on his travels. Compared with it the fortress of Beal, which haunted him in his dreams, was as rude as a stable and seemed fit only for dumb beasts to dwell in. Bright were the roofs of the strange city, its pillars wondrous high, its dwellings stately and spacious with goodly foundations and flowered archways; its streets, curved or straight, were well-proportioned, and its silent squares in the shadow of lofty palaces filled him with awe. Very small was the sorcerer in that city immured in oblivion. He climbed the dusty steps of the central palace, the most magnificent of them all, where stone lions gaped at him, but of living things he saw not even a dog. In the center of this palace, as the dolphin had foretold, he found an enormous hall of ancient stone, and the tiny hole stopped with vine leaves. As he was a forthright man, he did not hesitate but bent and pulled out the stopper at once.

The hall shook so that Finya was thrown forward onto his face, and he feared that the palace would topple down upon him. The walls held firm, but more terrible than the earthquake was the voice he heard, the voice of a woman whose resonance turned his bones to water: “Insolent mortal,” she said. “Thinkst thou that I do not remember thee? Bitterly wilt thou regret the crime which has stained thy hand this day. This people are set beneath my curse for their pride and the depth of their wizardry, which surpassed that which it is good for mortals to know. Thou hast broken my holy curse; believe that it shall avail thee none. Thus speaks thy destiny from among the stars.” “Alas!” cried Finya; for he had offended the goddess Sarma once before and was hated by her. And he heard the ringing of bells.

There were tambourines in the streets of the city, and drums, and joyful flutes; everywhere people were singing, embracing, and dancing with wild gladness. The young sorcerer pushed through the crowds to the very edge of the city in search of the dolphin who had caused him to anger the goddess Sarma. But instead of the dolphin, a beautiful maiden was swimming in the water, clad in white garments which floated about her and mixed with her long black hair. “Help me up!” cried she. And Finya went down the steps and helped her, and she stood on the white steps of her city and wept for very joy. “Thank you, blessed enchanter,” said she. And Finya said: “Alas, good lady, why did you cause me to sin against the goddess who already hates me?” And the princess said: “Why, what did she say?” “That you are wicked sorcerers.” “Ah, no,” said the maiden: “It is she who is wicked; she hates me for my beauty.” “That I can well believe,” said Finya; for truly the damsel was exceedingly lovely, having bronze skin and black eyes and hair, and a shape to devastate nations. Indeed, he was well-nigh dazzled by her and found her more lovely than any woman he had seen, save only she who haunted his dreams. And the princess laughed and led him into the city filled with rejoicing, where all they passed bowed and did them homage. “Now you shall see,” said she, “if ours is truly a wicked city. Stay with me for one year: for I love thee.”

So Finya stayed with her in the beautiful city of wells and gardens. And she told him: “This is the city of Nine Wonders. The first wonder is our horses, which are scarlet and shine like roses. The second is our fine white hunting dogs, which can hunt at sea as well as on land. The third is our musicians, who can make men weep until they cast off all their burden of sorrow. The fourth wonder is our light, which is the most delicate in the world. The fifth is our birds, who are wise and speak like men. The sixth is our fruit: the most gratifying to the tongue, and strengthening to the body, of anything one can eat on earth. The seventh is our wine, a delight to the tongue and the heart; and the eighth is the water of our miraculous wells, so pure that it preserves us from old age, sickness and death.”

“And what is the ninth wonder?” asked Finya.

“Is nothing to be held sacred?” cried the princess with a laugh; and Finya asked that she forgive his discourtesy. “I have already forgiven thee,” she said. Indeed, she had a loveliness that could drive the very gods to envy.

Finya stayed with her for a year and enjoyed every good thing: hunting on land and at sea, and the best of music, wine, and horses. At the end of the year she asked him to stay longer, and he agreed, for he said to himself that there was only despair in his other suit. And he enjoyed the love of the princess, who bore him two fine children, the most passionate hunting of his life, and the wisdom of the birds. All things he enjoyed, save that he did not know the ninth wonder, which he thought must be the most wonderful of them all.

Now Finya still possessed the earring made from a piece of amber which had been given to him in the forest by the witch Brodlian, in which there dwelt his helper and familiar, the lubnesse, which was an owl with the sad face of a woman. Once when he was alone in the palace he rubbed at the earring, and the lubnesse appeared flapping before him. “O lubnesse,” said Finya, “I wish to know the ninth wonder.” “Art thou yet unsatisfied?” said she. “Yes,” said he: “Without this knowledge I cannot enjoy the other wonders.” “Not even thy wife,” asked the lubnesse, “and thy two children?” “Not even these,” said Finya. “Then,” said the lubnesse, “thou chosest well, when thou didst determine that thou wouldst be a wizard. Hast thou not noticed, then, that for one month out of every year, thy wife doth leave thee, taking the children with her?” “Yes,” said Finya: “She goes to the sacred mountain behind the city, for it is her custom to pray at the tomb of her father.” “That is as may be,” said the lubnesse. “When next she goes there, climb the narrow stair to the top of the palace. If her dogs fly at thee, strike at them with a sheaf of wheat, and they will not devour thee. Enter the room at the top of the stair. There will be a fire burning inside, and another thing, and this is the thing that thou must throw onto the fire. Then indeed shalt thou discover the ninth wonder of the city.” “May I perish,” said Finya, “if I do not so.”

Soon enough the time came when the princess wrapped herself in a cloak and said: “I go to pray at the tomb of my father. Let the children come with me, that they may learn our custom.” “Very well,” said Finya; and they parted. Then Finya went up the narrow stair which led to the top of the palace, a dark and dusty stair which seemed in disuse; great dogs rushed at him, barking and snarling with foam on their jaws, but he struck them with a sheaf of wheat and they lay down and whined. At the top of the stairs he opened a door and entered a small and dirty room where a fire smoked foully in the grate. On the table was something long and black. He picked it up and held it; and it was the long black hair of his beautiful wife.

“Alas,” cried Finya, “what is this?” And he threw the hair on the fire. Then a great hush fell on the City of Nine Wonders: the music, the laughter, the footsteps, all ceased, and the only sound to be heard was that of a single voice weeping and lamenting.

Finya rushed down the stairs and out of the palace into the street, and the city was as it had been when he had first seen it: vast, empty, graceful, abandoned even by the mice. And again the chains moaned in the deserted wells. He followed the sound of weeping, and it led him to the sea; and there he saw the beautiful white dolphin, and with her two dolphin pups. And she cried: “Alas, my husband, what hast thou done?” And she wept bitter tears.

Finya, wild with grief, ran down the white steps to the sea. “Who art thou?” he cried. “Who art thou?”

“Alas,” said she, “I am the ninth wonder of the City of Nine Wonders.”

And she swam with her children out to sea, and was lost.

An owl gave a low, flute-like call from somewhere in the garden. For a moment I thought the High Priest was looking at me, but the light of the oil lamp writhed like a sea worm, casting wayward shadows, and his pensive gaze was impossible to trace. Miros and the others applauded, congratulating Kovyan’s sister, exchanging remarks on the poignancy of the tale. Auram leaned and clasped my arm. “From memory!” he hissed in triumph. “All that from memory. She cannot read a word.”

I rose, pleading exhaustion, and one of the young men led me into a dark bedchamber. The only light seeped in from the other room. Don’t worry, I told myself. Only survive, survive until they bring the body to you and it crumbles on the fire. Flames grew in my mind, great bonfires, suns. The young man slapped the bed, checking it for stability or snakes. He left me, and as I sat down and pulled off my boots I heard the priest’s voice clearly from the other room: “Yes, a Night Market.”

A Night Market. I lay down and covered myself with the coarse blanket. The others talked late into the night, exchanging laughter. In the morning a watery sun showed me the scrubbed walls of the room patterned with shadows by the ivy over the window. Once again the angel had not come. A painting of the goddess Elueth regarded me from one wall, kneeling, her arms about a white calf. The expression on her dusky face was sad, and underneath her ran the legend: “For I have loved thee without respite.”

Chapter Fourteen The Night Market

The next day we traveled farther into the Valley. And a message ran out from Kovyan’s radhu in every direction, announcing the Night Market. It would be held outside the village of Nuillen, almost on the eastern edge of the Fayaleith. The news traveled to Terbris, Hanauri, Livallo, Narhavlin, tiny villages in the shadow of towers overgrown with moss. We followed in a carriage, jouncing along the graveled roads. Miros drove, and I sat beside him on the coachman’s seat. Sometimes we stopped by the roadside and drank milk from heavy clay bowls, waving our hands to drive away flies in the shade of a chestnut tree, and the young girls who sold milk spoke to us with the glottal accent of the country, clicking their tongues when Miros teased them. They urged us to buy their pots of honey and curd, or strings of dried fish. One of them tried to sell us the skin of an otter. They had lively eyes and raggedly braided hair, always in four plaits, sometimes with tin or glass beads at the tips.

At the crest of a hill, we passed beneath the famous arch of Vanadias, the great architect of the Tombs of Hadfa. The pink stone glowed against the sky, carved with images of the harvest, of dancers, children, and animals entwined with bristling leaves. The intricacy of the carving filled me with awe and a kind of heartache, such as one feels in the presence of mystery. In the center of the arch were the proud words “This Happy Land,” and beyond it the very shadows seemed impregnated with radiance.

At night those shadows were deep and blue, the radhui immense and silent, and the whole world had the quality of an engraving. The carriage trundled past temples and country villas, their white shapes standing out against the darkness, each one spellbound, arrested in torrents of light. A healing light, cool as dew. We passed the famous palace of Feilinhu, standing in nacreous grandeur against the dark lace of its woods: that triumph of Vanadias with its roof of astounding lightness, its molded, tapering pillars of white marble. Miros stopped the horses and swore gently under his breath. The palace, nocturnal, resplendent, stood among palisades of moonlight. Even the crickets were silent. Miros’s voice seemed to rend the air as he spoke the immortal first line of Tamundein’s poem:

And she, my empress of sighs. Where was she waiting now with her ravaged hair, her deathless eyes, her perfect desolation? Waiting for me. I knew she was waiting, because she did not come. My nights were silent, but too taut to be called peaceful. Jissavet waited just beyond the dark. The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams I reached up and touched it gently with a fingertip, and it burst like a yolk, releasing a deluge of light.

People traveled together in little groups along the roadsides, talking and laughing softly, on their way to the Night Market. There was no sign of the Telkan’s Guard. I blessed Tialon privately: she must be doing all she could to keep me safe. Fireflies spangled the grass, and a festival air filled the countryside, as if the whole Valley were stirring, coming to life. At the inn in the village of Nuillen, in the old bedrooms divided with screens, the sheets held a coolness as if they had just been brought in from the fields.

We spent two days in Nuillien. During that time the inn filled up until, the landlord told us panting, people were sleeping under the tables. From the window of my room I could see little fires scattered over the square at night, where peasant families slept wrapped in their shawls. On the evening of the Market, music burst out suddenly in the streets, the rattling of drums and the shouting of merry songs, and Auram came into my room bearing a white robe over his arm, his eyes alight. “Come, avneanyi,” he said. “It’s time.”

He was splendidly dressed in a surcoat embroidered in gold, its ornamental stiffness softened by the fluid lace at his wrists. Above the glow of the coat, rich bronze in the firelight, the flat white triangle of his face floated, crowned with dead-black hair. He looked at me with delight, as if I were something he had created himself: a beautiful portrait or gem-encrusted ring. His exaltation left no room for the human. I saw in his shining, ecstatic, ruthless eyes that he would not be moved no matter how I suffered.

“Come,” he said with a little laugh that drove a chill into my heart. “You must dress.” I undressed in silence and put on the robe he had brought for me. The silk whispered over my body, smooth and cold like a river of milk. Afterward he made me sit down and tied my hair back with a silver thread.

The mirror reflected the firelight and my face like a burnt arrow. Under the window a voice sang: “Gallop, my little black mare.”

“Have you been studying?” Auram asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you committed it to memory?”

“Yes.”

My glance strayed to the ragged little book on the table. The Handbook of Mercies, by Leiya Tevorova. Auram had brought it to me wrapped in old silks the color of a fallen tooth. “One of the few copies we were able to save,” he said, and he pressed it into my hands and urged me to memorize the opening pages. This was the book Leiya had written in Aleilin, in the tower where she was locked away, in the days Auram called the Era of Misfortune. A handbook for the haunted. I turned away from it and met Auram’s eyes in the glass.

“Come,” he said. “You are ready.”

The yard was full of people: word of the avneanyi had spread, and now, seeing Auram and me in our vivid costumes, the huvyalhi pressed forward. “Avneanyi,” someone cried. The landlord struggled through the back door and ordered the stableboys to clear a way to the carriage for us. A careworn man with a sagging paunch and protuberant blue eyes, he looked despairingly at the crowd, which was still pouring in from the street, then flung himself into their midst, moving his thick arms like a bear. “This way, telmaron,” he bawled. “Follow me.” Auram stepped forward, smiling and nodding, gratified as an actor after a successful play, holding his hands out so that the people could brush his fingertips. No one touched me: it was as if a shell of invisible armor lay between them and the glitter of my robe. “Pray for us,” they cried. Above us the sky was dancing with stars. When I reached the carriage my knees gave way and I almost sank to the ground. Someone caught my arm and supported me: Miros. “Hup!” he said, holding open the carriage door. “Here you are. Just put your foot on the step.”

I crawled inside.

“Avneanyi. Avneanyi,” moaned the crowd.

Auram joined me, Miros closed the door, and the carriage started off. All the way to the common I had the priest’s triumphant eyes on me, the cries of the huvyalhi ringing in my ears. At the Night Market I stepped down into the grass beside a high tent. Its stretched sides glowed, warmed from within by a lush pink light. All the moths of the Valley seemed gathered round it, and before it sprawled the booths, flags, and torches of the Night Market.

A great crowd had gathered about a wooden stage in front of the tent, where an old man sat with a limike on his knee. One of his shoulders was higher than the other, a crag in the torchlight. He cradled his instrument and woke the strings to life with an ivory plectrum.

“I sing of angels,” he called.

Auram held my arm. “Look, avneanyi!” he whispered, exultant. “See how they love angels in the Valley.”

The crowd pressed close. “Anavyalhi!” someone shouted. “Mirhavli!” cried another; and the word was taken up and passed about the crowd like a skin full of wine.

“Mirhavli! Mirhavli!”

The old man smiled on his stage. His face glittered, and his voice, when he spoke again, was purified, strained through tears. That voice melted into the sound of the strings—for though limike means “doves’ laughter,” the instrument weeps. In these resonant tones the old man told

The voice of the ancient troubador went on: it told of Mirhavli’s wanderings, and of how the Telkan discovered her fainting in the Kelevain; it told of his love for her, the jealousy of his queen and concubines, their false accusations, and how Mirhavli was wrongly condemned to death. It told, too, of the miracle: her voice restored, rising over the sea. It told how the Telkan begged her to return, and how she refused, and was taken up alive by Ithnesse the Goddess of the Sea, to live forever in paradise:

As the song ended, a sense of unreality seized me, a curious detachment. It was as if the music had carried the world away. I gazed at the torches that twinkled all the way to the horizon, and found them strange. Then, with a start, I realized that my companions were quarreling.

Perhaps I was slow to notice because they were arguing in a foreign tongue: in Kestenyi, the language of Olondria’s easternmost province. I recognized its hissing sound, for my master had taught me the one or two words he knew, and I had heard it among the sailors of the Ardonyi. I turned. I could see Miros gesturing, angry in the torch glow. The priest was hidden from me by the wall of the carriage. Suddenly Miros changed languages, saying distinctly in Olondrian: “But how can you refuse? What gives you the right?”

The priest answered sharply in Kestenyi.

“Curse your eyes!” said Miros, hoarse and vehement. “Even my mother wouldn’t refuse me this—”

“And that is why you have been separated from her,” Auram said flatly. “She means well, but she is weak. Her influence over you has never been of the best. It is common for women to spoil their youngest children.”

“Don’t talk about her,” Miros said. “Only tell me why you refuse. What harm can it do?”

Again the cracked, pitiless voice answered in the eastern tongue. The priest’s hand appeared beyond the edge of the carriage, jewel-fingered, trailing lace.

Miros shouted, and I suppose he was told to lower his voice, for he continued in a wild, strained whisper, a passionate outburst of Kestenyi which his uncle punctuated with brief, crackling retorts. Then it seemed as though Miros was pleading. I backed away from him, toward the tent. “Uncle!” he said in Olondrian. “You were young once—you have experienced—”

“You have said enough,” said the priest in a cold rage. He whirled around the side of the vehicle, stalked toward me and took my arm.

“Wait!” cried Miros. But the priest dragged me forward toward the door of the tent. When I looked back, Miros was clutching his hair in both hands, his eyes closed. Auram pulled the tent flap aside and we entered the rosy light, and I did not see Miros again until after the fire.

Lamps burned on tables inside the tent. There was grass underfoot, its dry autumnal odor strong in the warmth. There was also, in the center of the space, a high carved chair—brought from a temple, I guessed, or borrowed from some sympathetic landowner of the district. How swiftly they must have ridden to place it here, so that I might sit as I sat now in my white robe, my hands clamped tight on its lacquered arms. Auram was himself again, forgetting his quarrel with Miros. He traced a circle on my brow and whispered joyfully: “It begins.”

He went outside. Dear gods, I thought, what am I doing here?

There was a pause in the murmur of the crowd that had gathered before the tent. I only realized how loud that droning had been when it stopped, as one becomes aware, in a summer silence, of the music of cicadas.

Auram’s voice rose harsh and pure. “Children of Avalei! Children of the Ripened Grain! Who would hear an avneanyi speak?”

“I, veimaro!” cried a woman’s voice. “I and Tais my daughter.”

“Come then,” said Auram impressively. “He awaits.”

He led them in: a girl, a woman in wooden slippers, a bent old man. “Avalei hears you,” he said, and went out.

The woman sank down and advanced on her knees, pulling her daughter behind her with some difficulty, for the girl would not kneel but walked stiffly with a fixed gaze.

“Avneanyi,” the woman sobbed. She put her hand over her face. It was clear that she had not intended to address me in tears.

I clutched the arms of the chair. After a moment she regained control of herself and looked up, still shaking, drawing her arm across her eyes. “Avneanyi,” she moaned. “You must help us. It is for the sake of a child. A little child—you know how Avalei loves them.”

“Please stand,” I said, but she would not. She looked at me wonderingly, as if my slight accent increased her awe. Her daughter, still standing, gazed at the tent wall.

“It’s my grandchild,” the woman said. “My daughter’s son. A little boy—three years old when we lost him a year ago.”

“I can’t,” I said.

She looked at me eagerly, her lips parted.

“I can’t promise anything,” I amended. “But I will try.”

“Thank you, thank you!” she whispered with shining eyes. “Thank you,” the old man echoed behind her, seated cross-legged on the grass. And I looked at one of the little red lamps. I listened to my heart until it grew steady. And I conjured up Leiya Tevorova’s words like a smokeless fire.

The Afflicted must sit facing in the direction of the North, which, though it be not the Dwelling-Place of the Angel, is yet the place which draws the Spirit to it with its Vapors, and thus may keep it lingering in its Environs. The Afflicted must then bring to mind a certain Wraith or Image which shall have the form of a Mountain of Nine Gorges. Each of the Gorges shall be deep, ragged, and abysmal, and filled with brilliant and icy Vapors withal. The Afflicted must pursue this Vision until it is well attained, building up the Mountain Stone by Stone. When he has achieved it, he must cause, by an action of Mind, a Tree to grow from each of the Nine Gorges. And the Nine Trees shall have a golden Bark, and various Limbs, of which there shall be Nine Hundred on each Tree: one hundred of Ruby, one hundred of Sapphire, one hundred of Carnelian, one hundred of Emerald, one hundred of Chalcedony; and one hundred also of Amethyst, Topaz, Opal, and Lapis Lazuli; and these shall flash with a most unusual Splendor. When the Afflicted has mastered this—the Gorges, and the Trees, and the Branches which are nine times nine hundred in number—then will he be dazzled most grievously by virtue of the Radiance of that Image, which he will maintain through sore Travail. And when he is able to look upon it without Agony of Spirit, then must he bring into his Vision miraculous Birds, of which there shall be nine hundred on each of the Branches of the Nine Trees; and each Bird shall have nine thousand colored Feathers. On each of the Birds one thousand Feathers shall be jetty black, one thousand white, one thousand blue, one thousand others yellow; and one thousand each of red, green, purple, and bright orange; and one thousand feathers shall be clear as Glass. The Afflicted must perceive these things at once: the Mountain, the Gorges, the Trees with all their Limbs, and the colored Birds. Then shall there come a moment of most dreadful Suffering, which shall be sharp, white, and heated as if in a Forge. And when that Moment has passed, the Afflicted shall no longer see the Mountain, nor any of the things he has lately perceived; but another Vision shall take its place, an unfamiliar Image which shall take a form such as that of a Wood or a Cave. Then shall the Afflicted enter the Cave, or the Wood, or the Strange House, or whatever Image is by him perceived; he shall walk until the Image grows obscured with a gaping Darkness. And in that Darkness he shall meet the Angel.

“Jissavet,” I said. “Answer me.”

The red lamp burned, and the angel arrived. She stood there in her shift, her shoulders bright as dawn. Her bare feet tore the fabric of the air. Sparks clung to her plaits; her inimical light engulfed the glow of the little red lamp. A veiled light, certainly less than what she was capable of, but still a light intrinsically hostile to life. In the islands we say that death is dark, but I know there is a light beyond that door, intolerable, beyond compare.

“Jevick,” she said. Her absorbed, caressing voice. Her expression of longing and the wildness in her beautiful brooding eyes. She raised her hand, and I stiffened and closed my eyes, expecting a blow, but she did not strike. “Jevick,” she said again: a glass shard in my brain.

Words came back to me, whispered prayers, ritual incantations: Preserve us, O gods, from those who speak without voices. With an effort of will, my eyes tightly closed, my head pressed back against the chair, I forced myself to say: “I have a question.”

“I will tell you everything,” she said. “I will tell you everything that happened. You will write it for me in the vallon.”

I opened my eyes. She hung in the middle air, her hand still raised in an orator’s gesture. All about her gleamed a soft albescent fire. She smiled at me, stars falling. “I was waiting for you. I knew you’d call me. You are that rare thing, I said: a wise man from the islands.”

I swallowed and stumbled on. “My question. My question is for this woman here, this Olondrian woman. Her grandson is lost. Do you know where he is?”

She stared at me from the circle of her light. She was still so small. Had I stood beside her I could have looked straight down on the top of her head. I sat, frozen, on the Olondrian chair, not daring to move. After a moment I managed to say: “This woman’s grandson…”

“Grandson,” she said. Her glance was like a needle. It was her glance of startling clarity, which I remembered from the Ardonyi.

Then her voice clashed against my brain in a shower of brilliant sparks. “What do you want? Are you asking me to find him? You dare to ask me that?”

“Not me. These people. Their priest. He said you could answer—”

“Answer! Do you like to see me? Does it please you?”

She advanced, a golden menace.

“No,” I screamed.

“For me it is the same. The same. To enter the country again—that country—among the living—never! I couldn’t bear it!”

She shuddered, throwing off light. I could feel her dread, as strong as my own, the dread of crossing. She clenched her fists. “Write me a vallon,” she said.

“I can’t. Jissavet, these people are trying to help you. They’ll find—they’ll find your—”

“Write me a vallon!”

“Stop!” I screamed, pressing my hands over my eyes. The outlines of my fingers throbbed before me, huge and blurred, the blood in the body like oil in a lamp. Then she was gone.

I came to myself on the ground, in the odor of vomit. “Grandson,” I murmured. A face floated over me, tearful, the face of a stranger. An Olondrian peasant woman. My head was pillowed on her knees. “Thank you, my son,” she sobbed, her fingers in my hair.

“But I told you nothing.”

“We felt her. We saw your torment. Avneayni…”

I rolled away from her, sat up after a brief struggle, spat in the grass. My chair lay on its side. Two of the little lamps had gone out; another blinked madly on the verge of dissolution. And we—myself, the woman, and the old man she had brought with her—we looked at one another like the survivors of a deluge. The girl still stared at the wall. She stood in that same attitude, as if exiled from life, when out on the starlit commons a storm arose.

At first I thought it merely the noise of the Market. Some new attraction must have arrived, I thought dully: dancers or a wagon full of clowns. Then, as the woman was helping me stand up, a figure burst into the tent, his dark face wild and sweating. “Fly, fly!” he shrieked. “It’s the Guard!”

Stains on his robe—earth or blood. “The Guard, I tell you!” he shouted, waving hands like claws as if threatening to tear us apart. A moment his shadow chased itself over the walls, and then he fled. As the tent flap opened and fell, I caught a glimpse of fire.

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.

Chapter 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.”

Afterward she led me to a dank, smoke-blackened room. “Thank you,” I said. The girl turned, careless, bearing away her little lamp. Through an aperture high in the wall the stars showed white. There was a battered screen, a straw pallet on the floor, a cracked washbowl. Such poverty, such unrelenting hardship. I touched the screen, which perhaps contained, as many old Valley furnishings did, scenes from the Romance. The forest of Beal, its trees a network of spikes. Or the tale of a saint, Breim the Enchanter or poor Leiya Tevorova, haunted by an angel.

I closed my eyes and touched my brow to the screen. Fire behind my eyelids. Suddenly a storm of trembling swept over me. My mind was still numb, detached, but my body could not bear what had happened. I sank down and curled up on the moldy pallet.

There I thought of the huvyalhi of the Market, and of our hosts in this desolate place. I thought of the woman who had wept over me in the tent. I wanted to do something for them, for these abandoned girls, to give them a word or a sign, to carry something other than horror. But I possessed nothing else. And when the angel appeared, shrugging her way through the elements, born in a shower of sparks, I thought that perhaps this horror itself could become something else, could be used, as Auram had said. That I could be haunted to some purpose.

Her light was dim; she looked like a living girl but for her slight radiance, a crimson aura coloring the air. Beneath the jagged hole in the wall she clasped her hands and gazed at me with a seeking look, an expression of abject longing. There was a stealthy force behind that gaze, a ruthless intelligence that sent terror to the marrow of my bones. A will that would not flag though eternity passed; a strength that would not tire. Yet her eyes were like those of a lover or a child.

She loosened her fingers. “Write,” she whispered. A faint smile on her lips. She mimed the clapping of hands with another child, singing an island song.

I knew the song. The familiar tongue. It occurred to me that only with her could I hear my own language spoken in this country of books and angels. She laughed when she came to the second verse: “a bowl of green mango soup.” And I remembered trying to make Jom sing, in the courtyard under the orange trees.

“Jissavet. Stop.”

She paused, her mouth open. A frown: cities on fire.

“Jissavet. I need your help. For these people. I’m in a house in the Valley.”

The air bent, warped about her.

“Stop. Listen. Such cruel things have happened to them. If you could tell them something. Something to give them hope.”

She looked at me with inconsolable eyes. “I can’t. I told you. There’s a void between—it’s horrible. And they are not people like me.”

“They are.”

She shook her head. “No. You are people like me. You are my people.” And again her voice, light and eerie, rose in song. This time she sang of the valleys and plains of Tinimavet, the estuaries where the great rivers rolled in mud to the sea. She sang of the fishermen whose bodies grew accustomed to the air, who could not, like other men, be driven mad by the constant wind. And she sang the long story of Itiknapet the Voyager, who first led the people to the islands.

She sang of those lands. The Risen Lands, fragrant with calamus. Kideti-palet: the Islands of the People.

“And this shall be the place where the people live,” the angel sang. “This shall be the home of the human beings.”

I remembered it, I felt it—home, with all its distant sweetness—I remembered it through the high voice of the dead girl. One memory in particular came back to me when she sang: that early memory of how I had tried to teach a song to my brother. “My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!” He said: “My father.” “Is a palm,” I insisted. But he would not answer. He gazed into the trees, rubbing the edge of his sandal in the chalky groove between the flagstones. As always when he was pressed, he seemed to recede behind a protective wall of incomprehension and maddening nonchalance.

I saw him clearly. How old was he? Six, perhaps seven years old. He was already unable to learn, but my father had not yet noticed. He wore a short blue vest with fiery red-orange embroidery, just like mine. His trouser leg was torn. If I asked him how he had torn it he would not know, or he would not tell me, though the edges of the tear were stained with blood. He would not even complain he was hurt, though he must have cut his knee, somewhere, in a place that would never be named.

“My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!”

I had seen other children play the game. I had learned it from them, copied the intricate clapping—this was what I had brought for my brother. When I shouted at him a wariness went flitting across his gaze like the wing of a bird.

“You say it,” I snarled through clenched teeth, glaring, trying to frighten him—to break through his simplicity and reach him.

He looked away, his eyes uncertain. Did he know what was coming?

My two fists rammed straight into his chest, and he sprawled on his back, howling.

And now, years later, in a strange land, to the sound of an angel’s singing, I relived that moment of despair, that attempt to bridge the divide, that terrible reaching, desperate and cruel, when love swerved into violence, when I would have torn the skin from his face to discover what lay beneath.

“Jevick,” the angel whispered.

Her eyes met mine, black, secretive, moonless. Her luminous gaze. “Why don’t you answer me? Why don’t you write?”

Grief and rage, a gathering ocean.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”

“Listen to me!” she screamed.

And the waves fell in a rush.

The silence struck me like a blow. I sat up, sweating and panting, and looked into the lighted face of a demon.

It hovered above me, a deformed face with elements of the human and of the iguana. Its fleshless lips were parted, showing tiny teeth. I shrank toward the wall, cold with terror, and babbled a snatch of Kideti prayer: “From what is unseen… from what is afoot before dawn…”

“You had a bad dream,” the demon said in the language of the north. Its voice was husky and childish, with a slight lisp.

“God of my father,” I whispered, trembling. I wiped my face on the sheet. The shapes in the room began to resolve themselves: I recognized the window and marked the position of the screen, and knew that the figure before me was no monster, but the scarred child. She was dressed in a tattered blue shift, made no doubt from a worn-out robe, and her soft hair, unplaited, stood up around her head. She was holding a saucer of oil in which a twist of cotton was burning with a light that fluttered like a dying insect.

“You shouted,” she said.

“No doubt I did,” I muttered.

“What did you dream about?”

“An angel,” I said. I looked up into her face, trying to focus on her beautiful eyes with their vibrancy, their sweet directness. She looked back at me curiously.

“If you have a bad dream, you should never stay in bed. You should get up. Look.” She set the saucer of oil on the floor, took my wrist, and pulled until I got up from the pallet. Then she stretched her arms above her head. “You do this. Yes. Now you turn around.” Slowly we rotated, our hands in the air, our shadows huge on the walls, while the child recited solemnly:

“There,” she said, letting her arms fall. She smiled at me, brightness brimming in her eyes. “You ought to say it around a garlic plant, but we’re not allowed out at night. The others are on the roof. Do you want to go up?”

I nodded and put on my shirt, and the child picked up her meager light and glided soundlessly into the hall. The rooms were black and vacant; we surprised rats in the corners. The air was chill, with the odor of moldy straw. I saw that a radhu—often so bright, so cheerfully domestic—could also be a place of stark desolation. The bare feet of the child were silent on the cold stone floors, and the light she held up trembled under the arches.

At last we came to a narrow stairway where the air was fresh and the stars looked down through a triangular hole in the roof. The stairs were so steep that the girl crawled up and I followed the soles of her feet, already hearing soft voices outside. We emerged onto the roof, into the immeasurable night. The sky was littered with sharp, crystal stars. A sliver of moon diffused its powdery light onto the ruined house and the consummate stillness of the surrounding fields.

“Jevick!” Miros cried in a voice so heavily laden with feeling that I knew he was drunk even before I saw him. “Thank Avalei you’ve come. This is terrible. It’s been terrible.”

I moved toward him. Vines rustled about my ankles.

“Amaiv!” said a sharp voice. “What are you doing with that light? Put it out, and don’t spill the oil.”

The little girl blew out the light obediently. “He had a bad dream, yamas.”

“A bad dream.” Miros sighed. “Even sleep is dangerous…”

They sat against the low wall along the edge of the roof, where the vines made a thick curtain over the stone. Miros was holding a bottle and looking down, his face in shadow; the girl with the obstinate chin rested her head on his shoulder. A little apart from them sat the tall girl in the scarf, her legs splayed out and her toes pointing inward. I supposed she was half-witted. I stumbled over an empty bottle as I approached them and then sat down among the vines.

“Careful,” Miros said. “If you fall off the roof, vai, I’ll have killed an avneanyi on top of everything.”

The girl leaning against him began to giggle and could not stop. Miros held the bottle unsteadily toward me. “There, my friend,” he said. “Drink. I’ve given it all to Laris. We are drinking through her hospitality now.”

I drank some of the cleansing teiva and handed back the bottle. The scarred girl, like a deft little animal, curled up her legs beside me.

“You should be in bed,” the girl with Miros reprimanded her, suddenly recovering from her giggles.

“I can’t sleep,” the child protested, wheedling.

“You’ll sleep soon enough, and then who’s going to carry you downstairs?”

“I’ll sleep on the roof,” said the child decidedly.

“You can’t sleep on the roof.” The sister had lowered her head like an angry cow. It was this, along with the dogged way she spoke, and her slurred consonants, which showed me that she was very drunk as well.

Miros had one arm around her. He caressed the top of her head, and she nestled back into his shoulder with a sigh. He raised his head and looked at me, and the moonlight showed his features blurred with drink. “This is Laris,” he said brokenly. “This is Laris, a true daughter of the Valley. I’ve already given her two bottles of teiva. It was all I had. I’m going to give her everything I own. It will never be enough. Never enough for the Night Market.”

“Everything?” said Laris slyly, tugging the neck of his tunic.

“Ah gods,” Miros groaned. “You see how it’s been, my friend. Drink again. Don’t take such little sips; it won’t do anything. Let no one reject her hospitality.”

“That’s right.” Laris smirked.

I drank, more to dispel my own embarrassment than from a real desire for teiva. The drink made the stars look brighter, cut out of the sky with a tailor’s scissors. Dogs bayed away in the long fields.

“Laris, Laris,” Miros said sadly. “You don’t know who I am.” He rested his head on the wall, his features smooth in the delicate light. “Nobody knows who I am,” he murmured. “Except perhaps my uncle. Not even Jevick knows, and he is my best friend east of Sinidre.”

“I know who you are,” said Laris.

“No.” Miros shook his head wearily, rolling it back and forth on the wall. “No one knows. Not one of you. Jevick.” I felt him looking at me, though his eyes were lost in shadow. It was his cheek that shone, his brow. “You think I’m a gentleman, Jevick,” he said hoarsely. “But you are wrong. I have no honor. I forget everything, everyone. I will even forget the Night Market one day. I will forget it long enough to laugh again. It makes me hate myself… I tried to go into the army once. To be sent to the Lelevai. Everyone said I wouldn’t go through with the training. And they were right. I drank too much—you know, when you’re wearing a sword, they give you credit everywhere—and the way I gambled! Well, I had to give back the sword. For a year I thought I would die of shame. I had proved them right, my brothers, my uncles, everyone… But then—” He shrugged. “I didn’t have the courage to kill myself, either. It seemed so much more sensible to go hunting…”

He laughed, but even the moonlight showed the stiffness around his mouth. “The truth is, I have only been good for two things in my life: and those are hunting and londo. Even in love I have been a failure. Even in serving a goddess. And that is why, my Laris, I sleep alone.”

He kissed the top of her head. “No, no,” the girl said dully, clawing vaguely at the neck of his tunic. “I know who you are. You are the man foretold to me in the taubel, the man with the long shadow.”

“No,” said Miros. “I am no one.” He leaned forward and pressed the teiva bottle into my hand. Then, with some difficulty, he pulled himself away from Laris. He disengaged his arm from around her shoulders with infinite tenderness as she grabbed at his tunic with her blunt little hands.

“It’s a mistake,” she said, drunk and sorrowful, when at last he had made her hands return to her lap. “You should have loved me, lammaro. In this house we have no shame. All of us lost our shame when we lost our brothers.”

“Look.” She pointed to her sister, the tall girl in the scarf, who sat mesmerized, opening and closing her hands in the dust of moonlight. “She wears a brodrik, but she’s not a widow. She’s not even married.” The girl’s voice sank to a whisper: “She had a baby, though. We buried it… I know she’s prettier than me, but still, my time is coming. Mun Vothis read it for me in the taubel. A man with a long shadow, she said. He’s supposed to come on a Tolie. But today isn’t Tolie, is it?” She looked around at us, her face brightening.

“It’s Valie.” Miros’s voice was muffled, his face in his hands.

“Ah! That’s good. Look, Amaiv is sleeping…” We all looked down at the child, who was curled up in a ball at my side.

“She would have been the most beautiful,” said Laris.

The next day when we were ready to leave, as I was climbing into my seat, the girl called Laris came rushing out to me. She had not combed her hair, and her scraggly plaits jangled about her face with its broad outlines, its firm, determined jaw. She caught my arm in the shade of a spindly acacia tree by the barren court. “Are you really an avneanyi?” she asked breathlessly. And without waiting for an answer she pressed my palm against her stomach, closing her eyes, in a long, sensual movement. She smelled strongly of teiva and old sweat, and I recoiled. Laris released me, giving her wild laugh. “Thank you, avneanyi,” she said, the shadows of the acacia branches jagged across her smile. “When the time comes, it will quicken me.”

Chapter Sixteen The Courage of Hivnawir

Loneliness was descending on us: we were reaching the end of the country.

It was not, of course, the end of the known world: that place, marked on maps by the dire word Ludyanith, “without water,” lay on the other side of the desert, beyond the mountains of Duoronwei. Yet the starkness of the hills of the Tavroun, rising about us, dazzled me after the delicacy and warmth of the Valley. For the first time, the road appeared ill-kept. Go on if you like, its pitted stones seemed to say. It is no longer our affair.

One afternoon we left our horse and carriage at the stable in a wayside inn and walked down to the river to board the ferry. Stones rolled beneath our feet and clay-dust rose on the wind, a single-minded and nameless wind, colder than anything I had known before I entered that wilderness. The priest was now able to walk, but he would not speak or remove his cloak, and clung to Miros’s arm with his frail hand as we slipped down to the water’s edge. The ferry was manned by slaves. A young girl on the boat, a bride, wept as we pulled away from the shore, trying to hide her face in her dark mantle.

Across that river, the great Ilbalin, I was to meet the angel’s body. The river, bordering the highlands like the beads on a woman’s skirt, was as sacred to me as it was to the ancient Olondrians and the Tavrouni mountain people, who called it the river of Daimo the God. That water, shining with subdued lights under the gray sky, would carry me to Jissavet and freedom. It stank of fish and rottenness, like the sea. On the deck an Evmeni in a black turban sold images of the gods carved from boars’ teeth.

On the other side stood the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Mud walls, windy alleys, carts and donkeys, cider in the single unhappy café. The walls and floor were black with smoke, and dried venison was sold on strings, and the villagers did not know how to play londo. Miros brought out his own ivory pieces and tried to teach them, but they looked at him with suspicion and sucked their pipes. Later he burned his hand trying to turn the spit on the wayward fire and one of them treated him with the juice of an aloe.

Auram crept into one of the narrow bedrooms, beckoning for Miros to follow with his trunk. Then Miros came out again, leaving his uncle alone. I did not see Auram again until the kebma hour, when he swept into the common room, his wig purplish in the light of the coal-oil lamps. He wore a dark red costume with a spiked collar and gold-lined cape, and smiled at me coldly with artificial teeth. His eyes blazed. He was splendid, beautifully made like an image of worship. One could believe that he would never die.

After we had eaten, Miros went to sit by the fire. Auram rubbed his waxen, shapely hands so that his rings clicked softly. “You have begun,” he said to me. “Have you not?”

“Begun what?” I said, although I knew.

“You have begun to speak to her. I see it in your face.”

“I do not know what you see,” I said, looking back at him boldly, knowing how my face had changed, become sterner, less readable. But the priest smiled as if he saw only what he had most hoped for, though the light in his eyes, I saw with a start, was made of tears.

“Ah! Avneanyi, it is a privilege to watch you—you have discovered, I think, the courage of Hivnawir. You do not know the story?” He laughed, shaking his head so that the black horsehair of his wig rustled. As he spoke he chased the shadows with his hands, his narrow wrists turning in the thick lace at his cuffs. “Hivnawir,” he breathed, his eyes sparkling, “is a legendary character, one of our greatest lovers. His story comes from the great era of Bain, when the clans of the Ideiri slew one another in the streets… The time when the Quarter of Sighs was built with its sturdy barred windows, when it was known as the Quarter of the Princes. Bain was a city of vicious noblemen and hired assassins, yes, in the very age of its highest artistic achievements! You must imagine, avenanyi… carriages studded with iron spikes, and women who never emerged from their stone palaces… Darvan the Old, who was struck through the eye with an arrow in his conservatory, and Bei the Innocent, who had his ears filled with hot lead! Hivnawir was born in that quarter and little is known of him but that, and the tale of his passion from the beautiful Taur, who was forbidden to him not only because she was promised to another but because she was the daughter of his uncle. Our painters adore this story: they have represented Hivnawir as a beautiful, fiery youth with broad shoulders, often on horseback; somehow he has become associated with oleanders and goes wreathed in white and scarlet flowers through centuries of fine art. As for myself, I have always wondered if he were not wan and petulant, a mediocre young man who simply stumbled into a legend! Perhaps he had a drooping lip or wheezed when he ran too fast. But never mind! The goddess forbid we should dabble in sacrilege! We know no more of the beauty of Taur than we do of the splendor of Hivnawir—her portrait was never painted, despite the fashion of the times. Her tyrannical father, Rothda the Truculent, locked her up in a series of stone chambers, like a poor fly in an amber pendant. It is said that she was too beautiful to be looked upon by men: there is the tale of a Nissian slave who cut his throat for love of her. No man was allowed close to her, not even her own relations: Rothda himself did not visit the little girl for years on end! It was the scandal of the city, as you can imagine; they said it was barbarous, and several young men were killed or maimed in their efforts to rescue the damsel. Soon after she was promised in marriage to one of her father’s creditors, her cousin Hivnawir became inflamed by the thought of her.

“It is said that he was passing down a hall in his uncle’s palace when he heard a girl’s voice, sweet and sad, singing an old ballad. He was alone, and he searched the corridors for the source of the music and, unable to find it, finally called out. As soon as he spoke, the music ceased. Then he thought of his cousin Taur; he was certain that he had happened upon the regions of her prison. Knowing this, he could think of nothing else and returned there every day, carrying a taper and pounding vainly on the walls. The more he searched, the less he found, the more he craved a meeting. After all, he reasoned, she is my cousin; there can be no impropriety in my meeting her just once, simply to congratulate her on her engagement! But his determination was more than that which a kind relation would feel. He was stirred by the rumors of her perilous beauty. And Taur, in her carpeted prison, heard the faint cries of the unknown man and drew her shawl about her, trembling.

“At last his persistence began to drive her mad; she was cold around the heart, afraid to play her lyre or even to speak. And her curiosity, too, began to grow like a dark flower, so that her breath was nearly cut off by its thorns. Her women saw how she languished, losing her aspect of a bride, which they had tended so carefully by feeding her on almond paste. ‘O teldamas,’ they cried, ‘what can satisfy your heart?’ And she answered weakly: ‘Bring me the name of the man in the corridor.’

“So it began. Once she knew his name, she became captivated by the thought of her cousin, as he was by the thought of her. The poet says that she ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them. Taur began to harass her women, demanding that they arrange a meeting, which they refused with exclamations of terror. She became moody and would not eat, but played her lyre and sang, so that the shouts of her distant lover grew in their inarticulate frenzy. ‘Bright were her tears, falling like almond blossom’—that is Lian. Who knows where she discovered such bitter strength? Where did this secluded girl develop the strength to threaten to kill herself—to attempt to dash her brains on the wall? One supposes that she inherited the truculence of her father, along with his cunning of a teiva merchant… for just as he had satisfied a prince to whom he had lost everything at cards by promising him this pure and unseen girl as a bride, so Taur entangled her women in a net of lies and threats so that they lived in dread of the tales she might tell her father. They wept: she was a cruel girl; how could she threaten to say that they were thieves, so that their eyes would be put out with a hot iron? How could she force them to risk their lives, how could she endanger her cousin whom she loved—that unfortunate youth in the corridor? But she would not be dissuaded, and at last they reached a compromise: they would allow her to meet with the young man on the condition that they did not see one another: the women themselves would hold a silk scarf between them, so that the youth would not be deranged by the sight of her.”

Auram paused. Outside the sleet was whispering in the stunted trees by the road; a donkey cart went by, creaking. The priest looked dreamily at the lamp, his painted eyes glowing deeply, slowly filling up with the tale’s enchantment. “One wonders,” he said softly, “how it was. One can imagine her: what it would mean, the voice in a distant passageway. She had books, after all. So no doubt her cousin became the symbol of what she lacked: the sky, the trees, the world. But he…” The priest gave me a brilliant, significant glance. “What of Hivnawir? He had everything. Everything: riches, women, horses, taverns, the stars! That is why I said ‘the courage of Hivnawir.’ It is the courage to choose not what will make us happy, but what is precious.

“Well, the cousins met. They knelt on either side of the silken scarf, neither one touching it. They spoke for hours. For days they met like that, weeks, months, speaking and whispering, singing and reciting poetry. A strange idyll, among the servant women tortured by dread, the lover risking with every meeting a sword in his reckless neck! In the stone room with its harsh outlines disguised by hanging tapestries, in the perfumed air of the artful ventilation… The love of voices, naturally, produces the love of lips. Imagine them pressing their ardent mouths to the silk. The poet tells us that Hivnawir outlined her shape with his hands and saw her ‘like a wraith of fog in a glass.’”

The priest sat silent now, tracing a scar in the dark old table, his face still haunted by a fluttering smile. He sat that way until the sleet stopped and the night crier passed outside, wailing “Syen s’mar,” which is in Kestenyi: “The streets are closed.”

At last I asked: “And what happened to them?”

“Oh!” The priest looked startled and then waved his hand, conjuring vague shadows. “A series of troubles—a muddled escape, an attempt on the life of the girl’s intended—at last, a sword in the back for the tragic youth. And Taur burned herself in her apartments, having chosen to meet her love and to wound her father by destroying her wondrous beauty. The barb went deep, deep! For Rothda hanged himself in the arbor where, in other times, he had played omi with the princes of that cruel city. A famous tale! It has been used as a warning against incest and as a fanciful border for summer tablecloths. But think, avneanyi—” He touched my wrist; his teeth glinted. “They never saw one another face to face.”

Village of Klah-ne-Wiy, I remember you. I remember the shabby streets and the cold, the Tavrouni women in striped wool blankets, the one who stood by her cart selling white-hot odash and picking her ear with a thorn, the one who laughed in the market, her dark blue gums. I remember her, the flyaway hair and strange flat coppery face and the way she tried to sell us a string of yellow beads, a love charm. She pointed the way to the sheep market, and Miros and I bought sheepskin coats and caps and leather sleeping-sacks to survive the cold of the inn.

Cripples begged for alms outside the market. A great bull was being slaughtered there, and expectant women stood around it with pails. One of them clutched Miros’s arm and quoted toothlessly: “The desert is the enemy of mankind, and the feredhai are the friends of the desert.” Geometric patterns in rough ochre framed the doorways, turning violet in the pageantry of dusk. By the temple smoked the lanky black-haired men called the bildiri, those whose blood mingled the strains of the Valley and the plateau.

Only once we saw the true feredhai, and they were unmistakable. They came through the center of Klah-ne-Wiy in a whirl of noise and dust. There were perhaps seven of them and each man rode a separate skittering mount, and yet they moved together like an indivisible animal. They drove the dogs and children into the alleys, and women snatched their braziers out of the way, and someone shouted as baskets overturned, and yet the riders did not seem to notice but passed with their heads held high, men and ponies lean and wiry and breathing white steam in the cold. The men were young, mere boys, and their long hair was ragged and caked with dust. Their arms were bare, their chests criss-crossed with scabbards and amulets. They passed down the road and left us spitting to clear the dust from our teeth and disappeared in the twilight coloring the hills.

Then the gloomy inn, the barefoot old man shuffling out of the rooms at the back carrying the honey beer called stedleihe, and the way that Miros made us pause before we drank, our eyes closed, Kestenyi fashion, “allowing the dragon to pass.” And the way we banged on the table until the old man brought the lentils, and later heard a moaning from the kitchen and learned that there was a shaggy cow tied up among the sacks of beans and jars of oil, with garlics around her neck to ward off disease. And the old man seemed so frightened of us and waved his hands explaining that he kept her inside to prevent the beshaidi from stealing her. And later we saw him taking snuff at a table with some Tavrounis; he was missing all the teeth on one side of his mouth.

Darkness, smoky air, the dirty lamps on the rickety tables and outside a mournful wail and a rhythmic clapping, and we all went to the door and watched the bride as she was carried through the streets in a procession of brilliant torches. The wind whipped the flames; the sparks flew. The bride was sitting on a chair borne on the shoulders of her kinsmen. I supposed she was the unhappy girl who had traveled with us on the ferry, though her face was hidden beneath an embroidered veil.

But I waited for another, as impatient as any bridegroom. And at last she came. We had then spent six days in Klah-ne-Wiy. She came, not carried by eunuchs and decked with the lilies sacred to Avalei but packed in a leather satchel on a stout Tavrouni’s back. They slunk to the door, two of them, looking exactly like all the others except perhaps more ragged, more exhausted, their boots in stinking tatters. They had walked a long way, through the lower hills of Nain, where it was already winter and freezing mud soaked halfway up their calves. And now they were here, at home, in Klah-ne-Wiy. They sat down at a table, and the one with the satchel laid it on the floor beside his feet. Auram put his hand on my arm and nodded, his eyes drowned in sadness. I swallowed. “It’s not her.”

“Oh yes! Oh yes!” whispered the priest.

My insides twisted.

“Here,” said Miros, alarmed, his hand on my back. “Have some stedleihe. Or perhaps something stronger. You! Odashi kav’kesh!”

“No,” I said with an effort. “No.” The satchel was small, too small for a human being, unless—and my stomach heaved—unless she was only bones.

“It’s not her,” I repeated. And then, impelled by some mysterious force: “Jissavet.”

“What?” said Miros.

“Quiet!” hissed Auram. “He’s calling her!”

“Jissavet. It’s not you,” I said. The priest whipped his head about, his eyes drawing in light, hoping to glimpse a shadow from the beyond.

“It’s not you.”

“There,” said the priest, alarmed in his turn, “not so loud, we mustn’t appear to notice them.”

He bent close to me, smelling of powder and cloves, his fingers fastened on my sleeve. “When they go,” he whispered. “When they go to bed, in the back. Their room’s in the northwest corner. I know it. I’ll get the package for you. And perhaps…” His tongue, hungry and uncertain, darted across his lip. “Perhaps—now that you have grown stronger—perhaps you’ll address her again. Once—or twice. A few words, a few questions. It would mean a great deal to us…”

I laughed. Pure laughter, for the first time since the Feast of Birds. “Oh, veimaro,” I chuckled, seizing his face, wrinkling it in my hands. I brought it close to my own, so close that his great eyes lost their focus and went dim. “Not for an instant,” I told him through my teeth. “Not once.”

I released him abruptly; he fell back against his chair. The odash arrived, a heady liquor made from barley and served with melted butter. I gulped the foul brew down, fascinated by the battered satchel visible in the light from the dying fire. It lay there, stirring sometimes when one of the messengers touched it with his boot. Her body, rescued from the Olondrian worms.

“Jissavet,” I murmured.

And then the door, always bolted, shivered under a volley of blows, and a voice cried, “Open in the name of the king!”

We stared at one another and Auram took my arm, not in panic but with deliberate softness, almost with tenderness. His voice, too, was soft, yet it penetrated beneath the pounding and the shouts at the door, boring straight into my heart. “The road behind the market,” he said, “will lead you to the pass. When you have crossed the hills you will see a small river, the Yeidas. Follow that river and it will take you to Sarenha-Haladli, one of the prince’s old estates. Stay there. Our people will come for you.”

“What are you saying?” I murmured in a daze. The door swelled inward.

The High Priest laughed, shrugged, and brushed the side of his vast brocaded cape. “A marvelous journey. Marvelous and terrible. And perhaps we will go on together. But it is possible that this is, as it were, the last act.”

He nodded to the landlord. “Open the door.”

The old man lifted the bolt and sprang back as four Valley soldiers rushed into the room. Shadows leapt on the walls. All my thought was for the body, the weather-stained leather satchel that held the key to my future. I ducked beneath the table and scrambled toward it over the earthen floor, but it was gone, swept up on the back of one of the Tavrounis. “Sit down, sit down,” the soldiers shouted. But my companions faced them squarely, Auram with his thin hand raised.

“Stand back in the name of Avalei,” he commanded. There was a pause, a slight uncertainty on the part of those fresh-faced, well-fed Valley soldiers. Still on my knees, I grasped the Tavrouni’s belt. “That’s mine!” I hissed. “It’s mine! You brought it for me! Give it to me, quickly!”

One of the soldiers looked at me, frowning; Auram stamped his foot to draw his attention. “What do you mean by harassing a High Priest and his men? What has the king to do with me? I am Avalei’s mouthpiece. I am prosperity. And, if the hour requires it, I am evil itself.”

Even in my dread I admired the old man. Straight as a young willow-tree he stood, his head thrown back, his nostrils curling with disdain. One arm was drawn across his chest, upholding the carmine brilliance of his cape. The hand behind his back, I noticed, clutched a knife.

The soldiers glanced at one another. “We mean no dishonor to Avalei or your person, veimaro,” one of them grumbled, scratching his neck. “But we have come for a man, a foreigner.” He scanned the group and pointed to me with his sword. “That one. The islander. We’ve come for him.”

“That man is my guest,” Auram said icily. “An insult to him is an insult to me and through me to the Ripener of the Grain.”

“Our orders are from the Telkan,” said another soldier, not the one who had spoke first, his dark face swollen with impatience.

Auram smiled. “Our speech begins to form a circle, gentlemen.” His finger twirled in the air, its shadow revolving on the ceiling. “Round and round. Round and round. You invoke the king, and I invoke the goddess. Which do you think will prove the stronger?”

“Priests have committed treason before,” shouted the dark-faced youth. And it was then that one of his fellows gave a start and dropped his sword. The weapon landed with a thud, and as if a spring had been released a whirr split the air and Auram’s knife lodged in the dark soldier’s eye.

“Run, Jevick,” Miros shouted. “It’s over now.”

He raised a chair in the manner of one accustomed to tavern brawls. One of the soldiers struck it with his sword, and the light wood cracked and splintered. Miros ducked, fine chaff in his hair.

I sprang to my feet and seized the satchel on the Tavrouni’s back. “Give it to me!” He stood his ground, splay-footed, stinking of curdled milk, and we hovered, locked together, for a long moment before I realized he was helping me, attempting to lift the strap over his head. I released him and he whipped off the strap, dropped the satchel, and drew his dagger. His companion sat on the floor, holding his stomach. One of the soldiers had fallen, his head on the hearthstone; in a moment the room filled with the sickening odor of burnt hair.

“Miros,” Auram cried. He shouted a few words in rapid Kestenyi and Miros sprang to my side, using the remains of his chair as a shield. “Hurry!” he panted. “Go through the back, there’s a door. I’ll go with you, I know the house. Ah.”

I reached for the satchel, then turned to him as he groaned.

He sank to the floor. A shadow loomed over us, a healthy and carefree shadow with crimson braid adorning its uniform. It advanced to strike, to kill. I dove for its legs and it toppled over me, its sword all slick with Miros’s blood slapping on the floor.

The soldier kicked, getting his feet under him. I rolled. A Tavrouni was there, his gray teeth bared, a knife gleaming between them. He sprang on the soldier like a panther. And I—I ought to have taken the angel’s body, risked everything for it, my life and the lives of others. But suddenly I could not. I thought: Too many have died for this. I thought: Not what will make us happy, but what is precious. And I did not lift a dead body from that chaos. Instead I reached for Miros. I seized him with both hands. I took my friend.

I clutched him under the armpits and dragged him into the dark kitchen where a scullery boy with a withered arm lay whimpering in the hay. The large, mild eyes of the cow observed me through the gloom, reflecting the beams of a coachlamp standing outside in the courtyard. The soldiers’ coach, no doubt. Miros was breathing fast, too fast. “Miros,” I said.

“Yes,” he gasped.

“I’m taking you outside. Somewhere safe.” I kicked the door open and dragged him into the alley. His bootheels skidded across the hard earth, leaping whenever they struck an uneven patch in the ground. He groaned with every jolt. In the dark I could not see where his wound was, how bad it was, but I saw he clutched his side, and his hands were black in the moonlight. He threw his head back, teeth clenched.

“Miros. Is it—can I—”

“Nothing,” he panted. “Nothing. I’ve had—worse—on a hunting trip.”

His words comforted me, although I knew they must be false. I glanced up: another corner among the mud houses. I rounded it, pulling my friend. A crash sounded somewhere behind us, breaking glass. It must be the window of the soldiers’ coach, for the inn had only shutters. Auram, I thought. Or perhaps one of our taciturn allies from the Tavroun. I hauled Miros up to grip him more surely, provoking a cry of pain. Faster. Another corner, more silent houses, sometimes behind the thick shutters a fugitive gleam like a firefly in the dusk. My goal was to put as many of those winding turns as possible between myself and the soldiers of the king. They could not track our movements in the dark, and I hoped the earth was too hard for them to gain much from it even in daylight.

At the next corner I paused, gasping for breath in the stinging cold. Miros lay flat on the ground. His head lolled to one side. His hands on his abdomen were lax. My heart gave a spasm of dread, and I crouched to check his breath and found it was still there. I stood again, gulping the cold. The night was silent, littered with stars. This night, this same night stretched all across Olondria, and across the hills I must somehow pass, the Tavroun, said to be the necklace of a goddess flung down carelessly in flight. Dark jewels in the night, a black ridge against the stars. I knelt beside Miros again. When I moved his hands aside, blood spilled from his wound as if from a cup. I stripped off my jacket and shirt, the cold air shaking me in its jaws, put the jacket back on and tied the shirt clumsily around his waist. I feared these maneuvers would do more harm than good; but at least, I hoped, we would streak less blood through the streets of Klah-ne-Wiy. I tried taking Miros’s weight on my shoulder, but he was too tall and heavy for me. I was forced to drag him as I had done before.

A fine, icy rain was falling when we reached the sleeping horse-market. The stalls were all dark, closed under covers of goatskin. The tents of the feredhai pitched in the square were mostly dark as well; only one or two glowed subtly through the rain. For an agonized moment I thought of going to one of those tents for aid; these were desert people, after all, traditional enemies of the Laths, unlikely to have ties with imperial soldiers. But I was afraid. I pulled Miros through the mud of the open square and into the rocks beyond.

Cold, exhausted, I hauled his insensible body up the trail. Thorns and juniper branches snagged our clothes. Once I lost hold of him and he slid down a slope of rattling pebbles, coming to rest against the stone wall of the hill. “Off the road,” I muttered. “Off the road. We have to get off the road.” This thought, its promise of rest, gave me the strength to go on with my task. I slid down to him and gripped his arms once more. “Not yet, Miros. Not yet.” Shivering and straining, I pulled him up the hill.

No fire. No fuel. No tinder. I dragged him into a ditch by the trail and lay down beside him. The rain had stopped, and the stars wore a veil of freezing mist. My breath curled in the darkness, white as foam. Beyond it starlight glazed the bare folds of the mountains. The Chain of the Moon.

I climbed the pass. This I have done, if I have done nothing else. I climbed the pass with Miros dragging on my arms. In his pocket I found a little penknife, and I used it to cut a strip from my sheepskin jacket which I looped under his arms and around my aching wrists. I pulled. I pulled under porcelain skies in the shadow of the pine gullies, through a landscape dark, dazzling, and inflexible, the stern cliffs topped by the pink glow of the peaks where scattered geese went flying, filling the air with dim nostalgic cries. It was uncompromising country, home of the short and rugged Tavrouni people, who call themselves E-gla-gla-mi and worship a pregnant goddess. Too desperate now to fear anything but death for Miros and myself I knocked at the slabs of bark that served as doors to their crooked huts. There were no villages now in the hills—all had been destroyed by either the Laths of the Valley or the warring nomads of the plateau. The huts I found belonged to taciturn shepherds who raised their goats on the meager vegetation of the cliffs. They showed no surprise when they saw me, and I recalled that bandits were said to haunt these hills and thought that these shepherds must be accustomed to such visitors—wild and wounded men who devoured their odash and curds without speaking and robbed them brusquely of food, water, and dried skins. From one I took a tinderbox, from another a length of Evmeni cotton. They sat by their smoking juniper fires, nursing their short clay pipes. One, a fierce graybeard with a broken nose, cleaned Miros’s wound with odash and stitched it with gut while the patient screamed as if visited by angels.

At last, after days of exposure and hardship, we were rewarded: a door of wonders opened in the landscape. At the crest of a rocky hill, suddenly, a new world lay before us, a blaze of gold, a bleak, profound desolation: Kestenya the savage and solitary, stretched out at the foot of the mountains, the great plateau that led to the birthplace of dragons. A few isolated lines marked it: a roughness hinting at hills, a dry riverbed like the shadow of a wrist. It was the home of the bull, of the stalwart, bristle-maned desert pony. Wolves prowled at its edges through the winters. It was “a shape to make men weep,” wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: “exactly the shape of a desecrated sea.”

I stood looking down at it, forgetting the wind. Miros, pale as wheat, rolled onto his side and stared over the edge with me. “It is a mystery,” writes Firdred, “how man ever had the temerity to enter a place so forbidding and forlorn.”

The sight of the desert from the pass had all the mesmeric power of a clear and moonless night resplendent with stars. It provoked the same greed of the eyes, the feeling that never, no matter how long one looked, would the image remain undamaged in the memory. It was too vast, mystic, impenetrable. And yet, as one Telkan wrote, it was nothing: “May Sarma forgive me,” wrote Nuilas the Sage, “for I have caused the blood of our sons to be shed for this utterly hostile wilderness, this annihilating void of the east.” Perhaps this was why I felt, dazzled, that I could never contain that sweeping vision—because it was nothing, pure nothingness: an almost featureless wasteland, golden, streaked with incarnadine, as Firdred wrote, “the color of a fingernail.” To the north the chain of hills stretched on and I saw the city of Ur-Amakir in the distance, poised dramatically on a precipice over the sands, and as I stood gazing at its high stern walls the wind began to shriek and a diamond burned my face. It was the snow.