A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read online

  “The letter.”

  “Yes. From someone called Yedov. You were staying with him, I think.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, compassion softening her gaze.

  I laughed: a short, hard sound.

  “Your name?”

  “Jevick of Tyom.”

  “Jevick. Come with me. He’s waiting for you in his study.”

  I followed her. She was taller than I, and her curls were cropped short, as if she had been ill. There was nothing elegant in her cloth slippers, her plain wool dress; had she not introduced herself as the daughter of a priest, I would have taken her for some sort of superior servant. Yet she had a certain distinction, an air not of loneliness but of self-sufficiency. In the next room, where gray light filled the windows that dripped with returning rain, I saw that she was older than I had thought, perhaps thirty years old. Her left temple was tattooed with the third letter, against insomnia.

  “Father,” she said.

  I did not see him at first; the room was crowded with desks, each covered by a landslide of books and papers. I only noticed him when he cleared his throat: a bent old man in a black robe, seated by the fire on a high-backed chair.

  The knob of his head gleamed in the grainy light as he gazed at me. At the sight of his carven features my heart gave a throb of hope: he had the same arrogant, solitary look as the doctors of my own country, men who cured illnesses of the spirit, men who banished ghosts. Ivrom, Second Priest of the Stone—a holy man. “Greetings, veimaro,” I said. “My name—”

  I stopped, taken aback, as he moved toward me. He did not rise: the chair itself was moving. As it drew closer, I noticed the delicate wheels at its sides, spider-webbed with spokes.

  The old man advanced with a slight ticking sound. When he reached me, his gaunt hand, resting on the arm of the chair, gave a barely perceptible twitch, and the vehicle stopped. He tilted his head back to read my face. His eyes were startling, large and light, rich signal lamps still burning in a shipwreck.

  “So,” he said. A single word, yet my heart sank at the sound. His voice was thick with phlegm, disdainful, the voice of a tyrant.

  “Jevick, please sit down,” his daughter murmured, pushing a stool toward me. I glanced at her and she nodded, her eyes giving back the light from the windows. Something in her gaze, so steady and frank, encouraged me, and I sat down.

  “So,” said the priest again. “You claim to have seen an angel.”

  “I claim nothing. It is the truth.”

  “So you say.” He cocked his head as if observing a process of nature. “But it’s original,” he said. “A ludyaval.”

  Ludyaval—an “unlettered one.” Illiterate: a savage.

  “I can read and write,” I said, stung, “and speak Olondrian fluently.”

  “Ah! And you are proud of yourself, no doubt.” He shook his head, smiling so that his lips whitened, drawn against his teeth. “Well, well. Come, there is no need for this. The matter is a simple one. Tell me who has sent you, and you may go.”

  “No one sent me. I was brought here by soldiers.”

  “Do not toy with me,” he said more softly. “Give me your master’s name.”

  I swallowed. Rain rapped sharply against the windows, the fire stirred in its bed. The old priest watched me, clutching the arms of his enchanted chair. “I,” I said. My blood sang in my ears; a strange sea, white and full of stars, seemed to be rising about me, filling up the room.

  “A name!” barked the priest.

  I blinked fiercely to clear my vision. His arm in its black sleeve flashed through the mists around me like a wing. Parchment crackled. He spread a map on his knees and jabbed it with a yellow fingernail. “Where did you go in Bain? Where were you corrupted?”

  “Corrupted—”

  “Yes! Was it Avalei’s priests? I doubt it; they are too cunning for that these days. Was it a merchant? Was it the proprietor of your hotel? What was his name?”

  “Yedov,” I whispered.

  “Was it he?”

  “No—that is—I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t know what you mean.”

  The priest turned to his daughter, who had drawn up a stool and sat near us, her chin in her hand, her expression thoughtful and tinged with pity.

  “You see?” he said. “That’s why they chose this ludyaval. He can claim he doesn’t know anything, and we cannot prove he does.”

  “But perhaps he’s telling the truth,” she said.

  “I am,” I interrupted, seizing on this spark of hope. “Veidarin—”

  “I am not a priestess.”

  “Teldarin—”

  Again she shook her head, frowning. “No. Call me by name.”

  “Tialon, then—by the gods you pray to, help me!”

  My cry hung in the air. The priest’s daughter seemed moved by it: her cheeks grew pale, and she sat up straighter, setting her hands on her knees. “I will,” she said. Her father groaned, wrinkling his map in a gesture of impatience. “I will,” she repeated firmly, “but you must help me too.”

  “Anything. Anything you ask.” I rubbed my eyes with a trembling hand. The mist of my faintness had receded, the room growing clear again. Beneath the windows, blue in the rain, Tialon leaned forward, her hands clasped, a streak of firelight on her cheek.

  “Jevick,” she said in a slow, earnest voice, “this is a serious matter. You have been brought here under suspicion of a crime. Do you know what it is?”

  “No.”

  “Pretense of sainthood,” she said and paused to watch me.

  “Sainthood.”

  “Yes. The crime of claiming contact with the spirits of the dead.”

  “But I claim nothing,” I said. “I have claimed nothing. I told no one but the keeper of the hotel, and he sent me to you.” I turned from her clear green eyes to the glittering orbs in her father’s face. “I am no saint. I would not call anyone with my affliction saintly.”

  “You see, Father,” Tialon said.

  “I see nothing,” he snapped. “Nothing but a new ruse of the pig-worshippers of Avalei.”

  Tialon sighed and turned to me. “Tell us about your island. Tell us—”

  “Tell us,” the priest broke in with a sneer, “do your people worship angels?”

  “No,” I said. “That is—we have good spirits which we call angels. But they are not dead. They are not the same as the dead—that is something different. . . .”

  My voice sounded very small in the room, but the priest leaned forward, intent, transfixing me with his pitiless gaze. “Not the same?”

  In my mind there were vast forests, my mother’s hands, smelling of flour. There were bowls of burning rosemary and janut on their dark altar. The wind sighing in the jackfruit trees, the sound of the doctors chanting, the sound of my elder brother being beaten behind the house. I struggled to put these images into words, looking at Tialon rather than the priest, strengthened by the candor of her gaze. The room grew slowly darker as I spoke. The rain had ceased, but there was a sound of distant thunder over the sea.

  “In the oldest time,” I said, “there was only the sea. There were no islands. At this time, the gods were there, but under the sea. And with them were their servants, the lower spirits, who are the angels, who are like the gods, always the same, neither increasing nor decreasing. . . . After the world was divided, they went to live on the Isle of Abundance, which is where we go after death—those of us who die well. Those of us who do not die well—belong to another place.”

  “Another place? Which place?” the priest demanded.

  “Jepnatow-het,” I said softly. “The angel—no, the dead country. Of those who are dead, yet alive. The one place that cannot be reached by sea.”

  “And what does it mean—to die badly?” Tialon asked.

  “To die unburnt. To die at sea, or to rot, or to die in the midst of an evil passion. This angel, the one who haunts me, died in Aleilin in the north. Her body was
never burned, and so she cannot rest.”

  Tialon nodded. “I have read, in the books of one of our scholars, a man called Firdred of Bain, about the island people burning their dead—”

  “Yes!” said the priest testily. “My daughter adores the geographers. But let me ask you, ludyaval—do you communicate with the dead?”

  “No.”

  “He shudders!” the priest exclaimed, sitting back and raising his eyebrows. “Well, that is something! That is out of the ordinary, at least! So your people do not seek to reach the dead; they are not grave-lovers. A splendid, a sensible people, you ludyavan! But our own people, as you may know, have a terrible passion for angels. At one time, one could scarcely dream of one’s dead grandfather without being dragged to the temple. Those who claimed they could speak with the dead were revered, and people came to them with all sorts of questions, as if they were oracles. How will the maize crop be, where is the necklace my mother gave me, whom will I marry, who stole my brown horse—all nonsense, chicanery, a farce! Yes, the love of angels was once a canker of this country, and I am the physician who removed it.”

  We had arrived at a moment I must not lose. “If you are a physician,” I said, “then cure me. Help me to find my countrywoman’s body. I need to go to Aleilin, or to have the body exhumed and sent to me here. And I must burn it on a pyre.”

  The old man stared at me. For a moment a look of surprise and respect flitted across his face of a bleached old cormorant battered by the snows. Then he looked at Tialon, returned his gaze to me, threw back his head, exposing a skinny throat, and laughed.

  “Marvelous!” he crowed. There was no true mirth in his laugh; it was a cruel sound, like the sharpening of a beak against a stone. “He asks me to send people traipsing across the country, to dig up graves, to make summer bonfires as our peasants do when the haymaking is over. What a festival it would be! And you, I suppose,” he went on, bringing his head level to fix me with his predatory glare, “you, no doubt, would lead the procession, loved and revered by all, and we would not hear the end of it for a hundred years. No, ludyaval, it shall not be. I will not have my people duped. I will have them clean, and honest, and able to read the Vanathul. Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.”

  He turned to his daughter. “The Gray Houses, I think.”

  “Yes, Father,” she murmured. She crossed the room and struck a gong, sending out a clang like a spray of ice. She remained in the shadows, her face like a wafer of stone, the firelight touching only her ankle and the black nap of one of her slippers.

  Her father folded his map on his knees, pressing down each crease.

  “Veimaro,” I said, but he did not look up.

  A moment later we heard the tramp of feet, and I stood so abruptly my stool toppled over as the guard arrived to take me to the Houses.

  Chapter Nine

  The Gray Houses

  The Gray Houses. A hospital for the mentally afflicted, located at Velvalinhu, on the southern side of the Tower of Myrrh. Built in 732, it was reserved for members of the Imperial House until 845, when, having stood empty for some time, it was opened to other noble families. At present any person, noble or common, admitted by a priest or priestess not of the cult of Avalei may receive treatment there. The Houses are run according to the philosophy of Muirn of Feirivel, who emphasized light, air, and silence in the management and cure of lunatics.

  I closed the book and looked up.

  White walls, a white floor, a ceiling painted like the sky.

  I remembered hearing the words before: The Gray Houses. A crowded café in Bain, scattered talk of an artist everyone knew. “Shut himself in the kitchen,” they said. “Almost bled to death.”

  The young woman drinking with me waggled her head. “Poor boy! He’s for the Houses.”

  “The what?” I said.

  “The Gray Houses,” she replied. Again that curious sideways waggle of the head, the roll of the eyes, the laugh. At the back of her dazzling smile, a single blue tooth.

  I returned the book to my satchel—The Lamplighter’s Companion, stolen from Yedov’s library at the Hotel Urloma. The nurse who had brought me in had told me to use the shelves if I liked, but I would not. I would not make a home for myself in that white room. My books stayed where they were. The nurses had taken away my clothes: I wore the pale robe and sash of the Gray Houses. They had taken my purse, “for safekeeping,” my pens and ink. But writing was encouraged. They gave me a soft pencil with a rounded tip.

  There were other books on the shelf. I crossed the room in four steps and bent sideways to read the titles. Kankelde, the Soldier’s Discipline. The Evmeni Campaign. A Concise History of the War of the Tongues. Fat tomes in brown calfskin, no doubt donated by some aging former soldier.

  I looked up. I scratched at the wall with a fingertip, and some whitewash came off. I walked around the room for exercise, and to forget I was a prisoner. I could have gone out to the common room, where stained white couches lined the walls, but I recoiled from the society of the other patients. At kebma two of them had looked at me and whispered and giggled together: a man with a scarred head and a woman who wore a neat bandage on each fingertip. The woman had bright green paint on her eyelids, a smear of red on her mouth. When she caught my eye she waved those mysterious cotton-tipped fingers. . . .

  No, I would not go there. I walked around and around, hopelessly, in an effort to tire myself before night arrived. A lamp burned above me on the lofty ceiling, too far to reach, enclosed in an iron cage so that no one could break the glass.

  The door was locked, but the angel still came in.

  I burst from sleep with a cry.

  She was there, a rust-colored glow, her garment on her like a liquid.

  I arched my back and writhed on my cot, the whole room suddenly a grave, my heart a mad instrument beating too hard to be borne. My fear was still an animal fear, immediate and unconquerable like the scream of a donkey that catches the smell of blood.

  She said many things before I could hear her over the pounding of my heart. I think that she was speaking to me of the cold. But I only saw her moving hands, her head tilted to one side, the light from her picking out the lines of the volumes on the shelf. I watched her lips as they opened and closed, unreal, a trick of her light. I imagined her hollow inside, or filled with ashes or perfume. She had an earnest look, though her eyes were still inhuman, unreadable. She moved the way I imagined eels would, under water.

  Her thoughts, her images, invaded me: I was as open as a field. I saw her mother’s face, then a street corner somewhere in Bain. I knew it was Bain by the shape of the lamps. A lopsided carriage passed me in blue light. Rooftops, a midnight sky so cold the stars rang with it.

  I rolled on the floor, threw myself into the walls, to escape that vision. The room went silver and tossed me to and fro like a boat. I fainted, and woke lying on the floor. A light moved above me: the mundane, greasy light of an oil lamp, so steady and natural it brought the tears to my eyes.

  “There, he’s coming back.”

  One of the nurses, the servants of Leilin, put his arm around my shoulders and helped me sit up. Another nurse held the lamp. The one beside me dabbed my temples with a cold handkerchief, filling the air with the odor of bruised ivy.

  “There,” he said. He helped me into bed. His companion watched us, her worried face lit from below, her mustache a thumbprint.

  “Can we bring you anything?” she asked.

  “You can bring me a dead girl’s body.”

  “What’s that?” said the other nurse, bending down.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “O benevolent reader,” wrote Firdred of Bain from the road above Hadellon in the northern mountains: “Do not think that a man has ever finished his creation. A soul may always be forged in a new shape; and the fiery hand of Iva now took hold of me in earnest—nay, he even set upon me with his hammer. . . . A
h! you ladies of Bain, lovelier than mimosa flowers, what will you think if I tell you that I bent down, and crawled on my belly into the wretched hovel of a mountainside magician, who wore a cap made out of sheep’s bladders? Only desperation caused me to submit to him, for the wound in my thigh now gave off an evil odor. I looked into his eyes smeared round with fat and told myself: A day has dawned that never was foretold. . . .”

  I, too, was set upon with a hammer; and in the clash of it I was ready, like Firdred, to seize any hope of healing. And so when the priest’s daughter, Tialon, came to my room and told me she thought she could ease my pain, I sat up on my cot and said: “Do it.”

  She paused. “You are very persuadable. Don’t you want to hear my proposal?”

  “I don’t need to,” I mumbled. My lip was swollen, cut by a fall in the night.

  She pulled over a bredis, a scribe’s stool covered with leather, from the wall, and sat, one slippered foot crossed on the other.

  I lay down again. Her face was just above the level of mine, and I gazed at the whorl of her ear and the blue tattoo on her temple. She had brought a battered writing box with her, and now she opened it on her knees and took out a small book bound in white.

  She cleared her throat. Her hands were very brown on the little book. Bars of shadow from the cage of the lamp passed over her when she moved. “It’s really too early for this,” she said, glancing at me, “but I thought it would help you understand the treatment I have in mind.”

  She opened the book and read: “For you are following a thread. For you are cloaked in dawn. For in a field you have found a hidden treasure. Kneel, traveler, and take it. It is a word. Now stand, take up your staff, and travel on until you find another.”

  She closed the book, smoothed the cover.

  “That’s your father’s book,” I said. “Jewels from a Stone.”