A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read online

  He began by taking me by the wrist and leading me around the room, pointing to things and naming them, signing that I should repeat. When I had learned the names of all the objects in the schoolroom, he took me into the kitchen garden and named the vegetables. If there were plants he did not know, he pointed and raised his gull-gray eyebrows, which meant that he wished to learn the Kideti word. He carried with him always a leather satchel of very fine make, in which he kept another leather object, dyed peacock-blue; when he opened it, sheets of rich cotton paper spread out like a fan, some of them marked with minute patterns which he had made himself. The satchel had a narrow pocket sewn to an outside edge, fastened shut with a metal clasp and set with bits of turquoise, and in this my new master kept two or three miraculous ink pens, filled only once a day, with which he made marks in his vallon. Whenever I told him a word in our language, he took out his blue leather book, wrote something in it rapidly, and thanked me with a bow. I was puzzled, for though I admired the book as more cunning than our wooden blocks, I could not understand why he wished to keep track of the number of words he had learned.

  At last one morning he brought a wooden box with him into the schoolroom, a splendid receptacle covered with patterns in gilt, paint, and mother-of-pearl. Orange flowers danced on its dark blue lid, and in a cloud of golden stars a pair of ivory hands floated: the hands of spirits. I knew that the box had come from my master’s heavy, ornate sea chest, with which my father’s servants had toiled through the damp forests of the island, in which he was said to keep the awful trappings of a magician, as well as the bones of his wife, her skull as flawless as a bride’s. He set the box on the round, flat stone that served us as a table. I knelt on my mat with my elbows on the stone, cupping my chin in my hands. My master preferred to sit on a stool, hunkering over the table, his legs splayed out, his crooked knees rising above the level of the stone. He did so now, then removed his satchel and set it on the table, and drew from it a slim book bound in red leather.

  “For you,” he said in Olondrian, sliding the little book toward me.

  I felt a rush of excitement and a tightness in my throat. I took up the book and tried to put my gratitude into my eyes, while my master grinned and cracked his spider’s knuckles, a habit he had when pleased.

  The schoolroom was already warm. The long light came in through the garden archway, and the voices of the servants reached us from the kitchen next door. I turned the little book tenderly in my hands, fingering the spine, and at last, with a sharp intake of breath, I opened it. It was empty.

  I touched the blank paper and looked at my master reproachfully. He chuckled and squeezed his knuckles, apparently charmed by my disappointment. I knew enough of his speech to ask at last: “What is it, Tchavi?”—addressing him, as I always did, with the Kideti word for “Master.”

  He held up a finger, signaling for me to wait and pay attention. He opened the book before me at the first page and smoothed the paper. Then he unlatched the ornate box, revealing a neat shelf suspended inside the lid, flecked with diamonds of yellow paint. Humming cheerfully to himself, he removed several small clay jars, each with a tiny cork in it, and a little red cut-glass bottle. His fingers hovered over the shelf for a moment before selecting an engraved silver pen from an ivory case. Swiftly, with fluid, dexterous movements, he unstoppered one of the jars, releasing the dark odor of rust and aloes. He added a few drops from the glass bottle, which made the room smell of pollen, and stirred the resultant brew with a slender reed. The reed came out very black, and he rested it in a shallow dish. Then he filled the pen from the jar by turning its tip. He wiped its nib on a silken cloth much stained by streaks of ink; then he leaned toward me, bent over my book, and wrote five intricate signs.

  I understood now that my master meant to teach me the Olondrian numbers, and how to record accounts, as he did, in neat, small rows in a book. I leaned forward eagerly, imagining how it would please my father when he saw his son writing numbers on paper just like a Bainish gentleman. I had my own secret misgivings, for though the book was easy to carry, much more so than the blocks on which we wrote with a piece of hot iron, it seemed to me that the pages could be easily ruined by seawater, that the ink could smear, and that this was a flimsy way of keeping records. Nevertheless the strange signs, fluted like seashells, captivated me so that my master laughed with pleasure and patted my shoulder. I moved my finger slowly under the row of graceful figures, memorizing the foreign shapes of the numbers one through five.

  “Shevick,” my master said.

  I glanced at him expectantly at the sound of his familiar mispronunciation of my name.

  “Shevick,” he said again, pointing down at the signs on the page.

  I said to him proudly, in his own tongue: “One, two, three, four, five.”

  He shook his head. “Shevick, Shevick,” he said, tapping the paper. I frowned and shrugged, saying, “Forgive me, Tchavi. I don’t understand.”

  My master put up his hands, palms outward, and pushed gently at the air, showing that he was not angry. Then he bent forward patiently. “Sh,” he said, pointing with his pen at the first sign on the page; then he moved the pen to the second sign and said distinctly: “Eh.” But only when he had described all the signs several times, repeating my name, did I understand with a shock that I was in the presence of sorcery: that the signs were not numbers at all, but could speak, like the single-stringed Tyomish harp, which can mimic the human voice and is called “the sister of the wind.”

  My back and shoulders were cold, though a hot, heavy air came in from the garden. I stared at my master, who looked back at me with his wise and crystalline eyes. “Do not be afraid,” he said. He smiled, but his face looked thin and sad. In the garden I heard the sound of the Tetchi disrobing herself in the leaves.

  Chapter Three

  Doorways

  “A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Fanlewas the Wise, the great theologian of Avalei, writes that Kuidva, the God of Words, is “a taskmaster with a lead whip.” Tala of Yenith is said to have kept her books in an iron chest that could not be opened in her presence, else she would lie on the floor, shrieking. She wrote: “Within the pages there are fires, which can rise up, singe the hair, and make the eyelids sting.” Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. “For they have gone into the Pit, into which they descend on Slopes of Fire, but when they rise they climb on a Ladder of Stone.” Hothra of Ur-Brome said that his books were “dearer than father or mother,” a sentiment echoed by thousands of other Olondrians through the ages, such as Elathuid the Voyager, who explored the Nissian coast and wrote: “I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.” And the mystic Leiya Tevorova, that brave and unfathomable soul, years before she met her tragic death by water, wrote: “When they put me into the Cold, above the white Lake, in the Loathsome Tower, and when Winter came with its cruel, hard, fierce, dark, sharp and horrible Spirit, my only solace was in my Books, wherein I walked like a Child, or shone in the Dark like a Moth which has its back to a sparkling Fire.”

  In my room, in my village, I shone like a moth with its back to a sparkling fire. Master Lunre had taught me his sorcery: I embraced it and swooned in its arms. The drudgery of the schoolroom, the endless copying of letters, the conjugation of verbs—“ayein, kayein, bayeinan, bayeinun”—all of this led me at last through a curtain of flame into a world which was a new way of speaking and thinking, a new way of moving, a means of escape. Master Lunre’s massive sea chest did not hold the bones of a murdered wife, but a series of living lovers with whom he lay down voluptuously, caressing the hair of each one in turn: his books, some written by hand and some from the printing press, that unearthly invention of the
wizards of Asarma. I soon understood why, when I went in to call him for the evening meal, my master could always be found stretched out on his pallet in the same position: his head on his hand, his bare chest gleaming, a thin sheet over his hips, his earrings glinting, his spirit absorbed in the mists of an open book. I, too, soon after I read my first book, Nardien’s Tales for the Tender, succumbed to the magical voices that called to me from their houses of vellum. It was a great wonder to me to come so close to these foreign spirits, to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of those I had never known, to communicate with the dead, to feel that I knew them intimately, and that they knew me more completely than any person I knew in the flesh. I confess that I fell quite hopelessly in love with Tala of Yenith, who was already an old woman when the printing press was invented. When she heard of it, she is said to have danced in ecstasy, crying out, “They have created it! They have created it!” until she fell down in a dead faint. Her biographer writes: “When she rose she began her rapturous dance again, shouting ‘They have created it!’ until her strength was wholly exhausted. She continued like this, beyond the control of the people of her House, who feared to subdue her with force, for seven days, whereupon she died. . . .”

  The books of my master’s sea chest were histories, lyrics, and romances, as well as a few religious texts and minor philosophical works. In their pages I entered, for the first time, the tree-lined streets of Bain, and walked in the Garden of Plums beside the city’s green canal. I fought with the rebel Keliadhu against Thul the Heretic, and watched the sky fill with dragons, unfurling fires like cloth of gold. I hunted mushrooms in the Fanlevain and fleet wild deer on the plains, and sailed down the swift Ilbalin through the most radiant orchards on earth; I stood in a court in Velvalinhu, the dwelling place of the kings, and watched a new Telkan kneel to receive the high crown of black and white silk. My dreams were filled with battles, haunted woods, and heroic voyages, and the Drevedi, the Olondrian vampires whose wings are like indigo. Each evening I lay on my pallet, reading by the light of an oil lamp, a tear-shaped bowl made of rust-colored clay—a gift from Master Lunre.

  My master’s gifts to me were those whose value cannot be reckoned. The education he gave me was erratic, shaped by his own great loves; it was not the traditional education of wealthy Olondrians, which consists of the Three Noble Arts of riding, music, and calligraphy. It was more like the education of novices dedicated to Kuidva, yet still it deviated, rejecting some classics for more obscure texts: I knew almost nothing of Telidar’s seminal Lectures on Poetry but had read many times a small volume entitled On the Nine Textures of Light. Thus, while my father imagined that I was becoming a Bainish gentleman, I was in fact ignorant of almost all that such gentlemen know. I had only seen horses in pictures, I could not play the flute or guitar, my handwriting was neat but uninspired, and I knew only five classic writers. What I knew, what I learned, was the map of a heart, of the longings of Lunre of Bain: I walked in the forests of his desire and bathed in the sea of his dreams. For years I walked up and down the vales of his heart, of his self-imposed exile, familiar with all he loved, looking out of his eyes, those windows of agate.

  He was as reticent as a crab. Or he was reserved about certain subjects: there were things of which, in the course of nine years, I could never persuade him to speak. One of these was his former trade, the one he had followed in Bain: he would never say what he had been—a tutor, a printer, a merchant, a thief? My boy’s mind dreamed up fierce romances for him, but he would not be baited and only laughed when I said he had been a sorcerer or a pirate. When I asked him why he had left, he quoted Leiya Tevorova: “I was spoken to by a god, and I found myself unworthy of Him.”

  His face, neither old nor young, grew dark as an islander’s with the sun, and his brows and close-cropped hair were bleached like sand. With his gangly limbs, in his island clothes, he resembled a festival clown, but he had too sad an air to be truly comical. He grew to love our valleys and forests and spent many hours outdoors, roaming the slopes with a staff of teak wood or exploring the cliffs by the sea. He would come home with completely ordinary flowers or shells and force me to look at them while he praised their inimitable loveliness. “Look at that!” he would say, elated. “Is it not finer than art? Is it not like a woman’s ear? Its curves are like notes of music. . . .” On subjects such as the beauties of nature, books, and the colors of light, he spoke with an unrestrained passion which often drove me to groan with exhaustion. He spoke to my mother as well: he studied our language doggedly, until he could praise the trees and the play of light and shade in the courtyard. When my mother explained how the shadows echoed the pelt of my father’s god, he rubbed his hands with delight and jotted some notes in his private book. “Let me tell you,” he said to me once, resting a hand on my shoulder after drinking a glass of our liquor, to which his tastes had become accustomed: “Let me tell you about old men. Our appetites grow like vines—like the hectic plants of the desert, which bear only flowers and have no leaves. You have never seen a desert. Have you not read Firdred of Bain? ‘The earth has a thousand thirsty tongues.’ That is what old age is like.”

  He never seemed old to me, though he certainly had a great appetite—for sights, for the sounds of birds, for the smell of the sea, for the words of our language. And sometimes, too, he would take to his bed, his body wracked with fevers, with the stricken expression of one who has not long to live and whose life is unfinished. I nursed him through his fevers, reading aloud from the Vanathul because he believed words had the power to cure all ills. I loved him as if we were partners in exile, for only with him could I speak of books, enjoying that conversation which Vandos calls “the food of the gods.” And yet there was something unyielding in him, something unconquerable, an unknown center which he guarded with care, which was never revealed to me, so that, while I knew him best, he seemed to hold me at a distance. Even in his delirium he let fall no shining thread.

  In the islands the old word tchavi, by which I always called my master, originally referred to a teacher of ancient and cryptic lore. The tchanavi were few, and their houses were built on mountains so that those who sought them could only reach them after prolonged struggle. They were strange, solitary, at home in forests, speakers of double-voiced words, men without jut, for they cast their janut to the sea, a symbolic death. Their disciples passed down laments in the form of sighing island chants, bemoaning the dark impenetrability of the tchanavi’s wisdom: a Kideti proverb says, “Ask a tchavi to fill your basket, and he will take it away.” They were difficult spirits, and made men weep. Yet the greater part of their pupils’ laments do not mourn the enigma of wisdom but rather the failure of the disciples to find their masters at all: for the tchanavi were known to melt away into the forests, into the mists, so that those who had made hard journeys discovered only the mountain and silence. These songs, the “Chants of Abandonment,” are sung at festivals and express the desperate love and grief of the followers of the tchanavi. “Blood of my heart, on the mountain there is no peace in the calling of doves/ My master has pressed a blossom into the mud with the sole of his foot.”

  My people called Lunre “the yellow man” or “the stranger.” Their stares in the village hurt me, the old men’s grins, the shouts of the children who followed us through the streets. Sometimes they even called him hotun—a soulless man, an outcast, a man without jut. I coaxed him away from them, away from the broad clean roads. He knew it, regarding me amused and compliant as I led him through knotted patches of jungle and onto the dangerous cliffs, through heavy forests where cold air rose from the earth, where I breathed raggedly, striking dead vines away from us with a stick. Leaves split under my weapon, spraying milk. When we broke through at last and emerged on the cliffs, my vest was so wet the sea wind chilled me. About us the crags lay tumbled and white with guano, and beyond them a sea the color of spittle moved in regular heaves.

  “How do you bear it?” I muttered.

  Lunre stood ca
lm in the midday glare, chewing a shred of ginger root. “I am not sure what you mean.”

  “You know what I mean. This place.”

  “Ah. This place.”

  “You’ve been to Bain, to the great library. You’re Olondrian. You’ve been everywhere.”

  “Everywhere! Indeed not.”

  “Other places.”

  “Yes.” He shrugged, looking out to sea. The breeze was growing cooler, and fat clouds blocked the sky. In places the sun shone through them, silver, making them glow like the bellies of dead fish. Every day, I thought, every afternoon, this rain.

  Lunre slapped my back, chuckling. “Don’t be so gloomy. Look!” He darted back to the edge of the forest and plucked a bell fruit from the undergrowth. “Look around you!” he went on, returning to wave it under my nose, dispersing a sickening odor of hair oil and liquor.

  I batted his hand away. He laughed as if it were a game but at once regained his usual pensive look, his hair standing up in the wind. The sky turned the color of dust while in my mind there were porcelain tiles, medallions embossed with the seals of Olondrian clans, monuments of white chalk. I longed for wide streets loud with the rumble of carriage wheels, for crowded markets, bridges, libraries, gardens, pleasure houses, for all that I had read of but never seen, for the land of books, for Lunre’s country, for somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Thunder broke in the distance, and the afternoon darkened around us. Lunre spat out his scrap of ginger root, and it whirled on the wind. We hurried home beneath the shrieks of agitated birds, arriving as the storm fell like an avalanche of mud.