A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read online

  At home the archways were full of sound. In the hall I looked at Lunre, barely able to see him in the rain-dark air. He lifted one pale hand and spoke.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to read,” he repeated, louder.

  “Me, too,” I lied and watched him melt away in the south wing.

  When he had disappeared, I went to the stone archway that gave on the courtyard. A low gleam pierced the storm from a window on the opposite side: my father was in the room where he kept his accounts. I dashed across the courtyard, soaked in seconds, and pounded on the locked door.

  A click, then a juddering sound as the bolt slid back. Sten, my father’s steward and shadow, opened the door and stepped aside to let me in. I rubbed my hand over my face, throwing off water, and blinked in the dull radiance of the little brazier at my father’s feet.

  He was not alone. Two elderly men from the village sat with him beside the brazier, men of high rank with bright cloaks on their shoulders. Their beaky faces turned to me in surprise. My father sat arrested, an iron rod in his hand, its tip aglow. A servant knelt before him holding a sturdy block of teak wood; similar blocks were stacked beside him, ready for use. Behind the little group, silent and ghostly, arranged in rows as high as the ceiling, were other blocks, my father’s records.

  I threw myself on my knees on the sandy floor. “Forgive me, Father!”

  There was a pause, and then his expressionless voice: “Younger son.”

  I raised my eyes. He had not touched my head, but he was too far to reach me, the brazier and the kneeling servant between us. I scanned his face for anything I could recognize: anger, acceptance, disappointment. His eyes were slivers of black silk in the fat of his cheeks.

  I waited. He lowered his iron rod to the brazier, turning it in the coals. “This is my son Jevick,” he explained to the old men. “You’ll have forgotten him. He doesn’t compete in games. I brought him a foreign tutor, and now they spend all their time gossiping like a pair of old women.”

  One of the men laughed briefly, a rasp of phlegm.

  “Father,” I said, my arms taut at my sides, my fists clenched: “Take me with you when you go to Olondria.”

  He met my eyes. My heart raced in my throat. “Take me with you,” I said with an effort. “I’ll learn the business. . . . It will be an education. . . .”

  “Education!” he smiled, looking down again at the rod he was heating. “Education, younger son, is your whole trouble. That Olondrian has educated you to burst in on your father in his private room and interrupt his business.”

  “I had to speak to you. I can’t—” I stopped, unable to find the words. Rain roared down the roof, pounding the air into the ground.

  “Can’t what?” He lifted the rod, the tip a ruby of deep light, and squinted at it. “Can’t speak to your age mates? Can’t find a peasant girl to play with? Can’t run? Can’t dance? Can’t swim? Can’t leave your room? What?” He turned, drawing the burning iron briskly across the block his servant held. Once, I remembered, he had slipped, searing the man’s arm, leaving a brand for which he had paid with a pair of hens.

  “I can’t stay here.”

  “Can’t stay here!” His harsh, flat laugh rang out, and the old men echoed him, for he had too much power ever to laugh alone. “Come now! Surely you hope and expect that your father will live for a few more years.”

  “May my father’s life be as long as the shore that encircles the Isle of Abundance.”

  “Ah. You hear how he rushes his words,” he remarked to his companions. “It has ever been his great failing, this impatience.” He looked at me, allowing me to glimpse for the first time the depths of coldness in the twin pits of his eyes.

  “You will stay,” he said softly. “You will be grateful for what you are given. You will thank me.”

  “Thank you, Father,” I whispered, desolate.

  He tossed the hot iron aside, and it fell with a thud. He leaned back, searching under his belt for a cigar, not looking at me. “Get out,” he said.

  I do not know if he was cruel. I know that he was powerful; I know that he loved power and could not endure defiance. I do not know why he brought me a tutor out of a foreign country only to sneer at me, at my tutor, and at my loves. I do not know what it was that slept inside his cunning mind, that seldom woke to give his eyes, for a moment, a shade of sorrow; I do not know what it was that sprang at last at his heart and killed him, that struck him down in the paradise of the fields, in the wealth of pepper.

  The morning was cool and bright. It was near the end of the rains, and the wind called Kyon rode over us on his invisible serpent. The clustered leaves of the orange trees were heavy and glistened with moisture, and Jom stood under them, shaking the branches, his hair dusted with raindrops. His was the voice we heard, that voice, thick with excess saliva, calling out clumsily: “There is a donkey in the courtyard!” His was the voice that brought us running, already knowing the truth, that hoofed animals were not brought into houses except in cases of death. I arrived in the doorway to see my mother already collapsing, supported by servants, shrieking and struggling in their arms, whipping her head from side to side, her hair knotting over her face, filling the air with the animal cries which would not cease for seven days. In the center of the courtyard, under the pattern of light and shade, stood a donkey, held with ropes by two of my father’s dusty field-workers. The donkey’s back was heaped with something: a tent, a great sack of yams, the carcass of an elephant calf—the body of my father.

  The body was lashed with ropes and lolled, dressed in its yellow trousers, the leather sandals on its feet decorated with small red beads; but the ceremonial staff, with its arrogant cockscomb of hawk feathers, had been left behind in the fields, as none of the field-workers could touch it. I brought that scepter home, resting its smooth length on my shoulder, climbing the hill toward Tyom as the wind came up with its breath of rain, followed by the fat white mule who had been my father’s pride, whom the field-workers had abandoned because a death had occurred on its back. When I reached the house, I stepped through an archway into the ruins of the courtyard, where every shade tree had been cut down and every pot smashed on the stones. I stood for a moment holding the staff in my arms, in a haze of heat. From the back rooms of the house came the sound of rhythmic screaming.

  That screaming filled my ears for seven days and seven nights, until it became a drone, like the lunatic shrilling of cicadas. The servants had gone to the village to fetch eleven professional mourners, ragged, loose-haired women who keened, whipping their heads back and forth. Their arrival relieved my mother, who was hoarse and exhausted with mourning, having screamed unceasingly ever since she had seen my father’s body. The mourners sat in the ravaged courtyard, five or six at a time, kneeling among the broken pots, the dirt, the remains of flowers, grieving wildly while, in our rooms, we dressed in our finest clothes, scented our hair, and decorated our faces with blue chalk.

  Moments before we left for the funeral I passed my mother’s room, and there was a tchavi there, an old man, sparse-haired, in a skin cloak flayed by storms. He was crouching by my mother where she lay face-down on her pallet, and his thin brown hand was resting on her hair. I paused, startled, and heard him say: “There now, daughter. There, it’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.” I hurried back down the passage, guilty and frightened as if by a sign. My mother appeared soon afterward, unrecognizable under the chalk. I could not tell if her grief was eased by his visit, for she was like a shape etched in stone. As for the tchavi, he left the house in secret, and I did not see him again.

  The women keened, their voices mixed with the raucous notes of horns, as we walked through the village slowly, slowly, under the gathering clouds, we, my father’s family, blue-stained, stiff as effigies, with our blank, expressionless faces and our vests encrusted with beads. We walked in the dusty streets, in the cacophony of mourning, followed by the servants bearing the huge corpse on a litter. Mast
er Lunre was with us, in his Olondrian costume, that which had caused the village children to call him a “frilled lizard.” His face, unpainted, wore a pensive expression; he had not mourned, but only clasped my hand and said: “Now you have become mortal. . . .”

  He sat with us for the seven days in the valley, beside the ruined city, the city of Jajetanet, crumbling, cloaked in mists, where we set my father’s body upon one of the ancient stones and watched his flesh sag as it was pelted by the rain. “Where shall I go to find the dawn?” the hired singers chanted. “He has not pricked his foot on a thorn, he leaves no trail of blood.” My father’s jut was beside him, potbellied like him, kept bright through years of my mother’s devoted polishing, its feathers drooping.

  Because of my father’s high position, the mourning was well-attended: most of the people of Tyom were there, and some had come from Pitot. The green and gentle slope that led down into the ruined city was covered with people sitting cross-legged on mats under broad umbrellas. Harried servants walked among them bearing platters of food, begging them not to refuse nourishment in the ritual phrases of mourning. The people turned their heads away, insisting, with varying degrees of vehemence, that they could not eat; but at last they all accepted. “May it pass from me,” we said, swallowing coconut liquor, sucking the mussels from their shells, the oil dribbling down our chins.

  Before us rose the ancient ruins of Jajetanet the Desired, that city so old that none could remember who it was that had desired it, that city of ghosts inhabited by the ashes of the dead, where damp mists crept along the walls and a brooding presence lingered. At night when the fires were lit and the mourning rose to a frenzied pitch, the women with their knotted hair imitating the throes of death, Jajetanet rose above us, massive, blocking out the stars, She, the soul of loss, who knew what it was to be forgotten. The mourners shrieked. My father’s body lay on a block of stone, surrounded by lighted torches, in his gold trousers and beaded sandals. Did his hands still smell of pepper? I thought of him, inspecting the farm, while within his ribs his death was already waiting, coiled to spring.

  All at once, through the shadows of drink, I realized that I had not wept, and recognized the strain in my heart as the secret elation of freedom. I saw, looking into the blur of fires in the night, how it would be, how I would descend like a starling into the country of guitars. I trembled with excitement as, on the block of crumbling stone, my father’s jut was consumed by a burst of flame; I felt within me the moment when I would bid my mother good-bye and canter down into the drowning valley, riding toward the north. I had that moment within me, and many other moments as well: the moment of touching my father’s wife on the top of her head as she knelt, weeping and imploring me not to cast her out of the house; the solemn moment of taking snuff with the old men of the village; the moment when I would pack my satchel, moths about my lamp. My journey was already there, like a word waiting to be written. I saw the still, drenched forest and the port of Dinivolim. The ship, too, that would bear me away, arresting as a city, and beyond it, like light rising up from the sea, the transparent coast of the north.

  The one thing I had not foreseen was that Lunre, my foreign master, would refuse the chance to return with me to the country of his birth. He shocked me when, with a small, hard smile, he shook his head and said: “Ah, Shev, that way is barred. ‘I have cast my helmet into the sea.’”

  “Ravhathos the Poet,” I murmured numbly. “Retiring from the wars . . . secluding himself in a cottage made of mud, in the Kelevain. . . .”

  “You have been a fine student,” Lunre said. I glanced up at him. He was shadowed, leaning, framed in the archway, the bright kitchen garden behind him. A touch of light caught one earring with its blue stone, a silver eyebrow, the steady green of an eye, a shade of expression: resigned, resolute.

  “I am still your student,” I said.

  He laughed and made a light, uncertain gesture, opening one pallid palm in the glow that came in from the garden. “Perhaps,” he said. “I have been a student of Vandos all my life, and I believe your tchanavi tended not to release their disciples.”

  His teeth flashed in a smile; but seeing my still, crestfallen look he added gently: “I will be here when you return.”

  I nodded, recognizing the secret iron at my master‘s core, the adamantine vein that never yielded to my touch. I narrowed my eyes, looking into the sun, my lip between my teeth. Then I asked: “Well—what can I bring you from Bain?”

  “Ah!” He drew in a sharp breath. “Ah! For me? Don’t bring me anything. . . .”

  “What?” I cried. “Nothing? No books? There were so many things you wanted!”

  He smiled again, with difficulty: “There were so many things I spoke of—”

  “Tchavi,” I said. “You cannot refuse a gift, something from your homeland.”

  He looked away, but not before I saw his stricken expression, the anguish in his eyes, the look he wore in the grip of fever. “Nothing,” he muttered at last. “Nothing, there’s nothing I can think of—”

  “It can’t be, Tchavi, there must be something. Please, what can I bring you?”

  He looked at me. He wore again his grim, despairing smile, and I saw in his eyes the sadness of this island of mist and flowers. And I thought I saw, as well, a tall man walking along a windy quay and spitting the stone of an olive into the sea.

  “The autumn,” he said.

  Book Two

  The City of Bain

  Chapter Four

  At Sea

  The ship Ardonyi—in Olondrian, “the one who comes out of the mists”—bore me northward along the coast of Jennet, the still hours punctuated by the sound of the captain’s gong announcing meals of odorous fish stew clotted with bones. I stood at the front of the line with the other paying passengers while my steward, Sten, and our laborers waited behind, shifting their feet and snacking on the crescent-shaped rolls the sailors called “prisoners’ ears,” which were abandoned, rather than served, in a row of sacks. A great heat came from the galley next door, a rough voice singing, the clanging of metal, a creeping odor of rot and a reddish glow, while outside, on the smooth sea, which was both dark and pale in the moonlight, the Isle of Jennet floated by with its peaks of volcanic stone. We took no passengers from that tortured island of chasms and ash, where double-tongued salamanders breed among flowers shaped like pitchers, and where, according to island lore, there dwells Ineti-Kyan, the Devourer of Mouths, who runs up and down the black hills with his hair in the wind.

  I had almost fought my way through the stew by the time Sten joined me with his own bowl. He set it down with the tips of his fingers, his nose creased in distaste. About us the walls vibrated with the movement of the ship, the old wood gleaming in the light of whale-oil lamps.

  I nodded in greeting and spat a collection of bones into my hand. “Come,” I laughed, “it’s better than what we had at the inn.”

  “At the inn there was breadfruit,” Sten replied, looking gloomily into his bowl.

  “Breadfruit dulls the brain. Try this—there’s eel today.”

  “Yes, Ekawi,” he said. The title, uttered in a quiet, resigned, and effortless tone, made me start: it was the way he had addressed my father. That title now was mine, along with the house, the forests, the pepper bushes, the whole monotonous landscape of my childhood. And it means nothing to me, I thought, crunchy spiny morsels of fish, my momentary unease absorbed in a rush of exultation. The sacks of pepper we’ve stuffed in the hold, the money we’ll make, the farm—to me all this weighs less than the letter fi pronounced in the sailors’ dialect. . . .

  They pronounced it thi; they whistled their words; they sang. They hunched over other tables, tall rough men, their ruffled white shirts stained dark with sweat and tar. Some wore their hair cut short in the Bainish fashion, but others left it to fly out over their ears or knot itself down their backs. They raised their bowls to their bearded lips and threw them down again empty, and when they turned their heads t
heir earrings flashed in the light. They were nothing like my master: they told coarse stories and wiped their mouths on their sleeves, and laughed when one of their fellows struggled against a bone in his throat. “The Quarter,” I heard them say. “You drink with the bears. Gap-toothed Iloni, the smell in her house.” In their speech ran the reed sounds of Evmeni and the salty oaths of the Kalka; they used the Kideti words for certain fruits and coastal winds, and their slang throbbed with the sibilant hum of the tongue of the Kestenyi highlands. At last they rose, one after the other, spitting shells on the floor. As they passed our table I lowered my head to my dish, my heart racing, afraid they might notice me and yet longing to be one of them, even one of the galley slaves who wore their crimes tattooed underneath their eyes.

  When I looked up, Sten was watching me.

  “What?”

  He sighed. “It is nothing. Only—perhaps you would ask the cook if there is fennel.”

  “Fennel! What for?”

  “Prayer,” he replied, raising his spoon to his lips.

  “Prayer.”

  “The old Ekawi was accustomed to pray while at sea.”

  “My father prayed.” I laughed, flicking my bowl away with a finger, and Sten’s narrow shoulders rose and fell in a barely perceptible shrug. The light of the lamp shone on the implacable parting in his hair and the small white scar that interrupted one eyebrow.

  I rested my elbows on the table, smiling to put him at ease. “And where will our prayers go?”

  “Back to the islands. To the nostrils of the gods.”

  “My poor Sten. Do you really believe that a pinch of dried fennel burned in my cabin will keep the gods from crushing this ship if they choose?”