A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read online

  Again his shoulders moved slightly. He drew a slender bone from his mouth.

  “Look,” I argued. “The Kavim is blowing. It blows to the north, without turning! How can the smoke move backward?”

  “The wind will change.”

  “But when? By that time our prayers will have disappeared, inhaled by the clouds and raining over Olondria!”

  His eyes shifted nervously. He was not hotun, after all, not one of that unfortunate class who live without jut: he had jut at home, no doubt in one of the back rooms of his strong mud house, a humble figure of wood or clay, yet potent as my own. Naturally it would not do to bring jut northward to Olondria: to lose one’s jut in the sea would be the greatest of calamities. Burnt fennel was said to make the gods favorable to keeping one’s jut from harm; but it shocked me to think that my father had held any faith in such superstition. Sten, too: his iron features were softened by dejection. He looked so forlorn that I laughed in spite of myself.

  “All right. I’ll ask for fennel. But I won’t say what I’m going to do with it. They’ll think they’ve picked up a cargo of lunatics!”

  I stood, took my satchel from the back of my chair, and left him, swinging myself up the steep stairs to the deck. The wind tossed my hair as I emerged into the sunlight where the great masts stood like a forest of naked trees. I walked to the edge of the gleaming deck and leaned against the railing. As the wind was fair, the rowers were all on deck, slaves and free men together, the slaves’ tattoos glowing like blue ornaments against their flesh, their hands sporting rings of carefully worked tin. They crouched in the sails’ shadow playing their interminable game of londo, a complex and addictive exercise of chance. The planks beneath them were chalked with signs where they cast small pieces of ivory, first touching them to their heads to honor Kuidva the God of Oracles. Some went further: they prayed to Ithnesse the Sea or to Mirhavli the Angel, protectress of ships, whose gold-flecked statue stood dreaming in the prow. The Angel was sad and severe, with real human hair and a wooden trough at her feet; as a prayer, the sailors spat into the trough, calling it “the fresh-water offering.” When a man ran off to perform this ritual, the soles of his bare feet flashing chalk-white, the others laughed and called merry insults after him.

  I drew a book from my satchel and read: “Now come, you armies of glass. Come from the bosom of salt, unleash your cries in the conch of the wind.” All through that journey I read sea poetry from the battered and precious copy of Olondrian Lyrics my master had sent with me. “Come with your horses of night, with your white sea-leopards, your temple of waves/ now scatter upon the breast of the shore your banners of green fire.” I read constantly, by sunlight that dazzled my eyes, by moonlight that strained them, growing drunk on the music of northern words and the sea’s eternal distance, lonely and happy, longing for someone to whom I might divulge the thoughts of my heart, hoping to witness the pale-eyed sea folk driving their sheep. “For there is a world beneath the sea,” writes Elathuid the Voyager, “peopled and filled with animals and birds like the one above. In it there are beautiful maidens who have long, transparent fins, and who drive their white sheep endlessly from one end of the sea to the other. . . .” Firdred of Bain himself, that most strictly factual of authors, writes that in the Sea of Sound his ship was pursued by another; this ship was under the sea, gliding upon its other surface, so that Firdred saw only its dark underside: “Its sails were outside of this world.” In Tinimavet there are countless tales of sea-ghouls, the ghosts of the drowned, and of magical fish and princesses from the kingdoms under the sea. I wondered if I would see any of them here, where the sea was wildest—if at night, suddenly, I would catch in the depths the glow of a ghostly torch. But I saw no such vision, except in my dreams, when, thrilled and exhausted with poetry, I stood on deck and watched the glow worm dances of the ghouls, or caught, afar off, the rising of a dreaded mountain: the great whale which the sailors call “the thigh of the white giant.”

  Above me, on the upper deck, the island merchants sat: men of my own rank, though there were none as young as I. There they yawned through the salt afternoons under flapping leather awnings, drank liquor from teacups, predicted the winds, and had their hair oiled by their servants. The Ilavetis, slowly sipping the thin rice wine of their country, also had their fingers and toes dyed a deep reddish-brown; the smoky scent of the henna drifted away with the fog from their Bainish cigars, while one of them claimed that the odor of henna could make him weep with nostalgia. I despised them for this posturing, this sighing after their forests and national dishes mingled with boasts of their knowledge of the northern capital. None of them knew as much as I; none of them spoke Olondrian; their bovine heads were empty of an appreciation of the north. The Olondrian boy who knelt on a pillow each evening to sing for their pleasure might as well have sung to the sails or the empty night: the merchants would have been better pleased, I thought, with a dancing girl from southern Tinimavet, plastered with ochre and wearing mussel-shells in her hair.

  The boy sang of women and gardens, the Brogyar wars, the hills of Tavroun. He knew cattle-songs from Kestenya and the rough fishing songs of the Kalka. The silver bells strung about his guitar rang gently as he played, and the music reached me where I sat beneath the curve of the upper deck. I sat alone and hidden, my arms clasped about my knees, under the slapping and rippling of the sails, in the wind and the dark. Snatches of murmuring voices came to me from the deck above, where the merchants sat under lamps, their fingers curled around their cups. The light of the lamps shone dimly on the masts and rigging above; the lantern in the prow was a faint, far beacon in the darkness; all was strange, creaking and moving, filled with the ceaseless wind and the distant cries of the sailors paying their londo forfeits in the prow. The boy broke into his favorite air, his sweet voice piercing the night, singing a popular song whose refrain was: “Bain, city of my heart.” I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

  Halfway through the voyage a calm descended. The galley slaves rowed, chanting hoarsely, under a sky the color of turmeric. The Ardonyi unrolled herself like a sleepy dragon over the burnished sea, and sweat crept down my neck as I stood in my usual place on deck. The pages of my book were limp with heat, the letters danced before my eyes, and I read each line over and over, too dull to make sense of the words. I raised my head and yawned. At that moment a movement caught my eye, an object beetle-black and gleaming in the sun.

  It was a woman’s braided hair. She was climbing up from below-decks. I closed my book, startled by the strangeness of the image: a woman, an island woman with her hair plaited into neat rows on the crown of her head, aboard an Olondrian vessel bound for the city of Bain! She struggled, for she grasped a cotton pallet under her arm which made it difficult for her to climb the ladder. Before I could offer to help, she shoved the pallet onto the deck and climbed out after it, squinting in the light.

  At once she knelt on the deck, peering anxiously into the hole. “Jissi,” she said. “You hold him. Jissi, hold him.” I detected the accent of southern Tinimavet in her speech, blurred consonants, the intonation of the poor.

  Slowly, jerkily, an elderly man emerged from below, carrying a young girl on his back. The girl’s head lolled; her dry hair hung down in two red streams; her bare feet dangled, silent bells. She clung to the old man’s neck with a dogged weariness as he staggered across the boards of the deck toward the shadow of an awning.

  Several sailors had paused in their duties to stare at the strange trio. One of them whistled. “Brei!” he said. Red.

  I turned my back slightly and opened my Lyrics again, pretending to read while the woman dragged the pallet into the shade and unrolled it. The girl, so slight, yet straining the arms of the others like a great fish, was set down on it, the end of the pallet folded to prop up her head. Her thin voice reached me over the deck: “There’s wind. But there aren’t any birds.�
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  “We’re too far from the land for birds, my love,” the older woman said.

  “I know that,” said the girl in a scornful tone. Her companion was silent; the old man, servant or decrepit uncle, shuffled off toward the ladder.

  Ignorant of my destiny and theirs, I felt only pity for them, mingled with fascination—for the girl was afflicted with kyitna. The unnatural color of her hair, lurid against her dark skin, made me sure of her malady, though I had never observed its advanced stages. She was kyitna: she had that slow, cruel, incurable wasting disease, that inherited taint which is said to affect the families of poisoners, which is spoken of with dread in the islands as “that which ruins the hair,” or, because of the bizarre color it gives, as “the pelt of the orangutan.” Not long ago—in my grandfather’s time—the families of victims of kyitna, together with all of their livestock and land, were consumed by ritual fires, and even now one could find, in the mountains and wild places of the islands, whole families living in exile and destitution, guarding their sick. Once, when I was a child, a strange man came to the gate of the house, at midday when the servants were sleeping, and beat at the gate with a stick; he was grimy and ragged and stank of fear, and when I went out to him he rasped through his unkempt beard: “Bring me water and I’ll pray for you.” I ran back inside and, too terrified to return to him by myself, woke my mother and told her that someone was outside asking for water. “Who is it?” she asked sleepily. “What’s the matter with you?” I was young and, unable to name my fear, said: “It is a baboon-man.” My mother laughed, rose, rumpled my hair and called me a dormouse, and went to the cistern to fill a clay pitcher with water for the strange man. I kept close to her skirts, comforted by her smell of dark rooms and sleep, her hair pressed into her cheek by the pillow, her gentle voice as she teased me. I felt braver with her until, just outside the courtyard, she started and gasped, kissing her fingertips swiftly, almost upsetting the pitcher of water. The man clung to the gatepost, looking at us with a desperate boldness. His smile was a grimace and had in it a kind of horrible irony. “Good day to you, sister!” he said. “That water will earn you the prayers of the dying.” My mother gripped the clay pitcher and hissed at me: “Stay there! Don’t move!” Then she took a deep breath, strode toward the man, handed him the pitcher, turned on her heel without speaking, walked back to the house, and pulled me inside. “You see!” I cried, excited to see my fear confirmed in hers: “I told you it was a baboon-man! He stank, and his teeth were too big.” But my mother said sadly, gazing out through the stone archway: “No, he was not . . . He was one of the kyitna people who are living on Snail Mountain.”

  The thought of any kind of people living on Snail Mountain, where the earth breathed sulfurous exhalations and even the dew was poisonous, shocked and terrified me. How did they live? What did they eat? What water did they drink? But my mother said it was bad luck to think of it. Later the empty pitcher was found standing beside the gate, and my mother had the servants break it in pieces and bury it in the back garden. And some days after that we heard that a party of men from Tyom, armed with torches and spears, had driven the kyitna people away: “They had a small child with them,” whispered the women in the fruit market: “Its hair was red, they could see it in the torchlight—as red as this palm nut!” I wished, at the time, that I had been able to see the kyitna child. Now I studied the girl who lay motionless in the shade of the awning, who took up so little space, who seemed without substance, a trick of the light, who flickered under the flapping shade like the shadow cast by a fire.

  She was not as young as I had thought her at first. She was not a child, though from a distance she appeared to be so—she was small even for an islander. But her waist, showing between her short vest and the top of her drawstring trousers, was gently curved, and the look in her face was too remote for that of a child. She seemed to be wandering, open-eyed; her skin was dark, rich as silt; the crook of her elbow, dusky in the shade, was a dream of rivers. She wore a bracelet of jade beads which showed she belonged to the far south, to the rice-growers and eel-fishers, the people of the lagoons.

  I think she had spoken to me twice before I realized it. She struggled to raise her voice, calling: “Brother! You’ll get sun-sick.” Then I met her gaze, her tired, faintly mocking smile, and smiled back at her. The older woman, no doubt her mother, hushed her in a whisper.

  “It’s all right,” said the girl. “Look at him! He wouldn’t harm anyone. And he isn’t superstitious. He has the long face of a fish.”

  I strolled toward them and greeted the mother, whose eyes darted from my gaze. She had the flat, long-suffering face of a field-laborer and a scar on her forehead. The young girl looked at me from inside the fiery cloud of her hair, her lips still crooked in a smile. “Sit down, brother,” she said.

  I thanked her and sat in the chair beside her pallet, across from her mother, who still knelt stroking the girl’s long hair and would not meet my eye. “The fish,” said the young girl, speaking carefully, her breathing shallow, “is for wisdom. Isn’t that right? The fish is the wisest of the creatures. Now, most of our merchants here are shaped just like the domestic duck—except for the fat Ilaveti—the worst of all, he looks like a raven. . . .” She paused, closing her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and fixed me with a look of such clarity that I was startled. “Ducks are foolish,” she said, “and ravens are clever, but have bad hearts. That is why we came up here now, at noon, when they’re asleep.”

  I smiled. “You seem to have had ample time to study all of us. And yet this is the first time that I have seen you come out of your cabin.”

  “Tipyav,” she answered, “my mother’s servant, tells me everything. I trust him absolutely. He has slow thoughts, but a very keen eye. My father—but I am talking too much— you will think me poorly behaved—”

  “No,” I said. But she lay very still and silent, struggling for breath.

  “Sir,” said her mother in a low voice, looking at me at last, so that I saw, surprised, that she had the deep eyes of a beautiful woman: “My daughter is gravely ill. She is—she has not been well for some time. She has come here for air, and for rest, and this talking taxes her so—”

  “Stop,” the young girl whispered. She looked at me with a trembling smile. “You will forgive us. We are not accustomed to much company.”

  “It is I who should ask forgiveness,” I said. “I am intruding on you—on your rest.”

  “Not at all,” said the girl, in a manner peculiarly grave and formal. “Not at all. You are a very rare thing: a wise man from the islands. Tell me—have you been to this northern ghost-country before?”

  I shook my head. “This is my first visit. But I do speak the language.”

  “You speak their language? Olondrian?”

  “I had an Olondrian tutor.”

  I was gratified by the older woman’s look of awe; the girl regarded me silently with an expression I could not read.

  “We have heard that one can hire interpreters,” her mother said.

  “I am sure one can,” I answered, though I was not sure of it at all. The woman looked relieved and smoothed her dark dress over her knees, moving her hand down to scratch discreetly at her ankle. Poor creatures, I thought, wondering how they would fare in the northern capital. The woman, I noticed, was missing the two smallest fingers of her right hand.

  The girl spoke up abruptly. “As for us,” she said in a strange, harsh tone, “we are traveling to a place of healing, as you might have guessed. It is called A-lei-lin, and lies in the mountains. But really . . . She paused, twisting the cloth of her pallet. “Really . . . It’s foolish of us. . . .”

  “No, not foolish,” her mother interrupted. “We believe that we will find healing there. It is a holy place. The temple of a foreign goddess. And perhaps the gods of the north—in the north there are many wonders, son, many miracles. You will have heard of them yourself. . . .”

  “It is certainly said to be
, and I believe it is, a place of magic, full of great wizards,” I said. “These wizards, for example, have devised a map of the stars, cast in brass, with which they can measure the distance of stars from the earth. They write not only in numbers, but words, so that they may converse across time and space, and one of their devices can make innumerable replicas of books—such as this one.”

  I held out the slim Olondrian Lyrics bound in dark green leather. The women looked at it but seemed loath to touch it.

  “Is that—a vallon?” the girl asked, stumbling slightly over the word.

  “It is. In it there are written many poems in the northern tongue.”

  The girl’s mother gazed at me, and I guessed that the worn look in her face came not from hard labor but from an unrelenting sorrow. “Are you a wizard, my son?”

  I laughed. “No, no! I am only a student of northern letters. There’s no wizardry in reading.”

  “Of course not!” snapped the girl, startling me with her vehemence. Her small face blazed, a lamp newly opened. “Why must you?” she hissed at her mother. “Why? Why? Could you not be silent? Can you never be silent even for the space of an hour?”

  The woman blinked rapidly and looked away.

  “Perhaps—” I said, half rising from my chair.

  “Oh, no. Don’t you go,” said the girl, a wild note in her voice. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me! My mother and I—we are too much alone. Tell me,” she went on without a pause, “how do you find the open sea? Does it not feel like freedom?”

  “Yes, I suppose—”

  “Beautiful and fearsome at the same time. My father, before he stopped talking, said that the open sea was like fever. He called it ‘the fever of health’—does that not seem to you very apt? The fever of health. He said that he always felt twice as alive at sea.”

  “Was your father a merchant?”

  “Why do you say that—was? He isn’t dead.”