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.”
“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.”