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.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“He is not dead. He is only very quiet.”
I glanced at her mother, who kept her head lowered.
“Why are you smiling?” asked the girl.
My conciliatory half-smile evaporated. “I’m not smiling.”
“Good.”
Such aggression in a motionless body, a nearly expressionless face. Her small chin jutted; her eyes bored into mine. She had no peasant timidity, no deference. I cast about for something to say, uneasy as if I had stepped on some animal in the dark.
“You spoke as if he were dead,” I said at last.
“You should have asked.”
“I was led astray by your choice of words,” I retorted, beginning to feel exasperated.
“Words are breath.”
“No,” I said, leaning forward, the back of my shirt plastered to my skin with sweat. “No. You’re wrong. Words are everything. They can be everything.”
“Is that Olondrian philosophy?”
Her sneer, her audacity, took my breath away. It was as if she had sat up and struck me in the face. For an instant my father’s image flared in my memory like a beacon: an iron rod in his hand, its tip a bead of fire.
“Perhaps. Perhaps it is,” I managed at last. “Our philosophies differ. In Olondria words are more than breath. They live forever, here.”
I held out the book, gripping its spine. “Here they live. Olondrian words. In this book there are poems by people who lived a thousand years ago! Memory can’t do that—it can save a few poems for a few generations, but not forever. Not like this.”
“Then read me one,” she said.
“What?”
“Jissi,” her mother murmured.
“Read me one,” the girl insisted, maintaining her black and warlike stare. “Read me what you carry in the vallon.”
“You won’t understand it.”
“I don’t want to understand it,” she said. “Why should I?”
The book fell open at the Night Lyric of Karanis of Loi. The sun had moved so that my knees were no longer in shadow, the page a sheet of blistering light where black specks strayed like ash. My irritation faded as I read the melancholy lines.
“Thank you,” said the girl.
She closed her eyes.
Her mother took her hand and chafed it. “Jissi? I’m going to call Tipyav.”
The girl said nothing. The woman gave me a fearful, embarrassed glance, then stumped across the deck and called down the ladder.
“Brother.” The young girl’s eyes were open.