“No,” she said. A single word, a stab of pure and agonizing light.
The time that followed is vague in my mind, flickering like a storm. I know that I fought to get out of the carriage. I fought Sten, my good Sten. I said: “Let me out. She’ll kill me.” These words I remember well.
When I had come out of the carriage, she faded, and I could see again. A crowded street, curious dockworkers gathered around the scene. The horses stamped and rolled their eyes. Sten took me by the shoulders.
Even now I cannot believe that he is gone.
I must believe it. He is gone, and it was I, his Ekawi, who sent him away. I know that I did right. It is only a matter of weeks before the winds change and Olondrian ships stop sailing for the south. What would happen to the farm, to my mother and Jom, without Sten? He would have missed two full growing seasons had he stayed too long. He knew it, but still he tried to stay. He said: “We’ll book a new passage next week.” I told him it was no use. I said: “The ghost will not let me go.”
The ghost will not let me go. I came back to the Hotel Urloma alone. I walked through the room of white roses and down the hall. Yedov looked up from his newspaper when I entered the dining room. A cigarette before him, a glass of tea.
I told him I was too ill to travel. He brought me here, to this room on the roof of the hotel.
He said he had already rented my former room. He did not look at me when he spoke. He unlocked the door to a cramped stairway and led me up to this chamber, the “student’s quarters.” It stands alone on the roof. He has not used it for some time. “Students, you know,” he said, “furniture broken, strange women at all hours.” I told him yes, I saw, I understood. I was suddenly anxious for him to leave. Unsure of how much he knew. Afraid.
“You help me.”
I remember coming back through my beloved Bain. Passing the Street of the Saints, the Street of the Baths, where the air is perfumed with myrrh. The Street of Acacias, the Street of Red Eaves. The Street of Prince Kelva’s Mistress. The Street of Harps, populated with echoes.
“Oh streets of my city,” writes Fodra, “how you depart when I enter you.”
I passed the Street of the Dead, the Cemetery of Bain. Its whitewashed ramparts glitter like spun sugar. There stand the miniature homes of the dead, tiled fantasies, like houses for children.
Beneath them Olondrian bones are falling to dust.
Somewhere, she is like that too. She must have died here, in Olondria, in the north. She was buried, then, not burned as is our custom in the islands. She is one of the Rotted Dead.
She must desire what all such dead desire: to be consumed. To be released.
“You help me.”
“Do you want me to find your body?” I screamed.
My own voice frightened me: too harsh, too much. As I slipped into darkness, I heard swift feet downstairs. Dogs barked from a neighboring yard.
From The Starling, a Bainish newspaper, just after the Feast of Birds:
The Feast of Birds is over, to the relief of all upright citizens. Small fortunes were lost, glass broken, reputations irreparably soiled—but this will hardly come as news to longtime residents of the capital. What is more alarming is that, contrary to popular belief, the so-called Feast is no mere invasion, attended solely by outsiders. This writer observed, from a convenient window, a person very like Lady Olami of Bain wailing before the effigy of the Goddess.
Such displays are proof that despite the best intentions of the Telkan, whose wisdom in the matter is undeniable, the cult of Avalei persists in its more unworthy forms, and can be expected to do so for some time. Those who thought that the Telkan’s decision to prevent the High Priestess of Avalei from attending the Feast would crush it, must admit themselves in the wrong. It seems that as long as Avalei’s priests, bulls, eunuchs, and peasant hangers-on exist, chaos will clog our streets every Month of Apples.
But is there no solution, nothing to be done? Is our only response to be a sigh, and the sweeping of broken glass and refuse from our doorsteps? No! For it has been reported that letters are flooding the Blessed Isle, complaining of damages and requesting more guards. Respectable Bainish hearts must not lose hope! We must add our voices to the Telkan’s, until the Red and White Councils answer our demands! Citizens, make your wishes known: no more harlots’ festivals in Bain, no thieves’ holidays, no Feast of Birds!
Letters respond in the next several issues. Agreement, approval, reports of crimes committed during the Feast. No challenge. No defense.
The windows in the student’s quarters are all covered with boards. They must have been broken long ago. Prepared for me.
A door leads onto the roof, where herbs and vegetables grow in pots. Sometimes I step out for air. I lock the door at night.
A table. A candlestick so dented it looks as if it was used in a brawl. A fireplace wreathed in grinning figures, some missing a nose or a horn.
My satchel, my books. Olondrian Lyrics, the binding stained with seawater. the Romance of the Valley, beginning to curl with use. Newspapers, pens. I have no talents, but unless my master failed, I am a decent scholar. That scholarship must serve me as sword, and shield, and friend.
From The Lamplighter’s Companion, the Olondrian almanac and general encyclopedia, the entry on angels:
Angels. Hallucinations.
Once believed to be the spirits of the dead, and to possess knowledge of the Land Beyond, the angels are now understood to be merely products of human minds which have become unbalanced through illness, shock, or intrinsic abnormalities. In the days of widespread ignorance and the reign of the cult of Avalei, diseased individuals were adored as saints rather than treated and returned to health. Suffering and folly ensued. The worship of angels, like geomancy and reading the taubel, was outlawed and registered as a crime in 939.
939. Three years after my master left Olondria.
A fruitless trip to the Library of Bain.
There are no books about angels. I countered my weakness with coffee and seared beef at a café and took a carriage to the great pillared edifice. How often I walked its halls in happier days! Now I clung to the banister as I climbed the stairs to the seventh floor. Here, in the Collection of the Rare and Unseen, I paged through discourses on magic and theological textbooks. Sometimes I found a word, a line, that seemed to promise discovery. “Breim may have been led to his profession by his mother, who was visited by an angel for six years.” “According to the Angel of Berodresse, as reported by his mouthpiece Gerna, there will never be a machine capable of flight.”But I found no treatises, no arguments, no explanations. Only a little white volume, Jewels from a Stone, for the Edification and Uplifting of Eager Hearts, which repeated what I had read in the Companion—there are no angels, only sick minds—and appended several prayers to restore order to the spirit.