In my mind there were vast forests, my mother’s hands, smelling of flour. There were bowls of burning rosemary and janut on their dark altar. The wind sighing in the jackfruit trees, the sound of the doctors chanting, the sound of my elder brother being beaten behind the house. I struggled to put these images into words, looking at Tialon rather than the priest, strengthened by the candor of her gaze. The room grew slowly darker as I spoke. The rain had ceased, but there was a sound of distant thunder over the sea.
“In the oldest time,” I said, “there was only the sea. There were no islands. At this time, the gods were there, but under the sea. And with them were their servants, the lower spirits, who are the angels, who are like the gods, always the same, neither increasing nor decreasing… After the world was divided, they went to live on the Isle of Abundance, which is where we go after death—those of us who die well. Those of us who do not die well—belong to another place.”
“Another place? Which place?” the priest demanded.
“Jepnatow-het,” I said softly. “The angel—no, the dead country. Of those who are dead, yet alive. The one place that cannot be reached by sea.”
“And what does it mean—to die badly?” Tialon asked.
“To die unburnt. To die at sea, or to rot, or to die in the midst of an evil passion. This angel, the one who haunts me, died in Aleilin in the north. Her body was never burned, and so she cannot rest.”
Tialon nodded. “I have read, in the books of one of our scholars, a man called Firdred of Bain, about the island people burning their dead—”
“Yes!” said the priest testily. “My daughter adores the geographers. But let me ask you, ludyaval—do you communicate with the dead?”
“No.”
“He shudders!” the priest exclaimed, sitting back and raising his eyebrows. “Well, that is something! That is out of the ordinary, at least! So your people do not seek to reach the dead; they are not grave-lovers. A splendid, a sensible people, you ludyavan! But our own people, as you may know, have a terrible passion for angels. At one time, one could scarcely dream of one’s dead grandfather without being dragged to the temple. Those who claimed they could speak with the dead were revered, and people came to them with all sorts of questions, as if they were oracles. How will the maize crop be, where is the necklace my mother gave me, whom will I marry, who stole my brown horse—all nonsense, chicanery, a farce! Yes, the love of angels was once a canker of this country, and I am the physician who removed it.”
We had arrived at a moment I must not lose. “If you are a physician,” I said, “then cure me. Help me to find my countrywoman’s body. I need to go to Aleilin, or to have the body exhumed and sent to me here. And I must burn it on a pyre.”
The old man stared at me. For a moment a look of surprise and respect flitted across his face of a bleached old cormorant battered by the snows. Then he looked at Tialon, returned his gaze to me, threw back his head, exposing a skinny throat, and laughed.
“Marvelous!” he crowed. There was no true mirth in his laugh; it was a cruel sound, like the sharpening of a beak against a stone. “He asks me to send people traipsing across the country, to dig up graves, to make summer bonfires as our peasants do when the haymaking is over. What a festival it would be! And you, I suppose,” he went on, bringing his head level to fix me with his predatory glare, “you, no doubt, would lead the procession, loved and revered by all, and we would not hear the end of it for a hundred years. No, ludyaval, it shall not be. I will not have my people duped. I will have them clean, and honest, and able to read the Vanathul. Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.”
He turned to his daughter. “The Gray Houses, I think.”
“Yes, Father,” she murmured. She crossed the room and struck a gong, sending out a clang like a spray of ice. She remained in the shadows, her face like a wafer of stone, the firelight touching only her ankle and the black nap of one of her slippers.
Her father folded his map on his knees, pressing down each crease.
“Veimaro,” I said, but he did not look up.
A moment later we heard the tramp of feet, and I stood so abruptly my stool toppled over as the guard arrived to take me to the Houses.
Chapter Nine
The Gray Houses
The Gray Houses. A hospital for the mentally afflicted, located at Velvalinhu, on the southern side of the Tower of Myrrh. Built in 732, it was reserved for members of the Imperial House until 845, when, having stood empty for some time, it was opened to other noble families. At present any person, noble or common, admitted by a priest or priestess not of the cult of Avalei may receive treatment there. The Houses are run according to the philosophy of Muirn of Feirivel, who emphasized light, air, and silence in the management and cure of lunatics.
I closed the book and looked up.
White walls, a white floor, a ceiling painted like the sky.
I remembered hearing the words before: The Gray Houses. A crowded café in Bain, scattered talk of an artist everyone knew. “Shut himself in the kitchen,” they said. “Almost bled to death.”
The young woman drinking with me waggled her head. “Poor boy! He’s for the Houses.”
“The what?” I said.
“The Gray Houses,” she replied. Again that curious sideways waggle of the head, the roll of the eyes, the laugh. At the back of her dazzling smile, a single blue tooth.
I returned the book to my satchel—The Lamplighter’s Companion, stolen from Yedov’s library at the Hotel Urloma. The nurse who had brought me in had told me to use the shelves if I liked, but I would not. I would not make a home for myself in that white room. My books stayed where they were. The nurses had taken away my clothes: I wore the pale robe and sash of the Gray Houses. They had taken my purse, “for safekeeping,” my pens and ink. But writing was encouraged. They gave me a soft pencil with a rounded tip.
There were other books on the shelf. I crossed the room in four steps and bent sideways to read the titles. Kankelde, the Soldier’s Discipline. The Evmeni Campaign. A Concise History of the War of the Tongues. Fat tomes in brown calfskin, no doubt donated by some aging former soldier.
I looked up. I scratched at the wall with a fingertip, and some whitewash came off. I walked around the room for exercise, and to forget I was a prisoner. I could have gone out to the common room, where stained white couches lined the walls, but I recoiled from the society of the other patients. At kebma two of them had looked at me and whispered and giggled together: a man with a scarred head and a woman who wore a neat bandage on each fingertip. The woman had bright green paint on her eyelids, a smear of red on her mouth. When she caught my eye she waved those mysterious cotton-tipped fingers…
No, I would not go there. I walked around and around, hopelessly, in an effort to tire myself before night arrived. A lamp burned above me on the lofty ceiling, too far to reach, enclosed in an iron cage so that no one could break the glass.
The door was locked, but the angel still came in.
I burst from sleep with a cry.
She was there, a rust-colored glow, her garment on her like a liquid.