“Not yet,” said Auram. “That is natural enough. You have not tried. Our lady will aid you in your first attempt. After that, slowly, it will become easier.”
“No,” I said.
The priest and priestess glanced at one another. As for the young man with the glass in his eye, he chuckled, lit another cigarette, and, with an ugly movement of his throat, blew smoke rings toward the glittering trees.
“But I think you will,” the priest said then, smiling, his teeth perfect as a bar of silver. The black thatch of his hair whispered as he turned his head. He gazed at the priestess, repeating: “I think you will. For my lady is powerful. She has the power to do what you wish. Did you not say that your countrywoman died in the mountains? How will you retrieve her body unless we help you? But with our assistance everything becomes simple, as in a play. Our enemies are strong, but our lady is stronger.”
The priestess drew herself up. A gleam passed through the murky depths of her eyes. “It is true,” she said. “I am a woman of no meager power. I have been since childhood a favorite of the goddess. I say this not, as another would, to frighten you, but to persuade you to accept my offer of help. You are far from home, and the attentions of an angel are at first difficult. You require guidance, guidance that Avalei can provide. You are unlikely, in these evil times, to escape the notice of those who shut you up in the Gray Houses, those whose blasphemous cult is becoming—”
I followed her gaze, for she was no longer looking at me, and saw the youth in the skullcap make a slight gesture. It was almost nothing: his hand, which had been relaxed on the arm of his chair, lifted an inch, the fingers spread out in warning. At once the priestess fell silent, and I wondered at the power of this stranger, who was only half her age. “But you know all that,” she said. “You have already met them. It is I who can help you, I who can bring you the body of the angel.”
Expectancy charged the air. They were waiting for me to speak.
“How will you do it?” I asked.
The priestess gave her low, heavy laugh. “If what you say is true, then while you hold the Night Market I will send my servants northward to Aleilin. They will obtain what you seek. They will come down into Kestenya, into the highlands, where it is easy to hide from the soldiers of the king. You will meet them there, in the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Our Prince,” she said with a soft, caressing glance at the silent youth, “has a house nearby.”
The prince. His gaze met mine. One of his beautiful eyes was larger than the other, slightly magnified by the glass. His expression was at once disdainful and sad: yes, filled with regret. Seed pearls nestled in the lace at his throat.
I turned to the priestess. “If I do this for you—if I hold your Night Market—you’ll give me the body.”
“Yes,” she said.
“How can I be sure?”
“You cannot be sure,” she answered. “Nor can you be sure that in the end you will want the body destroyed.”
I laughed. “I will burn it, I promise you.”
“In the Book of Avalei,” the priestess said, “it is written: ‘Like a wind upon the valley, like a dragon, like a sea of ambergris, and like the striking of a hammer: so is every spirit among the dead.’”
Among the dead.
They took me through the trees, the way the others had gone, and we entered a pillared veranda filled with night. Steps led down to a terrace under the stars, where four lamps burned on brass posts, diffusing a freshening scent of resin. The terrace overlooked a small lake among the towers, a captive pool where lamplight and starlight played. There were other terraces bordering it, and balconies above it, but the others were all deserted, the lamps dark.
There was a shout from the water. I saw pallid bodies swimming there, the hard young bodies of Miros and the other gentlemen. Their clothes were strewn on the terrace along with the gowns of some of the servant girls, who were shrieking and splashing each other in the shallows. There was no furniture on the terrace but a table, and so the company sat above it, on the steps leading from the veranda, but they often rose to go to the table, where there was a bowl of sparkling liquid which they poured into their mouths with a ladle. The notes of the lute quivered. My heart, soaked in los, expanded at the sight of the two young ladies dancing on the terrace, their faces flushed in the lamplight, their beautiful gowns awry, their hair disheveled, hanging about their ears. They were singing a popular song of the type called vanadel whose refrain was: “Gallop, my little black mare.” The white-haired nobleman, luminous in the dark, had stepped into the trees beside the terrace and was gathering berries to pelt them as they whirled. He wore no shirt.
I entered that delirium. Later I would remember images but lose their chronology in the delusional air: someone shouts, another laughs, a wind disorders the quince trees—but I cannot place the events in their proper sequence. I see again the sharp, witty, mocking face of the lady in peacock feathers as she holds me by the collar, forcing my head back to empty the ladle into my mouth, the cold, tingling liquid soaking my clothes. She wears a bracelet of natural pearls which breaks during this struggle, the precious pellets scattering on the tiles. A rose-colored slipper drifts away on the water and slowly sinks. A servant girl is weeping among the pillars.
I see the High Priestess with her extravagant body raising her arms to release her hair, which springs outward in inky tendrils. The mask of her face is lifted. She bares her teeth, shrieks, runs, and plunges herself, still clothed, in the black water. Her arms rise, flinging drops. The company call her by her title, but also by the name Taimorya, which is the Queen of the Witches. The white-haired youth breaks the lake’s surface, his hair a matted gray, and his arms encircle her astral shoulders. A naked servant girl slips in a puddle on the tiles; she falls to her knee with a cry, her dull flesh jiggling. And the prince is holding the Nissian slave by the wrists in the shadow of the veranda. They do not speak.
The last image, and the most powerful, concerns this enigmatic youth. It must be the end of the night, for the air is gray. He announces that he is leaving us. Slowly the revelers gather on the terrace, sopping, staggering, some of them naked. The youth has lost his curious single eyeglass and his skullcap. His face is sad; his hair falls on his shoulders. The assembled guests begin to bow. One by one they approach him, kneel, and touch their foreheads to the tiles. With each prostration the young man’s face twitches, as if he is wincing, and an insufferable pride touches his plummy lips. The High Priestess kneels in a single arc, her wet gown clinging to the vastness of her hips. She cries out: “Father!”
I kneel too, close to his gleaming boots, almost swooning with my brow on the aching coldness of the tiles.
I do not remember returning to the Gray Houses. I woke with bile in my throat and a scrap of paper knotted in my hair.
Chapter Eleven
The Girdle of Avalei
We return on Tolie before the sun rises. Bury this note in the garden.
The angel did not come to me for two nights. Two whole nights, slow and splendid, undisturbed by the sound of light. The first was painful; on the second hope grew in me like a branch of thorns. She knows, I thought. I felt that some of my hope belonged to the ghost, that she was watching, that she knew I had set our destiny in motion, that she understood how I intended to save her. And those two nights, after so much suffering, filled me with a strength that came close to elation. I buried the little note I had pulled from my hair by the garden wall. Afterward I walked, spoke with a patient, tried to learn the words of a vanadel. I touched the cracks in the wall. I touched the trees. A crow took flight with the sound of a handkerchief in the wind. I could hear the world.