“Where are you?” I ask, or the priestess asks with my voice. “Why don’t you come to me? Can’t you hear me? I’ve been looking for you for so long. I’m lost…”
Silence. A ripple of water which might be, far away, the bells of the girls in the cave.
Then I see her. And for the first time and the last, I know that I am seeing her when she is alone, before she knows I am there. She walks uncertainly, sometimes pausing as though she has dropped something. She is far away, and her progress is very slow. She wears the same short, colorless shift, and her hair lies on her thin shoulders. She turns her head, bewildered, filling me with the desire to weep.
“I’m here,” I say.
She looks up sharply and sees me. Her gaze burns. In the air, the insistent ringing, like flashes of light. “Jevick,” she says.
“Yes.”
She comes close to me, almost blinding me with her ocean of light, making me cry out, my eyes on fire; then she grows dim and looks at me anxiously and hungrily through the whirling cloud. “Jevick, you’re here. You’ve come to find me…”
“Yes,” I whisper.
She frowns. “But you’re strange. There are two of you.”
“Yes. I have asked the aid of a northern priestess. Together we have come to find what it is that you desire. We have—I have done this for love of you—”
A blaze of scorn makes me scream again. My eyes are bleeding. “You do not love me,” the angel says.
“Forgive me. It was the love which all of the living must have, for those who come from beyond the narrow grave, of which I spoke.”
“Beyond the grave,” the angel says. “That is northern talk.”
“Yes,” I whisper. I feel the words echo inside me. I am listening, and speaking, in two languages at once, translating. The mouth and ears of the Priestess of Avalei.
“Very well,” says the angel. She looks at me in bitter disdain, and I grovel, writhing before the flame of her face. “This boy is weak,” she says contemptuously. “He will not last long. You have asked what I desire, and I will tell you.” She pauses, her indrawn breath a conflagration. Then she says: “Write me a vallon. Put my voice inside it. Let me live.”
She draws close to me. “Write me a vallon, Jevick. Like what you read to me on the ship that day. You said they last forever.”
Her voice is suddenly fragmented, broken with tears. She weeps like one who is dying of grief, and yet she cannot die; she weeps like one who has lost her dearest possession, her only love. “Jevick, my mother left me alone. Do you hear me? They buried me there, in the north. She was weak. She let them put me into the earth. In the graveyard—faugh!—in the huge graveyard on the hill. She let them put me there, to have my bones sink into the earth, and—oh, Jevick! I am one of the Rotted Dead.”
Her face is transformed by the horror she feels—the horror that grips us both. In its clutches and for one moment she looks devastatingly human. Her face is close to mine, the eyes wide, the mouth aghast. I think I can see the pores in her skin, the beads of sweat, the terror… But of course it is an illusion, a wraith: her body is underground, sinking and putrefying, her youth and beauty mere bubbles of gas. As if she has read my thought, she shrieks, begins to wail, whipping her red hair to and fro, in mourning for herself.
“Jissavet,” she cries. “Jissavet.”
The priestess plucks the translation from my mind. Island of the White Flowers.
But I am falling now. I cannot speak for her, to answer the foolish question: “Yes, angel? What do you mean?” I know what she means, I think to myself, and the priestess does not hear me because I am already too far away, my body shivering, slick with sweat, riding the river of pain which bears me away to a new depth where I will not hear the grief-maddened shrieking of the angel. It is as if she moves away from me, weeping over the valleys. “Jissavet, Jissavet.” Then silence. Then I know nothing, until I wake again in the holy cave and see the face of Auram bending over me.
“Don’t sit up,” he said. I looked up at him, at the thick locks of his hair in disarray against the craggy ceiling. His face was shadowed, but I could see that it did not have its usual chalky pallor: the skin was mottled, tense, excited. There was a sour odor: I guessed it came from his short leather skirt. An odor of ancient cabinets, ancient sweat. His mask was slung around his neck, and it looked at me too, leering downward, its hide in the torchlight criss-crossed with fine wrinkles.
“Brave one!” he said ecstatically. He caressed my hair; his palm was damp and heavily scented with musk. I lay motionless on the bare floor of the cave, close to his crossed legs, his plucked-looking, almost hairless shins, the brief flap of his skirt. Voices resounded in the air, the murmuring of the girls, and huge shadows moved to and fro on the walls. “Avneanyi,” Auram whispered. His fingernail snagged my skin as he traced a circle on my brow with his index finger.
The shadows leapt and shrank to nothing, staggering drunkenly over the walls, those visions of glorious color. I lay still, my throat aching. The cavern throbbed, a forest fire, the lanterns of a carnival, a blossoming sky emblazoned with rare tulips.
At last Auram and another priest helped me sit up. My face felt stiff; the clarified butter had hardened. I looked about me dully. The girls, their beaded anklets rattling, were clustered around the high priestess, who lolled unconscious before the stone altar.
“Don’t worry,” Auram said. “With her it is always like this. You have had a splendid success, splendid! Ready! Up we go!” He chuckled, overflowing with high spirits. The girls were rubbing scented oil into the white temples of the priestess. One of them chafed her feet, her slender hands dwarfed by those great slabs of flesh. Another sponged the blood from her hands.
The priests wheeled me around and dragged me through the crack in the hillside, and we stumbled out into the cold, fragrant night. The moon was full and the shadows of trees lay black on the ghostly sward. Beyond them, a meadow furrowed like a pale sea. Auram crowed. He and the other priest told jokes, supporting me as they strode through the long grass toward the lights of the palace. The other priest was called Ildo; he told me about his niece who was a baker in the kitchens of the Telkan. Her brown-flour breasts. The two priests roared over their bawdy stories, like men returning from a hunting party. The masks bounced on the ropes around their necks. In the palace gardens among the yew trees we saw deer feeding on the grass.
Inside again, in the parlor, Auram served me a cup of chocolate without sugar. He wore a robe now, a lustrous garment of orange silk. “Avneanyi,” he whispered.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Drink,” he soothed me. “All will be well.”
He watched me drink, perched on the corner of his chair.
Write me a vallon, I thought. And I laughed, my muscles slow and sore. The priest had washed the clarified butter from my face with a rag, but I still felt as if I wore a mask. I laughed with stiff, uncooperative lips, with a raw ache in my throat, at the monstrousness of it, the sublime absurdity. Write her a book, set her words down in Olondrian characters! This ghost, this interloper, speaking only Kideti!