“He was twenty years older than I,” she said to me in that stone cell in the Gray Houses, seated on the edge of my low bed. “He was—but why am I telling you how he was? You must know.” She looked at me, her gaze penetrating, direct.
“Yes,” I whispered.
I had thought that she would weep, but she did not. She was like a queen, sitting very straight, her hands quiet in her lap. Only her voice wavered, and a shudder crossed her throat when she said: “Yes. I knew. And how could I not? I did not spend those years, the years of my childhood, listening to him read in the evening light, only to forget the books he loved, the books we loved together. I knew when I saw you with his Olondrian Lyrics.”
She nodded as if to herself and looked around the room, the rickety shelf with its useless volumes, the bareness and the squalor. The room had grown colder. Her face, turned away from me, was cast in shadow so that I could not see her expression when she said: “And how is he?”
“He is well,” I said.
Tialon nodded again. She had the flawless dignity of one sentenced to death. Her story seemed to have drained everything out of her, her terror and wildness and even the resolution that had forced her to tell it. I knew she had told it because she could not give up the chance to say his name, aloud, in the hearing of another, of one who had known him. I sensed this in the way her lips curved to form the word, lingered over it—that it was a forbidden sound in her house. Lunre: the call of a water bird, and then the fall of water. A name that means “with light,” the last month of the year. She said it now with the sigh of the closing year and then she stood and faced me, her face pale and severe in the cold lamplight.
“I have something for you.”
She went to the door and picked up her writing box. She carried it back to the mattress and sat beside me, the box in her lap. Then she sprang the catch and the box yawned open, and she took from it two oily-looking packages tied with string.
“News from the past.”
A shrill note in her voice. She set the packages on the sheet. Each was as solid and dense as a cheese. They were bundles of paper covered with a closely written script, discolored with the passage of the years.
“Take them with you,” Tialon said. I looked up at her, speechless. Her smile trembled; her eyes were very bright. She clasped her hands in front of her face and looked down, hiding her mouth behind them. “I wrote him over a thousand letters, I think.”
“I’ll take them.”
She swallowed. “Thank you. I’ll try to make it easy for you to get out of the Houses.”
“And if you want to know more about him,” I murmured, “I can tell you—”
She shook her head, closed her writing box, and stood, not looking at me as she whispered: “I have built my life without knowing where he was.”
I often think of her like that: with her head half turned away, the curls gleaming at the nape of her thin neck, one hand already reaching down to pick up her umbrella, the other gripping the writing box like an anchor. She seems to hang before me, wavering like the light of a candle, suspended in that breathless, fragile instant. Then the candle is blown out and she is gone, the room is empty, she leaves only a fleeting warmth and a trace of smoke.
After she had gone I remained staring at the door, thinking of the young figure of my master: dark-haired, but with the same steady, piercing, quartz-green eyes, in a black robe that would make his skin seem paler. I thought of him standing among the trees with the rain falling through his cloak in the oblivion of religious contemplation, and cringed with the feeling that I had wronged him by picturing him thus, in his other life which he did not want me to know. But now it was too late: my master, Lunre of Bain, had been irrevocably replaced by Lunre of Kebreis. And the small boy who lay in the corner and watched frost form on the door had replaced all the fantasies of my master’s childhood.
There is a courtyard where I imagine my master and Tialon, the tortured man and the adolescent girclass="underline" an illusory place with flowers of mother-of-pearl in the swaying almond trees whose leaves are spangled with drops of a recent rain. It is a place of tears. And yet their laughter echoes against the stones, this tall man with the slightly abstracted air, with the solitary smile, in the unseasonable dark wool, and the girl in the short, straight frock of the same material. They are talking under the trees. The girl has hair of dark honey, bound into four fuzzy plaits harassed by the leaves. She is knock-kneed, with the lighted eyes of an evening after a rainstorm and the shapely, fluted ankles of a deer. Again they laugh. Her eyes are quick and lively under thick lashes, and his eyes, answering, wrinkle at the corners. This girl speaks excitedly and precociously about the classics, but she still sleeps in the same room as her old nurse… And he watches her, watches the dazzling light slide on and off of her shoulder, changing as she moves beneath the trees, turning her skin from the color of pale sand to the color of autumn and in the shadows to the color of old silver. Her resplendent skin, which is still the skin of a child. He notices that it is almost the same color as her hair. The difference is infinitesimaclass="underline" yet in that difference of hue there are desert armies, cities of marble in conflagration. The air is rarefied by the sound of her laugh and the smell of the trees, and then by the sleep and meadows which her arms smell of, as she puts them around his neck and prostrates him with a chaste kiss. A burning memory crackles in his hair. Later, while they are walking, she will wonder why they are suddenly sad, and he will not be able to explain; he will say: “We should not have eaten the mussels. They smell of death…” And they will both want to weep in the dark air.
I see him with the sweat on his brow which has turned the color of tallow and imagine how he will flee to the ends of the earth, putting the fathomless sea between himself and this sweet, incautious girl, interring himself in a country of alien flowers. And never, not even in the delirium of his island fevers, will he allow himself to pronounce the lost child’s name. And as for her, she will say his name only in solitude, hugging herself in her small bed, her tears shining in the moonlight.
Tonight the house is quiet. The old nurse sits by the hearth, muttering to herself, half-asleep. The young girl is collecting their soiled plates from the table and carrying them away to the dark kitchen. Suddenly she looks outside. The balcony doors are open, the night soft and humming with the insects of summer. Then there is her startled cry, and the crash of a plate on the floor. She has noticed the disappearance of the stars.
Midnight. The door creaked open and I was instantly awake, fearing as always the witchlight of the ghost. But there was only the dull glow of a lantern, and a hand like an iron scepter prodding me urgently in the neck. “Rise. Rise.” It was Auram, High Priest of Avalei, cloaked and hooded. His sleeve was damp and carried an odor of salt. He had already crept down to the shore where a boat rocked on the waves, hushed and lightless, awaiting its cargo: a fugitive saint.
Book Four
The Breath of Angels
Chapter Thirteen
Into the Valley