“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“It’s not yours either,” he countered, watching me sternly through the flames. “I know what you’re thinking.”
I looked away, at the priest. “He’s so old.”
Miros laughed then, tears in his eyes. “How old did you think he was?”
“Forty… Perhaps forty-five…”
“Forty!” he shouted, falling on his side. “Tell him when he wakes up…” Then he sat up and stifled his laughter, saying hastily: “No—never mention it.”
“His energy,” I said, dazed. “He walks so quickly, stands so upright—”
“That’s bolma. You don’t know it? The Sea-Kings used to take it, down in Evmeni. It’s incredibly expensive. The old man lives on it. Sometimes he chews milim, too, because the bolma makes him crazy.”
“Is it because he’s a priest?” I asked.
“Ha!” grunted Miros. “It’s because he’s an idiotic old camel.”
He cooled the soup and fed it to the priest, the liquid trickling down the old man’s chin, into the ridges of his neck.
We traveled slowly to spare the horse. The country grew rough and empty. Miros made use of cart tracks, avoiding the King’s Road. We drank at a stream and washed there. I found my satchel in the carriage, with all my books and clothes, and Tialon’s letters. The priest’s big traveling trunk was there too, and Miros’s few belongings, consisting largely of tobacco and bottles of teiva. I remembered Auram’s words: “We must expect to be found.” He had lived as he spoke. He had come to the Night Market fearlessly and prepared for flight.
We walked downhill to a stream to gather water. Miros carried the bowl we used for cooking, and I had an empty jar. The jar had once held a preparation belonging to the priest, and when we drank from it the water stung like perfume. Still we filled it everywhere we could. That day the light was tender, and flocks of miniature butterflies hovered in the grass like mist. Suddenly Miros stumbled and sank on one knee. “Oh gods,” he said. Sobbing, undone. Water sloshing over his boots.
That day I took his arm and helped him up, I made him drink, I pulled him out of frenzy. And in the night he did the same for me, for the ghost appeared in the carriage where we slept curled up against the chill and I filled the air with wild smoke-roughened cries. She was close, so close. All the fulgent stars were drawn about her like a mantle, and her face shone clenched and angry, a knot of flame. “Write me a vallon!” she said. And a landscape burned across my vision, the coast as flat as the sea: her memory, not mine.
“Write me a vallon!”
When she let me go I was outside, on the ground. A dark meadow about me and all the stars in place. Miros held my shoulders to stop my thrashing. “I’m all right,” I gasped, and he released me and sat panting, a clump of shadow.
“What,” he said. “What.”
“The angel,” I said. I was glad I could not see his face.
“Dear gods.”
He was silent for a time, arms about his knees. I sat up, breathing slowly, waiting for the shaking to pass. A wind slipped gently past us, a murmur in the weeds.
Then Miros asked in a low, troubled voice: “Is it always like this?”
“Always. Yes.”
And I thought to myself: It will be like this from now on. I had refused the angel; she knew that I would not do as she asked; she would hound me across Olondria like the trace of an evil deed. “I am sorry,” Miros said, and I scarcely heard him. His words meant less to me than his hand, pulling me up and guiding me to the carriage, and his efforts to make the next day ordinary: his jokes about water, his tug at the reins, his cracked lips whistling a broken tune.
On the fifth day we stopped at a huge old radhu. The falling dusk had a tincture of violets. I made out a sprawling building in the gloom: broad sections had crumbled away from it, leaving raw holes, and scattered stones lay about the yard along with pieces of rotten beams. The place had an air of decay, yet goats went springing away through the rubble and a girl came out with a yellowed basin of water to wash our hands. She had black eyes, a restless manner and a firm, obstinate jaw. When we had washed she tossed the water into the weeds.
Miros lifted his uncle from the carriage, and without comment, without a single word, the girl led us into the house. There we found a dark, smoky room with a carpet on the floor. Miros laid the unconscious priest down near its edge.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked the girl.
“He’s had a fall,” Miros said curtly. A moment later he paused and met her eyes. “The truth is, we’ve come from the Night Market outside Nuillen.”
Her eyes widened, but she said only: “You are most welcome, telmaron.”
Slowly, furtively, the huvyalhi came out of the darkness, wearing the faded blue robes of their class. There was a bent, defeated-looking woman, a tall girl with a vacant smile, and an aged man who mumbled incessantly. Last of all came a small girl, perhaps nine or ten years old, whose face had been horribly disfigured by smallpox. There were no men but the demented grandfather, and no infants. The bent woman and the tall girl stared at us with their mouths open.
The black-eyed girl with the firm jaw, who clearly ran the household, brought us wooden bowls of stew and rough tin spoons. She looked no older than sixteen, and her hair hung in four plaits, but she had the capable hands and decided tread of a matron. She arranged the two older women—her mother and sister, I supposed—on a mat and gave them a bowl and spoon to share. Both of them wore white scarves bound tightly around their heads, a mark of widowhood.
The little girl came around with cups of water. She was a lively, graceful creature, with snapping black eyes in her melted face. Miros could hardly look at her, and his hand shook as he spooned stew into his mouth. He asked in a subdued voice about the mumbling old man.
“My mother’s father,” the matronly girl explained. “He has rheumatism and cramp, and is almost blind with cataracts. But in his day, he was a bull! He plowed the fields by hand and built this room when he was already old. He attacked the dadeshi with his big knife—men on horseback, imagine! He used to keep their dried-up ears in a box…”
“Until Kiami ate them,” the small girl added wickedly, her lovely eyes flashing at her sister.
The older girl showed her sixteen years in a burst of wild laughter, putting one hand quickly over her mouth.
“Who’s Kiami?” Miros asked.
“One of the cats,” said the younger girl. “Oh! Grandfather was angry! He pulled our hair…”
The child, utterly unconcerned with her sad and monstrous appearance, regaled us with stories of this most incorrigible of animals. She sat with her legs crossed, her back straight and her arms relaxed, sometimes raising a tiny finger for emphasis. Her speech was rapid, her eyes shone with mischief and intelligence; she was all brightness, merriment, and vivacity. Her sister’s black eyes softened as she looked at the slender child with the wonderful strength of character and the rough, reptilian features. The little girl so enjoyed the attention and her own inventiveness that she ended the story prostrated with giggles. Even Miros smiled, and some of the old animation came back to his face as he put down his bowl and said: “A demon, your Kiami!”