When the child went out for more water, her older sister leaned forward and said in a tense whisper: “You’ve really come from the Night Market?”
“Yes,” said Miros.
“The one where so many were killed?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” the girl said bitterly. “That is Olondria these days.”
All at once her mother broke in softly: “We have no men anymore. Ours is a house without windows. He is the last.”
She was pointing her soiled spoon at the grandfather. Her intent gaze, and the strange way she had blurted out the words, cast a pall over the room.
“Yes, Mama,” her daughter answered soothingly. “They know.” She turned to us. “An accident,” she explained. “A part of the house fell on my brothers and killed them, both of them. And my father died before them, of an ague.”
“Bamai,” Miros whispered—Bamanan ai, “May it go out,” the old Olondrian charm against misfortune.
“Oh, it’s already gone out.” The girl smiled, rising to collect the dishes. “Evil’s gone through this house. We’re safe now. Nothing else can happen to us.”
Afterward she led me to a dank, smoke-blackened room. “Thank you,” I said. The girl turned, careless, bearing away her little lamp. Through an aperture high in the wall the stars showed white. There was a battered screen, a straw pallet on the floor, a cracked washbowl. Such poverty, such unrelenting hardship. I touched the screen, which perhaps contained, as many old Valley furnishings did, scenes from the Romance. The forest of Beal, its trees a network of spikes. Or the tale of a saint, Breim the Enchanter or poor Leiya Tevorova, haunted by an angel.
I closed my eyes and touched my brow to the screen. Fire behind my eyelids. Suddenly a storm of trembling swept over me. My mind was still numb, detached, but my body could not bear what had happened. I sank down and curled up on the moldy pallet.
There I thought of the huvyalhi of the Market, and of our hosts in this desolate place. I thought of the woman who had wept over me in the tent. I wanted to do something for them, for these abandoned girls, to give them a word or a sign, to carry something other than horror. But I possessed nothing else. And when the angel appeared, shrugging her way through the elements, born in a shower of sparks, I thought that perhaps this horror itself could become something else, could be used, as Auram had said. That I could be haunted to some purpose.
Her light was dim; she looked like a living girl but for her slight radiance, a crimson aura coloring the air. Beneath the jagged hole in the wall she clasped her hands and gazed at me with a seeking look, an expression of abject longing. There was a stealthy force behind that gaze, a ruthless intelligence that sent terror to the marrow of my bones. A will that would not flag though eternity passed; a strength that would not tire. Yet her eyes were like those of a lover or a child.
She loosened her fingers. “Write,” she whispered. A faint smile on her lips. She mimed the clapping of hands with another child, singing an island song.
I knew the song. The familiar tongue. It occurred to me that only with her could I hear my own language spoken in this country of books and angels. She laughed when she came to the second verse: “a bowl of green mango soup.” And I remembered trying to make Jom sing, in the courtyard under the orange trees.
“Jissavet. Stop.”
She paused, her mouth open. A frown: cities on fire.
“Jissavet. I need your help. For these people. I’m in a house in the Valley.”
The air bent, warped about her.
“Stop. Listen. Such cruel things have happened to them. If you could tell them something. Something to give them hope.”
She looked at me with inconsolable eyes. “I can’t. I told you. There’s a void between—it’s horrible. And they are not people like me.”
“They are.”
She shook her head. “No. You are people like me. You are my people.” And again her voice, light and eerie, rose in song. This time she sang of the valleys and plains of Tinimavet, the estuaries where the great rivers rolled in mud to the sea. She sang of the fishermen whose bodies grew accustomed to the air, who could not, like other men, be driven mad by the constant wind. And she sang the long story of Itiknapet the Voyager, who first led the people to the islands.
She sang of those lands. The Risen Lands, fragrant with calamus. Kideti-palet: the Islands of the People.
“And this shall be the place where the people live,” the angel sang. “This shall be the home of the human beings.”
I remembered it, I felt it—home, with all its distant sweetness—I remembered it through the high voice of the dead girl. One memory in particular came back to me when she sang: that early memory of how I had tried to teach a song to my brother. “My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!” He said: “My father.” “Is a palm,” I insisted. But he would not answer. He gazed into the trees, rubbing the edge of his sandal in the chalky groove between the flagstones. As always when he was pressed, he seemed to recede behind a protective wall of incomprehension and maddening nonchalance.
I saw him clearly. How old was he? Six, perhaps seven years old. He was already unable to learn, but my father had not yet noticed. He wore a short blue vest with fiery red-orange embroidery, just like mine. His trouser leg was torn. If I asked him how he had torn it he would not know, or he would not tell me, though the edges of the tear were stained with blood. He would not even complain he was hurt, though he must have cut his knee, somewhere, in a place that would never be named.
“My father is a palm,” I said. “Repeat!”
I had seen other children play the game. I had learned it from them, copied the intricate clapping—this was what I had brought for my brother. When I shouted at him a wariness went flitting across his gaze like the wing of a bird.
“You say it,” I snarled through clenched teeth, glaring, trying to frighten him—to break through his simplicity and reach him.
He looked away, his eyes uncertain. Did he know what was coming?
My two fists rammed straight into his chest, and he sprawled on his back, howling.
And now, years later, in a strange land, to the sound of an angel’s singing, I relived that moment of despair, that attempt to bridge the divide, that terrible reaching, desperate and cruel, when love swerved into violence, when I would have torn the skin from his face to discover what lay beneath.
“Jevick,” the angel whispered.
Her eyes met mine, black, secretive, moonless. Her luminous gaze. “Why don’t you answer me? Why don’t you write?”
Grief and rage, a gathering ocean.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Listen to me!” she screamed.
And the waves fell in a rush.
The silence struck me like a blow. I sat up, sweating and panting, and looked into the lighted face of a demon.