I had heard the song pouring out of a café, rowdily sung to bawdy laughter and the clashing of cutlery. But Miros sang it lightly, tenderly, in a pensive, faltering voice that broke away at last and was lost in the night.
When it was over, he looked at me. “I’ll never hunt again. Even if I live. I’ll fight for Avalei as I have never fought before. People say the prince is conspiring against his father the Telkan. Some even say he’s preparing an army in secret.”
I hushed him, touching his brow, but he pushed my hand away.
“I hope it’s true. I hope I live. I’ll join him. I will have vengeance for the Night Market.
“If I can’t see Ailin again, I’ll be as I should have been when she was mine. Someone who doesn’t forget. Who keeps faith.”
His sentences dissolved, and soon he was raving. I tried to cool his face with pieces of wet damask: the rotting stuff dropped in his hair. I caught his flailing arms, held him, begged him to be still. At last he stopped fighting and lay with his eyes wide open, moonlight in his tears. I sat with him until he was safely asleep, and then I closed the heavy door of his box bed against the cold. I went to the next room, the one where I slept, a place of despair like all the others, stale as a charnel house.
“Jissavet,” I said.
“Jissavet.”
She bloomed in the dark chamber, illuminating the walls. But she could not see them. It was clear to me now that she could see nothing but me. A crushing and changeless fidelity, like a perfect love affair or the dark, single-minded devotion of a saint.
“Jissavet,” I whispered.
She stretched out her hands. She was going to speak, to return to the tales of her past, those disembodied memories. But this time I could not listen. There was no time. “Stop,” I said. “Jissavet. Listen to me. I need your help. I must have food and medicine.”
“Listen to you! I do not listen to you.”
Her face affronted, steel in a thunderstorm. Olondrian poets speak of the deadly potency of a woman’s frown, but I know what a frown can do, the lowering of a delicate eyebrow, the twist of a lip.
“Don’t do this to me,” I screamed. “I’m dying.”
The light dimmed about me, a shuttered lamp. On my hands and knees I retched, bringing up water and a little bile on the carpet.
“Dying!” she said.
“Yes,” I coughed. “I’m dying. We’re dying. We’re starving. My friend is ill. I need medicine and food.”
“I won’t go back, I told you!”
“Don’t!” I groveled on the floor, a skewered songbird. “Don’t, Jissavet… You’ll kill me, and no one will write your vallon…”
Again the light dimmed. I had no strength to rise and lay where I had fallen, rolling onto my back to look at her.
She hovered above me, the red ropes of her hair almost touching my face. I thought I caught their scent: mildew and decay.
“You’ll write it?” she demanded, her face ablaze. “If I help you—you and your friend—you’ll write my vallon?”
“Yes,” I said.
That was our bargain: a life for a life. A bargain in which we both suffered: she in the crossing over into my world, I in the crossing to hers. That night she led me through the frozen orchard and told me to dig up the fruits of the hairy vine the Kestenyi call yom afer, the “hand of the desert.” The snow numbed my fingers; the hard earth broke my nails. I clawed at the ground by starlight like a grave-robber or seeker of buried treasure. The spiny harvest stung my hands, but I soaked the roots in water that night and boiled them at dawn, and they were as soft and nourishing as cream.
She looked at Miros, too: she stepped through the curtain between the worlds and gazed at him. And she guided me out into the foothills of the Tavroun. There, in a cave dug into the hillside and hidden with dried vines, lived a Tavrouni crone with a tin ring in her lip. We shared no common language; I described my friend’s trouble with gestures. She gave me a bundle of fragrant twigs and a poultice of twisted grass. I had no way to pay her and mimed my poverty in distress, but she waved me away with the single Olondrian word: “Avneanyi.”
And then, when I had treated Miros and he was asleep, I went upstairs to the library of Sarenha-Haladli. Squeezed in like an afterthought by the dilapidated observatory, the library had felt-covered walls and a balcony closed in latticework like a cage. The prince had built a Kestenyi collection here, only diversified by some Bainish novels and the works of Karanis of Loi, the books leaning on the shelves like broken teeth. I set my candle down on the writing desk and searched it thoroughly, scrabbling in the drawers. The thought that my light might be seen no longer frightened me: the night was so empty, so vast, reaching all the way to the mountains. I discovered a few pens, brittle as old men’s bones, a half-full bottle of ink. I chose Lantern Tales from the shelf, for its wide margins.
I sat at the desk in my jacket, dipped the pen in the ink, and steeled myself against the coming light. “I’m ready,” I said.
Yes, I called her. I asked her to come. Come, angel, I said. I called her Visible, the Ninth Wonder, Empress of Sighs. Come, I said, and I will show you magic from the north, your own words conjured into a vallon. A book, angel, a garden of spears. I will hold the pen for you, and I will weave a net to catch your voice. I will do what no one has done, I will write in Kideti, a language like you and me, a ghost hesitating between worlds. Between the rainstorms, angel, and the white light of the north. Between the river dolphins and the wolves. Between the far south, the land of elephants and amber, and this: the land of cypresses and snow.
So come. Sing to me of Kiem, speak to me of rivers. Pour your memories into my pen. Tell me your anadnedet, your life, your death story, as if you were still dying and not dead. Let me do for you what we do for those who are favored by the gods, and die slowly in the islands: let me sit beside your pallet in the firelight, and listen to the tale you long to tell. The story of a life which is revealed, after many years, to have been all along the story of a death. How one lives and goes on living, how one comes to die, under the eye of the vulture, Nedet, the goddess of ashes.
THE ANADNEDET
(1)
The angel said:
I already know about writing. We made maps: maps of the sea, of the waters between Tinimavet, Sedso, and Jiev. And maps of the rivers, the great ones, Dyet and Katapnay and Tadbati-Nut, the ones that made our country of mud on their way to the girdling sea. We made the maps on skins. First we would draw the lines with ashes and water, and later we traced them with a piece of hot iron. For many seasons our house was full of those maps, hanging on the walls, curled at the edges, dark-faced in the rushlight.
If you want to hear my anadnedet then you must begin with a map, and it must be a map of the land of Kiem. Of Kiem, the Black Land, wet and shining, the Jawbone of a Cow. I will draw a map for you like this: