He shook his head. “Shevick, Shevick,” he said, tapping the paper. I frowned and shrugged, saying, “Forgive me, Tchavi. I don’t understand.”
My master put up his hands, palms outward, and pushed gently at the air, showing that he was not angry. Then he bent forward patiently. “Sh,” he said, pointing with his pen at the first sign on the page; then he moved the pen to the second sign and said distinctly: “Eh.” But only when he had described all the signs several times, repeating my name, did I understand with a shock that I was in the presence of sorcery: that the signs were not numbers at all, but could speak, like the single-stringed Tyomish harp, which can mimic the human voice and is called “the sister of the wind.”
My back and shoulders were cold, though a hot, heavy air came in from the garden. I stared at my master, who looked back at me with his wise and crystalline eyes. “Do not be afraid,” he said. He smiled, but his face looked thin and sad. In the garden I heard the sound of the Tetchi disrobing herself in the leaves.
Chapter Three
Doorways
“A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Fanlewas the Wise, the great theologian of Avalei, writes that Kuidva, the God of Words, is “a taskmaster with a lead whip.” Tala of Yenith is said to have kept her books in an iron chest that could not be opened in her presence, else she would lie on the floor, shrieking. She wrote: “Within the pages there are fires, which can rise up, singe the hair, and make the eyelids sting.” Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. “For they have gone into the Pit, into which they descend on Slopes of Fire, but when they rise they climb on a Ladder of Stone.” Hothra of Ur-Brome said that his books were “dearer than father or mother,” a sentiment echoed by thousands of other Olondrians through the ages, such as Elathuid the Voyager, who explored the Nissian coast and wrote: “I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.” And the mystic Leiya Tevorova, that brave and unfathomable soul, years before she met her tragic death by water, wrote: “When they put me into the Cold, above the white Lake, in the Loathsome Tower, and when Winter came with its cruel, hard, fierce, dark, sharp and horrible Spirit, my only solace was in my Books, wherein I walked like a Child, or shone in the Dark like a Moth which has its back to a sparkling Fire.”
In my room, in my village, I shone like a moth with its back to a sparkling fire. Master Lunre had taught me his sorcery: I embraced it and swooned in its arms. The drudgery of the schoolroom, the endless copying of letters, the conjugation of verbs—“ayein, kayein, bayeinan, bayeinun”—all of this led me at last through a curtain of flame into a world which was a new way of speaking and thinking, a new way of moving, a means of escape. Master Lunre’s massive sea chest did not hold the bones of a murdered wife, but a series of living lovers with whom he lay down voluptuously, caressing the hair of each one in turn: his books, some written by hand and some from the printing press, that unearthly invention of the wizards of Asarma. I soon understood why, when I went in to call him for the evening meal, my master could always be found stretched out on his pallet in the same position: his head on his hand, his bare chest gleaming, a thin sheet over his hips, his earrings glinting, his spirit absorbed in the mists of an open book. I, too, soon after I read my first book, Nardien’s Tales for the Tender, succumbed to the magical voices that called to me from their houses of vellum. It was a great wonder to me to come so close to these foreign spirits, to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of those I had never known, to communicate with the dead, to feel that I knew them intimately, and that they knew me more completely than any person I knew in the flesh. I confess that I fell quite hopelessly in love with Tala of Yenith, who was already an old woman when the printing press was invented. When she heard of it, she is said to have danced in ecstasy, crying out, “They have created it! They have created it!” until she fell down in a dead faint. Her biographer writes: “When she rose she began her rapturous dance again, shouting ‘They have created it!’ until her strength was wholly exhausted. She continued like this, beyond the control of the people of her House, who feared to subdue her with force, for seven days, whereupon she died…”
The books of my master’s sea chest were histories, lyrics, and romances, as well as a few religious texts and minor philosophical works. In their pages I entered, for the first time, the tree-lined streets of Bain, and walked in the Garden of Plums beside the city’s green canal. I fought with the rebel Keliadhu against Thul the Heretic, and watched the sky fill with dragons, unfurling fires like cloth of gold. I hunted mushrooms in the Fanlevain and fleet wild deer on the plains, and sailed down the swift Ilbalin through the most radiant orchards on earth; I stood in a court in Velvalinhu, the dwelling place of the kings, and watched a new Telkan kneel to receive the high crown of black and white silk. My dreams were filled with battles, haunted woods, and heroic voyages, and the Drevedi, the Olondrian vampires whose wings are like indigo. Each evening I lay on my pallet, reading by the light of an oil lamp, a tear-shaped bowl made of rust-colored clay—a gift from Master Lunre.
My master’s gifts to me were those whose value cannot be reckoned. The education he gave me was erratic, shaped by his own great loves; it was not the traditional education of wealthy Olondrians, which consists of the Three Noble Arts of riding, music, and calligraphy. It was more like the education of novices dedicated to Kuidva, yet still it deviated, rejecting some classics for more obscure texts: I knew almost nothing of Telidar’s seminal Lectures on Poetry but had read many times a small volume entitled On the Nine Textures of Light. Thus, while my father imagined that I was becoming a Bainish gentleman, I was in fact ignorant of almost all that such gentlemen know. I had only seen horses in pictures, I could not play the flute or guitar, my handwriting was neat but uninspired, and I knew only five classic writers. What I knew, what I learned, was the map of a heart, of the longings of Lunre of Bain: I walked in the forests of his desire and bathed in the sea of his dreams. For years I walked up and down the vales of his heart, of his self-imposed exile, familiar with all he loved, looking out of his eyes, those windows of agate.
He was as reticent as a crab. Or he was reserved about certain subjects: there were things of which, in the course of nine years, I could never persuade him to speak. One of these was his former trade, the one he had followed in Bain: he would never say what he had been—a tutor, a printer, a merchant, a thief? My boy’s mind dreamed up fierce romances for him, but he would not be baited and only laughed when I said he had been a sorcerer or a pirate. When I asked him why he had left, he quoted Leiya Tevorova: “I was spoken to by a god, and I found myself unworthy of Him.”
His face, neither old nor young, grew dark as an islander’s with the sun, and his brows and close-cropped hair were bleached like sand. With his gangly limbs, in his island clothes, he resembled a festival clown, but he had too sad an air to be truly comical. He grew to love our valleys and forests and spent many hours outdoors, roaming the slopes with a staff of teak wood or exploring the cliffs by the sea. He would come home with completely ordinary flowers or shells and force me to look at them while he praised their inimitable loveliness. “Look at that!” he would say, elated. “Is it not finer than art? Is it not like a woman’s ear? Its curves are like notes of music…” On subjects such as the beauties of nature, books, and the colors of light, he spoke with an unrestrained passion which often drove me to groan with exhaustion. He spoke to my mother as welclass="underline" he studied our language doggedly, until he could praise the trees and the play of light and shade in the courtyard. When my mother explained how the shadows echoed the pelt of my father’s god, he rubbed his hands with delight and jotted some notes in his private book. “Let me tell you,” he said to me once, resting a hand on my shoulder after drinking a glass of our liquor, to which his tastes had become accustomed: “Let me tell you about old men. Our appetites grow like vines—like the hectic plants of the desert, which bear only flowers and have no leaves. You have never seen a desert. Have you not read Firdred of Bain? ‘The earth has a thousand thirsty tongues.’ That is what old age is like.”