Now I went up the stairs, to that neglected and shadowy room where the carpet glittered with frost in front of the balcony door. Light came through the doorway, the implacable iron light of the winter plateau, the only light in the room until I called her. I sat in the chair at the desk before my broken pens, the ink-bottle filled with ash and water, the stack of books with her story in the margins. My hand on the stiff leather bindings gray with cold, my shadow faint on the wall. I drew in an icy breath. “Jissavet,” I said.
Her voice. Its wistful texture, unrefined silk. “Jevick.” Her lights, a series of enigmatic gestures among the bookshelves. And there she was, barefoot in her shift: the black and wary eyes, the childishly parted amber-colored hair.
“You stare like a witch,” she accused me with a smile. “If you did that in Kiem, I would spit.”
“You wouldn’t spit,” I said. “You’re not superstitious.”
“No,” she said with a quiet laugh, turning her hair in her fingers. “No, I’m not superstitious. I never was.
“Is that my vallon?” she asked then, looking over my shoulder; for she, like me, was now an adept at passing between the worlds.
“Yes,” I said, my hand on the books protective, for I could not help but be proud of those lines, wrung as if from my heart. I opened the first one, Lantern Tales. “This is Olondrian,” I said, pointing to the printed text, “and on the sides—this is Kideti.”
“No one can read Kideti,” the angel laughed.
“I can,” I said. I showed her how I had used Olondrian characters for the sounds the two languages shared. Sometimes I used a letter for a neighboring sound in Kideti: so our j sound was the Olondrian shi. And sometimes I altered the characters to make new ones: our tch sound was also a shi, but one that carried a plume-like curve above it.
“Listen,” I said. The sun was sinking, flooding the desert with scarlet. It seemed to blaze up unnaturally, casting a threatening glow on the book in my hands. I fumbled with the pages. Suddenly my chest felt tight; distress seized me as I read the opening lines:
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…
“Stop,” she whispered at last.
I had not finished the anadnedet. My voice faded uncertainly from the air.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve hurt you.” I felt the distress again, more intensely than before. My fingers curled around the page.
“No,” she said hoarsely. She was weeping somewhere far away, inconsolable, beyond my reach. The pain it gave me, the sense of helplessness, was so exquisitely sharp I closed my eyes.
“It’s a terrible story,” she sobbed.
“No,” I said. “No. It’s a beautiful story. Jissavet? Can you hear me? You’ve told it beautifully.”
“I miss him,” she said. “I think he’s dead, but I can’t find him anywhere.”
“You’ll find him,” I said. “You’ll find him, I’ll help you to find him…”
Still she wept, devastating me with a flood of grief. So I spoke to her, willing her to be comforted. I snatched my words from anywhere, from the poetry of the desert and the Valley, from the songs of Tinimavet. I imagined I had met her at home in the south. I told her about this meeting, how she rowed her boat on a languid tributary of Tadbati-Nut. I evoked the tepid light, the bristling stillness of the leaves. “And I was riding a white mule,” I said, “bringing pepper to sell on the hill…”
And Jissavet, you drove your oar into the shallow stream, arresting the movement of your little boat, and you looked at me with startled eyes, those eyes which have the strange power to penetrate anything: a stone, a heart. I reined the mule in sharply. Can I deny that I was riveted by those eyes, with their low light, their impalpable darkness? By that shoulder, thin and flexible, that flawless skin on which the unctuous light fell, drop by drop, like honey? We were engulfed in the forest, the opaque air was hard to breathe. Your expression altered subtly but unmistakably. You were no longer surprised. You sat up, quickly withdrawing the light of your glance, and faced me instead with a look of offended hauteur… Then I thought, my stare has insulted the daughter of a chief. But what chief’s daughter is this who, bold and careless, paddles her boat through the forest alone, regardless of her beauty which must attract the unwanted notice of her inferiors? And I greeted you, emboldened by the fact that you had not rowed away. Then your expression, so mutable, changed again. In it were all the hidden laughter, the irony, and intelligence which, now, you allowed to sparkle for the first time…
Her misery had grown silent. Now she interrupted bitterly: “That’s all nonsense. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
But I told her that I knew. “I remember it,” I said. “I saw everything that day, aboard the Ardonyi.”
I told her, too, of the days before the Ardonyi, my days in Tyom. In the ossified glitter of the abandoned garden, where the immobility of the trees was as deep and abiding as winter itself, I spoke to her of my parents, my brother, my master. My breath made clouds of fog as if my words had condensed in the air; and when the angel spoke, her breath made light. I told her that I agreed with her father, that sorrow was everywhere, and I described the rain, the frustration, my father’s wife. I think she saw Tyom then. She imagined, vaguely, the house of yellow stone on its hill overlooking the deep green of the fields. She imagined my father observing his quiet farm, monumental on the terraced hillside under his reed umbrella. “He must have looked like Jabjabnot,” she said. My laughter rang in the frozen air, making the blue trees tremble. “He was,” I said. “He was, he was like a god. We lived in terror of him. He was disappointed in us to the day he died.”
She did not speak. I saw that I was alone. “Show yourself,” I whispered.
There she was, seated on the rim of the fountain, coming into being like the letters drawn in a magical northern ink which is revealed only when held close to a flame. She rested her hands on the edge of the fountain’s bowl; her feet dangled.
“Not like that,” I said. “In something else. In—a coat. You couldn’t sit outside like that, half naked.”
She raised her eyes and looked at me gravely.
“I know,” I said with a harsh laugh. “You don’t feel the cold. You couldn’t do this small thing just to please me? You couldn’t—just to make it seem—”
She let me talk until, hearing the foolishness of my words, I fell silent.
“Then I’m all alone,” I said at last.