She smiled, wise and sad. “Tell me more about your tchavi—Lunre?”
“Good pronunciation for an islander,” I muttered. “My mother always insisted on calling him ‘Lunle.’…”
“And was he really from Bain, from that terrible city?”
“That wonderful city,” I said. I tilted my head back, looking up through the trees. I glanced at her, her incandescent darkness against the marble.
“I’ll tell you his love story,” I said.
I told her the story of Tialon and Lunre, and she wept. I told her everything, all of my secret things. I felt myself disintegrating, fading, turning to smoke, becoming pure thought, pure energy, like her. I wanted this dissolution, sought it eagerly. It was never enough. Never, although we clung together like two orphans in a forest. “Now you’re not afraid of me anymore,” she whispered, shivering. “No,” I said, closing my eyes as I reached for her, touching marble.
I could not touch her. And yet she seemed so close, the glow of her skin against my hand, her voice in my ear a private music. I read her anadnedet again and again. I wanted to write there too, to inscribe myself among the Olondrian and Kideti words on the page. My own wild poetry scattered there like grain. I thought of her playing with her friends, and I could see her so clearly: satin-eyed, dictatorial. And it seemed to me that she had been made to answer a desire which I had carried all of my life, without knowing it.
Dark nights of Kestenya. Lamplit hours in the library. And that voice, laughing, restless, proud and forlorn. The voice that inhabited the wind and rang in the sun on the trees of ice and occupied the empty space in my heart. I had not known of this empty space, but now I recognized it, and it bled; and I was wretched, distracted, and happy. I ran in the snow, shouted, and broke the icicles on the gate in the wall, stabbing her nebulous image with those bright knives.
And in the box bed I wept. “Stop,” she said. “Stop, Jevick, it’s over, it’s finished.”
“It’s too late,” I choked. “I’ll never know you.”
“You know me now.”
“But I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything for you. If I’d known I might have done something—found you—”
“Hush,” she said. “Sit up, now. Light the candle.” She asked me to throw shadows on the wall while she guessed their shapes. This was the way to play tchoi, the shadow game of Tinimaveti nights. But as for my angel, my love—she cast no shadow.
Miros was coming back to life. He walked around the garden, first leaning on a stick, then upright, by himself. His face was still gaunt and fierce with beard, but his eyes had regained their brightness and his body the strength to haul water and split wood. To restore his muscles, he had begun practicing kankelde, the soldier’s art, on a horizontal branch of a plum tree in the garden. He startled me when I came upon him swinging upside down, his face wine-dark, in the figure called Garda’s Pendulum.
In the evenings we ate whatever scraps we had in the ravaged sitting room. Firelight flashed on the tangle of his hair. He said: “You saved my life this winter.” He said: “I don’t know how you did it. It’s a miracle.”
I smiled and said softly: “You really don’t know?”
He gave me a guilty glance. “Well. Yes, I know. But I’m not—I’m not like my uncle.”
He tugged at his earring and went on slowly: “Knowing there’s an angel in the place doesn’t make me want to ask it questions. It doesn’t seem right.”
I cleaned the last streaks of yom afer from my bowl and sucked my fingers. “You sound like an islander.”
He shrugged and smiled through his beard. “Perhaps. I don’t know.”
When the meal was over we stood and he clapped my shoulder, and for a moment, grateful, I leaned into his rough, human embrace.
And then I went upstairs, and read to the angel.
I opened Lantern Tales again, old highland stories retold by Ethen of Ur-Fanlei. This time I read not the angel’s tale but the story printed there. Its ornate diction recalled an earlier time, before the war in the east. Ethen at the window of her room above the river where she spent several years as the guest of the Duchess of Tevlas, the tall floor lamps on the balcony after dark, burnt nath to keep away the mosquitoes, Ethen barefoot, massaging her perennially swollen ankles. This tale was told to me by Karth, a gaunt manservant with a lazy eye, who claims to have seen the White Crow himself on more than one occasion. I read aloud, haltingly, translating as I went. Each time I glanced up the angel was looking at me, resting her cheek in her hand.
I read. I read her My Chain of Nights by the famous Damios Beshaid, Elathuid’s Journey to the Duoronwei, Fanlero’s Song of the Dragon. Limros’s Social Organization of the Kestenyi Nomads, which calls the east “this vast theater of miserable existences.” She listened, a moth at a window. I read On the Plant Life of the Desert, by the great botanist of Eiloki, who succumbed to thirst in the sands, with its spidery watercolors of desert flowers such as tras, “whose yellow spines are lined with dark hairs like eyelashes.” Sometimes she stopped me with questions. I created new words in Kideti: the Olondrian water clock was “that which follows the sun even after sunset.” Some books she attended to more closely than others. She grew so still she almost faded away while I read Kahalla the Fearless:
What do they say of the desert? What they say of it is not true. What do they say of the dunes, the salt flats, the cities of broken gravel, and the fields of quartz and chalcedony thrown down by the majestic volcanoes of Iva? Nothing. They say nothing. They speak shrilly of the feredhai, and they smile and add more pounded cloves to their tea. They are unacquainted with heat and cold, they are utter strangers to death, they speak like people who have never even seen horses…
I looked up. She was still there, her light pale as a fallen leaf. “I’ll have to stop,” I chattered. “I’m too cold to go on.” She nodded, sighing. “It is a great magic, this vallon.” My lips cracked when I smiled; the evening light was rarefied with cold. My breath poured out of me as whiteness, traveling on the draft. I felt it go like an ache, a tearing of cloth. I moved to the balcony doors and saw, in the instant before I closed them, the stars of the desert branching like candelabra.
I read to her from Firfeld’s Sojourns, too: the two of us wandered together among the fragrant trees of the Shelemvain, and encountered on the fringes of the forest Novannis the False Countess, smoking her beaded pipe among the acacias. We dined at the court of Loma, where women wore tall coiffures made of hollyhocks, and sampled, in the dim greenness of the oak forests, the brains of a wild pig fried with chicory in its own skull, a delicacy of the soft-spoken Dimai. We shivered as we read of the nameless desert in the center of the plateau, which the feredhai call only suamid, “the place,” where no water comes from the sky, not even the snow that falls near the mountains, “and one lives under the tyranny of the wells.” And we read of our own islands, of Vad-Von-Poi, the “city of water-baskets.” Jissavet’s fingers flared above the page. Later, when I was almost asleep, she spoke to me suddenly out of the dark.