“I know what the vallon is,” she said. “It’s jut.”
The gods must have loved her, and they had taken her.
In Pitot they say the elephant god, Old Grandfather, is jealous. He steals children, he steals wives. This much, he says, and no more. He is the Limiter, the controller of human happiness. He must have seen her; they all must have looked at her, even when she was a child, when she paddled her tiny boat made out of skins. They must have seen her bold eyes and her arms, dark, sunlit, polished, reflected in the brown mirrors of the pools. This girl, small and already so headstrong, with hair in those days of an iridescent black. But with the eyes, the mouth, the expression, with the waywardness and audacity which I would come to love when it was too late, when the gods had claimed her for themselves.
Those years, the years she lay in the doorway: every one of them hurts me, and every hour has an individual pain. Lost hours, irretrievable, hours that I would have taken up and treasured and which were scattered abroad in the mud. Hours in which she lay alone and deserted by her friends. But had I been one of her friends, had I eaten those stolen fish in the fields, had I been blessed, like them, with that inconceivable good fortune—nothing could have parted me from her. Not the kyitna, not that hair with the color of poisonous berries, which I would weave into ropes to bind me close to her side, not the hatred of all the world, not the danger of sickness, contamination, which I would have welcomed with tears of joy. Yes, I would have clasped that hair, that waist, and inhaled her frightened breath in the hope that the curse would swell to make room for me, that we might be together, safe, removed from everyone else in the honor and preference which death had shown for us. To be, like her, an aristocrat of death, who would bury us under his scarlet blossoms. To suffer, like her, from torrid fevers. To clutch her hand as I struggled for life, to hear her words of comfort gathering the transparent coolness beyond the stars.
For the first time in many months I prayed to the god with the black-and-white tail, incoherent and extravagant prayers. I prayed that once, just once, the laws of time might be suspended and I might find myself, ten years ago, in Kiem. I prayed that she would stay with me forever, that somehow we would enter the magical, intimate purlieus of her book. And I called down terrible punishments on the playmates of her childhood: that they might first love her memory, and then perish. “Let them die,” I begged, “but only after they’ve suffered as I’m suffering.” It seemed to me that the whole world must know of her, must recognize that with her death the universe had altered and the fields, the forests, the rivers were full of ashes.
Is kyitna the sign of the hatred of the gods? Or of their love?
Fading, exhausted, she lay in the open doorway. The heavy light, falling across her stomach like a wave, seemed too much for her body to support. Fragile, she was fragile and impermanent as salt. Like salt she would dissolve, lose her substance. And like salt she would flavor everything with a taste that was sharp and amniotic, disquieting and unmistakable. The gods saw. They saw what I had seen aboard the Ardonyi, this girl with her piquant, pleasing oddity, her lips from which such strange utterances fell, such as when she had said to her mother, “He has the long face of a fish.” They saw the dark and vibrant eyes in which all of her life was concentrated; they knew her erratic moods, her mysterious will, her loneliness which she could not explain to anyone, and her violent rage which had given me so much pain. And they knew more. Into her brain they went, and into her heart. They probed those elusive gardens, those nocturnal roads. They knew the black and sinister wells, the mazes, the sudden traps, and the floating, limpid, inaccessible evenings. Had they not simply recognized, in her, one of themselves? One who, through some cosmic accident, had come to reside on the island of Tinimavet, lost like a star which finds itself, all at once, far from the others. And then the cry had gone out from the Isle of Abundance. And they had crouched, anguished, watching this one who had fallen somehow from the skies. And then with slow and careful gestures, so as not to startle her, they had led her back, and she had departed with them.
“When I was alive, even when I was alive,” she whispered to me, “I didn’t want to live as I do now.”
We went out into the orchard, through the rusty gate, the great flat country glittering before us and the wind rising. The wind, the Kestenyi wind. I called it “four hundred knife-wheeled chariots,” but Jissavet called it “the soldiers of King Yat.” It drove the thin snow writhing over the cracked earth of the plain and set the prayer bells jingling on the goat-hair tents. “That one.” She pointed. “They’ve just traded for some lentils and only the eldest of the sisters is there, the one with the kindest heart.” I called at the tent flap, hoarse in the wind, and a pair of startled eyes peered out from under joined brows like an island hunting bow.
She exclaimed in Kestenyi, a clatter of sounds. I gestured at my loose jacket. “Please,” I said in Olondrian. “Please, my lady, I’m hungry.”
“Kalidoh!” she breathed and pulled me in where a low fire burned in the center of the floor, sending up a sweet, rough scent of dung. “Sit,” she said in a mangled Olondrian, forcing me down on a woven stool. Her gestures were quick, her long, large-knuckled hands in perpetual motion. She adjusted her mantle over her shoulder, flicking its beaded hem out of reach of the fire, and squatted to prod at a bubbling pot balanced in the coals. She said something in Kestenyi, her voice raised. I heard the word kalidoh.
“There’s another,” Jissavet said. “Beside you. Her grandmother.”
I looked more closely at the pile of skins on the floor. A thin face watched me, clear-eyed, ringed with fine gray hair.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
“No,” the granddaughter advised me. “No Olondrian.”
The grandmother lay still, staring.
“Look at her eyes,” Jissavet whispered.
“I know.”
“She isn’t dying. She only looks like she’s dying. She isn’t, though. She’s going to live for a long time.”
The granddaughter served me lentils and dried meat in a leather bowl. I ate half and showed her my empty satcheclass="underline" “I need some for my friend.” She threw her hands up, scolding as I made to put the remains of the food in the satchel, snatched the bag away and filled it with dried lentils.
“No,” I said. “Too much.”
She waved her hand dismissively, her face turned away. “For the kalidoh. For the kalidoh. Not too much.”
On her bed the grandmother gazed at me with stricken, watchful eyes. A gold earring curled beside her cheek, lavish as spring.
“Sick?” I asked the granddaughter.
She shook her head.
“No, not sick,” Jissavet said, almost in a whisper.
“Jissavet.”
A warning in the air, an electricity. Grief.
“Jissavet.”
She burned beside me, a bright tear in each eye.
I sank to my knees on the floor, her pain going through me like fire in the grass. “Jissavet.”
“Tell her he’s dead,” she choked. “Her boy. He’s not coming back.”
I looked up, the fires fading. The granddaughter stared, mouth open, the satchel in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” I panted. “The boy is not coming back. He’s dead.”
She dropped the satchel. “Mima,” she cried. A string of Kestenyi words, and then a keening. She drew her mantle over her head.