The old woman did not weep, did not cry out. She lay so still she seemed to be calcifying, turning into stone before my eyes. The light of the low fire sprang back from her cheek, which the terrible hardness descending on her body had turned to mother-of-pearl.
“Grandmother.”
Frightened, I crept to her and took her skinny hand. Her eyes were knots of amber that did not blink. Then, unthinking, I whispered to her in Kideti. “There, daughter. It’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.”
The angel, outside my vision, grew still. The weeping granddaughter too; though she whimpered, there was no harshness in her cries.
The air of the room seemed lighter. I heard the gentle crackling of the fire, and a wind sent ripples along the wall of the tent. Just as my straining muscles relaxed, the old woman squeezed my fingers in a vicious grip and burst into a passion of weeping. The granddaughter, gulping, took my place at her side and dried the old woman’s eyes with her mantle. The two wept quietly for a long time.
At length I rose, trying not to disturb them, and picked up my satchel.
“Wait,” the granddaughter cried, beckoning me back.
The old woman fixed her large light eyes on me. She reached down to the earth and dug a series of careful lines with her fingernail. A wolf took shape, coming into being as I watched, alive in snout and limb, the hairs on its belly distinct. She nicked its teeth into place with a few deft twists and lay back, closing her eyes.
The granddaughter motioned at the drawing. “Gift,” she said. “For the kalidoh.”
I gave her a snake she could not understand, and she gave me a wolf I could not take away. It’s fair, I thought, shouldering my satchel over the plain. The wind had fallen; the snowy earth was lighter than the sky, holding the murky luminosity of a coin.
“Jissavet,” I said, and she was there, her smile a garland. We walked slowly homeward under the darkening sky.
When I swung the gate open, its creaking seemed to echo.
“What’s that?” Jissavet said, and I looked up, sensing a change in the air.
“Thunder.”
In the desert a rain of five minutes is like a carnival.
The rains fell in short, sharp bursts, and ephemeral meadows sprang up on the plateau; the snow melted, leaving great empty patches of shining earth and tender flowers of concentrated gold that froze and died in the night. The vines of the yom afer turned green and sprouted all over with saffron-colored blooms, giving off an insipid scent, and frayed like pumpkin flowers; the eerie plant called laddisi burst forth with its flowers like pungent white stars and its green, obscenely swollen sacks of formicative blue milk. The rains washed the marble terrace of Sarenha-Haladli; I skated across it barefoot, laughing after the angel, the rose trees snagging my shirt. Water lay in the bowl of the fountain like a forgotten hand mirror, and all the trees were studded with buds like knobs of brass.
In a month or less it would all be blown away, replaced by scorching sand, the thorn trees withering through the sapless days; but for now it was ours and we reveled in it, elated by the sudden perfumes, the transitory carpet of the meadows. And the hills of Tavroun, she wears them like a necklace. “Show yourself,” I said, and she turned for me like a lamp in the ringing fields. The wind blew through her, fresh and startling, spiced with the odor of the plateau, an animating fragrance like crushed pepper. And her laugh went dancing in sparks of light when I told her how I loved her and how silken and volatile she was, and haughty like a black flower. Her arms encircled me, full of the essence of spring. She was so alive, so alive I forgot that the name of the life she lived was death.
“You have to go home,” she said.
“Not now. Not yet.”
“Soon,” she whispered. A chilling sound, a brush against my third vertebra.
Rain pattered on the window, touched with light. I could hear Miros downstairs, singing, hacking up furniture for the fire.
“You have to go home,” she repeated, “and so do I. When the time comes, you will release me. I’ve told my anadnedet. I’m tired of the ghost-land. Old.”
She hovered by the lamp. It was true, she had grown old. A century of living in her eyes.
“Please, Jevick. It is the last thing.”
A movement below in the garden. I froze.
“It’s here, isn’t it,” I whispered, staring. “The body.”
Her tears like springtime over the great plateau.
I leaned to the window. Auram, High Priest of Avalei, was coming up the path.
Book Six
Southward
Chapter Nineteen
Bonfire
But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.
Nothing could have prepared me for the silence that was to follow. Had I been told of it, I would not have believed. Such silences, such griefs, no one can predict them, they come like the first red gleams of kyitna, unimaginable until they are suddenly there.
The morning was bright and still. A few white clouds hung on the edge of the sky, a frail scaffolding of mist above the hills. Snow lay in the cracked bowls of the fountains, but already the trees cast denser shadows, bristling with tentative leaves. I swept a space in the orchard clear of snow, built up a heap of broken chairs, and placed on them the pink box Auram had brought with him: a wooden confection adorned with carved rosettes in which the bones of my love had been folded and put away like a musical instrument. The sound of something shifting inside the box knocked at my heart; my hands were sweating, and when I had positioned the coffin I wiped them on my coat. The house observed me, silent. Miros and Auram were there, but no one looked out; they had left me to complete this ritual alone.
I am the last thing you will see, I said in my heart. I am the last, I have carried you in my arms, I have brought you home.
“This is Jissavet of Kiem,” I said aloud, my voice taut and strange. “And we release her into the Isle of Abundance.”
I crouched beside the pyre and touched it with the flame of an oil lamp, now on the left, now on the right, north and south. At first it would not burn. Black feathers of smoke curled around the delicate pink of the box, and I gritted my teeth, impatient now for a conflagration. An annihilating transcendence like the death that lovers feel. She was waiting for it, glowing with absolute desire, and her desire made a desolation of the garden, turned the sparkling trees to ash, blackened the marble of the fountains. The books that held her anadnedet were stacked nearby on the ground. If the book was her jut, then let it go with her. Let it burn, as we burned janut in the islands. “Burn, burn,” I whispered. “Burn, scorch this garden, flicker in tongues…”
The smoke increased in density: it rolled on the wind, stinging my eyes, smelling of dust, dark libraries, burning cloth. Then a low glimmer, faintly orange in the sun. I tossed my little lamp on the pyre, and the oil hissed up in a ribbon of light.
A startling crack as the wood split. The odor of burning varnish, sparks of livid blue and green along the box. The gilded roses blackening. More loud cracks, making me start. The paint destroyed, flaring up, turning to soot. And then the flames, eager, crackling, devouring. Tears poured down my face. The flames were eating their way to the heart of the box. What was left there, Jissavet, my love. Your broken, delicate bones. Fragile fingers, ankles like cowrie shells. And a ball of hair, perhaps that ball of flame which burst up suddenly like a star, with a coarse, tragic, appalling odor. Other odors were there, despoiling the freshness of the day: something like resin, spices, a tainted revolting sweetness. I covered my eyes with my hands and sobbed, sitting on the ground, one hand pressed on that sad collection of volumes spotted with ink like blood. She’s going, I thought in panic. And she was. She lifted away from my heart, tearing it as she vaulted into the sky. Her foot snagged in my veins, ripping away, floating free. She was climbing that dark and trembling ladder of smoke. “Jissavet!” I cried. I snatched up the books and held them to my chest, unable to burn them now, gazing up at the sky. There, where the smoke was fading. Where the sky was the purest, most tranquil blue. Where she had gone alone, no jut to take her hand. Lighter than snow or ashes. Where she had entered at last the eternal door, leaving me inconsolable in the silence.