I packed the books, put on my boots, and set the strap of the satchel on my shoulder. There was already enough light to see the steps. Downstairs in the dining room, where the shadows of the rose trees streaked the windows, Auram’s Evmeni manservant was boiling coffee. Soon Miros came in, supporting the arm of the hooded priest with a new tenderness, a reverence. We sat together in the lightening air. The servant gave me a glass of coffee clouded with white steam. Its flavor was earthy, stinging, coarse: the taste of Tyom.
Miros sang as we traveled in the priest’s carriage along the cart-tracks, the country altering slowly, kindling with the sparkle of orchards in flower. Soon the track grew wide and level and bordered with fragments of brick, and there were more sheep and fewer cattle in the fields. Far away to the south waved the blue fringes of a forest. Birds filled the air, geese and swans flocking around the reservoirs. Honeysuckle drowned the balustrades of the country houses, and bildiri villages smoked in clouds of alabaster dust.
The sun brought the color back to Miros’s face; the meals we ate in the villages filled out his frame. He was almost himself again when we reached the southern Tavroun. As we rolled beneath the ancient aqueduct into the town of Tashuef he was singing a vanadel that made the priest’s servant snigger. And when we went out that evening to a tavern called the Swan, he appeared altogether restored, tall and fresh. We ate a Valley meal of kebma, sour cream, and mountain olives, followed by a dish of apricots and quails. After a bottle of insipid wine we began on the white-hot teiva with preserved figs floating thickly in the bottle, and listened to the Evmeni musicians playing their long guitars and violins among the streetlamps and shadows of trees. It was like an evening in the Valley. Only the dryness of the air, the peculiar echoes of the sounds, and the aloof and solemn propriety of the patrons at other tables, made it clear that we were still among the mountains. We removed the tablecloth and marked the little table with chalk, and Miros taught me the elementary rules of londo and promptly won six droi from the purse the priest had given me and shouted to the waiter: “Another bottle. And bring us some chicken livers.”
Turning to me he grinned and said: “I know I owe you my life. But you owe me six droi.”
“You may have the droi,” I said, “if you will take care of your life.”
His face grew pensive, showing its new hardness under the lamps, a touch of age. “I will care for it, body and spirit,” he said.
Afterward we walked through the stiff brick streets of the town, passing doors where the names of the owners hung in brass, singing vanadiel to the barking of chained mastiffs and the tolling of a bell in the temple of Iva. We saw no rubbish pits or decaying backstreets. All was trim, definite, contained. The shadows lay very straight and black. We compared the town to the nomad camps where refuse fell haphazardly, submitting to the purification of sand.
Under an old arcade he said: “This is a city of emptiness. Look, there’s no one awake in the whole square. No late-night carousers, not even a soldier. Look at the benches, all alone. And that house with all of its shutters bolted. This is a place you could bring a woman to with complete discretion. She’d wear a Kestenyi mantle in the streets. I don’t think anyone would question you, or even notice…”
“Would she come here with you?”
“Never,” he laughed.
He did not mention her again. And now we stood at the inn where lamplight fell on the whitewashed steps, the sleeping geraniums. He gripped my shoulders and saluted me with kisses on both cheeks, calling me bremaro beilare, “my poor friend.” I was already forlorn, thinking of traveling without him. A grumbling servant answered our knock at the door. Dawn was breaking as we walked to our rooms, and Miros’s outline seemed to waver in the cinder-colored air.
And in the morning I left the town of Tashuef, I left Kestenya. I boarded a riverboat called She Lies Weeping and leaned on the railing squinting at the wharf, the merchants and soldiers swearing, the crates of fish being swung overhead on ropes. There was the carriage, Miros seated on the box with the driver, both of them waving. Miros had wrapped his head in a scarf, Kestenyi-fashion. I saw rather than heard his good-byes, his mouth open and shouting. Of the priest I saw only a bony hand at the window.
“Good-bye,” I yelled back, knowing they could not hear me. The river swelled beneath the vessel, wide and full, a milky blue beneath the sky. The hills rose smothered in grass and flowering thorn on either side, and over them the peaks of snow hung shining like foam.
We passed the Land of Gum, the Land of Willows, the Land of Mice. Far off in the pallid east glimmered the Sweet and Bitter Lakes. The villages had names like Weam, Lilawu, Elwianab—Evmeni syllables rounded and dropping like honey. South of Wun there were camels imported from the desert of Waob; at Welawion I saw the first elephants. And yet the effect was not one of excitement, but of fatigue, for the land continued gray, mud-hued, and oppressed by a salty wind. Often I saw men asleep in their boats, their lips white with salt. In coastal pastures enervated sheep chewed colorless grasses. In the distant east the fringes of the Dimavain waved like flags of dark blue silk, exuding the same refreshing seduction as the mountains.
Orange trees, date palms, the colocynths Fodra called “the flowers of sleep.” At Ur-Brome I boarded a ship for Tinimavet. My satchel, my clinking purse, and my sore heart. It was trying to live again, that heart: it throbbed in me like a scarlet bruise. Ur-Brome reeked of smoke and sewage, in full sun but somehow failing to absorb the light, its flattened squares preserving the dullness of fog. As we pulled away from the shore a feeble clamor went up from the crowd on the quay and a woman beside me wept beneath her parasol.
Inscrutable country of the north—ravishing Olondria! Suddenly, as we pulled away on the sea, she unveiled the beauty of that coast with a limpid gesture of the light which seemed to contain a coy and voluptuous smile. A wash of blue poured over the sea that had been so thick and gray, a blue of dazzling, ineffable tenderness. And the city took on the delicate colors of a bed of roses on the brink of death, those exquisite pinks and whites. The ivory of worn seashells glowed in its walls, and the faded gold of tapestries, and another, elusive color, the gray of chalk—a frail and etiolated color, more precious to me than the rest because it seemed to contain the essential Olondrian sadness. The woman beside me sobbed with renewed despair, throwing back her head, her sunshade drooping, two bright tracks descending from under her lashes. While on the waves the Salt Coast grew still whiter, more fragile, more luminous—and at last it was only a nimbus on the sea.