Chapter Twenty-One
Jissavet’s Alphabet
“Ah!” my mother said. “What’s this? You’re thin. And you have a completely different face.”
We sat in the courtyard in the soft air of the evening. The sky was a dark turquoise and the first stars already floated, detached and pale, as if they were not real stars but only reflections. It was the end of a day which I had spent on the back of a gaunt and sullen donkey I had purchased at Dinivolim, coming down through the forests and rubber plantations into the shimmering tea country, and at last to the cliffs of Tyom. My household was not expecting me; Jom saw me first, bellowed, charged, and crushed me to his heart in the front courtyard, and my mother ran out to meet me with a look of fear, her hair disheveled, her hands still gleaming with the grease of the kitchen. A servant was sent to fetch Lunre, who was away; others hurriedly prepared a reception for me, filling the courtyard with flowers. Now we sat there on cane chairs in an atmosphere of relaxed festivity which I recognized as the absence of my father.
“I’ll soon get fat again,” I said, holding up my empty plate. A servant took it and held the cloth and the bowl for me to wash.
“Fat again!” she said. “You were never fatter than a little mouse. And all of your fat, you carried it on your whiskers…”
“Yes, we must fatten you,” said my father’s wife, wiping her narrow hands on the servant’s cloth, smoothing her long skirt. She sat very straight in the growing darkness, not bending into the shape of the chair. The last rays of the sky shone on her high and polished plaits. Her face was a lean shadow. “How else can we find you a bride?” Her laugh clattered, an old spoon falling on metal. “Not that it stopped your foreign tutor. He’s still as thin as a cricket, and we celebrated his wedding during the Sea Days!”
I turned to Lunre, shocked. He wore an abashed, uncomfortable smile, and I imagined that he was grateful for the darkness. “True,” he said in a low voice, in Kideti, glancing away at the trees.
I stared at him. “But where is she?”
He rubbed his jaw.
My mother answered gently: “Lunre lives in his own house now, on Painted Mountain.”
“You moved away,” I said in Olondrian, dismayed. And he answered in the same language, his hands moving in the dark like drifting leaves. “I couldn’t stay here forever, with no one to teach. I would have told you later, but…” He shrugged, eloquent in silence. The servants brought two braziers from the kitchen, and the reddish light revealed a demure smile on the face of my father’s wife.
“Congratulations,” I told Lunre in Kideti.
He looked at me, his face serious, filled with gratitude in the dimness. “Thank you,” he said. He reached and grasped my hand, then patted my arm as if to feel that I was real, was here beside him. “Jevick,” he murmured. His voice hummed out in the twilight, his same voice. I had forgotten how thin it was, ragged in the upper register. Had I described his voice I would not have said that it had that worn quality, as if its fabric was stretched, on the verge of tearing. I would have told of another voice, smoother, nobler, more restful, yet when he spoke it was this voice I recognized: this weather-beaten voice, shredded by winds like the voice of an old sailor, brought him close to me in a dazzling instant. I knew him through his voice, despite his hair, grown longer and bleached salt-white, tied at the nape of his neck in the island fashion, and despite his vest with the Tyomish designs, his drawstring trousers and leather sandals, the costume of a fisherman of the cliffs. His voice was the same, his lanky body, the way he sat with his elbows on his knees, his sad necromancer’s eyes. He played with a leaf, burning it on the coals, and the redness lit his fingers until they were incandescent with hidden blood.
We spoke. We spoke of nothing, fish and fruit trees and the gossip of Tyom, an old man’s death, a number of betrothals. My father’s wife, loyal to her bitterness, made only comments whose innocence concealed their essential cruelty. She was a dagger thinly sheathed, as always, only slightly subdued by the thought that I, the Ekawi, could send her away. And only this gnawing fear, evident in her strained and watchful pose, made her pitiable and therefore bearable. Her laugh rang out unnaturally, so that Jom whimpered with distress and my mother looked at her co-wife with concern. My mother, incapable of malice, even in self-defense, who humbled herself in order to soothe the first wife: “Look at your son’s clothes,” she said, teasing, and my father’s wife, not unaware of the kindness, sniffed coldly. “Ridiculous attire,” she said. “Even his tutor doesn’t dress like that.” A smirk twisted her iron face in the moonlight.
It was my mother’s genius, this passionate sensitivity that made her capable of knowing others better than they knew themselves. When Lunre was ready to go, we walked with him to the arch of the courtyard, a servant following with a Tyomish lamp, a bowl of oil. The light was florid and agitated, a light by which one could never read, its nervous color bouncing in all directions, lighting up my master’s smile and then, leaning against the wall, the pole which he took in his hand, grasping it firmly. It was a bolkyet, a stick in which a narrow blade was hidden. He twisted the handle, revealing a streak of white. “In case of thieves,” he grinned, snapping it closed, and my mother said approvingly: “Yes, Painted Mountain is far.” I looked at her and saw, by her earnest eyes in the transient light, by the tender curve at the corner of her mouth, that her thoughts were the same as mine: she knew that Lunre would never have occasion to use the bolkyet he leaned upon so proudly. For any islander coming upon my master in the dark, even the most brutal and wayward criminal, would flee from his spectral countenance and supernatural height and from the pallor that indicated a lack of blood. Yet I saw that, since he had moved away, my mother had flattered him for his brusque courage in going armed among the forests, and that Lunre, who would never have admitted to physical vanity, was pleased to be seen as a man to be reckoned with. This glimpse of their new lives, so full of grace and generosity, affected me like the sight of a beautiful painting, like one of those dark and melancholy paintings of Olondria in which only a tiny corner is laden with light. There they stood, surrounded by darkness under a distant moon, lit by the thick and glancing rays from the bowl, the white-haired man with his pale and gentle eyes as changeful as water, and the woman, black-haired, barefoot, lambent with smiles. Then he put his free hand on my shoulder and kissed me on both cheeks, saying in Olondrian: “Welcome, friend of my heart.” He squeezed my shoulder and turned, the servant lighting his way out to the gate, his angular shadow sliding over the path.
“He is a good man,” my mother said when he had gone. “You should be happy that he has found a wife.”
“I am happy,” I said.
She linked her arm through mine, turning with me to walk back to the chairs. “My little mouse…”
The words affected her suddenly; it was clear she had not expected it. I heard the catch in her voice, and she fell silent. Then she laughed tearfully: “How silly I am! And look, Jom’s taken off his vest—it’s getting colder, he’ll be chilled…”