One of the men laughed briefly, a rasp of phlegm.
“Father,” I said, my arms taut at my sides, my fists clenched: “Take me with you when you go to Olondria.”
He met my eyes. My heart raced in my throat. “Take me with you,” I said with an effort. “I’ll learn the business… It will be an education…”
“Education!” he smiled, looking down again at the rod he was heating. “Education, younger son, is your whole trouble. That Olondrian has educated you to burst in on your father in his private room and interrupt his business.”
“I had to speak to you. I can’t—” I stopped, unable to find the words. Rain roared down the roof, pounding the air into the ground.
“Can’t what?” He lifted the rod, the tip a ruby of deep light, and squinted at it. “Can’t speak to your age mates? Can’t find a peasant girl to play with? Can’t run? Can’t dance? Can’t swim? Can’t leave your room? What?” He turned, drawing the burning iron briskly across the block his servant held. Once, I remembered, he had slipped, searing the man’s arm, leaving a brand for which he had paid with a pair of hens.
“I can’t stay here.”
“Can’t stay here!” His harsh, flat laugh rang out, and the old men echoed him, for he had too much power ever to laugh alone. “Come now! Surely you hope and expect that your father will live for a few more years.”
“May my father’s life be as long as the shore that encircles the Isle of Abundance.”
“Ah. You hear how he rushes his words,” he remarked to his companions. “It has ever been his great failing, this impatience.” He looked at me, allowing me to glimpse for the first time the depths of coldness in the twin pits of his eyes.
“You will stay,” he said softly. “You will be grateful for what you are given. You will thank me.”
“Thank you, Father,” I whispered, desolate.
He tossed the hot iron aside, and it fell with a thud. He leaned back, searching under his belt for a cigar, not looking at me. “Get out,” he said.
I do not know if he was cruel. I know that he was powerful; I know that he loved power and could not endure defiance. I do not know why he brought me a tutor out of a foreign country only to sneer at me, at my tutor, and at my loves. I do not know what it was that slept inside his cunning mind, that seldom woke to give his eyes, for a moment, a shade of sorrow; I do not know what it was that sprang at last at his heart and killed him, that struck him down in the paradise of the fields, in the wealth of pepper.
The morning was cool and bright. It was near the end of the rains, and the wind called Kyon rode over us on his invisible serpent. The clustered leaves of the orange trees were heavy and glistened with moisture, and Jom stood under them, shaking the branches, his hair dusted with raindrops. His was the voice we heard, that voice, thick with excess saliva, calling out clumsily: “There is a donkey in the courtyard!” His was the voice that brought us running, already knowing the truth, that hoofed animals were not brought into houses except in cases of death. I arrived in the doorway to see my mother already collapsing, supported by servants, shrieking and struggling in their arms, whipping her head from side to side, her hair knotting over her face, filling the air with the animal cries which would not cease for seven days. In the center of the courtyard, under the pattern of light and shade, stood a donkey, held with ropes by two of my father’s dusty field-workers. The donkey’s back was heaped with something: a tent, a great sack of yams, the carcass of an elephant calf—the body of my father.
The body was lashed with ropes and lolled, dressed in its yellow trousers, the leather sandals on its feet decorated with small red beads; but the ceremonial staff, with its arrogant cockscomb of hawk feathers, had been left behind in the fields, as none of the field-workers could touch it. I brought that scepter home, resting its smooth length on my shoulder, climbing the hill toward Tyom as the wind came up with its breath of rain, followed by the fat white mule who had been my father’s pride, whom the field-workers had abandoned because a death had occurred on its back. When I reached the house, I stepped through an archway into the ruins of the courtyard, where every shade tree had been cut down and every pot smashed on the stones. I stood for a moment holding the staff in my arms, in a haze of heat. From the back rooms of the house came the sound of rhythmic screaming.
That screaming filled my ears for seven days and seven nights, until it became a drone, like the lunatic shrilling of cicadas. The servants had gone to the village to fetch eleven professional mourners, ragged, loose-haired women who keened, whipping their heads back and forth. Their arrival relieved my mother, who was hoarse and exhausted with mourning, having screamed unceasingly ever since she had seen my father’s body. The mourners sat in the ravaged courtyard, five or six at a time, kneeling among the broken pots, the dirt, the remains of flowers, grieving wildly while, in our rooms, we dressed in our finest clothes, scented our hair, and decorated our faces with blue chalk.
Moments before we left for the funeral I passed my mother’s room, and there was a tchavi there, an old man, sparse-haired, in a skin cloak flayed by storms. He was crouching by my mother where she lay face-down on her pallet, and his thin brown hand was resting on her hair. I paused, startled, and heard him say: “There now, daughter. There, it’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.” I hurried back down the passage, guilty and frightened as if by a sign. My mother appeared soon afterward, unrecognizable under the chalk. I could not tell if her grief was eased by his visit, for she was like a shape etched in stone. As for the tchavi, he left the house in secret, and I did not see him again.
The women keened, their voices mixed with the raucous notes of horns, as we walked through the village slowly, slowly, under the gathering clouds, we, my father’s family, blue-stained, stiff as effigies, with our blank, expressionless faces and our vests encrusted with beads. We walked in the dusty streets, in the cacophony of mourning, followed by the servants bearing the huge corpse on a litter. Master Lunre was with us, in his Olondrian costume, that which had caused the village children to call him a “frilled lizard.” His face, unpainted, wore a pensive expression; he had not mourned, but only clasped my hand and said: “Now you have become mortal…”
He sat with us for the seven days in the valley, beside the ruined city, the city of Jajetanet, crumbling, cloaked in mists, where we set my father’s body upon one of the ancient stones and watched his flesh sag as it was pelted by the rain. “Where shall I go to find the dawn?” the hired singers chanted. “He has not pricked his foot on a thorn, he leaves no trail of blood.” My father’s jut was beside him, potbellied like him, kept bright through years of my mother’s devoted polishing, its feathers drooping.
Because of my father’s high position, the mourning was well-attended: most of the people of Tyom were there, and some had come from Pitot. The green and gentle slope that led down into the ruined city was covered with people sitting cross-legged on mats under broad umbrellas. Harried servants walked among them bearing platters of food, begging them not to refuse nourishment in the ritual phrases of mourning. The people turned their heads away, insisting, with varying degrees of vehemence, that they could not eat; but at last they all accepted. “May it pass from me,” we said, swallowing coconut liquor, sucking the mussels from their shells, the oil dribbling down our chins.