A Stranger in Olondria

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? — No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there — the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.
Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It`s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it`s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you`ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadow of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it`s merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

You can sit in the corner. It`s all you can do when it starts raining. Sit in the dry corner and watch the water slide on the floor. It finds its way to the doorway at last and joins the rest of the rain, down there, outside. There`s a thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.
But sometimes — wasn`t it true that you would go outside, when the sky had cleared, and run, screaming and jumping to dash the raindrops from the leaves? Wasn`t it true that the smell of the mud was buoyant, delightful excessive — that the yellow light of the flats outshone the sky? And everywhere you could hear your own voice ringing in the cold air, and you would charge through the reeds, which sprang back, scattering moisture. And the sea, still bubbling, angry, glowed with a heavy phosphorescence. You could play with it: its radiance clung to the body.

Love, for our people, was synonymous with dishonor. It was something to be avoided, hidden, crushed... They spoke of it in hushed tones, telling about my cousin who loved a man forbidden to her and drowned herself, of disapproving of a father who doted on his young son, saying the child would be spoiled, would become a weakling. Then I don`t want to be strong, I told my mother before I left. That was her complaint, that I was weak. I don`t want your kind of strength, I said. Do you know what she said to me? I wish I`d aborted you with tama-root.

At last, after days of exposure and hardship, we were rewarded: a door of wonders opened in the landscape. At the crest of a rocky hill, suddenly, a new world lay before us, a blaze of gold, a bleak, profound desolation: Kestenya the savage and solitary, stretched out at the foot of the mountains, the great plateau that led to the birthplace of dragons. A few isolated lines marked it: a roughness hinting at hills, a dry riverbed like the shadow of a wrist. It was th ehome of the bull, of the stalwart, bristle-maned desert pony. Wolves prowled at its edges through the winters. It was "a shape to make men weep," wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: "Exactly the shape of a desecrated sea."
I stood looking down at it, forgetting the wind. Miros, pale as wheat, rolled onto his side and stared over the edge with me. "It is a mystery," writes Firdred, "how man ever had the temerity to enter a place so forgidding and forlorn."
The sight of the desert from the pass had all the mesmeric power of a clear and moonless night respledent with stars. It provoked the same greed of the eyes, the feeling that never, no matter how long one looked, would the image remain undamaged in the memory. It was too vast, mystic, impenetrable. And yet, as one Telkan wrote, it was nothing: "May Sarma forgive me," wrote Nuilas the Sage, "for I have caused the blood of our sons to be shed for this utterly hostile wilderness, this annihilating void of the east." Perhaps this was why I felt, dazzled, thast I could never contain this sweeping vision — because it was nothing, pure nothingness: an almost featureless wasteland, golden, streaked with incarnadine, as Firdred wrote, "the color of a fingernail." To the north the chain of hills stretched on and I saw the city of Ur-Amakir in the distance, poised dramatically on a precipice over the sands, and as I stood gazing at its high stern walls the wind began to shriek and a diamond burned my face. It was the snow.

"We mean no dishonor to Avalei or your person, veimaro," one of them grumbled, scratching his neck. "But we have come for a man, a foreigner." He scanned the group and pointed to me with his sword. "That one. The islander. We`ve come for him."
"That man is our my guest," Auram said icely. "An insult to him is and insult to me and through me to the Ripener of the Grain."
"Our orders are from the Telkan," said another soldier, not the one who had spoken first, his dark face swollen with impatience.
Auram smiled. "Our speech begins to form a circle, gentlemen." His finger twirled in the air, its shadow revolving on the ceiling. "Round and round. Round and round. You invoke the king, and I invoke the goddess. Which do you think will prove the stronger?"

We were moving away from the sea. On our left hung high limestone cliffs, topped with turf and a few wind-blasted trees; on our right the country spilled like a bolk of silk unrolled in a market, like perfumed oil poured out in a flagrant gesture. The Ethendria Road, wide and well-kept, curved down into the Valley, into the shadow of cliffs and the redolence of wet herbs. The grape harvest was ended, and the country was filled with tumbled vines, rust-colored, mellowed with age, birdsong, and repose... Everything shone in that sumptuous light which is called "the breath of angels": the hills flecked with the gold of the autumn crocus, the windy, bronze-limbed chestnut trees and the radhui, the peasant houses, sprawling structures topped with blackened chimneys. The trees and roofs stood out precisely against the purity of the sky whose vibrant blue was a unique gift of the autumn. The dust sparkled over the road, and its odor mixed with the wilder scents of smoke and grasses in the deep places of the fields.

"Let me ask — how old are you?"
"Twenty-two."
"Twenty-two." She looked at me, her eyes wet and green as celadon. "You are very young. I think that you have not built anything yet?"
I thought of my life: lessons, a journey, an angel. I shook my head.
"No," she murmured. "I thought not. It is dangerous to build. Once you have built something — something that takes all your passion and will — it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don`t realize that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom — something which, later, will make you suffer."

"In the oldest time, "I said, "there was only the sea. There were no islands. At this time, the gods were there, but under the sea. And with them were their servants, the lower spirits, who are the angels, who are like the gods, always the same, neither increasing nor decreasing... After the world was divided, they went to live on the Isle of Abundance, which is where we go after death — those of us who die well. Those of us who do not die well — belong to another place."
"Another place? Which place?" the pirest demanded.
"Jepnatow-het," I said softly. "The angel — no, the dead country. Of those who are dead, yet alive. The one place that cannot be reached by sea."