Kitabı oku: «The Embers of Heaven», sayfa 3
Three
Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making somewhat acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.
Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.
‘That’s what we wear in mourning,’ Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.
‘So your people are happy when someone dies?’ her friend Ennea asked. ‘White is a colour of joy, you wear it when you marry, not when you die.’
‘But back in Syai…’
‘Is that where you’re really from?’ asked Dia, the school-teacher’s daughter, a slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they were edicts handed down from the Gods on their mountain. ‘My papa says that blood will tell.’
‘I was born here,’ Amais said fiercely. ‘I am from here!’
‘But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,’ said Ennea, with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.
‘That was different,’ said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s-blood to escape. ‘My father was of Elaas, and…’
‘But so is your grandmother,’ another girl, Evania, pointed out. ‘My grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here – but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.’
Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said carefully, too young to analyse the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of the practical questions of her playmates because they simply could not understand it.
‘My mother says you’re strange,’ Ennea said.
But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least for the time being.
Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence and with considerable trouble – since the body had had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not a totally straightforward matter. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas stepped in to offer a helping hand – and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her – but Vien was an adult, with an adult’s decisions to make. Decisions that would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her – her two daughters.
And it soon became apparent that there was yet another voice, perhaps the most forceful of all, that guided Vien’s choices – the insistent ghost of her mother.
When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it – but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination that frightened her into paying much closer attention.
The wind of change started blowing quite softly, nearly imperceptibly.
‘I must take Mother home.’
That had been the innocuous sentence that let the first breath of moving air into the cold, stagnant little house, which was thus demoted, without ceremony, into a temporary dwelling. No longer the ‘home’ that Amais had known – the only home that she had ever known.
Elena did miss it, that first time. She simply ignored it, like she ignored so many things in those days. She ignored Vien’s views on how her younger daughter should be dressed, fed, disciplined. She ignored Vien’s older daughter altogether. She tried hard to ignore Vien’s white clothes and the white ribbon she wore woven into that incongruous glossy smooth black hair that now hung long and loose down Vien’s back.
But it quickly became too big to ignore. Mysterious people with inscrutable faces and round dark eyes came to call on Vien at Elena’s cottage, treating Elena herself with scrupulously correct if icy politeness. Vien herself would disappear for several days at a time to the mainland, her only word on her absence that she had ‘arrangements’ to make. When she returned to the island after her final visit to the mainland, she carried something in a large envelope, clutched to her breast as though the contents were more precious than jewels.
That time even Elena had to notice.
‘What do you have there?’ she asked in the voice she now customarily used with Vien when she spoke to her at all, clipped and brusque, as though she had judged her daughter-in-law of some crime and found her unforgivably guilty.
‘Tickets,’ Vien said. ‘We’re going home, the three of us and Mother. Back to Syai.’
Everyone looked up at that, Amais in stark astonishment and Elena with something indefinable that was equal parts fury and fear.
‘It’s a long, wasted journey for a baby to make,’ Elena said at last after a moment of silence, riding her emotions on a tight rein. ‘Really, Vien. Your mother lived on these shores all of her life. She can hardly object to being buried in those hills now.’
‘Did she?’ Vien questioned softly, and Amais began to pay much closer attention. This was starting to sound a lot like the frustrating conversations she had had with her friends out at the rock pools, dressed in her inconvenient white ‘mourning’ garb. ‘I don’t think she ever quite lived here. Not really.’
‘She was born here,’ Elena snapped. ‘As far as I know, she never set foot in Syai.’
‘Her body, no,’ Vien said. ‘But her spirit…I do not think her spirit ever left Syai. She was half a woman all of her days, yearning back to the things that made her who she was. She deserves to rest there, in peace at last.’
‘Syai is a long way to take the child to a funeral,’ Elena said crisply.
Amais bowed her head to hide the sudden tears that welled in her eyes. There was only one child in Elena’s mind, and it was not herself.
Her little sister, untroubled by all this, slept in her crib, oblivious to the conflict around her and about her. She would never know, Amais thought. She was too young for any of this to have meaning. She had never known her father, could never remember him.
‘It is a long way, yes,’ Vien said, and lifted her head, meeting her mother-in-law’s eyes. ‘But it isn’t just a funeral that we would go for, Mother-in-law. We go…to stay.’
Elena’s eyes widened for a moment, in pure shock that she could not hide, and then narrowed again and hardened until they were chips of obsidian in her set face.
‘I forbid it,’ she said, dropping each word like a pebble. Amais could almost hear them rattle as they rolled around on the floor at the women’s feet.
‘I’m sorry,’ Vien said, ‘but you cannot. It is not your place.’
‘This is my son’s child,’ Elena said, crossing the room and snatching up the sleeping toddler out of her crib. Nika woke up abruptly, knuckled her eyes with her hands and began to whimper softly as though Elena’s hands were clutching claws locked around her, holding on tight.
‘It is my child,’ Vien said. ‘And here she would always be wangmei, just like…just like I was.’
‘What are you talking about? What is that? She is my son’s daughter, the last thing of his that I have on this earth. She is no wing…whatever that is.’
‘Wangmei,’ Vien repeated patiently, standing her ground. ‘It means “stranger of the body”, an outsider, someone who obviously does not belong in a community. Someone different. Look at her and tell me how she will fit in here in a few years’ time, when she’s grown enough to want playmates, friends.’
‘Amais never had a problem,’ Elena said defensively, bringing her other granddaughter into the discussion for the first time, but only out of desperation, sacrificing her as a pawn to keep her claim on the younger, the precious one, the now openly wailing toddler in her arms. Amais’s eyes were wide, her mouth parted, her heart beating painfully fast.
‘Amais, korimou…’ Vien said, letting a quick and strangely soft glance rest on her oldest for a moment. She had used the word Amais’s father had called her – it was hard to tell whether she had done it deliberately or instinctively, but either way it suddenly sounded strange to Amais, coming from her mother’s lips. ‘Would you let your grandmother and I talk alone? I’ll come and find you in a few moments.’
‘But, Mother…’
‘Please, Amais-ban. It is important.’
Amais slipped off the chair where she had been perched trying very hard to be invisible and dragged herself outside with unwilling obedience. But this concerned her – this was her life they were discussing in there! – so she didn’t go far. She merely turned the corner and crouched underneath the window. It was shuttered against the sun, but beyond the shutters the window was open and it was not hard to eaves-drop on the conversation within.
‘Amais is just as much wangmei as anyone,’ Vien said as the door closed after her daughter. ‘But Aylun…’
‘Nika,’ said Elena fiercely.
‘Aylun – for that is the name she takes with her to Syai, not Nika,’ Vien countered. ‘She could be Nika only here, in this house, in your heart. But she can still be saved, Elena. She can have one world to choose from and she will never know different. Amais…it is already too late for Amais. She is already of two worlds, and will always be torn between them. My mother is probably to blame for that. Perhaps I was, too, for letting her take my child, so young, so malleable – but Amais is already lost here, in this place, because she already knows who she is, who her ancestors were. She is more than wangmei here, she is always going to be xeimei, stranger of the heart, someone who might well have the sense of belonging to this community but who will never be a real part of it. Just like I never really was.’
Amais suddenly felt hot tears welling in her eyes. She will take me away…
‘You were,’ Elena whispered fiercely, rocking her Nika in her arms. ‘You were. When you chose to be.’
‘Amais would have chosen to be, in these last months,’ Vien said, and tears stood in her eyes. ‘Why have you not let her, Elena?’
‘No,’ Elena said, and for the first time her voice broke, brittle with the weight of too much sorrow. ‘Don’t take her away from me, Vien.’
‘You have already done that,’ Vien said. ‘I don’t have to do anything – you have already pushed Amais away yourself.’
‘Not Amais. This one. Go, if you have to – take your child – but leave me Nika. Nika has my son’s eyes. She…’
‘Elena,’ Vien said quietly, ‘she does not. Amais does. Nika is Aylun – she has my mother’s face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth. She will never be Nikos, Elena. She can’t be.’
Elena stared at her, shaking her head minutely, as though she found her words incomprehensible, as if Vien had suddenly started speaking in the language of her ancestors. Which she had, in a way. This had been the first time she had ever used a word of that language in her mother-in-law’s house, and it seemed almost ironic that the words she used meant ‘stranger’.
‘Excuse me,’ Vien said, her voice floating out of the shuttered window, quietly filled with the calm serenity of one who had fought hard battles but who had finally won a war that had been raging for a long time in her soul. ‘I think I had better go and find Amais now, and talk to her.’
Amais, under the window, uncoiled like a whip and raced across the rocky slope behind the house, down the path that led to the cove. She knew the track, every stone and rut and bump on it, and she fled surefooted along the familiar route, around the first curve and out of sight of the house before her mother had had a chance to turn around and open the door.
She wasn’t even aware that the tears that had gathered in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks until she came to a stop at the bottom of the path, leaping down onto the shallow beach of boulder and coarse sand, and had to wipe the back of her hand across her eyes in order to clear her blurred vision. It was only then that her mouth opened like a wound and she sobbed out loud, her whole body shaking with an unexpected and bottomless grief.
The ocean glittered in the sunlight, sparking memories, bringing out things that it was suddenly a white pain to think about. Amais covered her mouth with both hands, as though that could keep the memory from coming, as though she could simply banish it back down into the repository from which it had been called – but it was too late, already too late for that.
She had gone out in a small sailing boat with her father when she was maybe four or five years old, something that she thought of as her first real clear memory. She had already been able to swim like a fish, and there was no fear there – but the women in the household had put up a fight nonetheless and part of the joy of that memory was the way that her father had cut through the whole brouhaha with a simple, ‘She’ll be with me.’ And she was, that was exactly what she was – they were out there together, father and daughter, the white sail furled and the boat bobbing on the sapphire waters with the two of them ducking and diving around it and each other in the warm sea. She had giggled with pure childhood joy, and shrieked with laughter when her father splashed her from behind the boat or dived under to tickle her feet as she kicked out in the water.
That alone would have been enough to hold the magic of the memory, but there had been more.
They had been joined in their games, quite suddenly and with startling gentleness, by three dolphins who came to investigate the noise and stayed to play. They did spectacular leaps and flips, dived back into the water, swam underneath their two human companions and around them, occasionally lifting their heads out of the water to gaze upon them with luminous, intelligent eyes. Amais dived under with them, fearless, and could hear the echo of their sounds in the water. They’d bob their heads to the surface, and so would she, and they’d nod at her as though in approval and utter small chattering noises. They came close enough for her to touch them and she did, running her small hands down the length of the huge animals, almost twice her size. She had finally taken courage and stopped in mid-caress, wrapping her arms around one dolphin’s dorsal fin. It seemed to understand her intentions immediately, squirmed gently until she sat on its back with her feet dangling on either side, and then took off, cleaving the surface cleanly and leaving a white foamy wake behind. Amais was first too startled and then far too enchanted to be in any way afraid. By the time the dolphin circled back to where his companions and Amais’s father waited, she kissed her ocean steed squarely on the nose, which he gave every impression of enjoying, and turned to her father, treading water, her face one huge exhilarated grin.
‘Did you see me? Did you see me ride him?’
‘I saw you,’ Nikos said, his own face wearing an expression of matching joy.
And then they were suddenly gone, the dolphins, as though they had never been there at all, as though they had been just a dream.
‘I hoped they would come,’ Nikos had said, after he’d helped to hoist her back into the boat and had raised the sail for home. ‘I wanted you to meet them. They’re my friends, they often follow the boat; sometimes they will even lead it to where the best fish are. The littlest one is a baby. He was born last calving season, nearly grown now but I remember him when he was quite small, maybe only a few days old. They brought him, you see, they brought him for us to meet. I promised them I would show them my own child one day, when I had a chance.’
‘Thank you, Papa!’ Amais had exclaimed, her face still one huge grin after her experience.
Nikos had reached out and ruffled her wet hair. ‘They’re your friends too, now. They always will be. They never forget. You must never forget them, either.’
‘I won’t,’ she had promised.
She had promised.
But she had also promised baya-Dan something else, something quite different.
Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.
She owed other debts, to long-gone ancestors, to people who had walked this earth centuries before her, and who had never seen a dolphin leap from the sea.
She wished that she didn’t feel as though keeping one of those promises meant inevitably and permanently breaking the other.
Four
Aylun was asleep when the family boarded the small boat that would take them to the mainland, carried in her mother’s arms. The bigger pieces of their luggage had been loaded already; the travellers perched on a couple of battered trunks in the midst of the boat, a number of smaller packages at their feet. Vien also wore a bag slung crosswise on her body, strap on one shoulder and the bag itself resting on the hip on which she was not balancing her sleeping toddler. In that bag were the most precious of the things they had brought with them – Dan’s ashes in a small bronze urn, what there was of Dan’s gold and valuables that was small enough to be carried by hand and that could be exchanged for the things they would need on their journey, tickets for the various conveyances that would take them all the way back to the shores of Syai, and necessities for Aylun’s immediate needs.
Amais carried a similar bag. No concessions had been made for her size and on her the thing looked enormous, overwhelming, threatening to make her buckle under its weight. In hers she carried whatever her mother required but could not fit into her own luggage, as well as the thirteen precious red journals that had been left to her by Dan and – smuggled in as a last-minute sentimental impulse but already starting to be a subject for second thoughts – a couple of pebbles from the cove where her father had taken her to swim with wild dolphins.
The family’s break with the island seemed to be complete. Elena had not come to see them off at the wharf, and neither had any of Amais’s erstwhile bosom friends and companions. Those people who did happen to be there as Vien and her daughters departed seemed reluctant to meet their eyes, to look at them, even to acknowledge that they saw them. Many found something to be busy with, keeping their heads down. Only a couple of women offered a wan half-smile, and one or two children, probably too young to know better, waved goodbye as the boat carrying Vien and the girls pushed off from the dock.
Vien kept her back to the shore, clutching Aylun, occasionally patting the bag she carried with one hand as though to make sure it was still there. It was Amais who sat facing the island they were abandoning, and it was only Amais who saw Elena finally come running all the way down the wharf and then back again to shore, taking an awkward, stumbling leap off it onto the pebbled beach, her customary headscarf clutched in one twisted hand revealing black hair streaked liberally with grey and falling in untidy strands about her face and neck. She was calling something, but either they were already too far to hear clearly or else her voice was very weak – it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Vien sat with her back straight, without turning her head. She must have heard that voice, must have recognised it, but she gave no reaction to it at all, and Amais could see nothing on her mother’s face except a glint in her eye that might have been either determination or a concealed tear. But Amais, for her part, could not find it in herself to leave without a word, without a thought – even though she had been the despised and ignored one ever since her father had died and her sister had been born to take his place in Elena’s heart. Amais had never forgotten the early years and the fact that her father’s mother did love her, long ago, once upon a time. And Elena was the last link with that other world, the world with her father and his dolphins, the world where she had suddenly been put on trial and declared a stranger.
With a final glance at her mother, half guilty and half defiant, Amais lifted both hands and waved back to the grandmother she was losing, waved back hard, as though that single simple motion alone could convey all that now would never be said.
Elena had stopped stock-still as Amais’s hands came up, and for the longest moment she stood frozen, immobilised by this farewell. And then she lifted one of her own hands, very slowly, and allowed the black kerchief she carried to be stirred by the breeze. They waved to each other, in silence, grandmother and granddaughter, for as long as they could see one another, until the boat slipped around a promontory and turned towards the mainland and blotted out the small beach and the woman standing alone upon it, with the memory of Amais’s childhood dissolving in the white sea foam as waves lapped and whispered at her feet.
Everything was bigger on the mainland. It was the first time Amais, nine years old, had seen a human dwelling bigger than anything to be found in the village in which she had grown up, and where she had known every face, from the newest babies with eyes barely opened to the world to the wizened ancient widows who sat in the sun outside their houses and blinked at the cerulean Elaas sky all day, counting clouds like sheep. Amais watched round-eyed as the bigger pieces of their baggage were hauled onto the shoulders of burly men naked to the waist, burned bronze by the sun under which they toiled, and carried onto the larger ship on which they would continue their journey. She watched other passengers stream on board, people wearing strange clothes, the men in buttoned-down jackets and patent leather shoes and the women wearing white gloves and large lace-and-ribbon-trimmed hats that cast their features into alluring half-shadow. She thought they were all beautiful.
But their own accommodation was not shared with the beautiful people – Vien and her daughters had a tiny cramped inside cabin with no view and no air, just four bunks stuffed into the smallest space into which they could possibly fit and a platform that served as both table and nightstand screwed firmly to the wall in between them. The only other fixtures were a cubbyhole that was supposed to serve as a closet, into which one of their smaller trunks that still didn’t quite fit inside had been crammed, and a small porcelain basin in one corner. They were to share a bathroom and toilet with five similar cabins that surrounded them.
Amais surveyed all this as she paused in the doorway, and her expression must have betrayed something of her appalled dismay, because Vien, pushing in behind her with the toddler she carried, now waking and fretful in her arms, clicked her tongue at her eldest daughter and schooled her face into a stern expression.
‘We probably could have done better, yes,’ she said, answering an unspoken question. ‘But it’s a lot more expensive, and our means are limited right now. We must save our gold for when we get home – we will need it there. Besides, it’s ours – we don’t even have to share that fourth bunk with some stranger. There’s more room than you think.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Amais murmured obediently, but her heart quailed at the prospect of spending weeks, possibly months – she had no idea how long the journey was going to take – in this claustrophobic space.
‘You can take the top bunk,’ Vien said, inspecting the accommodations. ‘Aylun cannot sleep up there, and I must be where I can attend to her at night if I need to, so the two of us will sleep in the lower bunks. Now, help me sort this stuff out so that we have room to move. Some of it can go in the other top bunk, the one you aren’t using; it will give us a bit of space.’
‘May I go and see the ship, Mother?’ Amais asked, anxious to escape the confines of the cabin, grasping at whatever excuse she could muster.
‘Later,’ Vien said implacably.
So Amais spent the best part of an hour soothing her fractious sister and playing finger-games with her, sorting out the stuff in the trunk and hauling out things her mother considered necessities so that they could be better accessed atop the free upper bunk, and then squashing the trunk in as best it would go between the basin stand and the foot of one of the lower bunks, allowing free space to stand up and turn around in the midst of the cabin. She had not even noticed that the ship had actually started to move until her mother, satisfied with the arrangements in the cabin as best they could be made, took Aylun in her arms again and told Amais to lead the way up to the deck.
They were already a couple of ship-lengths away from the shore. A crowd of people stood shouting and waving, and the railings on that side of the ship were thronged by passengers who were waving back. Vien, with nobody to bid farewell to, simply turned her back on them and took her children to the opposite side of the ship, where there were fewer people and the view of the sunlit sea was unimpeded.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Over there, somewhere, is Syai. We’re on our way. We’re going home.’
But it was her father’s dolphins that Amais searched for in the waters that quickly turned from sapphire to deep cobalt blue, her father’s dolphins and her father’s spirit, wanting to say her farewells to them, wanting to assure them that she could not bid them goodbye because a part of her would never leave them. She thought she saw a silver fin break the surface of the water, once, a long way away – but she could not be sure, and, although she stayed at the railings for a long time after her mother grew bored and a little seasick and retired below with Aylun, she did not see the fin again.
And the sun rode across the cloudless sky, and dipped towards the horizon, and then beneath it; and the quiet stars came out; and the first day was over. Already Amais was alone and adrift upon the open sea; the land of her birth was lost behind her, the land of her ancestors only a secret promise far away in the night.
The shipboard days followed one another, monotonous and long, marked by persistent bouts of seasickness on the part of Vien and Aylun. Amais was apparently her father’s daughter in more than one sense – she was remarkably unaffected, having got her sea legs within hours of boarding the big ship, and when she wasn’t tending to her prostrate mother and sister she spent her time exploring. Frequently she was gently but firmly steered away from areas of special sensitivity or specific salons on the top deck which were exclusively reserved for the passengers travelling in spacious outside cabins with portholes, out of which one could see the sea and the sky. Amais didn’t care, really – she hadn’t wanted to join the ship’s aristocracy, only to see the places they had claimed. Denied those, she found other spots that she made her own. One of her particular favourites – and one from which she would probably have been evicted had she been observed – was the very point of the ship’s prow, where huge ropes and the anchor chain were coiled and stowed. The place, once rearranged just a little for her convenience, made a comfortable nest for Amais. On several occasions, when her family had been particularly violently ill and the cabin smelled overwhelmingly of sick, she had even escaped and slept out here in the open air, lulled by the hiss and lap of the ship’s prow cleaving the waters beneath her. She’d take her journals out there with her, Tai’s journals, and pore over them, immersing herself in Tai’s world, deliberately turning her back on the sea and the dolphins and the call of her father’s blood. Those were in the past, for now. There were things she needed to know, for her future.
She was troubled by dreams out there on that prow, she who had always slept soundly and deeply, and – as far as she had ever been aware – dreamlessly. If she had ever dreamed before, she had never remembered the dreams when she woke. But now she did, and they came thick and fast, and some were of the lost past and some were simply dreams, unknown, unexplainable, impossible to interpret or understand without context, which, as yet, she completely lacked. Sometimes there was nothing but voices – her grandmother’s, for instance, reading some familiar passage from a poem or a genealogical line, or uttering those last words of hers that were so much a binding laid on Amais by a dying woman; or an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s, calling, I’m lost, I’m lost, come and find me, come and set me free…There were weird dreams of almost frightening focus, sometimes a single phrase or even a single word written on scarlet pennants in gold calligraphy, things she could not quite read but knew were written in jin-ashu, the women’s tongue her grandmother had taught her, and that they were very important, if only she could get close enough to see them clearly and understand them. And sometimes there were dreams that were almost complete stories in and of themselves – she dreamed of strange skies, as though something far away, something vast and distant, was on fire. Once she woke from a vivid dream where she stood under such skies with a child, a little girl, both of them dressed in a manner described by Tai in her journals, their hair in courtly style, standing on a shattered piece of stairwell with only a shattered city around her – and she thought she knew what was burning then, but that didn’t seem quite right either.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
