The River and the Book (3 page)

When everything was finished, when the last lament had been sung and the keeners had taken their bells and cymbals and gone home, I fell into bed like a stone. I slept badly. All night I dreamed I was in the River, the waters hammering against my ears until I couldn’t tell whether the noise was the water or the pulse of my own blood. I held my breath and held my breath, my chest burning with the pressure of the black water, and then surfaced out of the dream like a drowning swimmer, gasping, and then, because I was too exhausted to resist it, slid back into the endless, suffocating dark.

I woke up properly when it was still dark. I could hear my sisters breathing beside me, and in the next room my grandmother snorted in her sleep and turned over. I felt as tired as if I hadn’t slept at all, but I suddenly couldn’t bear to stay in bed, I couldn’t bear to be in this house with all these people, breathing the same stale, stuffy air. I slipped out of bed, threw a sheepskin coat over my nightdress and stole out of the house. Once I was outside I walked down to the River, which ran faintly luminous between its banks. The sky was just beginning to lighten towards sunrise.

I sat down on a flat stone and waited. I don’t really know what I was waiting for, but I think I half expected to see my mother walking up from the house to call me in, as she did sometimes when I went out early. I watched as the stars faded and the landscape began to materialize out of the night and become solid again, and the rim of the world grew rose-pink and deepened to orange and then split with molten gold, and the first rays of the sun speared the wide, empty plains. And as I watched, the carpet of gems flared before me. Their cold brilliance hurt me, and their beauty filled me with anger. My mother had not come. My mother had not come, and the sun had risen, and I knew she would never come now, she would never call me again. And I knocked the jewels off the grasses, all the dew drops I could reach, so their prisms smashed into dull wetness. I tore the grasses until they cut my hands, I fell down on my face and howled in the heartless chill of the grey and empty morning.

My mother died the winter after I was presented at the temple. If she had been sickening, if there had been some warning, it might have been a little easier to bear. It seemed that one day she was there – scolding us when we squabbled, or sighing patiently and standing to greet a villager who was holding a squawking chicken by the feet as payment for his question, or leaning forward in the morning to light the fire in the stove, her plaited hair swinging over her sleep-blurred face – and then the next she had just vanished. She died of a fierce fever. She went out one bad night to help a young woman suffering in childbed, and a storm caught her as she walked home and chilled her to the bone.

I don’t remember anything about the next days. I have not one single image of the sickbed, of my brothers and sisters crying, of Grandmother burning herbs in a dish and chanting, not one memory of my mother gasping for breath, of her skin burning, of her raving when her fever took hold. My grandmother told me what happened, because I asked her to, and she also told me that I was there beside the bed all the time, and that I did not sleep for those two days. But I can’t remember anything at all.

The woman my mother had gone to help lived through her trouble, and so did her baby. For many months I couldn’t meet the woman’s eyes when I saw her and I hated her son, because together they had killed my mother. I have long forgiven them, and prayed for them to forgive me for hating them so much. “The gods give and take in their own time,” said my grandmother. “There is no profit in assigning fault.” She was correct, of course, but at the time it was hard not to blame them. I missed my mother so much. And after she died, the house felt different: a light went out, a soft illumination I had never noticed until it was gone.

My father’s face closed like a fist. He had always been a quiet man, but now he rarely spoke at all, and sometimes the baffled desolation and anger in his face frightened us. He had loved my mother from the first moment he saw her, when he was a young boatman from the next village. He had come downriver to do some trading and my mother was on the riverbank washing clothes. He told us that it was a dull day, with heavy slate-coloured clouds brooding overhead, but my mother shone with a light that seemed to come from her skin, and as the water splashed up around her strong arms it seemed to be made of liquid silver. He stared, transfixed, as the current pulled his boat around the river bend, and when she was out of sight he wondered whether he had dreamed her, or if she was a goddess who had appeared in human form, as they were said to do. But then he saw her in the village and asked her name, and that very afternoon he brought a courting gift to our house and asked permission to woo her, and the following spring they were married.

When we were small, we often begged to hear that story. And sometimes, smiling in his quiet way, my father would tell it, and as he did his eyes would meet my mother’s, and then they would both smile.

The omens, it was said later, were bad that year. In the springtime, a crane crashed into our chimney and broke its neck. My grandmother saw it happen and ran up to help the stricken bird, but it was already dead, its long neck twisted grotesquely under its wings. She picked up the heavy body, which was still quivering with the life that had just left it, and there were tears in her eyes. It was the second time I had seen her weep in less than a month, although before that year I had never seen her cry at all. She buried the crane without saying a word to the children who watched her, curious and frightened, and then she went into the room with the Book and shut the door, and she didn’t come out for a long time. When she did emerge, she looked much older, as if something inside her had been quenched. I was too afraid to ask her what she had read, although I was the only person in the family who had the right to ask.

The floods did not come in the summer, which meant it was twelve years since the River had last overrun its banks. There had never been such a gap before. Many people now said that the floods would never come again. Even without them, the River had always swelled in summer, rising greedily up its banks. This summer, the River shrank. Its level sank more than the length of a man’s arm below its lowest-ever point, and its waters were browner and murkier. Its voice changed: it was shallower and more urgent, like the voice of a sick man.

It was less than a month after the crane broke its neck on our chimney that we first heard of the water wars upriver. It happened this way. I was lighting the fire before first light when Foolish Dipli came to the door. He knocked and then waited for me to finish my task, squatting patiently by the step. It was very early for questions and Grandmother was still abed, so I took my time. When I came outside, he stood up and smiled apologetically.

“They need help,” he said, and pointed towards the River.

“Who?” I asked, a little impatient.

“Some strangers from upriver,” said Dipli. “A woman and a baby and a man. They need help.” He smiled again, but this time I noticed the expression in his eyes. Something was very wrong.

I swallowed hard and followed him quickly down to the riverbank. The sun was only just edging over the horizon and its gold light fell on a small boat drawn up on the bank. It was crammed with all sorts of things – pots, sacks of barley, clothes, an oil lamp, blankets – all thrown in higgledy-piggledy. The boat was so full I wondered that it hadn’t sunk in the River. A thin, exhausted-looking man was sitting on the bank, holding a sleeping baby, and in the boat lay a woman.

I could see that the woman was badly injured. Her dress was stained with dried blood all down her left side. She lay with her eyes closed, and her breath was loud and laboured. A hot panic began to beat in my stomach. I thought that I should go back to the house and get my grandmother, but Dipli was watching me, trusting that I would know what to do.

I looked to the man for permission, and then climbed into the boat and picked up the woman’s hand. It was as cold as the river water. As I touched her, her body arched violently and she made a harsh noise in her throat. Fresh blood broke out and dripped on the blanket where she was lying. And then I felt something pass me, as if a bird whirred past my ear, and I knew she was dead, even before the last of her breath whistled out of her throat.

I remembered then that I was an Effenda. I leant forward and closed her eyes, and I blessed the soul that had just flown away. I saw, with some other part of me, that my hands were trembling. Then I realized the man was standing at my shoulder. He said nothing at all. He touched the woman’s brow with the tips of his fingers, and turned away, holding the baby tightly to his breast.

I scrambled out of the boat. “You should come to the house,” I said.

He turned towards me and I met his eyes. They were like two holes in his face; they seemed to be looking at nothing. My mouth went dry, and I could say nothing more. I had never seen such pain in a man’s expression, not even in my father after my mother died.

Dipli gently grasped the man’s arm and led him back to our house. And there my grandmother took the baby from his unresisting arms and fed it some warm sheep’s milk. She brought him some soup and stood over him until he had eaten the whole bowl. Then she filled a basin with rainwater and gave him dry, clean clothes, and she led him to the top room, where we housed our guests. When she had taken care of the living, she went down to the riverbank to see to the dead.

On the way, Grandmother went to see Sulihar, who had given birth a week earlier, and asked if she would wet-nurse the baby. The boy was very small, no older than a month, and he was starving, which was why he lay so limp and quiet. And Sulihar, who had no shortage of milk in her enormous breasts and loved all infant creatures, took the baby and cared for him.

The stranger slept all that day and all night. Late the next morning, he rose from his bed and came downstairs. He was wearing the clean clothes Grandmother had given him, and he had washed himself. The day before you couldn’t really tell what age he was; he looked shrunken and tired, and he was covered in grime. Now you could see that he was a young man, maybe not many years older than I was.

He told us that his name was Kular Minuar, and that he came from a village a long way upriver. The woman who had died was his wife, Ilino Av’hardar, and the baby boy was called Inhiral Minuar. They had been travelling on the River for days without coming to shore. Even though his wife was so badly hurt, he hadn’t dared to stop.

My grandmother nodded gravely, and then told him that he could tell us anything he wanted to later, but that now he should eat. He smiled tiredly, as if her words reminded him of someone he knew, and he sat down at the table and obediently ate the beans she served him. She then asked him if he would like to see his baby and his wife. He nodded, and she took him first to Sulihar and then to the temple where she had laid out the body, ready for the cremation. She came back alone, her mouth set firmly, and wouldn’t tell us anything except that Kular would come back when he wanted to. There was a fierce glint in her eyes that forbade further questions, and all of us worked with our heads down that afternoon, because she picked fault with the smallest things.

By evening, the house smelt delicious: we had spent the afternoon cooking a stew of mutton and turnips, and there was new bread to dip in the dark salt and oil on the table, and fresh greens. My father, who had been away downriver for a few days, returned just before twilight, and we welcomed him home and told him what had happened. Just when we had finished our tale, Kular knocked at the door and entered. His face was as hard as stone, and again his eyes were empty. He no longer seemed like a young man. I couldn’t look at him, because it made me feel ashamed that I did not know how to help.

My father greeted him and asked him if he would like to eat with us. Then he looked closely at Kular’s face, in the way that I hadn’t dared to. “Or, if you are not well,” he said, “I can get Sim to bring some food to your room.”

It was not like my father to be so thoughtful, but my mother had not long died, and perhaps he saw his own grief in Kular’s face. Kular hesitated, staring down at the floor, and I thought for a moment that he would choose to be alone. But then he looked up and met my father’s eye, and said that he would be honoured to eat with us.

So we ate a good meal together, and then my sister Shiha played the
tar
, the five-stringed lute, with which she has some skill, and she sang the song of the lovesick minstrel, her husky voice rising sweet and pure:

It had been one of my mother’s favourite songs, and I hadn’t heard it sung since she died. I stole a look at my father, but his face was blank and inscrutable. The young man was listening with his hands shading his eyes, and when he looked up, his eyes were bright in the golden lamplight. He stood then, awkwardly twisting his hands as he struggled to speak, looking around at our upturned faces. At last he said, “Thank you. I had forgotten people could be kind.” Then he sat down and turned his face into the shadows. Grandmother sharply chided Tiak, who was pulling Shiha’s hair, but I knew it was to give Kular time to recover, because he was in tears.

The
tar
was put away, and the smaller children were sent to bed. And then Kular told us what had happened to him.

It began, he said, with cotton.

There was, Kular said, a great land called Tarn, which stretched north to the snows and south to the desert, east to the mountains and west to the ocean. It was bigger than any of us could imagine, the biggest nation in the world.