The River and the Book (7 page)

On the other hand, Grandmother also said that truthfulness has many faces, and that some of those faces might look like lies. “You can never be quite certain,” she said. “And that is a good thing, because only a god can be certain about the truth, and even then only sometimes. It is much harder to be a human being than it is to be a god.”

Aside from questions about the gods, the other problem is that I don’t think Mely will like it much if I do tell the truth, because it doesn’t always show her in a good light. Although she’d never admit it, I think that she wouldn’t mind if I wrote down a pack of lies about her, as long as they were flattering. Fond as I am of her (and I am very fond of Mely – that is the truth too), she is sometimes very annoying.

As Mely said, we met in Kilok, two days after I left my village, and by then I no longer felt at all peaceful. I was lost and confused and sad.

I know now that Kilok is a small town, but it is much bigger than my village, which is little more than a single road lined with houses and fields and orchards. I had been there many times with my father, who often brought cheese and fish to sell at the market, but never on my own. To me, Kilok seemed bewildering and enormous. I came ashore upstream, just where the houses began, and dragged my boat up onto the bank and covered it with brush to hide it from unfriendly eyes. Then I walked through the straggly outskirts into the market square, my shadow stretching long behind me in the rich light of evening.

I had unthinkingly expected the market to be bustling, as it had been every time I had seen it, but of course by then everyone had finished their business for the day and gone home. A couple of stray dogs nosed about for scraps, and an old man squatted by the well clutching his walking stick and staring blindly into space, but otherwise it was deserted.

The mood of peaceful certainty that had accompanied me down the River all day evaporated like spit on a hot griddle. It dawned on me for the first time that I had no idea what I was doing. What had I been thinking? What was I going to do now?

I stood in the middle of the empty marketplace as the dusk deepened. A noisy bunch of starlings was squabbling in a locust tree and, further off, I could hear the faint shouts of children playing and the plaintive bleats of goats being brought in for the evening’s milking. A couple of people walked through the square and stared at me incuriously as they passed. I saw myself suddenly as others did: a scruffy, skinny lad. Even the dogs took absolutely no notice of me.

I almost turned around and went home. It would be a couple of days’ hard row upriver, and inside I flinched at the thought. Then I remembered the shame in Yani and Sopli’s eyes when they had returned empty-handed from Kilok. I felt that shame already burning in my stomach, and I knew now it was shame at my own powerlessness. I couldn’t turn back yet. My pride wouldn’t let me.

At the same time, I didn’t have the first clue what to do next. The thought of knocking on one of those doorways, of facing the sceptical eyes of a stranger, made my heart shrivel. As I stood there, caught between one action and another, the sun set and a fat orange moon rose, throwing strange shadows everywhere. In its unwavering light the houses looked sinister and dangerous, and I shivered as I made my way back to my boat. At first I missed it, I had hidden it too well, and for a few horrible moments I thought someone had stolen it. But then, with a rush of relief, I put my hands on its friendly wood, and I scrambled into its bows as if I were coming home. Which was true, really; that boat was now all I had of home.

I pulled out my blankets and made myself a bed of springy branches nestled inside the sheltering hull of my boat. The night was mild and clear, and I lay on my back looking up with burning, sleepless eyes through the shrubby branches at the stars burning in the luminous dark blue sky. I had been sitting idly in the boat all day, so I wasn’t tired, and now my thoughts chased each other around and around in my head like a lot of stupid, frightened puppies.

Mainly my thoughts were telling me I had just made the most foolish decision of my life.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay back and watched the white ship of the moon on her long voyage above me. As the hours passed I felt my soul sinking, as if I were floating down through darkness, as if I were falling away from the moon and the world silvered by her light into an endless, black ocean. The waters beneath me were still and deep, and as each hour passed I sank more deeply into the darkness, further from the light, into a world that was ever more silent and more heavy.

I think I hadn’t really believed until that night in Kilok that the Book was gone. I had somehow kept the knowledge from myself. Now I couldn’t escape it.

There aren’t proper words for pain. When you hurt your body, or when you suffer toothache or a bad headache, the pain fills the whole world, and the only way to express it is to scream or groan; and then, when it’s over, you don’t remember it. The pain vanishes and your body forgets. I suppose it’s because if your body remembered what pain was like, it would be frightened all the time. It’s the same with grief or loneliness. Nobody can really know what pain is like for another person. Words can point towards the feeling, but they can’t describe it. You just have to hope that the person to whom you’re trying to describe the experience has felt similar pain themselves, because then they might nod and say, yes. Yes, it was like that.

But even though I would like to be understood, I hope no one who reads these words has felt like I did that night in Kilok. I had felt rage and intolerable sorrow when my mother died, but at least I was in my home, with my people. In Kilok, nothing made sense any more. I had not only lost my home; I had lost its meaning. I had lost the rooftree that held my world together, the height and the depth of it, the hearth that warmed it. When I lost the Book, I lost my people and my place and the meaning of my name. I lost the picture that lived in its pages somewhere of my mother showing me its mysteries for the first time, and I lost the voice that led me through my doubts and fears and showed me the path forward. I lost my past and my future. I lost everything that told me who I was. And I lost my place in the village. If I was not the Keeper, then who was I?

That night was the first time I tasted despair. But in the chill hours before dawn, I found that the ocean was not bottomless: there was a floor, a hard ground at last, where I stopped sinking. My soul looked around and found itself in a place of irredeemable bleakness: all was colourless, flat, devoid of hope. At that moment, I was sure that I would never again feel joy. At the same time, as I stared at that grey, shadowless world, I felt as if I were made of rock, as if nothing in me could be hurt again. A great stillness began to fill me. It wasn’t peacefulness exactly; it was simply that my soul had sunk as deep as it could go. The worst had happened, and I was still here. If I had not found that ground, I know I would have gone mad. Even in our village, I had seen people in great distress lose their minds. For some reason, I knew then that I would not go mad. I’m not sure what the difference is between those who collapse into madness and those who do not, and I don’t know whether it’s a curse or a blessing to remain sane. Perhaps there are darker miseries that would drive my soul through the stony ground it found that night. But I suspect that even if I stumbled into worse despairs, I would still be forced to suffer them in sanity.

Gradually, as the first glimmerings of dawn began to lighten the world, I felt my body come back to life. I realized that I was cold to the marrow of my bones. I hunched the dew-damp blankets around my shoulders and shivered, waiting for the sun to rise. I felt utterly empty, as if everything that was me had been poured out and there was nothing left inside.

I slapped my legs and arms, trying to get the blood moving in them, and then, realizing I was hungry, took some flatbread and bean paste out of my bag. I was nibbling my breakfast in the bows of the boat when I heard footsteps coming my way, walking carelessly so that twigs snapped loudly and leaves crunched. I didn’t feel frightened so much as shy, and I hid in the boat, hoping that whoever it was wouldn’t notice me in the brush; they had probably come down for their morning’s wash, and no doubt would welcome intrusion as little as I did. I peered through the branches and saw it was a stout boy about my age who, as I expected, was making his way to the edge of the river.

To my annoyance he seemed to be in no hurry to leave, and lingered by the riverbank. I bit my lip and crouched in my boat, burning with impatience; I had my own needs to attend to, after all, and it would be polite for this person to go elsewhere. I listened hard: I could hear the constant voice of the water and a couple of ducks squabbling under the shadow of the bank. There was a faint shimmer where the river cast up a pearly light that threw no illumination onto the banks. After a while, I began to feel angry; it didn’t occur to me that I was in fact the intruder, not this inconvenient but innocent stranger. I suppose I felt too tired and sad to be fair.

The light deepened and the world slowly filled up with colour, and still the figure sat unmoving on the bank. The sun edged over the horizon, sending its first level rays to dance in ripples on the river’s blinding surface. I blinked, dazzled, and decided that I would clamber out of my boat and walk around noisily to announce my presence; but I stopped, spellbound, when the boy began to sing.

He had the most beautiful voice I had ever heard from a human being. It was how I imagined the gods sang, surrounded by their avatars, on the clouds that embrace Yntara, the mountain of the gods. He sang of the lovesick minstrel, the song my mother had loved and that my sister played on the
tar
, raising her sweet, husky voice. I suddenly missed them both with a savageness that I could hardly bear. In the boy’s mouth the simple old melody was purer and more anguished than I had ever heard it: his voice throbbed with a liquid longing, and the song I knew so well seemed now iridescent with hues of feeling that shone through those words in ways I did not expect. I thought I had never properly heard it before; it seemed to enter my soul, and my bruised heart split open with exquisite pain.

As his voice ebbed to silence on the fresh morning air, I came out of my trance and found that my cheeks were wet with tears. All my resentment at his presence had vanished. I almost walked down the bank to thank him, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. He had believed he was alone, that he was pouring out this beauty in solitude, and I thought that I might startle and embarrass him.

He stayed for a few more minutes, then sighed heavily and stood up and wandered off. I followed him with my eyes until he disappeared through the scrub. The sun was now wholly risen, lifted from the horizon; I was sure he had been welcoming the new day. The boy’s singing seemed a sign, a gift to show me that despair was not the sum of the world’s lessons. No more panic, I told myself sternly, no more despair. I was not a child any more.

I finished my breakfast and decided that I would go into the marketplace and ask around for news of Jane Watson. If there was none, I would get back in the boat and head downstream to the next town, and I would ask there, and so on from village to village, until I heard news. There was no other way back to her country except down the River, because to the north were only the endless plains of the Tarnish empire and to the south was only desert. She would have to come back to the River; and if she did, I would hear of her.

“But you still haven’t met
me
,” said Mely pettishly this morning.

“Not yet,” I said. “But you know it isn’t far away.”

The truth is that the thought of writing about our meeting makes me feel nervous. If I get the smallest detail incorrect, Mely will let me know in no uncertain terms. If I offend her, she will take her revenge, perhaps by sharpening her claws on my special chair, which she has promised to leave untouched, but which, all the same, I sometimes see her eyeing speculatively as she flexes her paws.

We have a pleasant routine now. If I am at home in the evening, I write in my book; and then, after breakfast in our tiny kitchen, I read what I wrote to Mely. She curls up in her chair, nose to tail, and listens hard. She is, in fact, a very good listener. It is the most peaceful part of my day. When there isn’t anything to read, we still sit in the kitchen and talk, or play music on the old gramophone.

It is summer and the window is always open, so you can see the parrots and finches flashing in and out of the fig tree. I bought some white lilies at the market yesterday and put them in a jar on the sill, and their rich scent fills the kitchen, competing with the sweet smell of ripening figs that drifts in through the window.

I didn’t write anything last night, because I went out to the Stray Dog Café in the Magicians’ Quarter. I go there about once a week. Mely sometimes comes with me, riding on my shoulder like an emperor riding on an elephant, but she gets bored if she is not the centre of attention, and so more often I go on my own.

I am told – usually by people who have never been there – that it is best to avoid the Magicians’ Quarter. Like the Old Quarter, it has a bad reputation. It’s true that it feels sinister. It’s very easy to get lost if you don’t pay attention, and sometimes you wonder if the streets are playing tricks on you. I first went there, in fact, to consult a magician myself, but to my disappointment he was a charlatan. Worse, he saw that I knew he was a fraud – he had enough of the powers to see that I have something of the art – and without quite threatening me openly, he made me afraid. I never went back there until my friend Yuri dragged me to the Stray Dog one bleak night last winter, when the whole world was sitting on my shoulders and weighing me down and I was as sad as sad. He said it would cheer me up, and it did.