Wonders of the Invisible World (40 page)

Arram drew breath soundlessly, and decided to tell her about the rock in the river, which surely had to be the simplest thing in the world. “In the heart of the river beside my home there is a great rock. It is very old, old as the First Morning. It is very peaceful, so peaceful sometimes you can hear it dreaming.”

“You can?”

“Yes. It is hard and massive, so hard the river itself scarcely wears away at it. Only one thing ever came close to cracking that rock, and that thing was light as a breath. A butterfly. You ask me,” Arram said, though the Old Woman hadn’t, “how such a light thing could—”

“Get on with it.”

“It’s a simple tale.”

“It doesn’t sound simple.”

“It’s just about an old rock in a river. Anyway, one day the rock decided it was tired of being a rock.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? I don’t know. Someone told me the story. Or else I heard the rock remembering. It was very young then, and many things were still new. Caterpillars were very new. One big purple caterpillar fell out of a tree onto a leaf floating on the river. The leaf carried it downriver, where it bumped against the rock and the caterpillar crawled off with relief, thinking it had found land. But it toiled up a barren mountain instead. The hairs on the caterpillar’s body tickled the rock, waking it, and it wondered what strange little being was trudging up its side. After a time, the little being stopped trudging and started spinning, for its time for change was upon it. The rock went back to sleep. For a long time there was silence. A star shone, a leaf fell, a fish caught a fly. Then one morning, the shell that the caterpillar had spun around itself broke open. The rock felt feet lighter than bubbles walking about on the warm stone. Their dreaming merged, for the butterfly was half-asleep, and the rock half-awake. And the rock realized that the purple hairy being which had crawled up its side was now a fragile, gorgeous creature about to take to the air. And the rock was so moved, so amazed, that it strained with all its strength to break out of its own ponderous shell to freedom in the light. It strained so hard that it nearly cracked itself in two. But the butterfly, who felt its longing, stopped it. ‘Rock,’ it said gently, ‘You can live, if you wish, until the Final Evening. You saved my life and sheltered me, so I will give you a gift. Since you can’t fly, I will return here on my Final Evening and bring you dreams of all the things I have seen along the river, in the forest and desert, as I flew. And so will my children. You will not need to fly, and you will not need to die.’ And so, even to this day, butterflies rest in the warm light on that rock and whisper to it their dreams.”

Arram stopped. They were both silent, he and the Old Woman. She puffed her pipe and blew smoke out of the cave, and far away a forest fire started. “I don’t know this world,” she said slowly. “This is the world
She
knows. The Sun. The world I know is harsh, noisy, violent. Tell me a story with me in it instead of her. And make me beautiful.”

Arram accepted another puff from her pipe. His ears hurt from the thunder, his voice ached from his storytelling. He couldn’t remember whether it was day or night; he couldn’t guess whether he would live or die. He supposed he would die, since there was no way in the world to make the Old Woman beautiful. So he decided, instead, in his last moments, to tell her about the one he loved most in the world.

“The woman I love is not very beautiful either,” he said, seeing her face in his mind. “She is very thin, and her nose is long and crooked. When she was younger, the other children called her ‘Crane’ because she grew so tall and thin she stooped.” He paused to swallow, no longer caring if the Old Woman were listening, for he wanted to spend those last moments with his love. “She thought no one in the world would ever love her. But I did. She was light, like a bird, and shy like a wild thing, and full of funny movements. When I told her I loved her, though, she didn’t believe me. She thought I was making fun of her and she hit me. The second time I told her, she threw a pot at me. So I had a sore ear and a sore shin. I went down to the river and sat wondering what I was doing wrong.” He heard an odd, creaky sound, but he was too engrossed in his memories to wonder at it. “I decided to bring her all the beautiful things I could find and pile them at her door. I brought her flowers. I brought her bright snakeskins. I brought her feathers, colored leaves, sparkling stones. I fell on my head out of trees collecting speckled eggs for her; I roasted myself in the desert to find purple lizards for her. And you know what she did with all those treasures? She threw them, she walked on them, she gave them away—every single thing. Finally, one day, I brought her the fattest fish I had ever caught, all roasted and ready for her to eat—and she burst into tears. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to cry. I wanted to pull her hair. I wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. I put my hands on her shoulders, and a madness came over me, and I kissed her so long we both ran out of breath and fell on the floor. And when I looked at her, she was smiling.” He paused. “Like you are now.” He laughed himself at the memory, and at the shining in the Old Woman’s face. “Look at you. You look just like her. Look—” His breath caught. He stared out at the quiet sky, at the blazing colors that arched from one end of the world to the other. The Old Woman’s smile. He stood up, watching it, marveling, his face a lover’s face, until the smile melted like pipe smoke, and the Sun burned away the clouds.

He went back home. His tall, shy, crooked-nosed love saw him as she filled the water-skins, and came to meet him, smiling. He took the skins from her; she tucked her hand in his arm.

“Where have you been?”

“For a walk.”

“What did you see?”

“A rock. A shadow. A rainbow.”

T
he
D
oorkeeper of
K
haat

There were Khaati everywhere in Theore, those days, refugees from the war on the other side of the planet. There were Meri in the city also, but Meri had been moving into Tatia for a hundred and fifty years. There were Datu, but the land the Tatians had civilized had been theirs once, anyway. Now they ran restaurants in one side of the city, and in the other, they stole transport parts or painted huge bright murals on tenement walls and called themselves artists. There had always been Tatians in Theore but not as many now, Kel noticed, as there used to be. As the Khaati and the Meri moved into the city, Tatians moved out to the country, to the northern cities, to the sea-colonies if they could afford it. For a while, before he decided to become a poet, Kel had lived in one of the tiny, white-domed spaces in a sea-colony. His father had bought the space for him as a reward for finishing his engineering studies. Kel spent afternoons swathed in light, swaying gently to the movements of tide, listening to words well up from some shadowy, unnamed river running through his brain, fit themselves together as neatly as molecules. One day he left the sea-colony full of golden faces like his own and went to live on the oldest street in the oldest city in Tatia.

A hundred years ago, the street had been famous for its passionate, impoverished poets. Now it was populated mostly by Khaati. Kel, intoxicated by the past, saw pale, aqua-eyed faces so constantly that he forgot his own was different. The odd singsong language he heard on the street formed an undistracting background for thoughts. He drank their alcoholic teas, bought steaming, spicy fish from their shops, nibbled it as he walked down the street in the evenings. From behind paper curtains, he heard their odd, tuneless, meandering music that told of places no boat could sail to, of thresholds no shod foot could cross.

There were rules on that street. He couldn’t remember learning them, he just knew them: rules his poet’s eye observed while he himself was doing nothing much. Do not look their maidens in the eye, the rules said. Do not compliment the babies or lay a hand on the young children’s heads. Never step on the shadows of the elderly. Do not whistle in their shops. Never point at anyone, you could lose a finger. Be careful what small, amusing, tourist trinket, pin, or jacket you buy—you might find yourself wearing the emblem of the latest street gang, and unlike Tatians, they did not discriminate. And don’t call them gangs. Clans, they were. Clans.

He lived from hand to mouth there, from moment to moment, as a poet should live. Or at least as he understood them to have lived on that street in Theore a hundred years before. He tracked down their forgotten poems, read voraciously, and tried to imitate them in his writings. They had written of everything, they valued every word, for each word, each experience, was equally sacred, equally profane. His Tatian lover, who had come with him from the sea-colonies, bore with his obsession for a couple of months. Then she realized that he was absurdly content in that neighborhood among the Khaati, that he had no inclination to take a job from his father, live in the great light-filled high-rises mid-city that strove like gargantuan plants toward the sun. She left him, disappeared into the Tatian heart of the city. The shock of her leaving and for such reasons fueled much articulate and bitter poetry. Sometimes, sobering up and rereading his work, Kel felt almost grateful to her for the experience of pain.

Around the time that brooding over his lost love was becoming habitual rather than unavoidable, Kel met Aika. He sat down beside her in a Khaati bar one afternoon. The scent of her mildly intoxicating tea wafted toward Kel as he chewed over his loss. Sometime during the next couple of hours, he found talking to Aika more interesting than getting drunk. She neither laughed nor sighed when he said he was a poet. She raised a thin white eyebrow and told him she was going to Khaat.

“Khaat,” Kel said blankly. He had been wondering why her eyes—the same light, clear blue as every other Khaati he had ever seen—were so astonishingly beautiful. Then he blinked. “Khaat?”

“Yes.”

“Khaat is not a place. Khaat is a war.”

“I was born in Khaat.” She sipped tea delicately; her fingers were long, tapering, ringed. “My parents escaped just after I was born. So I have lived in Tatia all my life. I know two languages, I have a Tatian education. But Khaat is still my country, even at war with itself. My heritage.”

“Your heritage—the best of it—is on this street,” he argued. “There can’t be much left in Khaat. It’s been tearing itself apart for so long nobody remembers who’s fighting who or why.”

She smiled after a moment, a thin-lipped, amused smile. “Just Blues fighting Blues in one of their interminable clan wars.”

“No. Clan wars I understand. But Khaat seems intent on destroying itself. What do you think you’ll find there but a dying country with nothing left of it but a name?”

Her level gaze did not falter at his glib bluntness, but her eyes seemed to grow enormous, luminous. She only said dryly, “You want to be a poet. Read Coru.”

He sat up until dawn reading Aika’s copy of Coru’s poems, while she slept beside him. The poet-shaman had lived two thousand years before in a Khaat that Kel had not realized was so old. Coru had spent his life wandering down farm roads, through jungles, into villages, bringing both practical and mystical remedies for everything from hangnails to impotence. He wrote of everything: fish soup, morning dew, sex, starving children, clan battles, and white tigers. Words kept the world orderly, he believed, kept the past from vanishing.

Soul, like butterfly, has no language.

We who walk from moment to moment,

Must say where we have been

Moment to moment,

Or we disappear.

So, like rice pickers,

We harvest words out of our mouths,

To feed ourselves.

Aika made an irritated movement in her sleep at Kel’s voice. He stopped reading, blinked gritty eyes at the dawn. Strange images prowled in his head like ghosts of somebody else’s relatives: the white tiger that appeared sometimes ahead of the poet to lead him to a place where he was needed; monkeys and teal-eyed birds screaming at one another in different languages; noon sun on a chalk-white road; the stout, broad-faced, sweaty farmer’s widow whose lovemaking Coru compared to every natural disaster he could think of; the Doorkeeper, the mysterious, many-faced woman who carried the keys to the Doorway of Death on her belt.