A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

them while he praised their inimitable loveliness. “Look at that!” he would say, elated. “Is it not finer than art? Is it not like a woman’s ear? Its curves are like notes of music. . . .” On subjects such as the beauties of nature, books, and the colors of light, he spoke with an unrestrained passion which often drove me to groan with exhaustion. He spoke to my mother as well: he studied our language doggedly, until he could praise the trees and the play of light and shade in the courtyard. When my mother explained how the shadows echoed the pelt of my father’s god, he rubbed his hands with delight and jotted some notes in his private book. “Let me tell you,” he said to me once, resting a hand on my shoulder after drinking a glass of our liquor, to which his tastes had become accustomed: “Let me tell you about old men. Our appetites grow like vines—like the hectic plants of the desert, which bear only flowers and have no leaves. You have never seen a desert. Have you not read Firdred of Bain? ‘The earth has a thousand thirsty tongues.’ That is what old age is like.”
    He never seemed old to me, though he certainly had a great appetite—for sights, for the sounds of birds, for the smell of the sea, for the words of our language. And sometimes, too, he would take to his bed, his body wracked with fevers, with the stricken expression of one who has not long to live and whose life is unfinished. I nursed him through his fevers, reading aloud from the Vanathul because he believed words had the power to cure all ills. I loved him as if we were partners in exile, for only with him could I speak of books, enjoying that conversation which Vandos calls “the food of the gods.” And yet there was something unyielding in him, something unconquerable, an unknown center which he guarded with care, which was never revealed to me, so that, while I knew him best, he seemed to hold me at a distance. Even in his delirium he let fall no shining thread.
    In the islands the old word tchavi , by which I always called my master, originally referred to a teacher of ancient and cryptic lore. The tchanavi were few, and their houses were built on mountains so that those who sought them could only reach them after prolonged struggle. They were strange, solitary, at home in forests, speakers of double-voiced words, men without jut , for they cast their janut to the sea, a symbolic death. Their disciples passed down laments in the form of sighing island chants, bemoaning the dark impenetrability of the tchanavi ’s wisdom: a Kideti proverb says, “Ask a tchavi to fill your basket, and he will take it away.” They were difficult spirits, and made men weep. Yet the greater part of their pupils’ laments do not mourn the enigma of wisdom but rather the failure of the disciples to find their masters at all: for the tchanavi were known to melt away into the forests, into the mists, so that those who had made hard journeys discovered only the mountain and silence. These songs, the “Chants of Abandonment,” are sung at festivals and express the desperate love and grief of the followers of the tchanavi . “ Blood of my heart, on the mountain there is no peace in the calling of doves/ My master has pressed a blossom into the mud with the sole of his foot .”

    My people called Lunre “the yellow man” or “the stranger.” Their stares in the village hurt me, the old men’s grins, the shouts of the children who followed us through the streets. Sometimes they even called him hotun —a soulless man, an outcast, a man without jut . I coaxed him away from them, away from the broad clean roads. He knew it, regarding me amused and compliant as I led him through knotted patches of jungle and onto the dangerous cliffs, through heavy forests where cold air rose from the earth, where I breathed raggedly, striking dead vines away from us with a stick. Leaves split under my weapon, spraying milk. When we broke through at last and