The Ordinary

by Jim Grimsley

  “What do you mean?”

  A moment of pain stilled him, and she waited till he could speak again. His eyes had gone glassy, he had become more distant in that moment. “You don’t get to leave,” he said. “You have to stay here for God knows how long. I see what that would be like, now.”

  She found she had no answer, and simply sat beside him, patting his hand. He looked her in the eye and shook his head. “You know why I asked you to give me the cup, don’t you?”

  “To torment me.”

  “To make you feel it when I go.” He closed his eyes, such a heavy, sluggish motion, as if no power on earth could have held the lids open. “To make you feel it for certain. To make you feel sad again.”

  She said, after a while, “Thank you.”

  He was smiling, relaxed against his bed pillows, impossible to tell whether he heard. Soon he drifted to sleep, and she stood by the windows for a while, looking down at the work in the gardens, the autumn planting, fresh mulch going down, pruning and cleaning. She was out of kei-state but her senses felt almost as acute as if she were in a choir doing chant. The smell of camphor from a cloth Erinthal used to ease his breathing a bit. The scent of turned earth from below, the dim hint of her own sweat. She felt heavy, rooted to the spot, and looked at Erinthal in the bed, slight and nearly hidden in the bedclothes. What a miraculous creature, she thought, which only made the loss of him all the more acute. She would give him a cup of acht and he would vanish from the world, from all of time from here on out, irrevocably. She no longer thought of death in terms of crossing the mountains. She no longer believed in Zan.

  She and Erinthal had been friends, never lovers. How then could the connection feel so strong?

  She walked in Old House, the part of Carathon she liked best, which was open to the public in the summer season, an old dwelling of Edenna Morthul’s from ancient times. Stones too old to think about. A stone house should stand as long as a mountain, or so say the Tervan. Old House had that kind of feeling. One crossed a garden to a threshold of delicately carved stone, something like lace, and then a vault opened overhead and one walked into an entry court, facing a broad stone stairway. The stone had an airy lightness, though one could see how the steps had worn on the stairway, the edges of the carved balustrade softened with time. Malin had tried to live in these rooms once and found them too inconvenient; the house had no proper plumbing in it, and no floor furnace or other innovations. Most of the furniture was of a type ages out of use, though at the same time nobody could be certain it was anything like the stuff Edenna herself had used; the house had belonged to the House of Imhonyy, a rarely used place under the King, granted to Malin by her uncle. Sometimes she thought it haunted. Today it felt merely peaceful and still.

  Edenna’s rooms occupied most of the second floor, including a library with a vault in which Malin kept her copy of the King’s book during that era. She called for the book and sat with it, touching the wood of the case. She had a feeling, a kind of seeing, which had never come to her before, that someone was calling her. Years too long to count since she had heard from her uncle, closed away in the perpetual clouds of Cunevadrim, learning how to make time run the wrong way. But she would hear from him soon.

  On the day of Last Cup, she sat at Erinthal’s pillow and held the cup to his lips. He smiled at her with watery eyes and drained the cup. “Good-bye,” he said, and died.

  “Good-bye,” she said, and felt a choking fill her, a rage. She closed his eyes. She signaled to the attendants in the room. Two Prin began the Long Chant, Irinhalii, the song for the dead. She lit a candle scented with jasmine and placed it near his head.

  As she walked out of the room to let the body-tenders start to prepare him for burning, she felt a heaviness that could not be transcended in any of the ways she knew. She shut herself in her apartments and gave way. She could not have counted the years since she last cried; the grief felt unbearable, as if it were a cave collapsing around her, as if the next second would bring only darkness.

  In the evening she drank a good deal and slept. At dawn the next day, the tenders burned his body, and she watched the fire and waited. His smoke trailed upward into nothing. Wind carried the smell away; she spared herself that much. The tenders sang “Crossing the Mountain.” She planted his ashes into the soil around a new tree in the garden, the one she could see from her own windows.

  A few days later a messenger presented himself, carrying a letter signed by her uncle and sealed with a ring she knew. The messenger was a fellow from the Onge Forest, a Cardlander, who had been hired by a lord’s people to bring the letter, or so he claimed. The letter was signed simply “Karns,” which was short for “Thief of Karns,” one of Uncle’s names, the one he used for private correspondence with Malin. “My dear, the time has come for us to talk again, though you will not find me where you expect. I am in Chalianthrothe. I don’t believe you have ever been here but you should be able to find the way. I will know when you are coming and my people will find you and guide you into the mountains.”

  The paper was of a fine texture, the writing unquestionably Uncle Jessex’s, the ink at times muted and at times bold, in the most elegant of styles. She felt frightened and calm at the same time, holding the solid page in her hand: frightened at the thought that he had finished some large stage of the work he described, calm because for the first time since Erinthal died, she had shed the feeling that the world was closing in on her.

  Before she left for Cardland and Chalianthrothe, she arranged a choir of a hundred Prin to sing a major seeing-chorus, with her own voice in the pivot. The choir gathered in the Hall of Swallows in the old palace in Montajhena, a room in which she had sung less often than she wished, as she remembered again on this occasion. The hall was oddly rounded, without corners, with baffles and careful treatments on the walls to enhance acoustics. A very old room but one that was kept up to date; its hangings and furnishings quite modern, in the plainer style, the wooden pews straight-backed, clean lines, crisply polished. As the Prin began to sing, the firsts and seconds took up the low line, the sopranos and tenors mixing their harmonies and dissonances, the linguists chanting, and Malin joining with the central ten singers, herself the eleventh, in leading the vocalists through a preparatory high song and then the seeing-chant that would allow Malin to take a look at the real word, beyond the world of substance.

  She chose Chafii Makraen, “The Hunter Makes the Mountain,” and allowed the feeling of the kei-space, the word-space, to engulf her.

  She meant to study her uncle as best she could, and without his knowing he was being inspected, if she could manage that much. She had succeeded in doing so before, or had no reason to believe otherwise. This required that she move so completely into her consciousness of the present moment that it slowed to nothing, and that she make use of the music of the choir, the part that she could hear with her ears and the part she could feel in the kei, the part that reshaped her senses. For her, these moments were blanks from which she emerged with a kind of knowledge that grew distinct in the same way that a photograph became distinct as it developed. Whatever seeing she performed in that impossibly dense moment of consciousness emerged as she herself emerged from that state. She returned to the seeing-state and emerged from it again and again. A series of images formed over moments, that she could then contemplate.

  She saw him in three places. Her uncle’s presence was distinct and could not be mistaken for anyone or anything else. Over Inniscaudra he remained, even though he was supposed to have left the Winter House a long time ago; he had gone to Cunevadrim, where she could also see him clearly; and he was also east of her in the Onge Forest, beyond Cardland into the mountains.

  Before there had been two of him but now, with the letter to back up what she saw from the vantage of the choir, she understood him to be three. This newest patch of him wanted to talk to her, had sent for her, with a letter unmistakably his own. So when the choir was done, when the voices moved on to other wo
rk, she left the pivot with what she had seen in the chant still forming itself in her head.

  She called for her new Marshall of the Ordinary, Hegra, and had him begin to organize a traveling party to Chalianthrothe, an old estate in the eastern mountains that had belonged to Jurel Durassa and passed from him to the King in later days. She had heard of the place and sent to the library for books to study what she could during the evening; Hegra needed maps as well.

  Nothing could happen quickly in her life; after some days of meetings with people in her government, after detailed preparations by the Marshall and his staff, after she had read a historical study of the various owners of Chalianthrothe along with carefully detailed sketches examining the architecture, after she had endured days of preparing people in Montajhena for her absence, she detached herself from the city with a small army of two hundred retainers, including two tens of Prin. The party traveled south and stopped at hamlets and small towns along the way, some of them very old places, like Karsk, but the majority younger than Malin herself, the product of a world that had begun to change more rapidly. They traveled along the western edge of the Onge, where the new road was being constructed, a mess of mud and Tervan machinery, a gash in the countryside. The old road traced its way into the Onge, and that was where Malin headed.

  She rode in a carriage as long as she could, switching to horseback east of the river. Most evenings she settled into an inn or a lodge; occasionally the party spread tents in the old way, though Malin herself found tent living to be uncomfortable and avoided it wherever possible. Each evening she dealt with the messengers who had reached her during the day, pouches full of business to which she attended in the evenings, added to the time she spent with the other Prin, in chant. Now and then she would expect to turn and find Erinthal, and his absence, so persistent, would shock her.

  Uncle’s people found her when she crossed the river, a trio of riders, two women in leather britches and close-fitting jackets with Uncle’s house marks on the sleeves, and a third, a young Anin man who introduced himself as Arvith Indrone. Speaking both his names in the modern fashion, when in the old days nobody except the most honored people had two names. “I’m new in your uncle’s service,” Arvith said. He looked impossibly fresh and young, coming up to near Malin’s ribs, thickset, eyes black as midnight. He was giving her the freshest looks, as if her age hardly separated them, as if he already knew her. She bristled a bit.

  “He sent a letter? May I have it?”

  He fetched it out of his saddlebags, sealed in a leather packet. She could feel Uncle’s seal as well as see it. “My dear,” she read, “you may trust my new friend Arvith to escort you into the mountains. I prefer that you come with only a few of your people, though I know you can’t do without them all. You may arrange for further messengers to reach you here with business, as you choose. I hope to give you some respite, once you’re here, but we’ve all that to talk about. I look forward to seeing you with much affection, thrice your uncle, the Thief of Karns.”

  Thrice? He had known what she would see in the chant when she sang for seeing with the choirs of Prin.

  She made no delay but fixed immediately on a plan to take a party of twenty with her on the journey into the mountains, meaning to leave behind a horseman at intervals along the way to guide her daily messengers. By the time she reached Chalianthrothe, there were only herself, Hegra, and Arvith, but even that was not privacy enough, apparently, since Uncle Jessex contrived to find her when she was almost at the border of his lands, alone.

  Hegra and Arvith had fallen behind and Malin was pausing to give them a moment to find her. She could feel their confusion even at a distance, since both of them were Prin and, at the moment, kei; she could also feel that they were moving in the wrong direction, away from her. The quality of their presences troubled her, and when by some instinct she turned in the saddle, there was Uncle Jessex nearly beside her, standing with his hands folded. She had sensed nothing of him.

  He looked much older than she had ever seen him before. Reaching a hand, he said, “I thought I’d come to meet you. I wanted to find you alone, at first. Forgive me for tampering with your new Marshall.”

  “And your friend.” She flooded with sudden warmth, his face looked so gentle and familiar. Swooping down from the horse in a rush, she threw herself at him, as if she were fifteen again. “So good to see you.”

  They stood silent and content. His bones felt thin, and he felt so tiny. He said, “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes. But I was still surprised, when I got your letter.” She moved away from him on the words, hardly knowing how to ask the question.

  He answered it anyway. “I’m through the worst of the sickness, I hope,” he said. “I’ve made a solution that allows me some freedom, though it may end up creating a worse problem.”

  “You mean that there are now three of you, rather than two.”

  His face lit when he smiled. “I thought you had been peeking. Very good. There are three of me now.”

  “What happened?”

  “In due time,” he said. “That’s better talk for indoors. Come let me show you around a bit, and we’ll get used to each other again. It’s been too long.”

  24

  He was building a tower here, nothing like the other towers, this one a frame of metal reaching up half the height of the peaks, but also dug very deep into earth and rock. “The kirilidur goes down through the rock,” he said. “The Orloc have hollowed it down to twice the height of Ellebren.”

  “You have Tervan here, too?”

  “They made the frame and are helping me to engrave it.”

  What Malin knew about the construction of a High Place was no more than she had picked up from him in conversations like these; the Prin did their work in choirs and never used the older devices of the soloists, the wizards who could work alone. “What goes on top?”

  “Nothing. The seeing stone goes down below. A new one, from the Untherverthen.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “At the bottom,” he said. “Where the seeing stone will be. There’ll be a workroom and then, beneath it, a platform for the stone.”

  “Why?”

  “To make an antitower.” He shook his head after a moment. “It won’t make any sense to you; the chant works in a different way from the other languages, and I’ll use all three in this place.”

  “Three?”

  “Yes.” He looked at her. “I went to Cunevadrim to learn Eldrune. I’ve learned it. This tower will be made of the three together, Eldrune, Wyyvisar, and the Malei.”

  They were standing alone at the work site, which was deserted in the late twilight. Rhythmic sounds rumbled from deep below, beyond the fenced area where lay the open top of the kirilidur. They had climbed so high the air was thin; the main entrance to Chalianthrothe was below, where the mountain flattened for a moment. “Have you named it?”

  “No. Not yet.” He touched one of the metal beams, slid his palm along the bright surface. “I’ve thought about calling it Kirithren, after the King.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know if he’d be pleased.”

  With a gesture he signaled that he was ready to descend to the others, who were patiently waiting at the border of the work site. She walked down with him, nearly offered him her arm. She had never seen him feeble before. He caught her thought and said, “Yes, I know how I look. I’m vain, you know, and I don’t like it.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. It’s time for me to go into the Deeps again, that’s all.”

  By then he had led her back to Hegra and Arvith, and they walked through splendid spring gardens into Chalianthrothe. After reading the books she’d borrowed in Montajhena, she expected to be let down by the place, but it was like no other mountain house she had ever seen. Rooms were hollowed into the mountain, designed to resemble a series of clearings in a forest. The Orloc had begun the house for Jurel Durassa and enlarged it for Uncle. Lightstone panel
s in the ceilings brought down sun from somewhere high on the mountain, up where it had not yet fully set, a liquid luminescence tinged with red. Uncle Jessex showed her to a room lit with an assortment of scented lamps, and sent her a householder to help her bathe. All the guests would come together for dinner, and Malin and Uncle would talk after.

  She watched Uncle with Arvith during dinner and wondered whether they were lovers. The thought had never occurred to her before, in all these years, that Uncle Jessex might want company himself, sometimes; there was something in the intimacy of their conversation, Arvith treating Uncle Jessex as if they had known each other for a very long time, that reminded Malin of the King. Yet he was an awkward, almost homely fellow, this Arvith. All through the meal she had the feeling she had met him before.

  Uncle showed the rest of the house after dinner, the lower floor including Jurel Durassa’s study and workroom, and a floor beyond that which included the underground entrance to the antitower. He let her look into the doorway, into a circular room the use of which she could not guess. “Perhaps I’ll show you through those rooms another time. There are workrooms and a library for texts I’ve collected that I want to keep safe. You’ll see them all in due time. But not tonight.”

  “Due time?”

  “Yes. When you begin to study with me. As I hope you will.” He regarded her without any change of expression and gestured that she should follow him into Jurel’s study. Householders had prepared the place, setting out a spring liqueur and a pot of steeping tea in the warm, richly lit chamber. “That’s what I’ve brought you here to ask you.”

  “To study with you? You mean, to come away here and live? I don’t have time.”

  He smiled.

  “Really, I don’t,” she said, and stopped, looking at him. “Oh.”

  He touched her hand affectionately. “So you’ve been enjoying yourself while I was away. You do like being in charge after all.”