The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  That second evening, Awijan took the foreigners farther uptown, and it was on this tour that they began to get a feel for the strangely hybrid layout of the city. There was, they now realized, the skeleton of rational gridwork, a rectilinear system of main streets well paved with good heavy cobbles and a system of canals, dividing the city into segments that linked incoming freight from the countryside or ocean to processing and distribution centers in the city.

  The city was not crowded in the way that the teeming ports of Earth were. There were no beggars, no limbless cripples, no emaciated loners picking through garbage or potbellied children tugging at weary despairing parents. There was an increasingly noticeable contrast between the rich and the poor as they moved uphill and the congestion thinned and the buildings became more imposing, but it did not disturb the humans as they might have been disturbed in Rio or Calcutta or Lima or New York. Here, one had the impression that prosperity was attainable, that people were competent and confident and either on their way up or content to be where they were. The makeshift markets and bustle seemed due to a desire to get down to business without a lot of extraneous bother over display. And there was a kind of beauty in that.

  They saw no schools but many small shops and little factories and minifoundries in which apprentices absorbed skills by patient accretion. For all the movement and hustle in the streets, there were gates to small yards in which families could be seen at rest, eating under wide overhanging eaves, sheltered from the rain but outside in the evening air. There was an eerie quiet sometimes, when the sounds of soft-booted feet and musical Runa voices and the plashing patter of steady rain were all that could be heard as they passed through districts where the trade, like tailoring and embroidery, involved no metal.

  On their third evening, Awijan took them across the bay to the glassmakers’ quarter to see the manufacture of spectacular serving pieces like those that graced Supaari’s table: clear, heavy, polished glass with streamers of sparkling bronze-colored aventurine ribboning through the bodies of the bowls. Marc had the impression that there were two main aesthetic traditions, one encrusted and heavy with decoration, the other rather spare and clean. Made for Jana’ata and Runa, respectively, he guessed, gazing across the bay to Galatna Palace and the surrounding hillside compounds, with their mosaics and fountains, their high walls crenellated and corbeled, their facades barnacled with ornament. More money than taste, Marc thought uncharitably. Galatna had an overevolved look, like that of classical Chinese architecture, as though it had been worked on too long, layered and added to more than was strictly good for it.

  He questioned Awijan about this as they toured the next shop. "Most Jana’ata prefer such things as those," Awijan told him, indicating the highly decorated items, and added in a low confiding voice, "Someone’s eyes get tired looking at them." Which confirmed Marc’s admiration for Runa chic.

  And yet on their final day in the city, Marc was forced to modify his dismissal of Jana’ata art. George and Jimmy had finally made it clear that the one thing they must do without fail was talk to a chemist about fuel for the lander. It took a fair bit of explaining, but Supaari finally caught on to what they were trying to say and Awijan dispatched a runner to a local distiller of perfumes who brought back a thin-faced and somewhat nervous-looking chemist. With graphics of the periodic table of elements to establish some common ground and 3-D displays of fuel components to work from, the chemist was quick to catch on to the problem. To the belly-deep relief of the foreigners, the formula did not seem at all daunting.

  But Marc’s eyes glazed over during the technical discussion that followed and Supaari, equally bored, asked if perhaps Robichaux would like to see something of Jana’ata art. The suggestion was so casual that Marc, who was beginning to know Supaari, suspected immediately that Supaari had planned it in advance. A two-passenger chair was summoned, and Marc was given a hooded robe that was far too large and helped into the curtained conveyance. Supaari declared that he himself would accompany the Foreigner Marc on this excursion, leaving Awijan behind to assist George and Jimmy with the chemist.

  It was full daylight and Marc, peeking through the spaces between the curtains as they were carried uptown, caught glimpses of new areas of the city and got an entirely different impression of the place. Here, Jana’ata were everywhere and conspicuous, "In robes," Supaari murmured, a little sarcastically, "as heavy as their responsibilities, headdresses as lofty as their ideals." The faces were very like the Runa faces Marc was familiar with, but there was a hollow-cheeked and wolfish look to them that left him uneasy. Unlike Supaari, they seemed not lively but frighteningly intent, not friendly but coldly courteous, not humorous but keenly observant, and above all: unapproachable. Everywhere, Runa stepped back, bowed or nodded or turned aside. Marc shrank back into his enclosure, now feeling in his gut some of the reasons behind Supaari’s repeated warnings about other Jana’ata, and gave thanks to God that they’d encountered the Runa first.

  The commotion of the city receded as they continued uphill and turned toward the mountain south of Gayjur. At length they arrived at a solitary stone building, low-lying and horizontal in plan, galleried and deeply eaved. Supaari told Marc to wait out of sight, and then disappeared for some time. When he returned Supaari leaned in through the curtains and whispered, "You are an elderly Jana’ata lady here to observe the ceremony for your serenity. For this reason, you must be alone. You understand?" Marc lifted his chin and understood very well. Jana’ata were capable of lying, he observed with some amusement. Supaari continued very quietly, "Someone has purchased the exclusive viewing rights. They will clear the courtyard so you may enter the balcony. It is not permitted to speak Ruanja here. Say nothing."

  When they were alone except for the Runa chaircarriers, Supaari assisted Marc out of the chair and led him, head down under his hood and dripping oversized Jana’ata draperies like a child playing dress-up, into the building and across a central open area with scented fountains. Holding up his robes, keeping his hands concealed under the long oversleeves, Marc found himself ascending a ramp to a second-level gallery. He was so intent on not tripping over his garment and keeping his alien anatomy under wraps that he hardly glanced at anything around him until they reached a small curtained room, like a box at the opera. Supaari stepped in first and found his position before drawing the front curtains close together. Then he motioned Marc in and closed off the back curtain, leaving the box in semidarkness, indicating with a gesture that it was safe for the foreigner to throw back his hood.

  "You shall stand back a little, but watch carefully," Supaari whispered. "It is very beautiful. Like your ‘landscapes.’ "

  Marc was charmed by this compliment but very worried that they were taking some terrible risk. Before he could say anything, the ceremony began, and since they were already in as deep as he imagined they could get, he decided to trust Supaari’s judgment and God’s plan.

  Moving slightly so he could see through the small gap in the curtain, Marc looked down into a little room of quiet perfection, the gray dressed-stone walls nearly mortarless and shining like polished granite, the floor paved with flags of something veined and figured like pink marble. There was a large, low, black stone bowl, filled with some colorless liquid, and around this knelt six plain-robed Jana’ata. At the knees of each was an array of pottery cups, containing pigment, and behind each, a small brazier in which some kind of incense had been set burning. The scent reached Marc just as the chanting began and although he had been told that these were artists, it all recalled for him the mood and awe of worship.

  Then, in time with the telling of some epic poem, leaning toward the bowl in a balletic movement of body and arm, the adepts each dipped their styluslike talons into the pigment pots and touched the surface of the black bowl’s contents. For an exquisite moment, colors appeared: blending, spreading, dispersing in a radiant mandala. Again and again, the artists, chanting and dipping and swaying in time, touched the liquid surface with magic an
d color, the shimmering patterns changing with every hypnotic verse, the incense growing more powerful …

  Later, Marc would have no memory of leaving the box or of climbing into the chair again. The swaying rhythmic movement of the carriers merged in his mind with the poetry he had heard, and the ride back to the harbor compound of Supaari VaGayjur was a mixture of half-dreamt visions and floating moments of reality. Slumped against Supaari and staring with dilated eyes inside his fabric cocoon, Marc noted at one point with vague and distant interest that they were going past a public square of some kind. He saw through a space in the curtains three Runa publicly put to death, their throats slit as they knelt with their backs to the Jana’ata executioners, who stood behind them and drew their heavy claws across their victims’ throats as cleanly and humanely as kosher butchers.

  This scene registered at some level, but Marc could not be sure if it was real or a doped hallucination. Before he could inquire about it, the image drifted away, lost in pulsating bursts of glowing color and rhythmic chant.

  IT WAS NOT, evidently, a day meant for sobriety.

  Assured now that the lander fuel could be duplicated, George and Jimmy were alternately limp with relief and jubilantly keyed up. Awijan did not entirely grasp the motive behind the transaction just concluded but saw the foreigners’ need for celebration and felt moved to make this possible for them.

  For a time, Awijan did not act on this feeling, for she was an unnaturally controlled and unspontaneous Runao, the product of several hundred generations of selective breeding and a thorough education. Supaari’s first yard boss, she had quickly moved up to secretary, and he had always treated her as an equal, subordinate in position but not inferior. Indeed, Awijan’s bloodlines were more ancient and in some ways superior to those of Supaari himself, a fact that he noted with characteristic amusement at the irony. And though the other Jana’ata merchants disapproved of Supaari’s almost egalitarian relationship with the Runa in general and there was ungrounded gossip about him and Awijan, she had enjoyed full use of her own capacities and lived in a good deal of physical comfort. The price Awijan paid for her position in life was solitude. She had no peers, nor anyone to look to for guidance. She rarely ventured beyond Supaari’s compound except on business, bearing proper identification and taking care to appear deferential to Jana’ata and Runa alike. She had no wish to arouse either outrage or envy. It made for a tense, compressed life. One had to have an outlet.

  "Tomorrow you shall return to Kashan," she told the foreigners, who had treated her with respect and kindness. "Someone would like to invite you to share a meal. Shall this be acceptable?"

  It was. It was altogether acceptable. And so, as Marc Robichaux was carried, dozing, through the streets of Gayjur toward Radina Bay, Jimmy Quinn and George Edwards followed Awijan out of Supaari’s compound and into a Runa neighborhood a little distance inland from the harbor. Standing with her at a gateway, they found themselves looking into something like a restaurant or perhaps a private club, filled with Runa of many types, exuberant and louder than the humans were accustomed to hearing them.

  "Jeez, it’s like the wedding," Jimmy said, smiling broadly.

  They moved inside and Awijan led them to a corner where people made room for them on the padded floor. Huge platters of food circulated from hand to hand through the crowd, along with beautiful plates of jellied lozenges and these, George and Jimmy found, were delicious. There was no dancing or music but there was a storyteller and all around the room, there were games of strength and gambling going on and cash was definitely changing hands. Nudging Jimmy as they settled onto the cushions, George murmured, "I guess city Runa don’t get porai as easy as country Runa."

  Soon even the reserved and self-contained Awijan opened up and joined in the raucous commentary on the storyteller’s tale, and the two foreigners were delighted to find their Ruanja good enough to understand the funny parts. George and Jimmy and Awijan ate and watched and listened and talked, and at some point in the evening, one of the Runa challenged Jimmy to a sort of arm-wrestling competition. Jimmy tried to beg off, saying, "Someone would be sad to make your heart porai," which he meant as courtesy but which was in fact exactly the kind of backward insult this crowd loved. So the two unlikely competitors squared off across a low table, Awijan coaching Jimmy with stupendously unhelpful athletic advice and George cheering wildly when Jim took two of the five contests in spite of being handicapped by the lack of a stabilizing tail. And they all three had some more of the jellied stuff, sweet and tart and cool on the tongue, to celebrate.

  The crowd’s attention shifted then to another pair of happy combatants and Jimmy eventually lay back flat, his legs out straight, and put his hands behind his head, smiling serenely at Awijan and then at George, who sat cross-legged and motionless next to him. He is a wonderful-looking man, Jimmy thought suddenly. White hair sweeping back in silken waves from a tanned and splendid old face, George Edwards was the very embodiment of venerable dignity: Seneca amid a gathering of statesmen reclining on Roman daybeds, if you could overlook all the tails.

  As though feeling Jimmy’s eyes on him, George turned toward the younger man. There was a pregnant pause. "I can’t feel my lips," George announced, and then he giggled.

  "Me neither. But I do feel something." Jimmy pondered this feeling. It required the entirety of his concentration to identify it. "I feel meself suddenly overcoom with a startlin’ desire to sing ‘Danny Boy.’"

  George rolled himself into a ball laughing, fists pounding the cushion on either side of his knees with uncoordinated appreciation. Jimmy sat up and snaked out a long arm to snare another jellied thing from a passing tray. He frowned at it with unfocused but mighty scientific interest. "Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph! What d’ fook is this stuff?"

  "Alien Jell-O shots!" George sang breathlessly. He leaned toward Jimmy to whisper something but misjudged his center of gravity and fell over. "Bill Cosby would be so proud!" he said, sideways.

  "And who d’ fook would Bill Cosby be?" Jimmy demanded. Not waiting for an answer, he blinked at George with owlish deliberation and confided in his own South Boston accent, "I am hammahd."

  George Edwards spoke fair Ruanja, good Spanish and excellent standard English. He considered "hammahd." He compared the sound to many mental templates. He found a match. "Hammered!" George cried triumphantly, still sideways. "Trashed. Destroyed. Totaled. Wiped. Bombed. Smashed. Wrecked."

  Jimmy stared down at the small gelatinous timebomb shimmering innocently in his limp hand. "This stuff is great," he declared to no one in particular, since George continued to chant his litany of synonyms, unperturbed by the lack of attentive audience. "You don’t even have to take time off from the party to pee."

  And Awijan, who had not understood a single word her howling guests were saying, nevertheless gazed upon them with beneficent pleasure. For Awijan was wholly relaxed and utterly unconcerned about her peculiar life and its almost unremitting tensions: quietly and intentionally and magnificently drunk, among friends.

  SUPAARI WAS AWARE of his secretary’s occasional need to dissipate the uneasiness she fell prey to, and although he was surprised that she had taken the foreigners with her to the club, he was not angry. Truth be told, he enjoyed the almost complete silence that prevailed during their first day’s journey back to Kashan.

  The second day was a little more animated but now the foreigners were thoughtful. Supaari suspected that they would have a great deal to say to one another when they reached the privacy of their homes and companions in Kashan. He knew from their meals together and their questions and comments that Gayjur had not disappointed them and that his hospitality had been appreciated. This pleased him. He now looked forward to doing the same for Ha’an and the others, more confident that he could control the situation in the city.

  Supaari recognized that the silence on their last day of travel was of a different quality, although he could not have known why. In fact, as they came around the last bend of th
e river and Supaari tied up to the Kashan dock, Marc Robichaux, George Edwards and Jimmy Quinn were preparing themselves to be met by people in mourning.

  Knowing that D.W. was close to the end, they’d offered to postpone the trip to Gayjur but he’d insisted they go on, not trusting Supaari to make the offer a second time after stalling them a whole year. So they had said their good-byes before they left. Now, they could see Sofia spot them from her terrace and watched as she and Sandoz picked their way down the cliffside to the dock. The ravaged faces of Emilio and Sofia told them, they thought, all they needed to know. Climbing out of the boat, Jimmy went to his wife and stooped low to hold her while she cried. Marc Robichaux, taking in the obvious, said quietly, "The Father Superior." Mute, Emilio nodded but continued to look at George, as he had from the moment he’d emerged from the Quinns’ apartment and come within sight of the returning travelers.

  "And Anne," George said, uncomprehending but certain, the heart in him going dead.

  Emilio nodded again.

  THE RUNA WERE still out harvesting anukar, so they were alone. Supaari came with them to Sofia and Jimmy’s apartment, having been told only that Ha’an and the Elder had been killed. He was shocked and could see the distress all around him. They love one another, he thought, hardly knowing whether to envy or pity them.

  Fia, the tiny one with the black mane, told the tale. Knowing Supaari had been fond of Ha’an, she repeated parts of it in Ruanja for him. Dee and Ha’an were killed by some kind of animal, she told him. "Manuzhai and the others told us to be careful for djanada. Someone thinks a djanada attacked them."

  "This was not an animal. Djanada are Jana’ata, do you understand? But these are dishonorable men. The killer was VaHaptaa," Supaari said, making his contempt obvious. "Do you understand this word? Haptaa? In Ruanja, it is brai noa."