“But don’t chew it; roll it about,” Tayar directed. “Each part of your tongue can experience different flavors. Now bite once, to release more flavor. Ah, yes, you feel it, don’t you?”
He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel other than the quiet of the moment, the close warmth of her voice, but he bent his head to a single slight nod, his eyes still closed.
“Now, chew your food slowly, feeling it flow to all areas of your mouth.”
The layered flavors separated and exploded. Dov sighed, “Wow!”
“When you’re ready, swallow.”
Dov felt calm, yet excited. But not the excitement of heartbeats and quick breaths. More like the elation of a mountaintop sunrise. Tayar placed another forkful into his mouth, this time of salad, with its intermingling of different textures and tastes.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw his Allesha watching him. It felt different than her other looks, though he didn’t understand how or why. “What?” he asked.
She caressed his fingers with the lightest stroke. “Don’t look for explanations right now, Dov. Let’s just enjoy our meal together, like this.”
Leaving her hand still on his, she closed her eyes and placed a small portion of meat and sauce on her own tongue, rolling it, tasting it fully, experiencing the heightening of all senses that radiated from her mouth. She then opened her eyes.
He watched her, this achingly beautiful woman who seemed to be waiting so patiently that he felt she could wait forever, connected to him by their fingertips, the air they breathed, the food they savored, all becoming an essence of something else. “Tayar, is this it, the thing that the Alleshi do, that make them worshipped?”
“Not worshipped. We are — I am — merely a vessel of knowledge and experience from which you may drink deeply, to learn, to grow, to discover the delights of our world together, as you discovered the true taste of meat and salad just now.”
Dov shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s right, Tayar. I mean, it’s more than what you say, isn’t it?”
“Yes, much more, but then our winter has only begun.”
Chapter 32
After awakening the boy’s senses during their supper, the Allesha anticipated difficulty in persuading him to delay entering the inner room. But it was time to move onto the next stage. “What will you read to me tonight?” she asked as she settled into a corner of the sofa.
“It’s your turn.” He threw himself into the armchair, with a brusque energy that might have made less sturdy furniture creak.
“Is it, really? I didn’t remember. But then I’ve had some rather nice distractions since our last reading.”
His position shifted slightly, to a less rigid posture.
“Dov, does it really matter whose turn it is? I have a yearning to hear your voice.” And, she knew, she needed to give him some place to keep his hands, so that his mind might be the focus, to explore without the distractions of touch. “I want to close my eyes and see the world your words form for me.”
“Like the food? You do that with sounds, too?”
“Oh yes, with sounds, smells, touch, anything you can sense. Especially a loved one’s voice.”
“A loved one’s voice, huh? Well, sure, if you put it that way…” Dov stood to fetch The Traveler’s Tales from a side table, then sat down on the other end of the sofa. Stretching his legs toward his Allesha, he opened the book to the page where they had put a slip of leather to mark where he had stopped previously.
Tayar folded her long body into the back cushions, rested her head on her arm and closed her eyes, ready to receive his story.
“This story is called The Empty Land,” he said.
The Village at the End of the World knew not how to welcome strangers, for few came to them and none with good reason. Even in a world repeatedly ravaged by war, in which places of peace were scarce, no one chose to seek refuge in a far-off village that cared so little for life they could not find the passion to war ~ or to love.
Yet, there I journeyed, seeking an end. For this was in the early years of my travels, and my feet were faltering, weighed down as they were by how little I carried. No mate, no children, no kin, no hearth, all gone, all dead.
No inn nor open door offered hospice. Only young children would look at me as I passed, though they were quickly taken in hand and pulled away by the back-turned adults. Where my feet ceased, there I lay, tired and in pain, on stony earth that appeared unfenced, unclaimed.
Almost as soon as I put my head down, I felt the toe of a boot poking my side “Hey, you! Get up, get out of my field. You can’t sleep here.”
I raised my head to look at the cracked, parched soil. If field this ever were, it could no longer be. “What do you grow here?” I asked the sun-baked man who stood over me, still pushing with his toe.
“That’s my concern, not yours. Get out of here.”
“I have traveled far to be here, and I’m tired. I saw no place in the village where a room or bed might be had. Where can I sleep?”
“That’s your concern, not mine. Get out of here.”
Seeking a reprieve from the prodding boot that bruised the same rib over and over, I stood and saw that I was a head taller than the man. And as little food as I’d had for longer than I cared to remember, his skin was so thin over his jutting bones that I felt well fed in comparison.
His hands flew at my face, pushing his words at me, like small birds of prey circling their quarry. “Get out of here. Go back where you came from. We’ll have no strangers in our midst.”
“Well, I’ll not stay where I am unwanted.” I swung my pack onto my back and continued walking in the direction I had been headed before my feet had stopped.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going? There’s nothing out there.”
“Nothing sounds good to me,” I mumbled, knowing he would not expend the effort to stop me, except for the diversion of my discomfort.
“You crazy? Didn’t you hear what I said? Why d’you think this place is called the End of the World? Only death is beyond that hill. It’s the Empty Land.”
The Empty Land. The name echoed the void inside me. So I kept walking.
Soon after I left the Village at the End of the World, the parched, packed soil became sand ~ dry, coarse, unresisting grains that slipped out from under my steps. That brown skeleton of a man was right about the emptiness. No green of plant or spark of life, no water or succulents, no scurrying animals or clouds in the sky. Only the grey sand that undulated in small, amorphous hillocks.
It was in that emptiness that I finally found peace, enough peace to be ready to lie down and die, if only my feet would allow me to stop and rest. Sleep gradually descended upon me as I walked, so that I would fall in mid-step, only to be awakened again at dawn, when my legs had already begun pulling me forward.
I knew not how long I had walked, except that I had licked the last drop of water from my flask some time before, and my body thirsted for what would not be. I was weary of life and knew death was near, and I welcomed it. That’s when I heard her, though the sound of her singing seemed a thing of dreams or of my approaching end. So I ignored it. But when I saw her, sitting cross-legged on the next hilltop, my feet changed their direction to reach her.
She did not acknowledge my approach, didn’t even turn to look at me when I sat a few hands breadth from her, though I felt the warmth of her body bend to me. She continued to sing, unlike any song I had ever heard. More a vibration that I felt deep in my chest, its pace changing too often to have shape. I wondered if it were a lack of rhythm or too many rhythms that defined it. And how could that deep, throbbing sound be coming from such a frail old woman?
When she finished her song, if song it was, she smiled and bowed to the empty space in front of her. Then she turned, smiled and bowed to me in the same reverent manner.
The silence that now hung in the air seemed somehow sacred, so I dared not break it. Instead, I sat and waited for her to speak. She
did, but only some hours later, as the sun dipped to the far hill. During the interval between her strange song and her greeting, she stayed as still as the air, with her head bent toward the sand, watching something in the emptiness that I could not see, and smiling with such serenity that I ached to see what held her eyes.
“Welcome, Sister,” she finally said, at the end of day’s light. She stood, walked a few steps, and stopped to look back at me. “Welcome.”
By her look and her greeting, I understood that she was inviting me to follow her. Some time later, she stopped in a hollow between two hills and sat cross-legged once more. She nodded to me to sit beside her. When I was settled, she raised her hands toward a grey, dry twig that stood in the sand before her and began to sing again.
Hearing the song from the beginning, as I now did, I could sense its elusive pattern, one that fit the undulating hills and shifting sands, ever changing, deep and vast. I closed my eyes as the throbbing of her song pulsed through my veins. When I felt her move beside me, I opened my eyes to see her digging at the bottom of the twig. I bent to help, though I did not know her purpose. Some lengths below the surface, the twig ended in a big round root. The woman shaved that root with a small knife and held the shavings in her hand.
“Lean back and open your mouth,” she said, and I obeyed. To my surprise, when she tightened her hand into a fist, a sweet liquid ran into my mouth. She repeated the process ~ shaving the root and squeezing its sweet nectar over my mouth ~ until my thirst was satisfied. Somehow, the sharp edge of my hunger, also, was slaked. Then she drank her fill. She snapped tiny tendrils from the round root on which we chewed while she replanted the twig.
The moon was more full than new; I could see the woman’s face clearly. Deep lines shaped her face, written with years of smiling that crinkled eyes, cheeks, chin and nose. Age had twisted the joints of her body, but not her back. She moved with grace, despite ~ or was it in harmony with? ~ her knotty joints. Her gnarled hands rested quietly in the bend of her crossed legs, drawing my mind to thoughts of productive toil, calluses earned, gentle touches, love given and received. Yet I felt no incongruity in finding her here in the middle of nowhere, apparently living in the Empty Land, beyond the End of the World.
The woman looked at me with the same serene smile that had glowed from her that afternoon, when she had spent hours watching the sand. Did she see in my face the questions that were forming? “Call me Alleen,” she said.
The young Allesha opened her eyes in surprise at hearing the name, but resumed her pose before the boy noticed and could be pulled from the story.
“Alleen, I would give you a name to call me, but I have lost my names, back there in the world of villages, the world of war.”
“I will call you Roen, for the song that called you here.”
“It was a song unlike anything I’ve ever heard.”
“Yes, it exists only here.”
“Here in the Empty Land, or here in you?” I asked.
“You use the blind people’s name for this place, and yet, did you not see how rich this land is?”
“I’ve seen sand and clear sky.”
“And?”
“Nothing else, other than you and the water root you showed me.” I looked about the moonlit emptiness and wondered what she expected me to see.
“Then sleep, my child. We have a busy day beyond this night.”
When I awoke the next morning, Alleen was gone. I followed her footsteps, which had not yet been filled in by the shifting sands, to find her sitting on a hilltop, as she had been the day before. Her head leaned to one side as though she were listening to something I could not hear. Then she nodded to the space in front of her and altered her gaze to an area of sand just downslope from her knees.
I sat beside her, copying her posture as closely as I could, and stared in the same direction. I saw nothing.
I did not believe her mad. Therefore, I reasoned, she must see something I could not or did not. I continued to imitate her pose and manner, looking where she looked, even controlling my breathing to match her rhythm. My lungs protested at first, unaccustomed to thoughtful breath, preferring independence rather than concurrence with any other living being. But there was peace in her rhythms, as there is in gliding along in a dance with a lover who follows a breeze-blown flute. Soon, I realized that her rhythms were the most natural, easiest breaths, filling my lungs as they needed air, expelling when it was time. I was no longer imitating, for to imitate is to impose something unnatural, belonging to another’s way, onto your own.
We sat thus long enough for the sun to move halfway to its midday height. Yet the only thing I had seen was the play of light along the vast emptiness, as the sun searched out and, sometimes, stepped over the hills. But, there, just below us, I saw a movement that was not the play of light, though I had thought it so. It was the movement of sand, like a stream or rivulet, flowing from below our feet to join other currents crisscrossing the vast landscape. I watched in wonder the multitude of branching, converging, diverging currents of sand. I saw whirling rapids and peaceful pools, cataracts and sprays, tiny trickles and wide gorges ~ all of sand. Not grey sand, as I had originally thought, but so many colors that they could not be seen together without the eyes trying to blur them into something pale and easier to digest.
As the day before, I heard the vibration in my chest before my ears registered the song. It was the sound of the rivers of sand, flowing through the land, converging, diverging, whirling and pooling. And it was a song that had come out of my lungs, as I inhaled and exhaled, as I breathed the air of those eddies of sand, and felt myself become not a stone in the currents, but another rivulet carried over the land.
The many rhythms of the land reverberated in my chest and, as I recognized the counterbalance coming from my companion, the clarity of the song’s form filled my heart with joy. Then another sound flew to my ears, so alien that I had forgotten its sweetness, for I had not heard my own laughter for far too long ~ not since before that burning day I last saw my birth village, when it had become an unrecognizable pile of rubble, a single large funeral pyre.
The tears came in the whirling eddies of my laughter, and Alleen held me. Her song changed subtly, no longer calling forth the land, but calling my sorrow out of the deep, dark hole where I had buried it. At first, she matched the rhythm of her song to my sobs, but that too changed, carrying me along with it, to something more like our sand-river rhythms. Soon, she had me turned outward, though still cradled against her. She pointed to the foot of our hill. “Look.” Awe was in her voice. “Do you see who our song called forth?”
Drawn toward us in the currents of sand was a slash of black. But it was black in the same way that the sand was grey. A black that held gold and amber and other shimmering colors. When I saw that it was a large viper, I flinched, but Alleen held me still.
“Calm, child. He has come only for our song today. Tomorrow, he may be hungry, as we may be. But today, let us welcome him in the spirit of our beckoning.”
Still holding my hand, she sat facing the snake as it approached. The vibrations of her song shaped a new rhythm, one that moved in slipping curves. The snake raised his head, so that he towered over her, and she bowed to him with reverence as she continued to sing his rhythms to him. He did not move to strike or to leave, but coiled back down in repose, listening, watching.
Her song changed yet again, adding some small, hopping rhythms to those of the snake and of the sand and of my laughter and tears. In the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny brown movement to my left, but could not turn to look, fearful of disturbing the snake. It was gone as quickly as it had come, then back again, on the right. Up again, its head popped out of the sand, between Alleen and me, hidden from the snake by our knees. It was a little mewmit, a cousin to those minor barnyard nuisances children so often befriend. It crawled out of its hole and stood upon its hind legs, cocked its small round mottled head to listen to her song, then curled up in the shadow of my thi
gh.
Every time Alleen added another rhythm to her song, another life was summoned and revealed itself. The song held them, all enemies to one another, in repose and wary peace, as at a watering hole. Creatures that crawled and dug, flew and hopped, slithered and pounced ~ each held by its own rhythm, as I was, cradled and soothed, cajoled and sustained.
One by one, Alleen released the creatures by slowing each individual rhythm until it faded and its creature withdrew. Eventually, only the tiny mewmit remained, asleep against my thigh. Alleen took the mewmit in her cupped hands, blew a gentle breeze across its fur to awaken it, and remarkably, spit some of her own precious moisture into her palm just before the mewmit’s nose, so it might drink. She lowered her hands to the sand, near the hole, and the mewmit scampered into it.
When all had gone, Alleen bowed to the land and then to me. “I’m hungry, aren’t you?” she said as she stood.
I realized that, yes, I was not only hungry, but drained. Her parting song had buoyed me so high that, when it ended, gravity and heat, hunger and thirst could no longer be held at bay. But more than that, the energy of all those rhythms, all those creatures, where life should not, could not be, had been a shock. So much life where I had sought only death. I was as weak as a newborn. Alleen helped me stand and supported my weight as we walked across a flat area to the bottom of another hill, where even in the midday sun we found some shade.
From a fold in her robe, she pulled out what looked like an old piece of dried leather. She cut it and handed me half. Grinding it with my teeth, I felt like a pre-tool primitive softening a hide. Tiny morsels broke off and mixed with what little saliva I had into a pungent sweetness not unlike dried fruit. However, my jaw was aching before my hunger was satisfied, and the effort seemed greater than the value of what little nourishment might be had from it. But Alleen appeared so content, so patient, relishing the flavors that she fought out of the toughness, that I chose again to imitate her, hoping to discover whatever it was she was feeling.
The Winter Boy Page 18
