by Carol Berg
Karon’s attention drifted into the realm of story and memory that was always as vivid as present daylight for him. “I had watched J’Ettanni Healers perform the blood-rite and prayed for years that whatever my gift, it would not be that one. But on that day my desire was reversed, and I had no choice but to try. Otherwise Christophe was dead and would cross the Verges long before I could get him home. Our people had many theories on how specific talents developed; perhaps my gift might have been different if my need had not been so great. I did what I had to do, holding Christophe close to me so the blood would mingle as it must and taking myself into him so I could put right what had been damaged. More than half a day it took me.” He laughed and squeezed my hand, returning from his journey of remembrance. “I was not very skilled and caused both of us more grief than was necessary. That scar is my constant inducement to humility.”
When I asked him, he showed me the long, ragged white mark that had been his first.
“Can you remember them all?” I ran my fingers over the tracery of white that criss-crossed his left arm. Hundreds of scars.
“Every one. You cannot forget. The sense of completion… of purpose… of wholeness… is indescribable. There’s been nothing in my life to compare to it… until I met you.”
And then were both talking and gardening interrupted for a while.
Later, as we walked into the house in the moonlight, I asked him what he meant by “crossing the Verges.” He wrinkled his brow and said, “Nothing in Leiran cosmology corresponds to the concept. The J’Ettanne call the place where souls reside after death L’Tiere, the ”following life.“ We know nothing of its nature, but we believe that between the life that we know and L’Tiere, there exists a boundary which the living cannot cross and from which there is no return. After death there is a time—from a few moments to a few hours—when the soul has not yet crossed this boundary and can be returned to the body. It’s why time is so critical to a Healer. With skill and effort and luck and the gift I have been given, I can return one who is dead to life again, but only if the soul has not yet crossed.”
I was fascinated by all this, but uncomfortable, too. Death was rarely a topic of discussion in Leiran society. Warriors lived forever in legend and story, of course, and the Holy Twins would inscribe their names on their lists of heroes when we recounted their noble deeds in temple rites. And the families who nurtured such heroes shared in this immortality, as Mana shared in the glory of the First God Arot. Otherwise, Leiran gods had no use for the dead. Living a life of honor was what was important.
“It was not so very different in Avonar,” Karon said, when I mentioned my discomfort. “We had a somewhat more optimistic view of whatever is to come, but Healers were never the first ones that came to mind when one was making a guest list. Reminders of mortality are never welcome.” He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose now you’ll want to banish me to the kitchens when you entertain.”
“I’d already planned it so. It was your conversation that attracted me, you know, and I’m hesitant to put your social graces on display lest another woman be singed by the same flame!”
As Karon flourished in his more ordinary profession, I spent more and more time with him at the antiquities collection. Here we had no arguments, but reveled in the unending variety of human creativity. Among the bins and boxes we found man-high statues of Kerotean marble and tiny fetishes of wood and ivory from cultures so primitive that nothing at all was known of them. There were Vallorean tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, helmets and armor and swords of a thousand varieties, maps and glassware, jewelry and silverwork, rugs woven of the hair from exotic beasts. Most of these articles had been stuffed into musty vaults in the royal treasuries with no regard for their fragile nature. Armor was thrown on top of crumbling manuscripts, paintings laid face down, ivory and jade statuary left where dampness had made stagnant pools.
Shortly after assuming his post, Karon had several large, well-aired workrooms set aside for his use. He had his small staff of assistants bring each item to the workrooms, so it could be judged, and then it would either be disposed of or sent to be cleaned, repaired, and packed away more carefully.
Our delight was to find an article that was unmarked and unknown and to unravel the mysteries of its origin. We would seek some idea of its history from the pieces stored alongside it. Then we would attempt to trace the materials, the paint, the stone, the paper, the ink, the yam. Karon would search the royal libraries for references to anything similar or write letters to scholars or collectors who might have information. If we were still lacking information, I might take the piece to the market, and inquire of visiting merchants or travelers if they had ever seen such a thing.
Evard’s lord high chamberlain heard of the new commissioner’s work and sent his secretary to ask if there might be articles suitable for display in the palace. Evidently Evard had decided that some ornamentation might better suit his role as the supreme monarch of the civilized world. Perhaps his decision was connected with the rumors that the young queen considered Leirans, including her husband, to be barbarians. And so, when we found a particularly fine piece, I would write a card describing it, pack the card with the vase or statue or tapestry, and send them to the chamberlain with the commissioner’s compliments and a recommendation as to the object’s placement and method of display.
The only activity I avoided was accompanying Karon down into the vaults. I blamed my deep-rooted horror of dark, confined spaces on Tomas. Once when I was but five or six years old, I was playing hide and seek with Tomas and two of his friends through the dank cellars and musty storerooms of Comigor. Tomas decided it would be a great joke to abandon the game without telling me. He and his friends took themselves off riding, not knowing that the ancient cupboard I had discovered deep in the darkest cellar had a faulty latch and that I could not free myself. When I failed to come to supper in the nursery, the governess assumed I was out riding, too. Only when the boys returned at nightfall did the alarm go out.
It was two days until they found me, pale and terrified and perfectly quiet, huddled in the pitch-blackness of the cramped old cabinet. I had been afraid to cry out when I heard the searchers, for our old nurse had always told us that there were demons in the dark who would devour crying children to feed their sorceries. I had decided it would be better to starve than to risk such an awful fate. Years passed before I could sleep without a lamp left burning, and the fear of confinement had never left me.
The first time Karon took me into the vaults, eager to share the wonders of his treasury, I convinced myself that my childish megrims would surely be banished now I was a married woman. But as luck would have it, halfway down the ancient stairway our lamp ran out of oil, and it took no extraordinary talent for Karon to discover my terror. I almost tore the sleeve off his coat. In an instant, without regard for the risk, he conjured a light for me—a soft white glow emanating from his hand that faded only when he led me into the daylight and wrapped his arms about me to calm my shaking.
“Ah, love, you need never fear the demons again,” he said, after I’d told him the tale. “Is it not true that you have married one of them, who, now he is in your power, can well hold his fellows at bay?” It became a joke between us about the demons, and indeed I discovered that as long as Karon was with me, I could survive a venture to the vaults. Only rarely did I go, however, and I always checked the lamp oil carefully.
It was while delving into the crates of booty hauled from Valleor after its conquest that Karon came across a legacy from his ancestors. One summer afternoon, I came to Karon’s workroom as I did several times a week to help sort and number the artifacts. I had suggested a cataloging scheme, so we could have a record not only of what was stored in the vaults, but also where each item was located and what other items might be related to it.
On this particular day I was recording a description of a crate of mouse-chewed books, a set of erotic stories written and illustrated by a Kerotean noble f
or his bride. I was hoping the woman had possessed a strong stomach and an exotic sense of humor. Karon appeared in the workroom doorway, and I waved a greeting, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He was dusty and disheveled, not an unusual state when he’d been working in the vaults, but the expression on his face was his “storytelling” look, as if, despite his body being in the room, he traveled in some faraway place. Where ordinarily he would see fourteen things needing his attention, he seemed at a loss.
I left my list with a workman and threaded my way through the workroom clutter. “Karon, what is it? Have bodies come popping out of your rusty armor?”
His eyes caught mine for a moment. “Yes… well… in a way.”
A young man, whose nose, mouth, and chin came to such a sharp prominence as to be vaguely reminiscent of a rat, called out from across the room. “Lord Commissioner, should I discard this helm? It’s quite ordinary—Leiran, and not even a very nice one. I think it must have belonged to the fellow who collected this lot.” Racine had been the secretary for the previous Commissioner of Antiquities, but had been required to do little more than carry notes to the man’s mistress. Karon was pleased with Racine’s keen interest in the new procedures and how quickly the eager assistant’s eye had become discriminating.
“Whatever you think, Racine.” Brought out of his distraction a bit by the exchange, Karon spoke quietly to me. “Can you come? I’d like to show you. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Of course.”
Karon told Racine to carry on and led me to the steep, winding stair. “We have to go down. Will you be all right?”
“I’ll manage,” I said, touching his hand and remembering his magical fight. “My demon is with me.”
He took me deep into the far corner of the vault to a pile of rolled carpets. Setting the lamp on a nearby crate, he dragged a cracked leather trunk from underneath the pile. The trunk was full of old clothes. From deep beneath the jumble of faded silks and satins he pulled out a flat, wooden box. The wood was polished dark and smooth by years of handling, the plain brass hinges and latch tarnished. Karon raised the lid and reverently removed the contents, one by one.
First, a silver knife, the finger-length blade and curved, ornately worked handle black with tarnish. Next a threadbare strip of cloth, a scarf or sash perhaps, more like a spiderweb that threatened to dissolve at a touch. Then a round, button-like piece, also made of silver, blackened by time. Karon laid each thing in my lap, and I could not mistake the wonder in his eyes.
“They’re not very old by the standards of many things in the collection,” he said, “but they’re quite rare.”
“What are they?”
“Tools. The tools of a J’Ettanni Healer. One can use things that were originally designed for other purposes, as I do when I work, but there was a time… well, the custom was to have your own tools always ready: a knife of silver, cast with your own proper enchantments to keep it keen-edged—there is no way to make that part of it easy or pleasant, but a sharp knife is always better than dull—and a strip of white linen for the binding—it’s dangerous to lose contact in the middle of the rite, as I’ve told you. You can get dizzy. And in this”—he showed me how the button was actually a tiny cup with a hinged lid—“you would keep indiat, a paste made from herbs, quite rare and expensive, but it would ease the pain of the incision for the one you were to heal. The rite can be very hard, especially for children.”
As always, I had a hundred questions but I wasn’t sure he would even hear me.
“It’s incredible enough to find these things, but they’re not all.” From the wooden box he pulled a small book, hardly bigger than his hand. Its leather cover was half rotted away, the stitching gone, leaving it little but a stack of pages of precarious thinness. Faded ink filled the pages, words of a language I didn’t recognize written in a bold hand.
“The Healer’s journal,” said Karon. “See the symbol of the knife on the front. And here”—with utmost care, he opened to the front of the little book—“a list of names and places, and what I think must be a description of the circumstances for each healing he did. It’s written in the old language of the J’Ettanne, which went out of use long before bound books. I know so little of the language, it’s hard to read it. But look at this entry.” His face was that of a child on Long Night. “Garlao, the miller. Mycenar — that must be the village—hand caught in —something. J’dente means healed. It’s so important for a Healer to remember. There are times when it’s not right to change the outcome, times when death is not an enemy to be thwarted, times when sickness must be left to burn itself out, and so you must constantly look back at the judgments you’ve made to see if your course is straight. This man did it this way.” Karon’s whole posture begged me to understand what it meant to him to find these things. He believed he was the last living soul of his own kind.
“It’s a connection both to all those who came before you and to one particular man who was a Healer like yourself.”
“And even more than that. You see, he’s marked the book into days. Some are skipped; some are just noted by a symbol.” He turned the delicate pages carefully. “This one he’s marked Av’Kenat. I think the text must be a description of it… by one who was there.”
Av’Kenat was the “Walking Night,” the late autumn celebration when the ancient J’Ettanne would come together to celebrate the passing of summer, the harvest, and their belief that life was a formless essence, given shape by the crossing of our paths as each of us walked the Way laid down for us. It was a time for storytelling and family reunions, for betrothals and weddings, reunions and feasting, and magical games and displays of all kinds.
Karon’s face glowed in the lamplight. “All I’ve ever heard is legends, passed down so many times one never knew if they were true. Our people never dared join together on Av’Kenat. Only in the heart of the family could we have any celebration, and that contradicted the whole meaning of the feast. If I were to work at it, I could read of the real thing from one who witnessed it.”
“You could learn things that even your own family didn’t know.”
He nodded, but the glow was already fading, and his brow quickly settled into a frown. “But I’m required to destroy the journal and the other things. The law explicitly forbids these words, this language, any mention of these events and activities.”
“If you were not married, would you consider destroying them?”
He glanced up quickly. “Of course I would. The risk…” The flush of his cheeks spoke truer.
“How dare you use me as an excuse for cowardice! I don’t recall making any vow of safety when I married you. Nor do I recall requiring you to make any pledge to relinquish your life, your history, or any of those things that make you who you are. Besides”—I grabbed his chin and shook his frown away—“these are treasures that belong to the royal collection, and it would ill become the Commissioner of Antiquities to destroy anything in his charge.”
“Ah, Seri.” His pleasure illuminated the dim vault. “It would take me quite a while to decipher it all. What I’ve thought is that I could first transcribe it. Then I could return the book here and work at the translation as I had time.”
“Not at all efficient, Lord Commissioner. If I were to transcribe it for you, then you could begin work on the translation before the transcription is complete—tonight, if you wish.”
For the rest of the summer, I seldom came to the storehouse of antiquities. Not only did I transcribe the fragile pages onto decent paper, but I also made separate notes of word usage and combinations that appeared frequently. Karon taught me the words as we worked, and I developed the rudiments of a dictionary comprised of both words and symbols. Never had any work satisfied me so.
The Healer often wrote in symbols, many of them representing J’Ettanni talents and offices. Karon told me that in the Healer’s day it was the custom to have the device painted on the lintel of your house: the knife for the Healer, the lyre for a
Singer, the bridle for the Horsemaster, and so on. “If my father had lived in those days, he would have had his own Word Winder’s spiral, as well as this one.” He was sitting at our library table, and in the margin of his page of translation, he sketched a rectangular shield with two curved lines set into it, and a stylized floweret in each of the three regions scribed by the lines. “This is the symbol of a ruler. Christophe inherited both the talent and the office from our father—”
I was standing behind him and leaned over his shoulder to look closer. “But you were older. Why was your brother to inherit?”
“Our elders had ways to discern who was gifted in that way. Perhaps they could see I had no stomach for ruling. Christophe was to be officially named my father’s heir on his twentieth birthday in the autumn Avonar was destroyed. I planned to go home for it. If the Leirans had attacked two months later, I would have been in Avonar with the rest of them.”
I tugged at his chin, forcing him to look at me. “But you were not—for which I bless the hand of fate every hour. Does it bother you? Make you feel guilty that you weren’t there with them?”
He smiled. “No. That would not be very J’Ettanni, would it? Such was the Way that unfolded for us; we had escaped the ravages of the Leiran war for a long time as it was. But I miss them all and wish very much that they could meet you. All except Christophe.”
