The Glass Mountains

by Cynthia Kadohata

  “Do you think my parents suffer?”

  He hesitated. “No.” He was rubbing Artie’s stomach as my dog smiled and waved his hind legs helplessly in the air, a child being tickled. “I’ve never seen such a big dog.”

  “That’s what everyone says. He was the runt of the litter. That’s why I chose him.”

  “Why choose the runt?”

  “Because see what happens when you do. You end up with the biggest.”

  He seemed to think that over, and he nodded. “Are you hungry for fresh meat?”

  “Yes! Do you have any?”

  “I can catch some, and we’ll cook it at my house. We have to hurry. The soldiers will let you enter my town, since they’re my friends. But you need to leave by morning with them. No one can stay at the border more than one night without integrating.”

  He called out something to Panyor and then easily picked up my load. “We’ll leave the sled here. Take it from me, no one wants it.” We walked past the town to a small woods, where we sat quietly on some rocks. “Don’t move,” said my new friend. I realized we hadn’t exchanged names yet.

  “What’s your—”

  He cut me off with a quick stabbing motion. We sat quietly for quite a while, so close I could feel the warmth rising off his body. It made me lean in closer, to feel more of his warmth drifting against my face. It was like when I was a child and would cup my hands, trying to catch rainwater, and I would rue the water that fell between my fingers, and eagerly drink the water I caught. He moved suddenly and I heard a whoosh through the air, the noise almost simultaneous with a tiny cry perhaps twenty measures away. I jumped up, immediately worried for the dogs. But they stood right next to us as surprised as I was. We all ran toward the cry, to a large dead furrto with a knife through its small head. There was surprisingly little blood, which I commented on.

  “You have to hit them through a certain spot toward the back of the head. That way you can be sure of killing them with as little blood as possible. All the nutrition is in the blood.”

  It seemed preposterous that he could have aimed so carefully in the near darkness, with only the light from the sky and town filtering through the trees. I myself possessed good night vision but could barely see five or ten measures away in this forest.

  “Hurry,” he said.

  We gathered my things again and moved through the town, stopping at one of the lovely lamps. The ornate stone door was perhaps one-and-a-half times as large as the entrances in my old village. He pressed his hand against a metal plate on the door. Then he opened it and we entered.

  “What is that thing?” I said.

  “You mean the lock? You don’t have them on your doors in Bakshami?”

  “No, what does it do?”

  “No one can get in except me and my father. Here where so many foreigners pass though, we must be careful. This quiet town has seen many murders. Come on.”

  The high ceilings curved slightly, not quite domed, but more curving than simply slanted. The ceilings hadn’t been carved, but many of the items in the house had been. He turned on an inside lamp, and light danced off the metal vases and boxes arranged throughout the stone room. I’d never seen such beautiful metalwork. One box was covered with shiny blue metalwork almost like lace. When I touched it, I heard soft metallic bells from within the box. They played a childishly simple rhythm, but the effect was pleasing. “My father made that for my mother before they got married. He was the best metal and stone-worker in town before he got sick.”

  “It’s very beautiful.” I studied the other items in the room, and thought about how much Jobei and Leisha would enjoy playing in this room full of beautiful strange things. Two stone beasts guarded the immense doorway to the next room. The beasts looked so real it was as if they’d been turned to stone, not carved. And some of the rocks glowed almost like metal, so that I needed to look closely to distinguish metal from stone. Embroidered cloth pillows lay on each chair. Even without touching them, I could see the softness in the cloth. “Are all the homes here like this?”

  “We own beautiful things because of my father, but there are striking homes in every village. But come into the kitchen. My father will sleep for a few hours more. He sleeps most of the day. Shortly before I go to bed, he likes for us to talk until I’m sleepy.”

  We walked into the kitchen, the walls of which were lined with all manner of knives. I could see where my brother Maruk would fit in easily with this culture of knives. Someone had hand carved each one. Some possessed carved faces, others a series of faces, others faces with bodies, others animals. There were trees, flowers, insects, anything you could find in nature. I took out my knife to show him.

  “I sleep with this each night,” I said.

  “What for? I can see you don’t know how to use it from the way you handle it.”

  “Someone once told me that surprise is more important in war than skill.”

  “That was no doubt someone who had never fought a war.”

  “Can you teach me?”

  “There’ll be a price.”

  “What price?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “I think I have a lot of money.”

  “Yes. I’ve counted. But let’s eat. We can discuss this and other matters later.”

  He took out some kitchen knives and adroitly skinned the furrto while I peeked out back and saw what appeared to be human skulls sitting on a low wall at another house.

  “Those skulls out there look human.”

  He raised his head briefly. “Huh?” he said absently. “Oh, those, that’s correct. Human.”

  “Whose are they?”

  “People killed in war by my neighbor.”

  “Not Bakshami?”

  “Of course not. We have never been at war with Bakshami.” He smiled, and I felt fear of him, that he could smile over a subject like skulls. And yet I myself had chewed on human bones I found in the sand.

  “If someone were trying to integrate into Soom Kali, and this person failed, might this person’s skull eventually end up in a line on such a fence?”

  He looked at me strangely. “Of course not. What a question. We feel no triumph when someone fails to integrate.”

  He pressed a button, and a cross of fire lit up. In a moment the delicious smell of fresh furrto cooking filled the air. My friend fried all manner of vegetation and starches with the meat. And in this way, in this kitchen of knives with a fence of skulls beyond, I came to eat the most delicious meal of my life.

  My friend’s name was Moor-Ah Mal. He was one of the best knife throwers in the Soom Kali army. After our meal he put me in one of the rooms in his large dwelling and told me to bathe while he spoke with his father. He told me he got dispirited thinking about his sick father too much, which happened when he spent too much time at home. Yet the only thing that lifted his spirits was the time he spent talking to his father. “And watching you,” he added reflectively to me. “Every night after my father fell asleep I used to sit up in my room, thinking about his pain and his impending death. Sometimes I don’t sleep at all. When I discovered you it took my mind off my father for the first time in three years.”

  He was blunt, like many Bakshami, but his bluntness made me shy.

  He left me alone, and I sat with the dogs. Feeling both out of place and immensely satisfied, I explored the bathroom, where water poured out of the faucets without benefit of a pump, and I took a real bath for the first time since I left the hotlands. There were many pretty things in the bathroom, but they all had an aura of age about them, and an aura of having once belonged to someone else. The embroidered linens gave off an exquisite aroma hallucinatory in its vagueness, and the carving on the soap was slightly worn, as if someone had used it just once or twice. On a counter lay a beautiful silvery comb with eyes painted on it, and in the prongs I found a single pale orange hair. Moor’s hair was very dark brown, almost as dark as a Bakshami’s; perhaps the comb had belonged to his mother. The lamp
in the bathroom reflected off the window as I pulled a wet dead flea out of my hair. I felt the weariness of all the walking in my past, and also the weariness from whatever walking might lie in the future.

  I got in bed, where huge stone beasts rose on the headboard behind me, and I remembered drowsily that I ought to bathe the dogs, or at least fill up the bath for them. But they had fallen asleep, and as the room darkened with night I slept also.

  2

  I awoke to the sounds of phlegmy coughing and spitting. The sounds came from the room. A man’s tall, wasted shadow blocked what little light reached through the crack in the curtains. I didn’t close my eyes, but neither did I move. After a long while the shadow moved with some difficulty out of the room. I didn’t hear the dogs breathing, and I jumped out of bed.

  The dogs’ absence panicked me. I always knew where they were, and they were rarely out of sight. The coughing, phlegmy shadow man hadn’t shut the door all the way, so before going outside my room, I laid my ear softly against the crack where the door met the cool stone wall. At first I heard nothing, and then I heard the muffled voices of two men. When I pushed the door open, the dogs greeted me from the other side. They licked me passively and then settled in as they had been. Now I could hear more clearly Moor’s voice, probably talking to his father. That must have been his father who had come into my room. Now it was my turn to spy on him.

  I followed the voices down the hallway, my feet falling on the stone floor. The hallway stretched before me, the voices growing louder with each step. At the final door I stopped.

  First I heard Moor, speaking in a hybrid of Soom Kali and Artroran. He seemed to be asking whether his father needed another blanket.

  “No, it’s warm tonight,” said a raspy voice.

  “Did you see her? Was she still asleep?”

  “Yes. Maybe she isn’t well,” said the raspy voice. “You should wake her up.”

  “She’s just tired. I feel very alert to her. I think I would know if she was sick.”

  Moor’s father spoke sharply in Soom Kali. Then, “Kill her and eat her dogs before you fall in love.”

  I couldn’t make out anything for a while, and then Moor spoke the words “brave” and “lucky.”

  “Brave and lucky. That’s a good combination, I admit. But it doesn’t explain why you want to help her.”

  “Because she’s come all this way. I can’t find the words...”

  There was a long silence. There was an intensity to their silence as there had been to their speech. The silence and speech were, after all, between a dying father and his son. Maybe it was Moor’s intensity that prevented him from discerning my presence despite his excellent hearing. Then the raspy voice spoke. “Have I kept you here in the village too long, Moor? Will you help the girl escape as you wish you could?”

  “I’m glad to stay here with you. But in return can you understand that I plan to help her? I don’t believe she can find her parents without my help. It’s harder than she realizes. Her bravery won’t change, but her luck might.”

  “And are you so powerful that you can control a person’s luck?”

  He spoke sharply to his father for the first time, but I couldn’t understand what he said. He continued sincerely, without the sharpness. “The borders are dangerous today. If Forma declares war on Soom Kali, the borders will grow more dangerous still.”

  “War has been a constant since as far as even I can remember. The presence of war doesn’t change the borders. If she got this far, she can get farther.”

  “Why do you resist me?”

  “Because I have no wife, no brothers and sisters. I have only a son. And my son wants to help a foreigner from a sector whose people don’t have even the courage to fight their own wars. And you call her brave. If she’s so brave, why does she run from protecting her sector?”

  “You should see her standing up. She’s about my age, but she’s the size of a child.”

  “If you want a child, have a child.” But he spoke with resignation this time, and a sort of fatigue such as I had never heard anywhere, his voice wasting away just like his body. “I have some influence left,” Moor’s father almost whispered. “Perhaps I can get you out of your army commitment.”

  There was more silence, and I understood that they were both in despair. I sneaked back to my room and pulled the drapes open. It couldn’t have been very late because here and there people still walked outside, huge strong people with knives hanging by their sides. Once I suspected someone was looking straight at me, and I froze, such was the power in that gaze. The Soom Kali were legendary for their savageness, and yet my friend Moor seemed as gentle as anyone I’d ever met.

  The door knocker tapped softly, and Moor called my name. “Mariska? Are you awake?”

  I pushed open the door. “Yes, I was just looking out the window.”

  He peeked out with annoyance and pulled shut the drapes. “I could get in trouble for having you here.”

  “And what would happen?”

  “You might have no more trouble ever again.”

  “Sometimes I’ve wished for that.”

  He stepped into the room and lowered his voice. “You must take these rules more seriously. They have ways to make you feel they’re killing you once each day for a thousand days.”

  “But what would happen to you?”

  “Trials in Soom Kali can result in only two outcomes: death or freedom. I would be free but would have to go through the trouble of the trial.”

  As he spoke I again felt the heat radiating from him, and this time I seemed to be absorbing it, my face growing so flushed I felt I should look away. I turned my head toward the closed drapes. “Nobody could see me,” I lied.

  “You should be more careful just the same,” he said gently.

  He’d caught more fresh meat, and we ate another sumptuous meal. The dogs, too, ate like kings. Moor had taken them hunting earlier while I slept. He said they learned very fast and deserved good meals. After our meal he sat across from me and showed me how to hold a knife, so when I held the knife, it felt like an extension of my hand. “Most people like to hold it here,” he said. “But I like to hold it this way.” He moved his hand almost imperceptibly. It was quite a science, holding a knife. “I once knew a man who liked to hold the handle even when he threw his knife. It seems impossible, but he was actually a passable knife handler. So in the end you must find your own way. But you must start out the right way. If I teach you nothing else, at least you may be able to protect yourself.”

  “Can a knife protect me from my future?”

  “A knife can change your life, at least in my sector.”

  So while he worked around the house I sat in that kitchen of knives and practiced holding mine. I moved my hand up and down the blade and the handle. But still the knife felt alien to me.

  When Moor finished with his chores he took me for a walk in a forest. Later in my travels I saw other fine forests, but at the time this grove in Soom Kali was the biggest I’d seen. Even this close to the driest parts of Soom Kali, there was a sense of moisture and life in this forest. In Bakshami, even the lakeshores and woods seemed dry and devoid of any life but for the life of the ubiquitous fleas. Here, the moisture of the trees and the heat I felt emanating from Moor made me feel something there was no word for in Bakshami, but what I later learned to call bliss. In Bakshami we might feel a serenity as we sat at storytelling in the warm tranquil nights beneath the clearest sky on the planet, but I had never felt bliss before. In the same way, I sensed that Moor had never felt serenity. We shared with each other a tumult in our hearts—that pain I was born with was his pain as well.

  I touched his arm as we sat quietly in the forest. “How long has your father been sick?” I asked.

  “For three years. The doctors told him he would die several times now. It’s a degenerative disease. It taunts him. A death this slow is the worst kind.”

  “As if there were a best kind.”

  “
Old age, of course. In Soom Kali only four in ten die of old age. Two in ten are killed in skirmishes with Artroro.”

  “In Bakshami many children die of dust viruses. But we have no wars.”

  “You fight no wars, perhaps, but you have them anyway.”

  “Is it true the only reason Forma doesn’t invade the hotlands is because Soom Kali forbids it?”

  “It’s true. We don’t want Forma as neighbors. We have no love of Bakshami, but we liked a neutral country next to us. We were willing to let others pillage your towns and bomb your refugees because we didn’t really care what happened to your towns and refugees. But if they destroy the hotlands, they destroy Bakshami. And as I said, we liked your people as neighbors. We always took for granted what good neighbors you made. Now we see how neighbors who can’t protect themselves can prove troublesome.”

  “You talk about my sector as if it were an object instead of a living thing.”

  “Many times in our history foreigners have betrayed us.”

  The dogs chewed on sticks a short distance away. I remembered that I hadn’t played the rhythms since the day I first spotted the wall. When I’d traveled with the queen, I tried to practice the rhythms almost every night. The sound of something so familiar gave me comfort on those still nights when there was no noise at all except for the breathing of the dogs, my own breath, and the rustle of my hair against my ears. The rhythms are the first thing a newborn baby hears, and the last thing a Bakshami soul hears before relinquishing the body at the death ritual.

  In the forest Moor and I practiced throwing our knives a few times. He said my grandfather had given me a fine knife, with admirable carvings and some valuable jewels in the handle. “It’s weighted nicely, too,” he said. He took the knife from me and threw it at a tree I could barely see. I heard the thunk as it landed solidly in the wood. I practiced at a much closer tree. He also showed me how to change from holding the knife to throw at something far away and holding it to stab something closer by. He said that the knife should seem to have a life of its own as it changed positions in your hand. Indeed, he could change grips from handle to blade with such speed there seemed to be no movement in between—one moment he held the blade, the next the handle.