We walked through grass and wind, Dr. Cahill, Dr. Learner and myself, to meet the riders. Dr. Learner had come fresh from a dig in the desert and was heavily bundled against the steppe’s spring chill, his sweaters and coat making him seem even bigger than he was. Dr. Cahill might have just stepped out of a lecture hall.
“Good afternoon,” he said, stopping just within earshot of the Alyakshin men.
“Greetings of the day that brings us here together in this place,” I translated.
The Alyakshin stood to greet us. Lean, even slight, they did not meet the western image of warriors. They wore felt vests colorfully embroidered, and their long black hair was braided with bright yarn. Their sabers and slender wood javelins had been set aside for a peaceful meeting in another’s camp. The leader, a man perhaps a little younger than Dr. Cahill, stepped forward.
“You ride with these trespassers, woman of the steppe?” he said in the formal way.
“Yes,” I said. “I have come to speak their words in the Alyak tongue.”
“You are from the south. Pelyoshin?”
“I was.”
He was polite, he let it go. He said to Dr. Cahill, “You have ridden across grass grazed by Alyak herds, yet you are strangers, not a tribe we have met in friendship, nor yet one we have met in anger. How shall we meet, on this grass the Alyak herds graze?”
I translated, then added, “He’s being very formal, very polite in the old fashioned way.”
Dr. Cahill glanced at me. “And there’s a formal response, I suppose?”
“Assuming you don’t want outright war.” I gave a faint smile. “From his point of view, inviting him into camp is a bit like a burglar inviting in the man whose house he’s broken into, but not inviting him would be worse. Of course he knows—they all know—who you are and why you’ve come, and that you have government permission to be here. He’s just trying to make a point.”
Dr. Cahill looked the Alyak men over. “He can consider it made,” he said dryly. “By all means, invite them in for a cup of tea.”
The leader of the Alyakshin was named Kehboryavin.
“It is not the trespass on our lands,” he said. “Or not only that. We have learned long since what it means to be conquered by a nation that would put walls around the wind.” He paused to let me translate and sipped his tea. It would seem insipid to him, I knew, even with a spoonful of condensed milk stirred in, but he drank it, unremittingly polite.
“Is that really what he said?” Dr. Learner said. “’Walls around the wind’?”
“Jack.” Dr. Cahill was repressive.
Kehboryavin went on. “But this is not a matter of grazing, or water, or camping rights. This place is a place where the dead wait. You are not of the plains, any more than the hillmen who give you permits to come here, so perhaps you can be forgiven your ignorance. But since I now tell you, you will know: there is a great power buried here that must not be disturbed.”
Dr. Cahill spoke with long pauses for thought. “Tell him it is true there is something powerful buried here. Tell him I know this. Tell him the power here is the power of knowledge, the power of the past. There is no evil to be unearthed here, only a link in the chain of history, and of the lives of the people of the steppe. Tell him that the power we recover, the knowledge, will give his own people strength, like the strength a deep taproot gives to an ancient and flourishing tree. Tell him it is for his people that we have come here to dig.”
The trees on the steppe are stunted, wind-tormented things. The plainsmen trade hides and furs for wood straight enough to make tent poles and javelins. I didn’t mention this to Dr. Cahill. It is difficult enough just to translate the words, never mind the assumptions behind them.
Kehboryavin studied me when I finished, then turned his dark gaze on Dr. Cahill. “We know what is buried here,” he said flatly. “It is you who are in ignorance. Will you listen to the words of one who would teach you what you must know?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Learner before Dr. Cahill could speak.
“Jack,” said Dr. Cahill in exasperation.
“Speaking as an anthropologist, Tom, this is gold he’s offering us. The oral history of the place, of the people buried here, to compare with what we actually find? It’s a gold mine!”
Dr. Cahill frowned. “You know the modern plains people are the descendants of a different group entirely from the barrows people. They supplanted the barrows people more than a thousand years ago.”
“I know that’s what you’re digging to prove. But this could give us a whole new insight into the way populations meet and replace one another. We don’t even know if there was direct contact between the barrows people and their successors. Does the oral tradition about this place actually start with these people’s ancestors finding the barrows and inventing a reason for them, or is it a borrowed tradition from the barrows people themselves? Or was there even an intermediary group between the two? It could be a whole new facet to the investigation here!”
Dr. Cahill sighed. “If we tell him we want to hear what he has to say, it will only give him false expectations. I’m certainly not delaying the dig for you to catalog his superstitions.”
Leroy Paltz, the expedition photographer, said quietly, “If we say we’re interested in his knowledge, give him a role in the dig, some stake in the outcome, he might end up an ally rather than an opponent.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Learner emphatically, and two of the graduate students murmured their agreement.
“Very well.” Dr. Cahill turned to me. “But make it clear that we are going ahead with the dig regardless.”
“Tell him we value his knowledge and are eager to make use of it to direct the excavation and to help interpret what we find,” Dr. Learner said.
I told Kehboryavin. He looked at me a long time, while the wind slapped the fire down and shook the tents. “I think they said much more than that,” he said finally.
“I told you everything they asked me to tell you.”
His expression did not change, but I could feel a door close behind his eyes. “Tell them I will take their words to the elders. Tell them it would be better for them to wait to dig until they have heard what they must hear. Tell them they do not know what danger they could raise.”
Dr. Cahill listened, politely, and nodded. “Thank you,” he said. It was a dismissal. Kehboryavin set his cup aside, stood, and walked away.
When he was out of sight beyond the tents, Dr. Cahill chuckled. “What dig is complete without a superstitious native or two?”
Everyone laughed.
Even me.
The Alyak riders left as simply as they had come, returning to the rest of their tribe to report. For the next six days we labored over the barrows, cutting the recalcitrant sod and sifting the fine loess that the wind blew into everything, eyes and tents and food. Dr. Cahill set the workmen and students to excavating alternate squares along the spines of both barrows, reserving for himself and Dr. Learner the shallow dome-like mound where the two long barrows met in a T.
When I wasn’t relaying instructions to the workmen I assisted Leroy Paltz, the photographer. The blowing grit was a menace to the fragile mechanism of his camera, and even more so to the treated glass plates of film, so we spent a lot of our time constructing and reconstructing a kind of canvas blind, and Leroy had me back up every exposure with a sketch. It was tedious work at this stage, but Dr. Cahill’s enthusiasm kept spirits high—at least, the spirits of the academic contingent. The workmen were growing quickly sullen, but I put that down to the unaccustomed labor (they were all drivers and mechanics, men of status in the city where they’d been hired) and to having to take orders relayed by a woman. But one night, lying awake listening to the wind throb in the walls of my tent, I heard their voices rising in unison from their camp and realized that instead of the songs and boasting stories of earlier nights, those men were singing prayers.
Superstitious natives, Dr. Cahill would say.
My dre
ams were empty of everything but wind.
The Alyakshin returned at noon.
This time only Dr. Learner and I walked out to their camp, Dr. Cahill grudging any time away from his dig. The whole Alyak tribe had not come, I saw, but a fair proportion of it. Women were setting up the felt and lathe ghurdis, while men cut fire pits and kept an eye on the ponies and long-legged sheep grazing south of camp. They were a traditional lot, the Alyakshin, following their herds across this remote reach of the steppe, a long way from the encroachment of civilization. Most of them would never have seen a truck before, or a blond man, or a woman wearing anything but the long tunic and wide felt trousers dictated by tradition. The Alyak women were too busy, the men too polite, but the children stared and stared.
The man Kehboryavin met us on the edge of their camp with three elders, a hearty grandmother almost as broad as she was tall, and two sexless beings withered so dry by age it was a wonder the wind did not snatch them up and scatter them into dust.
Dr. Learner said, “Good afternoon.”
I said, “He gives you good greetings this day, honored elders, and wishes of health and fair journeying to you and yours.”
The ancients nodded. Kehboryavin studied the work taking place over my shoulder. The grandmother said, “My, such fine manners in a foreigner. And so much said in two little words!”
I blushed. “It was his meaning, grandmother.”
“Hmm.” She studied Dr. Learner a moment, then turned to me with shrewd black eyes nested in wrinkles. It was a look that took me back to childhood. She said, “Pelyoshin, I think my grandson said?”
In the grip of manners and memory both, I told her my name, my mother’s and grandmothers’ names. She took in my jodhpurs and plain shirt, and the bobbed hair dictated by both fashion and practicality, then dismissed me to say to Dr. Learner, “You are the one who is willing to hear the truth of this place.”
He gave a short, jovial bow. “I am he, madam.”
She looked, as her grandson had never ceased to look, at the industry taking place half a mile to the north. “You should have waited. Come tomorrow after dawn and we will begin.”
Dr. Learner bowed again, making no effort to hide his amusement, and turned away. Before I could follow, the Alyak grandmother said to me, brooking no argument, “You will stay. I have work for you.”
“I should go back, I—”
“I have greater need of you here. Come with me.” And when I hesitated, aware that Dr. Learner was watching with interest, she snapped, “Come!”
It was the voice of my childhood, the voice that could not be disobeyed. I went.
When I returned to camp a little before sunset, Dr. Cahill glanced up from the fire he was building to say mildly, “We could have used your help this afternoon.”
I flushed, grateful for once that my skin was too dark to show it. “I beg your pardon. It—” I wanted to explain the imperatives of a grandmother’s voice. But one thing all my studies have taught me is that some things truly will not translate. I finished lamely, “It won’t happen again.”
He nodded, his mind already back on his fire, or more likely on the dig.
Dr. Learner clapped then rubbed his hands together. “And tomorrow, the great mystery revealed!”
Grandmother Kehboryana sat by the fire, her broad, round-shouldered form dark against the newly risen sun. The cold wind was laden with dew, drenched with the scent of grass. My stomach growled at the smell of fried mutton stew.
“The Story of the Conqueror Yulima,” Grandmother Kehboryana said through me, “is the oldest story of the Alyak nation. It carries the names of our ancestors and of the lands they rode to find this place, their home. On this day, for the first time, those not of Alyak blood will hear this truth. Already, the Alyak heart becomes divided.” That said, she began the story. “These are the events that occurred in the days before days were numbered—”
There is a thing that happens to me when I translate. Perhaps it is common to all translators, I don’t know. But sometimes it seems that the two languages meet and mirror each other, word for word, without any involvement on my part at all, except the rudimentary cooperation of ears, lips and tongue. The rich phrases, soaked in the folkways of the Alyakshin, became straight and stiff and alien when clothed in English, like foreign students at the University clothed in their uncomfortable new tweeds. Dr. Learner fell into a trance of his own, writing, and I, as distantly as if I were reading what he wrote, saw the pageant of the Alyakshin story, their oral history, their truth, roll across the background of the windblown steppe. The people from beyond the known world who swept up the armies of a dozen nations and remade them into their own. The powers that let them conquer, and conquer again, and yet that drove them as unmercifully as they drove the lesser folk under their sway. The lust for the riches of the far west, the only land that resisted their coming and thus, like the winds of frustration, drove their desire into ungovernable need.
“—like the unceasing wind of the east that drives the summer fire until it consumes all the grass under the western sky,” Grandmother Kehboryana said. “And in that time a child was born.”
The sun had risen above the grandmother’s shoulder by this time, sending her shadow streaming across the grass. The clang of shovels and picks rang clear from the dig, counterpoint to the bleating of sheep. Several of the children had settled nearby to listen to the story, sneaking glimpses of Dr. Learner’s pale hair, and of his long hands doing incomprehensible work with paper and pen. Grandmother Kehboryana directed one of the girls to pour out the sugared tea that had been steeping to syrup by the fire. We both sipped before she continued speaking through me, trailing her images across my mind.
“A child who was no child, for, though she was as fine to look upon as any babe, with as sweet a voice and a smile more like sunlight than gold, she bore from the dark of her mother’s womb the hungry soul of a demon. She was the Conqueror Yulima—”
Dr. Learner would occasionally nod at a phrase or a metaphor. I had taken his class on folklore—in fact, it was he who had recommended me to Dr. Cahill as the expedition’s interpreter—so I also recognized what he was hearing. The story contained echoes from a hundred different cultures: the great and terrible leader who nearly transcends his own wickedness by the height to which he brings his people; the challenge to the gods that can not be borne; the humble hero who lays the prideful low. The one moral truth imperative to the primitive society, according to Dr. Learner. The individual with the power to wreak change upon the community must bow to tradition, or be buried by it.
The only new thing here was that the individual, the great leader, the Conqueror who threatened change upon the world, was a woman.
“—That first man of our people, he cried, ‘Wind of the north, wind of the east, wind of the south, come to me! The killing in the west has raised such a darkness that heaven itself has turned black. Come to me, and join your brother of the west to end the dying.’ And of course the winds came, for all the winds are the breath of the gods’ will. And the Conqueror Yulima could not stand before them. Her armies were scattered beyond the earth and she was blown here, where the ancestors of our ancestors, who had been left behind, buried her beneath grass and stone, for of course a woman such as she could not be killed. And here she has lain, for an age and an age, waiting for her tomb to be breached so that she may once again rise to conquer the west.”
The circle of silence the old woman had created with her storytelling closed in around us, a wall of wind separating us from the bleating sheep and the hard labor at the dig.
After a moment, Grandmother Kehboryana drew in a slow breath and let it out, her hands dark and gnarled in her lap. “So you see what you risk with your digging.”
Dr. Learner set his notebook aside and stretched, pressing his hands to his back. “Tell her she has all my thanks. Her knowledge can only add to the knowledge we will gather from the dig. And tell her that if this is the Conqueror Yulima, the stor
ies she will tell us will be given in turn to the Alyakshin. It is the greatest gift we could possibly give them: a return to the present of the power of their past.”
Grandmother Kehboryana thought about this when I had finished. “Tell him this, granddaughter. Tell him we, who have seen our children seek out the knowledge of his cities and come home dying of that knowledge—tell him we know the price that is always paid. All knowledge, and all power, comes at a cost. He would do well to listen.”
When Dr. Learner returned to camp, I went with him, quickly, before the grandmother could call me back.
That night, alone in my tent, I dreamed. No great vision of the mythical past, no window onto the days of the Conqueror’s triumph and fall. The dream I dreamed was an old one, familiar as the sound of loose canvas in the wind. There were the noble buildings and crooked quadrangles of my college. There were the echoing wooden floors, slate blackboards, and diamond-paned windows. There was the mellow chapel bell, the flutter of academic gowns, the pervasive smells of dry rot and tea. And there, where they never had been, never could be, was my family. Mother, brothers, aunts, who’d died so long ago they scarcely had faces, setting up my grandmother’s striped ghurdi on the green rolled grass of the Fellow’s Lawn.
I woke, as I always did, sweating and sick with shame.
The dig was going well, despite the growing reluctance of the native help. The students worked themselves into exhaustion every day, inspired by Dr. Cahill’s fireside lectures in the evenings. I don’t think you could even say he disregarded the grandmother’s warning, so utterly did it fail to impact on his consciousness, but the Conqueror Yulima’s story was the wind that blew his ambition, his desire to know, into a conflagration. Every night he spun a new strand of theory from Dr. Learner’s account of the tale. Each mention of a people conquered, each stage of the conqueror’s journey, was pinned down on the map of the world he carried in his mind. One night, Dr. Learner said, “So what’s next after this dig, Tom? When do you start to trace the Conqueror’s people back to their origins?”
In the Palace of Repose Page 9
