Manrie tasted chickpeas and lime, dates and coriander. She took another bite. Taeyaho was watching her, his elbows braced on the table, as if waiting for the moment when he had to encourage her to eat. But she wanted to eat. This was Cloedeya’s food, a small miracle of flavors, and she found her eyes welling with tears as she swallowed.
They were in the Man on the Mountain’s house, and they had missed the caravan by one day. But the food was here, in a large ceramic bowl that Haerahiz had brought out of his subterranean storage room. As if it was a message that Cloedeya had left for her.
Their host was standing in the doorway, watching them. If she looked at him, he would startle, nod, smile, find something to say. She hadn’t forgotten his rehearsed politeness. Or that he thought that the stars were other worlds. She looked up at the blue disc set in the ceiling above the table. The blue light that fell down from it made the room dusky, and she thought *at this table, it’s always dinner. Never breakfast.*
She could feel Daas Draebeye shifting around inside of her. He liked the taste of the chickpeas, the smell of lime as she raised her fingers to her lips. He didn’t know that her fingers were different from the last time she’d been here. That they bore the ravishments of her abuse, the nails misshapen by the quills she’d stuck under them, her palms scraped raw by gripped stones. Daas Draebeye wanted to know about the discs, but how did you explain color to a blind man? He had been fascinated by the seat of satisfaction when she went to relieve herself, and then had become overly aware of her bodily functions. She had found herself growing shy under the strength of his regard, and the guardsman had chuckled from somewhere deep within her mind.
“Why don’t you eat with us?” she asked Haerahiz, and he gave Taeyaho a sharp look, as if he were waiting for permission. It annoyed Manrie. He hadn’t been so diffident when she had been here on her own. Taeyaho kept watching her, as if he had forgotten that Haerahiz was there.
The food was working in her, as was the joy of her discovery that the caravan was so close by. After they finished eating, they would bathe and then they would go in pursuit of their friends. They could go much faster on foot than the wagons could travel. They might even catch the caravan before night fall.
“The Man on the Mountain believes that the stars are other worlds,” Manrie told Taeyaho between bites, by way of making conversation. “He looks at them in his telescope. He can even see himself on one of those other worlds. How could that be, I wonder? Maybe there’s another telescope on that world, and its lens is a mirror. Maybe he’s just looking at a reflection of himself here. But then you have to wonder who lives on that other world. Who is hiding behind the telescope’s mirror?”
Taeyaho frowned and shifted in his seat. There was a sore on the bridge of his nose, and it marred his beauty. But his breath smelled like lime, and the blue from the disc seemed to inlay his hair. She glanced towards the corner, where she had seen Aizdha standing in a beam of light. That was in the springtime. Many moons ago now, she thought, though maybe not. She had been living too much life. She couldn’t keep track of time. It annoyed her that neither Daas Draebeye nor the guardsman were interested in marking the passage of days. It was a service that they could provide, to pay for their travel within her.
“Come,” she said to Haerahiz again. “Come and sit with us.” When he did, he angled his chair away from Taeyaho, as if he were slightly afraid of him. “Taeyaho, have you ever visited here before?” she asked.
Taeyaho looked at the Man on the Mountain, as if expecting him to answer. Haerahiz paused, composing his words, picking them carefully. “I have never seen this boy before,” he said.
It was strange, and Manrie was annoyed. As if there was a secret that she wasn’t being let in on. “How many discs did Cloedeya take?” she asked.
Haerahiz frowned. “Many,” he said. “But there are always more.”
“Did he tell you what they’re for? What they do?”
He looked at Taeyaho, who wouldn’t meet his eyes. “They look into other worlds,” he said at last.
“They capture the dead, at least,” she said lightly. She wiped her fingers on her robes and looked around. “I thought that this place might be different.”
“Different?”
“Well, you succeeded, didn’t you? You dug through to the upside down river. It’s water is overflowing the pit. Why hasn’t someone swum through the hole yet? I thought you might have many visitors from the upside down land.”
“There is no upside down land,” Taeyaho said, as if he were refuting an old argument.
“How do you know?” she teased. “There might be. After all, the Enrieghos walked through a lace hole from somewhere else.”
“There’s only an underground river. Under this valley. Haerahiz dug through to it, that’s all,” Taeyaho said. He didn’t want to be teased. She wondered if the ghost of the old woman was annoying him today.
“You seem to know a lot about it for someone who’s never been here.”
He stared at her. “You told me about it,” he said.
She stared back at him. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I’m going to go swim in the pit. Maybe I’ll swim down to the hole and look through it. Do you want to bathe?”
“I’ll bathe at the pump,” Taeyaho said.
“Good. And then we’ll go.” She looked at Haerahiz. “Thank you for the meal.”
He nodded, thought, and then said, “You’re welcome,” with an air of relief, as if he hadn’t been sure that he could remember the correct words for politeness.
She went down to the pool.
The mountain air was very bright, and the sunlight was fine, like it had been sieved. There was no privacy beside the pool. She was sure that the men in the house could see her as she stripped off her robes, if they cared to look. But Taeyaho wouldn’t, out of diffidence, and Haerahiz wouldn’t, out of disinterest. Besides, she had been a slave. A memory flashed through her mind as she sat on a pile of discs beside the pool. She thought about the memory as she unlaced her boots. She was sure that it was her own. Men and women bathing in the public baths. Steam rising, and gazes flashing to and fro. People assessing each other, and maybe there had been some desire in it, but mostly they were asking the question *would she fetch more than I would?* Competitions over nothing. A way to gild each other’s misery. She didn’t think she had gone there more than once. She had been invited by another slave. A friend, she thought. Only she couldn’t remember the girl’s name. It didn’t matter. Someone she had left behind, long before Aizdha died.
She dove into the pool. It was so cold that it struck the breath out of her, and she had to rise immediately to the surface and thrash about, gasping. The water was curiously clear. The pit had been dug from loose, sandy dirt. She had hauled it in buckets as Haerahiz shoveled it up. Yet it had settled to the bottom of the pool as if it were clay. She wondered if it had covered the hole and blocked the passage to the upside down world.
She took a deep breath and dove. It wasn’t far to the bottom, and sunlight pressed through the water as if it were the sky. She could see the bubbles that streamed from her mouth. There was the hole in the center of the pool. She swam to it and stared down into its darkness. Like a well. Shouldn’t it be more like a fountain? Shouldn’t water be bubbling up through it? She reached out a hand, intending to put her arm in and feel its sides, but the guardsman woke up and told her not to. There was something about the hole. A sense of something beyond it. She swam back to the surface and tread water, thinking. Daas Draebeye wanted her to dive again. He wanted her to reach in and touch the hole’s sides. *But if I do,* she thought, *I might be pulled through to another world.*
Words came back to her, out of Daas Draebeye’s memory. *So many of us died, in those first years.* The sun was bright and the trees that lined the cliffs above her were lush with green. There was a pleasant hint of autumn in the air. A bird was calling from somewhere off to the west. An irretasha. Called the “hope bird” by some. Too common for the bestiary, but pretty, with its golden plume and silver wing tips. Her body was cold, and it wasn’t just because the water was chilly. She took a deep breath and swam back down.
She floated above the hole, studying it. The sunlight in the water seemed to shy away from it. She could almost hear voices speaking on the other side of it, their tones hushed, as if they were plotting something. The guardsman was wary. A memory. Sneaking up on an encampment at night. Two men who had kidnapped a woman in a little town. Lueked had killed them with her bow. He hadn’t wanted to look at what they had done to the woman.
Manrie swam back to the surface. She raced to the pool’s side and climbed out. She stood dripping, looking up at the house. Taeyaho and Haerahiz had appeared in the doorway. They weren’t looking at her. They were speaking to each other, their bodies leaning forward with considerable intensity. She wondered if she had ever seen Taeyaho look so intense.
Then her eyes fell on the discs piled beside the pool. It was ridiculous that Haerahiz had so many of them that they littered his valley, a mere inconvenience, something to be dug up and set aside. She imagined that Cloedeya and the others had filled a wagon with them, but there seemed to be an endless supply. Their colors were dull now, but she could see that they were various. If she spread them out on the ground, she could make a mosaic of them, could arrange them in the pattern of a face. She thought of the odd mating dance that she and Praeda had seen high in the mountains. The revelation of Aizdha’s face. She wondered, idly, if the birds could have made any face. She imagined her own face made of wings, or of discs, and saw them shifting positions, forming Daas Draebeye’s face, and the guardsman’s, and Lokeyn’s, and Taeslahbin’s, and the starving girl.
Perhaps the ghost that was possessing Taeyaho would stay here, if they left to find Cloedeya without taking any discs with them. Perhaps Daas Draebeye and the guardsman would stay as well. It was odd that there were no ghosts in the valley. That Aizdha’s ghost was the only one she had ever seen in the Man on the Mountain’s house. Maybe no one had ever died here. Unless Haerahiz was eating the ghosts, just like she was. Unless they were riding him, all of the time. It would account for so much. His strangeness. His abstraction. No one knew why the ghosts were rising. What if it had begun here?
She slowly turned to gaze at the pool. What if he had dug through? What if he had discovered a way into the Previous World, and found that everyone there was dead? Maybe they were just following their descendants, seeking living humans who could bury them, attend to them, help them find peace? There was something in the corner of her mind. A missing memory, like a missing tooth. A woman who had abandoned a daughter, yet still came to gaze upon her. A haunting. Manrie could see her, wrapped in a shawl, standing against a low wall. And then the image dissipated. She shook her head. It was foolishness. She knew many of the ghosts she’d seen. They hadn’t come from the Previous World.
She bent and took the top disc off of the pile. It was red and marbled with swirls of black. It lay smooth and heavy in her hands. She felt the guardsman and Daas Draebeye shift inside of her. Their attention left her, and she realized that she had been laboring under their scrutiny. She glanced at the house, but Taeyaho and Haerahiz had gone back inside. She stepped to the edge of the pool and plunged in.
The shock of cold almost forced the disc from her hands, but she swam down and down, towards the hole. She thought that she could hear voices, murmuring at her through the bright water. The disc fit over the hole and lay heavily across it. As if it were being drawn by the voices and the darkness. The sense of someone speaking fell away. A few bubbles escaped around the edges. She swam in place for a moment, her hands reluctant to leave the disc. She could feel her heart beating in her ears. Then she turned and swam upwards, desperate for breath.
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She crawled out onto the edge of the pool and lay still. The sunlight shone down on her naked body. She felt it warm her. Her body was strangely light, and a strange happiness pervaded her mind. She lay in the sun’s beams, basking. Then she realized that she was alone. The guardsman was gone. Daas Draebeye was gone. She swelled with love for the world. It was as if Daas Draebeye had taken all of her worry, her sorrow, and balled it up inside of himself, like a tumor. Even when he had ridden her, she had felt happier, as if her sadnesses were iron filings, and he had been drawing them down into the magnet of his despair. And now he was gone, having taken all sorrow with him. As the guardsman had taken all hint of wariness, of cynical fear. She felt the world swell around her as she lay there. And she knew that it was good and beautiful.
She washed her robes in the pool. The water had begun to cloud. She tried peering into its depths, to see if she could see the old guardsman and the blind scholar swimming near the bottom. She smiled. There was nothing to see, but she could picture them. The guardsman lean and wiry, his gray hairs plastered against his arms. The blind scholar nosing forward through the water, enjoying the way it moved over his skin. She wished that she could bless them, could give them a parting kiss.
Then she stood and walked back up to the house.
Taeyaho and Haerahiz were in the clay yard. The strange old man was digging clay for one of his pipes. Taeyaho stood watching him, an expression of exasperated love on his beautiful face. He turned his eyes on Manrie and regarded her patiently. She found herself wishing that he would sing.
She came to his side and said, “Baenlaez was wrong. This world isn’t trying to murder us. It isn’t cruel like that. It loves us.”
Something deadened in Taeyaho’s eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“Can’t you feel it? In the sunlight? In the mountain air? A benevolence.”
Taeyaho didn’t answer. She had expected him to share in her sense of joy. The boy who had come walking along the stream, swinging a line of bluegills, would have laughed with delight at her assertion. He would have sung something to the ridges above them. But he had been changed. By the farm. By his confinement in the upper room of the homestead. She felt a piercing grief as she regarded him. And a great fear. What if Cloedeya and the others had changed as well?
“We should go,” she said. “Have you bathed?”
“I am clean.” He watched Haerahiz for a moment longer, then nodded. “We will be going,” he called.
The Man on the Mountain paused in his digging. “They won’t be far. Turn north when you come to the road.”
There was a stack of discs beside the door that led out of the yard. Manrie paused beside it and picked one up. She handed it to Taeyaho and then watched him as he turned it in his hands. He lifted his eyes to her and held her in his questioning gaze. Then he looked back down at the disc, as if he were alarmed. After a moment a smile flickered across his lips. “Manrie,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “She’s left you, hasn’t she? You’re free of her ghost.”
“Why can’t I see her?”
“They’re hard to see, during daylight.”
He nodded, paused, then set the disc back down carefully. “Am I leaving her with Haerahiz?”
“He will know what to do with her.”
Another question in his eyes, but he said nothing. They went back through the house, pausing in the guest room to pick up the backpack. Manrie settled it onto her shoulders. She didn’t want Taeyaho to carry it. She wanted him to feel free, light, to let joy cascade through his body without hindrance. They headed down the dry river bed.
When they came to the pool Taeyaho stopped and looked at it. “Why is it silting over?”
“I had an idea,” she told him. “What if the hole that Haerahiz dug actually went through to the Previous World? What if the ghosts were coming from there?”
His reaction was so startling that she backed away from him. His face went white. His hands clutched at his sides. “Impossible,” he murmured. But he looked down into the pool. He studied the surface as if the ripples across it were a kind of language. “Why do you say that?” He asked, after a long minute.
“Well, they have to come from somewhere.”
“It is a trick of the land,” he said. His voice sounded different. Harsh and unyielding. “It is trying to scare us. It is not enough that it rejects us. It has decided to reject our dead.”
“You sound like Baenlaez. I told you, the land doesn’t think. Not the way we think. It isn’t plotting against us.”
He was wrestling with something. His shoulders were shaking. She half expected him to start reciting the farmers’ tenets, saying * There are only three truths that last forever. The first is that the land wants to kill us. The second is that we are greater than the land.* Speaking in the voice from the cradle. As if that voice had possessed him more powerfully than any ghost. She made a move towards him, intending to take him in her arms, but he shied away. Then he seemed to get himself under control. “Perhaps,” he said softly. “Perhaps.”
He turned towards her and allowed her to embrace him. But his posture was tense, his muscles tight. As if he were prepared for violence. There was something hard in the sleeve of his robe. It alarmed her. Was he carrying a weapon? She let him go and looked at him. “You go first,” she said softly. “Lead us out of this valley.”
He was still limping. She watched his gait. Watched the way his shoulders seemed to break the air with their rigidity. Her mind swelled with possibilities. He was not possessed. He had been converted by the farmers. He was leading her back to Baenlaez. But then why had he led her away? Why had he led her here? He had wanted to go through the door into the lace hole outside of Daas Draebeye’s subterranean room. Why? Where had the pack come from? Why was it so full, as if readied for a long journey? He seemed to know Haerahiz. How?
She puzzled over these questions as they reached the road and turned north. She let her stride falter, let him get far ahead of her. The sun was already at its zenith. She knew that she didn’t want to spend another night alone in his company. She realized that she was wary, and this gave her pause. She’d thought that the guardsman had taken all wariness from her. But maybe the ghosts left as much as they took. Maybe those who carried ghosts mixed themselves with them, becoming something new, like with one of Cloedeya’s recipes. *I am not Manrie, anymore,* she thought, *or I’m not only Manrie. I’m part starving girl and part guardsman, part scholar and part madman, part scout. But I’m also part Cloedeya. I’m also part Praeda. And part Uku. All the people I’ve met, they’re part of me. Koenbahki. Melsa. Even Tafaemi. I’m part Taeyaho.*
That thought caused her pain, and she almost stumbled. He was walking quickly, not seeming to care if she kept up with him. She let the distance between them grow. Miles passed by. Miles and miles. The sun began to slope towards the west. The backpack was heavy on her shoulders. Sweat was running down into her boots. She stopped to urinate and didn’t call to him. Yet he was waiting for her a little further on. He asked for food and water, and they ate.
“We need to walk some more,” she said. “It’s too early to make camp. We can catch them before nightfall.” He nodded, but said nothing. He took the backpack from her and settled it on his shoulders.
This time she went first. The rays of the sun strengthened as they slanted sharply from the horizon. The mountains loomed above them, and the road twisted and turned, climbing through the foothills. *If we don’t find the caravan before nightfall, I’ll wait until he’s asleep and then go and look for them in the darkness,* she thought to herself. She could feel him at her back. She did not want him following her through the night.
The sun disappeared and a blue glow lingered in the sky. A drum owl began to beat its rhythm, somewhere high in the cliffs above them. They came to a little stone hut, one of the resting places for travelers that had been built along the road. The last person to use it had observed the courtesies, had collected kindling and left it beside the fire pit. Taeyaho put the pack down beside it.
“We could go farther,” she suggested, but it was a ruse. A memory. Not hers, but the starving girl’s. *“Your husband has asked for parsley in his soup. There is some growing on Crohmit’s Hill. Won’t you come gather it with me?” *The starving girl’s voice wheedling, her desire naked. But Praevid had looked so beautiful that morning, with the sun slanting in to make her eyes glow.
Manrie frowned and sat beside the fire pit as Taeyaho lit the kindling. *I am like a barrow,* she thought. *The dead are buried in me. It doesn’t matter if their ghosts have left me. They keep whispering in my mind.* She wanted to say this to Taeyaho. She would have said it to him a few days before. Now she kept silent. She chewed at the jerky he gave her.
“Won’t you sing something?” She asked when they had finished their meager meal.
He smiled at her sadly. Then he sang. But the song was worse than silence. It was the little song that he had sung while the scout was leading them to the homestead.
“You’ve sung that before,” she told him.
“Yes.”
“But you never do that. You never repeat a song. You make them up, singing about everything you see.”
His face shuttered. A look of deep suspicion. “You only think that,” he said after a moment. “I have many songs. I sing what I want to.”
She said nothing in return. She lay down next to the meager fire, her body turned away from him. The land stretched away to the west, across the sand hills and then the plains. Melsa had said that they’d found Taeyaho out there, wandering naked. Perhaps it had only been the kindness of the caravan that he had responded to. Perhaps he was like one of the beasts that mimicked their surroundings, the chameleon dogs of the Copper Hills, or the reed snakes of the Dahladura Marshes. But if that were so, then he was mimicking her. His blankness, his secretiveness, his hostility, was only a reflection of herself. *Am I like that?* she wondered. *Do I meet every suggestion with suspicion? Do I never say what I really think or feel?* But how could she know what she was like, anymore? Five ghosts had ridden her. She closed her eyes. She had to find the caravan. They could remind her that she was herself. They could reassure her.
She didn’t let herself sleep, although her body ached from walking and a dull lethargy invaded her. She found some pine needles on the ground in front of her blankets and pushed their sharp ends under her fingernails to stay awake. Time passed. She turned and looked back. Taeyaho was lying on the other side of the dying fire, his back to her. The pack was leaning against the side of the little traveller’s house.
She slipped carefully from the blankets and looked back at him. He didn’t stir. She moved slowly out onto the trail and down it. The moon had risen, and it provided enough light. The road wound around a hill. Still, she waited to start running until she had counted a thousand steps. Then she sprinted, trying to put as much distance between herself and Taeyaho as possible. Even as she ran, she could feel him looming at her out of the darkness. She felt very alone, and very afraid. Her footsteps pounded on the dry roadbed. What had she to fear? Taeyaho? The beautiful boy? Her friend?
She glanced back and was sure that she saw a figure on the road behind her. Without thinking she broke from the road and ran into a copse of trees that hugged the mountainside. Camphor trees, twisted and fragrant. She crouched down beside a trunk and watched the road. No one came along it. And yet she was sure that he was following her.
A thought occurred. Perhaps the ghost of the old woman hadn’t left him. Maybe the disc had failed to take her from him. Maybe he was sending her in pursuit. Moonlight flattened the landscape. The road seemed empty. But she felt the loom of a spirit somewhere in the mountains around her.
She moved through the trees, paralleling the road, going slower, going quietly. She thought of Praeda’s mother, of the way the rock had moved and saved them from the zaizectu. *If you’re here,* she thought, *if you haunt these mountains, and can move the very stones, protect me now.* The grove of trees was thinning out. There was the sound of running water ahead. Shadows, the loom of stones, littering the escarpment. Roots tangling her footsteps. Then a break, a channel cut in the stone, a stream tumbling down it far below. She squinted through the trees at the road. There was a bridge there. But was something moving on the bridge? Some grim and seeking shape?
She would have to leap across the channel, from one hard, lichen covered stone the next. The image of her body, broken in the stream below flashed through her mind. But she also remembered that she was brave. She heard Aizdha say to her, *You did well. It did not frighten you very much, did it? You could have stayed in its presence much longer.* What had he been referring to? Some creature they had stalked. A great bull, with twelve horns sprouting from its back, and hooves that shed poison onto the ground. Her heart was beating loudly. Yes, she had been brave. Brave enough to let her fear ride her, and not run. She took a few steps back from the ledge, then ran forward and leapt.
She landed safely on the other side, but could not break her momentum. The rock was slanting downwards. There were trees below, looming up, their trunks straight and unforgiving. She could barely control her run and barely managed to dodge between the first few trunks. And then something else was there in the darkness, an enormous shape, and a snorting sound. A whinny. She saw dull light. Then someone was standing, and she was crashing into him.
Arms came around her. She smelled cloves and pickle brine and roasted lamb. Then a startled voice was saying, “Manrie? Is it really you? How are you here?” And she was crying.