Chapter Two

Master Lunre

My father’s actions were largely incomprehensible to me, guided by his own secret and labyrinthine calculations. He dwelt in another world, a world of intrigue, bargains, contracts, and clandestine purchases of land all over the island. He was in many ways a world in himself, whole as a sphere. No doubt his decisions were perfectly logical in his own eyes—even the one that prompted him, a patriotic islander, to bring me a tutor from Bain: Master Lunre, an Olondrian.

The day began as it usually did when my father was expected home from his travels: the house festooned with flowers and stocked with coconut liquor. We stood by the gate, washed and perfumed and arrayed in our brightest clothes, my mother twisting her hands in her skirt, my father’s wife with red eyes. Jom, grown taller and broad in the shoulders, moaned gently to himself, while I stood nervously rubbing the heel of one sandal on the flagstones. We scanned the deep blue valley for the first sign of the company, but before we saw them we heard the children shouting: “A yellow man!”

A yellow man! We glanced at one another in confusion. My mother bit her lower lip; Jom gave a groan of alarm. At first I thought the children meant my father, whose golden skin, the color of the night-monkey’s pelt, was a rarity in the islands; but certainly the children of Tyom were familiar with my father and would never have greeted a council member with such ill-mannered yells. Then I remembered the only “yellow man” I had ever seen, an Olondrian wizard and doctor who had visited Tyom in my childhood, who wore two pieces of glass on his eyes, attached to his ears with wires, and roamed the hills of Tinimavet, cutting bits off the trees. I have since learned that that doctor wrote a well-received treatise, On the Medicinal Properties of the Juice of the Young Coconut, and died a respected man in his native city of Deinivel; but at the time I felt certain he had returned with his sack of tree-cuttings.

“There they are,” said Pavit, the head house servant, in a strained voice. And there they were: a chain of riders weaving among the trees. My father’s plaited umbrella appeared, his still, imposing figure, and beside him another man, tall and lean, astride an island mule. The hectic screams of the children preceded the company into the village, so that they advanced like a festival, drawing people out of their houses. As they approached I saw that my father’s face was shining with pride, and his bearing had in it a new hauteur, like that of the old island kings. The man who rode beside him, looking uncomfortable with his long legs, kept his gaze lowered and fixed between the ears of his plodding mule. He was not yellow but very pale brown, the color of raw cashews; he had silver hair, worn cropped close to the skull so that it resembled a cap. He was not the leaf-collecting doctor but an altogether strange man, with silver eyebrows in his smooth face and long, fine-knuckled hands. As he dismounted in front of the house I heard my mother whispering: “Protect us, God with the Black-and-White Tail, from that which is not of this earth.”

My father dismounted from his mule and strutted toward us, grinning. I thought I caught an odor off him, of fish, seasickness, and sweat. We knelt and stared down at the bald ground, murmuring ritual greetings, until he touched the tops of our heads with the palm of his fleshy hand. Then we stood, unable to keep from staring at the stranger, who faced us awkwardly, half smiling, taller than any man there.

“Look at the yellow man!” the children cried. “He is like a frilled lizard!” And indeed, with his narrow trousers and high ruffled collar, he resembled that creature. My father turned to him and, with an exaggerated nonchalance, spoke a few foreign words which seemed to slip back and forth in his mouth, which I later learned were a gross distortion of the northern tongue, but which, at the time, filled me with awe and the stirrings of filial pride. The stranger answered him with a slight bow and a stream of mellifluous speech, provoking my mother to kiss the tips of her fingers to turn aside evil. Then my father pointed at me with a gesture of obvious pride, and the stranger turned his piercing, curious, kindly gaze on me. His eyes were a mineral green, the color of seas where shipwrecks occur, the color of unripe melons, the color of lichen, the color of glass.

“Av maro,” said my father, pointing to me and then to himself.

The Olondrian put one hand on his heart and made me a deep bow.

“Bow to him,” said my father. I copied the stranger ungracefully, provoking hilarious shrieks from the children who stood around us in the street. My father nodded, satisfied, and spoke to the stranger again, gesturing for him to enter the cool of the house. We followed them into the courtyard, where the stranger sat in a cane chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his expression genial and bemused.

He brought new air to our house: he brought the Tetchi, the Wind of Miracles. At night the brazier lit up his face as he sat in the humid courtyard. He sat with the old men, speaking to them in his tongue like a thousand fountains, casting fantastic shadows with his long and liquid hands. My father translated the old men’s questions: Was the stranger a wizard? Would he be gathering bark and leaves? Could he summon his jut? There were shouts of laughter, the old men grinning and showing the stumps of their teeth, pressing the stranger to drink our potent homemade liquor and smoke our tobacco. He obliged them as well as he could, though the coconut liquor made him grimace and the harsh tobacco, rolled in a leaf, sent him into a fit of coughing. This pleased the old men enormously, but my father came to his rescue, explaining that allowances must be made for the northerner’s narrow ribcage. In those days we did not know if our guest were not a sort of invalid: he vastly preferred our hot date juice to the liquor the old men loved; he ate only fruit for breakfast and turned very pale at the sight of pig stomach; he rose from his afternoon sleep with a haggard look and drank far too much water. Yet his presence brought an air of excitement that filled the house like light, an air that smelled of festivals, perfume and tediet blossoms, and drew in an endless stream of curious, eager visitors, offering gifts to the stranger: yams baked in sugar, mussels in oil.

My father swelled like a gourd: he was bursting with self-importance, the only one who was able to understand the illustrious stranger. “Our guest is tired,” he would announce in a grave, dramatic tone, causing his family and visitors to retreat humbly from the courtyard. His lips wore a constant, jovial smirk. He spoke loudly in the street. He was moved to the highest circle of council and carried a staff with hawk feathers. Most wonderful of all, he seemed to have lost the capacity for anger and ignored annoyances which formerly would have caused him to stamp like a buffalo. The servants caught his mood: they made jokes and grinned at their tasks, and allowed Jom to pilfer peanuts and honeycombs from the back of the kitchen. Even my father’s wife was charmed by the northerner’s gift of raisins: she waited on him with her smile drawn tight, an Olondrian scarf in her hair.

My mother was most resistant to the festival air in the house. On the night of the stranger’s arrival she burned a bowl of dried herbs in her room: I recognized, by their acrid smoke, the leaves that ward off leopard ghosts. They were followed by pungent fumes against bats, leprosy, and falling sickness, as well as those which are said to rid human dwellings of long-toed spirits. Her face as she moved about the house was exhausted and filled with suffering, and her body was listless because of her nightly vigils by the clay bowls. My father’s wife, strutting anxiously about in her Bainish pearl earrings, lamented that my mother would shame us all with her superstition, but I think she secretly feared that the stranger was in fact some sort of ghost and that my mother would drive him away, and with him our family’s new status. “Talk to your nursemaid,” she begged me. “She is making a fool of your father. Look at her! She has a ten-o’-clock face, like somebody at a funeral.” I did try to speak to her, but she only looked at me mournfully and asked me if I was wearing a strip of charmed leather under my vest. I tried to defend the stranger as nothing more than a man, though a foreigner, but she fixed me with such a dark, steady look that my words died out in the air.

The Olondrian tried, in his clumsy way, to set my mother at ease, knowing that she was the wife of his host—but his efforts invariably failed. She avoided his shadow, kissed her fingers whenever she heard him speak, and refused his raisins, saying in horror: “They look like monkey turds!” Once, in the courtyard, I saw him approach her, at which she hurriedly knelt, as we all did in the first days, being unfamiliar with his customs. I had already seen that the northerner was disturbed by this island tradition, so I hid myself in the doorway to see how he would address my mother. He had learned to touch the servants on their heads to make them rise but seemed reluctant to do the same with my patiently kneeling mother; and indeed, as I now know, to his perplexed Olondrian mind, my mother was in an exalted position as a lady of the house. A sad comedy ensued: the northerner bowed with his hand on his heart, but my mother did not see him, as she was staring down at the ground. Evidently he wished to ask for something, but knowing nothing of our language, he had no means of making himself understood but through gestures and facial expressions. He cleared his throat and mimed the action of drinking with his long hands, but my mother, still looking down at the ground, did not see, and remained motionless. At this the Olondrian bent his long body double and mimed again, trying to catch her eye, which was fixed studiously on the flagstones. Seeing my mother’s acute distress, I emerged at this point from the doorway. My mother made her escape, and I brought our guest a clay beaker of water.

It was proof of the stranger’s tenacious spirit that, through his friendship with Jom, he convinced my mother that he was, if not of this earth, at least benevolent. In those early days it was Jom, with his plaintive voice of a twilight bird, with his small eyes of a young beast, who was at home in the stranger’s company. Jom was my mother’s child: he wore strips of leather under his clothes, iron charms on his wrists, and a small bag of sesame seeds at his waist, and she had so filled his clothes and hair with the odor of burning herbs that we thought our guest would be blown back into the sea if he went near my brother. Yet Jom was excited by the stranger and sought every chance to speak to him—of all of us, only he did not know that our guest could not understand. And the stranger always met him with a smile of genuine pleasure, clasping his hand as Olondrians do with their equals and intimates. In the green bower of the shade trees with their near-transparent blue flowers, the two spoke a language of grunt and gesture and the eloquent arching of eyebrows. Jom taught the northerner his first words in the Kideti tongue, which were “tree,” “orange,” “macaw,” “finch,” and “starling.” My brother was fascinated by the stranger’s long, graceful hands, his gold and silver rings, his earrings set with veined blue stones, and also, as we all were, by the melodies of his speech and his crocodile eyes: another of Lunre’s early words was “green.” One afternoon Lunre brought a wooden whistle from his room, brightly painted, with three small pipes like the flutes of western Estinavet. On these he could play the calling notes of the songbirds of the north: music which speaks of vineyards, olive trees, and sacred rivers. At the strange music my brother wept and asked, “Where are the birds?” The stranger did not answer him but seemed to understand: his smooth brown face was sorrowful, and he put the whistle away, brushing the leaves with his fingertips in a gesture of despair.

I do not know when my mother first joined them under the flowering trees. She must have begun by watching to see that no harm came to her son; sometimes I saw her pause, a tall pitcher balanced on her hip, staring into the trees with alarm in her lovely eyes of a black deer. Bird sounds came from the shadows, the Olondrian’s low chuckle, the sound of my brother’s voice saying patiently: “No, that one is blue.” Somehow my mother entered the trees, perhaps to protect her son—and somehow the Olondrian’s humble expression and sad eyes softened her heart. In those days she began to say: “May good luck find that unfortunate ghost! He sweats too much, and those trousers of his must keep his blood from flowing.” She no longer knelt when she met him, but smiled and nodded at his low bow, and one morning pointed firmly to her chest and said: “Kiavet.”

“Lunre,” the stranger said eagerly, tapping his own narrow chest.

“Lun-le,” my mother repeated. Her sweet smile flickered, a feather on the wind. Soon after this she presented him, shyly, yet with a secret pride, with a vest and a pair of trousers she had sewn for his lanky body. They were very fine, the trousers flowing and patterned with rose and gold, the vest embroidered in blue with the bold designs of both Tyom and Pitot. The stranger was deeply moved and stood for some time with his hand on his heart, his silver head bowed, thanking her earnestly in the language of raindrops. My father’s wife did not fail to sneer at my mother’s kindness to her “ghost,” but my mother only smiled and said serenely: “The Tetchi is blowing.”

When the miracle wind had blown for a month, my father dismissed my old tutor, a dotard with hairy ears who had taught me mathematics, religion, and history. The Olondrian, he explained to me as I sat before him one morning, was to take the old man’s place, tutoring me in the northern tongue. His eyes contracted with pleasure as he spoke, and he waved the stump of his narrow cigar and patted his ample stomach. “My son,” he said, “what good fortune is yours! Someday, when you own the farm, you will feel at ease in Bain and will never be cheated in the spice markets! Yes, I want you to have a Bainish gentleman’s education—the tall one will teach you to speak Olondrian, and to read in books.”

The word for “book” in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, “chamber of words,” the Olondrian name for that tool of enchantment and art. I had no idea of its meaning but thanked my father in a low voice as he smoked his cigar with a flourish and grunted to show that he had heard me. I was both excited and frightened to think of studying with the stranger, for I was shy around him and found his green gaze disconcerting. I could not see how he would teach me, since we shared no common language—but I joined him dutifully in the schoolroom that opened onto the back garden.

He began by taking me by the wrist and leading me around the room, pointing to things and naming them, signing that I should repeat. When I had learned the names of all the objects in the schoolroom, he took me into the kitchen garden and named the vegetables. If there were plants he did not know, he pointed and raised his gull-gray eyebrows, which meant that he wished to learn the Kideti word. He carried with him always a leather satchel of very fine make, in which he kept another leather object, dyed peacock-blue; when he opened it, sheets of rich cotton paper spread out like a fan, some of them marked with minute patterns which he had made himself. The satchel had a narrow pocket sewn to an outside edge, fastened shut with a metal clasp and set with bits of turquoise, and in this my new master kept two or three miraculous ink pens, filled only once a day, with which he made marks in his vallon. Whenever I told him a word in our language, he took out his blue leather book, wrote something in it rapidly, and thanked me with a bow. I was puzzled, for though I admired the book as more cunning than our wooden blocks, I could not understand why he wished to keep track of the number of words he had learned.

At last one morning he brought a wooden box with him into the schoolroom, a splendid receptacle covered with patterns in gilt, paint, and mother-of-pearl. Orange flowers danced on its dark blue lid, and in a cloud of golden stars a pair of ivory hands floated: the hands of spirits. I knew that the box had come from my master’s heavy, ornate sea chest, with which my father’s servants had toiled through the damp forests of the island, in which he was said to keep the awful trappings of a magician, as well as the bones of his wife, her skull as flawless as a bride’s. He set the box on the round, flat stone that served us as a table. I knelt on my mat with my elbows on the stone, cupping my chin in my hands. My master preferred to sit on a stool, hunkering over the table, his legs splayed out, his crooked knees rising above the level of the stone. He did so now, then removed his satchel and set it on the table, and drew from it a slim book bound in red leather.

“For you,” he said in Olondrian, sliding the little book toward me.

I felt a rush of excitement and a tightness in my throat. I took up the book and tried to put my gratitude into my eyes, while my master grinned and cracked his spider’s knuckles, a habit he had when pleased.

The schoolroom was already warm. The long light came in through the garden archway, and the voices of the servants reached us from the kitchen next door. I turned the little book tenderly in my hands, fingering the spine, and at last, with a sharp intake of breath, I opened it. It was empty.

I touched the blank paper and looked at my master reproachfully. He chuckled and squeezed his knuckles, apparently charmed by my disappointment. I knew enough of his speech to ask at last: “What is it, Tchavi?”—addressing him, as I always did, with the Kideti word for “Master.”

He held up a finger, signaling for me to wait and pay attention. He opened the book before me at the first page and smoothed the paper. Then he unlatched the ornate box, revealing a neat shelf suspended inside the lid, flecked with diamonds of yellow paint. Humming cheerfully to himself, he removed several small clay jars, each with a tiny cork in it, and a little red cut-glass bottle. His fingers hovered over the shelf for a moment before selecting an engraved silver pen from an ivory case. Swiftly, with fluid, dexterous movements, he unstoppered one of the jars, releasing the dark odor of rust and aloes. He added a few drops from the glass bottle, which made the room smell of pollen, and stirred the resultant brew with a slender reed. The reed came out very black, and he rested it in a shallow dish. Then he filled the pen from the jar by turning its tip. He wiped its nib on a silken cloth much stained by streaks of ink; then he leaned toward me, bent over my book, and wrote five intricate signs.

I understood now that my master meant to teach me the Olondrian numbers, and how to record accounts, as he did, in neat, small rows in a book. I leaned forward eagerly, imagining how it would please my father when he saw his son writing numbers on paper just like a Bainish gentleman. I had my own secret misgivings, for though the book was easy to carry, much more so than the blocks on which we wrote with a piece of hot iron, it seemed to me that the pages could be easily ruined by seawater, that the ink could smear, and that this was a flimsy way of keeping records. Nevertheless the strange signs, fluted like seashells, captivated me so that my master laughed with pleasure and patted my shoulder. I moved my finger slowly under the row of graceful figures, memorizing the foreign shapes of the numbers one through five.

“Shevick,” my master said.

I glanced at him expectantly at the sound of his familiar mispronunciation of my name.

“Shevick,” he said again, pointing down at the signs on the page.

I said to him proudly, in his own tongue: “One, two, three, four, five.”

He shook his head. “Shevick, Shevick,” he said, tapping the paper. I frowned and shrugged, saying, “Forgive me, Tchavi. I don’t understand.”

My master put up his hands, palms outward, and pushed gently at the air, showing that he was not angry. Then he bent forward patiently. “Sh,” he said, pointing with his pen at the first sign on the page; then he moved the pen to the second sign and said distinctly: “Eh.” But only when he had described all the signs several times, repeating my name, did I understand with a shock that I was in the presence of sorcery: that the signs were not numbers at all, but could speak, like the single-stringed Tyomish harp, which can mimic the human voice and is called “the sister of the wind.”

My back and shoulders were cold, though a hot, heavy air came in from the garden. I stared at my master, who looked back at me with his wise and crystalline eyes. “Do not be afraid,” he said. He smiled, but his face looked thin and sad. In the garden I heard the sound of the Tetchi disrobing herself in the leaves.