Gry couldn’t come to visit me often while the work of harvest was going on and every hand was needed every day. And there was no need for her to give Coaly and me further training; we were by now, as my mother said, a six-legged boy with an unusually keen sense of smell.
But along in October, Gry rode Blaze over for the day, and after Coaly and I had shown her whatever our new achievements were, we settled down, as always, to talk. We discussed the quarrels at Cordemant and Drummant, and remarked sagely that as long as they were busy feuding with their own people they were less apt to invade and poach and thieve across their borders. We mentioned Vardan. Gry had heard that the child was dying.
“Could it have been Ogge, do you think?” I asked. “That night. When my mother was there, and heard… He could have been casting his power on the girl.”
“And not on Melle?”
“Maybe not.” I had worked out this hopeful idea some while ago and it had seemed plausible to me; spoken, less so.
“Why would he put the wasting on his own granddaughter?”
“Because he was ashamed of her. Wanted her dead. She was…” I heard the thick, weak voice,
Gry did not say anything. I had the sense that she wanted to speak but found she couldn’t.
“Mother’s been much better,” I said. “She walked all the way to the Little Glen with Coaly and me.”
“That’s good,” Gry said. She did not say and I would not think that, six months ago, such a walk would have been nothing to Melle; she would have gone on with me and climbed to the spring in the high hills and come home singing. I would not think the thought but it was there.
I said, “Tell me what she looks like.”
That was an order Gry never disobeyed; when I asked her to be my eyes, she tried as best she could to see for me. “She’s thin,” she said.
I knew that from her hands.
“She looks a little sad. But just as beautiful.”
“She doesn’t look ill?”
“No. Only thin. And tired, or sad. Losing the baby…”
I nodded. After a while I said, “She’s been telling me a long story. It’s part of Hamneda’s story. About his friend Omnan, who went mad and tried to kill him. I can tell you part of it.”
“Yes!” said Gry in a contented tone, and I could hear her settle herself to listen. I reached out to Coaly’s back and left my hand there. That touch was my anchor in the unseen real world, while I launched out into the bright, vivid world of story.
Nothing we had said about my mother had been dire, or even discouraging, yet without saying it we had said that she was not well, that she was not getting better, that she was getting worse. We both knew it.
My mother knew it. She was bewildered and patient. She tried to be well. She couldn’t believe that she couldn’t do what she had used to do, or half what she had used to do. “This is so foolish,” she would say, the nearest she ever came to complaint.
My father knew it. As the days shortened and the work lessened and he was home longer and more often, he had to see that Melle was weak, that she tired easily, that she ate little and had grown thin, that some days all she could do was sit by her fire in her brown shawl and shiver and doze. “I’ll be well when it gets warm again,” she would say. He would build up her fire and seek what else he could do, anything to do for her. “What can I bring you, Melle?” I could not see his face, but I heard his voice, and the tenderness of it made me wince with pain.
My blindfold and my mother’s illness worked together in one way that was good: we both had time to indulge our love of storytelling, and the stories carried us out of the dark and the cold and the dreary boredom of being useless. Melle had a wonderful memory, and whenever she searched it she found in it another story she had been told or had read. If she forgot part of the tale, she, like me, filled in and invented freely, even if it was a story from the holy texts and rituals, for who was to be shocked and cry heresy, here? I told her she was a well: she let down the bucket and it came up full of stories. She laughed at that. And she said, “I’d like to write down some of the things in the bucket.”
I couldn’t prepare the linen and ink for her myself, but I could tell Rab and Sosso, our two young housekeepers, how to go about it, and they were happy to do anything for Melle.
These two women were Caspros through their fathers, neither of whom had had any gift of the lineage. They inherited their position in the household from their mothers, who, together with my mother, had trained them thoroughly. During Melle’s illness they took full control of domestic matters, running the house according to her standards, and always plotting how to make her life easier. They were warmhearted, energetic women. Rab was engaged to be married to Alloc, though neither seemed to be in a hurry to marry. Sosso had announced that in her opinion there were enough men underfoot already.
They learned to stretch the canvas and mix the ink, and my father devised a kind of bed table, and Melle set to writing down all she could remember of the sacred tales and songs she had learned as a girl. Some days she wrote for two or three hours. She never said why she was writing. She never said that it was for me. She never said that to write was to affirm that one day I’d be able to read what she wrote. She never said that she wrote because she knew she might not be here to speak. She said only when Canoc anxiously scolded her for wearing herself out at the writing, “It makes me feel that everything I learned when I was a girl isn’t just going to waste. When I write it down, I can think about it.”
So she would write in the morning, and rest in the afternoon. Towards evening Coaly and I would come to her room, and often Canoc, and she’d go on with whatever hero tale we were in the midst of, or a story of the time when Cumbelo was King, and we’d listen to her, there by the hearth, in the tower room, in the heart of winter.
Sometimes she said, “Orrec, you go on with it now.” She wanted to know, she said, if I remembered the stories, if I could tell them well.
More and more often she began the story, and I ended it. One day she said, “I’m too lazy to tell a story. Tell me one.”
“Which one?”
“Make one up.”
How did she know I made stories up, following them in my mind through the long dull hours?
“I thought about some things Hamneda might have done while he was in Algalanda, that weren’t in the story.”
“Tell them.”
“Well, after Omnan left him in the desert, you know, and he had to find his way alone…I thought about how thirsty he was. It was all dust, the desert, as far as the eye could see, hills and valleys of red dust. Nothing growing, no sign of a spring. If he didn’t find water, he’d die there. So he began walking, going north by the sun, for no reason except that north was the way home to Bendraman. He walked and he walked, and the sun beat on his head and back, and the wind blew the dust in his eyes and nostrils so it was hard to breathe. The wind got stronger and began to blow the dust in circles, and a whirlwind rose up in front of him and came towards him, picking up the red dust and whirling it high. He didn’t try to run away, but stood still and held out his arms, and the whirlwind came on him and picked him up, whirled him up into the air, coughing and choking with the dust. It carried him over the desert, whirling him round all the time and choking him. Finally the sun began to set. Then the wind dropped. And the whirlwind died down, and sank down, and dropped Hamneda at the gates of a city. His head was still whirling, he was too dizzy to stand up, and covered all over with red dust. He crouched there with his head down, trying to catch his breath, and the guards at the gate peered at him. It was twilight. One said,
“Somebody left a big clay jar there,” and the other one said, “It’s not ajar, it’s a figure, a statue. A statue of a dog. It must be a gift to the king.” And they decided to carry it into the city…”
“Go on,” Melle murmured. And I went on.
But now I come to a place in this story I do not want to go through. A desert. No whirlwind to pick me up and carry me across it. Every day was one step farther into it.
There came a day when my mother put away the canvas and ink and said she was too tired to write any more for a while. There came a day when she asked me to tell a story, but shivered and dozed through it, not hearing it, only hearing my voice. “Don’t stop,” she said, when, thinking I was only making her more wretched, I tried to let my voice die away so she could sleep. “Don’t stop.”
