“There is nothing to know.”
She shook her head. “Well,” she said, “maybe just the one. You did get a beating, after all, just to hear one.” Then she began:
Vistas of dead cities assaulted my consciousness. But this time there were new places, cities I had not glimpsed before. Cities of glass. Cities in the sky. Even cities floating among the stars. Perhaps, as she had suggested, not all of these kingdoms were dead; some had yet to be created. I closed my eyes and savored the sweetness of them all.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Does it matter, my name?”
“Yes, it does. A man’s name is his being, his essence.”
“All the more reason why I have none.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You come to me, begging to hear my songs, but I know nothing of you. Where are you from? What do you do? How is it that you have come to me?”
Agna’s father burst into the courtyard, surrounded by a dozen boys. They carried chisels and hammers and walked briskly in my direction.
“Agna!” her father shouted. “Stand back!” He smacked the head of a hammer into his palm. “You’re dead, stranger, do you hear me?”
I backed away. They could not hurt my true essence, of course, but they could destroy my suit. I needed it to last, for Atleiu was a fickle demon and would not craft me another one for aeons.
“Who are you?” she said to her father. “And what do you want with us?”
“What?” her father shouted. “Has he drugged you? You’re safe now, baby! Papa’s here!”
“Who?” she said. She looked like she was going to be sick. “I don’t feel right. Something’s wrong.”
But I had to leave. I fled the courtyard through the rear gate, and the boys pursued. I ran through crowded streets, hiding behind bales of tobacco and under piles of manure. When I was certain I had lost them, I headed back to my brothers in the Jeen. I was not troubled. By morning, her father and his rabble would forget.
“We have followed you,” my brother said to me that evening in the Jeen, as the bright stars oppressed us. “You entered a city in the guise of a man and walked among its people, touching them. This night, their walls hold firm. The winds are calm, and their children do not scream. Tell us why, Brother, you’ve broken our trust?”
I dared not reveal Agna’s power to enthrall with her song, lest they try to usurp her for their own. But I could not deny what they had witnessed. “We have no rules,” I said, “nor laws preventing me from doing what I have done. I followed my will.”
“But you are a thing of destruction,” my brother said. “That is your nature. What do you seek in the world of form?”
“Sometimes, in the winds of the Jeen, I hear whispers of human things. Have you never been curious to know what they are?”
“Sometimes, yes. But if I satisfy my curiosity, what purpose does it serve? The curiosity vanishes. One day, the thing which piqued my interest will vanish, too. All is impermanent.”
“Then so, too, is my interest in this city,” I said. “It will vanish. Your concern will vanish, too.”
“As all things do. But now our brothers need to know: What is it that draws you there, in the morning sun, to walk among them without destruction?”
I paused before answering. “Of all the cities we sundered, Brother,” I said, “how many do you remember?”
“Not many,” he said.
“None?” I said.
He paused. “Perhaps.”
“I go to that city, dear Brother, to remember.”
“But why? Nothing is worth remembering. Memories, like cities, fade.”
I felt pain when I realized that one day Agna would vanish from the earth. “What are we then, without our memories?”
“We are nothing, Brother. We have and will always be nothing. You may convince yourself, for a time, that you are more, but it is only self-deception.”
And with these words, my brother left me.
In the winds of the Jeen I heard a laugh.
I searched the desert six times to make sure I was in the right place. Yes, this was the spot of sand where Gelecek had once stood. Like a drying oasis, the city’s circumference had shrunken inward. Its walls were devoid of grandeur. A few leaning towers thrust into a cloudless sky, and scattered buildings spotted an uninspiring landscape.
And Agna’s house was gone.
I entered the city and hunted for her within its changed streets. “Where am I?” I asked its residents.
“This is Gelecek,” they responded forlornly, as if the city’s name itself was a curse.
“There was a foundation,” I said to an elderly woman mashing chickpeas. “On Posterity Hill. Do you know it?”
She shook her head. “Never heard of it.”
“There is a girl,” I said. “Agna, daughter of a seamstress. Have you heard of her?”
The old woman squinted rheumy eyes at me. “Nay, but there’s the seamstress guild up on Trajen Row. Why don’t you bother them?”
I lost my way several times but eventually found Trajen Row, a cobbled dead-end street, with hundreds of dyed linens drying from hemp lines like standards. The air reeked of chemicals, and colored puddles filled the cracks between stones. Inside cramped buildings, hundreds of seamstresses stuck needles into cloth, combed lamb’s wool, or threaded looms. I found Agna’s mother working in a corner, her needlework tiny feats of prestidigitation.
She looked much thinner than I remembered, and her face was wrinkled and bitter.
“I’m looking for Agna,” I said. “Where is she?”
“Who the
“I’m a friend. I was supposed to meet her today.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Agna, your daughter.”
She stopped her stitching and looked up at me. “Is this a joke? Did the girls put you up to this?”
“No. Please! Where is she?”
She started to cry. “You’re cruel. Go away.”
“This is not a joke. I’m not here for anyone but myself. I am seeking your daughter to…” After my last incident with her father, I tempered my words. “… to protect her from a great evil.”
She began her needlework again, then said to the sky: “Mollai, great maker, why do you torment me so?” Then she said to me, “I don’t know who you are, stranger, but your words sting. I never had a husband or a daughter, nor do I know this Agna you speak of. Now leave me.”
