Speaking Bones, page 39
She scrunched up her nose. “I’ve seen scribes do that in Ginpen’s markets. It’s a shameful sign of the decline of standards. ‘Irregardless’ is not a word! Neither is ‘magnidazzlelicious’!”
He laughed. “If you say it and I understand it, how can it not be a word? Irregardless of the denunciations of Moralist grammarians, isn’t it magnidazzlelicious to have poems and stories that reflect the way the people of Dara speak, rather than having to translate them into Classical Ano?”
“But the classics—”
“The classics will be fine,” he said. “They have always adapted to changing readers. The Morality that Kon Fiji wrote and that Poti Maji glossed was not the same text that Master Zato Ruthi tried to teach me and that my father so gleefully reinterpreted. The logograms may remain the same, but the context is constantly shifting. If they continue to be meaningful to us, it’s because we have, without recognizing it, translated them.”
“What?” Zen-Kara looked at him as though he were mad.
“I believe the classics have survived because they are self-modernizing, self-translating. The ephemeral and the fashionable are washed away by the relentless pounding of time’s tides. Only hard shoals of deep wisdom could withstand the cycles—not because they’re unchanging, but because they are without vanity, without affectation, without pretension, humble enough to embrace new interpretations without yielding their essential nature. New readers are like the hermit crabs, sea urchins, anemones, snails, and seaweeds that colonize a tidal pool—only by first filling the bare rock of the classics with the colors of their own experience could the endless forms of meaning in the grandness of Life then blossom in the interaction of reader and text. The classics are always-already in translation.”
How similar to hers were his thoughts on reading and writing! How startling and pleasurable to hear her own view reflected in a new pool!
He used the vernacular always-already, a calque from the Classical Ano original, a word coined by Ra Oji, the irreverent Fluxist, to describe the awareness of eternal existence by a mortal consciousness. Ordinarily, Zen-Kara would have found the vernacular form vulgar, but in Phyro’s impassioned defense of the inherent translatedness and translatability of the classics, it seemed perfect.
“But how can the classics live vigorously if they remain in a language the people do not speak?” Phyro went on. “Dara is changing, with more students in schools, more documents and records, more people hungering for the written word—what was it that the ancient sages said? ‘Man is the word-hungry animal.’ Let the classics be translated into the vernacular; let the people write with a mix of logograms and folk logograms and letters and rebuses; let new voices be reflected with honor and grace.
“I like your invention, Zen-Kara. I think Secretary Kidosu would enjoy seeing it; perhaps she’ll find in it an inspiration for Dara’s future.”
She was stunned. The Emperor of Dara thought her invention admirable. He craved to marry orality with literacy as much as she did. He saw, in her very Adüan creation, a path forward for Dara—and yet, she felt no sense of being condescended to, as she had with Master Tathu, when the teacher had referred to her heritage; he treated her as an equal, with a mind and spirit as grand as his, unbounded by her origin.
“How can you be so”—she hesitated, struggling for the right word—“open?”
“To confront evil, one must be open to all that is good in the world,” he said. It was a Moralist cliché; yet, she had never heard it spoken with such conviction.
His easy trust in strangers and unfamiliar ideas, she saw, was a mirror image of her constant doubt. His sweet belief in good and evil, almost naive in its purity, was as much a defense against the world as her own cynical outlook. His faith in heroes and villains, in the potential of children rectifying the errors of their fathers and teachers, made him as alone among his people as she was among hers from a yearning to hold that same faith.
She had never expected to find the mirror of her soul in the Emperor of Dara.
In their mutual isolation, she felt a sense of belonging, of home.
* * *
Upon Zen-Kara’s return to Ginpen, Master Tathu gladly took her in as an assistant tutor for the fresh crop of cram school students. Zen-Kara corrected their grammar, taught calligraphy sessions, gave tips on how to handle the nervousness of being inside the examination hall, and performed other duties around the school.
Once, passing through the dormitories, she overheard two of the girls in their room mocking her accent.
“She sounds like a rooster with a cold,” said one of the girls, giggling. “Nooooomi! Nooooomi!”
“She told me to change the inflection glyph for the Twins from the dual to the singular!” said the other girl. “Can you imagine? I’m sure the graders gave her special consideration because she’s, you know, one of those.”
Zen-Kara felt blood rush to her face.
She imagined herself sliding open the door and marching in calmly to explain that she had never said, “Nomi, nomi” to anyone in Dara. She wanted to demand that they produce proof that Moralist masters who viewed their reputation as dearer than life would resort to breaking the veil of anonymity in the Imperial examinations to give her special treatment. She wanted to drag them by their ears to the library and show them classical verses composed by Dipa of Amu, Séthuwi of Gan, and Lurusén of Cocru, all of whom used the singular instead of the dual to refer to the goddesses as a way of emphasizing their divine unity, a mystery.
But she did none of those things. She simply walked away. If achieving the rank of toko dawiji did not give her the respect she craved, then what good would yelling at a few schoolgirls do?
She loved Dara. There was no heartache more piercing than a love unrequited.
Her old classmates, who were now studying for the Provincial examinations, sometimes invited her to the teahouses and beer pubs with them. At these reunions, her old friends were too polite to comment on the way she no longer wore her blond tresses in the double-scroll bun of a toko dawiji or to ask why Zen-Kara, the best student in their class, had decided not to advance further in her studies. A few did ask after her necklace of shark’s teeth, something they could not recall seeing her wear in the old days. She deflected their questions until they slid away like the water cascading off a cruben’s iridescent back; she did not want to tell them about her grandmother or the stories the old woman had told her, one for each tooth; she did not want to translate from Adüan to Dara; she did not owe them an explanation at all.
They spoke of the latest trends in scholastic philosophy and literary analysis, of new discoveries by the Imperial laboratories, of gossip from the court in Pan, of rumors of changes to the Imperial examinations advocated by Prime Minister Cogo Yelu and Farsight Secretary Zomi Kidosu, of the newest beaus of the actresses at Foundational Myths. For the most part, Zen-Kara listened while they chatted, disengaged. Once she would have hung on their every word, but now, it seemed as if her former classmates inhabited a separate world. The problems that troubled them were not her problems; the puzzles that absorbed them she found tedious. They were at home; she was not.
Messengers dispatched by her father came to Ginpen, telling her how much her parents missed her. Holding back tears, she shook her head. There was no way to explain to them why she was exiling herself. She wasn’t sure even she understood.
The performances of the Adüan storytellers now took on a new significance. Looking past the cringe-inducing words and gestures, she found not cynicism, but a yearning for a homeland that no longer existed, like a flower dropped into the fast-moving river of time, destined to slip through the grasping fingers of hope. Once, she even stopped in Temple Square, tears filling her eyes as she listened to two street performers of Dara imitate the throat-singing of her homeland in the middle of some restaurant competition. Would her children, and her children’s children, still sing like that? Or would they find the singing crude and grating, a dying art best consigned to oblivion?
Only when she was away from Tan Adü did she realize how abiding was her love for the island of her birth.
She decided to leave Ginpen; it was too painful to remain in a place imbued with memories of how she had tried but failed to belong. She didn’t want to go back to Tan Adü, but she didn’t know where in Dara she would be at peace. The Islands were many and the sea boundless, but there was no place that felt like home.
So she came to Dimushi, where everyone was from somewhere else, where to be rootless and homeless was not so strange at all.
* * *
Wordlessly, she eased him down into her bed. Their eyes still locked, she disrobed and stood proudly before him, naked except for the tattoos covering her skin, an aspect of herself she had never shared with anyone from Dara. Had never wanted to. Until now.
She sighed, pleased, as she saw the heat of desire fanned to life in his eyes.
He swallowed. “I’ll make you breakfast later. It’s my turn.”
“All right,” she said, feeling her skin tingle where his fingers touched.
Afterward, they lay together in bed, curled against each other like the crescent moon and her halo.
He kissed her neck. “Maybe it’s time you told me your story, Zen-Kara of Tan Adü.”
And for the first time, without feeling she was exploiting her own experience to pander to the tastes of other people, without feeling constrained by the expectations and condescensions of another culture, without feeling stifled by the suppressed voices of her family and tribe trying to speak through her, for her, she told her story.
* * *
He listened without commentary, understanding without being told that what she needed wasn’t response, guidance, help—only to be heard.
Together in bed, their limbs entwined, the lovers fought against the loneliness that was universal to dreamers, whether emperor or exile.
When she was done, when it was clear that she had said as much as she wished to, he held her as lovingly and securely as the sea held the Islands of Dara.
Then he began to speak. Though he had already confided his plans to her, he had never revealed as much of himself as he now did. The anecdotes were not woven into a coherent whole. This was not a performance, a crafted literary creation, a shaped just-so narrative to give coherence to a sequence of days, but raw glimpses into a living soul: hesitant and therefore glorious, full of doubt and thus magnificent.
Their parallel tales were like two great crubens swimming together in the ocean. Neither needed the other; yet there was comfort in their parallel solitudes.
He spoke to her of his alienation at court: the severe aunt-mother who disapproved of everything he did; the nurse-governess who forever treated him as a child; his father’s generals and nobles, who judged his every move against the shadow of his father.
He spoke to her of his longing for loved ones he could not reach: the big brother who was trapped in the enemy camp; the big sister who was fighting abroad; the little sister who lived in her own world; parents beyond the River-on-Which-Nothing-Floats, whose approval he craved but knew he would never win.
Only with his friends, companions who shared his dream, did he feel fully himself. “We’re born into one family, but then we must build another for ourselves. As my big sister used to say, we’re always the heroes of our own stories.”
She weighed his words in her mind, the sight of their entangled legs and arms a comfort. Where was her tribe, she who belonged to neither Dara nor Tan Adü?
Scenes of other exiles surfaced in her memory: storytellers in teahouses whose performances had made her cringe; tattooed sailors whose broken Dara vernacular had embarrassed her; Adüans who had refused the call to return home because their hearts had already taken root in Dara though they were not Dara. Did they not share her loneliness? Could she not kindle in them the same dream that moved herself?
She did not need to belong to either Dara or Tan Adü; she was already of both. In that vacillation, in that instability, in that uncertain rootlessness, she found also her strength. Contrary to the shortsighted caution of her father, she could see that the futures of Dara and Tan Adü were as entangled as the bodies of Phyro and herself. It was the defining insight, born of both experience and long reflection, that would form the plot of her own story.
She recalled Phyro’s plan.
Had the gods conspired to bring them together? Was this fate?
Heart racing, she turned to Phyro. “There are no merchant ships large enough to do what you want. There is only one course, a route pointed to by wayposts from history and legend.”
After a moment, he understood. “But years ago, Chief Kyzen asked for their aid against the Lyucu on our behalf, and that plea was rejected. Since then, he has steadfastly refused to be involved in the conflict between Dara and Lyucu.”
“My father’s voice is loud and sonorous, but it is hardly the only voice in Tan Adü. They may listen to me where they did not listen to him.”
He looked at her, awed. “I did not expect to meet a way-finder here.” After a pause, he added, “I may be emperor in name, but I can offer Tan Adü no treasure nor concession in recompense—”
She stopped him with a firm shake of her head. “The fates of Tan Adü and Dara are as inseparable as you and I. I offer you my aid not in expectation of some material advantage, but because the creation of a great literature requires not only words and scripts, but also deeds worthy of being recorded.”
They looked into each other’s eyes, two hearts ready for a duet with no misunderstanding.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO THE BATTLE OF CRESCENT ISLAND, PART I
CRESCENT ISLAND: THE SEVENTH MONTH OF THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF SEASON OF STORMS AND THE REIGN OF AUDACIOUS FREEDOM.
Waves gently lapped the craggy shore, the pattern unaltered for eons.
There was no oracular storm, no prophesying volcanic eruption. The sky yielded no lightning bolts to sketch the shapes of wolves or stags, nor shooting stars to prognosticate the fall of empires or warlords. The earth didn’t quake; bats didn’t crow in the morning; moonbows didn’t appear on a rainless night of the new moon.
On the eve of the upcoming grand battle, there were no signs from the gods at all.
Perhaps even the grandest deeds of mortals were but a passing flash in the eye of eternity.
- What a somber bunch! Aren’t you going to cheer on your champions? Some of you have been clamoring for war for forever; I’d have expected a bit more spirit now it’s finally happening.
There was no response to Tazu’s taunts.
The gods of Dara, confounded by the plots and counterplots of mortals, were assembled not in council, but to bear silent witness.
* * *
Crescent Island, though one of the Islands of Dara, always set itself apart. It was never occupied by the original inhabitants of the Islands, whose tribes were now concentrated in Tan Adü; it was not settled by the Ano and then later abandoned during the Diaspora Wars, like Écofi; it did not sprout great cities and Tiro states like the rest of the islands from Dasu to the Tunoas.
Instead, it remained a wilderness where the veil of nature was peeled back only in the environs of a few scattered settlements in the misty mountains. Poets imagined it to be the retreat of the gods of Dara when they were tired of the squabbling humans.
While there were numerous flat beaches and sheltered coves along the western coast, the island’s rocky eastern coast, full of jagged reefs and steep cliffs, presented few natural harbors. The lush jungle crowded all the way to the shore, where the waves roared and swirled under overhanging headlands and inside steep, narrow inlets carved into the coast, as though by the hand of Fithowéo, the divine bladesmith. Their sides were dotted with caves that wound deep into the rock, as though giant worms or prehistoric rivers had once tunneled through the landscape.
In years past, these isolated inlets had offered shelter for refugees, both poor and wealthy, seeking to escape the ravages of war on the core islands, as well as pirates wishing to hide from pursuing navies. But the dense, inhospitable jungle had never been welcoming to large, permanent settlements.
One of these inlets, perhaps a bit wider than the rest, housed a large troop of chattering monkeys. They swung from branch to branch in the jungle atop the cliffs, feasting on juicy monkeyberries dangling from vines. From time to time, bold and curious members of the troop climbed down the sheer cliffs to collect the soft-shelled crabs that skittered across the slimy rocks revealed at low tide. Away from the influence of humankind, they lived lives of leisure and plenty, like immortals in legends.
But one day, the monkeys stopped chattering and stared in amazement as their inlet transformed before their eyes.
Great floating islands surged into the inlet through the thick mist of dawn, their backs covered in iridescent scales more mesmerizing than any pirate treasure, their dome-shaped heads topped by horns more stout than any ship’s mast. Booming moans reverberated through the water, and the very cliffs shuddered in the waves thrown up by their powerful flukes.
Crubens, the greatest living beings in the known world, were visiting this sleepy inlet.
And they weren’t alone.
Teams of men and women, both Adüan and Dara by dress and appearance, rode on the backs of the giant scaled whales with chests and mysterious bundles in waterproof canvas.
But the monkeys paid the humans little mind. The crubens carried far more impressive passengers. Winged monstrosities with serpentine necks perched atop some of the living islands, gazing about curiously like long-necked cranes sometimes seen riding atop water buffaloes in the rice paddies of the Big Island.
Led by a wise old monkey whose hair had turned all white, the simian troop faded into the jungle with nary a peep. They knew, instinctively, that their home would never be the same again.
