Uma walked me to her hut, where she pointed to a cot near the window. I sat as she unpacked the medical supplies I had given her. The hut was spotlessly clean, the thick medicinal odor of disinfectant creating a strange contrast to the rough, moss-covered stone ceiling, plants growing from its jointed slabs of granite. The hut had been equipped with three cots, white cotton blankets, kerosene lanterns—all of which must have come from the castle. A man lay sleeping in the last cot, half his face scraped away, his jaw bone exposed, his cheek swollen, a long suture tracking over his collarbone. This was the man who had been hurt hunting, I realized, the reason Aki had needed extra supplies to begin with.
“Are you in pain?” Uma asked. I nodded, too shaken to speak.
Uma put pills in my hand, gave me a glass of water, and gestured for me to swallow them. I recognized the capsules—they were the same pills Vita had given me after my surgery. I swallowed them and watched as Uma went to a stack of clear plastic storage boxes in a corner of the hut and put the supplies away. Bandages and ointments and pills and gauze—Uma looked at each gift carefully before putting it in the box.
There was a row of old medical texts on a shelf. When Uma saw me looking at them, she said, “From Vita. She gave them to me so I could understand your ways of healing.” She said the word “your” with a particular resistance, and I understood how very foreign she found me and my people. She had learned from us, and she had accepted what Vita had given her, but there was a clear line between our civilizations. “Thank you,” she added, as she closed the lids and stacked the boxes back in the corner. “Thank you for bringing these things to us. I am always afraid we will be without them one day. It would make our survival much more difficult. Your kind has created many things we need. Medicine is one of them.”
She went to a basin of water in the corner, wet a cloth, and gestured for me to lie back on the cot, so she could examine the wound.
The rock had left a gash just below the hairline. A warm ooze of blood soaked my hair and dripped over my cheek. I touched the gash, feeling the sting. It was deep. Blood stained my sweater and my jeans. A headache bloomed through my skull, prickling and painful. If Jabi had been given the chance, he would not have stopped. He would have smashed in my head and broken my bones. He would have killed me without a second thought.
“Some time ago, we lost a child to a very bad sickness,” Uma said, as she cleaned the wound with the wet cloth. “The child was covered in small red sores. They became infected, causing him tremendous pain. His skin was hot. His tongue was dry. I tried everything, read everything in those books, but I could not save him. Do you know what illness he could have had, and do you have a medicine for it?” She looked at me with hope. “You have a medicine for everything.”
I tried to place what the disease could have been—measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, a list of possible diseases came to mind. But I only knew these names from the list of immunizations I had as a child. No one I knew had ever suffered from these diseases. I had no idea what they looked like, what symptoms they produced. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I’ve never seen a disease like that.”
“We have lost three children in the last five years. Two in the first month after birth. And the other to sickness, as I just mentioned. He was five years old. Do you know what it feels like to watch a child suffer? It is terrible. I knew if it was one of yours, living below, you could have saved him. You would have medicine to treat the sores. You will look for this medicine when you go back, and when you return, you will bring it to us.”
“I can try,” I said. “But I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what medicine you want.”
“You will find it,” she said confidently. “Since the first kryschia came to us, we have come to understand that your ways can save us. What you do to survive does not always make sense to us. There have been, over the generations, many among us who reject your ways. But I am convinced your people are wise. I have urged all of our tribe to follow your customs of survival, even when we find them strange.”
Uma threaded a needle and closed the wound, pulling three stitches tight before tying off the knot. Then she took a white cotton tunic from one of the plastic boxes and handed it to me. I slipped out of my stained clothes and put on the tunic.
Uma gave me a small mirror, and I saw the black thread holding my skin together, three tight tracks, a crust of blood at the edges. It had been some time since I had looked at myself, and what I saw startled me. My skin was dry, my expression worn, my hair dirty and matted with blood. I was no longer the naïve woman who had received a mysterious letter inviting her to Italy. I was no longer the person struggling to understand her failing marriage and her inability to have children. Pain had hardened me and made me strong. This battered woman was as powerful as any of the noble men staring down from the portrait gallery. As powerful as Vita.
“I am angry with Jabi for doing this to you,” Uma said. “He does not like your kind, but he must not hurt you.”
“Why did he attack me like that?” I asked.
“In the beginning, Jabi went with us to your home. He studied with us, but he became unhappy and left. He admired your kind, once, and wanted to learn everything you knew. But then he changed. He saw the castle and the way your family lived. He became”—she paused, thinking of the word—“jealous.”
I sat at the edge of the cot, trying to understand. “But Vita was trying to help him.”
“He saw that you live while we die,” she said quietly. “He saw that your kind has created unthinkable abundance, while we struggle. He knows that we suffer more than you suffer. And this made him hate you.”
After the pain medication kicked in, and the throbbing in my head receded, Uma took me behind her hut, where a narrow path angled up the side of the mountain. It was late afternoon by then, the light soft in the sky, but so much had happened since that morning that it seemed a week had passed since I had found Aki on the east lawn. The air was colder up in the mountains, swelling with the sound of birds. The peaks surrounding the village were so high that I felt that they were pressing in on me, squeezing the air from my lungs. Chateaubriand’s words—the words Leopold had written in his field notes—rushed back to me: High mountains suffocate me. The altitude was too high. I could not breathe.
Voices grew from somewhere in the distance. We walked for a few minutes, closing in on the sound, until we emerged onto a plateau of rock overlooking the village. At the center of the plateau, surrounded by rocks, stood a hot spring. Water bubbled up from the core of the mountain and reacted with the cool evening air, sending gossamer sheets of steam across the water’s surface.
“This is where we bathe,” Uma said, as she slipped out of her tunic, threw it on a rock, and waded into the water.
Uma joined a group of women at the center of the pool, and I watched her transform from the woman I had spoken with in her hut to one of them: her gestures became forceful, her voice loud and guttural, even the way she stood seemed altered. It was as though by speaking my language, and understanding my culture, she had put on a mask. With the mask gone, I felt our similarities recede.
I studied Uma, and this group of women, looking for one who might be different from the others, a body giving some clue of an inheritance that diverged from the pure Icemen. I found nothing. They all looked strikingly similar, a homogenous group of women, all the same height and coloring, with the same white hair and the same white skin as the rest.
The women paid no attention to me at all. They talked and washed each other, glancing occasionally at a group of children nearby. There were four, all between the ages of five and ten, old enough to be alone in the water, but still young enough to need oversight. They laughed and splashed, behaving like any group of children in any pool of water. When it began to rain, they caught raindrops in their mouths, a game that reminded me how Luca and I had sat on the top of a slide in the playground of our elementary school and caught snowflakes on our tongues.
I squatted at the edge of the pool, cupped my hands, and filled them. The water was bathwater warm, thick with minerals, sulfurous, giving the odor of rotten eggs. I brought the water over my face and washed the blood from my forehead. The wound stung. The water ran pink through my fingers. Through the haze of pain medication, a headache thrummed.
“Come, join us,” Aki said, his voice startling me.
I looked up, finding him naked before me. Night was coming, and his skin took on the gray-blue hue of twilight. He was a wonder of nature—the tapering muscles, the impossible height, the span of his arms and chest, the perfect symmetry of his torso. His feet were wide, shaped like mine, the second toe hooked, proof that we were cut of the same ancestral cloth.
“Come in,” he said, smiling. If he had noticed me staring, he didn’t show it. “It is warm. The water will feel good.”
“Okay,” I said, standing and pulling off a shoe, still a bit shaky from Jabi’s attack.
Just then, from the far edge of the pool, I saw Jabi. His gaze was unrelenting, one part fascination and another part disgust. I slipped off my other shoe, then my socks. I knew he was trying to intimidate me, and while I was afraid of him, I held his gaze without blinking. When at last he turned his eyes away, I felt a rush of triumph.
I pulled the white tunic over my head, feeling the cold mountain air pulse against my skin. I was bruised and covered with goose bumps, my thigh scarred pink from the gunshot wound. I was ugly compared with them. Damaged. Broken. But they didn’t seem to notice. Nudity, I would come to understand, was no different from being clothed for the Icemen. There was no sense of shame or embarrassment. They wore clothes for warmth, but in the summer heat, they were often naked. Not one of them watched me as I stepped into the warm, swirling water of the pool.
I started toward Aki when I saw that a woman had joined him. She was pregnant, her hands resting on her stomach. Aki said something in her ear and she laughed. She was beautiful, even taller and more muscular than Aki, with long white hair falling over her shoulders. When she sunk into the water, her hair spread over the surface like tentacles of an octopus.
As I watched them together, a hard pit formed in my stomach. In the shadow of their love, I felt how terribly I missed Luca. All the moments of tenderness we had shared, the intimacy and understanding between us—I wished with all my heart that I could go back and change things. I regretted so much: asking him to move out, the fight in Turin, but most of all asking him to come to Nevenero. He had sacrificed himself for me and there was no way I could ever repay him. A wave of longing came over me. I wanted Luca back.
When I stood before them, Aki slid his arm around the woman. “This is Ciba,” he said.
Ciba looked up, meeting my eye, and everything around me faded: her eyes were dark brown.