AYN

 

 

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, I think we need to discuss my funeral arrangements. Yes, now’s the time. I want an Air burial, naturally, and I’d like you to assume responsibility for it. Fair enough, Khollo? I know it’s a gruesome task but you’ve seen it done, you know what’s involved, you’re up to the job. It doesn’t really require much skill, no matter what the professional funeral officiators say. They make such a big song and dance about it. You know, ‘this way through the abdominal wall’, ‘that way down the medians of the arms’, and so on. What it boils down to is simply being able to hold a knife and cut. Common sense, that’s all. Follow the lines of the body. Any fool can do it. Not that for one moment I’m suggesting you’re a fool.

The question is, are there enough carrion birds around here? At Stonehaven the crows and the buzzards and the vultures know. When they see people arrive at the Plateau of Bones on the lip of the crater, they come flocking from miles around. The word goes out along the avian grapevine and the body’s a skeleton in no time. Same as at any of the officially designated Air burial sites. They have their regular customers, ready to drop by a moment’s notice for a free meal. Up here? In late winter? Perhaps a desperate eagle or two. But it must be done, that’s the main thing. I will not be put under the ground, or burnt, or plopped into that lake. I will be laid out and carved up and be eaten and dispersed, as is proper. Even in death, dignity. That isn’t too much to ask. All right, Khollo? You promise you’ll do it? Good.

Now, where have we got to? We’re on our way to the Li*issuan archipelago, correct? Bobbing merrily across the waves with our chum Thaëho, brother of the over-talkative hotelier Sha*so. So then what happened? Ah yes. Man overboard.

Forgive my chuckling, but your face when I pushed you in, Khollo. Priceless! I wish I could have given you some warning, but that would have tipped off our pilot as to what I was up to. The only way it would work was if it was a complete surprise for all concerned. And then your thrashing around, your gurgling, your struggles to keep your head above the surface... Most convincing. One would almost have thought you were genuinely in difficulties. But of course, you’d twigged to my plan and were putting on a terrific performance. The man who lost his footing on deck and tumbled into the sea and was in danger of drowning. Bravo!

[Elder Ayn was perfectly well aware that I’m not the best of swimmers. I wasn’t even particularly happy being a passenger on Thaëho’s boat, for that matter. It must have obvious to him how uncomfortable I was, surrounded by all that water. For him then to come up behind me when I wasn’t looking and give me a hearty shove between the shoulder-blades and send me head-first over the side... But I’ve mentioned that cruel streak of his before. And as he related the episode, I showed him what I thought about it by keeping my face sealed, not letting a chink of emotion come through. Not giving him the satisfaction.]

There was another boat on the horizon as Thaëho brought his vessel about so that we might retrieve you. That other boat, I knew, was one we wanted to be on. Its presence wasn’t simply convenient. There are no coincidences in the life of a previsionary. It was there because it was meant to be there in the pattern of my existence. That was its place. I knew it was coming, and to get aboard it I knew we had to stop where we did on the journey to I*il and we had to give the other boat’s pilot a valid reason to stop also. And as we came back for you, Khollo, I removed my boots and laced them around my neck, because in a short time I, too, was going to have to enter the water. And then Thaëho drew up alongside you, and I think the last thing he expected to happen was that the man overboard would be joined by another man overboard. But over the side I went, plunging in. Shockingly cold it was, too. The waters around the islands of Li*issua, where shallow, are famously mild and warm. But not that far out to sea. Fair took one’s breath away. But then I’d got used to cold water, thanks to my daily dips in Stonehaven’s lagoon. Got to the stage where I didn’t mind it at all. Even quite liked it. Good for the heart, the circulation, for sharpening the brain. I imagine your brain was pretty well sharpened by it, no?

[Sharpened like a dagger, keen to stab somebody.]

So there was poor old Thaëho, all at sea, as it were. At first maybe he thought I had jumped in to help you, but then, when all I did was tread water beside you, he must have been thoroughly perplexed. He urged us to come back aboard. He reached over the side and couldn’t understand why I refused to take his hand and why I ordered you not to take it either. Understandably he got a bit miffed and there were heated words. He threatened to shape the water around us so that we’d be forced up out of it, popping up like corks onto his deck. I told him if he made us get back on the boat that way, we’d simply jump off again. By then, the other boat was close by. I called Thaëho a few choice names, so that he would lose any last shred of concern he had for us. Then he and the pilot of the other boat, Auzo, were exchanging comments in their own language, and from what I could tell Thaëho was washing his hands of us. The way he spat at us was a pretty clear indication of his feelings. A Wet never parts with a bodily fluid without good cause.

I was well on my way to Auzo’s boat by that point, with you not far behind. Thaëho lobbed our luggage across, probably cursing us like mad, though I couldn’t really hear him over my own splashes. Then a slim, wiry arm extending down to me, a small but strong hand inviting me to grasp it.

This was our Yashu. I*ilyashu. Yashu Of-Three-Peak-Island. This was the young woman we had travelled all that way to make the acquaintance of.

A good-looking creature. A certain ruggedness to her, characteristic of islanders. It can be a hard life, islander life, and its vicissitudes write themselves on the faces even of the young, in forceful eyes, in a graininess of the skin. Nevertheless, a good-looking creature. Brown hair bleached lighter by salt wind and sun, cut in a rough, chunky style, just touching the shoulders and with a sheared-straight fringe. A narrow face tapering to a firm chin, and a mouth with just a hint of a petulant curl to it. A boyish figure, small breasts, trim hips. Some men prefer their girls voluptuous, but were I of that particular bent I would go for someone like Yashu. None of that heaviness about her, that female ponderousness. Not the type to run to fat as most women do, especially once they’ve started having children. Not likely to turn into a doughy milk-cow. A sinewy girl, with strength in her every movement, but also a comfortable grace. Yashu. An unfortunate name, though, I must say. To me it sounds like a sneeze.

[Elder Ayn gave a practical illustration of what he meant, faking a loud sneeze and yelling ‘Yashu!’ as he did so. For the record, it wasn’t the first time he had made this joke. He thought so highly of it, clearly, that he wanted it enshrined in his narrative.]

This was she, at any rate, and as I watched her haul you aboard, Khollo, I looked forward to the fun I was going to have revealing the truth about her Inclination. I foresaw myself at her aunt’s house, dropping some very unsubtle hints and pretending to be mortified when her aunt made it apparent that I had said something I shouldn’t have.

There was fun to be had right then, too. Almost the first words I spoke in Yashu’s presence were a lie. I made up some outrageous fib about Thaëho trying to screw an extra fare out of us. Poor chap, perfectly honest, would never have dreamed of it, would he? And Yashu became terribly indignant, didn’t believe a word I said, went into a sulk. Sooth-seers take it very hard when someone lies. It offends them deep down, like a personal insult. And even though Yashu did not know then that she was a sooth-seer, she reacted exactly as a sooth-seer would. I could see how much I had aggrieved her, and I hate to say it but I found it more than a little amusing.

Anyway, I purchased passage to I*il on Auzo’s boat with a trinket of some sort...

[In fact quite a nice gold bracelet. A sort of triple thing, three different-coloured bands wrapped around one another. Definitely an overpayment for the relatively short journey we had to make, but Auzo had few qualms about accepting it.]

...and shortly we were making landfall at Sooshyarlis, or Half-Moon-Bay, the largest beach on I*il. Sooshyarlis. Did I pronounce that correctly?

[Unusually for Elder Ayn, he did.]

Yashu stomped off, still unhappy with me, and you and I, Khollo, crossed over the sand dunes to reach the town of... No, I’m not even going to attempt that one. Town-By-The-Dunes, in Common Tongue. A biggish place, and quiet that day, still subdued after the ’Storm visit, still recovering its equilibrium. We found lodging at a hotel somewhere in the centre. The only hotel in town, as it happens. The owner told us they didn’t get many people staying overnight on I*il, mostly just merchants and seafarers who had been stranded by bad weather – in other words, who hadn’t much choice in the matter. But it was a clean enough place, simply but amply furnished. There were sea-scene murals on the walls, reasonably well rendered, and each item of crockery in the dining room had tiny glazed shells inlaid around the rim. It could have been worse.

Our rooms overlooked what seemed to be a sleepy little plaza. Next morning, the sleepy little plaza was awake with noise – shouting, clattering, thumping. It sounded like a riot was going on out there but it proved to be a market. Dozens of stallholders setting up shop, laying out their wares. Fishermen returned from an early catch, with baskets brimful of glittering bounty. Local farmers with the fruits of the field on offer. Vintners with flagons of wine and distillers with flasks of the indigenous orange-based firewater, sirassi (the name means ‘choppy seas’ and after a few glasses you know why). Sellers of conch shells and cowries and pearls and narwhal-spike scrimshaw and other such fine items, for ladies to buy and beautify themselves and their homes with. Visitors from other islands and from the coast, offering merchandise that could not be found on I*il – timber, cloth, rugs, et cetera. A raucous hustle and bustle, a teem of life, the market like a reef with a human shoal milling around it, nibbling here and there, moving in wafts and twitches...

You know, this is all rather poetic, isn’t it? I’m impressed with myself.

[‘Poetic,’ I said, ‘but perhaps also superfluous?’]

Superfluous? Pah! Local colour, Khollo. Filling in the detail. A word portrait. Cut it if you like, but frankly this account will be the poorer without it.

Oh, and now I’ve gone and lost my thread. You shouldn’t have interrupted me.

[‘I didn’t.’]

Well then, you shouldn’t have let me interrupt myself. Honestly! What good are you to me if you can’t keep me on the straight and narrow?

[‘But that’s what I was trying to do.’]

No, you weren’t. You were — Never mind. Town-By-The-Dunes had a busy market-place. Not just one but several of them. A dozen, or thereabouts. Lots of market-places. There, if I’m not allowed to be poetic, I shall be prosaic. Painfully prosaic. And that very morning you went out and bought yourself a new pair of sandals because you’d somehow contrived to lose one of your old pair. All right? Still dull enough for you? And we stayed in Town-By-The-Dunes for several days and it wasn’t unpleasant. The locals weren’t friendly but they weren’t unfriendly either. Reserved, I would say. In a remote community, outsiders are more alien than they might be elsewhere, in places not so isolated and insular. Especially outsiders who are differently-Inclined. And I noticed several people looking askance at you, Khollo. It was obvious that not many southerners came that way. Reserved, yes. A kind of wary barrier raised between us and them. Common Tongue used only reluctantly, as if a last resort. A few of the locals pretending they couldn’t speak it at all. But no one ever less than polite to us. The proprietor of our hotel made sure there was always fresh water in the pitchers in our rooms. And there was that restaurant nearby whose owner showed us his cold store and boasted how a specialist shaper-of-water made new ice for him every morning to keep the food fresh. He was very proud of that, wasn’t he, and I think he hoped to impress his Air clientele with it. And the seafood there and at other restaurants – quite superb. No complaints about the quality of dining in Town-By-The-Dunes! Although the cutlery – those whelk-shell knife blades could be rather blunt sometimes. And I recall us being entertained one evening by a very talented juggler who was a whatchemacall, a fish-in-the-air. The climax of his act had him floating three feet off the ground with at least twenty wooden balls hurtling around him, a kind of swirling blizzard of balls, a halo of balls – but I’m getting poetic again.

But perhaps the best thing of all about Town-By-The-Dunes was the simple fact that we weren’t travelling any more. Our three-day stopover in Sweel wasn’t much of a respite because we were merely waiting to move on, marking time, and meanwhile getting our ears bent all day long by Sha*so. And our sojourn in Tayorus – well, the ’Storm. Need I say more? At Town-By-The-Dunes we at last got the chance to be calm again. We deserved that. We deserved to be able to stop and take stock and relax, after many days on the road. And we had made first contact with Yashu, too, so in a different sense things were in motion. Rather than follow up that initial ‘chance’ encounter as soon as possible, it seemed prudent – as well as foreordained by prevision – to leave an interval before we and she met again. It wouldn’t do to arouse her suspicions. It wouldn’t do to give her cause to think that there was more to our first meeting than happenstance, that a plan was in any way afoot.

Three days seemed a decent length of time, and so on the third morning we set off round the island, finding our way to a place called Second-Cliff-Village. There, looking as lost and befuddled as only travellers can, we made enquiries. ‘We’re trying to find a young lady by the name of Yashu.’ This brought us to the attention of one Siaalo, a big brawny giant of a man who wore his moustache in the style that a lot of the Li*issuans seemed to like, two long strands drooping down on either side of his chin like a fish’s barbels. Siaalo informed us he was a friend of Yashu and also of her aunt, with whom Yashu lived. He had a dog who, as I recall, didn’t take too kindly to you, Khollo.

[In truth, the dog growled at Elder Ayn just as much as at me. Siaalo told us not to mind – the dog simply didn’t like not-of-the-archipelago people.]

Siaalo himself was marginally more amicable and said he’d show us the way to the aunt’s house, on condition that he went with us. Very protective of her he was, you could tell.

So off we went. The dog, I’m happy to relate, was left behind.

The aunt, name of Liyalu, lived a short way uphill from the village in a low, one-storey dwelling which seemed to mimic the plot of land it was situated on. Its walls were as rocky as the hillside around it; its roof was thatched with the selfsame gorse that grew in ragged abundance there. Everywhere on I*il the houses were built from these materials, but in towns and villages, in numbers, houses become just houses. Whereas that solitary cottage gave the impression it had sprouted rather than been built. A natural outcropping that just so happened to have taken the shape of a cottage.

Liyalu was on her own. Yashu had set out at dawn to catch rabbits and had not yet returned. We were invited in and a small but wholesome meal was laid on for us. It’s a tradition among the people of Li*issua that any stranger you permit across your threshold be fed the best food you have to offer. And a fine tradition I say. It also impressed me that Liyalu was prepared to invite us in on the strength of nothing more than an assertion that we had met her niece. Doubtless she would have been more cautious were the muscular Siaalo not on hand, but I admire her trustingness all the same.

She was clearly not a well woman, and that topic accounted for most of our conversation while we waited for Yashu to come home. Barely middle-aged, Liyalu was afflicted with one of those slow, terrible, terminal wasting diseases, and once I had made a tentative enquiry about it she seemed happy to talk about the symptoms and the prospect of death. I’ve gone on already about Wets and their beliefs – final immersion in the Great-Ocean-Beyond and all that – and I have little to add here on the subject except to say that Liyalu’s composure was something to behold. Disregarding for the moment her conviction that a further life awaited her after this one’s end, she was remarkably sanguine when discussing the months that lay ahead, during which her pain and debilitation would only worsen. In my time at Stonehaven I watched people succumb to all the excruciating declines the human body has to offer – cancer, stroke, creeping paralysis – but few if any of them displayed a fortitude to match Liyalu’s. Most spent their final days in a paroxysm of fear and self-pity, forever needing to be reassured that they had used their time well and had lived good lives. With Liyalu as my example, you’ll not see me indulging in that sort of weak-willed behaviour.

[!]

One other thing about her was apparent, at least to me. How can I put this delicately? Liyalu had no interest in the opposite sex. Whether she was attracted to her own sex, I don’t know. I suspect so, but I suspect she was constrained from acting on her innate impulses by the desire for conformity that prevails among the people of Li*issua (and, as far as I’m aware, in all exclusively Water-Inclined communities). Responsibility to clan and to the archipelago as a whole matters above all else, and implicit in this is the requirement to procreate and continue the race. There is an intolerance toward any member of the community who, for whatever reason, fails to do his or her bit in that regard. So Liyalu, in order to avoid being ostracised, had partially ostracised herself by living apart from her fellow-islanders and, save for Yashu, alone. I don’t know for sure if I’m right about her. But the evidence was strong, not least in her attitude toward Siaalo – the wide-eyed blitheness with which she ignored his blind devotion.

And then Yashu turned up, bearing proof of her prowess with bait and snare: two juicy rabbit carcasses. I’d have been surprised if she had been glad to see us. (A figure of speech, by the way. There is little that surprises a previsionary.) But in the event she performed the most spectacular flounce when she entered the cottage and found us there. Barely breaking stride, off to the kitchen she went. A breathtaking imperiousness! We might as well have been shit on her shoe sole, for all the level of respect she accorded us.

Her aunt managed to coax her back, and what followed saw the pair of them, her and Yashu, lured and noosed as surely as those two rabbits had been. I’m not bragging here. It was almost too easy. All I had to do was play the innocent – the typical unworldly Air Inclined. Liyalu did the rest. Perhaps she wanted it. Perhaps she had had a pretty good idea, when two Air types turned up at her door claiming acquaintance with her niece, what would ensue. It’s possible she was tired of the dissembling, relieved to get it all out in the open at last. She had kept Yashu in the dark about her Inclination for two years, long enough for the guilt to fester until it was more than she could bear. Having someone come along to lance the emotional boil for her – perhaps, in the end, she was using me no less than I was using her. I don’t know.

[For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to agree with Elder Ayn. I think Liyalu sensed the game was up as soon as she opened the door to us. Looking back, I can see, or imagine I can see, glad resignation in her eyes as she ushered us into the cottage. As I replay the moment over and over in my mind’s eye – there, yes, the transition from one kind of welcome to another.]

It was over rather quickly. The conversation, my contrived blunder. Not five minutes after Yashu arrived back home, you and I were taking our leave, in a suitable state of embarrassment. The hints I dropped about Yashu’s Inclination could not have been less subtle. ‘Like knows like,’ I said. And I also made some play on the word extraordinary, allowing Liyalu her last opportunity to maintain, unconvincingly, the pretence that her niece was ‘without-Flow’. I made out that I was curious to know how Yashu, as an Air Inclined, fared on an island where everyone else was a Wet. I stopped just short of blurting out that I knew she was a sooth-seer. That would have been a step too far. Showing all my tiles at once, so to speak. But again, a broad hint or two. After all, it was likely, once I’d recognised her as belonging to my own Inclination, that I’d also be able to intuit which class of Air Inclined she was. As the wise Corval says, ‘A black cat looks at a tabby cat and can tell it is a cat but a cat of a different colour. It can also tell it is a cat that is not the same colour as a ginger cat, say, or a tortoiseshell cat.’ You will of course, Khollo, check the quotation for accuracy.

I must admit to a certain pride at the way I orchestrated the whole event. I don’t think I could have managed it any better. And you, my young friend, played your part admirably.

[Said with some sarcasm. I contributed nothing to the conversation. The way Elder Ayn was manipulating these people left me feeling deeply uncomfortable, and although I could, I suppose, have backed him up with a comment here and there, would it have helped? I doubt it. I didn’t have his artfulness, or his shamelessness. Anything I said would have come out sounding absurd and sham and would have undermined his efforts rather than bolstered them. My best option seemed to be to keep silent. I made it easier by stuffing my mouth with food. Delicious cheese, tough salty bread, washed down with potent sirassi. While Elder Ayn insulted Liyalu’s hospitality with his behaviour, I wholeheartedly embraced it.]

Now then, did anything else of note happen that day?

[‘Perhaps you could mention our journey back to Town-By-The-Dunes.’]

Why? What about it? It was uneventful. Other than the fact that you had to turn back after we’d been walking for about ten minutes because you’d left something behind at Liyalu’s house.

[‘My waistcoat. I left it on my chair there.’]

Yes, that’s it. Careless of you. Presumably you don’t want such absent-mindedness preserved for posterity?

[‘No.’]

Well, good.

[‘But then when I caught up with you again on the coastal track, I asked you how was it possible that Yashu could have had no idea about her Inclination, not even an inkling.’]

Ah yes. Trying to beef up your role in the narrative, are you?

[‘Not at all. I just thought it was something that might —’]

Only teasing, only teasing. As I recall, I was able to answer you by relating part of the conversation I was to have with Yashu the next day. But shall we deal with that when we actually get to it? All things in order and order in all things. Impetuous youth.

So the next morning, Yashu came to see us. Poor child, she looked wretched. As if she hadn’t slept a wink. Wrung out. But then that was only to be expected. She’d just had the rug whisked out from under her. Everything she had come to understand about her life turned out to be not as she thought it was. And she had recently experienced her first ’Storm visit too, and it had brought about the death of her boyfriend, did I mention that? I didn’t? Well, I hadn’t actually been told then. Liyalu spoke of a bereavement, but it wasn’t until later that I found out that the person who died was the boy she was intending to marry.

[‘All things in order, Elder Ayn?’]

That’s enough cheek from you!

We were breakfasting in the hotel dining room when our hotelier informed us we had a caller. In she came, and it struck me she must have been walking since well before sunrise in order to reach us so early in the day. Poor, hollow-eyed, ashen-faced, angry creature. I’d have felt sorry for her, had I not known that her sufferings then were a necessary part of the process, that good would come of them in the long run.

That’s what’s meant by mala, isn’t it? I was rather hoping I’d be able to work in a reference to mala during this section of the narrative, while we’re still, as it were, on I*il. And now I’ve done so. Clever me. The central tenet of Water-Inclined life. A hope, a philosophy, an affirmation, all rolled into one. The belief that good will always come out of bad. Nothing unkind happens which won’t be compensated for eventually by some related or unrelated kindness. No run of luck is so dire that it won’t be redeemed, sooner or later, by a run of good fortune. A consolation to even the heaviest heart.

And they don’t come much heavier-hearted than Yashu was then.

She asked for a private audience with me, and though I insisted that there was nothing she could say in front of me that she couldn’t say in front of you too, she was adamant that she and I speak alone; what she had to say wasn’t for an enshriner’s ears. So I acceded to her request, and hence the next chunk of the narrative is drawn from my memory alone, without the benefit of Khollo Sharellam’s perfect recall to affirm its accuracy or amend its inaccuracies.

To find absolute solitude, we walked down through town to Half-Moon-Bay. It was a still, windless morning, and a yellowish sea-mist hung over the island. Yashu told me the islanders call this kind of mist usurraña – check spelling, please – which is a word related to the word for Flow but has a negative connotation. It means, in effect, a thing which fails to move or allow movement. The islanders hate it, apparently. Few fishermen venture out in such conditions. People as a whole tend to remain indoors. The mist brings a kind of stasis, and thus upsets the natural order – the natural order, for islanders, being a state of constant flux. And I have to say there was something about the smell and the thickness and the stillness of the mist, something in the way it deadened sound and reduced one’s field of vision to a radius of a few yards, that I found perturbing. It almost made one feel as if the world had come to a halt, as if anything beyond one’s immediate sensory sphere had ceased to exist.

Yashu led me out onto the promontory at one end of Half-Moon-Bay, along a path and down some rough steps to a flat area. Directly in front of us across a narrow channel, hidden from view by the mist, there was a large rock protruding from the sea. I’d seen this rock several times already, but Yashu, in her halting, lisping Common Tongue, explained its importance in the lives of her people. It was where Oriñaho, the mythical founding father of Li*issua, first landed and where once a year the islanders held a ceremony, a celebration to mark the manifestation of Inclination in children of the appropriate age. They swim through a tunnel worn by the tides through the rock, just below the surface. It’s a sort of ‘second birth’ ritual, denoting passage from one section of life to another. I knew about it already from Of-Jagged-Isle’s book but I let Yashu explain it to me in her own way, with her own charming simplicity of expression. Have you noticed the way she nods sometimes when she’s trying to find the right word in Common Tongue? And that little knot of concentration that forms above the bridge of her nose? But it’s the dental consonants she has the greatest trouble with. Traven was the same. He’d inherited many of his speech patterns from his mother. Some say it’s got to do with the actual palate-shape of the Water Inclined. It doesn’t lend itself to forming hard sounds, I don’t know whether that’s true.

Anyway, there was Yashu outlining the nature of this ceremony to me, and accompanying her the furtive lapping of waves against the island, the general susurration of the sea, the odd lone squeal of a gull, and now and then at regular intervals this huge wailing cry coming from the northernmost tip of the island. It was, in fact, the island’s name being bellowed out by a boomer, using his extraordinarily loud voice to warn ships at sea not to stray too close. ‘I*illllll,’ he cried, approximately once every other minute. ‘I*illllll.’

But for all that, it still seemed like the two of us were alone in the world, a pocket of life surrounded by an awesome pallid blankness. And then Yashu began reminiscing about her own participation in the ceremony, a couple of years ago, and the sense of shame that set in as she waited in vain, or so she thought, for her Flow to appear. How could she not have known? How could she not have realised? With hindsight, it was obvious. There were several tiny incidents, moments when someone said something that made her feel jangled and uncomfortable. What she’d thought was that her apparent lack of Flow was making her over-sensitive. She was reading too much into other people’s comments, attuned for personal slights, acutely conscious that people might be dropping snide remarks about her into the conversation, perceiving insult where there was none.

I hazarded that, also, islanders were on the whole honest types. She simply hadn’t been exposed to the requisite degree of mendacity.

This, she agreed, was possible. Also, it wasn’t as if she interacted with other islanders on a daily basis. Her aunt’s semi-isolated lifestyle was also her own. She had stopped attending school in the village in order to help look after Liyalu. On an average day she would see Liyalu and perhaps Siaalo, but no one else. And Liyalu, she had learned yesterday in the course of a long heart-to-heart conversation, had developed quite a knack for not saying anything that might come across as a lie or even a half-truth. Liyalu, you see, had figured it out. Knowing her niece as she did, she had watched her behave uncharacteristically in response to certain verbal stimuli and had deduced what this signified. Given that Yashu was Air-Inclined, Liyalu had known what would be best for her: to be sent to the mainland to receive training in her Inclination. Against this she had set her own desires – the companionship of her niece, the need for someone to look after her in her illness. She had weighed the one against the other and come to a selfish decision. Who can blame her? Can you? What it meant, though, was that she must always be scrupulously honest with Yashu, or, failing that, steer clear of any statement that might contain a hint of falsehood. In other words, in order to preserve a huge, overarching lie, she had to tell the truth at all times. A lovely irony, no?

I could tell how bitter Yashu was about this. It showed in her every hesitation, her every struggle to articulate herself correctly, the gaps in her faltering mastery of the less-familiar language. It was there, too, in her bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes. I was moved to pat her arm at one point. You know me, not much of a one for overt displays of affection, but there we were, two alone in the world, and she seemed in need of some sort of gesture of commiseration. And I told her how much I regretted being the cause of her grief, and she, dear girl, forgave me, saying it wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t have known. How could I have known? In fact, she said, I had done her a favour, helping to bring the truth to light, exposing Liyalu’s deceit. Not that she was criticising her aunt for what she had done. She understood Liyalu’s motives perfectly. If the roles were reversed, she might well have done the same. Nonetheless she couldn’t help but feel betrayed. She didn’t know who she could trust any more. She felt as if everyone, everything, was against her.

That was when I learned about the young man, the fiancé, who had been taken from her by the Worldstorm on its recent visit. Huaso, his name was, from Shai. I also learned about her parents, who had been killed by the ’Storm the previous time it came round, when she was just a baby. So cruel, for someone to be singled out in this fashion, to lose parents and then future husband to the ’Storm. So unfair.

I said I wondered if her resentment of her aunt might not, to some extent at least, be misplaced resentment of the ’Storm. She considered this and replied that the two were separate, although they did perhaps overlap. She added that ‘resentment’, in her aunt’s case, was too strong a word and, in the ’Storm’s case, too weak.

I then asked why she had come to see me, why she was unburdening herself to me like this. She said she wasn’t sure. She said she didn’t really know me, I was something of an untried quantity, words to that effect, but she felt she could talk about herself to me for that very reason. I was an outsider. Not-of-the-archipelago. And when I left I*il, I would take all these sorrows and grievances of hers with me.

I said I was honoured to be able to fulfil so useful a function! That almost raised a smile.

And then, after a brief, pensive silence, Yashu asked me about being Air-Inclined. About Stonehaven. About sooth-seeing.

The answers I gave her were short and straight. I said being Air-Inclined was in my opinion the greatest honour there could be. I said Stonehaven was not a place she need concern herself with. And I said, not being a sooth-seer myself, I couldn’t really comment on it other than to say it was a highly valued commodity, the sort of skill which, on the mainland, conferred status and renown on anyone who exercised it proficiently.

All this she took on board. I could see, from her expression, the thought processes she was working through. I let the wheels in her brain turn, not prompting her, saying nothing.

If, she said, she was to be trained as a sooth-seer, she would have to go to the mainland, wouldn’t she? She couldn’t learn here.

How could she learn here? I said. Who would teach her?

Couldn’t I teach her?

Of course not, I said. I had no intention of staying on I*il, I was just passing through. And besides, simply because I was Air-Inclined didn’t make me an expert in all classes of Air Inclination.

She said sorry, she knew it was ridiculous, she just had to make sure.

I said I was flattered but it simply wasn’t within my capabilities. I was a previsionary, you see. A whole different kettle of fish.

A previsionary, she said. I knew the future.

My future, I said. Not the future of anyone else. At least, not of anyone else who wasn’t in some way involved in mine.

And now she looked at me levelly, and even if I hadn’t known what was coming I’d have known what was coming. If that makes sense. Her demeanour, her stiffening resolve – you didn’t need prevision to be able to tell what she was building herself up to say.

‘What if,’ she said, and this is verbatim. Trust me, it is. ‘What if, Mr Ayn the previsionary, I come travelling with you. You and your friend. To the mainland. So that I can see the mainland. So that I can see what life might be like for me as a sooth-seer on the mainland.’

‘My dear,’ I replied, and this is verbatim too, ‘in so far as I already know that you’ll be coming with us, my answer can only be yes.’

And with that, I feel we can bring this session to a close, Khollo.