I’m scrutinising Belkis’s orphanage, one of the Ottoman caravanseries that once dotted the Balkans. It’s mouldering away but seems determined not to crumble just yet.
Belkis, always inclined to inject a congenial aspect to ugliness, called it ‘Rapunzel’s Tower’, the bastille where maidens with long tresses dream of heroic princes.
I had to divert here after Glorious Acre’s horrors. This is where Belkis broke through orphanhood’s doleful fog and reclaimed the indomitable spirit she possessed even before her birth. The tinker who found her must have been dazzled by the Sheban lineage illumining her.
I must incorporate her spirit fully. It’s the only way I’ll cross the mortal-immortal divide that stands between us now. ‘You are what you are,’ she keeps saying. That’s not good enough. To flow with her as one, I must be more than that.
Belkis is where my life began.
When we lived in each other’s skins, we scoured Key Picayune for scraps and shared them with waifs and stray animals.
One night, after dishing out some slop to urchins who had heard about us from murmuring pavements, Belkis said: ‘People profess childhood is idyllic. We know better. It seldom is. Demons interfere. Childhood within a loving family often ends in “if-only” requiems. Childhood in orphanages turns mites into dung beetles. A childhood where kids have never known their parents, can never remember their faces, is a vacuum. To fill up that emptiness, it questions graveyards. Why did my parents abandon me? Did they think I was a curse? Did they want to escape to a better reincarnation? Were they too poor to feed me? Did they die naturally? Were they killed – because that’s the culture of our times – as they tried to protect me? And the answers, sensible or irrational, breed other questions – questions that lie low in swamplands.’
It’s the answers in the swamplands that haunt me.
Belkis hears my anxiety and appears.
‘Don’t worry about Childe Asher. He’s already a Dolphinero.’
‘He might be ripped apart, too.’
‘We shed our mortal bodies quickly.’
‘Not always. Remember Passang?’
‘Souls rise before pain becomes unbearable.’
‘You wish!’
‘I know.’
‘Where is he by the way?’
‘Still keeping vigil with Nestvillians. He’s their purveyor of hope.’
‘I don’t want him fatherless ...’
‘He won’t be. You’re in his sinews.’
‘Some Dolphineros don’t become Leviathans. Especially the fear stricken. If I don’t, I’ll lose you – and Childe Asher.’
‘Leviathan or not, you are and will be my love forever. And Childe Asher’s father forever.’
She vanishes before I can argue.
A vision assaults me: Childe Asher crumpled up, blood seeping out of his mouth.