The River and the Book Read Free Page B

was like a sultan’s jewels in one of my grandmother’s stories. When she spoke of vast treasures, of vaults heaped with diamonds and rubies, I always imagined the dew at the moment when the sun’s first rays spilled over the horizon and struck it into fiery brilliance. I would stare at them until my eyes were dazzled and warm tears ran down my cheeks. I could smell the woodsmoke as people started their fires for the first meal of the day, and I listened to the low bleat of the sheep and the quiet music of the River and the early cries of the birds.
    My tracks stretched dark behind me where my feet had pressed down the grey, wet grasses, and on the slope in front of me sparkled a miraculous carpet stitched with countless tiny gems, each one a polished and perfect crystal that flashed emerald and violet and ruby and gold. It was so beautiful I held my breath. And then the sun lifted and the magic faded, and I realized that the numbness of my feet was climbing up my legs and making me shiver, and I turned back to the house and the duties of the day.
    On the morning after my mother’s funeral, I went out of the house before dawn to be on my own. I wasn’t thinking about the dew. I just wanted to be alone. The day before the house had been so full of people. The whole village had come to pay its respects, as well as village heads from up and down the River, and we had many guests sleeping in the house. My mother had been an important woman. All day I had gravely accepted their gifts and their sympathy, and I worried about how to serve the lamb and whether Raitam was burning the bread, and who was sitting where. Dipli and Lokaran might come to blows if they sat at the same table, but I didn’t want to offend either of them by giving the other precedence, and the Juta family was feuding but, while everyone knew about the feud, nobody was certain who was on whose side because the alliances and enmities changed every day… And underneath I thought I would suffocate with impatience and anger that I had to think of these things at all, which had always been the cares of my mother. I knew my grandmother was really in charge – she moved quietly and deftly between the guests, her face calm like iron – but I knew that now it was my job too, and I worried about everything. I kept my face formal and courteous as was required of the Effenda, and my stomach grew hot and tight with rage.
    When everything was finished, when the last lament had been sung and the keeners had taken their bells and cymbals and gone home, I fell into bed like a stone. I slept badly. All night I dreamed I was in the River, the waters hammering against my ears until I couldn’t tell whether the noise was the water or the pulse of my own blood. I held my breath and held my breath, my chest burning with the pressure of the black water, and then surfaced out of the dream like a drowning swimmer, gasping, and then, because I was too exhausted to resist it, slid back into the endless, suffocating dark.
    I woke up properly when it was still dark. I could hear my sisters breathing beside me, and in the next room my grandmother snorted in her sleep and turned over. I felt as tired as if I hadn’t slept at all, but I suddenly couldn’t bear to stay in bed, I couldn’t bear to be in this house with all these people, breathing the same stale, stuffy air. I slipped out of bed, threw a sheepskin coat over my nightdress and stole out of the house. Once I was outside I walked down to the River, which ran faintly luminous between its banks. The sky was just beginning to lighten towards sunrise.
    I sat down on a flat stone and waited. I don’t really know what I was waiting for, but I think I half expected to see my mother walking up from the house to call me in, as she did sometimes when I went out early. I watched as the stars faded and the landscape began to materialize out of the night and become solid again, and the rim of the world grew rose-pink and deepened to