Three Blank Pages * —page one: the death— * The first, real shiver came, even before the day’s impending chill. Orel sat quietly on a reed mat. There was a breeze. There were insects. Clouds drifted in silence, high overhead. There were kites in the lower sky: an extravagance of canvas shapes with vultures painted on them in all of the colors of Haiga With Vultures and Haiga Stands Farthest West. Of the eight Haiga cities, those were of paramount significance, today, though the nearest of the Eight Cities—Haiga on the Seaward Edge—stood close enough to show its light on a clear, quiet night. It was a warm day, and a sunny day; the sky swirled with Haiga colors on kites and on streamers. There was no music; that would come later… There were few—if any—real vultures in Gwot, and none in the town of Near Sea: no bald and feathered scavengers to rip the useless flesh from a dead man’s soul, but the kites were near enough, good enough…enough. Children whistled bird-chirp-codes to one another, and to the teenagers out there, and over there: anchors to their tethered vulture kites. There were more than a dozen kites, more than a dozen imitation-vultures, dragging streamers from their tails in all of the flagrant colors of death. They swooped. They circled. They drew arcane shapes in the noon-day sky, and the shrill, complicated whistles of eager kids told the vultures when to fly lower, when to circle closer, and when to hover (as motionlessly as possible) on a stiff pillar of warm, rising air. Their streamers trailed red and orange, yellow and cat-belly-ocher. At Death’s arrival, they’d land. Their tethers would be burned from them and with all due solemnity (and more than a little eager good-will) the day’s promised corpse would receive them. Vulture gifts. Pet kites. “Is it hard for you?” The voice at Orel’s side shocked him from his reverie. “All of this sitting. It can be maddening. You’re all right? I’ll walk with you, a little, if you want.” Shennet’s voice was—as always—a comfort: as dense and as warm as a hand-smoothed pebble clutched beneath the pillows on a night burdened with heavy, lonely dreams. Another shiver came as Orel roused himself from his mind’s wander among the bird-kites; he rolled his shoulders in the manner of a Haiga-man’s shrug. The breeze played a tickle of hair across his brow. He brushed it aside, tucking the errant lock behind his left ear. “I’m all right,” he said, as calmly as he could. It wasn’t until he spoke that he realized that the words came in Haiga. He sensed Shennet’s quiet smile. Though many in Shennet’s prodigious family spoke Gwot, a few did not; and as a courtesy to them—nearly half of them up from Haiga With Vultures, and Haiga Stands Farthest West—Orel spoke Haiga as well as he could, as well as he’d learned, though Shennet’s deadpan patience. There were Gwot relatives as well: marriage-relatives, sitting at some distance from the intimate death-watch. Orel didn’t share very much with them. His family was a different mass of humanity all together. He was engaged to Shennet, but was not yet his husband. “It ends today,” Shennet said, touching Orel’s shoulder. The contact was soft, fleeting, and heavy with unspoken—yet familiar—intimacy. Shennet’s fingertips lingered, for just a single beat of the heart, and then withdrew. Orel nodded. Privileged—by a good Haiga-traditional son’s affection—to sit before a dying man, Orel touched Kheb, with as much tenderness as a gaze might impart. Others did the same…uncles and nieces: all three of Kheb’s wives and both of his co-husbands. Shennet sat there, too, Kheb’s only son by birth. It had been Shennet who spent the most time explaining things to Orel. It had been Shennet who spent the most time tending to Khem with whispers and poems and polite dabs of morphine and sugared cannabis-paste to leaven the old man’s comfort. It had been some uncle’s idea to carry Kheb into the open: to let him lie in the sun, and beneath the stars, if Death was tardy in its arrival. And so now, Kheb lay on a pallet scented with herbs and cedar. It was a good idea, in Haiga’ii logic, and a poetic one, as Orel reckoned such things. He’d known Kheb—a little bit—and recognized a love for the sky, the stars, the wide open spaces, greener than much of the Haiga territories, and woefully lacking in vultures. There were kites today however, the dream of vultures if not the birds themselves. Children whistled. Some half-dozen of them played a complicated game among themselves, a running game. The adults watched them for a moment here, a moment there, but left them to their play and the kites. After a time, the vulture kites flew just a little bit lower. * By sunset, Kheb’s face had taken on the color of ash. He’d withdrawn the night before. His eyes closed tightly, as if to hold the last that they’d seen: the night’s late-summer constellations. His beloved stars. Orel imagined them there, cluttered behind the tight-closed lids. In his own mind’s eye, Orel saw them there, wadded and distorted: The Owl, The Lion, The Spindle…and low to the horizon, where the stars moved most, The Sphinx, the dim-gleaming light of Sol marking her left eye. There were those who maintained that The Sphinx was a Haiga-born constellation, and so it was fitting to imagine it there, gleaming in Kheb’s right eye, as he withdrew from life: gleaming in Kheb’s right eye, as he returned to Sol…where all humans lived, once, before they were born. Like Shennet, Kheb wore dark skin, brown skin, like the bark of an oak tree, dipped in tannin, dipped in tea and left there to swim. Even gray and ashen, he maintained his oaken hue, some measure of his strength, Orel judged, though he was uncertain if Haiga men saw such things. Kheb had been restive during the night, difficult to comfort. And now, he gasped like a fish drawn from the water. His chest rose and fell with exaggerated bellows-motion. His throat constricted, relaxed, constricted again, and his mouth—agape—grew dry around the edges. “He’s gone far into labor,” Shennet said, softly, and in Gwot. In the Haiga cities, everyone went into labor: mothers at the beginning of their children’s lives, and everyone at the ends of their own. An uncle, a cousin, and the youngest of Kheb’s sisters began a rhythmic, chanted count. Though none of them were tempors, they chanted in the manner of those strange men. Orel never knew the sound of a tempor’s voice beyond recordings; Shennet shared those with him on quiet nights, on laughing nights in bed. Tempors: men and women who spent their adult lives, counting: keeping time. They were living clocks, an inscrutableHaiga’ii invention. Orel couldn’t imagine living like that, living with only time for your thoughts, ticking out of your mouth, second by second for as long as you lived: ticking in your mind when your mouth was silent. And now, Kheb’s life was ticking out of the mouths and throats of his loved ones, as more and more of his relatives took up the count in quiet, lisping whispers. Labor ended after only seven thousand-and-twenty-eight seconds. At that time, Shennet placed the side of his face to his father’s still chest, and listened for a long time with his eyes closed. Orel couldn’t move, couldn’t break his gaze from Shennet’s bent form, face pressed to a dead man’s stillness. Shennet straightened, reached into a pocket and placed two circles of copper onto the man’s closed eyes, and in a deep, sonorous voice, began to sing his father’s death. A hush descended—though only for a moment—and the kites fluttered and twitched in the arms of adolescents approaching the circle of relatives attending Kheb’s journey west. Like Kheb and like Shennet, they wore dark skin, dark faces with their hair (black) cut close to the scalp or woven into tight and complex braids. The teenagers paid what respects custom demanded to their parents, aunts, uncles, and distants, and in an almost-rowdy gaggle, they presented their vulture kites to Kheb, covering him with the canvas and the finer, tougher fabrics. They spoke to him, joking it seemed, boasting, and Shennet had explained that too. Dead men liked good jokes and lively young people. * —page two: Kheb— Orel had first met Shennet when Shennet—still new to the sprawling town of Near Sea—ambled into the print house and asked after collections of poetry, famous novels, and significant entus of both local and national reputation. He spoke Gwot in a lilting, singsong manner: notes of teasing inquisition embedded in the shapes of each spoken breath. He’d made a weekly habit of asking questions and probing after Orel’s opinions and literary tastes. There was naked flirtation in Shennet’s manner and Orel found himself frightened, intrigued, and—at last—drawn to the lean, dark Haiga’ii immigrant. Something began: —a flirtation, at first— —an attraction— —an abiding affection that grew little roots and a tender shoot. It grew for the span of two years, smoldering with each winter, each summer, and in the flare of the second year’s autumn, what had been seething in the core of Orel’s bones, and in the flesh just south of his navel, erupted into riotous blossom. There was a hostel near the print house, and Orel counted the owners among his intimate friends. They gave bedding and an empty room to him on the nights when Shennet lingered at the print-house after closing. And then: “My family is curious,” Shennet said, well into their habit at the hostel. “My parents want to meet you. And what started as Orel’s agreement to a first meeting, grew into regular visits, to Kheb in particular. Kheb, the teacher of mathematics, at the senior gymnasium. Orel visited him there and shared opaque, oblique conversations on quiet and contemplative days. He spent time at the family house, with Shennet—of course—and some unfixed number of relatives: the main household, and mobs of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. He learned Haiga: slowly at first. It was Shennet who taught him the rudiments of the language, and Kheb—himself!—who taught the copious number of genital-words, insults and arcane vulgarities. It was Kheb who taught Orel how to make Shennet blush, and as the gap between them narrowed, he took Orel aside on a sunny, humid day. “Shennet says that you give shapes to words. He says that you smell of books.” Orel nodded. “I’ve apprenticed with the Printer’s Guild, and I am first assistant at the print house in town-center.” “And you’re a poet as well?” Orel shrugged, rolling his shoulders in that complicated, Haiga’ii way. “I squawk like everyone else,” he said, jabbing at the old Haiga’ii pun. “But I am no poet, no master of the word or the voice.” “Squawking,” Kheb said. “Please, forgive Haiga’ii arrogance in this description of your language.” “There’s no arrogance. We squawk,” Orel said, grinning. “Gwot…it is the ruckus-call of the black, trickster bird. Squawking is a good thing, I think.” Kheb nodded, closing his eyes for a moment. “Haiga-logic is many things. I prefer Gwot: there is a silence here that is absent in the Eight Cities, there’s calmness. The Gwot Lands are a wonder among the homes of mankind and your libraries rival our own, but I miss the buzzards: the great, bald vultures and I miss our tempors.” It was a sunny day and Orel walked with Kheb through the Alder Grove at the southern skirt of town. The air was jagged with bird-chirps and cicada rattles and the chortle of other things that were grudging in their acceptance of birds, of cicadas, and of humans. “Tempors,” Orel said, with something like reverence lending its taste to that word. “Shennet speaks of them. I’d like to hear them. Maybe I will…as the turtle walks.” “As the turtle walks,” Kheb echoed. “That’s a good promise, if I understand correctly.” “What’s it like to miss them?” Orel asked. Kheb laughed. “A Gwotian riddle? How can I explain what it is to miss the tempors…?” Something in Kheb’s voice invited boldness and so Orel seized it and cocked his head to one side, ignoring the sudden, blond nimbus washed across his left-peripheral sight by a playful breeze. He needed a haircut. He’d take one. Later. Now, he simply brushed the blond fog from his gaze and inhaled. “Teach me something about them. If my question to you is a riddle, then answer me with a riddle in turn, if you will…” Kheb laughed again, and the sound was profound in its depth. “It’s the riddle of the tempors you want, eh? What if there is no riddle? Shall I make one up?” Orel shrugged. “If you will,” he said. They walked for a while, and then, quietly, Kheb spoke. “How many toes do you have,” he asked. “Think on this. The answer is different from the one you take for granted. Answer me when you’re ready.” * —page three: after— The air stank of ashes and kerosene. It took a day of preparation for Kheb’s cremation, and a day of burning, and now, it was over and what remained of both man and pyre was left to cool, to blow away and to recede into memory. There was still life in the deep embers of the pyre, something remained of a human shape, written in ashes and bones and the whisper of flames reduced to embers. There was a breeze, and on occasion, it stole sparks from the embers, casting them westward (perhaps symbolically?) like clotted storms of fireflies. There were no grasses in the burning fields, nothing to for flames to seize, except for the husk of a dead man. The burning fields were the town’s allowance for death, and so it remained clear of what impediments might brew untamed flames. The burning fields were bleak and lumpy with black and gray mounds diminishing in the winds. The oldest pyres were weathered away, but Orel could read a history of funerals here. He could name the darker mounds and attach remembered faces to them. There were no bones here, no bone-shapes rendered in ash and char. They’d been removed by devout mourners, long ago…and Kheb’s powdery outline would soon be gone as well. Now, however, Orel sat on a reed mat, beside Shennet. He sat like a monk in his billowing, white shirt and pleated kilt, in the same glaring shade of mourning-white. In the manner of any Gwotian, he walked on naked feet, his insteps and toes marked with the near-abstract designs of formal grief. A henna-woman applied the patterns, asking of Kheb as she worked, making quiet and comforting conversation as any necrologist might. She’d been meticulous, perhaps too profoundly, as Orel spent a part of Kheb’s cremation blushing at halting, half-stuttered compliments, but now, only Shennet sat beside him, smiling at what might have been a personal joke. “Pretty toes,” he’d said, grinning. “My father will be famous in this family because of your toes.” Orel bristled. “I mean no offence.” “No one has taken any. You honor us all. You’re Gwotian and you’ve shared that with us. Mourning my father as you’d mourn your own blood-kin.” Distant members of the family had been the first to return to the house, well within the depths of Near Sea, and nearer relatives followed them after a respectful span of time. Now, only Shennet and Orel sat before the dying embers and breeze-gusts of ash, puffing out from the hot, powdery mound whenever a surge of gentle wind blew landward from the Westerly Sea. Orel could hear fisher boats in the distance, and if he strained, the sounds of commerce and trade might have tickled the insides of his ears. He thought of the boats, the fishermen, the trade-haulers, in a vain attempt to ignore the sprig of dry plant clasped gently between two fingers. Kheb’s younger sister—Esbet—had come to sit beside them in quiet reserve. Before leaving, she leaned into a whisper, tugging Orel’s attention with her movement and her voice. “You make words,” she said, in accent-warped Gwot. “I print words,” Orel said, gently. “On here,” Esbet said, clearly thinking in Haiga despite the Gwot words she voiced. “My brother,” she said. “Make words here. For him. Yes? Like book. Entu.” And now, after her departure back to the house, Orel sat, fingering the brittle sprig of dried lunaria. Its leaves and blossoms were gone and only its translucent seed husks remained, most were empty of the twin seeds within and those remaining rustled in the faint breeze, peeling apart…tearing. Lunaria annua. Orel knew the plant, and the value of its husks. It was the poet’s plant, its tripartite seed-skins lending themselves to three-page books. Most, if not all such things were gifted to the wind, when written. Orel, himself, had never written one, though friends of a common, romantic temperament wrote at least one per year, and cast them—once per year—to the winds, to the sea, and on romantic, sentimental occasions, to the fires of the hearth. Esbet’s request was touching and unexpected. “I don’t know what to say,” Orel said, staring ahead, and staring at nothing, despite all that met his gaze. “Then, don’t say anything,” Shennet said. “Esbet expects me to.” “Esbet likes you. That’s all there is to it. She’s just learned of three-page books. A Gwot-thing. Write something, if it’s right to do so. If not, give the blank pages to my father now.” Orel closed his eyes and shook his head. “No. Not now.” “Don’t worry about Esbet. She won’t hunt you down and ask what you’ve written.” Orel shrugged. “I want to write something.” He nodded. “For him. It’ll take time. He asked me a riddle, a long time ago, now. I never answered it. I’d like to. And maybe I’ll write it. On lunaria.” “Kheb’s riddle…?” There was a grin in Shennet’s voice. “Kheb’s riddle.” “You’ve been counting for years. Over and over again, from right to left and left to right. How many of your toes have you counted, now? Thousands?” Orel smiled. “Eight thousand, and I’ve learned today, that ten of them are pretty.” Shennet put his arm across Orel’s shoulders and pulled him close. “All of them are pretty, but what does a single man need with eight thousand toes?” “The answer to a riddle,” Orel said. “I wish I’d told him before…” “Tell him when the time is right,” Shennet said. “He’ll know. Even if he’s far away; he’ll know.” Orel closed his eyes, holding the moment of Shebbet’s warmth across his shoulders. He leaned into the contact, allowing himself to bask, quietly, in it. “He’s proud of you,” Shebbet said. “My father…he’s the first of my parents to call you his son.” “I’m proud to know him.” There was silence, for a while, and Orel held on to it. “I think you should keep his riddle,” Shebbet said, when darkness pulled itself over the eastern horizon and the first of the wander-stars rose, almost like a moon, and something like a promise, as the oldest poets called it. “Just keep counting and never give him the answer. He’s a mathematician. I think he’ll understand that. Besides, your knotty toes famous in my family now, why give them a finite number?” Orel smiled. “Count for the rest of my life?” Shebbet nodded. “Yes. If it suits you. If you do, I’ll help.” Laughter bubbled in Shebbet’s throat and he shifted, pulling his arm from Orel’s shoulder. He left warmth in the wake of broken contact. “I’ll start now,” he said, leaning forward and tracing one fingertip along a delicate line of henna, drawn on the alpine pallor of Orel’s skin. “You’ve counted eight thousand toes, so far?” “Yes.” “Eight-thousand and one,” Shebbet said. His finger moved, slowly, delicately, and playfully from Orel’s big toe and nine toes and nine counts later, he laughed, pressing a kiss into Orel’s mouth. “There’s food at the house,” he said, as he pulled away. “And an army of relatives. Let’s go eat, while there’s still something left.” THE END This is, as you’ve read, another story involving Gwot and its environs; the more I look at that world, the more I find myself drawn to the small customs and cultural assumptions. I rather like visiting there. There's still more to the unfolding exploration of this realm, and there will be more to come...as the turtle walks. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great post-Christmas holiday season.