The War Orphan

The fishermen saw the smoke first. Their shouts alerted the men in their workshops on the hill, who seized what tools might serve for defense and scrambled toward the shore. By midday everyone in President’s Tour had come to see the plume rising from the ocean’s horizon. The elders called it a portent. They planted their bare feet in the sand and waited, while behind them the children snuck glimpses through the trees before darting back to their mothers. Men with the keenest eyesight were sent to the treetops and to the highest roofs on the hillside road. At length they descried a shape drifting ominously toward the cove—then declared it was only a child, trembling with cold and terror as she clung to the flotsam.

The matrons waded in to their waists to pull her to the shore. They bore her in her sodden gown to Grandmother Omsa’s cottage, where for many days, her strange face was glimpsed only when the breeze tossed the curtains in the cottage window. Half a moon had passed when she let herself be seen, if only for a moment, when the matrons came up the path with baskets of fish and bread. And each day the fishermen casting their nets and the farmers heading to the fields exchanged and pondered the Grandmothers’ reports of the girl’s spare utterances in a strange language of which nothing could be understood but her name: Askdavan-keem.

Myakõa, the furniture maker, stopped on the hillside road to listen to the Grandmothers. They said the girl woke constantly in the night from the sound of her own screams. Passing Grandmother Omsa’s cottage, Myakõa looked toward the window, but could see nothing but darkness beyond the wavering muslin. When spring dissolved the mists and the meadow filled with frogs, the Grandmothers began repeating Askdavan-keem’s stories, relayed in pieces as she learned their language, of a great house that had floated on the sea and was blasted apart by the thunder from inside another like it, and of watching her family and everyone she knew slip into the deep black waves.

The girls Liluye and Kaliska, from between the meadow and the seaside, brought swathes of cloth and taught Askdavan-keem to sew. They coaxed her outside to husk the corn, to milk the goats, and finally to the woodlands to forage for wild herbs and mushrooms. Conspicuous in her haphazard gown, with her oddly rounded forehead, bulbous cheekbones, and skin the colour of a lobster left too long in the sun, Askdavan-keem worked among the other girls, though with fewer words and more hesitation, and she remained an enigma to the people of President’s Tour. There were other enclaves beyond the forest, that much was known; and elders had travelled the ancient roads to trade for cures in the time of the Wasting Sickness—although they returned too late, and their briny draughts saved few of those afflicted—but only in legend had anyone ventured onto the sea. The mystery of her origins, and the frailty Askdavan-keem never seemed to outgrow, stirred in Myakõa something more than duty or pity.

Myakõa had barely mastered the family trade when his parents had succumbed to the Sickness. For years he had risen in solitude at daybreak, to hammer and to plane and to hoist his works over his back to carry along the road, never caring he had no other skills or marks of distinction. Only now, as day by day his thoughts bent further toward Askdavan-keem, did he begin to contrast himself with other youths who carried more and ran faster, who painted epics in the coloured sands on the floor of the Domed House, who braided shells into their waist-length hair or carved bracelets from the rarest woods of the far forests. Unadorned in a tunic seasoned with years of resin and bleached by the sun, Myakõa took the hillside road each morning so that he might see the girl leaving Grandmother Omsa’s with her empty basket; and he passed through in the afternoon that she might come bearing her burden over the knoll—always barefoot, her gown now woven with her own original flourishes, with no accessory save a simple bow to tie her hair—and in her squinting eyes and uncertain gait something ineffable, something so beyond Myakõa’s comprehension that it pained him in equal parts to watch her and to stay away.

Catching him staring, the elders laughed. It was true her colour and features were strange, they said—by which they meant she was ugly—but she was, after all, just a girl like Liluye or Kaliska or any of the others Myakõa’s age or younger, and in consideration of her circumstances he ought to be kind.

Myakõa stopped asking the Grandmothers about Askdavan-keem, instead stealing glances at her in the Domed House, through the autumn firelights of the Spiral Dance and through the boisterous clamour of the harvest feasts; and through the thick smoke of Chalice Moon, when the youths who’d come of age were given their first taste of the sacred herb. And when it came time for Askdavan-keem herself to partake, Myakõa crossed the floor to kneel before her to offer his blessing, which she returned in silence and with downcast eyes.

Chance found them alone that day in the drying house. They sat side by side on the old stone bench to watch their pots of soil turn to silhouettes in the fire and gazed at the vacant meadow through the doorways beyond which the others’ voices were murmurs in the distant hills. Myakõa tested a comment on the difficulty of timing the fire to kill the fungus yet keep the soil alive. Askdavan-keem smiled, hesitated, faltered, and told him how to spot the subtle change in the cast of grey at the topmost layer—for of all the skills she’d learned in President’s Tour, the one at which she excelled was cultivation. Only when planting or tending to the verdure, the gossips noted, did she ever appear confident.

A shell of darkness grew over the embers. They reached at once for the handles of their pots. Their wrists brushed and they laughed. When they parted to take opposite paths across the meadow, it was with a newfound recognition of friendship.

From that day on they always waved and smiled when they saw each other on the road: Myakõa bare-chested and sweating under the weight of a new stool or armoire, Askdavan-keem with baskets of harvest or cradling a potted tree. Their work done, they stopped near the cottage closest to Myakõa’s, that of the lute-maker Helki, to listen to his music and linger over a pipe of the sacred herb from Myakõa’s garden or from Askdavan-keem’s, the nacre of the sinking sun and the crickets’ liquid songs growing deeper and richer with its power. At midsummer he led her through the glen to the leeward side of Relic Hill to see the giant pipe that jutted from its rusted base under the flowering vines. Longer than the height of two men, its vast mouth choked with morning glories, it remained the only artefact of the time of the fire, the only reminder left to President’s Tour of the ashes from which its people had risen. Askdavan-keem turned back toward the pastures and the cove. She clenched her fists and said if only she had the words she’d tell Myakõa everything she remembered about her own people. But when the last traces of her accent were gone—and when she was no longer a girl, but a young woman—she said her past was best left untold, those memories best forgotten.

Askdavan-keem was allotted a plot of land near the meadow, and Myakõa’s hands were joined by those of the timberers, the roofer and the joiner, to build Askdavan-keem a cottage of her own. Her garden, teeming with fruits and herbs, became a favourite play-spot for Liluye’s little sister Sanuye and for the clothier’s daughter Kolenya, to whom it was now Askdavan-keem’s turn to be a mentor. From across the knoll, Myakõa watched Askdavan-keem kneel to the children’s height and guide them in tying the young vines to their stakes and clipping back the bushes to bear the plumpest fruits the sandy loam of President’s Tour could offer. Myakõa, surveying the sturdy nut trees he’d planted as saplings when he was a boy, or the luscious rows of his hedges, wondered how large a part of their vigour they owed to Askdavan-keem. And though on their walks he sometimes took her cold little hand in his own, he stopped short of offering her a portion of his own garden. She was still too young, the gesture too presumptuous.

On a winter afternoon he heard the violent cry across the field. He threw down his tools and raced to the creek. There Askdavan-keem struggled against the current, her hands clutching madly at the rocks. He tore her from the surge, drew her to him, and cast his tunic over her bony shoulders. He rushed her shivering to his cottage, where under cover of his tunic she dropped her gown to the floor. And she did not demur as he guided her to his bed, where she wept and shivered under piles of blankets and tabards as he stoked the fire in his hearth.

The shadows had grown long when the chattering of her teeth subsided. Myakõa lit a tallow candle in the windowsill and heated one kettle after another of herbed water which Askdavan-keem could not be moved to drink. Her chills gave way to a swiftly rising fever. Yet she insisted that with rest she would recover. He replaced one after another damp cloth on her forehead, and she watched him with her weakest smile. Then she fell into a restless sleep that did nothing to assuage his fear.

The candle burned through the night, bathing the peculiar contours of Askdavan-keem’s cheeks and eyelids. Myakõa studied the rise and fall of her breath and was jolted by her sudden twists under the heaps of cloth. Shadows taunted him with memories of half-told stories he’d failed to hear, of faraway lands and of implements honed for unspeakable purposes. He cursed everything that had ever harmed her. He dreamed of beating his hammers and adzes against the hulls of those terrible floating houses, of pounding to shards the barrels of thunder, of driving his awls into the flesh of those who manned them, and he swore he’d give his life to protect Askdavan-keem. And at last, he prayed—but as she was more present and constant than any god or goddess of the earth or sky, he made his prayer to her: Please. Come through this sickness and show me your beautiful smile in the morning. if you survive, I promise to marry you and to make you as happy as it were ever in a man’s power to make a woman.

But when he opened his eyes to the blue light of morning behind a hardened tallow pool, the blankets no longer rose and fell: Askdavan-keem lay as cold and still as the remains of the candle in the windowsill.

Those who had come of age carried branches of pine to the Domed House for Askdavan-keem’s pyre and mourned for her as one of their own, as though she had always lived among the people of President’s Tour. And when her body was reduced to ash, they cast her to the ocean whence she’d come.

By winter’s final moon, Myakõa’s anguished screams gave way to beaten weeping. In spring he returned to his tools, though with less eagerness than patience, and less satisfaction than circumspection. The youths he came to mentor saw in the strokes of his hand the starkness of maturity. And as it had been in his youth, his work would be his only purpose. For he would never marry: For just as there was one sun and one moon, there was one Askdavan-keem, and no one would take her place. And though a part of him died with her, he still cherished the seasons and their rhythms, the shifting winds of the days, and the songs of the forest. In the evenings, when the sweet strains of Helki’s lute drifted through the garden and the sky turned pink and gold, Myakõa cast his gaze to the ocean’s horizon, to the rise and break of the flickering white peaks at the edge of the only world he would ever know, and he grew old in awe of the power of the currents and tides of the unknown to create and to destroy.

Tremain Xenos is a writer, translator, part-time teacher, mediocre flautist and very clumsy paragliding pilot. He lives with his wife, cats, and chickens in an old house among the rice paddies in Japan’s smallest and least productive prefecture. Some of his recent stories have appeared in such places as The Heduan Review, Rivanna Review and Channel Magazine.