She hadn’t thought to sleep that night, and when repose did find her, it was shallow and restive. She dreamed, as one often did in these circumstances, that she remained awake and tossing fretfully. When a hand landed on her shoulder, she woke with a gasp.
The person crouched above her was nothing more than black texture on black background, but their scent was familiar. They smelled of apricots and sun-warmed skin, even indoors in the cool of night. They didn’t speak, but moved back to make room, beckoning.
While her sister vanished into the recesses of the lightless chamber, she cast her blanket back. She’d laid her trousers out when she went to bed and felt a surge of panic when she couldn’t find them. Her anxious hands fluttered across the bedspread, twice grasping the blanket and jerking on it before she thought to lean forward and peer at the floor. There they were, lying on top of the sandals she had also set out carefully.
The pants were loose and soft, giving up halfway to the ankles. Easy to don even in the dark, and she tied the ribbon at her waist with such decisive force it was a wonder it didn’t break. The sandals were a labor in comparison: nerves made her fingers tremble so that fastening the buckles took on the delicacy of goldsmithing. A tunic on top, long in the sleeves to protect her from the chill.
Once she was dressed, she snatched a length of leather from beneath her pillow, where she always deposited it when she went to bed. She tied her hair at her nape as she quit her chamber, an eager smile dissolving into jaw-cracking yawns with every other step. She could just hear her sister’s voice as she ducked through the curtain: “Good luck!”
Beyond the cell where they slept, she entered a hallway. It wasn’t lit, either, but distant illumination tinged the air like the shade of an old stain mostly washed-away. Elsewhere, faintly, beyond more than one doorway or intersection, lamps were burning. She put her back to the distant apertures whence this less-dark came and set off purposefully in the opposite direction.
One hand rose, fingertips brushing the cool slick of polished stone beside her. Just to keep her bearings. Walking as she did from obscurity into the abyss, there was little to see, but the corridor was narrow, its ceiling low enough that taller folks treaded these halls with a habitual flinch and upward eye-flickering. She was small and didn’t worry, although her breath hitched every time her fingers lost contact with the wall: it was pocked by openings identical to the one from which she had emerged.
She walked long enough to give some sense of the scope to this ant-hive community. It wasn’t just her family here or their relatives. When the hall came to an abrupt end in front of her, she took a left, unperturbed. This brought her to a flight of stairs, which she ascended with confidence: a bannister had been carved cleverly into the solid rock of the wall so that, even in the dark, inhabitants could guide themselves.
The stair was long. Endless, it began to seem. Punctuated by multiple landings, and by multiple changes in direction as it climbed atop itself. Whoever had originally hewn it from this profound stone throat had been more interested in function than in comfort.
When she finally emerged from the stair, her thighs were on fire, her breath seeming too hot in her lungs. She would have gasped, but couldn’t: she had an audience. Finally, there were other people.
She had been alone since she quit her sister’s company, but she had entered a room full of people. You couldn’t really see them: no lamps burned here, either. It would show up their position and ruin their night vision. Still she could feel the human heat of them, hear the susurrus of their breathing.
One shadow detached itself from the wall to her left, moving toward her. “Gatekeeper.”
“Siren,” she replied.
“We are ready when you are.”
“They are below? They have given the proper signs?”
This chamber was airy in comparison to the hallway that confined her previously, six tall windows letting in the starlight and a vigorous wind, cold at this hour. She could see the guards now she’d had time to adjust to the relative brilliance of this space, but still they were nothing more than sable silhouettes. The questions were right and proper, but she wondered if it irritated them anyway. They knew she was new. It wasn’t hard to imagine they might doubt her competence, they might even feel as if she was challenging theirs.
The first man who stepped forward to greet her said simply, “They have, Gatekeeper.”
It didn’t answer her anxiety, but did answer the actual questions that were the crux of this midnight interaction. She took a deep breath and forced herself to put the worries away as childish fears better suited to novices. “Then we shall proceed.” Shall. She cringed at the pomposity of it, but he was already gesturing her forward.
Together, they stepped through the southern-facing window onto a lip of stone engirdling the lofty room. It was scarcely wide enough for her to stand upon: the toes of her companion’s much larger boots protruded into empty air. She dared to look down, and swiftly lifted her gaze, fixing it on the far, ochre horizon. A stiff wind licked against icy sweat on her brow and neck.
Two more of the tower’s guardians had followed them to the aperture. The man at her side had a length of sturdy rope in hand and stooped now, holding the loop at its end open with both hands. How he didn’t topple into the void was a mystery. “If you would extend your foot, Gatekeeper?”
Doing so felt like an acrobatic feat of stupendous peril, but one of the soldiers standing at the window took her upper arm in a grip as hard as metal, steadying her. She swallowed, but the wind gusted across the tower, keeping her fear a secret between the two of them. She felt like she would certainly fall, but the man on one knee before her slipped the rope loop beneath her sandal with expert speed.
“If you would sit, Gatekeeper?”
She sat on the lip of stone, trying not to let her descent turn into a graceless flop. At her side, the man who would accompany her was busy with a rope of his own. Soon, the sentries who would remain above were lowering them carefully into the sky. It was frightening to be adrift like this, nothing around her but the stars and the wind, but it was thrilling too. As far as the eye could see, there was emptiness. Rock and sand and sky, and novelty. Some of the sense of giddy anticipation she had felt as she tossed and turned in her bedding returned. Her protector was close, but not so close that she couldn’t turn her head and pretend she was all alone out here.
The trip was slow because the people on the ropes were being careful not to jostle them. And it was a long way down from the top of that shocking stone spire, which seemed from the outside to be completely natural. They weren’t descending to the level of the ground, but past the butte on which the tower stood and then into a narrow canyon.
Only as its jaws closed around her did she finally look down. She could see little beneath the black wing of the canyon’s overhang; just a narrow strip of star-blued sand pocked by many divots. She was practically close enough that a tall person could have reached up and touched her foot before it became obvious—if you didn’t know to look for it—that these were footprints. The tracks of the people who had drawn her out of her bed and out of her sanctuary so late.
New smells surrounded them as the sky prepared to relinquish them to the terrestrial environment whence they came. The scents of dung and sweat and animal musk overpowered those of sand and rock, which had reigned when they hung suspended. The smells of moisture and green things, she had left behind halfway down that inaugural corridor. There were new sounds, too, competing with the shushing wind: cloth rustling, metallic jingling, the farts and groans of massive animals.
Her companion kicked his foot from its loop of rope before they reached the canyon’s bed so that he could drop the rest of the way. He wanted to be on his feet and ready to receive her when she reached the floor of the ravine. One hand took her rope as she touched down, the other gripping lightly on her elbow. Once she was standing stably, he knelt to slip the noose away. The moment there wasn’t pressure on the ropes anymore, they were rising back into the sky, jerking like frightened snakes.
Ahead, the canyon came to an end abruptly in a cliff, sheer and forbidding. Lined up in the shadows facing it: a considerable party, details cloaked by the night in which they waited. Many people, anyway, and many large beasts of burden, all of them doubtless weary and longing for repose.
She turned to face the people emerging from beneath the canyon’s hollowed shoulder to greet her. There were three of them, all men, wrapped up against the elements, and she told herself she was imagining their skepticism. Then the one in the middle said, “You’re awfully young, aren’t you?” His displeasure was obvious despite his accent: he had expected things of this experience and she was ruining it for him.
She never had to find a response: the Siren who accompanied her had drawn his sword and laid it to the neck of the self-important merchant while everyone else was still wrestling with their sense of social awkwardness. “We did not ask that you come here,” he pointed out, and his voice was as cold as the stars.
The other foreigners were falling over themselves to apologize, the rude fellow shunted to the rear as if he might be forgotten there. She ignored the byplay: quarreling with merchants over manners wasn’t her duty. The decision to trade with these people hadn’t been made by her, could not be vetoed by her, and would not be decided on the basis of her dignity, not unless it was seen to cast a reflected bad light across all their people. In any case, it was a debate for another day, and for wiser heads.
She was just here to let them in.
Upon the sandy channel at the canyon’s nadir, she went to her knees. The sand was cool, soft, giving; it made her feel welcome. She cast a glance at the heavens, eyes seeking, although she already knew the answer. The seers had been aware that a party would be coming in tonight, and the elders had decided to grant them entrance two days earlier. She had been warned long since that the duty would be hers and had time to prepare.
This was her first chance, though, her maiden adventure beyond the walls into the desert wasteland with its endless sky and alien barrenness. She had been taught to take her time and do things right. Beyond that, if she made an error on her first-ever venture, she might never get another chance.
But all was as she had predicted. The heavens confirmed the calculations she had made on her charts, in consultation with her scrolls: the Ibis rode the sky tonight. From this sandy place where she alit when her descent reached its end, the pinnacle of the watchtower above pointed straight at it. Guiding her.
From within the pouch at her belt, she withdrew a fistful of sand, which she buried in the sand. Outsiders might find it, but would never be able to recognize it or parse its significance. They couldn’t know it was a bridge, spanning the gulf between a dream and its realizing.
Atop the buried sand, she cupped her hands, bowing her head so strands of hair slipped free from the thong and hung across her face. Ibis flies home, she whispered. Flies home to the spring/ His chicks are waiting/ For the fat frog in his beak.
The foreigners had watched this ritual with a combination of bemusement and breathless fascination. This was a wondrous event; witnessing it, a privilege out of legend. Still, she understood that she was an unprepossessing hierophant and perhaps the rite itself was homely too. Not so its result.
With a sandy grinding, the face of the cliff was parting and drawing back. Retreating into the flanks of the canyon. It was hard to see what precisely was happening and probably no one was looking anyway; they must be transfixed by what the withdrawing walls revealed.
A gust of air, sweet with water, breathed across them like the exhalation of a goddess. Suddenly the lonely wind wasn’t lonesome anymore, paired now with a liquid tinkling from near and far. Croaking frogs challenged each other and a dove cooed sleepily. You could smell the musk of flowers, the melting richness of ripe fruit. Above all, greenness and water.
From this vantage, you couldn’t see much. Little more than the trees and grass at the outer margin of the oasis, which was a feat of human ingenuity rather than a lucky fluke of nature. Any who came here would know about the city, but you couldn’t see it yet. The only evidence hinting at its existence, proving the truth of the legends, was a paved road emerging from beneath the canyon’s sandy bed as the eye passed across the threshold where the cliff had been. With a squeak, a bat darted past, and most of the people accompanying the caravan ducked. It was wondrous to find such abundance in this place, so wondrous that it was unnerving.
There was one last duty she must perform before she could return to bed, where she would surely lay awake for the rest of the night irresistibly reviewing her performance. The Siren stuck to her shoulder like a cloak; his work was almost done now too, and hopefully he would be permitted a rest before he must return to his watch upon the tower. Together, they positioned themselves within the entrance, but it was his to watch, to warn their people if enemies threatened.
Hers were the words, and her voice shook slightly as she finally spoke them: “We have water, friends, enough to share. Please, will you come in and have a drink?”
Note from the author: Back in undergrad I purchased from an art fair a pottery tile. The artist had painted a selection of vegetables arranged in such a way as to resemble a female nude lying on her side, seen from the rear. Beneath this striking image, the words: Reclining Salad. As objets d’art went, I thought that was pretty nifty, and it turned out my parents were taken with it, too.
Ever since, they’ve been bringing back tiles from their travels to add to my collection. The tiles range from abstract images to human figures, all of them necessarily small. Evocative, for such modest works of art. In this series, I’ll be writing a short story for each, my very own miniature Pictures at an Exhibition.
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