The 60th day of Yaris, 2706, evening
“I have been to Gior. Years ago. With my father. He was collecting glowworms that live upon the roofs of caverns in the south of country. I spend a lot of my time in dark caves, laying upon my back, watching the movement of the larvae above me. Like seeing ten-thousand years of the night sky changing overhead in the course of a single day. The unfixed stars.” ] He had been what, eleven or twelve then? Dragged off on an adventure during the holidays. The immensity of the place, the height of those sheer, freezing mountains, the thin chill air, even now he recalled them with unusual clarity. “Gior made me feel small, insignificant, superfluous. I don’t recall ever having felt so free, as though my actions counted for nothing at all. I should like to go back some day, to see if I can ever feel that way again. And to try more of the local cuisine. I had so little of it. All I recall now were these awful freeze dried potatoes, left to be preserved in the dry cold night air. They lasted forever and were filling, but not exactly what I would call pleasant.”
He would go back. Some day, when he was more himself. He had not felt quite himself for ten years. Living here was like trying to play a part that was too close to his own character for him to grasp. He would need time. Time along the canals and in the coffee houses and in the public squares. He might even tolerate the ‘gifts’ of the pigeons again. No. Never that. That could never be tolerated. Still, it might be the price of being home. That, and the stench from off the canals in the heat of summer.
He longed for home, yet this Niccolette would prefer to stay here, in Anaxas, with all its straight-laced, starched collar regimentation. A mystery. Yet her other desires, to be far away, to see strange countries, that he could appreciate with the ease of slipping into a bath of perfect temperature.
“Naulenon.” He let the word roll about on his tongue, tasting in it the strangeness of that distant place, the stories, the legends he never believed but desperately wanted to be true. “Yes, I too would like to see that. But in my heart and head, what I wish to see is Roannah. I want to see its desolation,stand among the cinders, and listed for the ancient words on the breeze.” He picked up one of his books, A Theory of Monic Semiotics and tapped the cover. “There is so much that has been lost, so much that we are barely piecing together. Uttering the prayers of decipherment and returning only more questions. That is another form of mystery I enjoy, though on a rather different level.” Those mysteries he had loved since as a small boy he sat upon what was supposed to be a reproduction of a sorcerer’s bronze tripod seat, still hundreds of years old, and pretended to be some ancient scholar-magistrate among the antiques that were his family’s stock in trade.
He took another drink of the wine, rather a large one, truth be told, felt the golden liquid flow into his veins. It loosened his tongue, gave fire to his thoughts. “I sometimes think we are too respectful of the trappings of the past. They deserve respect, of course, but I fear too much romanticism has been dreamed up, too much of golden aged imagined. Those early sorcerers, did they think they were the end of magic? I doubt it. Perhaps they knew in their bones that it was only the beginning.” He raised his cup to the disheveled girl. “Forgive me, I am rather further gone than I had intended. Still I did come here to think these thoughts, even if I had not expected to share them.” The girl was still drunk, yet it seemed inhospitable, uncivilized, not to offer her a drink. Did he have another cup? No, of course not. He had not come here expecting company. He waggled the bottle in what he hoped was a friendly manner. Did he want her to accept or turn it away? There was no way of knowing. That was another mystery.