Her face registered surprise, but she nodded. They walked together through the gardens, making meaningless, innocuous conversation about the plants and the weather. Surreptitiously he watched her face as she took in the view, saw the longing she could not quite conceal. He could never keep his own eyes off the view for long. The manor house sat at the peak of a narrow pinnacle of limestone, one of dozens scattered across the ancient, eroded terrain. He could see many of the others from here, rising like gnarled chimneys from the lush green of the plain, most of them bearing estates like his own. My own— He looked back suddenly, at the house on the rising slope behind him, and out at the view again; feeling a rush of vertigo.
The family shrine lay ahead of him, gleaming whitely on an outcrop at the edge of the sheer drop. There was no maze of shrubbery concealing it; the promontory itself offered a privacy that most estates did not have. Pandhara Netanyahr stopped as they reached the waiting-bench beside the path. She glanced at him, her fingers brushing the filigreed seatback; uncertain whether he wanted her to wait, or to stay at all.
“This is the first time I’ve seen the estates since I returned to Kharemough … the first time I’ve set foot on this path since I left home to join the Police, years ago,” he said. He turned back to her; she settled onto the bench, looking up at him. “When you … when you came here to pray, what did you say? I don’t know what to say, anymore.”
She shook her head, glancing at the shrine. “I didn’t know what to say, either, Gundhalinusathra.”
He nodded, and went on along the path alone. He went in through the always open door, into the cool, echoing interior. He paused, startled by the quality of the light. He had forgotten how the light… forgotten so much. There were no windows at all, but daylight shone through the translucent ceramic of the walls, silhouetting the countless barely visible names inscribed along their luminously glowing planes: the actual names of members of his family for every generation, for as far back as anyone had ever been able to remember and record, in a record that began well over a millennium and a half ago. He noticed, with a sense of dim surprise, something that he had never realized before—that his family actually claimed to be descended from Ilmarinen. He touched the name, feeling an odd electricity run up his fingers, wondering whether it was true.
He moved on along the walls, running his hands over the names, following them up through time into the present… stopping at last by the names of his parents, his brothers, himself. His own name was the only one with a red stain, coloring rubbed into the letters… he was the only one left alive. He stared at his own name for a long time.
At last he turned away, facing the small bench in the center of the room—a simple surface of gleaming white, mottled now with the dust of neglect. Still beside it were the cylindrical covered urn of the same perfect whiteness, and a container holding incense. He moved to the bench, sat down, with a peculiar reluctance. He took a stick of incense and held it between his hands like a flower, before he struck it sharply with his thumbnail, kindling it. He blew out the sudden flame, left it smoldering, watched as it perfumed the air with its bittersweet smoke. The old familiar scent brought the past flooding into his mind: memories from his childhood of sitting silently on this same bench while his father, his First Ancestor, head of the Gundhalinu family, prayed.
But his father’s prayers were silent, he had never known what they said … they didn’t help him now, as he tried to form something like a coherent thought. He looked up at the walls again, rolling the incense stick between his palms, the smoke making his eyes sting with artificial grief. This was the place where you came to feel pride, and tradition, to meditate on your family’s accomplishments; to worship the perfect order in which everyone knew their place, and yours had always been on top … to call it justice.
But he no longer believed that, had not believed it for a long time now. What was he supposed to do now? Ask forgiveness—? For whom? For himself, for losing faith, or for seeing the truth? For his father’s failure to act, for his brothers’ cravenness and venality and greed, for the ultimate degradation and humiliation of their deaths? His hands dropped the incense, left it smoldering between his feet. He should weep. He was the last of his line, and he was living a lie. And he could not weep, could not grieve, could not feel anything at all. He made himself remember the moment he had learned of his father’s death—when he had been far away, on Tiamat. Made himself remember his mother, her face blurred by time, as she kissed him goodbye and abandoned him in the rose-colored light of dawn. He pictured how his aged father had stood, leaning against the carven mantel in the main hall, his eyes like garnets as he urged his youngest son to usurp his brothers’ place, to spit on the ideals he had been raised to revere… . Forced himself to see his brothers suspended like meat in an abattoir.
He realized that his face was wet, that there were real tears on it, this time. Tears of self-pity. He wiped them away, disgusted. Gods … I’m so tired. Slowly he got to his feet, and slid aside the top of the urn beside the bench. It was filled with ashes—the ashes of his ancestors, a pinch added at each death, before their remains were scattered into the wind. He sank a finger into the surface of the ash, and painted the requisite smudge of grief on his forehead.
He left the shrine, taking a deep breath to clear his lungs as he started back along the narrow path. Pandhara Netanyahr was still sitting alone on the waiting-bench, gazing out across the valley. She did not even look up as he approached, until he said, softly, “Netanyahrkadda.”
She started, looked up at him with a slight shake of her head, as if she had been completely lost in the view.
“Yes,” he said, answering the look, “it is beautiful here, isn’t it?” He sat down on the bench beside her.
She looked at him a little oddly; he realized, embarrassed, that she was searching for some intentional slight. But it was not there for her to find, and her expression eased again. “Thank you for letting me have the pleasure of its company awhile. I feel as if this place and I are like old lovers, in a way. The parting was painful, but there will always be something special between us.”
He heard the melancholy in it, and glanced down. “Yes, I think I know what you mean.” He looked toward the house, where it rose above the gardens like an extension of the peak itself. “I’ve felt the same way, since my return home.”
“But you are the head of family now, aren’t you?”
Head of family. He sat down, wondering dismally what he was going to do, now that he was … now that everything he saw, every fond detail, with all the painfully bright memories of his former life they evoked, only rubbed salt in the wounds of his bitterness. Even if his only memories had been happy ones, there was no way that he could possibly stay here more than a few days longer. Then it would be back upstairs—to the shipyards, to the halls of the government centers and Police headquarters. There could only be brief, stolen visits to this place, at long intervals if at all, once he was back at work. And then there would be Tiamat waiting, and the gods only knew when, if ever, he would return from there. … He pressed his hand to his eyes, resting his arm on the seatback.
“Gundhalinusathra …” Netanyahr rose from the bench beside him as though she thought somehow her words had been to blame. She touched his shoulder briefly “I should not have stayed. I’m sorry—”