Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Third Side
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
This is the third story in the Elephant Corners sequence, after “At the Elephant Corners” and “In Search of Elephant Corners.”
Sylvie sat in a marble rowboat in the middle of a pool in one of the teaching basements, trying to read the future from ripple patterns of thrown pebbles.
Katerina watched from the wooden shore.
“I don’t know,” said Sylvie. Every splash looked the same. She wished she could go back to reading clouds, coins, or chicken bones.
Even down here, Sylvie thought she heard the ghost rumble of her stolen motorbike vibrating the stone. She forced herself to sit still, to stare at the water. Katerina called her stubborn.
“Something about a book?” Sylvie said.
“Something,” said Katerina with that almost-secret smile that meant she’d seen everything Sylvie had missed, that made Sylvie want to run up the stairs and out the elephant-leg door and never come back.
Sylvie had learned a dozen methods of future-finding. She knew she’d only learned the beginnings of each, that there were dozens more she hadn’t even started.
Each method was a different vantage point, according to the old man whose breath smelled of figs, who taught her a couple afternoons a week. The way a scene looks different depending where you stand, different readings give you different perspectives.
“When the thief was alive,” said Katerina, “he wanted something from you, from us. Now all that’s left of him is wanting.”
“What did he, does he want?” said Sylvie.
“The thief was an adept in the origami arenas on Phiros, the floating island. There is a divination akin to dueling-origami. It might tell you.”
They went upstairs. The fig-man gave Sylvie a crisp square of paper. The basics were easy to learn.
She folded through the night, until the paper was soft as cloth, seeking what her teachers called the third side of the page. That was where the answer would be written.
She folded while the sun crossed the sky. She noticed the skin of her palms stung with papercuts; all the folding hadn’t blunted the edges. She looked, and by candlelight — was it night again? the second, or the third? — she could make out runes in the clusters of cuts, not quite like what she’d learned to read in chicken bones or the angles where clouds met. She knew it was the answer. She knew she couldn’t decipher it. Maybe that was what she was meant to learn.
She found Katerina on the second-floor sofas.
“Please read my palms,” said Sylvie.
Katerina’s smile was an open secret.
Parenthetical Visitors
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
The women in long white dresses (who weren’t really there) said they were travelers. They’d traveled a long, long way.
They told Robert all this (without making any noise), and asked if he could turn over a moss-covered rock on the side of the road.
He was early. The Keeper of the Royal Signet probably wouldn’t reach the field for another hour–another insult, added to those that had finally pushed Robert past respectful silence, and had, ironically, made the Keeper the injured party. He kicked the rock over with his heel.
The women in long white dresses (who weren’t really there) were fascinated by what they found in the mud, pointing at bugs that scurried through their incorporeal fingers. Robert wanted to ask if there was anything else they wanted, but couldn’t bring himself to talk to what he were just figments of his exhaustion, bits of dreams he might have had if he’d been able to get any sleep since the day of Carolyn’s refusal, the day he walked out of the Keeper’s service, the day of the challenge.
The women either couldn’t read his thoughts or were too busy to bother, so he tipped his hat slightly enough anyone would think he was adjusting it and continued between dew-soaked fields, past trees as laden with thieving birds as fruit, and over the bridge. The Keeper was there, early and impatient.
Then twenty minutes of waiting while Robert’s second didn’t arrive, the Keeper staring at Robert with a hatred undercut by frequent yawns, Robert trying not to look back. Then ten seconds that might have been a year while Robert chose his weapon. Then a time that hadn’t seemed to happen at all: the burning in his chest crowded out any memory of turning or hearing the tenth pace called.
“I bet the Duke a dozen by midsummer,” he heard the Keeper say. “This makes seven.”
Robert saw that the women in long white dresses (who weren’t really there) were there again, bending down over something even more fascinating than the underside of a rock. He went over to join them, and looked down at his own body (he wasn’t really there anymore either).
The women in long white dresses said they’d traveled a long, long way. Would Robert like to join them? And perhaps he could show them some interesting things before they left this world?