Meta-Conversations: Ina

            The Ai-Naidari I’m hoping to meet is new to me and I want to put her at ease, so I set out what passes for a formal table for me: I have even found a tablecloth, and if the teapot and cups aren’t fancy, at least they match. I leave the tisane to steep, and hunt up a few almond cookies, and when I look up, she’s there, and I am taken aback.

            “Datyani,” she says, and her voice is like a flute’s, dulcet and clear and breathy. “I have heard so much about you. How great an honor it is to command even an hour of your attention…!”

            She’s so young.  That’s the only thing I can think, staring at her. Haraa had said it so casually—‘Ina was young enough to have children”—but I didn’t think that through. That Ajan married a woman who looks to be at least twenty years his junior. Beautiful and poised, a lovely blonde with eyes like aquamarines, she wears a Public Servant’s robes but has the manners of someone accustomed to interacting with those above the Wall. Of course… Ajan was born above the Wall. He would have found it comforting. He would have found her comforting… had turned to her for it, after Kor died.

            “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to stare. Please, sit. It’s Ina, isn’t it? Ina Nai’Qevellen…” I trail off, waiting for illumination.

            “…janaekedi, datyani,” she says, which makes her the servant to a Regal. This is the rank just below osulkedi. She might be Utraenith’s, then, though not necessarily: The Regals all have their headquarters at the center of the empire, in a ring around Thirukedi’s temple at center. She could report to any one of those Regals and be able to walk home for supper.

            I pour for her and hand the cup over, and she takes it. The words ring in my head again: she’s so young. I’m old enough to be her mother. “Would it discomfit you if I were to ask you questions? My questions are much like the Exception’s… occasionally untoward.”

            “If they are only occasionally untoward, then they are very unlike the Exception’s,” she says, and there’s a hint of mischief there. I can see it suddenly, why Ajan might have noticed her. “Please, datyani, ask.”

            “Is it common? To have marriages between two of such unlike years?”

            She curls her fingers around the cup and nods, almost to herself. “It is true what they say of you… that you know so much about us that what you don’t know is surprising. My union with Ajan is not rare, precisely. Not as common as for the two to be closer in years, but not unusual. When the gap is large, the woman is more often the younger, because it is harder for older women to conceive and carry successfully to term. Ajan wanted more children. I’m glad I was able to give them to him.”

            I suddenly wonder how much older she is than Kef, Ajan’s first child. God, but they might be around the same age. It’s hard to tell just by looking. “Jzasuil,” I say, remembering their names. “And Tekvet.”

            She brightens rosily. You can see the flush through the thin fur on her cheeks. “Yes. The delight of my life, and of his. He is a magnificent father, datyani. Everything I could have wished for. And Kefthen and Aishal were so welcoming. It’s not always easy to integrate new siblings into a household with grown ones.”

            “It’s not?” I say, surprised.

            “Oh no. Of course not. We are not paragons! We suffer from jealousy and insecurity. Did you think otherwise?”

            I watch her as she lowers her eyes and think it kinder not to say anything about what she’s so patently exposing… which is how she surprises me when she meets my gaze and addresses it directly. “I have always lived in Shame’s shadow.”

            Because she is willing to discuss it, I am free to ask. “Did it hurt you?”

            “Hurt… me?” She is surprised, ears akimbo. “Oh, no… you have misunderstood me, datyani. I was never jealous of Ajan’s love for Shame. But it was such a great love that it hollowed him out. I grieved that I could never give him enough to assuage that emptiness, even a little.”

            “He loved you,” I say, because I want it to be true.

            “Yes,” she says. “He did. And I brought him comfort, and the children taught him joy again. But there are losses so great that they define everything that follows. I would not have married him had I been unable to live with that. Knowing that I would never heal him. Not fully.”

            She was proud of what she had been able to do, I saw. How assured she was, despite having entered willingly into a union with someone heartbroken, and lived with it without complaint. I knew without having to ask, that she had never spoken of it. “Why?”

            “Because I loved him,” she says simply. “To be his comfort was sufficient meaning, given that.”

            What an extraordinary woman. No wonder Ajan had married her. “I hope you will tell me about the children.”

            “I am always happy to discuss my children,” she says. “And Qevellen, if you wish to hear what it was like…” She pauses, studying my face. “I see. Shame’s shadow lies across your heart as well.”

            “And Farren’s,” I admit. “You… you became head of household. Is that right? After Haraa.”

            “I did, yes. Kefthen was busy as Shame, and Aishal and Shan were devoted to him. Haraa had my training… I enjoyed the work. That work, and the children… they gave me purpose after Ajan’s death.”

            I can see her as Qevellen’s head of household: still young, but not quite as callow. She would have done well, but what else, as someone who’d been assistant in a Regal’s affairs? She would have been witness to some of the most skillful of managers in the empire.

            She has not ceased to watch me. Does some of Shame’s incisiveness seep into everyone who lives in his household? Or does a household that includes Shame necessarily attract only those who might be capable of unusual insight? Of courage, to face what insight illuminates? “You wonder about the endings. You must. You are called datyani, the channel by which Kherishdar is carried to aunera, but the means of that carriage is art, is it not? Then you are an artist.”

            “I’m afraid I am.”

            She takes one of the little almond cookies. “Then I shall tell you what you must know, with as little pathos as possible. The man you knew as Shame, who was Ajan’s lover, died before my arrival to the House, and I am told he died there, surrounded in his family, after having been sent to it by Thirukedi.”

            I am stunned silent by that image.

            She is continuing. “Ajan died ten years afterwards. We had been married for nearly eight. Jzasuil was seven, and Tekvet five, and their memories of their elder brother and sister are clearer than the memory of their father. Haraa was the last of that generation to die; she lived into her seventh decade, and was a great comfort to me as, I hope, I was to her. She was like… like another mother. I loved her dearly.” Ina looks at me. “She died in Thirukedi’s arms, and came home to us on a litter, with every honor.”

            Tucking the napkin on her lap, she continues, with an amazing show of social grace, to lead me away from painful topics to kinder ones. “Children such as mine, who lose a parent, are said to be futhan shidari… ‘nest children.’ Our families have so many adults and children that there is no lack of guidance and love, even for orphans.” I remember that word, because Kor had been one: jzirudari. “Kefthen was very kind to them, despite how little time he had to give to his family. Aishal also always had time for them. They did not grow up bereft.”

            “And they had you.”

            “Of course,” she said. “And they went on to wed, as you know, and have children of their own, which is how you know them: Mishor and his sister, Jelail, born of my daughter Jzasuil, and Tekvet, who gave rise to Moraen, Mishor’s cousin. It is Moraen who grew up here, in Qevellen, with the third Shame to succeed Tsevet in full, Amath.” She sips her tea. “How grave you look, datyani, as if all those you love were forgotten. But they never are. Do you have a concept similar to kafyat?”

            I am so involved in admiring her deftness with conversation that it takes a moment for that word to coalesce in my head. “I’m… sorry? Does that mean… a dent?”

            She laughs, and her voice is a melody. How lovely it must be when she sings! “It once meant that… or an impression. But we use it now for those qualities about a person that are particular to their behavior or speech. Idiosyncrasies, perhaps? Eccentricities? A little?” She taps the cookie so that the powdered sugar floats off it, then tries a bite. “Families have kafyatyave, which is when younger generations preserve something about their elders and give it to their children: a turn of phrase, a way of speaking, a dance or song schematic, a gesture. It is one of the ways we observe emethil, the chain of the generations continuing. Ajan isn’t gone, datyani, so long as Moraen laughs like him, or Mishor repeats his favorite aphorisms. Jelail even forms some letters the same way Ajan did, and without ever seeing his handwriting. It is uncanny.” She finishes the cookie. “You see, in Qevellen we understand something that is rare in Kherishdar below the Wall of Birth… and that is that it is well that we are not immortals, because to live to see those we love die is difficult. You are an artist, and so you must watch everyone die, perhaps. I remind you, then, that our salvation is in the knowledge that those deaths are never complete, because we are never fully gone. We live in the minds and hearts and flesh of those who loved us and bequeathed them to the next generation.”

            “How astonishing you are!” I exclaim, seeing now the grandmother who appears in Mishor’s life, tranquil and wise and gentle.

            “You are too kind,” she says, and once again she is the young woman who could marry the object of her adoration. “And now, I am told, you must have words, because you are a collector of words. I was warned, you see! So I have examined your miyeshkadi, and discovered you do not have the word for ‘year’! So I will tell you that it is faerqel… can you see how it was derived?”

            I am delighted, immediately, as perhaps she must have guessed I would be. “Faer is ‘twenty’, but it’s also ‘a lot’ or ‘an armful’. And qel is ‘day’, so… ‘a whole lot of days’? Really?”

            “Really!” she says, laughing. “And you will like this one. A decade is doqqeli.”

            Qel is back to a year, again, and doq, “…is a basket? A basket of years?”

            “Yes,” she says, “because our baskets used to be woven with coils, and the most common basket had ten of them.”

            “I love this,” I say, fiercely. “You make me a magnificent gift.”

            She beams. “Then I am content.”

            After she leaves, my mind veers inevitably to the loss of Qevellen’s first principals, and how grateful I am that I didn’t have to see it happen ‘in person’, as I would have had to, in order to write a book including those scenes. But I have a somewhat better feel for Qevellen after Kor’s generation, and I’m glad. I like Ina. And I like her taste in words…!