The Ruling Elite and Other Stories

  *

  Hour after hour I sat in the snow next to her, watching the sun rise, the stars emerge, thinking of the sandy beaches and white cliffs of home. My life ran by in streams of memories. There were some memories I could not take. I folded up inside myself, expertly skirting the mirrored lake of deadness there, thick with the sludge of years.

  I wondered if death was as the priests said: a darkened realm of ghosts and shades hovering about the living, forever grasping at food they could not taste and water they could not drink. Only brave soldiers and leaders of state might be among the Honored Dead and live in the Night Palace.

  Halis slept, pale face against paler snow, sighing every now and again, coughing more frequently. Once she woke, eyes unfocused and darker than I had ever seen them. I tried to give her water, but she brushed my hand away. Instead she sat halfway up, looking around her in confusion.

  "Where is my blanket?"

  "Right here," I said, tucking it around her chin.

  "No," she said angrily, petulantly. "My purple blanket with the tassels. Mama always wraps it around me."

  She was hallucinating, as I had seen so many near death do. Again I pulled the blanket over her.

  "No! I want my blanket. Oh, where is it?"

  And then she began crying like a tired child, fat tears rolling down her sunken cheeks, breath heaving and lips quivering.

  I comforted her as best as I could, wiping the tears from her face and patting her back awkwardly. How thin and fragile she seemed. At last she slid into sleep again, lips parted and muscles relaxed in utter exhaustion.

  For a long time I simply watched her: the darkness of her long curving eyelashes, the slightly parted lips, the sunken hollowness beneath her eyes. I reached out, intending to check the condition of her wound. Instead my hand drifted to a strand of her dark curly hair, rubbed it slowly between my fingers like fine silk.

  Something shifted inside me so suddenly and powerfully that I could not help but stop and take notice: my carefully harbored deadness, breaking up like ice floes on the northern sea. Frightened, I scrabbled desperately to hold on to it. Halis was not like other people. She was Elan, the ruling elite: cruel, uncaring, oppressive. Keepers of slaves. Keepers . . . of the shrines; dark mysterious places where postulants knelt in the coolness, whispering their prayers to the gold-embossed marble statues. Canu and Korei, god and goddess of creation—balanced like sea and land, dark and light, male and female—

  Female.

  Like the sea. Deep and dark, powerful and cold, dangerous, but always harboring life within her.

  Female.

  Willful and obstinate, slim and dark, soft and desirable. Halis, hint of rosy-tipped breast, turn of a shoulder and wink of an eye. Laughter behind the beaded curtain, soft voice and softer moans of pleasure . . .

  My mother, mad and dying.

  Female.

  When I realized at last what had been driving my life, the fear that had lurked like a specter behind every movement and decision, I began shuddering. I did not stop for a long time.