第8章 The Village Under the Hill

Yelviran was a village that had been left standing by accident. At the end of the last century, when the water table dropped and the fields failed, the government had resettled its two hundred families down to the new town by the highway, and most of the houses had been pulled down for their stone. Twelve had been left, because twelve were built directly against a soft cliff, and the cliff's face was unstable, and a demolition crew is not paid to be buried. So Yelviran remained: twelve houses in a line under a golden cliff, half of them roofless, all of them quiet, and in four of them, people still lived. They were shepherds, mostly, and their families, and they had stayed because the grazing above the cliff was good and because nobody had ever made them a better offer. Zeyla and Tufan came up the valley on the third morning after the flats and were met at the edge of the houses by a dog and then, after the dog, by a boy of maybe twelve who looked at them with the flat, assessing gaze of a child who has been told that strangers are interesting and also dangerous. Tufan did the talking, in the local dialect, which was close enough to his own that the boy relaxed after a minute and led them to the house at the end of the line, where his grandmother sat on a stone bench in the sun with a spindle and a pile of raw wool. Her name was Zelha. She was old in the way that people who have spent their lives outdoors are old, her face cut into a map of its own, and she looked at Zeyla for a long time before she said anything, which Zeyla had learned was the local method of judging a person's worth. "You are the one who copies the old stones," Zelha said at last. "Yes." "Then you are too late. The others came in the spring." She turned the spindle between her fingers. "They had a truck and a machine that clicks. They dug in the yard of the empty house and found nothing and then they were angry. In the summer they came back and burned the roof of the same house, and still nothing. Now they have not come for two months. Maybe they have learned, or maybe they are saving us for later." "You remember everyone who comes," Zeyla said. "There was a woman. Older. She would have come alone, with a bag of paper, and she would have asked about the old counting." Zelha's hands stopped. For a long moment she was still, and then she looked at Zeyla with a different expression, one that was not assessment but recognition. "Green notebook," she said. "She carried a green notebook. She sat where you are sitting and she sang me the counting song and asked me if I knew the words, and I told her the words were for children, and she said that children's words are the oldest roads." She smiled, briefly, at nothing. "She was your blood. You have her hands." "She was my grandmother." "She asked me to keep a stone," Zelha said. "And I kept it." She stood, which took some time, and led them into the house, and lifted a hearth stone that looked as if it had never been lifted, and beneath it, in a shallow bed of packed ash, lay a flat piece of dressed rock with a column of characters cut into its face. The third stone. Zeyla had to put out a hand against the wall. "She said the day would come when someone would ask, and she said the asking would be a green notebook and not a rifle." Zelha set the hearth stone down. "The men with the truck asked with a rifle. They did not ask correctly." Zeyla knelt and photographed the stone where it lay, and made her rubbing, and copied the column into the back of the notebook while Tufan kept the boy occupied with questions about the grazing. The inscription was longer than the others, twenty-two characters, and the last line was not a letter or a number at all. It was a word, cut cleanly, that had no place in a survey. "Remember the water," Zeyla read. "What does that mean?" "It means he built the system for a country that had water," Tufan said. "And someone has to tell us where it went." Before they left, Zelha took Zeyla's hand and turned it over, palm up, as if checking a coin for forgery, and then let it go. "Your grandmother stayed one night," she said. "She was afraid. She said the ninth was the one that could not be kept, because anyone can hide a stone but nobody can hide a person who knows where it is buried." She looked at Zeyla steadily. "She was talking about herself. And now she is dead, and you have her hands, and you are standing in my yard with a green notebook. That is how it works. The road passes from hand to hand." They walked down the valley in the last of the light, and Zeyla did not speak for two hours. Above them, on the cliff, a single lamp was moving along the edge of the grazing, one of Zelha's grandsons taking the flock in, and it looked, from that distance, exactly like the light she had seen on the flats, moving at an angle to her, steady and deliberate, closing a circle she could not yet measure. At the bottom of the valley they stopped where the track met the broken road, and because the night was clear and the ground was dry and there was nowhere to hide, Tufan chose to walk on rather than camp, and Zeyla did not argue. She had three rubbings now, and a decoy that the consortium would waste a week on, and a green notebook that had passed through her grandmother's hands and was beginning to feel less like an inheritance and more like an instruction. Read them in sequence, Sarpel had written. Remember the water. The words had the quality of something said twice, once to be understood and once to be obeyed. "Do you think she knew what it was?" Zeyla asked, when they had walked an hour in the dark. "Your grandmother?" "Yes." "I think she knew enough to be afraid," Tufan said. "People who are only curious do not hide a notebook under a bed for forty years. They talk about it." He was quiet for a few steps. "She hid it, and then she wrote down the place of every stone, and then she crossed out the ninth and warned herself. That is not a scholar. That is a woman leaving instructions." Zeyla stopped walking. In the dark, with the road under her boots and the notebook against her ribs, the shape of her grandmother's life rearranged itself for the second time that week. Mehve had not been preserving a curiosity. She had been keeping a promise, or a debt, and she had spent forty years deciding whether to pass it on, and in the end she had passed it on to the only person in the family who would know what to do with it. Ahead of them, at the far end of the valley, a truck engine started and then stopped, and started again, and the sound came down the road toward them like a held breath. Tufan put a hand on her arm and drew her off the track and into the shadow of a low wall, and they stood there together while the sound grew and passed them by, a single vehicle moving north toward the hills with no lights at all. ---