Capítulo 19: Vivianne – First Love
Vivianne went down to the campsite to get her things. Marcus never stayed at the Rock because he’d never again open Lune’s gates to Queen Adelaide. Lune welcomed Clément only. And Vivianne liked to stay at the Rock because the Rock was mostly uncharted territory. This time, she had planned to stay with Marcus at the bottom of the mountain because she was so angry with Clément after the village of the dead. But, You screamed, and they were best friends once again.
Clément waited on the mountain, right at the threshold between black rock and green grass. The change of terrain was abrupt. One step black, the next soft green.
‘I don’t like the way Marcus looks at me,’ said the prince. ‘Makes me feel like a worm.’
‘Worms are more useful than Clément of Deran,’ said Marcus when Vivianne told him why the prince had stayed back. ‘Worms are not afraid to come down the mountain.’
Vivianne went back to the Rock with her backpack and a shopping list from Marcus. Rimbaud’s Caravan was at the Rock and Marcus had requested a few things. Later, Rimbaud would go to Lune, but Marcus and Vivianne would be back home long before the caravan arrived, and Marcus could carry his own parcels. He just didn’t want to breathe the same air as that queen.
To Vivianne, the day Adelaide went to Lune she felt more pain than anger. She had been too small to understand the danger, to understand the meaning of the queen stepping into Lune. Vivianne remembered relief and a feeling of security when the Wraith enveloped Lune in his shadow, but she didn’t know why. Even nowadays she had the habit of leaving the doors open, which upset Marcus because the wind in Lune kept slamming the doors. She wasn’t even aware that she did it, but something inside of her avoided closing doors because maybe there was someone out there trying to come back home.
When Vivianne left her brother’s campsite with her backpack and his shopping list, she heard Ernest, a former Patirean soldier, ask Marcus:
‘Aren’t you afraid Adelaide will take your sister hostage?’
‘If the queen messes with Vivianne,’ said Marcus, ‘she’ll have to deal with the Wraith.’
Clément offered to carry Vivianne’s backpack, after all he was the host, but Vivianne was stronger. She’d always be stronger. They left her things in Clément’s room. While in the Rock, Vivianne shared the room with the prince. She asked him to hold Marcus’ list while she put away her clothes in a drawer.
‘Mother says you and I will marry some day,’ he said, handing her a shirt from the backpack.
They both made faces of disgust then laughed until they were out of breath. They spent the day holding hands and arms, pretending to go shopping together.
‘Helmets and boots for the soldiers,’ said Vivianne.
‘Bread and butter for breakfast,’ said Clément.
‘We make our own bread and butter,’ she said.
‘In Lune, perhaps, not at the Rock.’
‘We are going to live in Lune.’
‘We are going to live at the Rock.’
Thus began the couple’s first fight.
Rimbaud’s Caravan took over the Rock’s first landing. The castle was built in blocks, like a many-layered cake. Each landing had an open area within a wall. In that open area were the houses, shops, and workshops but they were mostly abandoned now, remnants of a time when Franária was whole and part of an empire. Only the top block was occupied. That’s where the castle was built. The Rock’s open areas intercommunicated through a web of tunnels that Vivianne had mapped two years earlier.
The first landing was the largest and there was a lot of space for Rimbaud’s fair. The merchants and artists took shelter in the abandoned houses, covering everything with noise and color for as long as they were there. There was always a murmur coming up from the market, like perfume. Vivianne liked the caravan better at the Rock. Lune didn’t have all that space, the abandoned train tracks, the skeletons of sorcery light now darkened by the torch fire that replaced the lamps.
Usually, in less than one hour Vivianne would have got everything on Marcus’ list. The Caravan had logic, and Vivianne understood logic. But today she was with Clément and Clément loved to get lost in the colors, the sounds, the spices; in the foreign flavours that the Caravan brought to Deran. Clément explored flavours with the same passion that Vivianne explored architecture, but not with the same efficiency. He wasted too much time with things he had already seen. He didn’t recognize what he had already explored last time the caravan was here, taking a long time with anything slightly new. The strangest spices were the ones that captured him longer.
Sometimes Vivianne left him lost within a perfume and went to look for one of Marcus’ things. The best she left for last. There was a part of the fair with only books and maps. Wagons that unfolded into many shelves full of books and curiosities in paper. The Caravan had plans from faraway castles, old, new, from across the ocean. Vivianne left Clément at a pepper tent and went to her favourite area of the fair. She passed by an armless clown announcing delights at the Tent of Performers. He was supposed to be funny, but Vivianne didn’t see anything comic about a man without both arms. She put her hands in her pockets and moved past him.
The literary corner of Rimbaud’s Caravan was always isolated from the rest of the fair, making an oasis of silence in the sea of colour. Here the merchants didn’t wag their goods under customers’ noses, nor did they chant or beckon or haggle. Here the merchants sat down behind a mountain of books and rarely looked at whomever came close. The visitors also moved in silence, communicating through stares rather than words.
A horse snorted and Vivianne found that strange. The animals were kept at special places, away from the fair. The horse that snorted was not with the caravan. It was black and white and Vivianne remembered it because it had once bitten Marcus’ elbow. It belonged to a woman with a dried face and hair combed by the wind. The woman worked with books and made business with the Caravan, but she wasn’t a member. Vivianne didn’t know where she lived, or even if she lived anywhere.
‘Quiet, Stain,’ said the woman, softening the order with a gentle hand on the black snout.
She was talking to a merchant from a wagon filled with scrolls. Vivianne went around Stain, making sure to stay far from those hooves and teeth, toward a merchant specialized in architecture. The Caravan colours quivered in the wind, which carried and a scroll. Stain tried to bite the paper, the woman tried to grab it, but it flapped around her like a bird, hit the ground, and slid in Vivianne’s direction.
The girl tried to grab the scroll. She wasn’t fast enough. The piece of paper was already getting away when she took her hands out of her pockets, but inside one of the pockets was a rock: the frog and fox from inside the tunnel. Then she took her hands from her pockets and the rock fell on top of the scroll, nailing it to the ground. Vivianne took the rock with one hand and the scroll with the other.
The woman with the dry face (what was her name?) was already beside her and Stain peeked from over the woman’s shoulder. Vivianne offered her the scroll, but the woman took hold of her other wrist, turning it to look at the frog and the fox. She dropped Vivianne’s hand and turned back to the merchant.
‘The girl will keep the scroll,’ her voice was also dry. ‘I’ll pay for it.’
‘I don’t want this,’ said Vivianne.
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Fulion,’ said Vivianne. ‘Your name is Fulion.’
Fulion paid the merchant, who began to count the change. Vivianne protested then unfolded the edge of the scroll. There were things written in symbols that were not used in Franish. Vivianne knew those symbols. They were the same that decorated the armour of soldiers from Inlang.
‘This was made in Inlang.’
Fulion examined the edge of the scroll and the foreign characters.
‘So it seems.’
‘I don’t want anything from there or from Farhaim.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Fulion. She pointed to Vivianne’s rock. ‘It has been decided. The scroll is yours.’
Vivianne tried to push the paper back to Fulion but Stain nearly bit her hand. Then Vivianne tried to return the scroll, but the merchant merely shook his head and went back to reading his book. Vivianne threw the horrible thing to the wind. It had been the wind that brought it to her, let it take the scroll away.
At night, when Vivianne and Clément went back to the room, they found the scroll on the floor.
‘Look,’ said Clément. ‘It must have been the wind.’
Vivianne left the scroll in a drawer when she packed to go home. The next night, when they made camp, she realized someone had put the scroll in her backpack. Someone, maybe Clément, thought she was forgetting it.
She tried to throw it away, but every time a soldier brought it back to her. This wasn’t a scroll, it was a curse. Coming from Inlang, what else could it be?
In Lune she tried to throw the scroll in the fire. The scroll made an elipse to the fireplace but the instant the fire stretched its tongues to lick it, the scroll ricochetted in the air, flew over Vivianne’s head and ended up in the Wraith’s hand. Vivianne stood still. The fire shrank.
‘What is this?’ asked the Wraith.
She told him.
‘You have a chance to see the world through the eyes of your enemy,’ said the Wraith with his voice of shades. He gave the scroll back to her and sat by the fire with a book on his lap.
Vivianne took the scroll to her room, put it at one end of the bed, then sat with her back against the headboard and hugged her knees. Farheim and Inlang meant villages full of dead, lives without mothers, fathers who never came back.
The few lines Vivianne had seen in the little piece of scroll she unfolded at the Rock were so fine and delicate that the books of Lune became rough and dull in contrast.
Farheim and Inlang were the reasons she couldn’t close the doors of her life.
What if it was beautiful inside? What if it were the most beautiful drawing Vivianne had ever seen? What if she liked the craft so much that she imitated it? What if she began to draw like the people who killed her parents?
Vivianne rested her face on her knees and cried. Her cry had no voice, just sobs. It didn’t last long because Vivianne didn’t like to cry. She understood that her body needed release, but nothing changed when she cried. So she gave room to tears but didn’t indulge in them. Soon, she raised her head and found Marcus standing beside her bed.
‘The door was open,’ he said. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
She shook her head.
‘Do you want me to go away?’ he asked.
Another negative. Marcus sat down beside his sister, put an arm around her. Vivianne could feel his discomfort from the way the muscles on his chest and belly contracted. Marcus could deal with war and the dead, but he hated sadness. He never spoke about his and always tried to redirect Vivianne’s to the Wraith, but if the Wraith wasn’t there, he stayed. He never left his sister unsupported.
‘I was doing the laundry,’ he said, ‘and found this in your trousers’ pocket.’
He gave her the piece of rock sculpted with the frog and fox. Vivianne opened her hand and he placed it there. The cold that ran through the lines in Vivianne’s hand was fox-red. A cold that tickled and made her want to open all the doors of Lune. How strange that rock was. Who would have sculpted it inside a cave?
Marcus realized his sister didn’t need him anymore and left. He left the door slightly open and his steps diminished in the corridor.
‘It’s your fault,’ Vivianne told the rock. She pointed to the scroll. ‘You brought it to me.’
The frog, though smaller, weighed more than the fox, but the fox seemed to be looking straight at Vivianne. The sculpture was fine and very realistic. The fur seemed real and the frog was very smooth. Something in the fox’s ears angle, in the intensity of the snout made Vivianne hold the rock against her chest.
‘You brought this to me,’ she said and reached for the scroll.
It was a map with gentle lines of varied thickness that created textures at the same time real and ghostly. The Wave unfolded itself on Vivianne’s bed. She recognized the folds of the rock, exactly as she could seem them from her bedroom window, as well as the sharpest shapes near the Rock. All that, Vivianne already knew, but the map also revealed the other side of the Wave. Vivianne pressed the rock to her chest.
The Wave’s north face was straight. A sudden abyss five thousand meters high, a wall that was impossible to climb, not by armed soldiers, least to say by horses. Artificial paths had been built along the wall and through only them could the mountain range be crossed. In the south there were several natural paths for Farheim and Inlang to choose, but in the north there were only three very narrow roads that made it possible for soldiers and horses to reach the top.
Vivianne ran down the corridor, crossed the library, ran down the stairs, across Lune in a wave of open doors to where her brother washed their laundry.
‘What is it?’ asked Marcus.
Vivianne showed him the map, pointed out the three points of invasion. Marcus dried his hands, picked up the map and went searching for his captain. Next morning, he sent watchmen to the three points on the mountain range. Later, he built watch towers on each. From that moment on, Farheim and Inlang didn’t invade Deran anymore.
The laundry Marcus left behind shrank but could still be used. The map of the Wave, made in Inlang, was Vivianne’s first love.
