Chapter 29: Frederico – Líran
Frederico slept inside the locomotive, which was now complete but still lifeless. He tried but couldn’t avoid feeling a bit sad. So many years working on the Eliana, and for what? Maybe this was how the Old Woman felt after teaching Frederico for seven years. At least the Old Woman’s dreams still have a way to go ahead. Faust had the strength and leadership that Frederico lacked. To the Old Woman there was a second locomotive. One that didn’t need any magic to work.
He left the Eliana and knocked on the Old Woman’s wagon. He knocked again and went in. He called for the Old Woman and touched her shoulder. She didn’t move. Ever again. Frederico left the wagon, sat on the ground and stayed there, a train without fuel, until nightfall. When the moon shone on his head, he prepared a solitary funeral for the woman who had given him a second-generation Stanton train. He made a pire so high that it singed the night; so tall that it was seen by a woman who was far away from there.
This woman was called Líran, and she had just become human. She was standing on a bald hill, her back turned to two figures that disappeared into the forest’s shadows. If Líran turned around, she would still see the girl with long, fox-coloured hair enter the night right behind her companion, who wore a black hat and long, red cape. But Líran wasn’t interested in mysteries. She was human. As far as she could see, the naked, autumn trees turned the forest into a gigantic sea urchin. How different the world was, when seen through mortal eyes! The human heart between her ribs beat very quickly. She adjusted her breathing to the rhythm of the heard. She wasn’t sure her body could do that instinctively. She wasn’t sure she had any instinct. She touched her face with icy fingers. The nose was colder than the fingers. Her nose, her fingers.
So this was what cold felt like: to harden up and shake all over at the same time. A sensation that was too peculiar now to be unpleasant. Líran joined her hands in front of her mouth and breathed on them, like she had seen mortals do. Her breath was warm. How strange, to have so much warmth inside and still feel cold. Líran knew she had to find a way to get warm. Mortal creatures were fragile: they died from the weather.
She saw the spark of a flame between the sleeping trees. She would go to that fire. Líran took her first step as a mortal. The second one was equally light and easy, as were the third and the tenth. Step number eight thousand and three was not so comfortable. The distance felt very different to the eye than to the feet. It took Líran the rest of that night and all of the next day to reach the fire that burnt no more.
She dragged her tired feet to the pile of ash and embers.
‘What a shame that such a splendid fire must die,’ she said and fainted.
Frederico knelt beside the unconscious woman, raised her head and dropped some water through her chapped lips. She took his hand and momentarily opened her brown eyes.
‘So this is what life tastes like,’ she said, closed her eyes and let go of his hand.
He lowered her head to the grass then took a sip of his bottle. Fresh, clean, pleasant. Not at all like life.
Líran’s first loss of consciousness, though a novelty, was not pleasant. She didn’t want to experience it again, so she jumped on her feet, thinking that putting her body in an alert position would make it stay awake. Instead, it was like plunging head first into black cotton. The world disappeared and Líran lost control over her body. The only reason she didn’t fall was because that man held her up.
‘Easy, lady, you will faint again.’
Líran felt her brain tingle. She was angry.
‘The human body is very fragile!’
The man still held her. He was a bit taller than she, had a delicate chin, long lashes that curved up, and green eyes with red veins and very dark bags underneath. She stayed there, in his arms, tasting the warmth of a living body. She touched his face with hers then drew back.
‘You are also cold,’ she said.
A shiver was born on Frederico’s lips. If he moved his face just an inch down, he would touch her mouth. But that proximity was absurd, the kind of thing that belongs in dreams. And Frederico only had nightmares.
‘I am Líran,’ she said.
He introduced himself, but she wasn’t paying attention.
‘Your eyes tell me that you have been crying,’ she said, ‘or that you haven’t slept. It could be an allergy.’ She moved his face from one side to the other. ‘I don’t see signs of an allergy anywhere else.’
Frederico took hold of her hand, automatically wraping it in his warm fingers.
‘It is not an allergy,’ he said.
‘Then you either cried or didn’t sleep.’
‘Both. There is a nightmare. It gets worse when I’m facing a difficult moment in my life.’
‘Why is this moment difficult?’
Líran had a triangular little face that turned slightly to the right when she asked something. Thin lips, small mouth, large eyes that were ready to swallow the whole world.
Frederico turned to the embers. What could he say? Behind him was the Eliana, second-generation Stanton train. Outside the train there were two backpacks with the Old Woman’s books inside.
Líran suddenly changed the subject.
‘I’m glad I speak your language,’ she said. Her hand was still between Frederico’s. As a mystery, she had never faced linguistic barriers, but as a mortal she didn’t know what to expect. ‘Do you have any food?’
Frederico went inside a wagon in search of food and Líran noticed the two backpacks near the train. She took the blue book from inside one of them and began to turn the pages.
‘Don’t touch that!’ Frederico grabbed the book from her hands.
It was an old book. Frederico’s violence tore it and the pages fell to the ground, one after the other after the other, in a cascade of worn-out paper. The pages got mixed in with the Old Woman’s death, with the eyes of that little dog from the nightmare, with the shiny blood in the Dungeons of Ice. The little dog licking Queen Margot’s hand, the rough handle of a dagger in Frederico’s hand, the cold hatred that lived on the other side of Beloú’s walls.
All of it was there, yapping in horror between the pages of that paper cascade.
‘Here,’ said Líran.
He blinked back to reality. Líran had gathered the fallen pages and put them back together inside the cover.
‘You can read it,’ she said, ‘if you handle it carefully.’
‘I can’t read that book.’
‘Yes, you can. All the pages are here.’ She opened the book to show him.
‘I can’t read it.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘It’s a sad book anyway.’
Frederico was very angry. Who did that woman think she was? To come here now and pretend she could read what the Old Woman spent her life trying to understand? To pretend she could read Satironese, like the imperial language wasn’t one of the first casualties of the war.
‘Leave,’ he said.
Líran backed away, feeling hurt. It was the first time she interacted with a mortal as a mortal and she had somehow driven him away. She put the book on the wagon’s floor. For the first time in her existence, she didn’t know where to go.
‘Here.’ He offered her bread and cheese.
She didn’t want it. She hadn’t become mortal to eat. She was hungry but didn’t want to get near the man who had shunned her. Why was he so angry?
‘What have I done?’ she asked.
‘You!’ What kind of question was that? ‘That book was important to me. It belonged to her.’ Frederico pointed to the ash and embers.
Líran didn’t follow his gesture. The old woman in the pire here was dead. Líran was only interested in the living. She kept on interrogating Frederico with her eyes.
‘To pretend that you can read that book is more than I can handle,’ he said.
‘I’m not pretending.’
‘No one here can read it.’ Frederico knew Menior had tried to translate it. He’d searched for translators not only in Patire and Baynard, but also in Deran, Anjário, and even in Eslarina, where it was common knowledge that they didn’t like foreign languages.
‘I’m not from Franária,’ she said. ‘I’m not from here.’
She said Franária instead of Patire. Not from here. Could she be from another continent? From a place where Satironese was still spoken? Frederico decided to test her:
‘You said this is a sad book, but I know it’s a book of Anjarian tales, full of glory and heroes.’
‘This is a Satironese book. It tells about the extinction of the elves and the eruption of the Land of the Banished. The death of a species, the birth of a curse. This is a book of history, not of tales, and it tells of tragedy, not glory.’
His tense brows began to relax. Maybe she was speaking the truth. Ah, but there was a hole in that story.
‘If the book tells of the Land of the Banished, then it was written after it erupted.’
‘So it was.’
‘But it’s a Satironese book.’
‘So it is.’
‘In that case,’ he said triumphantly, ‘would you care to explain how it ended up in Patire? How could this book be here if nobody dares to cross the Land of the Banished?’
‘By nobody you mean no mortal. Many cross the Land of the Banished, only you don’t.’ It was an absent-minded answer; Líran was reading through the book, stopping at passages here and there.
The Land of the Banished and that man saying Patire instead of Franária gave her an idea of what place in time she was, for the mystery who had made her mortal could have left here in any moment of history. Líran was having difficulties adapting to that mortal mind, so strictly linear. Even her memories had been framed by that mortal mindset, which moved only toward one future. As a mystery, Líran was not a mere line floating through the storms of existence but was the very universe that contained that existence. Líran used to be an infinite sphere. Now eternity belonged to the past.
‘Is Franária at war?’ she asked. ‘A civil war?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Endless War?’
He confirmed. She was silent. Frederico touched her shoulder.
‘Would you tell her a story,’ he pointed at the pire. ‘She once told me that, in the past, when Franária was whole, people told stories to the dead in their funerals.’
Líran closed the blue book.
‘I’ll tell a story, a tale from Sátiron, but not from that book. We don’t need more tragedy when we’re already dealing with goodbye.’
She opened her arms and spoke with the authority of mysteries talking about magic or mad people talking of what doesn’t exist.
‘Sátiron wasn’t always the Land of the Impossible. Home to mysteries and mages, it was Sátiron that received Nakamura when she first stepped into this world. But the impossible, it was Nastassja’s doing. She was the first empress of Sátiron.
She loved an elf. A human and an elf? You wonder. Easier for an orchid to love a jaguar. Impossible.
Of course it was impossible, but Nastassja was raised by Yukari Nakamura, she grew up among the wolves of Sátiron, side by side with mages. She didn’t understand the barriers of nature. The elves in this world were more like trees than like animals and Nastassja had a human body, like mine, but with darker skin. She could have fallen for an oak, a rock, or a river, it would have been the same as loving an elf.
Impossible. Yet, she loved him. And, with so much mystery, with so much magic in the world, Nastassja didn’t care for the laws of nature. She summoned a mystery, the same one I did. He had the shape of a monster: a frog’s head and skin, a man’s body, a voice of power.
“Nuille,’ she said, “I have a wish.”
“And I have a price.”
His price is a kiss, first or last. Nastassja gave him the first of her kisses. Winds became hurricanes of power.
“Nuille,” she said, “I want the impossible.”
Thus became Sátiron, the Land of the Impossible.’
While Líran spoke, Frederico’s nightmare squeezed to the darkest corners of his mind. The little dog in the dungeon stopped crying to listen. Líran didn’t tell a story, she brought it to the forest. Sátiron was there. The impossible happened. Frederico knew exactly what shade of black Nastassja’s skin was. He didn’t want Líran to stop.
‘Is that all?’ he asked. ‘Did the elf love her back? Did they marry? How did the impossible work? What happened to Nastassja? And that mystery, where did it go? Did you kiss him as well?’
‘Those stories are too long,’ said Líran. ‘And the dead generally have little time once they meet their deaths.’
‘Your eyes,’ he said, ‘they’ve become violet.’
‘Is that unusual?’
‘It is in humans. Ah,’ he gasped. ‘They’re brown again.’
