‘No one knows,’ I say.
‘I do,’ Janos replies.
‘You would never tell.’
Janos’s smile is our mother’s, but his way of frowning is our father’s.
‘A speculation: one day I’m careless, spill ink over an important codex and spoil it,’ he says. ‘Or make a disrespectful mistake during the next Word-incineration, before the eyes of the whole island. Scribe gets angry with me and throws me out of the House of Words. The City Guard nabs me and tortures me for information.’
‘You are never careless,’ I say. ‘And they don’t do that.’ Except to Dreamers, perhaps, I nearly add. But the truth is I do not know what the guards do in dusky rooms, behind closed walls. Nor what kind of orders the Council do or do not give them from the Tower, from the shelter of their masks.
‘I could compose an essay on the probability of the event, if you want,’ Janos says, raising an eyebrow.
‘No doubt.’ I shove him lightly. He rarely talks of his work, but I imagine the House of Words to be like the House of Webs: rows of scribes in the large Halls of Scribing bent over their desks, dozens of pens rustling on paper and filling the library of the house with copies of old codices, trading contracts, nautical charts, essays on learned subjects.
Our footsteps settle into a shared rhythm, and no one else carries the same childhood memories as the two of us. It makes the world a little less alien to us, and we both know it.
We walk through the gate side by side. The exterior of the arch is worn smooth by winds and rainfalls, but on the inside you can still discern faint traces of figures once carved on the gate. Their shape is not human, but older, stranger. I see more than two limbs, and something that might be a network of threads, or only toothmarks of weather and time in lichen-covered stone. Beyond the gate a path paved with flat, grey slabs crosses an open field of grass, and then, through a narrow opening, leads into the Glass Grove.
Here, light has an underwater quality, like sun sifting through the sea. It glimmers and dapples gold-green along the smooth arches of the glass walls, catches on the metal plates we pass and creates pillars of rays where dust speckles float without weight. This is how I imagine it would be to lie at the bottom of the sea, looking up at the surface and seeing the world above, but different, its shapes unfamiliar, softer, melting into each other, free from the forms assigned for them. Perhaps that is what those who built this place had in mind. Perhaps the rusty hooks in the ceiling above had fish hanging from them once upon a time, smooth and slippery and colourful, or singing medusas. The glassmasters still know how to make their tails swish without movement, how to capture the shape of swimming-bells mid-billow. But if they ever were here, they would have been stolen away long ago. Why leave something beautiful in a place where almost no one comes any more?
We stop before a plate with a waxing moon above waves engraved on it. For generations, only seafarers and fishermen came from our family. Janos and I are the first to be accepted into Houses of Crafts. I sweep aside a vine covering a small shelf under the metal plate. A leaf covered in bruised stains comes loose and floats onto the ground. Nothing is left of the heel of bread we brought last time. All the surrounding shelves are empty, but further away I see a cluster of wasps crawling over a rotting piece of fruit. Someone else still visits, then.
Janos pulls a simple earthenware cup from his pocket and detaches a wineskin from his belt, then pours a little bit of wine into the cup. He places the cup on the shelf, and we bow our heads to speak a quiet greeting to our parents. I think of my mother’s arms, slender and fragile as winter branches, and eventually as grey. I can no longer remember her voice. Every time I visit, yet another piece of her has fallen away, and what remains is so deeply entwined with my own being that I can no longer tell them apart. I think of my father’s eyes, losing their colour under the folds of his lids, fading away like the rest of him. The slow-growing disease they called it, first the neighbours and then the healers, when our parents finally sought them, each in turn. My mother was already gone when Janos was accepted to the House of Words; he was only ten. I was twelve, and had been rejected three times by the House of Weaving. I did not see my father again after they took me in two years later.
Goodbyes were said many times but always buried under other words, and in the end, they were never said at all. Thus we come here again and again, farewells weighing our steps. They are forever late and out of place: a moment gone by we did not recognize when it was within reach, and the ghost of which we will therefore never cease to carry.
But this is what the Glass Grove is for. No remains are kept here. Once the ashes leave the House of Fire, they are scattered into the sea. There is also another burial ground on the island, the place where most people go now. I have heard that there the dead are kept in dark glass coffins, and their features are clearly visible through the lids. The bodies are prepared in such a way that they look like a still image of life even decades later. Their families go to see them and talk to them, and in response they get a mute stare that looks unchanged yet entirely different.
I do not intend to go there. My ashes can be claimed by the sea, and if anyone remembers me once I have left the world, they can come here and whisper their farewells to the sky and trees and vines treading the glass walls.
‘I would like to go to the forest for a moment,’ I tell Janos.
He shrugs.
‘I’ll wait,’ he says. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all.’ I had been counting on it.
He makes a space for himself on the stone floor, leaning his back against the wall. I see him close his eyes from the watered-down sunlight coming through the ceiling.
The curve of the inner wall is steeper than the outer, its glass opaque and thick and murky. My mother once told me it was the oldest part of the Glass Grove, perhaps of the city. The treetops rise above it from the encircled forest inside, the only one on the island. The rusty iron gate croaks when I slip through the gap.
The stalks of the bright broadleaves and dark-drizzling conifers push towards the sky smooth and straight, and all is covered by a roof of intertwining branches. Ancient webs of stone are petrified between the trees. There is a tale in the city, one that all weavers know: it tells of the first people of the island, those who were already old before humans came. They taught our kind how to weave, and these webs are all that is left of them. I have walked here many times, touching them and memorizing their shapes. But of course I can never try to replicate them. There is only one way to weave wall-webs, and the patterns, knots and twists of these tapestries of stone are as strange as the creatures that weather has worn away from the gate of the Glass Grove: placed there to be remembered, yet now all but forgotten.
I dig out a piece of bread from my pocket, something I slipped in there at breakfast this morning. The newly dead need nourishment to make their trip to Our Lady of Weaving beyond the Web of Worlds. Valeria can weave, so a web of stone is as good a family crest as any other I can offer. I place the bread under it and kneel. With closed eyes I speak the names of Valeria’s parents and wish them a safe journey, say the words that Valeria can never speak again.
A wind does not rise. A rain does not come. The dead stay dead, and do not respond.
When I get to my feet, sunlight scutters along the stone surface of the webs, and for a moment the air seems to burst in flames, ready to scorch the world and make it anew.
I breathe in. Clouds close the sun away again, and the ancient webs rest shadow-coloured like things that must remain unspoken. I follow my own steps back across snapping twigs and leaves turning into earth.