“So. Tah.” She paused, thoughtful. “Tah is about your place in the natural world around you. Like honor, it is about connection between things. I am respectful to the earth and the spirits dwelling in the secondworld because I know myself to be part of a greater whole. Here, at the Bright Lake, do you feel nothing? No connection?”
I shrugged, feeling awkward, but answered honestly. “I don’t think I even know what that kind of connection would feel like.”
She gestured to the still water before us. “This was once the most sacred place in all Sjona. The Bright Lake was much different back then, but it was the place where all our tribes used to gather for the karodee.”
We still held karodee in Silasta as our biggest annual celebration—a week of sporting competitions, games, and parties—and even I knew it had its origins in the old annual spring festival of dance, song, and trade between tribes. But I knew little about ancient karodee and its significance to the Darfri.
“The karodee was our most important event. We traded fairly and we bonded joyfully with the other tribes, which brought us all honor. And we gave offerings of these great emotions to the mighty spirits of the Bright Lake and Solemn Peak, who dwell here together so close.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I admitted. “What do you mean by offerings of emotions?” I recalled the little things I’d seen left at Darfri shrines around the city—flowers, hair cuttings, figures of sticks.
An-Hadrea shook her head, astounded at my ignorance. “The spirits of the secondworld take strength from our offerings.” She looked all over my face like I was a puzzle she couldn’t solve. “We give them our hearts. What we feel. Joy. Grief. Admiration. Love. Passion. Hope. These make the spirits strong. Karodee was a time of great excitement, and so the spirits drank up all of that joy and connection and were renewed for the year. And they were grateful for our offerings, and gave us back a bountiful year and blessings on the bargains made and relationships forged at the karodee. It is said babies born or conceived during karodee would grow to be the strongest and wisest of all our people, blessed as they were by such great power.
“This is the same reason mothers take their babies outside to the sacred places close by, and exchange their love and fear and satisfaction and gratitude for blessings for the child. My mother brought me all the way here, to this very lake, when I was just a baby, to have the lake spirit Os-Woorin know me. That is not so common now. But it is why when you take a lover you consummate that in a sacred place, if you can, to feed the spirit there with your passion. Or—this you should understand, at least—why you all gather together to lower your Chancellor into the Bright Lake and feed the spirit with all your grief and loss and sadness and love.”
Was it really only a few weeks ago that we had gathered here for the funeral? I had never thought much about its origins. “It’s a tradition. I never thought about it as relating to a spirit of the lake, though.”
“You lower him into the lake so that his wisdom and knowledge may be absorbed by the great water spirit Os-Woorin. And Os-Woorin guides him safely to the afterlife.” She sighed. “I do not understand Silastians, Jovan. These are the simple things that are told to a child. I have seen all the libraries, the books. Your sister might be a page in one, so often is she squashed between them. What do your books say, if they do not tell you the stories of your past?”
Again, she left me unable to think of an answer. I supposed that as residents of the city grew further from religion over time, they had stopped valuing the Darfri stories of their past, and ceased recording the spiritual significance of things. Etan had always said that language was not neutral. There were consequences and value judgments in the manner in which we chose to record things. History recorded in the written language of the Credians’ past had no words for these Darfri concepts. So while the Darfri in the estates had continued their verbal storytelling tradition even after we had robbed them of the right to read and write, we had forgotten.
An-Hadrea seemed unbothered by my silence, and showed no sign of wanting to leave. She breathed the night air in deeply and looked up at the stars. The moonlight gave her profile an otherworldly sheen. How could she be so righteously furious at me, with just cause, but then such a short time later relax in my presence as if it were the company of a trusted friend?
“Will you tell me a story of our past?” I asked at last.
She smiled. “Yes. Shall I tell you about how your city came to be?”
“Please.”
“Before the refugees came here from across the Howling Plains, our tribes were not so settled in a single place. We moved around the lands, following the seasons. You know this?” I murmured agreement. The mechanics of history were taught to every Silastian child. The arrival of the refugees from Crede, their integration with the local tribes, and the sharing of their superior technology and engineering skills, which made it possible to build safe and manageable trade routes out of the resource-rich but geographically isolated Sjona. Our eventual government formed by the emerging leaders of the regions around new Sjona—some of original Credian descent, some local. This I knew. And objectively I knew that Darfri had been the dominant belief, part of the accepted main culture, but there was little mentioned in the texts about what that belief had meant.
“Over time, the idea of one country with central leadership grew more appealing, and with it the dream of a central city. Silasta, the word, meant meeting place, did you know? The first Councils met here, still really just a group of leaders and allies from around the land more than a true government. There were settlements here for many years but there was debate about the building of a permanent stone city. It held the promise of many things; prosperity, security, learning. But it involved taking much from the spirits here. Dredging channels in the marshlands, carving out much of Solemn Peak to use its rock, reshaping the Bright Lake and the path of the great river. Some Speakers argued that the spirits would not support such infrastructure.”
“What changed their minds?”
“The first Chancellor, Telasa. She was a woman of great charisma and vision, and also great understanding of the fresken of the land, though she was not a Speaker.”
“And a Speaker is someone who can communicate with the spirits.” That one I knew. “What is fresken?”
She looked at me, a half-smile softening her exasperation. “How is it that you can live here and not understand the land on which your city stands? It is like you walk around with one eye shut.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” I murmured, and she laughed.
“I have seen that about you,” she agreed. “You do not like being unbalanced, yes? I told you before, tah is all about balance. Understanding that the country is more than dirt and grass and wind and stone. There is power in the land. Great spirits, long memories. This power is what we call fresken.”
She gestured at the lake. “The stories say the Chancellor understood the fresken like our greatest elders. And she called upon the great spirit of the lake, Os-Woorin, and it blessed this place as the site for a great city. Water spirits are very powerful, and Os-Woorin the most powerful of them all. Its blessing held much sway.”
I chose my words carefully, not wanting to disrupt this fragile warmth she offered, though I didn’t quite want to articulate why. “How did the spirit show itself?”