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-- da-ri kur-niserin-na --
The cypress wife wakes with the dawn. Her old bones are easily chilled now; she sleeps under blanket and goatskin, and still her toes are stiff in the morning air.
She draws water from the cistern, blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Two sips for her, one for the mountain. She spits the mountain's share onto the dirt path, leaning carefully to avoid her chest and feet, and watches as the water muddies its trickling way into nothingness. Two sips for her, one for the mountain, until the dipper is dry.
She stumps upwards. Her cottage is near the mountain's summit, as it must be, but even so she tires more than she used to. She presses both hands against her aching right knee to push herself along, and rests against her favorite boulder when her hip pains her. Most mornings, it does. At the top, she closes her eyes and sings to the dawn, to the stone, to the sun and the cypress trees.
Her voice quavers, and the notes have never been quite true. A bard would be ashamed. But that's never been the point. The cypress woman sings for no human; she sings for the mountain, and the mountain is the only thing that matters.
When her wavering notes are thrown back between the stones, back and back and back, the cypress wife trundles down to her cottage, and its front room with the chair covered in fine silk. Pilgrims will arrive today; she can see it in the lines of the clouds.
-- pirin zalag, pirin zalag --
She's tired. Her old bones ache in their sockets, in rain or chill or from simple overuse. She has read her death in the river stones; she wants to be done with this waiting.
Her successor will come. The mountain calls its own.
She pours water and good foreign wine in a cup. She can't keep it straight any more, which seas this wine traveled, but it all tastes the same to her now, rich and sour. Her hand shakes, and wine slops on the table. She sees again her own death in the splash of red. The mountain winds will carry her soul free.
"Yes, yes," she says to the evening air. The mountain may not listen to this, but if she can't talk to it, who can? "You're stuck with me a while longer, you know. Call her louder if you like."
-- da-ri kur-niserin-na --
The cypress wife dreams.
The woman who will be cypress wife slumps her back against a cracked wall, hiding vicious misspelled graffiti with her shoulders. Her wrists are bony, corded strong, but they lie draped over her updrawn knees like the wings of dead birds. Loose hairs stick to the back of her neck.
"I don't know," she says to the sky. Her eyes are closed, and the cypress wife is fascinated by the moth-wing sweep of her lashes. "I don't know."
The woman poking the fire back into life glances at her, quick and opaque. They have something similar in the hook of their noses, the broad sweep of their dark foreheads: nothing so close as sisters, but perhaps cousins. Perhaps only coincidence. This other woman has a different weariness in the shallow grimy lines of her face, and thick coiling hair spilling untidily over hollowed shoulders and a stair-step backbone. Gula is her name. A holy name, but no mountain-god will eat it; she will keep her name all her life.
"You know where we're going," Gula says now, and prods logs closer together without looking away from her companion.
"We." The woman who will be cypress wife laughs a harsh breath, and curls forward to dig the heels of her hands into closed eyes. "I'm sorry, honey. So far, and I don't even know."
Gula rises, wiping soot onto the folds of her linen drape, and in the streaks the cypress wife sees that her life will be long. She steps around the fire lightly, and for a moment she looks like a girl in her grace; three decades wreath her again as she settles next to the woman who will be cypress wife, and wraps ashy fingers around her wrist.
Cousins, perhaps or perhaps not, but more besides. The mountain says nothing of this; the cypress wife knows it from the brush of their shoulders, the lattice of their joined hands, the way exhaustion holds them to each other instead of apart. The cypress wife knows it because once she too had a name, and lived in a valley town where her family had lived for generations. Her family lives there still.
The mountain says nothing. It is the cypress wife who thinks that her successor will need that love, and envies her a love deep enough to travel to the mountain with her.
-- pirin zalag, pirin zalag --
The cypress wife was given a dried fruit called mango once, by a man who told her that he was from lands far to the east, over mountains made of rubies and diamonds. He told her that he had traveled the corners of the world, that he had been to lands where men wore their faces in their torsos and lands where people walked crabwise, so the sun left their bellies brown and their backs white as clouds in the shadow of their scuttling. She saw in the purpled skin beneath his eyes that he was lying.
She gave him answers like anyone else, of course. The cypress wife tells the signs to all who ask, liars and saints and rough-handed farmwives. But his false tales exasperated her, then.
She's old now, and she no longer cares about what others think of her dignity. She still doesn't understand why he would bother to lie, as if the voice of the mountain might be impressed. But the mango was real, a fibrous strip of foreign sweetness. She tries to remember how it tasted, sometimes, but the flavor has faded in memory into something like lemon and honey, a texture like aged dates.
These are the things she thinks about, when the mountain's wind whispers around her door in the evenings.
-- da-ri kur-niserin-na --
Her eyesight is going. Some days, the only things she can see in sharp focus are the charred cracks in a goat's shoulder blade, or the wheeling patterns of migratory starlings, or the flames of cypress needles and myrrh. The rest passes in a blurred haze.
She squints herself to headache, and shuffles along the dusty paths so she doesn't turn an ankle among the pebbles and holes. But the mountain's messages are always clear.
Some days, she thinks that nothing exists in all the world but the mountain and its voice. Pilgrims' pleas are her only reminder of things outside; even the village far below her cottage seems dreamy and shadowed, years beyond her reach.
-- pirin zalag, pirin zalag --
The cypress wife dreams.
The woman who will be cypress wife walks along a rocky trail, wheel-rutted despite its holes and axle-cracking stones. There is a long knife at the back of her belt, a sling and a sack of hard nuts looped through Gula's. Their fingers are twined together, and their faces are bright with laughter. The cypress wife looks on, fascinated by the changes happiness brings.
"He walked all the way!" The woman who will be cypress wife is laughing. The cypress wife has never heard this before. "All the way, in the heat of summer, because he wanted this love-potion. And poor Father, he told that stupid story to start with, he had no idea what he was talking about. He -- he just, at the end, Father just offered the fellow his very best wine and hoped that'd make him happy."
The cypress wife listens to the end of the tale, wistful for something she cannot name. In the morning, she will not examine this too closely. She will think instead of her successor's eyes crinkled with joy, of how young she looked, like someone's daughter.
-- da-ri kur-niserin-na --
The pilgrims come, and the pilgrims go away again. They worship other gods in their homes, but here they speak only of the mountain: because it's here, because it looms over them ancient and forbidding, because it gives them answers their own gods do not. Three and four every day in the holy months, on foot and on donkeyback, old and young and arrogant and desperate. They bring with them tithes as payment: oatcakes and cheese and olive oil from the poor, gemstones and cedar chests and delicate golden jewelry from the richest. The cypress wife accepts them all, except the ones that are a pittance to the givers. The mountain's tithe must be worth the mountain's answer.
What she can use, food and warm fabrics and tools, she keeps. She serves the mountain, she gives its answer to its supplicants; gifts to serve her life serves the mountain. What she cannot use, she has strong young men from the foothill village carry into its sacred caves. The mountain will own its goods there, holy and unnoticed. It has no use for possessions, only for the giving of them, but fear of the god-mountain and its all-seeing cypress wife will keep the strong young men from taking its goods.
The pilgrims come from every nation under the sky's dome. Some come from lands too cold to imagine, their hair and faces bleached by ice and unhealthy eating, bringing her horn and salt fish and thick furs. Some come from deserts across the sea, with tiny embroidered packets of rich spices and incense. Some come from the village at the foot of the mountain, or other towns a day or a week away. They come in homespun rags, in tall hats and fine glimmering robes, in crisp linen and braided wigs, with bronze swords and with empty work-roughened hands.
The cypress wife answers them all, because the mountain gives the cypress wife truths to tell its supplicants.
This is what it means, to be the one who sees the mountain. This is what she must be.
This is what she is.
-- dili-du-a, dili-du --
The cypress wife dreams.
The woman who will be cypress wife stands in the road, her thin expressive hands limp at her sides, her head up and face wild. The cypress wife knows that look, not only from the outside. She knows that desperate hunger.
Gula hovers at her shoulder, uncertain and half-knowing and afraid. She calls the name of the woman who will be cypress wife, again and again. The cypress wife sees Gula's lips moving, but she cannot hear the name; the mountain has already eaten it.
The woman who will be cypress wife reaches back in a sharp convulsive movement, and her fingers latch onto Gula's wrist. "I see it," she cries. "Gula, Gula, it's there, can't you see? We've come. At last we've come."
"I see mountains," Gula whispers, no less afraid, and the woman who will be cypress wife laughs like a sob.
"Yes," she says, "yes, Gula, yes."
The cypress wife wakes.
She draws water, two sips for herself and one for the mountain, until the dipper is dry. Then she steps carefully over the mountain's trickling water, and stumps down the hill to meet the woman who will become herself.