"Vothanael."
Her hand on his shoulder. The grip of someone who had been saying the name quite a few times repeatedly.
The garden came back in pieces -- grass under his palms, the sourceless light at its usual height, the ember-copper tree warm at his back. The smell of something green and old. The sound of Rania's pen…never mind it wasnot moving.
He opened his eyes.
Amara was crouched two feet in front of him.
Dark brown eyes. A small crease between her brows -- not fear, the expression of someone who had done the arithmetic and wasn't pleased with the sum.
Her pen was in her other hand. She'd come to give him a word. She'd found him somewhere else instead.
"You were gone," she said.
He looked at his hands.
Grass under them. Green. Real. No red. No white place. No silver -- just the faint warmth in the skin of them, the warmth that had no temperature behind it, which was... Well, That was a sentence he would think about later.
He pressed his palm flat to the ground. The blades settled around his fingers, cool, the way they always settled — patient, like something that had been here a long time and intended to continue.
He looked at her.
"Here," he said.
Something moved through her face -- the fast internal thing, the receiving. She sat down in the grass, cross-legged, notebook on her knee, pen uncapped.
She didn't ask where he'd been or what he was dreaming about. Eleven years of fieldwork had taught her what it looked like when someone was dreaming something they didn't like to revisit, it was better to ground them in the present.
To the north the Wall kept its depth. Above it the seventh tree held its single pale gold leaf, perfectly still.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Next word."
. . .
The lesson had already been running when Rania opened her second notebook.
That was how she marked the days now -- by notebook. The first had lasted four days. The second, at the rate she was going, would not even last two.
She cracked the spine on it without ceremony and wrote the date at the top of the first page. Then she looked across the garden.
Amara was cross-legged in the grass at the base of the ember-copper tree. Vothanael facing her. The particular quality of his attention -- the forty-five degrees, all of it, nothing held back -- arranged entirely on her.
The grass under him was more vibrant again.
Every morning, the same discovery. Khalil had stopped cataloguing it as an observation and started cataloguing it as a fact... the kind of fact that accumulated weight with each repetition until it stopped being data and became something else.
Something the field notebooks did not have a reference for.
Rania uncapped her pen.
They had been at it since first light -- or what passed for first light in a garden that had no relationship with the sun. She had her list of the words he carried.
She updated it every morning before the lesson continued, checking her notes against what she had witnessed and finding, consistently, that her notes were insufficient.
Today there were five more to add.
. . .
Sky came first.
Amara tried it the way she tried all the ones without surfaces -- from the gesture up, through stone, through the forty-three metres, through everything the stone sat below.
Wide, open, her hands spreading to suggest a ceiling with no ceiling. She found Rania's rough sun sketch from day two -- an embarrassing circle, Rania's astronomical draftsmanship being the one professional skill she did not possess.... and held it up.
He looked at the drawing.
He looked at the arched stone above. The sourceless light living there, the way it always lived there, indifferent to whether the concept of sky meant anything in its vicinity.
The expression that arrived on his face was one Amara had been adding to her internal catalogue of his expressions for twelve days:
I understand what you are pointing at. I have never been there.
"Sky," she said.
He held the word. Set it in the place where the abstracts lived -- before, here, awe, far -- the shelf with no surface.
He looked at the ceiling again, at the stone, at the warm nowhere the light came from.
"Sky," he said.
Certain about the word. The concept, he was still deciding. She noted the distinction.
He was always more confident in the skin than the thing underneath. She thought that was honest of him.
. . .
Dark she had been avoiding.
There was a feeling that went with it she had not examined too closely -- the feeling of giving him the word for the place he had come from, the recess, the cold and the nothing of the sub-chamber where she had found him.
Irrational. She mentally catalogued the irrationality and gave him the word anyway, because the lesson had taught her by now that it ran on its own logic.
Completeness. All the words, or the architecture of language had gaps in it, and gaps were where meaning got lost.
She turned off her torch.
The garden held its sourceless light. The torch's absence made no real difference to the room -- it only made a difference to the gesture.
On. Off. On. Off.
"Dark," she said.
He went very still.
The particular stillness -- deeper than his ordinary stillness, the way certain temperatures were deeper than cold.
She waited. Three seconds, five.
Something in him was doing something she did not have access to.
"Dark," he said.
Quiet. The way you said the name of a place you had lived inside of a long time and left.
She turned the torch back on. His eyes came back to her from wherever they had been.
She wrote: dark. He already knew that one.
Then she underlined it and added a footnote: from the inside
. . .
Far arrived after Dawud's coffee.
She walked him to the base of the ascent rope, pointed up the shaft toward the surface, and pointed past it -- her arm extending past the shaft's edge, past the ruins at Level 1, past the stone above those, past the open Negev air, past the desert, past the sea.
Past her grandmother's plane, somewhere in all that above them, growing closer. But ambiguous all the same.
She said it once.
He looked up the shaft for a long time.
Something moved through his face in the silence -- not awe, not the almost-smile, something quieter and less nameable.
The look of a thing for whom elsewhere had been, for a very long time, an academic concept. He looked down at the grass. At the deeper shade of it in his radius. At the garden that was here.
"Far," he said.
From the documentation table Rania wrote, without looking up: he says far like a man who has decided it is someone else's problem.
She was not wrong in thinking that...
. . .
Then voice.
The one Amara had been building toward without knowing it. A placeholder in her lesson notes -- a bracket, a when -- and the when had apparently settled on today without consulting her.
She placed her hand at her own throat.
Spoke. Let him see the vibration. Moved his hand there -- gently, the way you moved someone's attention to something they had but had not yet located.
He looked at her fingers on his throat. His expression shifted through something internal.
The checking of a system always operational, suddenly identified.
She stepped back.
"Voice," she said.
He was quiet for a moment, Then:
"Voice."
. . .
The sound that came out of him arrived in the garden the way a door opened onto a larger room -- the space simply increased without announcement, and you understood you had been in a smaller one.
Rania's pen stopped.
Complete stop. The specific stop of an implement that had lost the person operating it because the person's cognitive functions had briefly ceased to operate.
Amara had heard him speak for days. Single syllables, then two-syllable words, the gradual arrival of shape and timing. She had charted the progress.
She had filed the development under improvement and been professionally satisfied with herself for doing so.
She had understood his voice was becoming itself.
She had not understood what itself was going to sound like.
The register of it came down through the chest first. Then settled, warm and complete, somewhere behind the sternum -- the temperature of deep-running water, the specific smoothness of something that had been in the dark a very long time and had emerged knowing exactly what it was.
A baritone.
The word arrived in Amara's head approximately two seconds after the word voice arrived in the garden's air...
...accompanied, entirely against her professional interests and without her consent, by the sensation of her spine briefly forgetting its primary structural obligation.
Oooh
She held her pen very steadily. She was a field archaeologist with eleven years of experience across eleven countries. She noted the development. Filed it under physiological response, involuntary, not mentioning it ever again.
From the documentation table, Rania made a sound.
She transformed it, with admirable speed, into a cough.
Nobody was convinced of that cough...You could tell by Yosef's dry look at the two females present.