Chapter 2. Kai’s Book

The Drawings That Should Never Have Been

Kai’s home stood at the very edge of Tamar — a flat hut of fired stone, with smooth walls on which no one had ever, in living memory, drawn anything. This was the custom in Tamar: he who draws is he who remembers what is better forgotten. The desert already remembered too much; people were meant to be lighter than it, to be sand that the wind carries forward, without looking back at the trail.

Kai could not be sand.

Every night, when sleep carried him back to that same tower, to that same old man with raised hands, to that same girl in the stream of light — he woke with something heavy in his chest, as though he had swallowed a stone, and the stone would not let him fall asleep again. He took the charcoal, stolen from the smith, and drew on the flat side of a shard until the dark began to grey.

First — the tower. Tall, luminous, like a finger pressed into the sky.

Then — the old man on his knees, with rivers of light flowing from his hands toward the stars.

Then — the girl. In white. With light in her hair, as though it were not separate from her, but grew out from beneath the skin. She was not looking at the old man. She was looking at the one who was looking.

Kai did not know why he drew her more often than the rest. He did not even know who she was. But his hand led itself, and he had long since stopped arguing with it.

His mother did not notice at first.

Nira came in to wake him that morning, as she always did — and saw the board, leaning against the wall, not yet put away. Tower. Old man. Girl. She thought: a child at play, it will pass, children draw all kinds of things — and went out to brew the morning draught, as though she had seen nothing.

The next day the drawing was different. The same tower, the same old man — but this time the girl was reaching forward, toward the viewer, as though calling. Nira stood over the board longer than she would have liked, and said nothing.

On the third day she was truly afraid. Because in the drawing there now appeared himself. A small figure in the shadow of the tower, looking up at the old man — as though he had been there, and not merely watching from the side.

Nira said not a word to her son. She folded the board into a cloth, and at sunset went to the Circle of Sand.

The seven elders sat where they always sat — beneath the open sky, at the center of the settlement, on stones polished by time and by many such evenings. Before them they laid out the drawing, transferred onto a thin slate.

Haran, the eldest of the Circle, looked for a long time without blinking. The fingers resting on his knees trembled, just barely.

“This is the tower that stands in the desert,” he said at last. “The one the old ones call the Spire, and of which it is forbidden to speak aloud. It should not be in a child’s drawing. It should not be remembered at all.”

Melar, sitting beside him, leaned closer, studying the figure of the girl, and his voice dropped to a whisper:

“I have seen her. Long ago. When I myself was a boy and dreamed the very same thing. My mother said — speak of it to no one. And I did not speak. I even stopped speaking of it to myself, until I forgot.” He was silent for a moment. “And now he has drawn her again. Word for word, as in my own dream.”

Ziya, the youngest of the Circle, rose.

“He is not drawing,” she said. “He is remembering. And the one who begins to remember, sooner or later, goes into the sand. Like those of whom we do not speak.”

No one objected, for all of them knew this story — not as a tale, but as a warning, passed from one Circle to the next: there had been people who began to see dreams while awake, to hear voices in the silence of walls, to speak with ruins as though the ruins could answer. They went out into the desert alone, without water and without a reason they could explain to their neighbors. They were not found. It was said — the sand had taken them. Not as a punishment. As something stranger: as though the sand had recognized its own.

He would carry this with him all his life: the elders do not kill. They forbid.

“Let the boy draw no more,” Haran pronounced. “Let him not go to the ruins. Let him not speak of dreams — neither to his mother, nor to his brothers, nor to himself in the dark, if that is possible. If he continues — he will be taken to the Temple of No Voice. There it will be decided whose he is: ours, or those who have gone.”

They thought: if the boy forgets, he will remain a person.

They did not know what Kai himself already understood, even if he could not have put it into words: that forgetting is not a strength, but a wall, behind which one hides from what one is afraid to understand. And the memory that had come to him through the touch of the dark stone — was not an illness. It was closer to hunger. To thirst. To that without which one cannot live, however much one forbids it.

He could no longer unlearn to remember. Just as one cannot unlearn to breathe.

His mother delivered the prohibition that evening, by the hearth, without looking into his eyes.

“Draw no more,” she said. “It is dangerous. Do you hear me?”

Kai nodded.

That night he went out beyond the walls of Tamar, carrying with him a new shard of stone and the charcoal he had hidden in his belt since morning — as though he had known in advance that the elders would forbid it, even before his mother returned from the Circle of Sand. Under the stars, where no one could see, he drew the tower once more. The old man. The girl.

He did not stop drawing. He went into hiding with it — learned to fold the boards beneath a mat, to wipe the charcoal dust from his fingers with sand, not to raise his eyes when one of the elders began to speak of dreams or spirits. He learned to be silent so convincingly that even his mother, in time, stopped asking.

But he did not stop seeing.

Sometimes, on those nights when the charcoal moved across the stone as though of its own accord, Kai heard — not with his ears, but with that place in his chest where before there had been only hunger — something like a whisper. Not words. Not even a voice in the usual sense. More — the trace of a voice, left so long ago that only its shape had survived, like the print of a hand in dried clay.

He did not know that this whisper was the first to sound in the Stream at all — long before the old man, long before the girl, long before the tower itself. That somewhere at the other edge of time, a person whose name Kai had not heard even once, had once asked not for himself, but for all — and that since then this asking had gone on sounding, quieter and quieter, through every one who happened to be quiet enough to hear it.

Kai thought he simply could not fall asleep in peace. That his hand reached for the charcoal on its own, because that was how his body now worked — with a shift, with a crack, through which something seeped and would not let him rest.

He did not know that the crack was not a breaking.

He did not know that through it, one day, the whole world would enter.

The girl in white, from that day forth in Tamar, began to be called something other than nothing. Word of the drawing spread faster than the elders could have stopped it — from mother to neighbor, from neighbor to herder, from herder to the children at the well, who repeated what they had heard without fully understanding what they spoke of. Thus she received a name, not a true one, but a folk name — the kind that is given to what one fears and yet cannot forget:

She Who Watches from the Sand.

None of those who spoke it knew that somewhere — not here, not in this age, not beneath this sky — she truly was watching. And that word of the boy who had drawn her had reached her sooner than one could believe: not as words, but as a tremor at the very edge of the Shimmer, barely perceptible, but unmistakable.

She recognized that tremor. She had been waiting for it so long that she had nearly stopped believing she would ever know it again.

He sees me, — she thought.

Then he is already on his way.