Karen Lord - Redemption in Indigo

'Then why did you waste time teaching me to spin five hundred different configurations of sugar spirals?’ Paama scolded her, alarmed at this news. ‘You should have been showing me how to fight him!'

'Set your mind at ease, Paama. It is not power that you should be concerned about. Power you already have. I have been teaching you control. Plus, they were delicious. Now I have told you all that I can, all that you need to know. Remember it well, because I cannot stay with you any longer.'

'Where are you going?’ asked Paama, forgetting for a moment and wondering why she had not heard of Giana's family leaving Makendha.

'Giana must come back. It has been almost seven days, and that is the limit for a child. I mustn't abuse her generosity.'

'Where is Giana?’ Paama asked, this time with an edge of apprehensiveness in her voice.

'Come and see.'

Paama walked with the djombi into the pasture and saw the faint, sleeping shape of another Giana. It was the final feather to tip the balance of her teetering belief-disbelief. She felt the ground falling out from under her feet.

'You cannot leave me by myself! Will I never see you again?'

'You may see me, or not, but I will definitely see you. Don't be afraid, Paama. But be cautious. Trust your instincts. Now, let me speak to Giana alone.'

Paama turned away, shivering under the high, hot sun. She stood looking back at the village and was very startled when a small hand tugged at her belt.

'I'm ready to go back now,’ said that familiar voice, but a subtle difference told Paama who it was who now lived beneath the child's skin.

Paama looked beyond Giana, but the pasture was empty. She extended cold fingers and took the child's hand. They walked slowly back to Makendha in a silence mildly tinged with the sorrow of loss.

Both the gift of the Stick and the djombi's words meant something quite significant to Paama. Even before Ansige had arrived, she had wondered to herself how much longer she should stay with her parents. Now she felt she had even more reason to try to order her life—a life outside of Makendha. She wanted to travel. A good cook could find work anywhere, in a household, on a ship, in a guest house. She had long desired to see the world, but Ansige's strong dislike of travel and utter dependence on her had thwarted that dream soon after their marriage.

She made preparations. She began to compile her recipes, printing them carefully in hardcover books and then putting the books into an old biscuit tin where they would be sealed away and protected from damp and vermin. She took up her savings, money earned from her share of the family's lands and livestock. She did this swiftly and quietly, because she did not wish to discuss with her family what she could not fully explain. Part of her still refused to believe in the mysterious stranger, but if there were such a person, all the better that she should leave Makendha to keep her family safe.

Then she began to tell her family by degrees.

'I think I need a small vacation, a change of scenery. You can spare me for a few weeks, can't you Maa?'

And later, more seriously, to her father:

'I can't stay here forever, you know. Our lands were never intended to support so many husbandless daughters. Let me go up to the House of the Sisters and see what work they may have for me.'

Semwe listened to the words and what he thought was behind them, and reluctantly gave his approval. He thought that she was seeking a sense of worth after her failed, childless marriage, desiring a status that could not be found as an adult under her parents’ roof.

'But a few weeks only, as you hinted to your mother,’ he said, raising a finger in caution. ‘Then you must come back, and we will talk again.'

Paama agreed.

She said nothing at all to her sister, which, in retrospect, may have been a mistake.

* * * *

Taran arrived, ironically, with exactly the entrance Ansige had hoped to have. He rode a fine horse at the head of a small procession of servants and pack animals. On arrival, he sent his majordomo ahead to the chief to present a gift and his compliments, and to convey his formal request to pitch camp in the fields near Makendha. This was a common practice for nomad merchant princes, so the chief happily accepted the generous gift and sent back one of his own servants to guide Taran to Makendha's pastures and woods.

The entire train wound through the streets of Makendha. People stared and muttered, and behind his veil Taran stared back, eyes glittering coldly. He was looking for a familiar face, and listening for a familiar voice.

But nothing has as fine a sense of drama and comedy as chaos. Thus it was that Paama, leading a single mule for a pack animal and carrying the Stick at her belt, left by the back roads which went up towards the hills and completely missed Taran's arrival into Makendha.

paama among the sisters,

and alton the poet finds his muse

Many times has the tale been told of the composer Lewis and how, fasting, he spent a full day and a night creating his famous chorus Entry into the Courts of Heaven , a chorus which would become the axis, the centrepiece of the latter portion of his symphonic diptych Redemption . After completing it, he was moved to tears and declared that it needed no revision, for he had but recorded the music exactly as he had heard it when, transported from his study, he had stood in those very courts with angels thronging to the left and right of him.

Less embraced by oral history is the equally interesting tale of Jacob's Ladder , the centrepiece of the first half of Redemption , which, though almost as renowned and adored as Courts of Heaven , caused him many pangs of labour to deliver live and not stillborn. Inspiration had been in such short supply that he had been constrained to cobble together pieces from his musical ragbag, that collection of orphaned snippets of likely pieces whose greater works had either suffered from drought or block at a critical point, or which, though performanceworthy, had been deemed unfashionable by patrons and were thus abandoned as unprofitable. To the trained ear it was evident—new lyrics sat oddly on musical trills that had been tailored to fit other, more secular words—and yet the public loved it and found in it something near to that other, effortless God gift.

Paama knew of both tales and often consoled herself that since very few people could tell the difference between gross human toil and sublime heavenly message, there might be an element of the heavenly in the former, and of the human in the latter. She had never realised that others thought the same way until she saw the legend on the arch of the gate to the House of the Sisters:

Work is Prayer.

She rang the gate's bell and waited.

A woman shuffled down the dusty path, her head bound in a simple cotton wrap, her feet in mended canvas shoes. She was familiar to Paama, but it was not until she was much closer to the gate that her old eyes brightened in recognition at the sight of her visitor.

'Paama, come in, come in and welcome! How good to see you.’ She fumbled back the gate's iron latch and opened the way for Paama and her mule to enter.

'Aunty Jani,’ Paama said, embracing her warmly, cheek to aged cheek.

It was the wrong form of address, of course, but Sister Jani had known Paama from her youngest days and had been an aunty for longer than she had been a sister.

'Will you take in a kitchen helper for a few weeks?'

Sister Jani laughed. ‘Kitchen helper—you? Please, take over with my blessing. But you did not come all the way up here just to cook for us, did you?'