The City We Came To

I.

The Folk of the High Tower called my visit "the slow season," because I was, by their standard, very slow. They flew from the river to the rooftop in fourteen wingbeats. I, on foot, took most of an afternoon. They were patient with me. They learned, by the third week, to fly slowly when escorting me, gliding when they could, and never circling impatiently. This is, I came to understand, their particular form of courtesy.

The High Tower had once been a building of the kind my people call a hotel. It was forty-two stories tall — thirty-eight habitable, the upper four collapsed in the long ago — and it stood at the center of what had once been a city of perhaps three million people, and was now a city of approximately ninety thousand crows.

I had come north because my Council had asked me to.

The Council, in our village in the foothills, had received, three winters earlier, a message brought by a far-traveling raven, who had spoken to our oldest woman in the small dialect of trade-cawing that had been preserved among us for three generations. The message had been: *the High Tower is willing to receive a Slow Walker, if you wish to send one.*

We had wished to send one.

I was thirty-one years old. I had been chosen because I was patient and because I was a little deaf in one ear, which the Council had decided would be useful — the Folk's voices, at close range, were difficult for unaccustomed humans, and a measure of natural muffling was considered a kindness to both parties. I had also been chosen because I had no children. The journey was three months on foot in each direction.

II.

I lived in the High Tower for one full cycle of seasons. The Folk gave me a room on the eleventh floor, in what had been, by the rusted plate beside the door, a junior executive office. They had cleared it of debris and lined the walls, in the way they line their own nesting hollows, with woven grasses and the flattened paper of old documents. The papers had been arranged, I noticed on my third day, by color.

I asked, through my host — a male named, in their tongue, *Three-Notes-Falling* — whether the colors meant anything.

He said: *Yes. The pale ones are for sleeping. The dark ones are for thinking. The bright ones are for guests.*

I was sitting, then, on a bed of bright pages.

I asked: *What do guests do?*

He said, after a particular kind of pause that I had begun, by then, to recognize as the pause of a teacher choosing a simpler answer: *Guests say what is true about where they come from. We give them, in exchange, what is true about us.*

I did not, that first week, feel I had anything sufficiently true to give.

I gave, eventually, my grandmother's recipe for the kind of bread we make with acorn flour. The Folk could not eat the bread — their crops were not made for it — but they were, *Three-Notes-Falling* explained, very interested in the recipe as an arrangement of steps, as a choreography, as a thing humans do.

In exchange he gave me, over the course of seven evenings, the names of the seventeen winds that pass through the High Tower in different seasons, and the song that each wind expects to be sung to it.

III.

The Folk had a word for my people that I want to record here, because I think it is, in its way, an act of generosity that should be witnessed.

They called us — collectively, as a category — *those who left*.

They did not call us *the dead*, although our population, in the regions they could survey by air, was perhaps one part in ten thousand of what it had been before the long ago. They did not call us *the lost*. They did not call us *the broken people*, although they had a word for that, used internally.

They called us *those who left*.

When I asked *Three-Notes-Falling* about this, he was, for the first time in our acquaintance, briefly impatient. He said: *You have not died. You have moved. You moved because you had to. Some of you stayed — like you — and are easy to find. Some of you went too far for us to find. We do not know where, but we know you went somewhere. To call you "dead" would be an insult to your going.*

I did not, until later, fully understand what he meant.

I came to understand it slowly, the way one comes to understand things in a language one has been learning by accident.

What I understood, in the end, was this: the Folk did not divide the world into living and dead in the way my people did. They divided it into *those who are here* and *those who are elsewhere*. The dead, in their reckoning, were elsewhere. We — my people, the southern remnant — were also elsewhere, but a kind of elsewhere they could imagine and reach. They were, simply, willing to wait for us, the way they would wait for a friend who had walked to the other side of the river to gather seeds, and would, at some point, walk back.

That this could be a true description of the situation between our two peoples had not, until then, occurred to me.

IV.

When the season turned, I was given a name.

The naming happened on a high windless morning, on the roof of the High Tower, in the presence of the seven elders whose names I had, by then, learned. *Three-Notes-Falling* spoke for them. He said the name out loud and translated it for me, because the courtesy of giving a name in a foreign tongue, when the receiver is a Slow Walker, is to translate.

The name was: *She-Who-Came-Up-Forty-Stairs*.

It was a literal name. I had, on my third day, climbed forty flights of stairs to reach the meeting hall, because my legs do not fly. The elders, watching from above, had been moved, *Three-Notes-Falling* told me, by the steadiness of the climb. They had felt that this was what a Slow Walker did, and that this should be honored.

I have, since I came home, used the name only with myself, on cold nights, when I forget what I went there for.

I went there because someone had to.

V.

I have been asked, in the eight years since my return, what I learned.

I learned the seventeen winds and their songs. I learned three forms of polite address, and one form of teasing, and one form of grief. I learned that the High Tower, although in the language of my people is a ruin, is, in the language of the Folk, a forest of stone with hollows shaped for nesting and with shelves shaped for the keeping of bright papers.

But the thing I learned that I want, most of all, to pass on, is this:

There is a people in the north who have been telling stories about us for many generations. The stories are mostly true. They have been keeping our names, in the way they keep the names of winds, against the day we walk back across the river.

It is not, I think, a long walk.

— from the field notes of *She-Who-Came-Up-Forty-Stairs*, of the southern foothills, who is — and was — also Hela Tomich.