The Scenic Viewpoint
The terrace had not been built for looking.
Anesh realized this as soon as he stepped out behind Zena and felt the air change around his face. There were no seats, no railings meant to keep people lingering, no lights arranged to make the view more beautiful. It was a technical passageway, wide enough for two workers to pass through with tools on their shoulders, protected by a metal railing and a thin net that barely vibrated in the wind. At regular intervals, small control boxes jutted out from the rocky wall, some lit, others dark. A service rail ran along the outer edge and disappeared behind a fold of the mountain.
And yet, from there, you could see almost everything.
Yantra descended below them in levels, terraces, bridges, courtyards, and towers, clinging to Mount Uruk as if rock and metal had, after a long discussion, found a way to support each other. By day, the city must have looked clearer, perhaps even harsher; at that hour, though, in the now-settled darkness of evening, it was made of luminous lines, thin smoke, lit windows, platforms moving slowly, and signals running from one level to another like nerve impulses. It hadn’t stopped working. It had only changed its rhythm.
Zena leaned the guitar case against the wall and slipped the strap off her shoulder with a small movement of relief. For a while, she said nothing. She seemed less irritated than before, or perhaps just more tired. The concert had left a residual tension in her, as if a part of her had remained on stage, in the last note that hadn’t wanted to close. Anesh approached the railing and looked out over the city.
Lower down, far beyond the inhabited levels and artificial slopes, the mountain began to descend toward darker lands. The roads became threads, the towers shrank, the lights thinned out until they blended with small settlements scattered in the distance. At the bottom, after a shadowy area Anesh couldn’t measure, there was the sea.
He hadn’t seen it when entering Yantra. The city had absorbed him before he could realize how high he had climbed. Now, though, the sea appeared distant and almost motionless, a dark surface beneath the lighter sky, crossed by faint reflections that seemed to belong neither to the stars nor the coast. It made no sound, from there. It was too far away. And precisely for that, it seemed larger.
Zena reached the railing, but didn’t stand next to him. She stayed a little behind, hands in the pockets of her jacket, gaze turned toward the black line of water.
“When I was little, I saw it differently,” she said.
Anesh waited a moment. “In Iridia?”
Zena barely turned her head. “How do you know?”
“Ardei is an Iridian surname. And in Iridia, the surname comes from the mother.”
She regarded him with cautious surprise. “I didn’t think people in Altaluna cared about these things.”
“We’re especially interested in things that don’t concern us.”
Zena let out a brief smile, then went back to looking at the sea.
“My mother used to say that in Yantra they always look at it from too high up. Like a surface to be measured, a distance to cross, a resource to protect, or a route to control. In Iridia, where we lived for a few months each year, you didn’t look at it that way. It would reach you before you even decided to observe it. It came into the houses with the salt, into your hair, your clothes, the things left out to dry. Even when you didn’t see it, you felt it.”
Anesh smiled softly.
Zena noticed. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t a ‘nothing’ face.”
“It sounded like an Altaluna question.”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure whether to take it as an insult. “I didn’t ask a question.”
“Not yet.”
The wind passed between them, light but cold. Below, from a level of the city, came the distant sound of a poorly hooked load quickly corrected, followed by a metallic voice announcing a procedure. Zena rested her forearms on the railing. The thin net vibrated under her weight.
“What does the sea do?” she said.
She wasn’t asking him. The words came out softly, as if she were trying to feel their weight in the air.
“It moves. Eats away at the coasts, carries, separates, returns. You can list all the things it does.” She followed a distant reflection with her eyes, where the water blended with the night. “But none of those things say what it really is.”
Anesh didn’t answer.
“You are what you do,” she murmured. “So what is the sea? What it moves? What it erodes? What it carries from one shore to the other?” She shook her head slightly. “And when from here it seems to do nothing, it’s still the sea.”
The wind moved the metal net of the terrace. Below them, Yantra kept working: a load was hooked, a platform changed level, an automated voice announced the completion of a procedure. Zena lowered her eyes to her hands, still marked by the strings.
“Maybe what it does isn’t what it is,” she said. Then she hesitated, as if the next sentence had gone further than she intended. “Or maybe what it is can’t be fully seen in what it does.”
She looked up at the sea again.
“And us?”
The question was left without a recipient. Anesh understood that there was no point in answering; not because Zena already knew the answer, but because for once she wasn’t trying to find one right away.
After a while, she smiled, almost annoyed at where her thoughts had led her.
“The sea ruins the sentence,” she said.
Anesh didn’t comment. The small wicker container was quiet against his side. After the club, after the music, that quiet seemed denser than before, as if Ku were listening to something coming from very far away.
Zena moved away from the railing and sat on the low edge of a technical box, pulling the guitar case closer with her foot. The gesture brought Anesh’s gaze back to the instrument.
“Have you been playing long?” he asked.
“Long enough to know when I haven’t practiced enough.”
“It didn’t seem like it.”
“From below, many things don’t seem as they are.”
“I was pretty close.”
“You were pretty new.”
Anesh lowered his eyes and smiled. The guitar case was worn in some places, especially near the handle. It didn’t look like something kept only out of duty. The surface bore small marks, repairs, scratches, removed stickers. An instrument could travel through a precise city and still gather disorder.
Zena looked at him.
“You have that face again.”
“Which one?”
“The one of someone who knows something and is deciding whether to hide it badly.”
Anesh would have liked to say it wasn’t true. Then he thought of the stage, Zena’s guitar, the way the bassist had followed a direction he might not have entirely chosen, and suddenly felt ridiculous. Not because he could play too, but because saying it now seemed to turn something of his into a comparison he couldn’t stand up to.
“I used to play a bit,” he said.
Zena didn’t answer right away.
“What?”
“Guitar.”
She lowered her eyes to her own case for a moment, then looked back at him with a different kind of attention than in the workshop. There, she looked for faults, delays, instability. Now she seemed to be looking for the exact point where he had tried to make himself smaller.
“A bit how much?”
“Not much.”
“‘Not much’ is a measure used by those who don’t want to be measured.”
“Or by those who have just listened to someone play much better.”
Zena looked away first. She didn’t blush, didn’t really smile, but the wind moved her hair across her face and for a moment she seemed younger than the confidence with which she had crossed the workshop.
“Where did you learn?” she asked.
Anesh leaned on the railing with both hands. The metal was cold. He looked at the city, then the sea, then a point in between where Yantra’s lights no longer reached and the coast hadn’t yet begun.
“From my father.”
Zena didn’t ask questions. Maybe that was what allowed him to continue.
“He used to say that in Ekud, the wood didn’t grow better. Just more willing to listen.”
Zena lowered her gaze to her own case.
“When I turned twelve, he gave me a guitar. He had built it in secret. For me. It wasn’t perfect. Or maybe it was, in the way things made for a specific person can be. There were places where the wood hadn’t quite wanted to follow the shape, and he had left them that way, corrected only as much as needed for the instrument to hold together. He put it in my hands as if he were handing over something very fragile, but he didn’t speak right away. He waited for me to look at it. Then he said: ‘Anesh, it doesn’t matter if you become someone. What matters is that you never stop listening to yourself.‘”
The words, once spoken, seemed to change the air on the terrace more than Anesh had expected. They hadn’t been solemn when his father said them. Or maybe he, at twelve, hadn’t been able to feel their solemnity. They had seemed like good words, a bit strange, maybe too big for a gift. Now, spoken above Yantra, in front of that distant sea, next to a girl who lived in a city where everything eventually ended up inside a profile, they seemed to come from a time that hadn’t yet finished reaching him.
Zena didn’t say it was beautiful. She didn’t say she understood. She just looked at her own guitar case, then at the distant line of the sea.
“And where is it now?” she asked.
Anesh felt the question coming before he even wanted to answer it.
“I left it.”
Zena turned toward him.
“You left it?”
“In the cave.”
“What cave?”
The wind slipped under Anesh’s jacket. Somewhere below them, the city kept moving, but the terrace seemed to have stepped a little away from its rhythm. The wicker basket remained still. Anesh rested a hand on it, not to keep it from moving, but to feel that it was there.
“It’s a long story.”
Zena looked at the device on her wrist. The red light was still there, but less urgent than before. Or maybe she was just looking at it with less obedience.
“The Nerek is still cooling down,” she said.
Anesh didn’t immediately understand if it was technical information or permission.
She sat back down on the box, with the guitar resting next to her knee. She didn’t invite him to speak. There was no need.
Anesh looked at the sea one more time.
Then he began.