The Viewpoint
The terrace hadn’t been built for looking.
Anesh understood this as soon as he stepped out behind Zena and felt the air change around his face. There were no seats, no railings designed to hold people for long, no lights arranged to make the view more beautiful. It was a technical passage, wide enough for two workers with equipment on their shoulders to pass through, protected by a metal railing and a thin mesh that vibrated faintly in the wind. At regular intervals, small control boxes jutted out from the rock wall, some lit, others dark. A service rail ran along the outer edge and disappeared behind a fold in the mountain.
And yet from there you could see almost everything.
Yantra stretched below them across levels, terraces, bridges, courtyards and towers, clinging to Mount Uruk as if rock and metal had, after a long argument, found a way to hold each other up. By day the city must have looked brighter, perhaps even harsher; at this hour, though, in the settled dark of evening, it was made of luminous lines, thin trails of smoke, lit windows, slowly moving platforms, 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 gesture of relief. For a while she said nothing. She seemed less irritated than before, or maybe just more tired. The concert had left a residual tension on her, as if part of her had stayed on the stage, in the last note that hadn’t wanted to close. Anesh went over to the railing and looked out over the city.
Further down, well beyond the inhabited levels and the artificial slopes, the mountain began to descend toward darker lands. The streets became threads, the towers grew shorter, the lights thinned out until they blurred into small clusters scattered in the distance. Farther still, past a zone of shadow that Anesh couldn’t measure, was the sea.
He hadn’t seen it entering Yantra. The city had absorbed him before he could notice how high he had climbed. Now the sea appeared distant and nearly motionless, a dark surface beneath a lighter sky, crossed by faint reflections that seemed to belong to neither the stars nor the coast. It made no sound, from up there. It was too far away. And precisely for that reason it seemed larger.
Zena reached the railing, but didn’t stand beside him. She stayed a little further back, hands tucked into her jacket pockets, gaze fixed on the black line of the water.
“When I was little I saw it differently,” she said.
Anesh waited a few moments. “In Iridia?”
Zena turned her head slightly. “How do you know that?”
“Ardei is an Iridian surname. And in Iridia the surname comes from the mother.”
She studied him with cautious surprise. “I didn’t think Altaluna cared about things like that.”
“We care most about things that don’t concern us.”
Zena let out a brief smile, then turned back to 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 be crossed, a resource to be protected, or a route to be controlled. In Iridia, where we lived a few months a year, you didn’t look at it that way. It reached you before you even decided to observe it. It came into the houses with the salt, in your hair, in the fabrics, in things left out to dry. Even when you didn’t see it, you felt it.”
Anesh smiled quietly.
Zena noticed. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t a nothing face.”
“It looked like an Altaluna question.”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure whether to take it as an offense. “I didn’t ask a question.”
“Not yet.”
The wind passed between them, light but cold. Below, from some level of the city, came the distant sound of a load poorly hooked and quickly corrected, followed by a metallic voice announcing a procedure. Zena rested her forearms on the railing. The thin mesh 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. It wears away coastlines, transports, separates, gives back. You can list all the things it does.” She followed a distant reflection with her eyes, where the water blurred into the night. “But none of those things says what it actually 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 another?” She shook her head slightly. “And when from here it seems to do nothing, it’s still the sea.”
The wind stirred the terrace’s metal mesh. 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 own 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’d intended. “Or maybe what it is doesn’t let itself be fully seen in what it does.”
She raised her eyes to the sea again.
“And us?”
The question was left without a recipient. Anesh understood that answering wouldn’t help; 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 ended up.
“The sea ruins the sentence,” she said.
Anesh didn’t comment. The small wicker container was quiet against his side. After the venue, after the music, that stillness seemed denser than before, as if Ku were listening to something arriving from very far away.
Zena pulled away from the railing and sat on the low edge of a technical crate, pulling the guitar case closer with her foot. The gesture drew 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 that way.”
“From below a lot of things don’t seem that way.”
“I was pretty close.”
“You were pretty new.”
Anesh lowered his eyes and smiled. The guitar case was worn in places, especially near the handle. It didn’t look like an object kept only out of duty. The surface bore small marks, repairs, scratches, removed labels. An instrument could cross a precise city and still gather disorder.
Zena watched him.
“You have that face again.”
“Which one?”
“The one of someone who knows something and is deciding whether to hide it badly.”
Anesh wanted to say it wasn’t true. Then he thought of the stage, of Zena’s guitar, of the way the bassist had followed a direction he perhaps hadn’t fully chosen, and he suddenly felt ridiculous. Not because he could play too, but because saying so now seemed to turn something of his own into a comparison he couldn’t hold up.
“I used to play a bit,” he said.
Zena didn’t answer right away.
“What?”
“Guitar.”
She lowered her eyes for a moment to her own case, then looked back at him, studying him with a different attention than she had in the workshop. There she’d searched for faults, delays, instability. Now she seemed to be searching for the exact point where he had tried to make himself smaller.
“A bit how much?”
“A little.”
“A little is a measure used by people who don’t want to be measured.”
“Or by people who just heard someone play far 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’d 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 asked nothing. This, perhaps, 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 eyes to her own case.
“When I turned twelve he gave me a guitar. He’d built it in secret. For me. It wasn’t perfect. Or maybe it was, in the way things made for one specific person can be. There were spots where the wood hadn’t quite wanted to follow the shape, and he’d left them like that, correcting them only as much as needed to keep the instrument 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 of the terrace more than Anesh had expected. They hadn’t been solemn when his father had said them. Or maybe he, at twelve, hadn’t known how to hear their solemnity. They had seemed like good words, a bit strange, perhaps too big for a gift. Now, spoken above Yantra, before that distant sea, beside a girl who lived in a city where everything sooner or later 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 only 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 arrive 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 drawn a few steps away from its rhythm. The wicker basket remained still. Anesh rested a hand on top of it, not to keep it from moving, but to feel that it was there.
“It’s a long story.”
Zena glanced at the device on her wrist. The red light was still there, but less urgent than before. Or maybe she was simply looking at it with less obedience.
“The Nerek is still cooling down,” she said.
Anesh didn’t immediately understand if this was technical information or permission.
She sat back down on the crate, the guitar resting beside her knee. She didn’t invite him to speak. There was no need.
Anesh looked at the sea once more.
Then he began.