Free The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper

ton’i, we, met in autumn.
    After autumn comes thirteen, because that is the age at which Pistach people are both ended and begun. And the last of the three is stairs, of course, seemingly endless flights of stairs that one climbs over and over during the thirteenth year, the year of selection. It is called a year, though it is occasionally shorter than that, or, as was true in to’eros case, my case, much longer.
    One’s thirteenth year begins on the day of one’s twelfth birthday and continues until selection. Selection takes as long as it takes, and one may not celebrate one’s thirteenth year until the time of selection is done. Thereafter, that date becomes one’s natal day, and at the end of the next year the count begins again at one. After one is selected, one no longer counts the years of undifferentiated childhood, only the years of being what one was meant to be.
    The symbols of renewal were much emphasized the autumn ton—that is to say, I—began that year. (Since this account is meant for you, dear Benita, one who is unfamiliar with our language, ton, I, will use the tongue of you who will read except where our own is needed for clarity—or when one forgets. Even Pistach forget. We are not perfect.)
    Perhaps the symbols that autumn were merely more noticeable than in previous years, but I seemed to see for the first time the shallow, woven-reed trays of flower bulbs before the gardener’s kiosks; the piles of gnarled hisanthine roots wrapped in damp, green moss and tied with lengths of ever-life vine; the transparent jars of seed; the tools used to rake and chop fronds when they fall; the canvas sacks in which the mulch is kept until time for it to be spread around dry stems, covering the cold soil. Even perforated clay jars of worms, though it is considered slightly disreputable to buy worms. One has one’s ancestral place, and after generations of dedicated care, one’s land should have enough worms to share with the less fortunate. Still, some families have been selected away from the care of their home place for generations—though this speaks of negligence by the selectors—leaving the soil to impoverish itself and in need of a generation’s attention before it can be returned to health.
    It is customary for the far flung to return to home places in autumn, to visit the stelae of our loved ones and ancestors, to plant a corm of loral or a root of hisanthine in the soil where their ashes were spread, to spread sweet fern mulch there, and even, if one cannot go oneself, to send a worm or two from the home ground to the ground of those who were burned and spread far from home. Autumn wreaths are hung upon the stelae around which the ash-grounds are gathered,thus twining our departed ones into the circle that includes ourselves and those to come. One sees renewal wreaths everywhere in autumn, on doors and walls and over windows, always vine-shoots of evergrow twisted into a circlet and decorated with fruits, dried blossoms and leaves. Our family wreath that year was decorated with a traditional trialur: dried star-rays of spring hisanthine, dark green feathers of summer’s fragrant loral, and the hard-skinned, silver-sheened autumn fruits of the red pomego. End and beginning. Beginning and end.
    Since the thirteenth year is the one of selection, it is on the twelfth birthday that one is taken to the nearest stair of selection for the first time. The stairs are great slabs of polished igneous rock of crystalline texture, with a carved banister at either side and a railing up the middle. They are rather wide, though not particularly steep, and they are built, always, to rise along a hillside spiked with cupressa trees, for the slow-growing cupressa is a symbol of patience. The stairs go up to a terrace that stretches on either side in great widths of mosaic paving, balustraded on the downhill side and on the uphill side, on either side of the stairs,