The first I saw of her was three minutes of video surreptitiously taken before the camcorder was confiscated. All footage of her unique act was strictly controlled. I remember losing the need to breathe as the sunlight runneling off the stained-glass spine of Tessadorma Cathedral broke into a billion particles across her taut scapulae. I understood why men gave up food for art. Each small motion of her brutal-angled body declared her mastery of it as she strode across her stage. This woman had honed herself into the devoted tool of her profession. Even as she gripped the rope in both of those strong hands and hoisted her subject kicking into the air, I knew that my life would be a disappointment if it did not, however fleetingly, intersect with hers.
The most famous noosemaker of Vizhilly was waiting for me when I emerged from the terminal three hours delayed. The sight of her loitering on the curb beside her autocar like a common chauffeur stopped me short and smacked me silent.
“Are you the reporter then?” she asked, in accented but professorial Anglic. She was taller than me by a few inches and similarly broader. Black hair braided into thick bulbs piled upon her strong shoulders, that musculature a testimony to a lifetime of physical labor. She wore a peacock-colored avgeré, like a saree that tied into a bow at the chest, and a pair of leather driving gloves. Flecks of gold jewelry glinted modestly from her ears, lips, and brow. There was an aquiline sharpness to her features, an inherent disapproval of everything, and her lavender eyes seemed to scold me for staring.
“That’s me, ma’am,” I stammered. I’d spent the overnight flight constructing my perfect first impression, and it currently lay in pieces at my feet.
“Good,” she said tersely but not unkindly, and opened the passenger’s door. “Come along. We’re behind schedule.”
Her voice carried the same authority as the nuns who’d thrashed me through four years of Yeshuite school. I hurried to throw my luggage inside and myself after it.
I’d dialed my editor Ian moments after I’d seen her on that video. I hadn’t expected to be so much as humored. I’d put in my time covering separatist rallies in Azovian Rus and labor protests in B?izh?u, but the New Anglund Post was still a callow upstart in the court of journalism, and a deep-dive on one of the world’s most reclusive celebrities seemed like reaching at stars from the bottom of a well. Yet two weeks later I was presented with a ticket to the country where she plied her trade. “A shot in the dark doesn’t always miss,” Ian had said, sounding just as dumbfounded as I was.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, as she took us on to the road.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” she replied sidelong, fastidiously studying the traffic. “Such is the reality of a country like mine.”
True enough. It was difficult as it was to land an aeroplane on a stationary target, much less one in perpetual, unpredictable motion. The country of Vizhilly, that restless landmass, was presently squelching like a kidney stone between the borders of Cumanistan and Gurkanistan on its way westward, and the conflicting airspaces of those two rival nations had made my decent more of an action movie than I could enjoy.
As the freeway emerged from a tunnel, it took us in a descending swoop over the capital city of Tessadorma. A heavy, hot rain beat down upon its rolling terra-cotta surface, courtesy of the atmospheric confusion whipped up by the country’s motion. The guidebooks called it the Seasonless City; so close to Vizhilly’s hindmost border no climate was guaranteed. This land snared winds on its dorsal mountains as it traveled, abducting and releasing at whim, the same as it purloined culture and architecture from those nations it visited or had fleetingly conquered it. This high above the depressed cityscape I could make out pagodas lifted from B?izh?u, aqueducts pilfered from the Reman Empire before its collapse. An old city patched with modernity, like Edo or Parisius, but old from many times more deposits of age. I felt fleetingly nauseous when I pulled my eyes away, as though I teetered over a thousand compounded vistas instead of one.
I recalled the famous words that the Emperor Gaius Caesarion had uttered upon his coming to this land: Ita vero. Mundus hie agit. Tis true, the world does flow here.
“Motion sickness is to be expected,” the noosemaker said, noticing my reaction. “It should pass quickly. If not, there are pills.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, probably lying. “I didn’t expect you to pick me up in person. Don’t you have people?”
“Of course,” she replied. “But when I saw that we were to lose plenty of time as it was, I decided not to waste any more sending a driver here and back. I thought we might begin the preliminary interview now, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” I said, hurriedly producing my digital recorder. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She did not take her eyes off the road but did lean in slightly, to be heard. “My name is Chella Gipzodi,” she said, enunciating carefully. “I am thirty-three years old, and I execute people beautifully.”