The city of Nan Rhok stands on the ridge of a great mountain, where a gullet of steaming water flows from volcanic hot springs. The ridge is narrow and the mountain chill, so the city hews close to the spring, building high its granite towers. The name of Nan Rhok is known for many leagues, from the lowlands to the sea, for in that city infants are born possessing not one body but many.

A woman walks the summer market. Call her the mother, though she’ll not give birth for a month yet. There, she pauses at a tree in a terracotta pot, which a traveling merchant promises will bear olives. She buys it. When she brings it home, to an apartment up many flights of stairs, her husband (call him the father) says that it will die in the mountain winter. Nevertheless, the mother removes the slats of flattened horn from the window, to let sunlight fall upon the tree.

The mother and father know the birth will result in a single child. The fact that, when the day comes, the mother pushes two infant forms into the midwife’s hands does nothing to change this. Nor are the twin bodies the only hosts of the child. His consciousness stretches out, free of the womb, and seeks new windows into the world. He brushes up against the mother, who he knows intimately, and against the father and the midwife, but these are bodies strongly inhabited, and so he must reach further.

A gnat circles above the bed, and so he learns what it is to be weightless; moss grows on the outside wall, and so he learns what it is to breathe in the sun; a family of mice nests in the walls, and so he learns what it is to embrace and shelter and be many. All these and more the child inhabits, in his first flowering in the world.

The gnat will die in a day, the moss in a season, and the mice in a year. A traumatic death can echo, imprinting for life, but these deaths are as kind as death can be, and as the child’s mind, once expanded, now begins to contract in a series of orderly retreats, he brings with him the insights the people of Nan Rhok know to be essential in the making of a life.

The mother and father keep the window open as long as they can, as summer fades. Then, one day, the father comes home with a luxurious gift—a pane of clear glass, to fit between the horn slats and allow sunlight all year round. The tree has not yet begun bearing olives, but the mother is sure that it will. It grows slowly as the years pass.

The two boys play and explore and jabber, spreading apart and coming together, learning and sharing of the world, and in all this they are moved by a same spirit. And so, while there is grief when, on an autumn morning two years after their birth, one does not rise, the parents reassure each other that, truly, they still have the son they always did. In the towns and villages in the lowlands at the base of the mountains, when a babe dies, it is sometimes said, “That one was for Nan Rhok.” It is rarely a comfort. Here, though, the parents have their own hazy memories of other lives lived, and they lean on these as they lay the small body to rest.

The child, so reduced, spends long stretches by the olive tree, staring out the glass at the city below. The father wonders aloud if the boy might still have other bodies somewhere out there, wandering. The speculation is idle, unworried.

They are unprepared for when the child breaks the glass and falls through the window; this death is a tragedy.

The mother blames herself for buying the foolish tree. The father blames himself for putting fragile glass in place of sturdy horn. They keep the window open, heedless of the chill nights as winter nears, and search desperately, wondering at a bird flitting across rooftops above, a cat lingering in the street below—hoping a piece of their child might still survive, somewhere, somehow.

One night, the mother wakes and runs to the window. She’s dreamed of a child with roots for legs and sap for blood and olives for eyes, a child reaching for the sun and dancing in the wind. She weeps over the tree, now brittle and frostbitten in neglect, and when the father finds her, she swears it is the body of their son.

• • • •

Olive trees do not grow in the city of Nan Rhok; the winters are too cold. But there is a place in the city where it is warm all year, in the great house by the hot spring. For while it is known that the children of Nan Rhok inhabit many bodies, what is less known to outsiders is that the very aged inhabit less than one. That is, if two elders are left together, then eventually one will be found dead and the other will recall two lives instead of one.

In the house by the spring, the ancient ones live. The volcanic soil is warm and fertile, and, there, an olive tree grows. No one knows who carried it to that place; olive trees live a very long time—millennia, even. The bodies of the elderly come and go, their gestalt minds accumulating like silt, but somewhere, deep inside, a mother and father sit in the shade of out-flung arms and watch the olives ripen.