A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel

by Sofia Samatar

  My companion threw back his hood. “Ah!”

  He turned to me and grinned, opening his lantern so that the light swelled up between us. Then he held out his hand.

  “Miros of Sinidre,” he said. “Disgraced nobleman, temporary valet, and general layabout.”

  I took his hand. “Jevick of Tyom.”

  “You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” he said, lifting the lantern and peering at my face. “And a battered-looking one, too. What have they been doing to you in the Houses? You look hag-ridden.”

  I glanced behind me. “I’ve been locked up. Shouldn’t we be moving?”

  Miros shouted with laughter. “Vai!” he swore. “Thank you for reminding me of my duty. It’s easy to forget such things on a night like this. Right. Here’s the official message: Mailar, High Priestess of Avalei, greets you and requests your presence at her salon.”

  I hardly knew what to make of him: his grin, his unkempt curls, the mixture of wariness and mischief in his manner. But his cheerfulness was as welcome to me as the breeze on that open walkway, and the Priestess of Avalei, I knew, was an enemy of the Priest of the Stone.

  “I shall be pleased to attend,” I said.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “Well done. The formalities are over. This way—and don’t go to close to the edge. The railing, I warn you, was probably made in the days of worshiping milk, and it’s a nasty drop into the garden.”

  We moved through the night palace. We walked across bridges, through halls where the painted statues looked startled in Miros’s light, as if surprised in acts of darkness. Sometimes we found sentries drowsing in stairwells, leaning on their spears, or pacing the battlements with a weary stride. None of them stopped us to ask about our business. With some of them Miros exchanged envelopes or tobacco, and once a small bottle of teiva; but he seemed to receive as many gifts as he gave, so that the ritual looked less like bribery than like an arcane form of politeness. The night was cool and fresh, and on the terraces the wind came, lifting my hair, spreading the scent of nocturnal flowers. Between the towers where windows were lighted or lamps shone in the elevated gardens, bats veered fleet and precise in the light. We passed walls of whispering ivy, entered the peaked arch of a doorway. In the halls beyond, my sense of direction failed me. I knew only that we walked through one vast silence after another while the lamplight slid over frescoes and gilded floors.

  At length we reached an indoor garden, its branches awash in moonlight. The only sound was the dripping of hidden water, and the ruddy glow of the lantern seemed indelicate, almost enough to wake the whorled flowers from their sleep. The waxy leaves of rhododendrons touched my hair in the scented gloom as we made our way down the tiles of the little path. At the end of this artificial jungle stood a door of dark wood flanked by tulip-shaped lamps, and Miros opened it for me with a bow.

  “Here we are at last.”

  I stepped past him into an antechamber. A lamp burned on a table just inside, guarded by a retainer in the last stages of senility whose thin, silvery hair hung over his shoulders. He looked at me doubtfully and then immediately lost interest and stood plucking at the loose rosettes on his jacket. Miros greeted him, clearly without expecting a response, left his lantern on the table, and hung up his cloak.

  In the next room, night had been dispelled. The globes of the lamps diffused a light that artfully mimicked the beaming of the sun; they shone, glazed and bulbous, from the sweetly scented tangle of flowering vines coaxed to grow across the ceiling. This canopy of dark green life melted into the verdure that covered the walls, winding among the branches of trees growing in pots, trees that glittered with a subtle life which I soon realized was not life at all: we were entering a forest of colored glass. A bird’s wing flickered; the flowers around it tinkled. We crossed a bridge over a miniature canal that gleamed with carp. In the parlor beyond it a circle of figures sat or reclined on couches, enveloped in laughter, smoke, and the notes of a lute.

  We approached them, and they grew quiet and looked at me. Their faces were proud, impassive, some of them beautifully painted. I knelt before them. Then a voice said: “Rise, dear boy!”—and I knew before I raised my head that it was the voice of the woman on the pink couch. Splendid, stupefying, she had already dazzled me with her breasts, almost completely uncovered, framed in a window of black silk. She was perhaps forty years old, her full throat powdered, encircled with diamonds and jet. Narrow eyes slumbered in her marmoreal face.

  I rose, and she held out her arm. I stepped forward and took her perfumed hand. The curls of her armored coiffure shone like lacquer.

  “Welcome, precious boy,” she said in her deep voice, without smiling. “I am the High Priestess. You may kiss my shawl.”

  The High Priestess of Avalei was a prisoner on the Blessed Isle. She had not been to the mainland for over a decade. Yet she maintained a dignified, even a sumptuous, salon, entertaining guests from the noble families who still supported her failing cult. She made sacrifices to the goddess in one of the hillsides of the Isle; she was permitted the use of a ballroom in the Tower of Mirrors on feast days. Her shawl was of a silk so rare it felt heavy, like a live thing. When I pressed it to my lips, it left a flavor of mulberries.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  I sank in the yellow upholstery of the chair she indicated. I found it difficult to meet her intelligent, faintly lascivious gaze. She said in a slow and liquid voice, each word a stone dropped into a pool: “You are safe here, my child. Don’t be frightened. Someone bring him a drink.”

  A sullen girl stepped out of the decorative forest and lowered an object made of glass and silver filigree into my hands.

  “Thank you,” I said, holding it gingerly. It looked something like a lamp, having a round belly and four silver feet. Several others like it stood on the low table inside the circle; from each rose a curving pipe of glass.

  “Have you drunk los before?” asked the High Priestess.

  I shook my head.

  “How fortunate you are to be trying it for the first time! Such is the priviledge of youth!”

  A wire-thin, avid young lady opposite me, her skirts adorned with a fortune in peacock feathers, took one of the round vessels from the table, put her lips to the pipe, and sucked, winking a painted eye. A line of golden liquid filled the tube. I followed her example and took a cautious sip from my own vessel, drowning my tongue with the thick, sweet, and potent peach liquor which is the refreshment of the Olondrian aristocracy. Its flavor and fiery texture were overpowering: I felt as if I had drunk undiluted perfume. However, after a brief wave of sickness, energy charged my veins. I thanked the High Priestess a second time, and she gave a low gurgle of laughter, barely parting her lips, which still did not smile.

  The room dissolved in los. The lute player took up his instrument again and the unctuous air filled with its sorrowful notes, while the guests fell into conversation, laughed and sipped their drinks, too polite or too scornful to notice my existence. The lady who had come to my aid with the drink beat her hand against her flat chest so that her gold bracelets jingled, emitting a series of helpless shrieks, while beside her an odd-looking man, young but with spiky, dead-white hair, punctuated his story with disdainful shrugs. One youth was trying to set his boot on fire; another, flushed and handsome, lounged on the floor with his head pillowed on a hound. A furtive monkey curled up in the lap of a gilded beauty, and she scratched its ears with her whitened fingernails. There was a slender courtier in peach-colored silk, a middle-aged lady with bunches of violets above her ears whose cheeks collapsed with every swallow of los, and among the servants on the floor a Nissian slave of searing beauty, her cheek against the arm of an empty chair.

  It was a pause in the room’s noises, rather than any specific signal, which revealed the mystery of the tenantless chair. The gathered company took a breath and the player’s lute fell silent, though only for a moment, a gap between notes. When the moment had passed, the music and laughter resumed, but b
y then I had seen him, the silent figure standing outside the circle, his back to us, one hand held behind him, covered up to the knuckles in the foamy lace that poured from his dark sleeve. He was bending forward to feed a monkey perched among the leaves of a potted tulip tree encumbered with glass fuchsias. He seemed as though he might have been there always, in the uncertain territory of the ornamental glade.

  Then he turned, and an ugly chance, combined with the fumes of los, made me believe I recognized him. In the way he turned toward me, his feral mouth, his preoccupied gaze, I thought I saw the Kestenyi dancer of Bain. The ghastly shock made me choke; my skin was awash in sweat; I thought I saw him as he had been in the brothel, with his cruel handsomeness and lunatic air, somehow transported to this dainty chamber full of aristocrats. In another moment the dreadful resemblance dissolved, and I breathed again, as the dark-clad figure advanced and joined the circle, retaining no likeness to the dancer except for a certain purity of feature and striking grace and height.

  He flung himself into the velvet chair and lit a cigarette. He was instantly the focus of darted glances and covert whisperings: conversation faltered, and an almost imperceptible depression entered the room, spoiling its atmosphere of an enchanted treasure chest. The young man who had caused the disturbance leaned back in his chair. He looked less and less like the dancer who had so unnerved me: his hair, though long, was tied in a knot on his neck; he wore a black skullcap, and the circle of glass in his right eye gave him the look of a jeweler or a young scribe. He seemed an arrogant, studious, slightly corrupt young man, well-born and long accustomed to being obeyed. Yet he shared with the Kestenyi dancer an electricity: the combination of beauty and the suggestion of menace.

  “Refreshments!” the High Priestess intoned in her dark and somnolent voice. Four servant girls rose and melted into the forest. The priestess had drawn herself up, the light gleaming on the swelling expanse of her breasts, and was looking at the strange youth in the black skullcap. The servant girls returned with a cart, and cries of appreciation greeted the towers of candied passion fruit it carried, the pears poached in wine, the segments of preserved ginger impaled on peppermint swords, and the little swans carved from white chocolate. This fare dispersed the gloom which had arrived with the weary stranger. It was served with a different wine, sweet and red, poured in tiny golden cups and strewn with jasmine petals, and followed by a hot drink made from cocoa beans. Under the influence of these confections the guests grew even merrier than before, rose from their chairs, and changed places, balancing their glass plates on their knees and waving their little forks, to which there clung pale flecks of whipped cream. They spoke to me at last, and complimented me on my Olondrian. I learned the word for the los-vessel: alosya. The white-haired youth came to sit on the arm of my chair, and I told him about the island of Jennet, the world’s greatest producer of chocolate.

  When we were drinking our chocolate, the priestess announced abruptly: “Enough!”—and, still laughing and talking, the guests rose to their feet, carrying their steaming cups, and went out through the forest, the ladies shrieking when their hair caught in the glass buds. The servants followed them. The lute player straightened his supple legs, picked up his cushion, and departed with the confidence of one who makes his living by skill. Soon there were only five of us: the High Priestess, Miros, the courtier in peach-colored silk, the dark stranger with the lace cuffs, and myself.

  The priestess arranged her skirts on the couch. An invisible monkey chittered.

  “Well,” said the courtier in a peevish, strangely querulous voice: “If we’re going to hold a secret council, must we do it in such glaring light? My head has been throbbing for the past hour.”

  At a sign from the priestess, Miros brought out a fantastically ornate lamp, encrusted with claws and tendrils of old brass, and set it on the table. He climbed on a stool to extinguish the ceiling lamps, jumped down, and retired among the jingling leaves. In the newly mysterious room, the company looked theatrical, hollow-eyed. Faint laughter reached us from beyond the trees.

  The courtier shook himself; the dimness seemed to restore his energy. He gave me his small pale hand and said: “Auram, High Priest of Avalei.”

  “Jevick of Tyom.”

  He laughed. His hair was so dry and black it reflected no light at all, his lips stark red in his powdered face. “I know who you are. We all know who you are. We expended some effort to see you in person, however. Delighted to meet you at last.”

  “Delighted,” the priestess echoed. I looked at her. In the gloom she had grown, her breasts and throat monumental above her black dress. Her hair was like the ramparts of a city. “I have heard,” she said, “that you have spoken with an angel.”

  Her features wavered in the light cast upward from the lamp. I wished fervently that I had not drunk so much. I wanted to ask the name of the strange youth in the dark suit but decided to concentrate on saving myself. “It is true,” I said.

  “Tell us,” said the priestess. And I leaned forward and blurted out the tale of my haunting, my captivity, and the ways of the Rotted Dead.

  When I had finished, the priest turned to the others and clutched the arms of his chair. “If it is true, we may hold a Night Market again!”

  “Yes,” said the priestess. “Still, it is too early to speak of that now. We must examine him thoroughly first. We must be sure.”

  “Of course,” said Auram.

  “What is a Night Market?” I asked.

  The priestess turned to me, fingering the jet beads at her throat. In the sculptured mask of her face only her eyes, long and black, the lids painted with two streaks of apple-green, lived and brooded. “The Night Market, my child, is one of Avalei’s multitude of blessings. It is held in the provinces, in the countryside. People come from far away to buy and sell, to eat and drink, to be merry together if only for a night. And always at the center of it there is the avneanyi, to answer their questions and comfort them in their distress.”

  Avneanyi—a mystic, a saint. “One ridden by angels.”

  My blood slowed. “What sort of questions do they ask?”

  “All sorts of questions, my child. The angels know all.”

  “But I can’t speak to her. I don’t want to speak to her. I only want to be rid of her and go.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Naturally you would like to return to your homeland. As we say, the fire of home is brighter than any other fire. And we also say, the cold of home is colder than any other. But an angel must be honored before it departs.”

  “Yes,” the priest put in, in his soothing, quavering voice. “Like the Snow Child, whom we summon to cure fevers. It never departs without an offering. When the patient is cured we give it basil leaves and grain, and then it melts. . . .”

  Sweat gathered on my brow. “I can’t talk to her.”

  “Not yet,” said Auram. “That is natural enough. You have not tried. Our lady will aid you in your first attempt. After that, slowly, it will become easier.”

  “No,” I said.

  The priest and priestess glanced at one another. As for the young man with the glass in his eye, he chuckled, lit another cigarette, and, with an ugly movement of his throat, blew smoke rings toward the glittering trees.

  “But I think you will,” the priest said then, smiling, his teeth perfect as a bar of silver. The black thatch of his hair whispered as he turned his head. He gazed at the priestess, repeating: “I think you will. For my lady is powerful. She has the power to do what you wish. Did you not say that your countrywoman died in the mountains? How will you retrieve her body unless we help you? But with our assistance everything becomes simple, as in a play. Our enemies are strong, but our lady is stronger.”

  The priestess drew herself up. A gleam passed through the murky depths of her eyes. “It is true,” she said. “I am a woman of no meager power. I have been since childhood a favorite of the goddess. I say this not, as another would, to frighten you, but to persuade you to accept my o
ffer of help. You are far from home, and the attentions of an angel are at first difficult. You require guidance, guidance that Avalei can provide. You are unlikely, in these evil times, to escape the notice of those who shut you up in the Gray Houses, those whose blasphemous cult is becoming—”

  I followed her gaze, for she was no longer looking at me, and saw the youth in the skullcap make a slight gesture. It was almost nothing: his hand, which had been relaxed on the arm of his chair, lifted an inch, the fingers spread out in warning. At once the priestess fell silent, and I wondered at the power of this stranger, who was only half her age. “But you know all that,” she said. “You have already met them. It is I who can help you, I who can bring you the body of the angel.”

  Expectancy charged the air. They were waiting for me to speak.

  “How will you do it?” I asked.

  The priestess gave her low, heavy laugh. “If what you say is true, then while you hold the Night Market I will send my servants northward to Aleilin. They will obtain what you seek. They will come down into Kestenya, into the highlands, where it is easy to hide from the soldiers of the king. You will meet them there, in the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Our Prince,” she said with a soft, caressing glance at the silent youth, “has a house nearby.”

  The prince. His gaze met mine. One of his beautiful eyes was larger than the other, slightly magnified by the glass. His expression was at once disdainful and sad: yes, filled with regret. Seed pearls nestled in the lace at his throat.

  I turned to the priestess. “If I do this for you—if I hold your Night Market—you’ll give me the body.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How can I be sure?”

  “You cannot be sure,” she answered. “Nor can you be sure that in the end you will want the body destroyed.”