A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel

by Sofia Samatar

  Oh, if I fall behind, my love,

  Will you look back for me?

  That was the saddest song he sang, the one with the simplest words. It was composed long ago on the road called the Trail of Wolves. I remember hearing that song, lying half-asleep on the balcony with my cheek on the tiles in the warmth of the summer night. . . . I could smell so many flowers and also the coals, still red from our supper. We stacked the plates in a corner of the balcony. And later, when I sat there alone, when I was nineteen years old, I could see that there were fewer stars in the sky.

  “I have heard that there are people who live happily alone. But I myself have not found it to be possible. I told you that I have built something, and since you came I have realized that what I have built is the shadow of happiness. But true happiness: that is what we had when we were together, my father and Lunre and I, sometimes with my nurse, when I was old enough not to scream with the wild sensation of joy but to sit, ecstatic, to let it wash over me. . . . We cooked, sometimes we went for a drive in one of the palace carriages and picnicked in the woods or walked in the hills, we went to plays organized for the king, and sometimes we wrote plays ourselves and performed them for my nurse on the balcony. By this time Lunre had come to believe in the message of the Stone, and he too had woven and sewn his own robe, although he did not change his name as my father had, which was good, his name suited him: he was with light, and I hope that he has always remained with light. But he had changed in himself. He had developed an intense gaze and the melancholy of hours immured in mystery. Once, from the balcony, I saw him far below in the rain, and I think that he had not realized it was raining.”

  Tialon paused. She looked wan and remote, as if carved on a fountain. Her eyes were lowered; the lashes cast a shadow. She said: “I used to lie awake at night out of pure happiness, because of an apple, because we had seen butterflies, because he had laughed at my jokes and for a thousand other foolish reasons, while slowly, inexorably, our lives were breaking. They had begun to quarrel, you see—Lunre and my father. They had disagreed on certain interpretations, and my father, who could not bear contradiction even then, had forced Lunre to burn some of his notes. Yes—you do well to look shocked. But worse things happened afterward. One of my father’s enemies perished in the Telkan’s dungeons—not murdered outright, but imprisoned until his death. And there was—”

  She stopped, then went on with an effort, her lips barely moving: “There was a school burned in the Valley.”

  A breath. Then she went on in the same flat tone: “They were teaching banned books. None of the children could read. Avalei’s eunuchs were teaching them by recitation. They were teaching the autobiography of Leiya Tevorova, who claimed to have been haunted by an angel. My father sent them three warnings, and then the Guard, the Telkan’s Guard. He told us later that he did not know they were going to burn the school. Lunre called him a liar—my father, a liar. Three children died when the school was burned. Two of them were my age.

  “Perhaps it was then that the stars began to disappear from the sky: for I believe whole constellations have been extinguished. They slipped away from us as we were lying awake or sleeping, and they have never come back, not even for a moment. Perhaps they were fading even as I walked back from the library with Lunre, the two of us arm in arm in the dark, in our somber clothes that made us call ourselves ‘the two ravens,’ laughing in the dim hallways and under the trees. I felt a surge of that wild joy which I had known as a child, and he saw it in me, my excited voice and laughter, and in the turning of one of the halls he suddenly grew still and said to me: ‘You should not laugh so; it is too much.’ He had never said such a thing to me and I took my arm away from him and we walked in silence back to the Tower of Myrrh. And as we passed through a garden I saw his face in the light of a lamp and it was grim and pained, and unlike the face of my friend.

  “The quarrels between my father and Lunre continued and grew worse. My father discovered that Lunre kept secret notes, and as for Lunre, his matchless ability to suffer quietly, which he had developed in the small house in Kebreis, which my father had so admired in him, proved to have its own limits. They shouted at one another, stormed out of the shrine. My father was afraid that Lunre would take his notes to the Telkan, or publish them on the mainland, destroying my father’s own work. And Lunre was tormented by his betrayal of his friend, by the burned school, and by the other, unspeakable thing.

  “Yes,” Tialon whispered, “by the other, unspeakable thing, which I did not discover until he had gone, though I must have sensed its presence without admitting it to myself and without even understanding what it was. I only knew that something, some threat, was hovering over us on that night in the hall when he had told me not to laugh, and again in one of the gardens when I caught my hair in the thorns of the hedge and he, releasing it, stroked my cheek. That was how it appeared: first like that and then on the hill overlooking the sea when we fell silent for no reason, afraid in the light of that threatening sky with the storm coming over the sea; and then at night on the balcony; and then everywhere. Yes, soon this fear, this desolation was everywhere, and I could not look at him without feeling my face grow hot, and he looked at me searchingly and submissively and without hope, and then one day, after eighteen years, he was gone.

  “He left my father a letter,” Tialon said quietly, “and my father, in his rage, forced me to read it. And so I read how Lunre was going away, was leaving Olondria, but did not know whether he would flee to the north or south of the world. And I also read of his reasons: that he was not worthy to study the words of the gods, as he had betrayed both them and himself. And that, he wrote, he was in the grip of a dishonorable passion. Those were his words: ‘a dishonorable passion.’”

  The sighing echo of those words hung in the air of the room, the echo not just of what Tialon had said, but of what she had read in the letter on that remote afternoon under the quivering and furious eye of her father. There was a burnt smell from the hills. In the evening she sat on the balcony with her back against the wall, staring into the dark, and when her nurse came out and asked her why she wept she told her that she had only now seen that some of the stars were missing.

  “He was twenty years older than I,” she said to me in that stone cell in the Gray Houses, seated on the edge of my low bed. “He was—but why am I telling you how he was? You must know.” She looked at me, her gaze penetrating, direct.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  I had thought that she would weep, but she did not. She was like a queen, sitting very straight, her hands quiet in her lap. Only her voice wavered, and a shudder crossed her throat when she said: “Yes. I knew. And how could I not? I did not spend those years, the years of my childhood, listening to him read in the evening light, only to forget the books he loved, the books we loved together. I knew when I saw you with his Olondrian Lyrics.”

  She nodded as if to herself and looked around the room, the rickety shelf with its useless volumes, the bareness and the squalor. The room had grown colder. Her face, turned away from me, was cast in shadow so that I could not see her expression when she said: “And how is he?”

  “He is well,” I said.

  Tialon nodded again. She had the flawless dignity of one sentenced to death. Her story seemed to have drained everything out of her, her terror and wildness and even the resolution that had forced her to tell it. I knew she had told it because she could not give up the chance to say his name, aloud, in the hearing of another, of one who had known him. I sensed this in the way her lips curved to form the word, lingered over it—that it was a forbidden sound in her house. Lunre: the call of a water bird, and then the fall of water. A name that means “with light,” the last month of the year. She said it now with the sigh of the closing year and then she stood and faced me, her face pale and severe in the cold lamplight.

  “I have something for you.”

  She went to the door and picked up her writing box. She carried it back to the m
attress and sat beside me, the box in her lap. Then she sprang the catch and the box yawned open, and she took from it two oily-looking packages tied with string.

  “News from the past.”

  A shrill note in her voice. She set the packages on the sheet. Each was as solid and dense as a cheese. They were bundles of paper covered with a closely written script, discolored with the passage of the years.

  “Take them with you,” Tialon said. I looked up at her, speechless. Her smile trembled; her eyes were very bright. She clasped her hands in front of her face and looked down, hiding her mouth behind them. “I wrote him over a thousand letters, I think.”

  “I’ll take them.”

  She swallowed. “Thank you. I’ll try to make it easy for you to get out of the Houses.”

  “And if you want to know more about him,” I murmured, “I can tell you—”

  She shook her head, closed her writing box, and stood, not looking at me as she whispered: “I have built my life without knowing where he was.”

  I often think of her like that: with her head half turned away, the curls gleaming at the nape of her thin neck, one hand already reaching down to pick up her umbrella, the other gripping the writing box like an anchor. She seems to hang before me, wavering like the light of a candle, suspended in that breathless, fragile instant. Then the candle is blown out and she is gone, the room is empty, she leaves only a fleeting warmth and a trace of smoke.

  After she had gone I remained staring at the door, thinking of the young figure of my master: dark-haired, but with the same steady, piercing, quartz-green eyes, in a black robe that would make his skin seem paler. I thought of him standing among the trees with the rain falling through his cloak in the oblivion of religious contemplation, and cringed with the feeling that I had wronged him by picturing him thus, in his other life which he did not want me to know. But now it was too late: my master, Lunre of Bain, had been irrevocably replaced by Lunre of Kebreis. And the small boy who lay in the corner and watched frost form on the door had replaced all the fantasies of my master’s childhood.

  There is a courtyard where I imagine my master and Tialon, the tortured man and the adolescent girl: an illusory place with flowers of mother-of-pearl in the swaying almond trees whose leaves are spangled with drops of a recent rain. It is a place of tears. And yet their laughter echoes against the stones, this tall man with the slightly abstracted air, with the solitary smile, in the unseasonable dark wool, and the girl in the short, straight frock of the same material. They are talking under the trees. The girl has hair of dark honey, bound into four fuzzy plaits harassed by the leaves. She is knock-kneed, with the lighted eyes of an evening after a rainstorm and the shapely, fluted ankles of a deer. Again they laugh. Her eyes are quick and lively under thick lashes, and his eyes, answering, wrinkle at the corners. This girl speaks excitedly and precociously about the classics, but she still sleeps in the same room as her old nurse. . . . And he watches her, watches the dazzling light slide on and off of her shoulder, changing as she moves beneath the trees, turning her skin from the color of pale sand to the color of autumn and in the shadows to the color of old silver. Her resplendent skin, which is still the skin of a child. He notices that it is almost the same color as her hair. The difference is infinitesimal: yet in that difference of hue there are desert armies, cities of marble in conflagration. The air is rarefied by the sound of her laugh and the smell of the trees, and then by the sleep and meadows which her arms smell of, as she puts them around his neck and prostrates him with a chaste kiss. A burning memory crackles in his hair. Later, while they are walking, she will wonder why they are suddenly sad, and he will not be able to explain; he will say: “We should not have eaten the mussels. They smell of death. . . .” And they will both want to weep in the dark air.

  I see him with the sweat on his brow which has turned the color of tallow and imagine how he will flee to the ends of the earth, putting the fathomless sea between himself and this sweet, incautious girl, interring himself in a country of alien flowers. And never, not even in the delirium of his island fevers, will he allow himself to pronounce the lost child’s name. And as for her, she will say his name only in solitude, hugging herself in her small bed, her tears shining in the moonlight.

  Tonight the house is quiet. The old nurse sits by the hearth, muttering to herself, half-asleep. The young girl is collecting their soiled plates from the table and carrying them away to the dark kitchen. Suddenly she looks outside. The balcony doors are open, the night soft and humming with the insects of summer. Then there is her startled cry, and the crash of a plate on the floor. She has noticed the disappearance of the stars.

  Midnight. The door creaked open and I was instantly awake, fearing as always the witchlight of the ghost. But there was only the dull glow of a lantern, and a hand like an iron scepter prodding me urgently in the neck. “Rise. Rise.” It was Auram, High Priest of Avalei, cloaked and hooded. His sleeve was damp and carried an odor of salt. He had already crept down to the shore where a boat rocked on the waves, hushed and lightless, awaiting its cargo: a fugitive saint.

  Book Four

  The Breath of Angels

  Chapter Thirteen

  Into the Valley

  The boat slid swiftly through water and night to Ethendria, a city named for the “Lovely Palace” overlooking the sea. We arrived too early to land without drawing undue attention, and dropped anchor within sight of the city’s lights to await the dawn. The air was cold, the sea restless; the boat danced at the end of her tether like a foal. I breathed in great gulps of salt and darkness, and remembered buying a ticket to Ethendria long ago, in Bain. The memory lightened my heart: I was moving eastward at last, toward the angel’s body. My path was a knot, full of loops and barriers, but freedom lay at the end of it, I was sure. As if to confirm my choice, the angel had withdrawn. She was not far off—I felt her in my heart like a grain of poison—but she had not torn my nights apart since we had spoken in the Girdle of Avalei.

  Auram appeared at my shoulder; the spark of my new confidence wavered and grew dim. “Avneanyi,” he said.

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  “Why not? It is what you are. But never mind now,” he went on smoothly, his voice smiling, his face a hollow in his cloak. The starlight caught his teeth.

  “Tell me: are you well?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent, excellent! You have a formidable constitution; or, like me, you are a cricket.”

  “A cricket, veimaro?”

  “A midnight creature; the foxes’ bard. All night he makes music, but by day he is oh! so tired!”

  His hood tilted to one side; he might have been resting his cheek on his hand. I smiled without pleasure, thinking that he was extraordinarily like a cricket: his liveliness and neatness, his black eyes, the extreme fineness of his limbs, even the chirring of his voice.

  “As it happens, I prefer the day,” I said.

  “A pity. But you may change your mind before long—the night belongs to Avalei.”

  “The night, perhaps. But not me.”

  “Come, avneanyi.” A soft note of warning crept into his voice. “We must be friends if we are to succeed.”

  He put his hand on my arm, each finger precise and delicate as a physician’s lance. His breath smelled faintly of rotting strawberries. “We shall travel light and swiftly. I have but a single trunk, and Miros, my nephew and valet, has been ordered to leave it behind if we are pursued.”

  I recognized the name of the careless, engaging young man who had first brought me out of the Houses.

  “Miros is here?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Listen. We’ll avoid inns where we can, at least until the village of Nuillen, at the eastern edge of the Valley, where we shall hold the Market. Is this clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “It may not keep the Telkan’s Guard from us. We are a rather conspicuous party—at least, you and I are easily marked. I say th
is without either humility or conceit, without wishing to flatter or condemn you. We must prepare to face dangers. We must expect to be found.”

  The boat swayed under me, treacherous.

  “What about your lady’s friends? What about her power? You said it would be easy.”

  “And no doubt it will, it will,” he soothed me, stroking my arm, the edges of his nails catching in the embroidered jacket he’d given me.

  I pulled my arm away. “Speak plainly. Will we be found or not?”

  “I cast no bones,” he said, laughing. “The Oracle God has no reason to love me. I say that it will be easy, because I believe it. And I say we must expect to be found, because I believe this also.”

  The sky had grown subtly lighter while we spoke; his hood was black against it. His hands showed white when he moved to fold his arms.

  “And what happens if we are found?” I asked sharply.

  “For you: the Gray Houses. Indefinitely. For me . . .”

  He shrugged, his bright laughter a string of pearls. “I fear no dark place.”

  Before dawn was full Auram disappeared under the deck, and like day trading places with night, Miros came up yawning and rubbing his eyes. He smiled when he saw me. “Good morning, avneanyi,” he said, awkward with the word, rubbing his hands on the sides of his plain linen tunic.

  “Please call me by name.”

  “Much better!” he said, visibly relieved. “What was it? Shevas?”

  I laughed in spite of myself—shevas is Olondrian for “turnip.”

  “Jevick of Tyom.”

  “Right! I’ll leave your place name alone, if you don’t mind—too fine a note for my heavy tongue. But Jevick will do very well.”

  He pronounced it “Shevick,” as my master had—as all Olondrians did, save Tialon, who had a musician’s ear. He took my arm and pulled me out of the way of the turning sail, and we leaned on the rails at the edge of the boat together and watched the city take shape. Miros did not resemble his uncle: where the priest was pale and black-haired, Miros had the brown curls and golden skin of the Laths, the people of the Valley. He had only recently joined his uncle’s service—to escape some trouble, I understood from his evasions and nervous fumbling with the pearl in his earlobe.