A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel

by Sofia Samatar

  “Avneayni,” he said.

  Miros, seated beside him, rose.

  “Surely I no longer deserve that title,” I said.

  “You will deserve it always, my friend!” said Auram. “But come, sit. There is wine, and my manservant has prepared a meal.”

  I glanced at Miros.

  “Not me!” he said with a hard smile, raising his hands. “I’ve changed professions. I’m going into the army.”

  “The army,” I said. For a moment I was lost; then I recalled the words of his delirium, his dream of the secret army of the prince.

  “Come,” Auram invited me, extending his good hand. And for the first time I noticed the papers on the table. Bainish newspapers. I walked over and touched the cheap stuff darkened with print, and the ink clung to my fingers like moth dust. At first I could not make sense of the letters: they were too bold, too contrastive, too crude after weeks of the gracefully written books in the library. Then they sprang into meaning like a mosaic seen from a distance, and I sat and huddled over them with Miros.

  We read of the Night Market. There were reports of the fire, of the Guard’s attack on unarmed huvyalhi, of the trampled corpses. There was a report of an avneanyi, denied in the next issue of the paper, then revived the following week. I read: “The hand of the Priest of the Stone, too long gripping the fair throat of the Valley.” I read: “The freedom to worship.” I read: “Shame.” There were pages of angry letters, so fierce the paper seemed hot to the touch. It was clear that the winds had turned against the Priest of the Stone.

  I looked up. Auram sat jewel-like in his impenetrable disguise, glowing from the exotic stimulant of the Sea-Kings. He smiled. “You see, avneanyi, you have given the prince and his allies what they most desire.”

  “What is that?” I asked, suddenly fearful.

  “War.”

  Miros leaned over the papers, absorbed. The fire hissed, sending up sparks.

  “War,” I said.

  “Yes, avneanyi. A war for the Goddess Avalei. A war of revenge, for those who perished in the Night Market, for the feredhai, for all of Olondria’s poor and conquered peoples.”

  He lifted his head proudly. Now Miros was looking at him too. “The Priest of the Stone has ruled Olondria too long,” Auram said. “Our people can no longer bear it. They cannot bear, anymore, to be kept from all unwritten forms of the spirit.”

  An edge came into his voice. “It will be a great war, avneanyi. You ought to stay for it. To see the libraries fall.”

  My heart shrank. “Must they fall?”

  He shrugged, his eyes an impersonal glitter. “What can be saved will be saved. We are not criminals, but the protectors of those without strength.”

  “Those without strength,” I repeated. My blood ran hot; I stood. I could have struck his face there in that funereal dining room. I could have seized the back of his head and brought that beautiful, bloodless mask down again and again on the oaken table. I could have torn down the portraits on the walls, where the prince’s accursed ancestors smirked through the dust with overfed red lips. “But you caused this. You. You knew the Guard would come to the Night Market. You set a trap with those you claim to serve. And with me.”

  “I did,” he answered calmly.

  “Jevick,” Miros murmured, rising and touching my arm.

  “I did,” said Auram, piercing me with his knife-point eyes. “I did. I am not ashamed. You do not know, perhaps, of the schoolchildren of Wein, who were attacked by the Guard nearly fifteen years ago.”

  “I do know of them,” I said, shaking with anger.

  He opened and closed his mouth, off balance for a moment. Then he said: “Well. If you know, then you know that those children were never avenged. No one was punished for their deaths. That is the leadership of this butcher, the Priest of the Stone. And I will not have it.”

  His narrow chest moved under his brocade tunic; his eyes were horribly steady, holding rage as a cup holds poison. “I will not have it. Now all Olondria knows the truth. The Night Market showed them. I bleed for those who fell there, but not more than I bleed for the schoolchildren of Wein. Not more than I bleed for the province where we now sit, occupied and mutilated for a hundred years, not more than I bleed for Avalei’s people, the huvyalhi of the Valley. And do not forget that I risked my own life to start the war that will save them. And yours,” he added before I could remind him. “And yours.”

  I sat down and put my head in my hands. I heard the shifting of Miros’s chair as he sat, the susurration of the newspapers. I raised my head and looked at him. “And you agree with this, Miros.”

  His face was stubborn, though his voice shook as he said: “I am Avalei’s man.”

  I stood up again. I walked around the table. My body would not be still. Firelight glimmered on the empurpled walls. I spun to face the priest. “But the libraries, Auram—you need them too! Leiya Tevorova’s book, The Handbook of Mercies—you saved it from the Priest of the Stone! If the libraries burn—”

  “Yes,” he said. “Much that we love will be lost. But the memories of Avalei’s people, as you know, are long. And the choice that faces Olondria now is a simple one: Cold parchment or living flesh? And I have made my choice.”

  I shook my head. “That is no choice. No choice one should have to make.”

  “I agree. But it was forced upon us the moment the Telkan sided with the Priest of the Stone. The moment Olondria chose the book over the voice. Now we must balance the scales.”

  “The price is too high.”

  He smiled. “Come. Let me tell you a story.”

  I shook my head again. My lips trembled. “No more of your stories.”

  His smile grew softer, more encouraging. He patted the chair beside him. “Come, one more. A story about a price. You will not know it, for it is very seldom told. The tale of Naimar, that beautiful youth . . .”

  The story bloomed inside him, inhabiting his body, a kind of radiance. I saw that nothing would stop him from telling it. All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

  “Naimar was raised in a palace in a wood,” he began in his throaty voice, “the only child of his father’s only love. His mother had died in birthing him; the palace was dedicated to her, and it was called the Palace of Little Drops. Those drops were the tears she shed on the newborn brow of her only child, when she held him in the instant before her death. The boy was raised among mournful paintings and images of her: the statues in the garden all bore her likeness. Sculptors had fashioned her sitting, weaving, walking, leading her favorite stallion, caressing the hoods of her beloved hawks. The child was strikingly like her, with his wide eyes and parted lips, his black hair and the anemones in his cheeks! And because of this he came to brood over her, and over death—for he was soon the same age as the lady in the garden.”

  Slowly I walked around the edge of the table, returned to my chair between Auram and Miros. The priest turned to keep his eyes on me as he spoke. “Then the world lost its savor for him,” he went on with a sigh, “and he found no delight in it, neither in hunting, wine, music nor concubines. . . . His father despaired of pleasing him, and Naimar wandered in the woods, wild and woolly haired, and of savage aspect. One day he went to bathe in a stream, and as he was bathing there a Lady appeared to him, clad in saffron-colored robes and beautiful as a rose. ‘O youth,’ said she, ‘stand up from the water, that I might see thee plain, for I am already half in love with thee.’ ‘Nay,’ said the boy, ‘what wilt thou give me?’ ‘What is thy desire?’ said she. And he said: ‘To escape death, to become immortal!’

  “Then the Lady smiled and said, ‘That is easily granted.’ And he stood, and the water fell from him in streams. And the Lady admired him greatly, and a blush spread over her cheek; but Naimar said: ‘Now grant that which thou promised.’ ‘Willingly,’ said the Lady. And she plucked a handful of lilies which were growing by the stream, and
took the bulbs, and washed them in the water, and she bade the boy to eat them. And taking them in both hands, he did so.

  “‘Will I become immortal?’ he asked. ‘Surely thou wilt,’ she said. And as she spoke, the boy cried out, and fell; and the Lady, who was Avalei, looked down at the beautiful corpse that lay on the bank and smiled. ‘Thou art immortal,’ she said.”

  In the aftermath of this virulent tale I looked at the priest, aghast. And his red lips parted in his most childlike smile. I sat up straighter, pushed my chair back and turned from the priest to Miros as I spoke, so that both of them could see my face.

  “I will tell you the truth,” I said, “and if you think me a wiser man than you, and you listen to me, so be it, and if you do not, so be it. Your prince will be a tyrant. He will not hesitate to burn libraries or palaces or radhui. He will set Olondria aflame.”

  Auram inclined his head slightly, a gesture of acceptance. “You may be right. But he will save a future, a way of life. For those who cannot read, he will save the world.”

  I knew it was true. A certain world would be saved, but it would no longer contain the Olondria I knew.

  No more battles, I thought, no more arguments. I held out my hand to the priest, and he placed his own inside it, white driftwood barnacled with rings. So frail, so cold, with a bandage on the wrist.

  His dark eyes questioned me. “Forgiveness?” he said.

  “No,” I answered. “Farewell.”

  A night of desert stars and silence, poignant as a breath. I sat on the bed and watched the open window. No angel tore the air. The sky was motionless, complete above the sleeping mountains, seamless as a glass. I did not close my eyes, because when I did I saw Miros screaming in battle, blood-streaked mares, Olondria on a pyre. I saw war come, and I saw myself far away, in a courtyard of yellow stone, with no one to bring me messages from the dead.

  The heavens turned. A dark blue glow came to dwell on the windowsill. Slowly the shapes in the room emerged from the dark as if rising from the sea. There was the mantelpiece, there the door. There was the wrought-iron table and the stack of books that held the anadnedet. And there was my satchel, rescued by the priest, with all my books inside: Olondrian Lyrics, the Romance of the Valley. The record book where I had scribbled my agony in Bain. And the packets of Tialon’s letters, heavy as two stones.

  He had brought them for me. When his Tavrouni allies had killed the soldiers in Klah-ne-Wiy, he had had the presence of mind to collect my things, this precious satchel and the angel’s body, and he had hired a servant and suffered his broken wrist to be tied in place by a local doctor. A group of soldiers met him when he came out of the little mud clinic. Auram smiled at them, his disdain as gray and icy as the sky. They took him to Ur-Amakir, the nearest city, where he was to be tried for treason and the murder of the soldiers. He would be very glad to oblige, he said. News of the Night Market had reached the city; crowds gathered chanting outside the jail where he was held. Realizing that his oration in court might spark riots, the Duke of Ur-Amakir accepted his claim of innocent self-defense and released him.

  And he came to Sarenha-Haladli with the body, as he had promised. He was, after all, a man of honor.

  I stood. My bones ached with a sorrow older than myself. I went to the table and put my hand on a book to feel something solid. It was Lantern Tales, in which Jissavet’s words murmured like doves. I remembered her telling me: I know what the vallon is. It’s jut. Now she had helped start a war in a far country to liberate those who could not read, the hotun of Olondria. I wondered, for an unguarded moment, what she would have said. But I knew that this was not her war. Nor was it mine.

  I packed the books, put on my boots, and set the strap of the satchel on my shoulder. There was already enough light to see the steps. Downstairs in the dining room, where the shadows of the rose trees streaked the windows, Auram’s Evmeni manservant was boiling coffee. Soon Miros came in, supporting the arm of the hooded priest with a new tenderness, a reverence. We sat together in the lightening air. The servant gave me a glass of coffee clouded with white steam. Its flavor was earthy, stinging, coarse: the taste of Tyom.

  Difficult, difficult, difficult!

  Difficult to carry these blankets

  and these curds, threads, skins and splendors

  into the Land of Red Sheep.

  Maskiha spinning your wool,

  spin the sun into blankets for me.

  For all night I am lying alone now,

  in the shade of invisible spikenards.

  I go to where the water is sweet,

  and the peaches are of carnelian.

  Someone tell me why my road

  is eternally strewn with ashes.

  And why in the doorways of the sky

  there are girls whose palms are rivers of milk,

  bursting, flowing, dissolving like snowflakes

  over the Land of Red Sheep.

  Miros sang as we traveled in the priest’s carriage along the cart-tracks, the country altering slowly, kindling with the sparkle of orchards in flower. Soon the track grew wide and level and bordered with fragments of brick, and there were more sheep and fewer cattle in the fields. Far away to the south waved the blue fringes of a forest. Birds filled the air, geese and swans flocking around the reservoirs. Honeysuckle drowned the balustrades of the country houses, and bildiri villages smoked in clouds of alabaster dust.

  The sun brought the color back to Miros’s face; the meals we ate in the villages filled out his frame. He was almost himself again when we reached the southern Tavroun. As we rolled beneath the ancient aqueduct into the town of Tashuef he was singing a vanadel that made the priest’s servant snigger. And when we went out that evening to a tavern called the Swan, he appeared altogether restored, tall and fresh. We ate a Valley meal of kebma, sour cream, and mountain olives, followed by a dish of apricots and quails. After a bottle of insipid wine we began on the white-hot teiva with preserved figs floating thickly in the bottle, and listened to the Evmeni musicians playing their long guitars and violins among the streetlamps and shadows of trees. It was like an evening in the Valley. Only the dryness of the air, the peculiar echoes of the sounds, and the aloof and solemn propriety of the patrons at other tables, made it clear that we were still among the mountains. We removed the tablecloth and marked the little table with chalk, and Miros taught me the elementary rules of londo and promptly won six droi from the purse the priest had given me and shouted to the waiter: “Another bottle. And bring us some chicken livers.”

  Turning to me he grinned and said: “I know I owe you my life. But you owe me six droi.”

  “You may have the droi,” I said, “if you will take care of your life.”

  His face grew pensive, showing its new hardness under the lamps, a touch of age. “I will care for it, body and spirit,” he said.

  Afterward we walked through the stiff brick streets of the town, passing doors where the names of the owners hung in brass, singing vanadiel to the barking of chained mastiffs and the tolling of a bell in the temple of Iva. We saw no rubbish pits or decaying backstreets. All was trim, definite, contained. The shadows lay very straight and black. We compared the town to the nomad camps where refuse fell haphazardly, submitting to the purification of sand.

  Under an old arcade he said: “This is a city of emptiness. Look, there’s no one awake in the whole square. No late-night carousers, not even a soldier. Look at the benches, all alone. And that house with all of its shutters bolted. This is a place you could bring a woman to with complete discretion. She’d wear a Kestenyi mantle in the streets. I don’t think anyone would question you, or even notice. . . .”

  “Would she come here with you?”

  “Never,” he laughed.

  He did not mention her again. And now we stood at the inn where lamplight fell on the whitewashed steps, the sleeping geraniums. He gripped my shoulders and saluted me with kisses on both cheeks, calling me bremaro beilare, “my poor friend.” I was already f
orlorn, thinking of traveling without him. A grumbling servant answered our knock at the door. Dawn was breaking as we walked to our rooms, and Miros’s outline seemed to waver in the cinder-colored air.

  And in the morning I left the town of Tashuef, I left Kestenya. I boarded a riverboat called She Lies Weeping and leaned on the railing squinting at the wharf, the merchants and soldiers swearing, the crates of fish being swung overhead on ropes. There was the carriage, Miros seated on the box with the driver, both of them waving. Miros had wrapped his head in a scarf, Kestenyi-fashion. I saw rather than heard his good-byes, his mouth open and shouting. Of the priest I saw only a bony hand at the window.

  “Good-bye,” I yelled back, knowing they could not hear me. The river swelled beneath the vessel, wide and full, a milky blue beneath the sky. The hills rose smothered in grass and flowering thorn on either side, and over them the peaks of snow hung shining like foam.

  We passed the Land of Gum, the Land of Willows, the Land of Mice. Far off in the pallid east glimmered the Sweet and Bitter Lakes. The villages had names like Weam, Lilawu, Elwianab—Evmeni syllables rounded and dropping like honey. South of Wun there were camels imported from the desert of Waob; at Welawion I saw the first elephants. And yet the effect was not one of excitement, but of fatigue, for the land continued gray, mud-hued, and oppressed by a salty wind. Often I saw men asleep in their boats, their lips white with salt. In coastal pastures enervated sheep chewed colorless grasses. In the distant east the fringes of the Dimavain waved like flags of dark blue silk, exuding the same refreshing seduction as the mountains.

  Orange trees, date palms, the colocynths Fodra called “the flowers of sleep.” At Ur-Brome I boarded a ship for Tinimavet. My satchel, my clinking purse, and my sore heart. It was trying to live again, that heart: it throbbed in me like a scarlet bruise. Ur-Brome reeked of smoke and sewage, in full sun but somehow failing to absorb the light, its flattened squares preserving the dullness of fog. As we pulled away from the shore a feeble clamor went up from the crowd on the quay and a woman beside me wept beneath her parasol.