It was the silence more than anything else that showed me we had arrived. Waking at night in an unfamiliar bed in a roadside inn, I would become aware that although the window was open, the world was sleeping so soundly that there was no noise at all. No dogs barked, no midnight horseman jingled by on an errand. Even the mattress, firmly stuffed with goose feathers, did not crackle beneath me like the leaf and straw-stuffed mattresses of Kestenya. And there were no night guards playing kib on the doorstep. I am in the Balinfeil, I thought. And for a long time it was a pleasant thought, like the thought of an adventure: it meant that I would play with my cousins and eat honitha and watch the puppet shows and laugh as my uncles danced the klugh. And ride the fat and stupid pony Mertha, whom I liked to treat with scorn, assuring the stable hands that she was nothing to Nusha. And allow Hauth the assistant cook to terrify me with tales of the Bilbil crawling out of the hearth to make mischief at night. But after several summers had passed I no longer woke to the silence with that feeling of excitement: rather my heart sank. Ah, I’m in the Balinfeil, I thought, and the stillness of the inn and the roads and countryside in the dark oppressed me.
Even the inns, where we were awakened early by the severe bright ringing of a bell and the sheets and tablecloths shone with a daunting whiteness, even these seemed to possess the watchful and disapproving air of our grandmother’s house, of our own house, Faluidhen. That mansion of eighty-two rooms in which the important halls were known by color, Nainish-fashion. The silver room and the lilac room and the gray. The blue room where my Uncle Brola had died and still communicated by slamming the shutters viciously when it rained. The rooms opened southward whenever possible and the north side was shut against the summer dust and the ruthless winter winds: a dreary arbor of birch and cypress and winter plum survived there, along with the old iron chair where my grandfather used to sit. This chair was wrought with curious forms of dragons, dogs and rabbits and stranger creatures, goat-headed lions and winged dolphins. It stood alone beneath the trees, a little away from the house, covered with dust and dried leaves. Siski cleaned it off with the hem of her skirt. Beside it stood the timeworn brazier with which our grandfather had warmed himself in the winter months, where we once made a fire with the idea of roasting nuts and Dasya burned his arm and Siski blew on the injured spot to cool it. Dasya did not tell anyone but sat very stiff and pale through dinner, saying nothing and eating with his left hand. The next day the old brazier was blacker than ever as if it had never been used. “There must be a curse on it,” Siski said. And Dasya said that if it was cursed, so much the better, for we had gone to that strange place on the north side to play Drevedi, knowing that no one would look for us in our dead grandfather’s lonely patch of trees on the unlucky side of the house. Siski sat on the chair: she was Oline, the Dreved of Dolomesse. Dasya was always the Dreved of Amafein. Usually they made me a soldier or peasant or ill-destined king to be put to death repeatedly under the trees.
Afterward we went back to the house and into the silver room where the adults sat talking quietly in groups. Their chairs and couches seemed so far away, under the lamps. “How restless you children are,” Grandmother called. And sometimes everyone was restless or the weather was hot and we would go for an evening walk around the grounds, walking up and down the rows of flowers and along the pitch-dark banks of ivy, which gave off a bitter scent. Down the avenue of limes, everyone keeping to Grandmother’s pace. Voices floating in the evening hush. “Why don’t you keep dogs?” said a visiting neighbor, and Grandmother said, “My dear boy, because we are not under siege.” And when we turned we saw the lights of Faluidhen in the darkness of the grounds, and working by smell I found my way to Mother’s dress. I touched the folds of cotton and took her hand. “Is that you, my love?” she whispered, squeezing my fingers. “Come and walk with Mother.”
Later I thought of Dasya, when it seemed that I would never have the chance to think of anything again. At first I thought: How tired my arms are!—and I was glad my sword had spun away and lay distant in the snow. Yes, and it was pleasant simply to lie there with my arms at rest in the dazzling whiteness, flung back on the slope. The others seemed suddenly quiet, they had lowered their voices as if they were talking privately and did not wish to disturb me. The swords struck one another with a tinny sound, like that of children playing at dakavei in a neighboring courtyard. The air was fresh and sparkled in my lungs and then the Brogyar rose up suddenly and blocked the brilliant sun, and a moment later when his face grew clearer I recognized his sagging eyelid and his mouthful of rotting teeth. So then I had not killed him. He was breathing raggedly and the sound thrilled me, for he was close now, very close. His hair stuck out from underneath his cap, it had no color except at the edges where the sunlight made it glow. I noticed the iron studs along his leather jerkin where his coat fell open and I could see his gilded belt when he raised his arms. Then the arms descended, and there was pain. There it was, it was the pain of which I had heard, it had arrived. It was the rest of the pain which I had waited for when I had fallen from my horse or been struck by the masters at the school, it had simply been waiting for me too and now it stepped from behind a screen, clad in majesty like the body of a god. When I could breathe again I opened my eyes and saw the Brogyar through a veil of light and he was smiling at me, and I knew his smile for it was the smile of the mountains. There, his eyes were alight, he was biting his lip, unable to speak for joy.
Soon he would laugh as we had laughed as children in the inner courtyard of the school when the door was raised and the pigs came clattering in, their smooth backs and bobbing ears passing us in the torchlight as we stood trembling and holding our bare swords. “A pig screams like a man,” we had been told by Master Gobries that afternoon, “and also he has flesh similar to man’s.” We struck them clumsily across the eyes and along their bony heads and they cried out as the blood began to flow. And after a moment we began to laugh. A tall boy slipped in the blood and fell and Vars had a stripe of black gore on his cheek. When we caught one another’s eyes we crouched with impossible laughter while an unearthly clamor of woe rose to the sky. Stumbling over bodies, sliding, chasing the last survivors. At that moment I thought, Joy is one of the secrets of war. And now I saw that exultation on the Brogyar’s face and thought, He is going to kill me. This is death.
And if it was death, then why not think of dancing in the avla, of my mother’s ring, of milk, of Uncle Veda? But only one thing came to me and it did not come with pleasure but with regret, such sharp regret that my eyes flooded with sudden tears. I remembered our camp along the Firda, near the end of autumn, when the sable geese were flying in long arcs. The wind came from the north bringing the gusts of early snow and there were dark leaves massed on the surface of the river. I went up to the hills alone. Riding along the stony paths I heard the wind as it sang in the dry grasses, battering the little oaks so that they threw their acorns to the ground. A few hawk-apples withered on the crags. And I was lonely and happy going up to where the snow lay in the grass, urging my horse through the rocky passes, camping by myself under the trees, making my fire and cooking beans and drinking bitter gaisk from a flask. Sitting by my campfire I would take the letter out of my coat and read it again while the pines creaked in the wind. If it is possible make haste for I have much to tell you that I cannot write and will not be able to say in front of others . . . Deep blue skies with the mountains sharp against them and a sad twilight that promised an icy storm out of the north, and I was riding upward with my mantle wrapped about me when I saw the first broken pillars, gray in the dusk.
A smell came toward me, stone walls under the rain. There was a hissing sound and rain streaked down my hood and over my face. I had not seen Dasya in four years. There were no lights in the school and I supposed they had camped beyond it in the gorge. But a red glow touched the old pillars of the temple. I rode in through the archway, throwing back my hood in the sharp thunder of hoov
es on the stone, the sounds of the snorting horse and the jingling reins enormous under the lofty roof, and then I had slipped from her back, and he was there.
We greeted one another in whispers, standing back from our embrace to stare, and then he laughed and shook my shoulders. And I was laughing too. “Tav,” he said. There was a fire on the floor and a bottle of Nainish wine on the stone table.
“Vai, my life,” he said. He looked older and he had put on flesh and he moved with energy like an athlete, a soldier. He sat on the table and rested his feet on the bench and put the bottle between his knees to open it and passed it to me, and I drank.
“So you’re alive,” he said. He was still laughing and I thought how proud and joyful he seemed in his scarlet tunic trimmed with gold, and how as always he wore such finery easily, careless of how the wine dripped on his rich Feirini velvet. He passed the bottle to me again. My cloak steamed in the warmth. And we spoke of the war and our regiments and our losses, and that was when he sneered and spoke to me of the dance of the mountains and his laugh turned hard and rattled in the dark hall. For he had been at Gena when a regiment of new recruits had died in a snowstorm under the Miveri Pass. “They swallowed the snow,” he said. He waved his hand. “They just lay down and it closed over them. They were lying in rows like corn . . .”
We passed our bitterness back and forth, our years in the Lelevai, Dasya listing the errors of Uncle Gishas and Prince Ruaf: “Stupid old men,” he said, “who only wish to prolong the war because they’re tired of life at home and burdened with debts.” And we did not speak of the past, which seemed so distant now, but only of the future. His strange pallor in the firelight, his brooding eyes. “All this death,” he whispered. “It’s as if we’re eating—eating them. These men. As if Olondria can’t stop eating.”
We were sitting against the wall. The bottle rolled on the flags. I searched inside my jacket for my leather flask. I opened it and drank. The gaisk was strong and had a flavor of bruised grass and cleared the air of uncertainty. I looked at the smooth flames of the fire piercing the air in long clean waves and the shining bottle empty on the floor, and I thought of the dance of the mountains and how it had gone on since the days of worshiping milk, the same steps over and over. Generations now in rows like corn. And with a twinge, a shift in my heart, I thought of Olondria for the first time. I thought of it as a living thing, not a place to go or settle but a vast entity that grew and breathed and ate. Faluidhen in summer, all those rooms of empty luxury, and then, in Kestenya, the feredha tents pitched on Uncle Veda’s land. Uncle Veda sweating with fury, shouting: “Call me a traitor to Olondria if you like, these people have nowhere else to go. Nowhere, nowhere, we’ve hounded them into the waste and waterless places, it is a crime and Olondria must answer.”
“Olondria must answer,” I said.
And Dasya turned to me in eagerness and whispered: “Yes, you see it, you’re not afraid.”
But I was afraid, and I laughed and my hands were shaking for I knew his mind and that once lit it burned like a dragon’s entrails. I heard myself speaking, half frightened at my own words: “Why should we die for these hills, when we might die for an independent Kestenya?” I said the words in Kestenyi: Kestenya Rukebnar. Forbidden words. And Dasya went pale and then red, and his grip on my arm was fire. And lying in the snow with the axe flashing again in the sun I wept because I had lost the chance to die that way, because I was dying in the mountains after all, dismembered in the snow, because I was dying the death of a pig. And in the spring, I realized, I had planned to leave the army, but I did not know it until I lay under the axe. The plan had created itself in the dark of my mind and only now had it come to light, and I recognized it, and I wept. For I had thought to go down to Ashenlo and to the plains. And now, I saw, I would bleed to death in the snow. And all Kestenya blazed before me, flashing across the blue-gray sky, the desert like a ray among the clouds. The axe bit my thigh as the Brogyar fell, pierced by arrows, but the pain could not erase that gleaming sight. And still it glows before me and I see those shining mountains in another landscape, and in another war.
2. Loyalty Like a Necklace of Dead Stars
The swordmaiden will rise each day with the knowledge of her death. This death is a fair coin, which must be spent for a worthy purpose.
It is said that the sword is nobler than the arrow, because the sword extends the body, and to fight with it is to dance. It is said that the sword becomes its bearer’s soul. Thul the Heretic only believed in his body because he saw it reflected in his sword. In the Temple of Tol, it is common to say: “O Scarred God forever gone a-hunting, Thou has left me the pin from Thy hair.”
This pin, claim the priests, is the sword.
Such ideas are poetry and not history. The sword maims and kills. Evil is its essence.
The swordmaiden will hold evil in one hand, or, if she fights with a Nainish blade, in both. Consider then the purpose of each stroke. Maris the Crooked was asked on her deathbed: “What led you to turn against your king?” She answered: “Ask the women of Oululen.” This was a people who had been destroyed by the armies of King Thul: it is written that “their very names became dust.” When the men of Oululen had perished, the women took up arms. The last of them died defending herself with a harrow.
The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.
Maris was a renegade general, Galaron a rebel, the False Countess a bandit. Which of these now reclines on a couch of light?
When I came down from the hills that rainy spring with a shattered thigh they had already sent most of the servants away, and the east and north wings of the house had been shut off and locked and the unused keys hung in a row in Mother’s cabinet. Even from the window of the carriage the house and grounds looked lonelier, as if an expected visitor had failed to arrive. At the time I thought the gloom was caused by the unseasonable rain that dripped from the eaves and darkened the sand in the court.
Mother came out to greet me with a shawl over her head, tripping lightly across the mud in her felt slippers. “Oh Fulmia,” she cried, “have you brought her?”
“Yes, sudaidi,” Fulmia called, “and the two of us can take her, she weighs no more than a chicken.”
“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “Get Fodok and Gastin.”
Mother had climbed into the carriage and she knelt beside me and kissed my cheeks and brow. Her hair was loose and her face was wet with rain or tears and she wanted to embrace me but since I was lying down she could only squeeze my shoulders.
“Drive on,” Fulmia shouted.
Mother’s shawl had slipped and fallen onto my chest. The carriage shifted, getting closer to the door.
“Don’t try to lift me yourselves,” I said. Her hair blocked the light and the pallor that was her face moved slightly as she raised her hand to her eyes.
“Do you hear her, Fulmia?” she sobbed. “She says we’re not to do it alone, we must bring Gastin. Call him, Fulmia. Call Gastin.”
The carriage stopped, the doors opened, and as they eased me out the rain dropped on my face and I blinked in the cold rain-light.
The servants gathered by the door, the children staring at me and sucking their fingers as I was carried across the court. “Don’t let me fall in this mud,” I said, and everyone laughed. They carried me under the lintel into the warm air of the amadesh. There was the same soft yellow glow and the odor of roasting apples and I closed my eyes and let my head roll against Gastin’s shirt; I could hear him breathing and feel him gripping me carefully as they took me down the hall where there was less light. I opened my eyes.
“Not so quickly,” Mother was saying.
“And look at your slippers!” Nenya cried. “All over the carpets too.”
At the end of the hall stood Father. He stood very straigh
t at the foot of the stairs where the glassed-in porch opened into the hall and looked down on me sternly and held his pipe. As we lurched past he turned his head aside and muttered something. I craned my neck as we started up the stairs, catching a glimpse of his slightly rounded back and the shawl about his shoulders as he went back to the gray light of the porch.
I lay in that room all through the spring and they brought up my meals on a tray. Outside a milky froth of blossoms came out on the trees, pink and then white, and I rested propped on pillows and watched the changes in the section of orchard visible from my window. When it rained Mother came and read to me, her voice keeping back the thunder. We read Hodis the Solitary and Tales from the White Branch, and the whole Romance of the Valley and a number of similar stories, all the tales I had loved and listened to as a child. Mother searched in Malino’s old library for the books and she would burst into my room with a happy cry, with dust and cobwebs in her hair, brandishing a book whose leather binding had split and was hanging down in strips.
“Look at this, you loved this one!”
At such times she reminded me so much of Siski that I was almost startled. She leaned in the doorway, laughing, wiping the book on her skirt. Once my father shouted from the foot of the steps, “Firheia!” And as she called back a promise of silence, her eyes twinkled just like Siski’s.
The Winged Histories Page 3