The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

  She crossed the carpet noiselessly in her slippers and sat in the chair beside my bed. “Look, you remember this one, don’t you?”

  The book had fallen open at a picture of the boy Istiwin watching the Queen of the Bears emerge from the hill. His round eyes, his hands thrown up in horror. At his feet crouched the ragged, long-eared hare we had named Atsi as children.

  “You don’t feel well,” Mother said. Her hand was cool against my cheek, her face reflected in the bowl of the lamp.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. She smoothed her skirt out on the chair, the same brown velvet skirt she had worn seven years before. Now the golden pattern in it was faded and the swirling leaves could only be seen in the lamplight on her knee.

  “What’s happened to the forests?” I said.

  She frowned and turned the pages, biting her lip. Then she said: “Let’s not talk about that now.”

  “I know he’s sold them,” I said. “To Uncle Fenya.”

  She turned another page. “Please not now, the doctor says you must rest.”

  I turned my head on the pillow and looked at her, her wide sad eyes and the delicate skin around them where blue shadows lay. She tried to smile. She did not look like Siski anymore but only like herself. She turned back to the book and tried to find her place. And I thought of her through all those years at the table in her sitting room, her neat accounts, everything slipping away from her like sand. I thought that she must have put her head down sometimes in despair and rested her forehead on the glass of her writing table, and as she had done so I had moved through snow on horseback, killing, killing, watching men die for the glory of Olondria. It seemed right to me that the house was in decay, the avla shut up. I remembered earlier times, and what we had called “the unrest”: how we rode across the bridge on the Oun and heard an insolent song in the meadow: “Down goes the house! Fire, fire, fire!” I don’t think we knew they meant our house. The song was in Kestenyi and we were Kestenyi, Dasya and Siski and I. But to be Kestenyi, I thought, no longer hearing my mother’s voice, it can’t mean the blood you’re given, it must mean how you give your blood away.

  Give it away. But not to Uncle Fenya, who acted for Aunt Mardith, obeying her orders, pouring our precious forests into her coffers. I wanted to shout: Don’t you see how we’re changing masters? The Laths have ruled Kestenya with swords and the Nains will rule it with gold. But I couldn’t say it. Not when Ashenlo had been my mother’s life. Not when this was her work: finding a way to pay the herdboys, to have the carriage repaired, to scrounge up decent clothes for Siski and me as our father sold everything to pay for the bolma he ordered from the south. As he sat like a king in his glassed-in porch. He was the true son of a traitor, the heir of my grandfather who had signed the Treaty of Tevlas. Thinking of it, rage filled me and I ached to crawl out of bed, to hurl myself down the stairs and accuse him to his face. You. You. You have supported my grandfather’s act of treason, that disgusting treaty that crushed Kestenya’s chance at independence. And now you’re selling Ashenlo to the Nains so that you can stuff yourself with bolma. I twisted in the bed and my mother touched my brow.

  “You’re warm,” she said. Her hand was as soft as gauze. I closed my eyes and remembered the forest, driving out there in the winter long ago. I remembered Mother exclaiming how hard the servants must have worked to clear the road. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said.

  “First you complain that I do nothing for the children,” Father said, “and then you complain about what I do.”

  “No, I don’t mean to complain.” She put her hand on his arm and he shrugged it off and turned and shouted, “Who can see the Snow Horses, eh? Who’s seen them?”

  We crowded to the sides of the wagon and gazed at the snowy stillness of the wood, and the shadows of trees moved over us like the shadows of bars, and the trees themselves stood arched above the road or glided by like sentries deep in the long blue corridors of night. The horses kicked up mist and the wagon jolted. In the carriage behind us men were singing, the little red lantern swinging in the dark. “Go on,” Father shouted. Some of the children were playing in the straw and Mun Karalei was afraid they would burn themselves on the bricks. “She hisses like a gander,” Siski said. We stood close in the smell of our coats and looked for alien hoofprints where the moonlight fell. The wagon stuck when the horses turned and everyone had to get out. Uncle Veda carried Siski on his back.

  “Come on, Meisye, pull,” she screamed, kicking her feet in excitement, her thin legs flashing in a shaft of moonlight.

  “Please don’t let her down,” said Mother, “she’ll soak her stockings and catch a chill.”

  “My dear,” Uncle Veda said, “she’s stuck to me like a crab.”

  While they struggled with the wagon I wrestled Dasya in the snow and struck my face on a hidden root and began to bleed, and I fell asleep on the drive back to the house and the snow they had pressed against my eye slid down my face and soaked my collar. I woke groggily under the lights of the house. They seemed so high, as if the windows opened onto the stars.

  “Look up there,” I said.

  “Yes my darling,” Mother said, but it was Father who held me and carried me up the steps.

  “Take care how you play,” he told Dasya. “She’s only a girl.” In the hall everyone was laughing and giving their coats and furs to the footmen.

  “Acres of trees,” said Uncle Fenya. “It’s a silent fortune. I congratulate you.” Firelight filled the mirrors.

  Late that summer, I woke in the night to a pounding on the stairs, an urgent clatter that could only mean Siski had come.

  “I’m awake,” I called.

  “You see,” she cried. She dashed into the room and threw her traveling case down in the corner. And then she was kneeling beside my bed and had flung her head down on my chest and her arms in the tight black coat were about my shoulders.

  “Oh, it’s me, it’s me,” she said. “You didn’t think I was coming but I came. I’m sure I got here faster than a letter. I came all the way from Nauve without stopping once, we slept in the carriage.”

  Nenya came in with a candle and lit the lamp, grumbling. “It’s not the way to treat an invalid, disturbing her rest.” Light flared up, revealing Siski’s sharp, pale face.

  “Don’t look at me, I’m the image of death,” Siski said, tucking her hair behind her ear. Her coat was dusty, one button hanging. “I came so fast I’m wearing all the wrong clothes. It’s warm here, isn’t it? Oh Taviye, we’re home again and it’s going to be delightful!”

  Looking at her I could see that she believed it. “No, don’t look at me,” she said. “Do I look older? Yes, I must, I’m five years older. And you, you’re lovely but so thin.”

  I did not know if she looked older, but certainly she looked different in some indefinable way. Her hair had fallen down on one side, but her embroidered collar gave her an air of refinement and hidden wealth. It was a Nainish look, and her face despite the narrowness and the tiredness had a new and elegant cast.

  “We’ll do anything you like,” she said. “Riding, bathing, anything. Can you get up?”

  When I told her I could not, she put her hand over my eyes.

  “What am I seeing?” I asked her, smiling. An old game. Her voice came clearly and with a fierce undertone: “It’s our rowboat on the Oun.”

  “We couldn’t row on the Oun right now,” I said. “It’ll be dry.”

  “You’re not playing right. You’re supposed to see it.”

  “All right,” I said. “I see it.”

  And I did. Sun on the chipped white paint, sunlight on the water under leaves.

  The next morning I realized Kethina had come as well. As soon as I saw her, I knew what had made the difference in Siski’s face. The two of them came in together, Siski in yellow, Kethina in rose. They
had washed their hair and tied up the long damp plaits. “For the heat,” Kethina explained. “It’s not hot now but later we’ll be so glad we put our hair up early, believe me.” She bent and pricked my cheek with her arrow-shaped mouth. Her fingers strayed in my hair. “So pretty! Siski, you never told me about her hair. Almost blue—a real mulberry black.”

  She turned, sighing, swinging her arms. “So what are we going to do?”

  “What about breakfast?” Siski said.

  “Splendid!” Kethina cried, snatching Siski’s shoulders. She pressed her brow to Siski’s, her eyes laughing. For a moment they whirled with their foreheads together, giggling, their fresh gowns lifting and swaying around them. “What would I do without you? I’d never eat!” Kethina cried. “But now I’m terribly hungry. What shall we have? Please not fish or cucumbers.”

  “Let’s go down to the amadesh and see,” said Siski.

  “We’ll be back to report,” Kethina cried out over her shoulder. And they were gone in a patter of pale house slippers and bubbling laughter and floating gowns and scent, and that was the way they were all summer. Laughing in corners, embracing one another and making journeys which, from what they said, were always perfection itself. On the journeys they wore wide hats and carried baskets. They would come home dusted with chalk from the hills and burned by the sun on their slim arms, Siski’s hair grown wiry and Kethina’s lank with the heat and their dresses creased from sitting on banks or old stone fences. And always they would explain about the wonderful day they had had, and indeed the excitement on their faces suggested extraordinary delights, as did their dusty boots and drooping ribbons and the odor of sweat, like that of pea flowers, which rose from their damp clothes. Siski had moved the two red chairs from Malino’s old study into my room and she and Kethina would collapse on these, their legs stretched out, the toes of their boots turned up, fanning themselves with their bleached silk hats while the scent of burnt grass drifted in at the window. Then they would tell me what had happened. Sometimes they had been charged by bulls, sometimes received from a peasant a gift of butter tied up in a cloth. Later still I would smell their tobacco and hear them whispering out on Siski’s balcony as the moon rose over the orchard. And while I could hear their sudden giggling and even the jingle of Kethina’s charm bracelets and sometimes, I thought, a bare toe rubbing the iron grating, I never heard what they talked about. And the sound of their chatter exhausted me, they talked without ceasing all through the day and night.

  My sister despised silence. She had a willful and hectic happiness with which she was determined to conquer the world. Sometimes I would hear them screeching, her and Kethina, swinging on the boughs of the Lathni chestnut tree by the well. The house grew quiet only when my father shouted for peace and then I would hear again how it was when we were absent, the growing hush of solitude in the halls where no one walked and the lifeless parlors and the rows of abandoned bedrooms. Then it seemed like our house again with the alien element banished. And for a few days the girls would slip out early, whispering in the hall and returning only when the sun was setting to lock themselves together in Siski’s room. But irrepressibly the laughter would burst from her balcony and soon it would spread through the house again, into all the corners. Once she dashed upstairs and shouted as she passed my room, “We’re eating out on the terrace, I must put on my shawl.”

  Whirling past my door again with the shawl about her shoulders she paused, the black and scarlet fringes settling slowly against her dress. “Don’t you want to come outside?” she said. “They could bring you in a chair.”

  “No,” I said.

  She did not move, she stood by the door.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She stood there for a moment. Then she said: “Then why won’t you look at me?”

  I told her that I was tired and when I glanced at the door again she was not there, she had slipped away without making a sound. And I felt my bandages under the blanket and struggled to sit up. I’d work, then pause, holding my position, propped on trembling arms. Work, then pause. Work, then pause. Thinking of the last time I’d seen her, five years before, when our happiness had shattered. Her horse, the beautiful Tuik, had died. Siski mourned through the corridors, knot-haired like a bereaved woman in a song. We all supposed she’d get over it, it was terrible, of course, but after all not the end of the world, everybody said. I remember the intense darkness of the house that autumn, the way the halls seemed to lengthen when you stepped in with a candle. I didn’t like to go up the stairs alone. Dasya was silent and morose—he too seemed wounded by the death of Tuik. And I was outside, subtly abandoned, too young for them, for the first time. On the day of the first snow they went out alone. No one knew they were gone until Siski returned without our cousin, chilled and filthy and with blood upon her cheek.

  Work, then pause. Work. When I swung my legs out of the bed the pain slammed into my gut and nearly made me retch. I sat there sweating and shaking like an overworked mule but I would stand up, I was going to stand. I clasped the bedpost. I had never asked my sister what had happened that dreadful day. It seemed impossible. They bathed her and put her to bed in Mother’s room. The doctor was called and prescribed a draft of oinov. Nenya stopped me when I tried to go in: “My heart, get back, don’t you know your sister is ill?” Her eyebrows, flecked with gray, stood up like the quills of an angry goose. But what was wrong with Siski? No one would say. And when Dasya returned, very late I learned from Gastin, they dressed him in traveling clothes and sent him down to Klah-ne-Wiy in the coach.

  Work. Work. I stood up, gasping, my weight on my good leg. It is possible for the world to change in an instant. Siski needed to be alone, she needed peace and quiet, Mother said. My sister who thrived on noise. I was to go to Bain, to spend the season with Uncle Veda, who had recently been called upon to take up his role as duke, to leave his dogs and horses, his dusty carpets, the stedleihe brewery in his cellar, and go into the west. Before I left, I visited Valedhara. Uncle Veda’s former steward—now the owner of the house—met me at the door. He clung to the doorjamb with small, alert fingers; his eyes had grown very bad. “It’s cold in here,” he said, “since the old man left.”

  Late in the summer Siski and Kethina’s friends came from Nauve. I was walking then, I had even ridden Na Faso in the meadow, and we had heard of a slaughter in the Valley, unarmed peasants massacred on the orders of the Priest of the Stone. I had had no letter from Dasya, but I knew what he must be thinking: that this was our chance, that for the first time the Valley was divided against itself. That if the anger simmering in Kestenya could be released now, swiftly, we might see freedom in the east at last. At Ashenlo no one spoke of such things: Siski’s guests arrived laughing, their scabbards ringing as they hung them on the wall. They poured in led by Siski who was radiant and triumphant in a pink silk bodice cut low and tight in the arms.

  “This is the informal parlor, the oldest room in the house,” she explained, her face aglow above the rosy silk. She put her hand on a young man’s arm. “Don’t smoke those things, we’ll never get the smell out of the carpets. Let me fill you a nice pipe.” I thought of her as a child, collecting apricots and standing on a stool to watch the jam boil on the big stove, and I thought of her riding Tuik into the desert outside Sarenha and coming back with her hair in tails and her skirt shredded by thorns. She used to be so happy there, especially in the mornings, giggling over her breakfast, making herself choke, then laughing harder. No one could understand her. And Nenya, spooning out the porridge, would say: “Some people eat crow berries during the night.”

  And now, in the evening: her smooth face like a china dish, black brows and lashes starkly painted, a crisp light laugh. “I never did that, did I?” she said, looking around her wide-eyed. “I don’t remember, it sounds terrible, not like me.”

  “Do you me
an to say you’re not terrible?” said Kai of Amafein, leaning over her chair.

  It was just what she had wanted him to say. Her tinkling laugh, the others closing in on her, the pipe smoke and her bright expectant face looking up at them.

  And I was far away. Sometimes a guest spoke to me—it was clear Siski had told them not to shun me—but mostly I sat by the wall and drank. First we drank Eilami brandy and then we drank mountain wine and gaisk from my father’s cellar. “I knew how it would be,” Siski said bitterly, on one of the evenings—rare after her guests arrived—when she came into my room. “First he says he won’t have anyone and won’t pay for anything. But then he can’t bear to have others pay for it. I told him,” she said, lifting her chin and glaring at the closed door. “I told him, they’ve brought everything from Nauve. If you don’t want us we’ll sleep in the hills.” She was wearing a thin gray shawl and she drew it about her shoulders as though she were cold. Then she gave a hard laugh. “He’s with us now. He can’t help it.” She turned toward me and her face grew soft in genuine amusement. “He’s going to give a party for you. To celebrate your recovery. A garden party with lamps and singers, everything.”

  I said I did not want a party.

  She grimaced fondly and tweaked my hair. “Don’t be silly. Why shouldn’t he give parties for us, if he wants to? I don’t care if he gives us some of his money.”

  “He doesn’t have any money,” I said.

  “Nonsense, where does he get that bolma from, and the wine? No no, don’t be stubborn.” She drew her legs up onto the bed where we were sitting and covered my eyes with her cool hand. “See your party.”

  I took her wrist and pulled her hand away. “He has nothing,” I said. “Do you understand me? Nothing.”