The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

  And on the evening of the party, when the lamps were lit in the garden, she passed with her skirts whispering against the leaves, and with light falling over her shoulders and hair she knelt to give me a glass and grinned and said, “Have a sip of our father’s nothing.” I took the glass and smelled the gaisk; it reminded me of the mountains. In the garden all the voices and laughter were soft. It was not like being inside where the noise became unbearable; the loudness was drawn away and absorbed by the night. The feathery trees swayed above us, hung with round-bellied paper lanterns, and a wooden arch decorated with roses bristled above the musicians. We sat on wicker chairs and smoked. “Look, everything is the color of smoke,” said Siski. Talk and laughter rose in the thin trees. Gastin came out with a tray of difleta, and Armali took two glasses at once and winked at me. He braced one foot on the rung of the table. “Thank you, I’d rather not sit. Sitting too much is no longer restful. If only the heat would break we’d amuse ourselves with a hunt.”

  Kethina shook her head in passing, wrinkled her nose and prodded his thick arm, crying, “Always in such a hurry!”

  “Like yourself,” he boomed out after her. His smell was fresh and strong as if he had bathed himself in lemon verbena.

  “Look, fireflies!” cried Siski.

  He looked vaguely toward the garden and made a humming sound in his chest. “Yes, delightful!” Then he turned back to me. “What are you planning now? Going back into the army, I hear.” He gulped his second glass.

  “No,” I said. “Into the desert.”

  “Tav is going to visit a cousin of ours, Prince Fadhian,” Siski said quickly. She took a brief sip and added: “A very good friend of our uncle the duke’s.”

  “Not so good,” I said, and at once felt foolish.

  “Well, you told me they were friends.” She frowned, tapped her foot on the gravel and looked away toward the musicians under the arch, and everything gathered in me, the misery of being with her and being estranged from her, and I said: “He is a prince of the feredhai.”

  Later, up in my room, I thought that I could easily have escaped, I could have avoided everything that came afterward, I might have said “He is my uncle’s friend,” I might have danced, I might have bowed to Siski’s request that I take off my sword. Instead I stood harsh and awkward in an old-fashioned frock, too tight across the shoulders now, with my old scabbard half smothered in its folds, and leaning on my cane I looked like a clown, Siski told me afterward. A prince of the feredhai.

  “Do they have princes?” Kethina asked brightly, looking around at the others.

  Armali swallowed hastily in order to answer: “Not as we do. Not at all. There’s no—” He put down his empty glass and snapped his fingers, looking for the word. “No sense of continuity, of blood.”

  “But they have such dreadful feuds!”

  “Well, but in that case the bloodline is just an excuse. All of their squabbles really take place over cattle. Cattle and horses—it’s what they have instead of politics!”

  Laughter.

  “And what’s your politics?” crowed Kethina.

  “My dear, gaisk and good weather!”

  He motioned to Gastin for another drink. His foot restless on the rung of the chair. His calf pulsing and swelling. And Morhon was still talking about blood. The lamplight on his spectacles hid his eyes. “In order to have proper royalty, that is, princes of the blood, or as it is more genteel to say, princes of the Branch, one requires history, and in order to have history, one requires a means of recording history, and the feredhai, possessing no writing—” Kethina was helpless with laughter. Kai of Amafein nuzzling her ear. Something had fallen into her dress—a spider. And Siski sat under the spreading mimosa tree, a pattern of leaves falling over her face and dress, gazing up at Armali, nodding and smiling. Her plaits in a knot on top of her head, small curls escaping and glinting like black fleece. The greenish radiance of her gown. And on the side of her brow a small contraction, the hint of a frown, a pulse beating angrily, signs only I could read.

  “Feredha politics are clean, at least,” I said.

  Armali looked at me, surprised. “My dear girl.”

  “Cleaner than ours. Look at the Lelevai. A feud over horses, a feredha feud—that’s a feud over something. The Brogyar war is a feud over nothing.”

  “But think of—”

  “Nothing.”

  He laughed. A sound like a cough. “Hrrm, hrrm,” deep in his chest. His eyes glittered, chips of broken enamel. “I should think someone like yourself—you are, after all, of a Nainish House—would see the sense in protecting our northern border.”

  “You are, after all, of a Kestenyi House. I should think you’d respect the feredhai, your own—”

  “Don’t start that!” he barked, putting his glass down hard.

  “Come,” laughed Siski.

  “Lady Siski,” he said, breathing hard through his nostrils, “my respect for you is absolute, but I will not stand to be called a feredha by anyone.”

  “But you are one,” I said, “if we trace your lineage back far enough! So am I. So are we all.”

  It was like running downhill. I waited for him to say it, and he did. “If you weren’t a lady, I’d—”

  “Stop!” cried Siski, leaping up.

  She seized my hand as I started to draw my sword, and I let it slide back into the scabbard, afraid of cutting her. “Stupid!” she hissed. “You’re making fools of us all!” She was so close I could smell her skin: liquor and summer rain. There was a brief silence, and then the music again, the singers’ repetitive song. The hum of voices resumed, but excited now, subtly energized, Kethina’s eyes sparkling under her pointed brows. “Drink!” Ermali shouted. “Where’s your idiot footman?” And Gastin hurried toward him over the gravel.

  Siski caught her breath and gave my wrist a pinch—a single, childish gesture, a brief word in the language of boredom and the schoolroom. It startled me so thoroughly that I laughed. At once I wished I could take my laughter back, for her eyes widened and I knew she would not forgive me. Then she laughed, too. She leaned forward, embracing me gently, her breath warm at my ear, and for an instant I was transported back in time, and the cheap Tevlasi music wrenched my heart, for it was home.

  She pulled me close. “You look like a clown,” she whispered.

  Very well. I looked like a clown in my old frock. She was right. But I would not be a clown. I would not dance to a Valley tune like our hapless Uncle Veda. When I thought of him in Bain, in the stuffy rooms of the ducal residence, I knew that I had been right to run away. Siski had depressed me with her mysterious illness, Dasya had cut me with his desertion, but it was Uncle Veda who truly broke my heart. He met me at the door smelling of hair oil and fresh steam, squeezed into a figured coat, and I wished that I was dead. I wished I had died before I saw his anxious, sweating face, his lopsided mustache decorated with a pair of beads. He only owned carriage horses—“It wouldn’t be right to keep a proper horse in the city”—and dosed his “cold stomach” with Eilami brandy. Because he was a bachelor, and considered too stupid to deal with young ladies, my Aunt Firvaud had come from the Isle to help me settle in. The two of them led me upstairs to a bedroom crowded with lamps and couches. The window, my uncle informed me, overlooked the gardens.

  I put down my things, and he noticed the swordbox. “Oh! Ha, ha! Did you bring that thing? Ha, ha!” he wheezed, leaning on a couch. “A joke,” he explained to my Aunt Firvaud, who regarded me with a searing stare. “Our Tavis used to be so fond of swordplay.”

  “I still am,” I said, though I did not feel fond of anything. I thought I would never be fond of anything again.

  “So I understand,” said Aunt Firvaud. Small, with painted lips, she flashed like a jewel in the setting of her elaborate beaded cape. “Veda,” she said then, in a
deliberately careless tone, “please leave us. We have things to discuss. As ladies.”

  “Naturally!” Uncle Veda said. And he went out, receiving a tiny shock when he touched the doorknob, because of the way his buffed slippers rubbed against the carpet.

  Aunt Firvaud, my sharpest and most scornful relative, who hardly allowed us any intimacy with her although she was my mother’s sister, who always insisted on being called “Teldaire Aunt” because she was Queen of Olondria, advanced on me with a blazing face. “What has happened?” she demanded. “What is the matter with him?” And I knew that she meant Dasya, and it was as if my heart had dropped into my boots.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is he ill?”

  “Ill!” she cried, flushing darker still. “He’s weaker than a gnat; his heart is broken!”

  I stared.

  “Don’t stand there like a stump! Your sister has crushed his hopes, that’s clear enough; does she think herself too good for the future Telkan?”

  “I don’t know,” I faltered. My head was spinning, and the edges of the room seemed to fade. I thought of Dasya and Siski going away together into the woods without me, and Siski coming home alone. The blood on her cheek, so dark in the instant I was allowed to see her, the instant before they whisked her away upstairs. I felt like a fool for not having seen the signs of romance between them, for thinking them depressed by the loss of Tuik. As if horses were everything. Kad shedyamud, I thought in Kestenyi. What barbarism. I felt, in that moment, like a barbarian, someone who was only good for riding and hunting and fighting, and then I almost wept for desire of such a life. My aunt was screaming in my face, her elegant little hands tearing the air—“I want to know what happened! Nobody tells me anything! What did they quarrel about? Whatever it is, she must forgive him!”—and I gave up the effort of standing and sat down on a plump silk couch.

  The cushion was harder than I had expected; my teeth clacked together. Outside the window, just past my aunt, spread the windswept sky of Bain. Gulls swung between the towers. The sun struck a distant window that glittered so brightly I thought, for a moment, it was a tear in the corner of my eye. How quickly the world comes down, as if it were only made of paper. I thought of Uncle Veda pacing downstairs, his thumb and forefinger stained with ink, his ankles throbbing from dancing the arilantha and other intricate Valley dances. And everything was gone, the house, Valedhara of the high cupboards which even my uncle’s valet stood on a table to reach. The pearl-knobbed doors, the antelope horns that were taken down and polished with wax, and the great collection of weapons in the study. This room that was called a study was really a storage room for no one studied there and the old wall lamps were empty of oil, so that one always carried a candle inside even during the day because the windows were blocked by enormous old armor cases. I remembered the odor of dust and leather and the glow of the candle revealing the buried wonders of that chamber. “Somewhere here,” said Uncle Veda. Suddenly he had decided to look for a hawking glove that predated the War of the East. Metal clanged, shields slid to the floor. “Help me look, my dear,” my uncle said. His robe trailed in the dust and caught on boxes, his hanging sleeves became tangled in a collection of Panji hunting bows. At last he said: “Ah, look. There it is.” He held the glove up in the light of the candle. It seemed huge, misshapen, a monstrous gauntlet trailing moth-eaten ribbons. “I knew you would enjoy that thing,” he chuckled. “How we loved our hawking parties then, when Ranlu was alive!” And downstairs in the parlor I sat with the great glove on my knee and gingerly touched the ribbons and strands of beads, while Uncle Veda lit his pipe and told me of the hawking they had done in the golden days before the war. First they would choose their birds, walking quietly in the early morning among the hooded cages of the lokhu. Then they would go out among the hills, riding on the shaggy, stalwart ponies of the plain, and at last release their falcons to the sky. “We would catch foxes, yellow hares, even ermine,” he said. His eyes grew moist as he began to laugh, remembering how Ranlu’s hawk had perched on the roof of an aklidoh and the hermits had refused to let them retrieve it. “They were so kind to us, that was the worst of it!” he sputtered, wiping his eyes. “Yes, suddi! Welcome, suddi! Giving us curds and butter! We squatted in the yard and ate while Ranlu eyed the roof and they gave lectures on the sanctity of their walls . . .” He laughed, his face as red as mahogany in the dusky parlor. How wonderful it seemed to me as I sat on that hard silk couch, how wonderful, the soaring birds and galloping hooves, the wheeling space of the plain beneath the blueness of the hills. And rage welled up in me like icy water in a thaw: rage at Dasya and Siski for allowing some stupid lovers’ spat to spoil our autumns; rage at Uncle Veda for accepting the title of Duke of Bain and submitting to a society he loathed; and rage at my Teldaire Aunt who, tired of shouting, realizing I knew nothing, picked at the shoulder of my gown on her way out of the room. “Cheap,” she pronounced, standing over me, smelling of some expensive scent that reminded me of nothing but her own apartments in the Tower of Pomegranates.

  “You’ll have to dress better in Bain,” she added. “This isn’t some highland barn.”

  I raised my eyes, and she took a step backward, her fingers against her throat. For a moment I exulted at having frightened her, but then her expression cleared. She even smiled. “That’s it,” she murmured. “You’ll do very well.”

  I often wondered what she meant. Did she recognize something in my murderous look? Did she, too, dream of murder every day? Did Siski? Do they still? Is that how they survive, these bright society women—by chewing on visions of violence as if on milim leaves? But I would not, could not; I would follow Ferelanyi; I would run away to military school. In the stolen carriage—borrowed, as I put it to myself—I flew eastward along the Ethendria Road. A kind of terror oppressed me, the sense of having done something irrevocable, of having set myself apart from my world forever. Autumn had come to the Valley: the vines lay rumpled and brown and fallen leaves blew over the road in the cold wind. And then there was that blue and misty morning when the horses seemed so fresh and stamped so prettily on the bricks of the old inn yard. The air was crisp and smelled of smoke and coffee and roasted chestnuts and the laughter of the girls in the kitchen rang from the lighted window. The porter ran out with my great trunk: he was a crooked old man and grinned with strong white teeth as he heaved his burden up into the carriage. And I stood smiling back at him and he smacked his palms together and exclaimed something about the chill in the air. Why did he suddenly strike me as such a handsome and wonderful old man? All that day we flew past empty fields; there were a few horses and children squabbling over the last of the apples, and when the sun came out the frost glittered. We crossed the Ilbalin on the ferry and I stood by the rails and smelled the air and listened to the shouts in the blunt accent of Nain. My happiness and impatience grew as we climbed into the mountains and I had to wear my wool vest and heavy mantle. “Raise the window, my lady,” Fulmia said. But I closed my eyes and let the wind scour my face, burning with joy and cold. I would not be a clown, I would not dance. Good-bye, Uncle Veda! It was the end of ribbons, the end of bouquets.

  Years later, when my sister told me I looked like a clown, that moment sustained me. The carriage climbing higher, into rare air. My swordbox at my feet. In my excitement, I drummed it with my heels. It was the beginning of the dance of the mountains.

  I still carry the letter my sister sent me from Ashenlo three months ago. It found me just before I left the great plateau. I was with the feredhai then, and the young boys crowded around me with huge eyes to watch me read the piece of paper. “What does it say?” they asked. “No news,” I told them. I folded the letter and tucked it into my shirt. There it stayed as I traveled westward with a small company of men, into the clement autumn of the Valley. It crossed the country with me and now it has taken up residence in the forest. I carry it still, in this chilly camp where we wait to make our move. Sure
ly it no longer possesses any virtue. Its letters smudged, its creases near-transparent. Still I carry it and sometimes I unfold it by the lamp.

  My own dear Taviye,

  If you knew how dull we are without you, you would come back at once. Even the horses are pining for you! Poor Ustia will hardly eat his mash, and when I took him across the Oun this morning he wouldn’t gallop, but ambled like an old workhorse. All of the dogs are terribly jealous of Farus. Noni told me that she will not speak to you when you come unless you bring her an emerald collar. You know how she is, so you had better comply. As for Fotla, when I mention your name he acts as if he’s never heard of you!

  To speak from my heart dear Taviye, come back for the feast if you can. It will be so wonderful for Mother. I’ve told her to try not to think of it but she says she dreams of you in those wild mountains surrounded by criminals disfigured by the black needle! So you see how it is. Father is the same as ever, exactly the same, only more so if possible, taking most of his meals alone in the porch. One never knows what mood will take possession of him from one moment to the next. I hate to leave them alone together.

  As for me, I’m bored almost into the grave. Kethina has gone back to Nauve and never writes, as she says she is “caught up with life.” I suppose she means new gowns. I have given up on all that myself and go about in a blue dress like a peasant. What is the point? Mother and Nenya force me to dress in the afternoons, as we have not, apparently, sunk so low as to appear at the table in slippers. How stupid everything seems! Even my shell combs have grown heavy; when I put up my hair, I swear to you, my arms ache.

  Taviye, how has it happened that we are scattered all over the country?