Whatever our interpretation, certain facts remain: that the people of Hernas, who called themselves Laths (from the ancient lak-thet, “vine grower”), sought forcibly to unite themselves with the Kestenyi and Nains, their neighbors to the east and northeast, who spoke languages related to their own; that their justification was their common ancestry, and the favor shown the Laths, through Hernas, by the goddess; that the ensuing War of the Tongues was the longest and bloodiest in our history; and that it was effectively ended by the Drevedi.
“They appeared in the western sky like a storm of claws,” writes Von.
“The first to die in their clutches,” Besra adds, “was Natho of Ildei. Seated on a saddlebird, his bow drawn to shoot down at the ground—where he thought his most dangerous enemy to be—he was torn from the saddle and devoured face first, as if in a diabolical mockery of the act of love, by an ogress of piercing beauty.”
“Like blue leaves of a murderous autumn,” writes Hailoth.
“The earth is poisoned now,” writes an early, anonymous contributor to the Dreved Histories. “We all go about in white cloaks. My heart is sore: a bruised and seedless fruit. And a salt wind blows endlessly in the empty streets.”
The Dreved Histories, perhaps the most painful chronicle ever written, gathers accounts of the reign of these monsters, who, not satisfied with anthropophagy, put on clothes, established themselves in palaces, and married the sons and daughters of noble houses. The Histories also tell of the eventual human rebellion, the fall of the vampires (who were variously burned, drowned, and battered to death with bricks), and their reemergence here and there in the coming centuries, in the form of horned or curiously insect-like children. As recently as the reign of Varon the Petulant, a boy with horns was executed at Ambrelhu. But the era of Dreved domination is, happily, long over. Iloki, or “saddlebirds”—once the war steeds of noble Laths—are kept in the palace, but never ridden. We will have no winged lords.
“The project undertaken in the War of the Tongues,” writes Imrodias, “a project of unity (and there is, surely, no greater or wiser aspiration), was interrupted by the accursed Drevedi, but not abandoned. In the course of time, it would be completed, and called Olondria.”
This expresses a popular perspective among the Laths, who eventually conquered Kestenya and Nain under Braud the Oppressor. What we now call “the common tongue,” or simply “Olondrian,” is in fact the language of the Laths. In Nain and Kestenya, due to a centuries-long series of political marriages, those who hold titles often carry, as well, a strong strain of Lathni ancestry: “the higher the branch, the closer to the trunk,” being a common saying. Genealogy is a national obsession. The Hath Harevu, a book containing the names of all those who can trace their ancestry, however distantly, to Hernas the Shepherd, is updated every year, and consistently outsells the Vallafarsi, causing Odrid of Eal to quip: “Our true Holy Book is the Hath.” The most exalted bloodline, of course, is that of the Telkan—a title meaning “King Over All.” Olondrian inheritance passes from a man to his sister’s son; if he has no sister, and names no heir before his death, it passes to his own son—that is, to a different family or House. As the proverb goes: “A house without sons, a house without windows; a house without daughters, a house without doors.” The betrothals of kings, particularly those with no sisters, are watched with great anxiety: the House of a queen may, in such cases, seize the kingship through an accident of fortune or judicious poisoning.
The noble Houses of Nain and Kestenya are generally considered “too far from the trunk” for marriage with the Telkans. They are not quite Olondrian enough; yet for all that they speak the common tongue, dance the arilantha, and play the limike. It is thus possible to speak of “our common history”: a history briefly blocked by the Drevedi and then permitted to run its course. This is not the only way of seeing matters, however. Faska, the Kestenyi rebel, is said to have spat, while bound to a post: “For this the gods cursed you with monsters.”
“And the years pass like clouds.”—Karanis of Loi
Olondria swells and shrinks. It gains Nain and Kestenya, then it loses them both. It wins Kestenya back, then loses it after the Olondrian army is weakened by a protracted war with the Sea Kings of Evmeni. Olondria gains Evmeni and the hitherto independent kingdom of Panj. The justification of a common ancestry is no longer thought necessary. The only justification now is power. Goods flow north from Evmeni: ivory, oranges, bolma, musicians, and salt.
Nain, threatened by the Brogyars to the north, enters into a treaty of fellowship with Olondria. Olondria gains Nain. “Not by force of arms,” laments the historian and Nainish patriot, Ailmali of Faluidhen, “nor even by some treachery did we fall, but through our desire for wines, silks, dyes, and other seductions of the insidious Laths.” The greatest seduction, it must be admitted, is that of the vast and well-trained Olondrian army, which enters into a war with the Brogyars north of Nain. “War,” writes General Aren of Deinivel, “breeds war.” His mood is cheerful, his sword hungry for conquest. Olondria gains Kestenya.
Rebellions wrack that mountainous waste, which is called the Intractable Province. “Then they must be made tractable,” insists Aren. “We must accustom them to the bit.” The aklidai—houses of lonely ascetics which serve the highland people as temples—are emptied, and the mystics put to the sword. Roun, the Moon Goddess, patroness of Kestenya, is declared a blasphemous figment. “Woe, woe,” runs a popular song of the times. “Woe for my little bone thimble. It lies broken in the gorge. And woe for my little bone finger, pricked to death.”
An uneasy peace. An outbreak of war. An uneasy peace. An outbreak of war. An uneasy peace. And then an organized rebellion in Kestenya, a revolt that unites the cities and the desert. Kestenya Rukebnar, they shout—“Independent Kestenya”—nomads, farmers, aristocrats, they all cry out together. This revolt almost succeeds, but is broken by that cruel attack, the Karafia—in Kestenyi, “The Night of Tears”—on which the city of Tevlas is burnt to the ground. During the reprisals, the desert is so thickly strewn with corpses, the crows grow listless.
Uskar of Kestenya, heir to the destroyed city of Tevlas, cannot bear it. When he joined his cousins in rebellion, he was drunk on stedleihe, singing in a café. Now, smearing his tears on his sleeve, he gives in. He betrays the rebels to the king.
The young Telkan, Eirlo the Generous, is generous indeed. Once the last rebels have been captured and strung up by their heels to die (“like songbirds on a wire” as the Kestenyi lament has it), the Telkan gives his sister in marriage to the loyal Uskar. That marriage shocks the empire: the next Telkan will be half Kestenyi. Princess Beilan, the Telkan’s sister, thinks it a fine joke. A tall, broad woman, her hair dyed yellow as Nainish apples, her face weather-beaten from a life lived primarily on horseback, she throws herself into what she considers the customs of her new home. Having been a passionate hunter of deer, she switches to hunting shambus, the wild sheep of the highlands. It pleases her, once a year, on Tanbrivaud Night, to throw a ball to which she invites the most notorious bandits in Kestenya: “I won’t cut your throats,” reads the invitation, “if you don’t cut mine.”
Wine flows, and the princess lights the outlaws’ cigars with a candle.
She bears three sons. Teskon, heir to the throne. Veda, heir to the valuable duchy of Bain. And Irilas, who will inherit the Kestenyi estate of Ashenlo and the duchy of Tevlas.
Three sons. No daughters.
A House without doors.
The princess develops a passion for raising doves. Her skirts crusted with guano, her eyes encircled by rings of dark green paint, she reclines in her aviary, blowing pipe smoke toward the rafters.
Princess Beilan and Lord Uskar were sadly unsuited to one another. Where the princess was bold, the duke was timid. Where she was hale and ringing as a bronze bell, he was pallid—for a Kestenyi, unusually so—and short of
breath. He loved wildflowers, but because of his asthma could only enjoy them in pictures. He began to suffer from night terrors after the Kestenyi War—he kept hearing the glass in the windows of Tevlas shatter in the heat, the children scream, and his betrayed, dead cousins curse him before the gods. For a time he attempted to live in Tevlas, but his health was so affected by the ash in the air, the dust of renovation, and the gloom of the gutted buildings, that he retired to Ashenlo. There, one winter, his health and spirits were restored by a visit from a saint.
“The old man came out of a snowstorm,” said one of Uskar’s footmen, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Half naked and with that great stone on his back. We never thought he’d last the night. He’d no more flesh than a stick of raush.”
The old man, however, did live. He was Hudra, First Priest of the Stone. Led by a dream, he had ventured into the deadly region beyond the Duoronwei, where even the feredhai dare not go, and returned with a huge black rock, magnetic and apparently covered with writing. Uskar engaged a doctor for him (saving his life, but not his frostbitten toes) and soon the old visionary was settled in a small room at the back of the house, where, aided by Uskar, he devoted himself to copying down the lines in multiple languages and scripts inscribed on the Stone. The two men became convinced that what they possessed was a message from the Nameless Gods, those who were before Avalei or any of the others, the architects of Time and Space, distant, inexplicable, and inexorable, who are referred to collectively as Nieb. The earliest lines deciphered by the two enthusiasts instructed them to burn their garments and put on robes of raw wool. Never had Nieb shown an interest in such trivial human matters. The two men wept. Thus began the Cult of the Stone.
Hudra changed his name to Elarom: “Bearer of the Stone.” Uskar became Ahadrom: “Face of the Stone.”
His eldest son, Teskon, who was extraordinarily like his father, tall, black-haired, and inclined to melancholy and coughs, joined Ahadrom in his work and was soon indoctrinated into the new faith. Neither of the younger boys, however, could be prevailed upon to spend his time squinting at a stone and being lectured by an old windbag mottled with frostbite. Veda, who had inherited his mother’s passion for sport, spent his days outdoors, while Irilas plagued his tutors and pillaged the liquor cabinet.
Princess Beilan, absorbed in the lives of her birds, was nearly oblivious to the changes taking place under her roof. When her husband spoke of his work, she was overheard to say: “Pssht!” To her brother she wrote: “We are all as healthy as cockroaches and as merry as thieves.”
Years later, when her son Teskon took the throne, he changed his name to Ahadrom II. The princess was then in mourning for her brother, Eirlo the Generous, who had died at table, collapsing into a bowl of mutton soup. The news of her son’s decision startled her from her thoughts for a moment; she is reported to have asked: “Is it so serious with him, then?” At once she lapsed back into her reverie, playing absently with a feather and murmuring: “I had no idea. I had no idea.”
Her ignorance might be excused, as she had not seen her son for some years: he had moved to Velvalinhu after his marriage. That marriage, to Firvaud of Faluidhen, a Nainish noblewoman, had been celebrated all across the empire. Eirlo, the Old Telkan, overjoyed at his nephew’s choice, had ordered sweetmeats and festive ribbons distributed in the streets. The ribbons read: “Olondria’s Love Match,” “The Greatest Green Marriage in History,” “A Braid of Three Peoples,” “Unity at Last.” Now, however, Eirlo was dead, and the new Telkan seemed more preoccupied with the Cult of the Stone than with promoting the unity symbolized by his marriage. He had the Stone transported to Velvalinhu, along with its priest and Ahadrom I, who could not bear to be parted from his master. The first Ahadrom, who had been Uskar of Tevlas, was aging fast: he found it hard to speak, and even writing had become an arduous task. From the ship, he wrote to Princess Beilan, left behind in the highlands: “Lord. Burnt. Thunder. Where. Lament.”
The Cult of the Stone grew. We hardly noticed it at first: the fading of the old priest, Elarom, and the rise of Ivrom, his successor, a man who used his tongue like a riding crop and gained several thousand converts with the fire of his eye. We failed to take note of the priest’s growing power, the success of his books and pamphlets; we were too much occupied with the question of the throne. Who would take it after Ahadrom II—who was, as certain voices never tired of repeating, only half a Lath himself? Could Olondria bear to see, on the Horsehair Seat of her ancestral kings, that dream of Eirlo’s: a living “Braid of Three Peoples”? For not long after his coronation, Ahadrom introduced the empire to his son and—as he had no sisters—his heir.
There were other living members of the House of the Old Telkan, of course. It was expected that one of them would lay claim to the throne. Hinro, Duke of Ethendria, was the most likely candidate: not a young man, but strong, and of impeccable lineage. No one expected that Prince Andasya, the son of Ahadrom II and his Nainish bride, would so thoroughly bewitch the public. “My pet, my pig,” goes a bul composed in his honor, when he was but an infant: “my bully, my bee, my bud, my cherry-sweet.”
“Impossibly handsome,” wrote a journalist for the Bainish newspaper the Starling, when the prince was nine years old. A lady who was fortunate enough to glimpse him astride a white pony on the Isle of Ban declared that she could have eaten his velvet breeches.
At the age of twelve, the prince posed for Ferulei, then First Court Painter. Engravings of his portrait sold by the thousands. The boy, black-haired, with pouting lips, holds a kite in one hand and leans on a leafy oak. The title: Death, with Kite.
By the time he was sixteen, it was clear that no one in Olondria would refuse to have Prince Andasya for their king. He was not only the most beautiful youth in the country, but a superb dancer and rider, a budding scholar, and a wit. “His charm perfumes the air for a hundred miles,” gushes a writer for The Watcher. Hearts flutter when he enters the army: if he should be injured or killed! But then—how heroic of him to enlist! When he puts on his scarlet guardsman’s jacket, his lips look redder than ever.
He is charmingly old-fashioned—a proper Prince of the Branch, despite his questionable lineage. In opposition to his father, Ahadrom II, he declares himself a devotee of the goddess Avalei, now the primary enemy of the Cult of the Stone. “I could never bow to a rock,” he is quoted as saying, “and I have too much taste to go about clad in a blanket.” He is the monarch of our dreams. He is seen at Loma in a green coat, at Feirivel in gray. No one imagines that, with his cousin Tavis, he is planning a war.
Suddenly, in the Valley, the peasants are armed.
It is the Feast of Lamps, and all the roads are blocked.
They travel in groups of ten. They wear red cloaks, red woolen caps, sometimes only a red rag pinned to a shoulder. Even the poorest have hennaed their beards.
They are singing the songs of Avalei on the roads. The hunting knife is within my heart. The hunting knife is the ornament of my heart.
Such a moon! The dogs bay as if wild with joy.
Fighting breaks out in Bain. Within hours, the garrison is set on fire.
Fighting in the Balinfeil. It begins in the mountains and spreads to the woods and farms. Soldiers are bleeding out of the hills. They knock on doors, they are found asleep in haystacks. Their stories are garbled, excited. “No, it’s not the Brogyars,” they keep repeating.
The first refugees from Kestenya have crossed the Ilbalin.
In Bain, the duke, Veda, is trying to control the rioting in the Old Quarter. During a brief retreat to the Ducal Residence, he receives a note from the Isle. Dear Uncle Veda, I have decided to take the throne early!
He stares at the card, his bones filling with ice.
Smoke drapes the windows.
Outside, figures huddle in the walled garden. They are devotees of the Stone, seeking refuge at the Residenc
e. Their lives are in danger in the streets of Bain.
Veda drops the card and runs up the stairs.
He runs up stair after stair, panting, until he reaches the flat roof. As he has often done over the last few days, he peers toward the Blessed Isle, his eyes prickling in the smoky air. He looks toward Velvalinhu, the Holy City, his royal brother’s seat, where he has sent so many frantic letters, asking for help, for counsel, for armed men.
Today, for the first time, he sees flames in the distance. Velvalinhu is burning.
Book Two
The History of the Stone
Yours is a negative kingdom.
“The towers are all aflame and I, I skim the air between them, defiant in my feathers of burnt lace.” Lines by the great queen Fanleshama the Poet, who recited them long ago from the Chrysoprase Seat. In this poem, the Seventy-Fifth Elegy, she speaks in the voice of an owl. “Oh pines, oh rain of opals, oh curling ice.” The owl laments the loss of its home in the north but refuses to leave the Blessed Isle, where its mate is trapped in a burning aviary. Today I repeat this elegy over and over through numb lips, for the towers are burning. Smoke pours thickly from the Tower of Mirrors; the Tower of Lapis Lazuli is visible only as flashes of murky light in a vast pall of ashen fog.
The railing of my balcony has gone black. When I grip it, it stains my gloves.
It is the ninth day of Fir, the Month of Darkness. On this day, the Telkan hears reports from the Master of Granaries and seed samples are presented on beds of raw wool. The Telkan tastes the winter wine and pronounces it either Sloe, Amber, or Earth. Based on his choice, his rooms are refurnished in purple, red, or black. He hears reports from the Master of Prisons. His chief scribe, known as the High Engraver, records the number of prisoners in each province of the Empire.
The Winged Histories Page 9