And if his lip twitched in contempt when he watched them chasing a ball, how much more did he despise Ahadrom II, who rode, hunted, attended obscene comedies at the theater, and danced, holding his wife gingerly as if he feared she would sting! The blood of their souls floods the marble ballroom—when they dance there, they shall slip. These were the words of the Nameless Gods! Words carved into the Stone and flung down into the wastes of Ulunith where Elarom had found them in the snow. Elarom had nearly died in retrieving these words. And Ahadrom II, Telkan of Olondria, who had had the great good fortune to be born at Ashenlo, who had crept, as a boy, into the room where the flower of the age lay recovering from frostbite—Ahadrom danced because, he said, he was king. “I can’t get out of it,” he said, seated on a stool in the room of the Stone with his knees splayed out, turning and turning his skullcap in his hands. His big, pallid, sad young face with the firelight playing on it, the cropped black hair already growing thin . . . and the robe he wore when he came here to work, but not to official functions, not to parties: on those occasions he put on his plain black suit. The iron ring of the Telkans shone on his finger. And the lifeless metals with which they adorn themselves will avail them not, though they flash like a dragon’s scales.
“We shall work late,” Elarom said gently. “You may join us after the ball.” Ahadrom wriggled off the stool with a little sob, knelt on the floor, and kissed the old man’s hand. And the other Stone worshipers looked up from their books and murmured in sympathy. Ahadrom, who had been more sensitive than usual since the death of his father, remained bent over Elarom’s hand, his great shoulders shaking, while Elarom, who ought to have spurned the king, kicked him, spat upon him—Elarom smiled, and a faint blush of pleasure warmed his withered cheek. “Your burden is great, my child,” he said. And if the old man was warm from the king’s tears, Ivrom was hot, white-hot, gripping the seat of his wooden stool in both hands, the pressure of his seething blood mounting into his temples so that the figure of the kneeling Telkan swam before his eyes. He must leave the room; he was choking; he was falling into a fit. But he stayed. And mournful, traitorous Ahadrom shuffled toward the door. Useless, stupid Ahadrom, who contributed nothing to their work, slumped off to dance with his barbed and sparkling queen. “A man of dough,” she had said; and she was right. And she would mold him with her fingers and her teeth. She would dip him into a vat of caramel and roll him in colored sugar till he gleamed. And still Elarom would say, “my child.”
But I’m your true child. I’m your child. Ivrom passed a shaking hand over his eyes. His body felt enervated, as if after a long illness. He turned his gaze to his notebook and the words heaved before him. For they have set forth in a ship of fools. “A ship of fools,” he murmured. He was tossing on the sea. He clung to his hatred and it bore him through the waves. Gradually, he discerned the shape of land, the shape of the message: a condemnation, vast and final, of the worship of Avalei.
“It occurred to me that night,” he explained to Lunre, shortly after the younger man had joined the work of the Stone, “that there was a wonderful consistency in the statutes of the Nameless Gods. They condemned wine-drinking, gambling, adornments, gluttony . . . and many other things, such as popular divination and the interpretation of dreams, which are associated with the cult of Avalei. They condemned all forms of the worship of the body. They condemned superstition and the pursuit of invisible spirits. They urged us to read, to write, to think. To live simply and with grace. In that moment, I saw the future.”
He saw it alone, without the aid of his master or his colleagues. Utterly alone. Impossible to comprehend the burden of that vision. He told Lunre of it quietly, almost casually, seated on the floor of his apartment after a meal. Evening light came through the open door that led to the balcony and glinted on the strings of the limike against the wall. Ivrom was peaceful, leaning back beside the instrument, his throat elongated, vulnerable and still. A small vibration when he spoke. “I saw it, not as a blinding flash, but as an accumulation of solid truth. It rose up like a mountain. It was as real to me as the stool on which I sat. As tangible as the Stone itself.”
He did not speak of the violence that accompanied the vision. How he gnawed his sleeve. The bruise where he struck his fist against the door. The nurse coming into his bedroom with a taper, fearing disaster, the terrified child clinging to her skirt. “Get out, get out!” he roared. He was half naked, streaked with sweat and ink. Broken pens were strewn across the floor. He flung the heavy inkwell at the nurse; it hit the wall, and she retreated with a shriek, dragging the child. His shouts reached them from behind the closed door, muffled, inarticulate. The nurse muttered prayers—prayers to Avalei—she was, after all, a peasant. The words took up residence in the child’s heart; they would be uprooted later. “Protect us, merciful Ripener of the Grain . . .”
“Insect! Scum!” he yelled. Everywhere his shadow appeared it took the form of a woman in a rich dark gown. He spun, but could not catch her. He would tear off her jewels, tear down her hair, grind the roof of her House beneath his heel. He would see her people sober and bowed in contemplation, or dead. These noble descendants of the gods, these pigs, these vampires! He would burn their theater, shred the canopies above their scented beds, put out the lights of Velvalinhu one by one. What is a mantis? It is well known that the female of the species is larger than the male, and that, when she is finished with him, she eats him. The queen had taken offense when a journalist nicknamed her the Mantis; that journalist now languished in Velvalinhu’s dungeons. The king had put him there, though he knew it was wrong. He wept, but he obeyed. And Ivrom craved that power over the king. He craved it, and he would get it. Many years later, the Telkan, whimpering softly, would write the order to burn a school in the village of Nerhedlei. At this school, in the depths of the Valley where the worship of the Ripener was most entrenched, where the half-civilized peasants lived on bais and mushrooms, the eunuchs of Avalei were teaching the autobiography of Leiya Tevorova in defiance of the new law written by Ivrom. The book, considered a classic of Olondrian literature for the writer’s refined and effervescent prose, was among those he had banned because it encouraged a belief in angels, and therefore in spiritual voices other than that of the Stone. Violaters of the new law must be punished. The Telkan would weep at the thought of destroying the school, but he would obey. Ivrom would stand behind him with his narrow hands clasped; their shadow, cast on the wall, resembled an insect’s spiked forelegs.
On the night of his vision he had no such power. He was wild, feverish, desperate.
Write. Write. One day he would teach the child: Writing is power. He leaned on the table and added a scrawl to the page. Such pain. He was tearing down walls. He was trampling their starry chains and cashews and peppercorn trees. The Teldaire had wasted away and he broke her sternum and she was dust. He ground her aunt, Mardith of Faluidhen, to a smear of chalk. This woman he had never met but who faced him across the country from her castle in Nain, manipulating the Teldaire, laughing at them all. She had orchestrated the farce of the Telkan’s marriage; she wanted to see a Nainish prince on the throne. She sought power only for wealth—not, as Ivrom did, for change, for a transformation in Olondria’s deepest heart, for the start of a new, quieter, more pious era. He had gathered from his research that this Mardith was regarded as a woman of principle, self-denying, almost ascetic, that she went about clad in the palest colors as if in perpetual mourning, and he hated her even more for this posturing. She was no ascetic—but she’d know asceticism soon enough, when the temples of Avalei fell and demands for wine dried up, when she could no longer make a fortune from her vineyards and frankincense trees, when she was forced to exchange her theatrical white for black! Then she would cry—in his vision the smear of chalk wept icy tears. He was surrounded by a chorus of weeping women. And Time was defeated, and Death. When his book was finished, he’d mock the queen in the title. Wear these jewels, my que
en, just to please me. Jewels from a Stone.
Today when Vars came in I was holding my father’s book in my hands. That little white leather volume, the edges of the pages touched with blue gilt, has been until recently a bestseller in the capital, ostentatiously displayed on shelves and tea tables throughout the empire. “Even if they don’t read it they have to buy it,” my father said a few weeks ago, triumphant, upright in his chair. I was silent. I never liked his attention to power, so naked—it humiliated me to hear him crow. I felt his ambition threatened the book itself. Those words Lunre called “a healing rain.” And if you find a stone along the way, pick it up and set it aside. It will leave dust on your fingers but cause no pain. And in this way you will proceed to the Mount of Clouds. The last words Lunre said to me, the night before he left the Isle forever. Under our favorite stone archway in the Tower of Aloes. The air pulsed blue and his eyes were full of shadows. I thought it was the beauty of the words that made us weep.
Vars unpacked his satchel onto the table with some pride. A heel of bread. “You can soften it in water,” he said.
“Vars, have you read my father’s book?”
He glanced at it, uneasy. “No, teldarin. My sister’s read me a few lines.”
“Really? She’s sympathetic?”
He blushed.
“Ah, I see. She read it to mock at it. Is that right? In the garden, after a glass or two of wine? No, no, you mustn’t apologize,” I went on, talking over him, “you mustn’t think I’m offended, why should I be? I know how we are used. But Vars, did you never think that we are really on the same side, you and I? We are both rebels after all.”
“Well. But we came to restore the Goddess.”
“Yes. You are rebels who look backward, and we are rebels who look forward.”
I rose and walked toward him, smiling. There was a prickling behind my eyes. The truth is that my morning had been very bad. Had it not been so, I doubt I would have tried to push the book into his hands. He recoiled, of course—as if a moth had flown at him in the dark.
“It’s only a book, it’s only a book,” I soothed him. I reminded him of Uskar, known as Ahadrom I, the grandfather of the prince. How Uskar, like Vars, like all the rebels, was wounded by Olondria, by its violence, the ruthlessness of its ceaseless wars. Like them, Uskar had tried to free Kestenya. But in the end he had relinquished his sword and become a man of peace. He had found another way to turn his back on the Olondrian Empire. He had turned his face to the Stone.
All morning I had been thinking: I am now the High Priestess of the Stone. I had been thinking: How can I survive without my father?
For a long time, it seemed, I tried to make Vars take the book. Its white leather binding nosed feebly at his hands.
At length he took me by the sleeve and led me to the chair. He was saying something—words of comfort, I believe. Something about the prince. That the prince had guaranteed my safety. “No one is to touch you,” I think he said.
The room was coming to pieces. I opened the book, I don’t know where. I don’t need to see the words. I read without seeing: “Yours is a negative kingdom.” I thought of my father and how he was like a bird who flew through a window by mistake. Ultimately, we Stone worshipers are a homeless people.
This did not keep us from cruelty. From murder. The children at Nerhedlei dead. Farhal dead. My argument with Vars was flimsy, I see now, hollow. Ahadrom I may have been a man of peace, but everyone knows my father was not. And even Ahadrom, when he was Uskar, betrayed his own kin to their death.
It is the twenty-first day of the month of Fir. On this day the Telkan puts on a blue robe and yellow slippers. He drinks rose-colored sherbet made with snow from Porcelain Mountain. He meets with the representatives of the White Council. They come to see him on the Isle and sit in the Chamber of Midday Reflection, their feet submerged to the ankles in a rug made of white lion’s manes. The rug has been laid down for the occasion; afterward it is combed by the servants and wrapped in seven leaves of waxed paper.
Such polished ceremonies. And the end of it is blood. Such graceful language in my father’s book. Blood.
I have been thinking that I don’t know how to be Priestess of the Stone. I don’t know where our followers live, I don’t know their names. I can’t convince a single soldier to read our book. My father prepared me for nothing. Why did I think that he would never die?
The fire sinks. Vars is gone. The room goes colder. I put on my gloves. The sky is dark today: they are putting out the fires.
No one is to touch you. The words seem terrible, profound.
Only one person could mourn my father with me: Lunre, who is lost.
3. And gentle from the edge of night the blue.
928–936
Look at his face. This is the face he will wear until his death. A grim face, beardless, chiseled out of jasper. Every morning he washes and shaves the face. The hair grows thinner and whiter and he is the Priest of the Stone and his master is dead. Elarom, whom the gods favored, is dead, and Ivrom still dreams of the chilly morning he entered the room of the Stone, feeling his way toward the lamp and the flint on the table, and he had never lit the lamp himself because Elarom was always awake and reading in its light, and he fumbled with the flint and knocked the lamp over, spilling the oil, and he could just see the white, almost dead log lying on the hearth, but he couldn’t see his master’s bed at all, and at length he realized that the strange, shrill voice crying for help was his own.
Look at his face, at the funeral on a hill overlooking the sea. The king is weeping, as are most of the worshipers of the Stone. The sea wind tugs their robes. Lunre and Farhal, two young men who joined the work of the Stone two years ago, are digging the grave. They are scholars, slender, unused to the work. It takes them half the morning. When the child, now thirteen years old, sinks down to sit on the grass, her nurse quietly pulls her up again. Slowly the light changes from the gray of a dog’s coat to the gray of a coin.
Ivrom’s profile becomes ever sharper, more rigid, more heroic. He does not weep. He notices that the child does not weep either. He is proud of this. He cannot see her young heart shuddering under her ugly homemade frock, in panic, in anguish, in a kind of horror. No one speaks as the body, wrapped in Elarom’s black robe for a shroud, is carried forward in the arms of three sobbing women. They can’t keep hold of it once they’ve sunk down, they don’t have any ropes, the body tumbles into the hole like a sack of rice. Everyone looks at Ivrom. Look at his face, it might be carved on a granite doorpost at the entrance to a temple, except that there is no Temple of the Stone, and if there were it would be without images, decorated only with words. For the image is vulgar, the gods have said; it coarsens the spirit and dulls the intellect. Who but an infant needs to receive the world through pictures? The wise use words. But Ivrom does not speak, and the Stone worshipers are at a loss, for they possess no traditions, no funerary rites.
Look at his face, like a blade. At length Lunre clears his throat. He draws his wrist across his sweating forehead, leaving a smear of mud. He steps forward and begins to shovel earth into the grave. Soon Farhal joins him. And the others watch.
Walking back to Velvalinhu through the fields it grew colder and colder and they stumbled in the stony aisles among the faded vineyards, and had it not been for the child’s nurse, who knew these paths from childhood, they might have lost their way altogether. For though Velvalinhu, with its vast and complicated towers, its hanging gardens like cuffs of precious lace, was ever in view, the way toward it was not direct, but involved a series of unexpected turns and sometimes even reversals around a house or copse. And this, Lunre said afterward, was an apt metaphor for the process of deciphering the message of the Stone, in which so many promising trails had to be abandoned. Indeed, he said, it might serve as a metaphor for any worthy endeavor. This was in Ivrom’s apartment, w
here the nurse served tea while the child went into her bedroom and curled up, trembling, with Nardien’s Tales for the Tender (and when her father came in to say good night he would frown and ask if she could not find something less babyish to read). It was after they had reached the Court of the Sands, vast as a battlefield, where the sentries watched them steadily and in silence, as the Telkan paused and cried out with a loud voice that he had no anchor now, no adviser, no friend, no counselor but Ivrom. “Both my fathers have passed away,” he said, “and I must depend upon my brother.” And Ivrom’s heart, frozen in sorrow, shook itself awake, and he held out his hand to the tall, clumsy, black-robed king of Olondria who knelt on the stones and grasped and kissed that hand. The king had a bald spot on the top of his head and his kiss was repulsive, slick with grief, and the new High Priest of the Stone wore his usual knife-hard face. When Lunre mused about their circuitous journey home, the priest laughed. “Oh,” he said, “but we might have cut the vineyards down.”
The Winged Histories Page 13