Here was Velvalinhu, with its courtyards, its gardens, its mighty towers, its light and darkness, always light in one place and always dark in another, and how strange it seemed, now, that Tenais had been so oppressed by the darkness, that she had lit a fortune in candles one night long ago. How strange that he himself had been disturbed by the salmon-colored stones, half-blinded by the glitter of the ballrooms—half-blinded, if the truth be told (and why not, there was no harm in admitting it now) by the brazen, jetty, taunting eyes of the queen. He looked back in astonishment at his nights spent poring over the Hath Harevu, and that idiotic little book The Nains, by the queen’s great-aunt, with its anguished clan sensitivities and the bloated, rubicund figures on the cover, who looked less like knights than the inhabitants of a sanatorium. How small the palace seemed now, though they called it a city! It was so little he could balance it on his palm; it reminded him of nothing so much as the music box in the shape of a castle that stood on his aunt’s writing desk in Bain. This castle, manufactured in Feirin or Deinivel, where such trinkets were churned out in great numbers, was graced with gardens of green baize, with trees of wire and felt, balconies of such fine filigree they might have been earrings, and windows of real glass. When the key was wound, the box played the popular vanadel “Bain, City of My Heart,” and the mechanism inside rotated, so that, peering through the windows, one could see tiny smiling ladies and gentlemen passing in a row, in a kind of eseila. Now, bending down and squinting through the window, he could see the queen, no taller than his fingernail, passing with a fixed smile, her paste jewelry glinting as she moved jerkily in the path she must travel forever. Her black hair looked freshly painted (and he knew for a fact that she had begun to dye it, although she was not yet forty, because one of her ladies-in-waiting, a secret devotee of the Stone, spied for him, and even copied out the queen’s letters). She passed to the plinking of the keys. Behind her, holding her hand, came her son, Prince Andasya, now eight years old, stiff as an effigy in one of his marvelous outfits, so thick with embroidery and pearls that he might have been tossed down the stairs without injury. He bumped along in his mother’s wake; he was already unhappy; his eyes brimmed with resentment in his candy-colored face. He would come to the Stone. Ivrom wound the key as tightly as possible, then released it, and the whole company whirled around to the sound of the keys. Bain, city of my heart! All the colors blended together; it was no longer possible to make out the black stains on the queen’s teeth (she had begun to chew milim), the red marks on her fingers (she slammed the lid of her writing-box on them deliberately every time she received a letter from her tyrannical Aunt Mardith); the young prince’s glowering brows had disappeared, the melancholy jowls of the Telkan, and the sumptuous oiled shoulders of a thousand court ladies, and the gentlemen’s jeweled scabbards, and all of their boots, wineglasses, prize-winning roses, londo debts, racehorses, intrigues, and affairs. The ballroom was nothing but soup. It looked like the gray, gelatinous, peppery soup he had once eaten at one of the queen’s dinners, back when he had felt that he must always be where the Telkan was, that he must watch over the king to maintain his power. The noxious soup was treacherously threaded with melted cheese, which clung to Ivrom’s spoon, his lips, and the side of his bowl; he found himself in a desperate battle with this cheese, though he tried to copy the cunning manner in which the others spun their spoons in order to break it. At the head of the table, the queen’s eyes glistened with tears of mirth. Muffled laughter ran up and down the room. But they were not laughing now. If they were not careful, he’d make them dance until they fainted; he’d wind the key until it snapped.
No one laughed now, for vineyards might be cut down, and it was not only the Mantis who could have people thrown in prison. Jewels from a Stone, Ivrom’s collection of the words of the Nameless Gods, had appeared in print in the winter of 931. It was a particularly cold winter; there was snow on the Isle, and many went hungry in the east. “It soothes me,” choked the Telkan, wiping his face, cradling the little book against his chest in the room of the Stone, “it soothes me to read these blessed words, when things are so difficult!”
The priest bowed slightly. His hard face did not change. He dwelt in a different realm, one infinitely more exalted: the realm, not of those who are soothed by the truth, but of those who draw it forth—those who are torn by its brambles and battered by its stones. It had wrenched his heart (whatever Lunre supposed) to have Farhal imprisoned in order to keep him from spreading his inferior translations. He had wept when Farhal, whose health was poor, had perished in the dungeon after his usual winter cough spread to his lungs. The inner lamp had blazed out at Ivrom then, and his heart, he told Lunre, had nearly stopped. And Lunre, seated at one of the desks in the room of the Stone, with a barricade of dictionaries and prayer books around him, had looked up calmly and said: “Peace, Ivrom.”
Ivrom stared at him. “Peace?”
“Peace,” Lunre whispered. Somehow, though his hair was cropped short and his cheeks clean-shaven, he looked disheveled; something about him suggested that he had been rubbing his face, or trying to tear his hair. His eyes glinted flatly.
Ivrom looked at his own papers, but found he could not work. He spent a few moments trimming his pen. “Farhal was ill,” he said.
No answer.
Ivrom tried a sigh. “Perhaps you are right, and this feeling of depression comes from a slowing of the blood . . .”
With a sudden, violent scraping, Lunre thrust his stool backward over the stone floor and stood. The oil lamp on the table lit his face from below; the shadows made him look aged, almost a skull. “Everyone has left you,” he said in a strange rough voice. “Everyone save poor Ahadrom, who cannot go anywhere, and Tialon your daughter. You have chased everyone away; Farhal you have killed, yes, murdered; I am still here. I am still here, and I hate myself. I hate myself. But Ivrom—”
Here he stepped out from behind the desk, his hands outstretched, his voice breaking with tenderness, and clasped both of Ivrom’s hands. “I cannot go. I will not go. I will not leave the Stone, and our work, and you. Not yet.”
The two men embraced. Lunre was shaking. “Only,” he said, stepping back, his face warped with grief, and with something else, something dreadful, a kind of warning—and his voice grew in strength and harshness—“only we will never speak of Farhal’s illness again. We will not speak of Farhal at all.”
Ivrom nodded, speechless. And he kept that bargain. It was Lunre who failed, Lunre who went back on his word. Lunre, whom he called friend. They quarreled when Ivrom banned the heretical autobiography of Leiya Tevorova—a monstrous act, Lunre said. They quarreled again, more bitterly, when Ivrom forced the Telkan to burn the school at Nerhedlei and three little children were killed. Have you seen the Ethendrian grottoes? Neither have I; I was happy with the stone arcade in the Tower of Aloes, where Lunre gave me the almanac.
“Read the Month of Lamps,” he said. His smile.
It seemed impossible that he would leave us. But it had also seemed impossible that we would lose Farhal. Things were becoming more possible. The world was growing larger—terrifyingly so. The Priest of the Stone traveled back and forth to Bain. Everywhere he drew crowds. They came to heckle, then to engage him in serious debates, then to buy his book. Once while he was away, before Farhal died, the priest’s daughter crept down to the dungeons with a copy of Jewels from a Stone. She ordered the guard to let her through in a piping, imperious tone. A young girl, only fifteen, her face as green as glass. The guard hesitated; she told him to unlock the door at once or she’d tell her father. The guard obeyed and gave her a paper sealed with black wax. This was her pass to show to the guards on every level of the dungeons as they admitted her into the bowels of the palace. After a certain level the floor was flooded, her slippers soaked. Farhal lay on a bench; she could see him through the bars.
“Farhal! Farhal!”
“He
re, little mistress, let me,” said the last guard. He banged on the bars with a dented pewter cup. Holding his lamp aloft in the horrible din. Farhal jumped up, trembling pitifully. He stared toward the bars, shielding his eyes from the light.
“Farhal, it’s me, it’s Tialon.”
He stood and came toward her, his bare feet in the cold water. His beard had grown and it seemed as though one of his eyes would not open. He coughed against his shoulder: a deep, full sound. The priest’s daughter was losing strength in her knees. She slid the book through the bars. “Here . . .”
“It’s all right,” said the guard. He had checked through the book for hidden weapons. “There might be a needle in here,” he’d explained to the girl. “Someone swallowed a needle once.”
Farhal took the book and looked at it wonderingly. “Is this from your father? He asked you to give it to me?”
“Yes,” she lied.
His beautiful sloe-colored eye, huge in his starved face, brimming with light.
“Thank you!” he whispered.
The guard caught the girl’s arm before she fell. He took her to his chair by the door and rubbed her temples painfully with his great thumbs. “You’ll want to wear boots next time,” he said.
Stop. Don’t go. In the foothills of the Tavroun there is a marvelous rainy valley overgrown with purple gentian. The air tastes of herbs. And we never had to go there, because we had our little hillside above the sea. We had the narrow walkways running through the palace orchards and the parapet overlooking the garden of the iloki—the huge saddlebirds with their raucous honking and prehistoric heads, who give off a terrible odor of decay. Once a day the sentries toss them the carcass of a pig. We used to watch the creatures moving through their gloomy garden, the chains on their necks clanking, their dusty tail feathers trailing in the weeds, till they reached the carcass and shredded it like silk.
Everything. We had everything, it seemed. Sooner or later, we thought, my father would forgive Farhal and let him go. We thought this, Lunre and I, even as our little circle dissolved, the other Stone worshipers leaving us for the mainland. They became leaders of reading circles in the capital, in Ethendria, in Sinidre. My father never mentioned their names again. It was forbidden to speak of them in his presence. The way he’d look up, crackling with rage. The red-hot orb of his eye.
I think of Farhal lying on his bench in a dark room. Did he even have enough light to read? Did he beg the guard to hang a light from the bars? Did he need the light to read Jewels from a Stone, or did he just run his hands reverently over the lines? Some of them were his own transcriptions. Some of them were Lunre’s. Some belonged to other Stone worshipers. Three of them were mine. But the book was my father’s because my father had drawn them together into a coherent vision, he had forged meaning out of scraps. At a moment when two powers were struggling for Olondria’s soul—the cult of Avalei with its mysticism, more magic than religion, and the wealthy barons of Nain, who cared for no religion at all—my father raised a two-edged sword against them both. Jewels from a Stone is divided into three sections of equal length. The first attacks Avalei’s cult: superstition, dream interpretation, communication with spirits. The second decries ostentation, greed, the accumulation of wealth. And the third sets forth an argument for reading as prayer. The words seem to glow as if wrought in adamantine. The book is perfect. It is perfect because it admits of no contradictions. It is perfect because a great number of the words written on the Stone—more than half, in fact—are absent from its pages.
“Orphans,” my father called these writings. The ones that contribute nothing to his vision. Minor scratches, marginal, like vestigial wings. The love songs, the lists of horses and camels bought and sold, the detailed accounts of events in long-lost villages. There is a prayer for an ailing cow. There is a message in plain Olondrian that might have been written yesterday: “I’ve gone up the pass with luck we’ll meet on the other side.” My father’s theory on the “orphans” was that they were recent defacements, scratched into the Stone by those who were ignorant of its value. In the terrible conditions of the desert, he thought, people used the Stone as a rough signpost, almost a way of exchanging letters. He raged at these scrawls for complicating our efforts, quoting a line from the Stone itself: “A curse on these orphans darkening my path!” But Lunre felt that the orphans were worthy of study. If we agreed, he said, that the Stone came from the Gods, that They directed the hands that touched it, then we must attend to even its smallest, most crooked lines. “After all,” he added, half smiling, “one could build an entire theology on ‘with luck we’ll meet on the other side.’” And Farhal—Farhal loved the orphans, especially the ones that seemed to contradict my father’s theory that they were only recent marks, the ones that were deeply scored in the rock, written in the Ancient Tongue yet cryptic, senseless. “And gentle from the edge of night the blue.”
Useless, my father said. A waste of time. And then, as time passed: dangerous. The orphans might weaken the true message of the Stone. He forbade us to work on them. Farhal did not listen. Secretly, he published a small pamphlet of his transcriptions in Bain.
This pamphlet no longer exists. All the copies have been destroyed. Farhal too.
His enormous eyes. The way he looked at my father with love. So eager to sweep the floor, to carry my father’s writing box. He had moles on his neck; when my father felt cheerful (affectionate, cruel) he called him “Spots.”
Ivrom and Lunre quarreled for the last time when the priest found Lunre’s private notes on the orphans. Lunre was the last of Ivrom’s disciples, the most intelligent, the most gifted, the most beloved. “How dare you?” Ivrom roared, louder than the autumn storm that thundered outside. His heart was breaking. And we never visited Nain, where the little houses glow red among patchwork fields and tame musk deer are tied up at the gates. We never needed to go anywhere. We had poetry. Lunre made me a crown of aimila blossoms from one of the gardens. “Fallen star,” he said.
Fallen star. He crouched at the hearth, throwing his notes on the flames while my father watched to make sure that every shred was ashes. It was the end, it was ending, Lunre was leaving, the next day, forever. “You might as well kill me,” he whispered. “As you did Farhal.”
Farhal lies in an unmarked grave on the hill, beside Elarom. Lunre—who knows?
Ivrom’s follwers were weak. He brushed them off like burrs. He maintained his precise activities, his routine. Every evening, wherever he was—on the Isle, on the mainland to give a speech—he sat down to a soup of herbs. In Bain the soup was ordered in a hotel. “No butter please.” On the Isle it was composed in the tiny kitchen in his apartment, first by his daughter’s nurse and then, once the nurse had been sent away, by the daughter herself, who was then nineteen years old. The soup required that the bones of a goat be boiled for seven hours. All the fat had to be skimmed off, the thyme and mint chopped very fine. The single narrow window in the kitchen whitened with fog. Not too much salt, no pepper. The daughter cried and cried.
Lunre, she wrote. Come back. She hid the letter under her mattress.
The daughter grew pale and sluggish. She, too, was weak, Ivrom thought regretfully. He attempted to strengthen her with the example of his own upright carriage, his thin hard mouth, his unrelenting poise. Clink, clink, went the spoon on the edge of his bowl. The daughter cried in her soup. He asked her if she was taking a course in amateur theatrics. No answer, of course—she was sulking. As usual he left his robe on the floor outside his room so that she could scrub it and hang it to dry.
Lunre, she wrote. Don’t come back.
In her room she took off her clothes. She could not see herself whole; she did not have a large enough mirror. She had only the little silver-backed mirror embossed with mourning doves that had belonged to her mother: her nurse had given it to her before leaving Velvalinhu. “I kept it,” whispered the
nurse. She had found it in the old apartment, in the chaos of the death and burial of Tenais, and had tucked it in her own bag. She had been afraid to give it to the girl before, she explained: she did not think the old man would like it. Now the mirror flashed in the light of the candle on the table. “Mother, come fetch me,” whispered the girl, but no one came. She drew a picture of her hand in charcoal, a picture of her face. Both pictures were ugly, distorted. She burned them at the candle.
I want to stay there. I don’t want to go any further. I want to stay. I can’t remember who it was—one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein—who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.
Look at his face.
The fire dies down, the air grows clearer, but everything looks bleak. How quickly Velvalinhu has fallen into ruin. Without its servants, who have been permitted to leave the Isle—chambermaids, gardeners, footmen—the palace is as desolate as a cave.
Thunder. Racing clouds. Across the Alabaster Court, a great painted cloth ripples in the wind. The rebels put it there, I know, so that I can see it, though Vars insists they do not know where I am. My kind, cruel jailer—he pretends the fires were started by accident—lamps knocked over in panic, bed-curtains alight. I know better. They set the fires on purpose, this gleeful, jeering rabble, as they raised that rough painting outside my window. Rabble—a word my father would have used. I see his face on the painting. Though the colors are crude, the brushstrokes hasty, the artist is not without talent. The pigs in the foreground look healthy, like ripe peaches, the mint-green grass appears soaked with rain, and the children seated nearby gnaw their maize with obvious delight. In the center, a peasant youth in a blue robe dances in a mire that is meant to represent grapes, or perhaps blood, with a girl, also in blue, on whose upright breasts and sunburnt calves the artist has expended considerable effort. How the rebels yelled as the painting went up, waving their wineskins! In the right-hand corner—the corner of law—the artist has painted my dead father. Dangling from a tree with his mouth open. His eyes bulge, but it is his face. Jasper. Hard. It is his face.
The Winged Histories Page 14