The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

  Geography.

  Nothing distant, not the grottoes of Ethendria or the blue paradise of gentian-covered hills, but a tree-lined street in the harbor district of Bain. Discreet, yet determined, I shadow the steps of a young priest of Heth Kuidva who walks with his wife on his arm. He wears the gray robe of his order, tied with a belt of braided leather instead of the keilon—an off-duty priest, a priest on holiday. And there is a holiday air to the crimson cap, decorated with faience beads, that sits jauntily atop his wife’s brown hair. It has rained recently; a watery sun peers hesitantly through the catalpas, and the priest tugs his wife’s arm to keep her from walking directly under the branches, because drops of water are shining on them and sometimes falling off, and it would not do for her to get wet in her condition. Sometimes, in his efforts to maneuver her around café tables and people rushing in the opposite direction (in Bain people always rush, they never just walk, something the couple has discussed many times), he pulls her sideways so unexpectedly that she stumbles, and he gives her a glance of wide-eyed alarm, for it is well known that the ankles of pregnant women are exceedingly unsound. And Tenais, who is not at all vain (he was drawn to her, when he saw her serving a meal to the poor at the temple, by her uneven dress, one sleeve rolled up, one down), nevertheless insisted on wearing for this outing to the harbor a pair of Dueman shoes with scarlet heels. Her swollen feet are obviously suffering in these shoes, but she smiles at her husband and gives his arm a reassuring squeeze. Still, he is annoyed at her choice of footwear, which is keeping him from enjoying their walk . . . at the corner, he will refuse to buy her an ice . . .

  Lies. The truth is, Bain is on fire. The spice markets have gone up in a plume of incense. The trees crackle in the heat.

  The truth is, I don’t know if my parents ever went on an outing to the harbor. I have had to imagine everything of importance: the coal cellar and the stolen nuts, the horns of the Telkan’s riding party, and yes, even the iconic, the inimitable pink peppercorn tree. I have breathed on shadows, as one breathes into a soap bubble, to give it breadth and life. I did it because I had to, because human beings cannot live without history, and I have no history or tradition that is not located in a pale, aggressive body lying in the dirt, or hanging from a tree. How cruel it is to live in a community of two. I used to crouch on the floor, with my bedroom door open a crack so that I could peer out, and watch the lamplight on his motionless shoulders as he read, just to feel that another person was alive. I stole his papers in order to feel that I was not alone. I went through his cabinet. (I found nothing there but pencils, lamp oil, and thread.) I read all his books and tried, in my clumsy way, to debate them with him. What is the difference between a genius and a monster?

  The truth is I know nothing. Perhaps he led a completely different life. Perhaps there was even a secret lover (Redis? I ask myself). Our relationship was so distant, barely perceptible except when we were jolted into intimacy by a quarrel or an illness. His tenderness over my toothache, astonishing. He brought me a glass of almond milk. How I struggled not to cry. And when he approved of my translations he’d raise his eyebrows: “Well!” My happiest moments were those in which he was talking to me.

  If Ura, the Bloody Imp, was right, and suffering causes lumps to form in the heart, then surely suffering is the geography of the body. I have tried to reconstruct the inner geography of a visionary by imagining how those lumps, those hills, were raised. Dear gods, the powers of children are terrible! A child can conjure a universe from the feel of a worn glove. A child like the one I was, given only a hand-mirror and a cold figure in a black robe, will make a family saga: Ivrom and Tenais.

  Such delicate history. Blow on it and it flies away like soot.

  It is the second day of Avere, the Month of Rain. On this day, in an earlier time, the Telkan’s beard was scented and dyed blue for his meeting with the Master of the Galleries. The Teldaire inspected her ladies-in-waiting, who were expected to exhibit immaculate stockings. The heels were examined with particular care. A dirty or threadbare heel sentenced its wearer to two years in the kitchens. But this is not that story anymore.

  This is no story I have ever read. On the paper before me, in turquoise ink:

  Dear Tialon,

  I suspect you have never heard my name: Lerel of Bain. I am your father’s cousin. My mother—Fadroe of Bain, dead now twenty years—was your father’s aunt, and used to host him here at our house when he was a boy. I make a point of writing to your father, and to you, every year on the Feast of Lamps, when, as the poet says, all debts are forgiven. I am sorry to say I have never received a reply—though you must know this. I write again now in the hope of receiving some news of you and your father. We are all concerned for your safety—dreadful rumors come from the Isle, and here in the capital there have been attacks on your father’s followers. I might as well tell you that we are all old-fashioned devotees of Avalei here, but even Fanlewas admitted that blood flows farther than language! If you would allow us to receive you, we should be honored! I have always felt it was wrong for us to be so estranged, not to know each other at all. Your mother’s family, too, wishes to reach you. I am sending their letter with mine. Like me, they write to you every year . . .

  In the second letter:

  Dear Tialon,

  This is your cousin Bron of Kasanhu I am of the Tetherin branch of the family. Your mother and mine are cousins. Forgive me if I do not write well we are not very lettered here certainly not like your mother’s branch in Bain. But perhaps you will remember me from the funeral of your grandfather. I took you into the barn to look at the cows. I am writing now to say if you wish to stay with us we will have you. I think you cannot stay on the Isle anymore . . .

  To think that my father kept such letters from reaching me. For years.

  For in a field you have found a hidden treasure.

  I searched his papers so often, yet I never found letters like these. He must have requested that they be destroyed on arrival. Such cruel, absolute integrity. He would not read a word. He would not even poison his mind with the address above the seal. And his daughter was in her bedroom drawing pictures of herself at tables, in carriages, in cozy rooms, in the garden of an aunt. And she would have given anything for such a letter. She would have raised the paper to her face, as she does now, and breathed in its fugitive scent.

  The light is fading. I must work quickly. I crawl around the floor like a child at a game, cutting a sheet to make a skirt. It is white, and I have only black thread. I will look terribly strange, like some deranged ragpicker, but at least it is appropriate for me to put on mourning. I’ll stitch the white skirt over my black and transform myself from a Stone worshiper into—what? The thought of it makes me wheeze with laughter. I bite my lip to stop the sound, it doesn’t seem right, not now when I am surrounded by dangers. Wind shakes the windowpanes; somewhere it’s whipping the sea. Perhaps I won’t be able to find a boat. Perhaps I’ll run into the duke’s warships and be struck with a flaming arrow. The towers are all aflame and I, I skim the air between them, defiant in my feathers of burnt lace. In the Seventy-Fifth Elegy, Fanleshama’s owl remains loyal to Velvalinhu, it refuses to leave the place where its life is turning to ashes, but I will not, I am making myself the costume of a humbler, shrewder creature, a piebald crow. At last I am telling myself to run.

  From Our Common History

  In the Valley, the peasant revolt is crushed by noblemen on horseback. And Veda of Bain, who never wished to lead, who already seemed an old bachelor at the age of thirty, when the death of his uncle made him Duke of Bain—Veda retakes the Isle. By the time he has regained control of the capital, organized a sea-going force, and traveled to Velvalinhu, the usurping prince is nowhere to be found. The tatters of the rebel army shiver among the palisades. The sea glints like the flat of a sword.

  The rebels surrender. Deprived of their leaders, Lady Tavi
s and Prince Andasya, they shed their plumage of weapons like birds in molt. They are boys, just boys, some from the Valley, others from Kestenya, all of them dazed as if torn out of a dream. The duke speaks with the Kestenyis in their own language. “Spare us, sud,” they say. The duke’s heart swells. All its fences are broken. He remembers riding with boys like these in the hills around Ashenlo: perhaps the fathers of these very boys, these “rebels.”

  The boys from the Valley kneel and press their foreheads to the ground. “Rise,” he says. They tell him they did everything for Avalei. “Well,” he tells them, “congratulate yourselves. Olondria belongs to the goddess again. The Cult of the Stone is dead.”

  Dead. Like its priest, slain by the rebels. Like the duke’s brother, Ahadrom II, who hanged himself in the Tower of Lapis Lazuli. “We didn’t know what to do,” says Vars, a hollow-eyed youth whom the others regard as their leader. “We just cut him down and buried him in the park.”

  Oh, Andasya, thinks the duke. You have killed your father.

  To Vars he says: “Where is the prince?”

  “Gone,” the man answers. His eyes so bleak. A sob caught in his throat. “They . . . flew.”

  “What?”

  “They flew on an ilok. They’re gone . . .”

  “An ilok?”

  The duke stands stunned. It’s like something out of a legend: a saddlebird. Legendary, not because it no longer exists, but because its ancient role has been forgotten for so long it has come to seem preposterous, impossible. He remembers, of course, peering into the bird garden on childhood visits to the Isle, nose buried in the crook of his arm against the stench. Irilas threatened to throw him down there once. “They’d gut you like a hare.” He remembers their scaly necks, rubbed raw by the chains.

  They flew away eastward, the rebels say. “Over there.” Waving exhausted hands toward the Tower of Aloes. Beyond that looms the Tower of Pomegranates, where the Teldaire stays in her rooms, as if her son still kept her a prisoner; and beyond that lies the sea. “We must search for Andasya and Tavis,” says the duke’s cousin Hinro, incensed (but clean, at least; one of the unlucky ones, he spent a month in the dungeons, and emerged, as he said himself, stewed in his reek like a pheasant in jelly), “and when we find them, they must be publicly hanged.”

  The duke smiles.

  “We must make an example of all these rebels,” Hinro insists.

  But the duke has already begun to let them go. Those who wish to leave—mostly Kestenyi boys—are setting out on the remaining ships and barges, prows turned eastward. Others stay, and he is grateful: he needs them for the rebuilding effort. He needs carpenters and stonemasons, especially for the ruined libraries. He needs scribes to mend whatever can be salvaged from the wreck. He needs gardeners, blacksmiths, glaziers. He needs nurses.

  Peace on the Isle. Peace under Veda of Bain. There is a general cry: Veda for our king!

  The duke writes to his brother Irilas in his sprawling hand (he has never been good at letters): “For the love of life I did not even want to be duke but if it means a lasting peace of course I am willing and then I’m a better choice than Hinro with his gambling what do you think?”

  A woman is brought to see him: the dead priest’s daughter. Tall, with a face like beaten bronze. His men apprehended her near the Outer Harbor. She carries only a writing box and umbrella, and wears an ash-streaked cloak and a wrinkled, dull white skirt. Her face is pinched with hunger and something else—excitement or terror. He expects her to ask him for the Stone, and prepares himself to tell her regretfully that she cannot have it, that it has been placed in the shrine called the Girdle of Avalei, deep inside a hill at the edge of the Telkan’s deer park. But she does not ask for the Stone. She asks only for passage to Bain. “Of course,” he says, surprised. She seems to care nothing for her father’s legacy. His assent to her request goes through her like lightning—when he gives her a letter of passage, she seizes it and rushes from the room, her umbrella clacking.

  She is right, he thinks, to distance herself from her father’s cult. For a true Stone worshiper, Olondria has little to offer. Peace has come to the cities and the libraries no longer burn, but the Valley remains in the grip of a frenzied love for the goddess. Caramel pigs and ostentatious charm jewelry everywhere. People are calling the revolt “Avalei’s Revenge.” They say the Priest of the Stone called down her wrath. A popular song describes, in gruesome detail, his torments in the afterlife.

  Others say the goddess was never threatened by the old raven. They say it is Olondria’s destiny to be shattered. Kestenya broken off now, floating, lost. They say: “Remember the War of the Tongues.” They call Andasya “the Dreved Prince.”

  Alone in the room he has commandeered—formerly a scribe’s office—Veda puts his head down on the desk. Why could you not wait? he asks in his mind. Dasya, why could you not wait? Where are you? Where are the girls?

  He closes his eyes. He’ll rest them for just a moment, he assures himself. He is instantly asleep.

  When he wakes, he will have to read reports from Nain, where scattered fighting continues between the loyalists and the few but passionate Nainish separatists. He will have to pay his respects to the queen in the Tower of Pomegranates, where she will stare at him unseeing, the line between her lips dark with milim. For now, he dreams of Kestenya. He is riding in the mountains through clear air, and his heart is light, so light. Then he sees a wagon full of children teetering on a cliff. He rushes to save them. He will be too late.

  And far away, to the north and east, where winter clings to the air, a vast shape descends toward the roof of a ruined temple. It lands hard, talons in snow. Two figures slip and fall from its back. One staggers to its feet. The other lies still.

  A third figure slides down from the creature’s back, more expertly, never letting go of the chain on its long curved neck, and loops the chain around a fallen statue. The great bird shakes itself, then lets loose a deep, mournful, piercing cry.

  Both of the standing figures cringe at the sound of that harsh lament. They face one another in the low radiance of an early winter dusk. It is clear that they are siblings: the same emphatic brows, the same skin. Sisters, in another life. Siski and Tav.

  One moment. A sob. And Siski throws herself into her sister’s arms.

  “Hush, hush,” says Tav, stroking Siski’s hair. “Hush, you’ll be all right here. Nobody lives here now. Listen, hush, you’ll like this: this is where I went to school.”

  Siski pulls back, startled. “Here?”

  Tav nods.

  “But that’s awful!” Siski cries, looking about the broad roof in dismay. In places, cracks show under a coating of snow.

  “I know,” says Tav. And suddenly they are laughing, with a rare and intimate abandon. They laugh the way siblings laugh, or people who have been friends since childhood. “Dear,” Tav says to Siski in Kestenyi. Murye. She calls her sister her lamp and her little foal. “You won’t come with me?”

  “No,” says Siski. “No. We’ll stay here. This is perfect.”

  They both look down at their cousin, who lies unconscious. His face so pale.

  “I’ll take care of him,” says Siski. “I know how.”

  Tav presses her lips together and nods briefly. “We’d better get him inside. I’ll help you before I go. And you’ve got to have some sort of fire.”

  Her sudden withdrawal, her curtness, is born of grief, Siski knows. She does not argue. How wonderful to exist in such effortless harmony. Taking their cousin down into the temple, arranging him on a couch, breaking apart a closet door to use as kindling. Why now? Why so late? Why in such terrible circumstances? It’s as if they’ve never quarreled in their lives. When they have finished, Siski accompanies her sister back up to the roof, where the ilok turns its head toward them with a moan.

  “Look at it,
” Siski says, shivering. “It’s like we’re living the Vanathul. Riding the ‘winter beast.’ You remember that?”

  Tav nods. The moon has risen; its light gilds her face. “I’ll tell you the truth. I never thought I’d ride it at all.”

  She keeps her eyes on the ilok as she speaks. “I wasn’t planning to ride it, at first. I simply climbed down there to die. Into the saddlebirds’ garden. I thought they’d kill me. It seemed a fitting death. But they didn’t. And this one came and rubbed her head against my hand.”