No, she was not afraid. She held the lamp with the shutter almost closed while he buried the corpse in the wood, and she washed his clothes and wrung them out, and the shirtfront which would not come clean she quickly replaced with one she sewed herself the next afternoon, before the servants had noticed its absence. And she never asked him about the corpse, not once. He flexed his hand which he claimed to have bruised when his carriage rolled into a ditch, and said to her: “A hot temper is a terrible thing my dear. But there, he won’t be missed. And now I can turn that water into the bean field.”
That was the willfulness, the spirit that changed the fortunes of Faluidhen, transforming it from the musty seat of an intellectual family into the frosty, formidable estate, respected throughout the empire, from which Mardith would negotiate her nieces’ brilliant marriages. Uncle Virdan attempted such a move: he sent his nephew Brola to Velvalinhu, bullied him into befriending the young Prince Eirlo, and tried to secure Princess Beilan for him. But the war in Kestenya was too recent, and the princess married Uskar of Tevlas. Alas, Uncle Virdan did not live to see the fulfillment of his hopes. When Mardith was thirty and he only fifty-five, a fit of apoplexy struck him on his way to the mill, and he died in the house of a peasant where he had gone to beg for a cup of water. “First he was red and then he went yellow,” the peasant woman said, gazing down in awe at the master stretched out across her kitchen floor. Mardith fought her first battle with her mother over the funeral, which she knew that her uncle would have liked to keep simple and inexpensive. A battle she won. Her mother retired upstairs with a slam of her door, and the boxes of lilies, the hideous garlands of sentimental chrysanthemums, were returned to Eiloki posthaste. The niece was accused of not having loved her uncle, and smiled for the first time her signature distant smile.
But perhaps the smile was more bitter in those days, when she wore it with a fresh pain unseasoned by the philosophy of the years. No one, no one knows what she suffered during that dark, vertiginous time when chasms opened beneath each step of her undyed cotton slippers. And she has never spoken of it to a single soul. That is pride. Not for her the shut door, the consultations with doctors, the hysterical displays which, when she thinks of her mother’s final years, still rise in her memory to fill her mouth with gall. No. For there was the lawsuit with the Arheni to be settled, there was the wet nurse to be found for her sister’s second child, the rents to be collected, a drunken groom to be delivered to prison, the menus to be written for every meal. And so her mourning consisted only in giving up balls and brightly colored gowns, which had never been much to her taste in any case, and in weeping with both hands pressed tightly over her mouth to stifle sound in the dim and somber privacy of her bedroom. Her smile, which no one can look upon without a creeping awe, has been carved from her face by a cataract of tears. Her face was never to be the same. It would never inspire a sensual love, though people continued to call it beautiful. For years it remained as lifeless as a plate. And it only softened when her goal was achieved: when her niece Firvaud was seated on the throne, her niece Firheia a duchess, and her great-nephew and great-niece poised to seize the throne for the House of Faluidhen.
But oh, these children—careless—spoilt! Andasya, she supposes, will have to be hanged—he who would have been the first Nainish Telkan. The thought of him is like ground glass in her heart. Tavis will be hanged as well, like the soldier she is—a loss that is easier to bear. And then there is Siski, the eldest daughter of Faluidhen, by all accounts a stupid flirt, who might have been the next Teldaire, who might yet be persuaded to marry well. Lady Mardith takes up her pen again. My dear Siski. The lives of women are very hard.
My dear Siski. You are no doubt as shocked as I am by recent developments. We must pull together, my child, if we are to keep Faluidhen afloat!
My dear Siski. Where have I failed?
Siski. I write to you because you appear to be the least hopeless of a generation of fools.
A pool of crushed paper gathers about her feet.
Siski. I am ashamed of you all!
My dear Siski. Imagine the life of an artist. Imagine she works on a single painting for half a century. And now imagine a child tears it with a razor.
Something strikes the window: a soft blow like a gloved hand. Mardith looks up. She is startled by her own face in the pane. It’s nothing, she thinks. An owl has brushed the shutters. She dips her pen in the ink. Faluidhen Faluidhen echoes in her heart. There is war in Kestenya: her niece Firheia, that fresh little girl with the laughing eyes, may be dead. Firvaud is addicted to milim, Andasya and Tavis lost. She presses her elegant pen down hard, her fingertips almost white. Siski you will not defy me you will come.
A tear on her knuckle.
How do we know? Why, because we were at the window, peering through the slit between the shutters.
Siski you children are all the same. Siski your duty. Siski your failure.
Siski the lives of women.
Dear Siski. Forgive me.
Book Four
The History of Flight
My heart is white with love.
1. The Land of Bells
The young woman arrives in the town at the time called “the tip of winter’s beard.” The air is raw, the streets piled with dirty snow. She is not the only one to arrive. Others have been coming for nearly four months, driven or frightened out of their homes to the north and east. They still come, but not so many, and the townspeople say this is a blessing. They say: “The war is over.” They say: “The new Telkan will set all to rights.” The young woman arrives as part of the last, small wave of refugees that the people of the town would like to see quickly swept away.
The refugees congregate in the square, underneath the new sign that forbids loitering. Some pace in circles, others sit down on the temple steps. They muddy the fountain. The women call for their children, they walk about clutching their hair in both hands. No one knows where to go.
The young woman goes to the square with the others.
She wants to find work. She thinks she could work as a governess. She knows how to write and sing.
No one knows how to find that kind of work.
She leaves the square. She follows the smell of coffee to the back of a café. She hopes for a strip of kebma, a bone with some meat still on it, but she sees at once that she has no chance: there are too many others there.
She walks through the town. She walks and walks. It’s a quiet Nainish town by the sea, and the odor of herring hangs everywhere. The town’s good fortune is its fishing industry, its ill fortune is its position here, at the edge of the land, where the refugees stop because they can go no farther.
The young woman passes a lamplighter armed against night with his ladder and light.
She sees a young woman about her age leaving the back door of a house. She follows her without knowing why: because the stranger has a kind, nervous face, because she walks purposefully, because of hunger, because of the cold.
The young Nainish woman stops. She tells the refugee woman that she works as a filler of mattresses. She’s not from the town, she’s from a village three miles away. She takes pity on the refugee. She gives her a stick of raush and the address of a place she should go tomorrow morning.
The refugee woman thanks her.
The two part ways. The Nainish woman is going home to her village. The other young woman is not going home. She leaves the town, she walks northward through the snow, up into the hills. On the way she eats half of the stick of raush.
She walks so far, making her way by starlight. When the way grows steep, she crawls.
At last she arrives at the great stone edifice. Long ago it was a temple, then for a time it was a barracks, now it stands empty. Almost empty. She goes inside.
He is lying where she left him, wrapped in his cloak. The fire has sunk a
nd she builds it up again, adding sticks from her store against the wall. Dear small warmth. The light plays on his face. She crouches down beside his makeshift bed and gives him the piece of raush.
He eats. It’s hard for him to chew. He weeps. He says: “You shouldn’t have come back.”
The young woman is silent. She holds her hands to the fire. Her hands throb painfully, and through the pain and through the brilliance of the firelight she can see her former life.
Into the distance, into Kestenya, into the land of bells.
When they were small they used to go to Sarenha every autumn. The nights came swiftly, filled with shooting stars. Each well had its own particular taste. The well at Sarenha is known as the Well of the Black Ewe. It lies in the garden among the vines, visible from the terrace. The feredhai come up the path with their skin buckets, they are noontide people, sundark and mapless, singing the Song of Lo. The buckets sing too, going down into the well. When they rise again the note is lower, replete, a round and delightful music. She leans on the balustrade watching them through the trees. We’ll go with them someday, we’ll walk in the desert, wearing out our shoes. It will be easy. Look at them, they just go down the path and through the gate. Then they keep going on from there. They walk as far as Eilam, as far as Bron, as far as the mountains where they hide their cattle in gorges filled with mist. And we’ll go too. Yes, but now there are noises from the kitchen and the odor of smoke, and Nenya dishing out platters of sticky rice. Each with its knob of onions, meat, and sauce. It’s called the topknot. Siski seizes it in her fingers, dripping oil.
Dasya hides his mouth in his sleeve, his eyes moist with laughter. Tiny bells adorn his plaited hair. Let’s go up on the roof. Let’s go up to the old observatory. Let’s climb the trees in the orchard. Let’s hunt owls. Silence and mystery of the rooftop at night beneath an autumn moon, breathless immobility of the orchard. She dances among the fallen leaves, churning them with her boots. From the branches comes her sister’s fierce owl call.
It’s no use, Siski has frightened the owls away. Let’s go in, it’s getting cold. The lamp is as tall as an effigy for the Feast of Angels. Placed on the floor it illuminates the whole room. Dasya sits cross-legged, his head bent slightly, tuning the limike. Tav lies on her back and drums her feet against the wall beneath the painting Night at the Inn of the Heartless Dove. Siski turns a page of her book. She raises her head when the notes come softly, softly, like a wing against the window. Dasya’s fingers are bright in the light of the lamp and she can see the scar where he gashed his hand on a tree playing rings-and-arrows. He is not singing but when Siski sings he glances up and smiles. O illustrious city, opal of the sands. She sings of the white stone streets and beautiful horses though she knows that Tevlas is really a city of smoke-stained walls and trees choked by the dust. For a moment the other Tevlas, the Tevlas of song, is called up by the music and opens its quivering doorways in the air.
The house is old, neglected, full of decrepit pieces of furniture and paintings rejected by even the humblest members of the family. The children blow the dust from the portrait of Hafyan of Bron in the formal parlor, revealing colors that owe their freshness to an austere climate. Hafyan exhibits the firm tanned cheeks of a sportsman, an epicure’s paunch, and the lazy, smiling eyes of the recently ennobled. It was he who built this house at the edge of the sands when he was made a baron by Vaud the Dreamer for his services to the Olondrian Empire. And merry, glittering kebma parties were held in this great dark room, the ladies wearing fronds of the sabior plant in their hair. Hafyan terrified them with tales of feredha witchcraft, of which he had made a long study, his teeth clenching the stem of his olive-wood pipe. It is said that he bathed in warm mint tea to soothe a troubled liver and that he could not bear to look at a man whose mustache was not trimmed well. A lifelong bachelor, he was devoted to his bildiri hunting master, and died with him in an avalanche in the Tavroun.
Once his angel appeared to Dasya here in the formal parlor: Dasya said he looked like a shadow filled with moonlight. “Uncle Hafyan!” Dasya cried, and the angel nodded sadly twice before disappearing, leaving behind an odor of caramelized onions. Thinking that his grave must be untidy, Dasya asked Nenya where it was. “Him!” said Nenya. “His bones are mixed with those of his horse.” And that was how the children learned of the avalanche that had swept Uncle Hafyan’s hunting party down the side of Spring Mountain.
A distant rumble as of thunder out of the hard blue sky. A ptarmigan shoots suddenly over the cliff. Uncle Hafyan looks up, and then the light banter, the goose-feather hats, the insouciance are snuffed out by the snow. A moment later a dreadful silence reigns. And down at Sarenha the overstuffed chairs, as if knowing they are soon to be abandoned, split their seams for grief, and the mirrors give back images in a tumbling disorder, panicked by a rumor of death.
Even now the big parlor seems distressed. A hundred years have not sufficed to erase the memory of grander days, and the children prefer the informal parlor upstairs, the “Kestenyi parlor” which, never having known opulence, seems undisturbed by the passage of time. Here embroidered cushions line the walls, perfect for collapsing on after a day of riding on the plateau, and the shelves are stacked with curious old books, including some big illustrated ones on the geography and plant life of the desert. Siski lies on her stomach and reads about the karhula flower “whose whiteness fills the traveler with melancholy thoughts.” The watercolor plates are faded, and when she turns the page a pair of silverfish go scuttling toward the dark.
“I want to stay here forever,” says Tav. “Don’t be silly,” Siski tells her, “you’d miss Mother.” But Siski too would like to stay in that crumbling palace, to play for the rest of her life in the spacious avla where light and leaves and birds come through the broken panes in the colored dome. Forever would not be long enough to live at Sarenha Haladli, to trap the owls and desert hares that come to hide in the orchard, to ride out onto the chalk plateau and sleep in the big old upper rooms where the shutters creak and the beds are covered with furs.
In the evening, after her bath, Siski wants to see Tuik. She goes outside in her slippers and runs along the little path to the stable. She can hear the horses moving in the dark. Tuikye. Darling Tuik. His breath in her face with its odor of new snow.
Tuik in daylight.
He is the color of day and of the desert. He has no equal between Ashenlo and Bron. She thinks he has no equal anywhere. His eyes, his elegant foot, his powerful shoulders, the way he holds his head. He moves as lightly and gracefully as a hawk and he is strong for their long rides and has no fear of waterless places. His trust in her is absolute and this is where he shows his worth, in his perfect docility, faithfulness, and courage. He loves the plateau because his mistress loves it, though in dreams his heart may linger in gardens burgeoning with fruit. Horses have dreams, for they are the only animals to possess souls, and this is why they are buried in cemeteries like men. She thinks that someday she will be buried in the same grave as Tuik, like the prince who owned the great horse Unsaur the Wind. She has told Tav and Dasya, so that if anything should happen to her, they will tell her parents how it should be done.
Wind, silence, the openness of the desert. Sometimes she lets the others ride Tuik, and whoever rides him wins the race. Then, astride the restive Na Faso or the pony Nusha, she is overcome by jealousy and rage. “Get down!” she snaps. And Tav, riding the horse in circles, whooping with triumph, senses her irritation and grins at her. When Tav has dismounted, Tuik comes trotting toward Siski over the sand, contrite, and pushes her gently with his nose. Still he cannot forget his victory, and his eye, reflecting the dancing light, seems to say proudly: I could not lose, even for you. She flings her arms about his neck. Astride him she feels she is riding through the sky. She sings him all the songs the feredhai sing to horses. Love, swift dancer, companion of my heart, I bring thee water carried for twenty thousand miles
in these two hands. Beloved the color of almonds. When the dew is on the mountains. Ah, would that I had died before my Sarya.
Beloved the color of almonds. When they ride on the great plateau they pass feredhai who always stop to look at Tuik. Siski keeps her head high like a feredha girl while her heart beats faster. Coming abreast of the strangers she turns her head. The men nod and she nods. Once she grows frightened and clutches at Tuik’s mane, for one of the men wears a mantle dyed red and printed with dark green leaves. She remembers that the man who sold them Tuik wore such a mantle, two years ago in the horse and camel market of Tevlas. Yes, a red mantle with green leaves. A tangled beard, tin rings on his fingers, exhaustion in his strange light-colored eyes. Tired, oppressed by the noise and smells of the market, she stands beside her father with her arms crossed and stares at the muddy ground.
“Siski, what do you think of that horse?”
“He’s beautiful,” she answers, gazing up at the marvelous golden creature cloaked in a dirty blanket. The young horse moving restlessly, worn out by the noise and ceaseless crowds, like her. His master has not even combed the tras-seeds from his tail. She looks away, yawns, wishes she was at home with her mother. Not to go back to the chill and the boredom of the Ducal Residence. Silent meals with her father, the strain of being alone with him, and then the ghastly bedroom crammed with satin flowers. Suddenly money changes hands and her father says: “He’s yours.” She stands with her mouth open, gripping the halter in numb fingers. The incomprehensible actions of her father. “Well,” says the man in the scarlet mantle, regarding her bitterly. “Thank him, little princess.”
The Winged Histories Page 23