The new friend is called Dai Norla. The tall girl is Dai Kouranu, and the third is Dai Gersina. The refugee gives her name as Dai Fanlei. It is the first thing to come into her head, because of the apple in the footman’s mouth. She has named herself after apples, after high summer.
Her new friends are professional menders and turners of mattresses and pillows, they upholster chairs, they hang curtains and lay carpets. Their eyelids are slightly swollen, they all have the same dry cough; up close they smell faintly of red onions and bread. They want to know everything about Dai Fanlei: where she’s from, how many brothers and sisters she has, what she puts on her hair to make it grow. They laugh because Dai Kouranu once put egg on her hair and rinsed it with hot water, and then her hair was full of cooked egg!
“An omelet!” she exclaims, shaking the end of her plait with one hand.
Dai Fanlei laughs: a brittle sound. The others exchange glances.
She tells them that she is a schoolmaster’s daughter from Barbilnes. When the war came there, the schoolhouse was burnt down and her parents killed.
The others say: “Bastards, bastards.” They pat her shoulders and stroke her arms. They say it’s all right now, there’s a new Telkan on the throne. They ask where she’s staying; she says with an aunt, in the country. No, she tells them, it’s not too far to walk.
When the mattress is turned and dropped it falls with a thud and dust flies sparkling into the air.
Dai Fanlei helps turn the mattress. She’s stronger than she looks. The others approve of this. She makes nice stitches, too. When she pricks her fingers, she sucks them. She doesn’t get any blood on the cloth.
Dai Fanlei coughs. She is cold and dizzy. At noon Dai Norla gives her a heel of bread with a scrap of onion pressed into the center. And at the end of the day, after the housekeeper comes and inspects the mattresses, each of the young women is given seven droi.
The streets are dark and frozen. Dai Fanlei bids the others good-bye. She stops at the edge of the town to buy currant buns and raush. She has no bag, so she puts the raush in her stockings and carries the warm bread in her arms, as if nursing a calm, sweet-smelling child.
All the way up the hill, she weeps. The bread will taste of salt.
She is thinking of how her new friends cursed the name of Prince Andasya of Faluidhen. Already, they told her, young children are threatened that if they don’t go to bed, Green Dashye will come up the road in his coach of bone and catch them.
Look, there it is: Faluidhen.
That spring they went there together, all three children, but Siski had already been there several times before. She had even been there alone and she knew the inn where they stayed at Noi and how it was proper to leave, on the springy white pillow, a coin or two for the maid. From Noi it is not at all far, it seems so fast when you come down out of the hills and begin to see the orderly Nainish farms and the walls of the gardens, the great black fields where the gusts of wind come wetly bringing a smell of milk and the straight roads crossing each other, bordered by cornflowers. The villages are laid out like games of cards. Passing the Neidhvian you can see the keeper riding in his red cap. Then a gentle curve in the road and look, that gray roof, that’s the house. Light gleams in the windows of Grandmother’s hothouse.
In the antechamber one always eats bread and salt beneath the portrait of Uncle Virdan, and endures Aunt Karalei’s kisses and endearments. Dasya crunches the hard Nainish bread, wipes away the crumbs, and then shakes his handkerchief surreptitiously under the table.
Aunt Karalei advances with painted eyes. “My darling niece.” She has thick fingernails, rheumatism, a long necklace of greasy beryls, and heavy hair that keeps its blackness through the arts of a coiffeur who comes from Eiloki once a month, her only extravagance. Her round lips tremble, her fingers are red from being pricked with a needle. She leads Siski upstairs with a handsome silver lamp. Everywhere there are paintings, faetha, chairs ruminating in corners and unnecessary shelves where snuffboxes gleam like beetles. This is Faluidhen, all these cupboards and vases, these high doors. After her bath, wrapped up in a cream-colored towel, Siski unpacks the dressing gown that has come from Ashenlo without being used, folded in muslin and scented with orange water. For Aunt Mardith will certainly come in. And indeed, as Siski stands at the window in antique lace there is a soft knock at the door, and before she has spoken the tall old lady glides forward, reflecting the lilac light of dusk with her silks, her perfect teeth, and her spun-cotton hair.
“So lovely to have you with us my dear.” Her kiss delicate, a snowflake’s touch. Smoothly she closes the shutters and hides the view of the fields. “Once the lamps are lit one should always have the shutters closed.” She touches Siski’s hair, her shoulder. “Welcome home.”
For this, this great gray house, is home. “The home of your blood,” Aunt Mardith says, turning down the lamp. “You don’t need so much light to undress. Yes, the home of your blood,” she repeats, her figure copper-colored in the mirror that hangs on the door of the tall wardrobe. Her voice is very soft, almost melancholy. “Alas, we women are so seldom granted the joy of living at home. Unless we are very lucky, marriage takes us away, it scatters us. Why, just look what her marriage has done to your mother.”
She smiles, her lips pressed tight. “But I don’t want to be so grave on your first night.” She raises her hand, attempting a light and frivolous gesture. And her six pearl bracelets, fiercely white as if lying in their box and not against flesh, gleam with an almost martial elegance.
Grass in the garden already, transparent buds on the apple trees. And the crocuses, upright and golden, piercing the earth, give off a heat that melts the last of the snow. The wind is fresh and wet clouds race one another across the polished sky. Dasya leans against a tree, grasping a low bough with one hand. His shadow, falling across Siski’s red dress, is distinct from the shadows of bud and branch, separate, with its own character and weight. He holds up the book, his thumb across the fluttering page. Emerald skies and a storm in which your name strives for existence, far from the earth, here at the fountainhead of the clouds. That spring they read so much poetry. Tamundien, Karanis of Loi, Damios Beshaidi, verses out of the Vanathul. Dasya has come with books from his father’s library on the Isle, Siski with books she ordered from Ur-Amakir. O small bird, the spring rain presses hard on the kernel of your mouth/ and brings forth pastures of lavender, blue with song.
It rains. She lies on her back on a white wicker bench in the conservatory. His voice moves under the cadences of the patter on the glass roof, as he sits on the floor near her head, beneath the potted oleander whose pink blooms have the artificial shimmer of satin. Reading to her. Instead of his face she sees the gray glass above her splashed with rain, instead of his mouth pale crimson flowers. Only the drunken gardener, clashing shears and murmuring out of sight, disturbs the perfection of their solitude. For I am unhappy without you, lakes are dimmed by the absence of your eyes. An old poem, clumsy in rhythm, harsh with longing. She sees the stern poet sitting beside the lake in which a stone, when he throws it, sinks like a man whose beloved has gone away. That’s the way I’ll feel, she thinks. She says: “That’s the way I’ll feel when we leave.” She turns on her side to look at him, and his eye, unexpectedly close to hers, meets her with its darkness in which her face is reflected as in an obsidian mirror.
In the evenings, when the weather is fine, they walk down to the edge of the lake. Moving through the infinite variations of the twilight, at the maddeningly slow pace dictated by her grandmother’s frailty and good breeding, she feels herself part of a holiday procession. Sometimes, across the deep blue sky, a flock of swans is flung like droplets of milk. About the crimson lantern carried by Grandmother’s footman, myriad fascinated country moths stumble against each other, singeing their wings when they get inside the glass. The moon gleams high and faint: a tender moon, unlik
e the hard moon of the desert. Someday Siski will own this house, and she and Tav and Dasya will all come here in the spring when it is too dusty to be comfortable in their true home, Sarenha Haladli. Tav will sell Aunt Mardith’s castle of Rediloth when she inherits it and spend the money on horses, weapons, and dogs. “Let’s always keep these bushes.” Siski spreads her arms and presses herself deep in the dew-laden branches of the honeysuckle. She feels the silk of her frock being stained by moisture, feels the delicate sprays of candle-colored blossoms showering her with their dense perfume. Inside the house again she wears her shawl to cover the marks on her dress, and is seated on the couch with a glass of tea, when Dasya leans and plucks a leaf from her hair, bringing into the lamplight the bitter, humid luxuriance of the garden.
Dear old Nain. Suddenly there are harp notes from the corner where Aunt Karalei plucks the strings with her curved hands. Uncle Fenya, half asleep, grunts and taps his knee with his pipe. A threadbare hound rises and shuffles across the room. The tune is very simple. Grandmother nods her head and motions for the footman to bring her another tiny glass of los. Dasya stands and begins to sing. Siski did not know that he knew any Nainish songs. She does not know the song herself.
Aragu med hauven, hauven
ande linde o.
A song, she thinks, about mist, black geese, and firelight. A song about the smoke that rises from the little thatched houses buried up to the eaves in snow, where peasants are drinking. But no, when she asks Aunt Karalei, she learns that the song is about the musk deer that come to nibble the last of the cabbages in the winter gardens. The young girls set out milk for them in bowls. But one of the girls, as she stands at the window, sees a young man take the bowl of milk from her step and drink. Aragu med hauven, hauven/ ande linde o. Would you steal my milk, my milk/ and leave my deer to starve? The young girl scolds the stranger, but he doesn’t answer her, he only stares at her with eyes the color of wheat. And when she runs out to chase him away, he springs off toward the forest, leaving beautiful small hoof prints in the snow.
To bed, everyone must go to bed—for tomorrow is the ball.
“I’ll never get to sleep,” Siski whispers.
“I know,” says Dasya.
They stand in a drafty space between two staircases. Murky portraits glower from the wall.
“It’s nothing,” Dasya says. “It’s just a party.”
“It’s not, it’s a real ball, it’s my first ball.”
“But I’ll be there. I’ll take you for the first two dances.”
“Will you?”
“Three if you don’t mind.”
“But why should I mind?” she laughs.
The thought of dancing with Dasya carries her through the hours of preparation, the face painter coming to draw an orange rose on her brow, the battle with the hooks of her gown of apricot-colored silk, the crush in the doorway of the great ballroom of Faluidhen. The orchestra plays soft music; all the walls are hung with flowers. “Congratulations, my dear,” says Uncle Fenya, kissing her cheek. Her hand in his is limp and numb as if broken, and she forgets to return the congratulations although it is his birthday. Everything makes her start: a sudden burst of laughter behind her, from across the room the popping of a cork. Every time she moves, her arm brushes against the bouquet of starry clematis fastened in her sash.
Suddenly everyone is bustling, getting into line.
“Where’s your partner?” asks a dark-browed older lady.
“There, in red.”
“Don’t point, my dear. Come now, you’re on my left.”
Music, bold and lively, fills the room.
Her eyes are foggy with tears of excitement; she can barely make out his scarlet coat and the long gleam of his scabbard. Trying to move in step, she finds with horror that she has grown clumsy during the night. At last she grasps the spar of his hand.
“It’s just like Uncle Veda’s,” he says, smiling.
“No it isn’t, how can you say so? Watch my flowers!” she hisses, turning toward the wall. The measure changes smoothly, becoming more vigorous, and as she whirls her body remembers the steps, permitting her to forget them. She begins to look around her, taking pleasure in the music. By the arilantha she hopes it will never end. And during the klugh, when she opens her little fan with the gold tassel, she feels pleasantly dizzy, light-footed, walking on mist. She laughs. There is another girl with a painted rose on her brow and Siski embraces and kisses her, a complete stranger. Everyone must be happy, everyone. It is a ball. Behind the open windows, the tapestry of night.
“Come over here for a moment my child, sit down. Didn’t you hear me call? I want to introduce you to our neighbor, Lord Valmion.”
A small crimped face, fingers with swollen veins, a beard that looks dirty because of the threads of black remaining in its white.
“This is Firheia’s daughter.”
Siski squeezes the old gentleman’s hand, gazing on him with pity and affection. Everyone must be happy, even this relic in the shiny coat whose face expresses chronic ill-temper and pride. “Yes, it’s a sad thing to give up one’s daughters,” Grandmother sighs, dropping her eyes to conceal their triumphant glitter. “But there! My poor girls married well! It has nothing to do with me anymore, I’m just an old doll to be set up on a shelf.”
Slender, erect, dressed in mauve, with recently slaughtered rare orchids in her hair and tiny beads on the hem of her gown, Grandmother is as fresh as a girl of sixteen. Success has kept her that way, her callous spirit, the arrogance of her blood. Every one of the highly bred ladies who snubbed her in her youth now sends her a basket of flowers and fruit on the Feast of Plenty. Each day a heavy plateful of letters, cards, and little presents is carried in to her by a staggering lady-in-waiting. Utterly lazy, devoid of interests, she is never bored. She spends her days in the composition of notes that drip with sweetness and malice, and in the pursuit of the physical pleasure afforded her by heated baths, new varieties of perfume, and elegant clothes. Nothing has disturbed the shallow existence in which she splashes like a duck since her brief marriage, years ago, to a lord who conveniently died of a fever. The lacquer of her prettiness, unmarked by self-reflection, conceals as soul as shrewd as a jackdaw and as rapacious as a caiman.
“May I introduce you to my son?” rasps Lord Valmion. Siski looks up to see a tall man breathing through dilated nostrils. She already knows him; she’s seen him at her uncle’s hunting parties. Red Guldo of Dhon, a notorious brawler and breaker of furniture.
She rises, flustered, fighting the urge to giggle. He dances badly, hiding his awkwardness under stamps and misplaced shouts, and overwhelming her with the avid brilliance of his close-set eyes and the powerful, heated gusts of his winey breath. Spinning, she sees Dasya in the clutches of a strikingly tall and slender lady with clumps of powder in her hair. “Table,” he yells when she passes him again, and she laughs at the desperate strength with which he whips his partner in circles.
They meet at the table with their partners, under the potted orange trees. Wine overflows, staining the tablecloth pink. She laughs up into her partner’s face, pretending to be interested in the Bainish tam he has ordered for going to parties.
“Just for balls,” he says. “I’ll never use her for anything else.”
“Oh, how fine.”
“She’ll have red wheels and gold knobs all along the roof.”
“Oh, gold knobs! Did you hear that, Dasya? Gold knobs on the roof!”
“By my heart,” says Dasya, “gold knobs on the roof.”
Having got rid of Red Guldo, she falls laughing against her cousin’s shirt. Stars are falling, lights hang in her hair. People are talking loudly all around them as he takes her hand. “Come,” he says. The second arilantha.
How beautiful everything is! It will gleam in her memory afterward, this night, lik
e a pendant flashing at the end of a long chain, after a subtle poison has seeped into everything, a creeping weakness and fog she will recognize, many years later, as shame. Shame seeps into her bones, chilling her limbs, when Aunt Mardith takes her aside at the beginning of summer, in the gray parlor at Faluidhen where priceless porcelain statuettes stand solemn as generals along the mantelpiece. Siski perches on an armchair stuffed so full it seems to be holding its breath. Red plum trees shower scent through the open window. Aunt Mardith, seated upright on a bredis, touches her handkerchief to her lip. “A pleasant spring,” she says.
“Oh yes,” says Siski.
“I believe you particularly enjoyed the ball.”
“Oh, yes!”
Again Aunt Mardith pats her mouth with the handkerchief. Siski swings her foot, then stops. Aunt Mardith clears her throat. Her eyes are bright, unreadable. When she speaks again, her voice vibrates.
“You know, my child, that I have no gift for idle chatter. I am on firmer footing with the essentials. Let us turn to the essentials, then. I have observed—we have all observed, your grandmother, your uncle, and I—your great affection for your cousin.”
The room grows quiet. The figures on the mantel seem to be listening.
“Now,” says Aunt Mardith, with a chilly attempt at a laugh, “don’t look so alarmed, my child! I haven’t brought you in here in the middle of the day to give you a scolding—quite the opposite!”
She tucks her hands under the bredis and, with a series of small jerks, draws it closer to Siski’s chair. She reaches out to pat Siski’s knee—a gesture so out of character that Siski freezes, nails digging into her chair.
“I don’t intend to scold you, but to encourage you,” her aunt breathes. “You have had a decent enough education—you know that the marriage of first cousins is frowned upon—but you may not be properly familiar with the genealogy of the Telkans! I am sure you know how to recite Hernas the Shepherd, Beloved of Love, but the family tree of the Royal House is more tangled than that, I assure you! Rava, the Opaline Princess, married her cousin—did you know? And so did Thul the Heretic—the one the Laths are always bragging about! His first wife was his cousin through both Houses—exactly the way Andasya is with you. Her name was Arinoe. She died in childbirth, poor creature, and the infant too . . . but that need not concern us.”
The Winged Histories Page 25