The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

  5. Seven Years in the West

  Here is what will happen.

  He will grow more and more sensitive. It will become impossible for him to wear clothes. He will grow thin, his body hot to the touch. The unnatural heat will be most intense in his back, where the wings are sprouting.

  He will have to lie on his stomach because of the pain.

  This is when he is at his most vulnerable. It might even be possible to kill him with hot wax. “During this phase, which is known as skadri,” the book advises, “the hot wax method ought to be attempted, if at all possible.”

  Kernis writes: “The wax melted the flesh as if it had been fat upon the fire; in an instant we saw the creature’s bones.”

  She further advises that those who administer wax should wear some sort of protection, perhaps armor, to guard against the creature’s saliva. “For the monster writhed most hideously, and spat great gobs of the thickened spittle called urum, which is produced in preparation for the state of thaus. This heavy white stuff, of the consistency of heated gum, fell upon the leg of our scribe Eivani, who broke out in painful pustules.”

  More and more urum will fill his mouth. His lips will be gummed shut. They will turn dark blue. The state of skadri lasts seven days.

  Then comes thaus, “cocoon” in the ancient tongue. He will be able to open his mouth again, in order to pour forth urum.

  “Thus, like the silk moth, the creature prepares its nest.”

  After thaus he will be a full Dreved. His wings will burst the cocoon, indigo-dark, almost black. His eyes will be dark, without whites. “Nevertheless the creature’s expression is one of abominable pathos.”

  A Dreved. He will no longer have teeth. Instead, his open mouth will reveal long vertical lines of blue, like the baleen of a whale. These are called surudin. Pressed against flesh, they cause the blood to flow with a marvelous and fatal copiousness.

  “The Dreved’s first victim is usually the first human being in sight.”

  He lies on his stomach. He can no longer speak. He weeps. His own tears cause him pain, they scald his flesh. He is an angel pinned to his couch and weeping.

  “Hush,” she tells him. “Hush.”

  She still can’t think about the future: this terror soaring toward her on dark wings.

  Instead she descends in memory. All that time, and so much of it wasted!

  Time, she thinks. And the mysteries of the body.

  Winter in the Balinfeil. The carriage moves at a crawl on the snowy road. At Noi, it is necessary to change from a wheeled coach to a sleigh. The coachman lifts Siski’s trunk into the back. “A rough time of year for travel, my lady.” He sings as they glide down the road, his voice muffled in his scarf.

  We got lost seven times on the way to Noi.

  The icy winter was combing its beard.

  We asked the way at an old footbridge,

  and the drunk said, “Stars are falling.”

  Stars are falling along the road

  that leads seventy times to Noi.

  Alas my heart, it’s snowing in Mendas,

  great flakes of silver droi.

  The carriage creaks as it goes down into the fog. It rumbles past Faluidhen and continues to the great, gloomy castle of Rediloth. This is Aunt Mardith’s private house. One day it will be Siski’s. Rooks skim the towers in the wintry air.

  She has come here for her health, everyone says.

  The coachman gets out to unlatch the gate. Icicles burst as it opens. In the courtyard, he takes down the trunk. “Come now!” he cries, glancing at Siski, who shivers by the door. “You’re young, my lady. It can’t be as bad as all that.”

  The little maidservant opens the door, her worn hands red and dripping from wringing out sheets. Straining, she maneuvers Siski’s trunk into the hall. Weeping stones, an odor of soured potatoes, on the wall a single taper glowering in an iron bracket. The cold is elemental, penetrating, persistent as a curse. And here is Aunt Mardith, gliding out of the darkness in pale gray. Pearls on her fingers and at her throat, a pearly radiance in her hair. Her face quiescent, timeless, beyond age.

  “Welcome, my dear.”

  She leads the way to the central hall, which she calls her parlor. Untenanted chairs face one another in the dark. The exertions of the maid raise a blaze on the massive, blackened hearth, calling four soft-padding dogs out of the corners. Aunt Mardith keeps dogs because they eat leftover food, and she does not like spoiling her servants. And so these imprisoned greyhounds, these Nualeithi hunters, serve no purpose but to prevent little Anilon with her bark-shod feet from taking home a gnawed joint in her pinafore.

  “Thank you, Anilon, that is all. Siski, give her your cloak.” But Siski shakes her head, refusing to give up her mantle. The maidservant scurries out, and Siski and her aunt sit on two of the straight-backed chairs before the fire.

  “You’re shivering, dear. You may draw closer.”

  But even if she hurls herself into the blazing logs it will not warm her; she will burn alive before she finds any comfort in this house. Already her cheeks are scorched by the heat but her bones are cold, cold, her teeth chattering, while Aunt Mardith sits in a portrait-like repose. Her pearls reflect the firelight. “It’s your Kestenyi blood,” she says. “I’m sure you’ll grow accustomed to Nainish weather in time.” In the darkness of the invisible walls the bolted shutters emit soft groans beneath the incessant punishment of the wind.

  When tea is brought in they move to the table. The porcelain lamp is lit. Siski resists the urge to warm her hands at its glow. Aunt Mardith does not speak until the servant is gone and the great doors have boomed shut. Then she says: “You may pour.”

  The cinnamon-colored tea trembles in the glasses. There are diced hazelnuts and miserly biscuits dusted with icing sugar. “I have lived for this House,” Aunt Mardith says. “I have been vigilant and tireless on its behalf. How have I failed?

  “The fact that you do not answer,” she continues after a moment, “means, I suppose, that you are not unaware of my meaning. You know that your sister is lost to us. Lost. Her name has been published in the newspapers. To us, she is in the tomb.”

  She lifts a biscuit to her lips and sets it down again without taking a bite. Her expression is so mild, so controlled, that Siski thinks she must have imagined the quivering of her fingertips. “In your place I should be thinking of the future. There is no need to sneer—yes, I can read your face quite easily. Perhaps you see what Tavis has done as a sort of prank, a game. You think it will all be forgotten in a year or two. You are wrong. It will affect you terribly. You will carry this scandal about with you like an anvil on your back.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because of the rebellious spirit that provokes you to ask that question, my dear niece.”

  Aunt Mardith smiles, stirring her tea, which she drinks black and unsweetened, with a silver teaspoon embossed with greyhounds. “Because you are young and frivolous, you do not have a serious nature. Your mother was much more serious as a girl. Though she, alas, was not saved from making a most disastrous marriage.” She raises her glass to her lips, shaking her head. “I pray that better things are in store for you—you through whom the dignity of our House may one day be restored. Because, make no mistake, that dignity has suffered a dreadful blow. You stare—perhaps you don’t understand my meaning.”

  Her small fist on the tablecloth, her black and motionless eyes. “You don’t understand what it means for the heirs of this House to degrade themselves. To throw away the efforts of their predecessors. To expose themselves to pity and scorn, after everything that has been done to advance our position. No. You don’t understand. What it means for a woman like the Duchess of Duema, a nobody whose great-grandfather traded in tea and spices, to be able to shower us with her disgusting
compassion. She wrote to me. I will show you the letter. Perhaps then you will know what I mean.”

  “I don’t want to read your letters.”

  “Look at me,” says Aunt Mardith.

  Siski lifts her head. Her face throbs with heat in the lamplight.

  “We are Nains,” Aunt Mardith says. “You take your position for granted, you and your sister. You think it was easy to forge a link with the royal House. Your cousin was born at Velvalinhu!” She opens one frail hand in the air, incredulous. “Nainish blood has been mingled with that of the Telkans! But it doesn’t mean anything to you. You care for nothing but riding, parties, and defiance.”

  “You don’t know me,” Siski says.

  “Apparently not. But I intend to.”

  Aunt Mardith raises a wand and strikes the little copper gong on the table.

  “Anilon will show you your room. I have given you the white room, upstairs. In the afternoon it receives some natural light.”

  White, the color of mourning. White settees and footstools of hetha wood. A high bed with white curtains like a bier. Oh narrow casement, show me a village square. But there are only the gardens of Rediloth, neglected at any season, now covered with snow. Only a woman who never looks out of the window, or who draws some satisfaction from the destruction of harmless things, could leave the little fountain in such a state: the stone nymph broken and her head lying upside down against her plinth. Under a growing burden of snow this nymph becomes ever more shapeless and unreal. Soon she will be unrecognizable, and stand isolated, deprived of all significance, in that frozen waste where the evening deepens her almost unbearable solitude. The wall is too high to see over; its crenellations outreach the pines. And what would one see there? Nothing but snow and mist, the occasional tree. Perhaps, for a moment, the footprints of Anilon where she trudged home after serving kebma. And in the distance the white-capped ruin of the Garahu.

  But when storms come even Gara’s fortress disappears in the howling snow that batters the shutters and strains at the latch with hands of ice. Siski lies with the door of the high bed open, the long funereal curtains tied back to admit the firelight, and listens to the wind. Its sound as it screams about the ramparts is terrible, and she wakes toward morning jerked from sleep by an avalanche of hail. But almost more dreadful than the noise is the absolute silence that follows, a watchful stillness tinted blue by the snow. In that strange, unearthly light she feels herself in the kingdom of Aunt Mardith. Not, as at Faluidhen, in the empire she controls, but in her original home, a glacial haven of perpetual night where she retires like a she-wolf to its den. Aunt Mardith was born at Faluidhen. But here at Rediloth, which she inherited from her aunt the Princess Ailmali, in this cavernous fortress which had stood abandoned for fifty years, here she has made her true, her immutable home. At Rediloth, which in the Nainish tongue is the Castle of Giants. What giants lived here Siski does not know. But somewhere in one of these rooms Aunt Mardith, as powerful as any giantess, restores the white architecture of her hair. Somewhere she raises her fingers to the lobes of her slender ears, leaving in each a pearl as fair as a narwhal’s tusk. The little maid fastens the hooks of her gown. As Aunt Mardith rises, her bones, more sensitive than her ivory heart, utter a creak like a sigh of distress. Siski imagines with superstitious dread the lace-edged nightgown the maid puts away in a cabinet under the bed. No, Aunt Mardith must never undress, for under her gleaming clothes there can be nothing but whalebone, plaster dust, and string. No, she must never undress and never sleep. In the morning she has only to wind the little key cleverly concealed beneath her arm. And here she comes down the hall, the impeccable chatelaine of Rediloth and the monstrous puppet of her own desire.

  “Go out for a walk, my dear,” Aunt Mardith says. And Siski wanders among the morning-glory vines embalmed in frost. Why is it impossible to see beyond this whiteness, into life? Into the dawn of another life. She walks in the gardens, muffled in furs. Her lashes emerge from the softness, starred with cold or tears. Her footprints follow her everywhere she goes. Down the path between the lilac bushes, past the decimated tulip garden. To the high wall. To the wall. She cannot even reach it because of the snowdrifts, could never climb it. Perhaps, on the other side, life begins. A life that would allow her to abandon the past, as her sister has abandoned hers, running away to the north. Tav with her toy arrows. And Dasya with his. Dasya with. Her mind stops at him, like the heart of that dead robin in the snow. Two months have passed since that day in the hills and still she cannot cross the line he flung across her vision like a bolt across the sky. Instead she walks, for her health. She must grow stronger, Aunt Mardith says. She must not let herself down; too much depends on her body, on her womb. Aunt Mardith is not coarse enough to speak this way. Instead she says: “Society. You must prepare yourself to go back into society.” The idea, of course, is to marry well. Siski bends and scoops up a handful of snow. She touches it with her tongue. She rubs it into her cheeks. The chill, the taste of death. Later, when she enters the house, Aunt Mardith will comment approvingly on her glowing skin.

  For this is fate, this flesh. Spring comes, even to Rediloth. One morning Siski finds a stack of magazines beside her plate. The Starling, the Watcher, the Waxing Moon. Aunt Mardith smiles at her across the table. “Open them, dear. It doesn’t do to be out of touch.” Sunlight on the coffeepot, on a plate a smear of jelly. Siski turns the pages. She hears Aunt Mardith talking with the maid. Racing stories, fashion designs. And then his name, Andasya Lanfirvaud Faluidhen. Dasya, in letters of lightning.

  Her hand tightens on the magazine. His name appears twice, three times, then everywhere. He is staying with their uncle the Duke of Bain. He travels in his own carriage. At the theater he wore green. He spoke with Aunt Sini, with their cousin Afiana. She goes on reading, without hope. She knows she will read the whole page. He rode on the Ban Vanai; he has “the weightless carriage of a nymph.” He wears Amafeini boots with scarlet heels. They are new boots, she has never seen them. Nor has she seen the “summer jacket of pale tussore.” Her fingers ache, she is crushing the page. To think that he is elsewhere, without her. She did not know it would be like this. This pain, this horror, the fear that his condition will be discovered, and then the rage, for she has been ill while he goes riding in the park! She reads the page, then reads it again more closely, determined to suffer and not to yield. His name has a power that never weakens. Every time she reads it the same jolt of anguish shocks her heart, undiminished by repetition.

  When she looks up, the maid has gone. Only Aunt Mardith’s calm dark eyes. She knew, of course. Siski hears the click of that ivory heart. Aunt Mardith touches her napkin to the corners of her lips. “You will spend the summer at Faluidhen,” she says.

  Siski’s cousin Latha, Uncle Fenya’s daughter, has come from Nauve, in the Valley, where she lives with her new husband. She has not brought her husband, however; he is tied up with the estate, some sort of lawsuit, so boring, Latha laughs, it’s not worth trying to understand it. She would rather stay at Faluidhen for the season. She is accompanied by a group of merry young people, all of noble Valley families, insouciant ladies and gentlemen who travel with servants and heavy trunks and take pleasure in calling themselves “old-fashioned types.” This attempt to appear old-fashioned, the newest fashion in certain circles, involves a laughing disdain for intellectual pursuits, an emphasis on the healthful benefits of riding, dancing, and wine, and a cavalier attitude toward money matters. Lady Latha’s friends are all in debt, and she herself, early one morning in the small blue parlor adjoining the breakfast room, begs her mother, Siski’s Aunt Karalei, for six thousand droi: “Just six thousand. You can spare it easily, you’ll make that much from the little vineyard alone!”

  Coming in from the garden Siski passes the open door and sees Aunt Karalei’s normally tawny face disfigured by sudden pallor. “I’ll have to ask your Aunt Mardith,” she says
faintly. “I don’t know if we have that much—such an amount—here in the house.”

  “Ask her then, if you have to get her permission,” says Latha. Turning, she notices Siski in the hall, but far from being angry she gives a roguish little smile as she pushes the door closed with her fingertips.

  Latha is beautiful in a hard, expensive way, and popular, especially with the gentlemen of the party, but the obvious favorite is her husband’s young cousin, Kethina, who, though only Siski’s age, has been to seven balls and is well known in society. Lady Kethina has golden-brown eyes that sparkle as if the sun is shining in them. They are close-set and ringed with faint blue shadows, but rather than destroying their charm these flaws increase their attraction by making them seem more intense, intelligent, and sly. She has the sublime, polished, sun-touched skin of Valley women, and already she guards it carefully with unguents and heavy creams. Her talent in matters of dress, astonishing in one so young, has made her the darling of journalists from Duema to Yenith. On her first night she dashes up to Siski. “There you are! I’ve been dying to meet you. You must protect me,” she goes on, leaning close and whispering: “Lord Feren won’t stop following me and I cannot, I simply cannot bear his cow eyes any longer! Come have a drink.”

  It happens like that: so easily. Kethina keeps Siski up late, scolds her, fixes her hair, tells her she’s very pretty, she mustn’t be so shy. She rubs expensive cream into Siski’s cheeks with her bony fingers, makes her go to bed with her head wrapped in waxed paper. New styles of make-up are tried out at Kethina’s dressing table. Kethina stands back, frowning critically at her subject, her head on one side. “No,” she announces, “blue is wrong for you, we’ll have to try pink.” She dabs her brush in a jar of antimony with quick, expert little jabs.