The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

  “Like blue leaves of a murderous autumn,” Hailoth says.

  Siski I am so afraid.

  The world is growing smaller. There is so little time. I struggle to lift my eyelids. It’s like peering from under an awning, into bright sun. Small people are moving far away.

  So little time, and in the short time we had we lost everything. You took it from us. Your cloak disappearing between the trees. Why, Siski? By all the gods, had you turned into a dragon in front of me, I would have perished in fire before I ran away.

  Your cloak disappearing between the trees. So swift. And the sky darkening. And the snow.

  I take some comfort in Kestenya’s independence. The only real success of this war. Everything else is ashes. Your wretched, outworn, unfashionable gray cloak.

  Oh Siski. To see you once more, if only to curse you to your face.

  I’m half asleep. We are such frail creatures, we—I still can’t write the word. How did we conquer anyone? How did we terrorize the world? We, with our burdens. Our pain. Our fear. Our woe. Our wings.

  She folds the letter and slips it between the pages of the book. She takes a stolen stub of pencil from the pocket of her dress. Then she tears out the pages at the end of the Dreved Histories, inches close to the fire to catch the light, and writes.

  Dasya. My dear.

  I have read the Dreved Histories and I know that when you wake again you will not be able to speak. But I think you may be able to read. So I’m leaving you this, in case. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to speak to you myself.

  I know you didn’t want me to stay. I stayed because I love you and because

  She stops. Then she begins again.

  I’ve been thinking about what’s happened to you. I know what you think—at least, I know what you told me that day in the clearing. You thought that perhaps your father had angered Avalei, and that you must find a way to placate her, or defeat her. I used to think this was true. That you were cursed, and that I was cursed through my love for you. I believed it for a long time, and I lived as if I were dead. Truly, as if I were dead. And I fooled everyone, you know. I was so lively, they nicknamed me “the Diali.”

  I don’t believe it now. I don’t believe that Avalei was angry with anybody or that you were her instrument to kill the Priest of the Stone, which is what they say, what some people say, or that the gods sent you to break up the empire the way the first Drevedi almost did, which is also what they say. If the gods send us signs—and perhaps they do—I do not believe that we can read them. For, as it is said, the gods do not speak as we speak. Interpretation seems worthless to me. Perhaps I say that because I’m afraid—but not even the Priest of the Stone could translate the language of paradise.

  When I went back to Ashenlo last year, I walked to the clearing and I prayed. You know I have never been particularly devout. I couldn’t even remember any prayers. I was saying your name, again and again, and then I realized I was praying. I called upon Avalei because my life was a plain of stones and I could not see any way out of what was coming: a marriage to some nobleman, a house, children, feast days, jewelry, gowns, and you lost, and Tav lost, and our autumns lost. Those autumns at Sarenha Haladli, the only times in my life I have been alive. I prayed to Avalei to save me, to set me free. I prayed for a door, and I saw that the door was open. It had been open all along. I only needed to step through.

  Not easy, no. But simple. And so I am not sorry for anything that has happened, except that I have wasted so much time. I think of all those years and how you didn’t tell anyone and you were alone. And I had run away from you. For that I am so sorry, Dasya. You trusted me and I betrayed your trust. I have not been a person who can be trusted. So many nights I dream of the stable door at Sarenha Haladli, and it’s unlocked, and Tuik is in the misar.

  If only I could go back. But I can’t. I can’t.

  Time, they say, is a stream. Do you remember where it has its source? You studied with the Priest of the Stone; he must have made you read about Nieb, who created Time and all the gods. I missed all of that; I had a very different sort of education. I’ve had to go back on my own and fill in the gaps. So many gaps still, Dasya! Why is Nieb a group of gods and also a single goddess, the mother and bride of Time? And if Nieb’s daughter Heth created the world, and Time was before Heth—why did Time not enter the world from the beginning? For there was no Time, at first—there was what the Book calls “the Time before Time.” There was paradise.

  Then the Dead King trapped Avalei and turned her into a deer, and there were seasons on earth, and it was the Time of Time. That’s where we live. With time and death and betrayal and disease and in the forest, as you know, the Drevedi.

  How I wish we could speak together of these things.

  But the Drevedi don’t speak. Only people barely touched by their influence can talk. That’s what I read in the Histories, anyway. In all those thousands of pages, there’s only one recorded line by a Dreved. He said: “I am a Lath.”

  What would they say, if they could speak?

  Do they speak?

  These are the things I ask myself now. We are told that the Drevedi are portents. Bream goes so far as to call them “absolute language.” But to themselves, surely, they are something other than words.

  Where are the Dreved books, and what is written in them? Dasya, I want to read the true Dreved Histories.

  And then I think that the Drevedi have no history, because they belong to the Time before Time. Perhaps, in some terrifying, mysterious way, our most fearsome dreams belong to paradise.

  For me, paradise was reading with you at Faluidhen. The words between us. Even the shadows were luminous. Do you remember? The way those words, those signs, seemed to burn through everything, the leaves, the lace at your collar, the light, the book itself. The book and the heavy, humid air and the spray from the gardener’s hose and the little bone buttons on the cushions of the couch, and the carpets hanging outside to dry and the faetha in the hall and Grandmother’s silver tea service and Faluidhen, and Faluidhen. Grandfather’s medal on the wall in the parlor they called the gray room, and the scrollwork on the dining room chairs—all gone. Everything transmuted into fire. History is useless to me, Dasya. I’m living on memory instead.

  (And I remember everything and I have been remembering it for years. Do you think I never wished for a lock of your hair? Is that what you think? How dare you. When you were at war in the Lelevai, I almost asked my sister to steal your shirt. I would have done it, only I couldn’t think of a way that would not sound strange. “One of his shirts, recently worn, not washed.” The stupidity of longing. And what would your shirt have done for me? I see myself wrapped in it, biting it, suffocating, undone.)

  Do you remember what Oulef wrote? That the Drevedi exist in the same relation to human beings as the future.

  I am ready for the future. I am saying yes. Dasya, let’s go through the door. Let’s go together.

  I remember when Tav landed on the rooftop with her ilok. I was sitting beside you, and you were asleep, as you had been for days. How terrifying it was—those great dark wings, the smell of death, and Tav’s face, refusing to weep, more frightening than anything else. I thought we would die, we’d fall, and I did not care, or rather I felt happy at the thought: to die with you and Tav. To die in flight, with you and my sister, the hero—it seemed marvelous. But of course Tav would never let us fall. You didn’t wake when we tied you fast, and you didn’t wake when we landed here, at this temple, because I told Tav we must find a place to hide, we couldn’t go with her to Kestenya, as she wanted. We can’t go, I told her, that’s all. I couldn’t bear to tell her why. You didn’t wake when she said good-bye, when she kissed your hands and face. It was only when she had gone that you opened your eyes. No, you said, the moment you saw me. No. Siski, no.

  Dasya,
the next time you open your eyes—say yes.

  7. Dark Butterfly

  It is happening now dark butterfly sweet butterfly.

  A morning in springtime. Everything green. For the first time, real green between the pillars of the ruined temple. She is ready to walk down to town again, her hair rolled in a knot, her old boots tied, and then there’s a sound from the back of the room.

  She turns.

  For several days she has almost forgotten to look there, at that vast pale form. The curve of it, the slight sheen, like the luster of spun sugar. But now, she looks. There’s a sound. A scraping. A knock. She stands poised as if for flight, as if she could still save herself. Somebody’s there.

  By the time the first stirrings are heard, it will be too late.

  Too late. Too late. She thanks Avalei for this lateness, this absolute lack of choice. Thank you, bless you, Ripener of the Grain! She could weep for this blessing, this gift. She does not trust her body not to run.

  There is no time to run. Only time to think: If I hadn’t been here. If I’d been away. What would have happened to him, where would he have gone? A spark, a momentary burst of gratitude for this: that she is here. Because they have had so little time.

  A scrape, a knock, a crack, the white curve bursting, a great dark wing flung up, the two halves of the shell falling back, falling empty, empty on the floor, a second wing unfolding and Dasya standing, Dasya there, alive: Dasya Dasya Dasya in green light.

  A sob breaks from her throat.

  He looks at her. Black eyes. All black. His expression like that of the faces carved in the temple wall. An expression not human, not animal. Midnight gaze, depthless, unreadable. Small horns on his brow, dark with a delicate fur, like willow buds.

  His hair falls on his shoulders. Exactly the same as before. Heartbreak.

  She speaks the only word she has. Quickly—so little time! Her hands on the buttons of her worn dress, fighting the buttons, slipping, then tearing, the dress torn away, her breasts now in green light. She drops the dress and steps away. She stands in her underskirt and boots. Somewhere, perhaps, his memory is alive. This is her hope: that he will understand the language of gesture, this word pulled out of memory, this sign.

  In the desert there are empty places. Places of utter stillness, utter silence. The sky meets the rim of the world with no window, no escape. There is only sunlight, desolation, wind. The heart grows brittle. These are the regions known as the fires, or the seas of glass.

  He folds his wings behind him. His elegant symmetry makes her gasp. Now he moves toward her, lightly, barefoot on the floor. His body strong again, flawless, cloaked in night, he is like a rich woman in an opera cloak, in opulence, in gems. Eyes of jet and the lips dark blue like ribbon. His sex an ornament of amethyst, his body all of silk. She turns. She turns her back to him, repeating his gesture of long ago, in the clearing, when he showed her the marks of wings.

  Now it is happening sweet butterfly. Sweet.

  Between the pillars, she sees the green hill. She will die like this, she thinks, with her eyes on the green of spring. Like this she will feel the surudin strike where her shoulder meets her neck. The mouth sticks fast to the flesh and the monster drinks until satisfied. It will happen like this, if she is to die. He is moving behind her now, unfurling his wings, she can tell by the sudden gust, the wind that lifts her hair. His letter, and hers to him, all those sheets of paper, fly out between the pillars, taking wing over the grass.

  Then a sound, unexpected. Snapping twigs. Two syllables. “Siski.”

  He is saying her name in his broken Dreved’s voice.

  He has not bitten her. He has not touched her at all. “Siski. Siski.” Repeating her name through the surudin, strumming them like harp strings.

  She turns. It is she who touches him. She puts her hand to his cheek. He is warm, familiar, his hair smelling of the mountains. He closes his burning, alien eyes, and now he is almost Dasya, his smooth cheek a perfect fragment of the past. She sees him in his desert, his excruciating solitude. The burden of his sorrow and of his wings. His secret, all along, all through the war he planned with Tav, the private knowledge that he had so little time. She seems to see him in gardens, dim rooms, forests, always alone. But we were never alone, when we were together then. Never, not even when reading or playing music, or asleep. By the dead fountain we stood whispering hand in hand. The fountain was white, like a swan. He opens his eyes. She is shocked again by their smooth darkness, darkness all the way to the skin. She trembles. He has not touched her yet and everything is lost, the world is made of fire, the seas are molten glass.

  “Dasya. Dasya. Love . . .”

  Will it be like this? Is there now, in his carven face, the mark of a terrible tenderness? A human emotion returning to him, stealthy as a frost. A passion, a sadness, something the gods have never known.

  “Siski.” But he cannot speak. He lacks the structure now to form clear words, to say more than the poorest, most truncated things. “Siski.” She says it with him, repeats her own name, her mouth in time with his. Beautiful, horrible sympathy of the body.

  His face. His dear face, here beneath her hand. The same face, only now with the budding horns, the deep indigo lips. Sigil of the gods. Tattoo. The color has bled slightly, under the skin, tiny threads about his mouth.

  She strokes his cheek. Reckless now, she moves closer to the heat of his body. He closes his eyes again. He’s trapped there, pinned, as if afraid to move, to lose one instant of her dazzling caress.

  The fires. The seas of glass.

  But there were lamps hung on the houses, shadows of trees. There was a library. There was snow.

  She sees him in his blue jacket. He reaches to pull a book from the shelf. Evening light on his face. Outside the window, hawks.

  In the desert there are empty places, but once we were not afraid. We rode through noon. You sang, My heart is white with love. And at last when we reached the shade of the trees you opened your book, your finger against the grains of sand whispering over the page.

  Open. Read this book. Here is your Dreved history. Here is the history of the time before time. She leans on his chest, her cheek against his skin. His hands are in her hair. Hot kisses falling, horses, lamplight, pearls. “Siski. Siskiye.” She can no longer tell the direction of the sky. She thinks, We are falling toward the clouds. But once we were in a desert, we rode horses. There was a lamp on the stable door. In another dusk a light like pearls. “Swans,” she whispers. Swans were flying. There was a beautiful river of broken ice. She hears, very far away, the voice of her cousin, her love. She cannot understand the words. He is not trying to form her language now. He is speaking the language of paradise.

  There is still time. She raises her face. If now I am to die it will be here, in this place, here where I belong. He gathers her close, and a kiss delayed for years blooms like a candle’s flame, throbbing among the walls of the ruined temple. The surudin withdraw: there is no knife, but only flesh. And holding her tight he sweeps from the room, he bursts between the pillars, up now, up, her boots torn off, a laugh torn from her throat, and there is green about them, and sky and sky and sky.

  Glossary

  Aimila—a flowering shrub of Nain, similar to hawthorn

  Aklidoh (pl. aklidai)—a Kestenyi monastery housing devotees of the goddess Roun

  Amadesh (Kestenyi)—a kitchen and storage area

  Arilantha—a stately dance

  Artusa (Kestenyi)—a corral

  Ausk (Kestenyi)—clan

  Avla (Kestenyi)—a ballroom or large hall

  Bais—bread made with chestnut flour

  Bamanan ai!—“May it go out” in the ancient tongue. An expression used to avert evil.

  Beshadun (Kestenyi)—a female bandit

  Bildiri—used to describe th
e mixed culture that has developed in parts of Kestenya

  Bolma—an Evmeni narcotic

  Bredis—a low stool stuffed with straw, commonly used by scribes

  Bul—a type of popular song, usually a drinking song

  Dai—term of address for an unmarried woman

  Dakavei—a children’s game played with a ball and sticks

  Darwad—leader of a town council

  Diali—a Kestenyi stringed instrument similar to a lute