The Winged Histories (10 page)

The Cult of the Stone grew. We hardly noticed it at first: the fading of the old priest, Elarom, and the rise of Ivrom, his successor, a man who used his tongue like a riding crop and gained several thousand converts with the fire of his eye. We failed to take note of the priest’s growing power, the success of his books and pamphlets; we were too much occupied with the question of the throne. Who would take it after Ahadrom II—who was, as certain voices never tired of repeating, only half a Lath himself? Could Olondria bear to see, on the Horsehair Seat of her ancestral kings, that dream of Eirlo’s: a living “Braid of Three Peoples”? For not long after his coronation, Ahadrom introduced the empire to his son and—as he had no sisters—his heir.

There were other living members of the House of the Old Telkan, of course. It was expected that one of them would lay claim to the throne. Hinro, Duke of Ethendria, was the most likely candidate: not a young man, but strong, and of impeccable lineage. No one expected that Prince Andasya, the son of Ahadrom II and his Nainish bride, would so thoroughly bewitch the public. “My pet, my pig,” goes a bul composed in his honor, when he was but an infant: “my bully, my bee, my bud, my cherry-sweet.”

“Impossibly handsome,” wrote a journalist for the Bainish newspaper the
Starling
, when the prince was nine years old. A lady who was fortunate enough to glimpse him astride a white pony on the Isle of Ban declared that she could have eaten his velvet breeches.

At the age of twelve, the prince posed for Ferulei, then First Court Painter. Engravings of his portrait sold by the thousands. The boy, black-haired, with pouting lips, holds a kite in one hand and leans on a leafy oak. The title:
Death, with Kite
.

By the time he was sixteen, it was clear that no one in Olondria would refuse to have Prince Andasya for their king. He was not only the most beautiful youth in the country, but a superb dancer and rider, a budding scholar, and a wit. “His charm perfumes the air for a hundred miles,” gushes a writer for
The Watcher
. Hearts flutter when he enters the army: if he should be injured or killed! But then—how heroic of him to enlist! When he puts on his scarlet guardsman’s jacket, his lips look redder than ever.

He is charmingly old-fashioned—a proper Prince of the Branch, despite his questionable lineage. In opposition to his father, Ahadrom II, he declares himself a devotee of the goddess Avalei, now the primary enemy of the Cult of the Stone. “I could never bow to a rock,” he is quoted as saying, “and I have too much taste to go about clad in a blanket.” He is the monarch of our dreams. He is seen at Loma in a green coat, at Feirivel in gray. No one imagines that, with his cousin Tavis, he is planning a war.

Suddenly, in the Valley, the peasants are armed.

It is the Feast of Lamps, and all the roads are blocked.

They travel in groups of ten. They wear red cloaks, red woolen caps, sometimes only a red rag pinned to a shoulder. Even the poorest have hennaed their beards.

They are singing the songs of Avalei on the roads.
The hunting knife is within my heart. The hunting knife is the ornament of my heart
.

Such a moon! The dogs bay as if wild with joy.

Fighting breaks out in Bain. Within hours, the garrison is set on fire.

Fighting in the Balinfeil. It begins in the mountains and spreads to the woods and farms. Soldiers are bleeding out of the hills. They knock on doors, they are found asleep in haystacks. Their stories are garbled, excited. “No, it’s not the Brogyars,” they keep repeating.

The first refugees from Kestenya have crossed the Ilbalin.

In Bain, the duke, Veda, is trying to control the rioting in the Old Quarter. During a brief retreat to the Ducal Residence, he receives a note from the Isle.
Dear Uncle Veda, I have decided to take the throne early!

He stares at the card, his bones filling with ice.

Smoke drapes the windows.

Outside, figures huddle in the walled garden. They are devotees of the Stone, seeking refuge at the Residence. Their lives are in danger in the streets of Bain.

Veda drops the card and runs up the stairs.

He runs up stair after stair, panting, until he reaches the flat roof. As he has often done over the last few days, he peers toward the Blessed Isle, his eyes prickling in the smoky air. He looks toward Velvalinhu, the Holy City, his royal brother’s seat, where he has sent so many frantic letters, asking for help, for counsel, for armed men.

Today, for the first time, he sees flames in the distance. Velvalinhu is burning.

B
ook Two

The History of the Stone

Yours is a negative kingdom.

“The towers are all aflame and I, I skim the air between them, defiant in my feathers of burnt lace.” Lines by the great queen Fanleshama the Poet, who recited them long ago from the Chrysoprase Seat. In this poem, the
Seventy-Fifth Elegy,
she speaks in the voice of an owl. “Oh pines, oh rain of opals, oh curling ice.” The owl laments the loss of its home in the north but refuses to leave the Blessed Isle, where its mate is trapped in a burning aviary. Today I repeat this elegy over and over through numb lips, for the towers are burning. Smoke pours thickly from the Tower of Mirrors; the Tower of Lapis Lazuli is visible only as flashes of murky light in a vast pall of ashen fog.

The railing of my balcony has gone black. When I grip it, it stains my gloves.

It is the ninth day of Fir, the Month of Darkness. On this day, the Telkan hears reports from the Master of Granaries and seed samples are presented on beds of raw wool. The Telkan tastes the winter wine and pronounces it either Sloe, Amber, or Earth. Based on his choice, his rooms are refurnished in purple, red, or black. He hears reports from the Master of Prisons. His chief scribe, known as the High Engraver, records the number of prisoners in each province of the Empire.

A priest of Tol enters in a pair of otterskin slippers and touches the ears and throat of the Telkan with white ash. Bells are rung in the ninth room of the Temple of the Storm God; the iron boar on the doorstep is rubbed with resin. The Teldaire hears reports from the Keeper of Gardens and the Master of the Reservoir, who recites the height of the water in all the wells. The Teldaire wears either plum-colored or rust-red garments. In either case, she wears gold jewelry, because the silver is being cleaned.

If the Telkan has children at home, they are dressed in scarlet and scented with bergamot. Tonight they will listen to stories about foxes.

The worms have entered their deepest sleep. The gods favor dogs and ravens. The stars bend low, trailing their long beards.

So says the palace almanac, the one I keep in my bed, in between the sheets. I have always kept it there, for fear my father would discover it. He would have sneered at me—perhaps raged at me, depending on his mood—for keeping this trash in my room, this compendium of palace life. It was the life he had sworn to destroy. He used to refer to all rituals as “bears’
dances.
” And Velvalinhu he called “the den.” But I found meaning in the almanac: in the light of its brief and graceful descriptions, the life of this Holy City became legible. My reading, too, grew richer: Fanleshama’s poetry called out to me with new urgency when I realized that the “wind-battered owl” of the seventy-fifth elegy, written on the last day of the Month of Lamps, undoubtedly refers to the pair of horned owls released by the Telkan and Teldaire on that day. “Oh pines, oh rain of opals,” she writes—references to the Grave King, the Lord of the Dead, whose steed is a horned owl. While the refrain sings over and over of “perfect love.” The poem captivated me; when I turned the page of the almanac, I left a streak of blood . . . I had been chewing my nails as I read, a bad habit that grew worse in times of excitement or distress. I closed the book and kissed its garish cover splashed with poppies. Lunre had given it to me that afternoon. “Read the Month of Lamps,” he told me, smiling. He did not say, did not need to say, “Don’t tell your father.”

And now my father is gone and I am alone and still I keep the almanac under my sheets, with my drawing pad, my brushes, my charcoal pencils, my private notebooks, my mother’s hand mirror, dear gods, after all these years I do not think I could fall asleep on an even bed.

Yet the rituals mean nothing now. Nothing. My father’s purpose is achieved: Velvalinhu is broken like a cup. Horses clop through the halls; figures hurry across the courtyards with chests and bundles; the air swells with the odor of smoke. Enemy soldiers lounge everywhere: strange, ragged rebels in mismatched uniforms, some of them speaking only the rasping tongue of the Kestenyi highlands, that language which, Firdred wrote, makes it sound as though all of one’s teeth have been shattered. They play londo on the roofs, rings-and-arrows in the gardens; their bonfires paint the night. Dirty, flea-bitten, drunken, and happy, they sing vanadiel until dawn, decked with spoils: gold earrings, bangles, rich scarves fashioned into turbans. My father’s vision is achieved, in a sense, the rituals of the palace abandoned—though it is his enemies who have stopped Velvalinhu’s heart.

Even how I hear soldiers singing down below.

The one assigned to my door is a Valley boy with a snub nose. His name is Vars. He brings me bread and olives, but no news. “Be easy, teldarin,” he says. His eyes are red; perhaps the smoke irritates them, or perhaps, like most soldiers, he drinks.

One day I tried to push past him and escape. I brushed against him and he stepped back, probably conditioned by his upbringing, for he has the air of the minor nobility or that tradesman’s class whose manners are even more impeccable. He could not at first bring himself to seize a lady—and so I ran down the hall, my slippers skidding on the dusty tiles, and he shouted and caught up to me before I even rounded the corner, for he is younger than I as well as stronger.

“
Now, teldarin,
” he said reproachfully, his hand on my arm. His breath had not quickened, while I was gasping like a carp.

I think it is possible that they will kill me. This is, after all, Velvalinhu, where as Olirei puts it, Death wears dancing shoes.

Vars took me back to my room. Now, when he brings me something to eat, he is careful to block the doorway with his body.

It is possible that they will kill me.
Write, write
, it rings in my head, remember, quickly, before it is too late.

Write.

My name is Tialon of Velvalinhu. I am the daughter of Ivrom the Priest of the Stone, who brought to Olondria the message—

My hand goes slack. I find myself drawing flowers in the margins. I draw spikes and a small woman among the thorns. The woman is ugly and wears a black dress. I lick my finger and smear her to create shadows, but only succeed in ruining the page.

Get up. Go to the door. Listen for Vars. My stomach grumbles; the light fades. What if they plan to starve me in my room? Blow out the lamp and step out onto the balcony (I am afraid to appear there after dark, with a light at my back—they might use me for target practice). How dark it is down below! I can scarcely see the Alabaster Court, where I walked as a child, or rather trotted along behind my father, awkwardly trying to match his long strides, carrying his writing box. It was so hot I sweated dreadfully in my wool frock. I remember the day I noticed a bitter odor from under my arms: an attacking smell, fiery and somehow shameful. I scrubbed myself almost raw with our brown soap, coveting the florets of scented toilet soap the maids carried through the halls . . .

Write. Write. My name is Tialon of Velvalinhu. I am the daughter of Ivrom the Priest of the Stone. If only he would come back and stand over me again, in the way I hated so much when I was a girl! The sound of his breath when I made a mistake. His disgust. I want it back—that short, irritated sigh—I want to crawl inside it.

I think I could make a home there, in that angry, hollow place.

I’m wasting ink. I must write of his vision, of the Stone.

My name is Tialon of Velvalinhu.

I draw a woman with a beak. A woman with the feet of a hare.

Forget yourself. Crawl inside, crawl inside him—not into the sound of his breath which is lost to you but into his message, the treasure he wanted to give the world. For certainly he did not wish to give it this tall, round-shouldered woman, going gray, whose jaw aches dully because she grinds her teeth together. She, I feel sure, was an accident. Yet if the accident could speak. If the beads of a ruined necklace could arrange themselves to spell a word.
Father
. I will not allow them to bury you as a heretic.

Write. Remember. This is the History of the Stone.

1. You will sever all ties and pass from your bondage into light.

914

When he had shed his name, left the capital, cut off relations with nearly all of his family and friends, when he had become this harsh young man,
Ivrom
, “the Mirror of the Stone,” he still remembered the pink peppercorn tree in his aunt’s garden in Bain. The old lady scattered pink peppercorns over everything: the meat, the flavored ice. And the cloth on the garden table, which had once been red, had been left outside in the sun so long—held down at the corners with bricks to keep it from blowing away—that it echoed that marvelous dry, pink, summery color. A color that at once recalled the little handheld fans, made of paper or wicker, or, in one case, seagulls’ feathers, which his aunt kept in the desk by the terrace doors and always offered to guests before they went out in the garden to take the air. “Don’t go without a fan, it’s so hot.” And when Ivrom, on one of the Telkan’s barges, was crossing the Ithvanai to the Blessed Isle, and first caught sight of Velvalinhu in the splendid evening light, its walls throbbed with that same vibrant peppercorn color. It made him uneasy—or perhaps that was only the motion of the boat—he had always hated boating—his cousins used to tip him out on purpose—but no, most likely he felt uneasy at being reminded so strongly of his aunt’s house, now, on the eve of his new life. The Isle grew closer and closer, and with it those scintillant pink towers. Their color oppressed him, as did the complex, salty smell in the air, and most of all the muted snuffling of his pregnant wife, Tenais, who was crying bitterly among the bags.

The barge drew up at the pier. A pair of young boys were lighting lanterns, their voices bouncing back from the calm sea. And Elarom, the Priest of the Stone, rose from the bench where he had been sleeping and faltered forward, hands outstretched for balance. Ivrom took his arm. “Thank you, my boy,” the priest said with a smile that pierced the younger man’s heart. Ivrom helped his new master onto the pier. Faintly he heard Tenais calling behind him: “Ivrom, Ivrom!” Like the cry of a gull. He held tight to Elarom’s arm. “Lean on me, Master,” he said.

Ivrom and Tenais moved into a pair of bare rooms in the Tower of Aloes. Tenais tacked a few of her paintings to the wall: wobbly, watery creations on heavy paper, made on excursions to the Isle of Songs with her sisters when she was a girl. She owned enough of these pictures to cover the walls with representations of blurred fountains, crooked mares, and dropsical squirrels, but she soon lost heart and left them in the box, and sat at the window all day eating raisins from a bowl balanced on her stomach. From the window she could peer upward at the sky between the towers, or down into a complex system of drains. On the Feast of Birds, when doves and pigeons were released, panicked flocks clattered overhead, and a bird fell down past her window—dead, no doubt, of the shock.

“The windows are too small,” she complained to her husband, who spent his days studying with the Priest of the Stone, absorbed in the tenets of a bright new faith, a faith that seemed to him deliciously cold, stripped of impurities, serene as a winter dawn. He would come back to their rooms from his days of study wrapped in a freezing and holy cloud. And there was Tenais, complaining the windows were too small. “The daylight can scarcely come in!” He brought her extra candles to quiet her, and one night he returned to find she had lit them all.

She had prepared a stew. They ate in the profligate glow of twenty candles—two would have sufficed, as the sun had not yet set. Tenais ate slowly, her round face seeming to pulse in the light, a moon. Ivrom was sweating; the dye of his robe would run, leaving marks on his skin like bruises.

Bruised by the Nameless Gods, he thought. A potent image. He would use it in the tract he was writing for distribution on the Feast of Plenty. If only he wasn’t so hot! Then he could think . . . how to connect the image of the bruise to the notion of prayer . . .

Tenais wore no shawl. Her plump arms gleamed in the blaze.

“It’s warm,” he said.

“I am very glad,” she said softly. “You were so late, I feared it would be cold.”

“Not the stew,” he snapped.

She raised her eyes. She knew perfectly well what he meant. Her eyes were flat, hostile, like two circles of black paper . . . And he began to shout at her, amazed at how easy it was to step through into rage, as if it were an open hall inside him, a hall with no door, or more accurately, an abyss, an empty space into which he hurtled, exhilarated by the plunge. Let the whole Tower of Aloes hear him shouting—he didn’t care! He was already lost, deprived of the refined, austere atmosphere of the room of the Stone, where the glow of the small green lamps enveloped him as he studied with the old priest, reverently copying the words of the Nameless Gods. They examined each mark on the Stone with care, observing it through a glass. The old priest had a number of special brushes to remove the dust from the lines. They could spend whole hours, whole days, on a single scratch. Time disappeared—and now he was plunged in time, in heat, in the vicious stare of this woman Tenais! The smell of the stew rising from the table was making him ill. He knocked his bowl to the floor—he’d fling the candles—he’d set the place on fire! And Tenais was standing and shouting too, red in the face as if ready for a brawl, despite the bulge underneath her apron.

“You’
ll break my mind! You
’ll break it!” he shouted, jumping up and down and snatching at his hair, which was already growing thin, and he knew he looked absurd, and the thought enraged him so that his temples throbbed and he feared that his mind really was going to pieces. He gazed at his wife with hatred. She waved her fist, her face shining with sweat or tears. Of course she wanted to undermine his work, having no real work of her own, only the Temple of Heth Kuidva in Bain, where she used to go every Tolie to dole out rice to the poor. That was where they had met—he, a priest of Heth Kuidva, the Oracle God, already aloof, touched in advance by a marvelous destiny, with the sharp, proud profile that made him look noble and withdrawn even when his stockings, as Tenais would soon discover, were falling into rags—and she, delicate-featured and shy, the eldest of four sisters, the only unmarried one, fond of songbirds and the romances of Korim, scrupulously devout and committed to serving the hungry once a week, her hair demurely bound up in a pale green scarf. They had walked by the harbor together, and he had bought her a caged cricket. She told him he had the nose of Baron Murei. And this was the same Tenais who now tore off her apron and threw it on the candles so that he—he!—had to beat out the flames with his hands.

“I hate it, I hate it!” she sobbed, while he tried to burn his hands as badly as possible. “I want to go home! There’s no one to talk to here, nothing to do!”

“No one to talk to!”
he cried, looking up.
“I’ve never enjoyed more splendid conversation in my life!”

“Oh,” she said, gazing at him scornfully. And she called him by his old name, the one he had left behind in the capital. And she said that he was a dupe and a toady, tricked by the old priest and drawn to the Isle by his longing to sit at the table with kings. She said he was dazzled by the young Telkan—when in fact he despised that silly oaf! And this was Tenais, whom he had married in the Garden of Plums. He would never, never forgive her. He clung to his anger like a spar while, quiet at last, she daubed his burns with medicinal honey.

Write. Write how they sat on the floor together in their little room, a single candle burning on the table. It shone on her brow as she bent over his hands in concentration. A faint reek of drains came in at the open window. Tenais, Tenais. She would be his enemy always. He felt almost cheerful. She was binding up his hands in linen strips. When she had finished she looked up and gave him a single, searching look, her eyes quivering darkly. She would die that year.

And I want to stay with them, for the sake of the child who will be born in a thunderstorm just as the hunting season begins. For the sake of the child who will grow up in the dark, accustomed to torches and lamps, expert at snuffing out candles with wet fingers. This child will possess no images of her mother. She will have to peer into a mirror and dismantle her own face. Her high, flat cheekbones—they can’t be from her father. Her curly hair, her verdigris eyes, she must have gotten them from the other place, from Tenais.

For the sake of that child I want to go back to Bain and walk by the harbor with the young couple, accompany them to their cramped rooms behind the temple. Rooms so small Tenais propped the window open with a pair of tongs when she used the stove, even in winter, in rain. Ivrom, who had a different name then, would stand on a chair to help her hang the clothes to dry—they couldn’t be hung outside, or they’d be stolen—the dark blue robe with the silver trim he wore when interpreting dreams in the temple porch, and the rich sash, the keilon, weighted with silver beads.

He loved his vestments, Tenais knew—how he fretted if he dropped wax on the cloth! He would pick it away himself with one of her needles. That robe was his reward, a sign of the gods’ approval after his terrible childhood, his years of torment at the acolytes’ school. She knew so little of those miseries, though he had told her how, at the age of five, he had been set to work in his father’s shop, how his aunt took pity on him and sent him to school, and how, at school, the other students blindfolded him and pinched him till urine flowed down his leg. These things she knew. She read others in the way he treated his robe, his tenderness toward it. And so a dreadful bell began tolling in her heart, a bell that said
finished, finished
, the night he came home from attending a lecture and calmly placed his robe and keilon in the fire.

“What are you doing?” she screamed.

He stood shining in his rough undergarment, a shift that ended slightly above his knees. His eyes glittered, his cheeks were drained of color. While she dragged his robe from the fire with the poker, he stood on a chair as if intending to help with the washing. He raised one hand in a strange, jerky gesture. He had met the true priest. Olondria’s one true priest. Why did he hold his head on one side that way? As if he were listening. “Get down,” she cried, trembling, weak with fear. She called him by his name. “Don’t call me that,” he said.

He had been hollowed out, transformed by the Stone. This holy gift. The Nameless Gods blew it from Their palm like a dandelion seed. It floated, then hurtled to earth, white and then black, obliterating everything, harbors and candles and crickets and peppercorn trees. It tore through his mind like lightning as he sat in the gloomy lecture hall at the temple, in the tiny audience that had gathered to see the priest, this priest of an obscure new cult, which, it seemed, the Telkan favored, an old man hobbling in his great square boots. The windows were open; there was a smell of cut grass. Gnats circled the lamp beside the speaker. In the audience people whispered and passed bags of sunflower seeds. The young priest who would be called Ivrom gripped the back of the empty chair before him, his eyes fixed on the old man’s mild, wrinkled face. When the talk was over he stumbled forward, rushing, trapped in the crowd, and only afterward did he realize that in fact there had been no crowd, that no one was trying to keep him from seeing the priest, they were going the other way, it was only his fear of missing this chance that made him see obstacles everywhere, and he reached the old man and grasped his hand, a cold dry hand like precious enamel, and he said he had always felt in his heart that the gods would send a new book, a text more eloquent and absolute than any dream, and he begged to go with the priest, to go to the Isle, to see the great Stone. To see.

“Strength to you, my son.”

“Thank you, Master,” he said. Something was wrong with his mouth; he thought he might be thirsty.

“Come closer, child.”

He approached the hard chair where the priest sat with his legs stretched out on a stool.

“I should die,”
said Ivrom.

“That is blasphemy,” the old man answered kindly.

“I should suffer.”

“You are suffering, are you not?”

“Not enough.”

“
Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods
,” the priest quoted. “
A cupful weighs as much as an ocean
.”

In fact—as Ivrom would discover later—a cupful weighs much more. When the time came, he would be able to bear more terrible things with less pain, less anguish than he felt that night, the night he became a father and a widower, the night of my birth, of the death of Tenais. He could not yet say the words to himself:
She is dead
. Instead, in the priest’s room, he staggered toward the great black Stone against the wall, a block as tall as a man, its surface glimmering faintly in the firelight, and he embraced it, something he had never done before. He had barely touched it. Now he laid his cheek against its darkness. He could feel its etched surface against his skin. The priest did not reprimand him. His cheek pressed hard against the lines:
You will sever all ties and pass from your bondage into light
.

At times she came back. Strangely, she did not come when he looked at the child, who was less an object of pity than a generator of duties—the nurse to be hired, the letters from his wife’s relatives to be dealt with—and who grew into a sober, alien little creature, nothing like Tenais. If he thought of Tenais when he looked at the child, it was only in the abstract: what would the dead mother think of her daughter’s progress? But at night, in the room of the Stone, Tenais would come, more often after the old priest’s death, when Ivrom himself was Priest of the Stone, a man of power. Then she came. She was lying on the bed, her face turned toward him. Women were weeping. The air smelled strongly of edlath and jasmine oil. Her face on the pillow, the eyes sunken and withdrawn. Someone put a bundle in his arms: the child. Her eyes sunken, accusing, withdrawn.