The Winged Histories (29 page)

That was how they came, one after the other. And how she loved the beginning, the overture, the rustling moment before the curtain rose. For one never knew what was coming next, she might fall in love after all, it had happened to others. She woke with a sigh, she had been smiling in her sleep. Moving toward the mirror in green light. She would not summon the maid, not yet. To be alone with this hazy, dim, still-drowsy wonder, this shape in the mirror, herself. And then to dress, the exquisite and sensuous touch of gauze against her skin, the way her flesh breathed against her imitation pearls. With her last, tenderest lover she walked in the square, and when they came to the fountain they walked straight through the great basin in their shoes. Leaving wet footprints on the stones, her heels slipping in her sandals. She would be happy, live very simply, never tell lies. She allowed him to say he loved her, thanked him, walked with him on the Grand Promenade, counted the stars from the deck of a pleasure boat. He wanted to take her everywhere, to every opening night at the Royal Theater, to eat oysters in the quarter of the spice markets, he waited for her while she shopped for books behind the university, admired her, scandalized her Aunt Sini by sending bouquets every day. Every day fresh flowers, fresh delights. Even her sadness was pleasurable when she looked at him and felt that she would never love him. But Kethina was sharp with her, looked at him critically with cold tea-colored eyes, said he was dull, provincial, not our sort. Kethina bristling with sapphires, the choker from her wealthy husband. She wore black velvet, it’s proper for married ladies. Now she squinted slightly, affected nearsightedness when she met Siski’s lover at a ball, at last said, “Oh, it’s you,” with a formal smile. And Siski felt cast adrift, abandoned, as if in a foreign city. The strangeness of the white towers and the parks. Her lover took her to Hama, to his estate, he had inherited it already, his uncle dead at fifty of a cancer. And everyone was so kind, only his younger sister snickered when Siski fell ill because she had drunk too much at dinner. “Let me take you to Miravel,” begged her lover. “We took our holidays there as children, you can be quiet there and rest.” At Miravel, a landscape of pale lakes and forests of beech trees, the season was already over, for it was autumn. There she could be away from the parties that tired her, he would take care of her, she would read—for he did not read himself but respected her passion for it. So much so that he sometimes grew worried, asking if she had had time to read that morning. And he would coax her to eat an egg, lie down after luncheon. He loved her. And in the carriage going to Miravel she could only look out of the window and weep, recalling the words of the summer’s most popular song.
Remember me, my darling. When you are free, my darling . . .
It was beautiful, silent, all the houses painted white. They walked, met deer in the forests, on an old wooden lookout tower he carved their names. And wearing thick woolen coats they watched a squall over the lake.
I see you sinking gently, and all my days are empty.
There was marvelous coffee, the cheerful landlady thickened it with fresh cream. Siski sat huddled in her coat while her lover rowed on the lake, there were leaves on the water and the sunset created an incandescent sky. “I love you,” she said, the first time she had ever lied to him. That night, reading Princess Mia’s new book, she came across the words:
For the lover, according to nature, is always nobler and less happy than the beloved
. “Do you think that’s true?” she asked, quoting it to him. He laughed. He always made jokes when she asked such questions, he was shy, afraid to make a fool of himself, he knew he was no philosopher. But looking at him where he lay on the couch pretending to whittle something and watching her read she knew that his happiness was as remote from her as childhood. At last they returned to the city. And it was over, she knew it was over as soon as she saw the enchanted streetlamps through the rain. He did not understand why she grew sadder every day, she seemed to have no strength, wept over dead leaves, playbills, ridiculous songs.
Please let me see you in the winter.
He bought her a box of emerald-colored candy tied with ribbon, his last attempt. She sat looking down at it, struck to the heart. The gulf between them. At once she left him to go back to the highlands, back to Kestenya, home.

And there, at Ashenlo, to walk in the hills again, to breathe the scent of mountain pines, to feel the air, was almost too much. She breathes in sharply, here in the ruined temple, and tastes the brusque, invigorating air of the great plateau. She sees herself walking again in the Abravei, a strange figure in a peasant dress and heavy boots and the smart little pumpkin-colored coat. Now she reaches the place where the trees draw apart and enters the clearing where, long ago, Dasya showed her his budding back. And look, a change, a surprise, for the clearing is full of delicate saplings striped with gold by the sun. The sky is the solemn, deep gray-blue of autumn. A garden has bloomed in the desert. She touches the plants with trembling fingers. Here, here is where he lay down in the snow. Here he threw down his shirt. She kneels, snagging her coat on branches, to touch the earth. Here he lay down and put his dear head in her lap. Here he sat up and called her name. With eagerness, with anguish, with rapture, she surrenders to the past. Her body feels hollow, her brow glows like a lamp. I must have come up the path too quickly, thinks that part of her which retains its grasp of logic. It’s the altitude that makes me feel so strange. She closes her eyes on a wave of sickness and euphoria, the curse of the high plateau. And opens them, dazzled, crushed, reduced to nothing by this passion of grief that has lain over her whole life like a stain on glass, coloring everything, darkening her perceptions, and that now, with the sun behind it, pierces her with its invincible splendor. At times, usually at the moment when she was on the point of leaving one of her lovers, the flame of a candle would seem to illuminate its design. But always the night came, clouds, all of her daily life obscuring it so that she was aware of it only as a dullness over the world. A tired, faded quality, a fatigue that made her feel as if she could not lift her earring when she was dressing for a ball. But now in the light of this terrible glade her sorrow is clear, magnificent, profound. “Dasya,” she sobs in the stillness. “Dasya.”

6. The Prince of Snows

Dai Fanlei. Dai Fanlei is a lie. Everything now is a lie. Only what is coming is true.

Horrible, horrible sympathy of the body. In the quick firelight he pulses and snaps. He draws up into himself, then stretches out, pulled taut. A snake, if you strike its head against a tree, stretches out like that at the moment of death, rigid in death, a stick. Everything in the body undone, rushing to the edge. He falls on the floor. Now he is gathered together, curled up in a knot. On hands and knees he heaves. And it pours out of his mouth, white and thick, a river of silk. It pools about his hands.

And she, where is she? Running about the edge of the room, clutching her hair, an immemorial gesture now become a refuge. Gesture of women whose homes are on fire. She has no breath to scream, she babbles and whimpers, crashes against the walls, poor moth caught in a lamp. Drawn to the light and singed. She rushes toward him and then away. He crouches in whiteness, his hands invisible, plunged in cloud. The cloud is rising. It covers his wrists, his feet, he is disappearing in fog, he is weaving a bed of winter and of mist.

It goes on and on. So much. So much. A sea. A sea of milk.

His body falls into rhythm. The ribs, so narrow, rippling, whiplike. An almost impossible movement, exaggerated, like a dance. Punishing dance of whiteness. Up and up it comes.

She sinks to the floor. She heaves. Two dancers now.

But only one is buried.

She leaves a poor spatter on the marble floor.

But he: he is far beyond her. Slowly it gathers him. He turns, eyes closed, he sinks in it, submerged. The prince of snows.

Afterward she sits on the floor with her back against the wall.

The room is dark, freezing. She crawls to the pile of wood. Her hands almost useless with horror and cold, she bats the wood toward the fire, shoves the pile together, leans down and blows into it. The spark in the center glows. The fire crackles. She kneels, dizzy with breathing out, until her face tightens in the heat. Then sits back on her heels. And sees in the light the great white bulge against the wall, gleaming dully like an egg.

Threads of dried
ulum
hold it fast, clinging to wall and floor. They glisten like glass, but are as strong as tempered steel. “Once the cocoon has dried,” she has read, “it becomes utterly impervious to violence. Only dragon fire has not been tried.”

Now is the time of waiting.

“And they rolled the cocoon down the hill to the sea. And the waves bore it away like a chunk of ice. And in twenty days the Dreved Oline came winging across the water, her jaws turned upward in a mocking smile.”

Oline. The Dreved of Dolomesse. She remembers playing that Dreved herself, with her sister and cousin in the woods at home. With Dasya and with Tav. To be a Dreved you spread your arms like wings and grunt through your teeth. Sometimes she would put twigs in her hair to make horns. The atmosphere was one of relief, of violence and heady joy. On the day her grandmother Beilan was buried in the park behind Ashenlo, and the house was unbearably sad, all draped in white, they played Drevedi in the Orsan wood, and in the heat of the game they tried to fly over a gorge. Of course, she has always thought, they knew that they could not really fly. They were frightened and unhappy, because of the funeral. There was a self-destructive quality to the game, a desire to tear down everything. This is what she has always told herself. Or—as she has sometimes thought—there was simply a desire for bruises, for the uncomplicated sensation of physical pain, for a pain that could be solved, unlike the suffering in the house, the servants whispering, her father sitting with his face in his hands. And so they ran to the edge of the hill and crashed over, fierce and reckless. But now she wonders if, in fact, they believed that they could fly. They held hands, screaming, until they hit the slope and were jolted apart. The sky seemed to burst above her like a crystal lamp. For a moment she lay in the brambles with her heart knocking at her ribs. Then she sat up groggily. Tav crouched nearby, her knee gushing blood. “
Dinner!
” cried Siski at the sight of the cut, smacking her lips, still in the character of a Dreved. Far from the house, in Orsanie, in the wood.

Oh, Tav.

She remembers her last days on the Isle. She had gone to her Teldaire Aunt’s party on the Feast of Lamps. She did not think that Dasya would be there; if he was, she told herself, she would face him, she would speak with him at last. But she was late to the ball. She stood at the mirror, unrecognizable to herself: the narrow face, the great dark chambers of the eyes. A subtle greenness in the skin, as if it were copper exposed to the weather. The worn filigree of the lace on her expensive, overwashed gown.
A torn shift clings to the fence in the little field
. Arduen of Suoveni, the Gray Lady.
And all the windows fade
. The scene etched in the bowl of the lamp—Felhami of Beal, lying in the tomb—was reproduced in shadow on the side of her bodice. Is this my life? Is it? The heroine of
The Romance of the Valley
, perhaps the most celebrated character in all of Olondrian literature, lying on her back on a stone slab. A lily in her hands. Her image thrown across Siski’s ribs, stirring with every breath.

She stood at the mirror too long. In the hall, the thudding of footsteps. A cry.

She ran to open the door, then hesitated and turned the lock instead. She pressed her ear against the wood. She listened for a moment and then hurried to the lamp and blew it out.

A time of flame and darkness. At Ashenlo, when she was a child, they had had to hide during a minor uprising of the feredhai. A shuttered lamp in the hall, her mother standing at the foot of the stairs in her cloak, directing the servants in a whisper. Footmen rushed about with blankets and chests. Siski jumped up and down and laughed because she was wearing her best beaded frock on top of her nightdress. Everyone hushed her at once and they went down to hide in the pantry in the dark among the big cool jars of olive oil. Crouching in the dark. When Fulmia passed with a lantern up in the amadesh, the light stole under the pantry door and then faded out. The feredhai circled the house, once, again, galloping wildly like wild horses in the dark outside the walls.

At Velvalinhu, those days came back to her. The sense of danger. She put on her traveling clothes and cloak. No jewelry, not even a ring. With her pretty, curved, ivory-handled nail file, a gift from her grandmother, she pried the intaglio heels from her boots. When hunger forced her out of the room, she darted through the halls, low to the ground. She found a group of chambermaids drinking wine in a music room. She told them she was a governess, and they told her what had happened. One gave her a piece of chocolate wrapped in stale kebma.

Ashes blew and settled like her thoughts in the strange gray light. In the ravaged gardens she dug up the bulbs of the asphodels. At last, one night, she went out with a stump of candle and faced a drunken soldier swathed in a figured bed sheet.

“I am Siski of Ashenlo. Take me to the captain.”

And Tav, the captain, sat on a rooftop. A brazier beside her hissing in the rain. Nearby, under a makeshift canopy, Dasya lay stretched out on the stones.

“You,” said Tav. “You’re here.”

Siski knelt, and they were in each other’s arms, there at Velvalinhu, at the end.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Tav. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Dasya, he won’t wake up, I’ve had a letter from Uncle Veda, he says he’s coming, he says everything is finished, we have to
surrender, he’s coming soon and I don’t know . . .”

Oh, Tav. Oh, Tav.

Tav in the rain. Tav in her room, the summer they spent at Ashenlo together. Tav on a pillow, recovering from her wound. That cold Tav with her bitterness and her cane. And the earlier Tav, the child, wrestling, running, laughing, falling, bleeding. “
Poor Taviye!
” said Siski that day in the gorge, dropping her Dreved mask. “
Poor knee!
” She took off her linen sash and bound up the wound. Dusk was falling and it was, it was paradise. She and Dasya limping with Tav between them, all the way back to the house.

“The end is coming, dark butterfly.”

The final, mysterious words of Oulef, one of the last contributors to the
Dreved Histories
. Oulef of Weile, who wrote with such careful detail of the stages of Dreved life and died, it is thought, in the clutches of the Dreved of Ur-Brome. Her body was never discovered. “We must assume that even her bones were devoured—though this is not usual with the Drevedi—or burnt upon a fire.” Those pages of scientific discourse and then this sentence opening like a door. “The end is coming, dark butterfly.”

This is not the end. Not yet.

Dai Fanlei still goes in to town to meet the others. But she is becoming more remote. The others look at her sadly. They ask her questions, is she all right, they pressure her gently for several days. Then they stop.

One day, in a tall house at the edge of town, Dai Fanlei sits in a streak of light. And suddenly she is breaking. It might be the way the light falls between the high shutters, the brown brocade in her hands, the dust, she doesn’t know, but she comes apart. Shaking, her head knocking back against the wall. Tears everywhere. The others get up, they seize her, Dai Kouranu keeps a housemaid from coming in. When Dai Fanlei can see again, she finds herself encircled. Dai Norla is weeping. Beautiful sympathy of the body.

They murmur. They stroke her hands. They say: “I know.”

She wants to say no. She wants to say, you don’t know, you don’t know us. She wants to say: my sister and cousin made this war. You don’t know how we have harnessed you and murdered you and made you refugees. She thinks:
For this the gods cursed you with monsters
.

These women should strip her and take her apart like an old piece of furniture. Throw her down, slice her open with Dai Kouranu’s curved knife. Tear out everything inside. She begs them in her mind:
Make me new
. But they are not her servants.

So she succumbs. She allows herself to be led. In the kitchen, they make her tea.

Afterward she walks up the dark hill alone. Dragging herself through the mud toward the temple where the great white shadow sleeps. She sings through numb lips:
My heart is white with love.

At the temple she sits in the glow of the fire and takes a letter from between the pages of the
Dreved Histories
. The letter Tav gave her at Velvalinhu, on the roof, because she had sworn to deliver it. The letter from Dasya.

His hand. The shape of the letters, instantly recognizable. The way the ink thickens at the top of certain strokes. Her chest throbs painfully at the sight of these blobs of ink, although she has read the letter many times.

I give you no greeting. I will not write your name. When you receive this I shall be dead, I hope, and everything discovered. I suppose I shall be hanged—the traitor’s death. Or, if they cannot hang me, they will drown me in hot wax.

A bath of wax. There’s something elegant about that. As if one were being prepared for a particularly arcane and taxing ceremony. To be made into a statue, perhaps. The idea doesn’t repulse me. I find it pleasing. After all I have been a statue for many years.

If they do hang me, I hope it works. I confess to you—not because you’re worthy of it, but because I can’t help it—that I have nightmares about failed hangings. I see myself writhing on the gallows. For hours. For days. Unable to live. Unable to die.

A perfect image of what I have endured for the past decade. Terrifying.

Does this strike you as self-pitying? A bit maudlin? Where are you? The last I heard, you were at Ashenlo, but I doubt you’re still there, as Kestenya has shaken herself awake at last. I, yes, I have ripped the highlands out from beneath your feet like a carpet; you will trample it no more. I imagine you have fled to your friends in the Valley, or to Nain. Perhaps to Aunt Mardith’s—how fitting that would be! Yes, you’re at Rediloth, licking your wounds, and everyone’s lamenting, the soldiers are coming down from the mountains, the separatists are burning the barns, and you’re reading this letter and frowning, tightening your lips (dear gods, they haunt me still) and thinking: “How unlike Dasya—this whining, self-pitying tone!” And I curse you for daring to think it, Siski, I curse you. I said I would not write your name but I will write it in a curse. Oh, Siski. May Leilin smite you, may Avalei turn your veins to fire, as she has mine, for daring to begrudge me my self-pity! May all the gods scourge you for leaving me alone. Without one word. For years. When you were the only one in the world I trusted. Would it have killed you, would it have been too much for your delicate sensibilities, to write me a single word in all those years? One word, to let me know that there was, somewhere, a human being who knew what I was and did not want me dead. Can you imagine what it would have meant? But you would not. You would not pity me; don’t dare to blame me for pitying myself.

I am tired. I sleep for the better part of every day. It’s not an ordinary sleep. It’s like a trance. Sometimes I fall from the trance into a real sleep, the kind with nightmares. I’m hot. I’m sick. I am preparing for the end.

Our uncle will save me. Dear Uncle Veda! He’ll have me executed. I won’t have mercy on him, I won’t kill myself, why should I? I’ll make him give the order. He’ll watch the execution, too. His principles will demand it. Are you disgusted? Good.

At any rate, I have been king! And so Aunt Mardith has what she wanted, if not precisely in the way she wanted it! Tell her she’s welcome to come to my execution. I’ll give her my hair to make a wig; she can wear it at the next Tanbrivaud.

(I often thought of writing to ask you for a lock of hair.)

Do not think that I am proud of what I have done. What have I to be proud of? I am a coward. I would have done anything to save myself, bowed down before any god. I tried them all, I think, before the end. I studied with the Priest of the Stone and the Priestess of Avalei, I tried the taubel, geomancy, milim, fasting, books, and at last this war, a final blow for the goddess, to crush her enemies, in the hope that she would give me back my life. I am not like Tav. Tav truly fought for Kestenya, while I have fought for nothing and no one but myself. Perhaps for this reason, Avalei has not seen fit to remove my curse, though for her sake I have steeped Olondria in blood.

Blood. In this land of almonds. This land where ladies like you put up their hair and gentlemen bow to them in the arilantha. The most beloved book in Olondria is
The Romance of the Valley,
because Olondria is the servant of romance. Sweet, sweet land, like honey with bees still in it! I hope I have made them feel the sting of it—Aunt Mardith and Uncle Fenya and the rest! I hope I have made you weep. I hope I have made you think of me for one moment. Just one moment. I dream sometimes of your wrist. Your shoe.