The Winged Histories (6 page)

I put down my things, and he noticed the swordbox. “Oh! Ha, ha! Did you bring that thing? Ha, ha!” he wheezed, leaning on a couch. “A joke,” he explained to my Aunt Firvaud, who regarded me with a searing stare. “Our Tavis used to be so fond of swordplay.”

“
I still am,
” I said, though I did not feel fond of anything. I thought I would never be fond of anything again.

“
So I understand,
” said Aunt Firvaud. Small, with painted lips, she flashed like a jewel in the setting of her elaborate beaded cape. “Veda,” she said then, in a deliberately careless tone, “please leave us. We have things to discuss. As ladies.”

“Naturally!” Uncle Veda said. And he went out, receiving a tiny shock when he touched the doorknob, because of the way his buffed slippers rubbed against the carpet.

Aunt Firvaud, my sharpest and most scornful relative, who hardly allowed us any intimacy with her although she was my mother’s sister, who always insisted on being called “
Teldaire Aunt
” because she was Queen of Olondria, advanced on me with a blazing face. “What has happened?” she demanded. “What is the matter with him?” And I knew that she meant Dasya, and it was as if my heart had dropped into my boots.

“Why?” I asked. “
Is he ill?
”

“
Ill!
” she cried, flushing darker still. “He’s weaker than a gnat; his heart is broken!”

I stared.

“Don’t stand there like a stump! Your sister has crushed his hopes, that’s clear enough; does she think herself too good for the future Telkan?”

“
I don
’t know,” I faltered. My head was spinning, and the edges of the room seemed to fade. I thought of Dasya and Siski going away together into the woods without me, and Siski coming home alone. The blood on her cheek, so dark in the instant I was allowed to see her, the instant before they whisked her away upstairs. I felt like a fool for not having seen the signs of romance between them, for thinking them depressed by the loss of Tuik. As if horses were everything.
Kad shedyamud
, I thought in Kestenyi. What barbarism. I felt, in that moment, like a barbarian, someone who was only good for riding and hunting and fighting, and then I almost wept for desire of such a life. My aunt was screaming in my face, her elegant little hands tearing the air—“I want to know what happened! Nobody tells me anything! What did they quarrel about? Whatever it is, she must forgive him!”—and I gave up the effort of standing and sat down on a plump silk couch.

The cushion was harder than I had expected; my teeth clacked together. Outside the window, just past my aunt, spread the windswept sky of Bain. Gulls swung between the towers. The sun struck a distant window that glittered so brightly I thought, for a moment, it was a tear in the corner of my eye. How quickly the world comes down, as if it were only made of paper. I thought of Uncle Veda pacing downstairs, his thumb and forefinger stained with ink, his ankles throbbing from dancing the arilantha and other intricate Valley dances. And everything was gone, the house, Valedhara of the high cupboards which even my uncle
’
s valet stood on a table to reach. The pearl-knobbed doors, the antelope horns that were taken down and polished with wax, and the great collection of weapons in the study. This room that was called a study was really a storage room for no one studied there and the old wall lamps were empty of oil, so that one always carried a candle inside even during the day because the windows were blocked by enormous old armor cases. I remembered the odor of dust and leather and the glow of the candle revealing the buried wonders of that chamber. “Somewhere here,” said Uncle Veda. Suddenly he had decided to look for a hawking glove that predated the War of the East. Metal clanged, shields slid to the floor. “Help me look, my dear,” my uncle said. His robe trailed in the dust and caught on boxes, his hanging sleeves became tangled in a collection of Panji hunting bows. At last he said: “Ah, look. There it is.” He held the glove up in the light of the candle. It seemed huge, misshapen, a monstrous gauntlet trailing moth-eaten ribbons. “I knew you would enjoy that thing,” he chuckled. “How we loved our hawking parties then, when Ranlu was alive!” And downstairs in the parlor I sat with the great glove on my knee and gingerly touched the ribbons and strands of beads, while Uncle Veda lit his pipe and told me of the hawking they had done in the golden days before the war. First they would choose their birds, walking quietly in the early morning among the hooded cages of the lokhu. Then they would go out among the hills, riding on the shaggy, stalwart ponies of the plain, and at last release their falcons to the sky. “We would catch foxes, yellow hares, even ermine,” he said. His eyes grew moist as he began to laugh, remembering how Ranlu
’
s hawk had perched on the roof of an aklidoh and the hermits had refused to let them retrieve it. “They were so kind to us, that was the worst of it!” he sputtered, wiping his eyes. “Yes, suddi! Welcome, suddi! Giving us curds and butter! We squatted in the yard and ate while Ranlu eyed the roof and they gave lectures on the sanctity of their walls . . .” He laughed, his face as red as mahogany in the dusky parlor. How wonderful it seemed to me as I sat on that hard silk couch, how wonderful, the soaring birds and galloping hooves, the wheeling space of the plain beneath the blueness of the hills. And rage welled up in me like icy water in a thaw: rage at Dasya and Siski for allowing some stupid lovers’ spat to spoil our autumns; rage at Uncle Veda for accepting the title of Duke of Bain and submitting to a society he loathed; and rage at my Teldaire Aunt who, tired of shouting, realizing I knew nothing, picked at the shoulder of my gown on her way out of the room. “Cheap,” she pronounced, standing over me, smelling of some expensive scent that reminded me of nothing but her own apartments in the Tower of Pomegranates.

“You’ll have to dress better in Bain,” she added. “This isn’t some highland barn.”

I raised my eyes, and she took a step backward, her fingers against her throat. For a moment I exulted at having frightened her, but then her expression cleared. She even smiled. “That’s it,” she murmured. “You’ll do very well.”

I often wondered what she meant. Did she recognize something in my murderous look? Did she, too, dream of murder every day? Did Siski? Do they still? Is that how they survive, these bright society women—by chewing on visions of violence as if on milim leaves? But I would not, could not; I would follow Ferelanyi; I would run away to military school. In the stolen carriage—borrowed, as I put it to myself—I flew eastward along the Ethendria Road. A kind of terror oppressed me, the sense of having done something irrevocable, of having set myself apart from my world forever. Autumn had come to the Valley: the vines lay rumpled and brown and fallen leaves blew over the road in the cold wind. And then there was that blue and misty morning when the horses seemed so fresh and stamped so prettily on the bricks of the old inn yard. The air was crisp and smelled of smoke and coffee and roasted chestnuts and the laughter of the girls in the kitchen rang from the lighted window. The porter ran out with my great trunk: he was a crooked old man and grinned with strong white teeth as he heaved his burden up into the carriage. And I stood smiling back at him and he smacked his palms together and exclaimed something about the chill in the air. Why did he suddenly strike me as such a handsome and wonderful old man? All that day we flew past empty fields; there were a few horses and children squabbling over the last of the apples, and when the sun came out the frost glittered. We crossed the Ilbalin on the ferry and I stood by the rails and smelled the air and listened to the shouts in the blunt accent of Nain. My happiness and impatience grew as we climbed into the mountains and I had to wear my wool vest and heavy mantle. “Raise the window, my lady,” Fulmia said. But I closed my eyes and let the wind scour my face, burning with joy and cold. I would not be a clown, I would not dance.
Good-bye, Uncle Veda!
It was the end of ribbons, the end of bouquets.

Years later, when my sister told me I looked like a clown, that moment sustained me. The carriage climbing higher, into rare air. My swordbox at my feet. In my excitement, I drummed it with my heels. It was the beginning of the dance of the mountains.

I still carry the letter my sister sent me from Ashenlo three months ago. It found me just before I left the great plateau. I was with the feredhai then, and the young boys crowded around me with huge eyes to watch me read the piece of paper. “What does it say?” they asked. “No news,” I told them. I folded the letter and tucked it into my shirt. There it stayed as I traveled westward with a small company of men, into the clement autumn of the Valley. It crossed the country with me and now it has taken up residence in the forest. I carry it still, in this chilly camp where we wait to make our move. Surely it no longer possesses any virtue. Its letters smudged, its creases near-transparent. Still I carry it and sometimes I unfold it by the lamp.

My own dear Taviye,

If you knew how dull we are without you, you would come back at once. Even the horses are pining for you! Poor Ustia will hardly eat his mash, and when I took him across the Oun this morning he wouldn’t gallop, but ambled like an old workhorse. All of the dogs are terribly jealous of Farus. Noni told me that she will not speak to you when you come unless you bring her an emerald collar. You know how she is, so you had better comply. As for Fotla, when I mention your name he acts as if he’s never heard of you!

To speak from my heart dear Taviye, come back for the feast if you can. It will be so wonderful for Mother. I’ve told her to try not to think of it but she says she dreams of you in those wild mountains surrounded by criminals disfigured by the black needle! So you see how it is. Father is the same as ever, exactly the same, only more so if possible, taking most of his meals alone in the porch. One never knows what mood will take possession of him from one moment to the next. I hate to leave them alone together.

As for me, I’m bored almost into the grave. Kethina has gone back to Nauve and never writes, as she says she is “caught up with life.” I suppose she means new gowns. I have given up on all that myself and go about in a blue dress like a peasant. What is the point? Mother and Nenya force me to dress in the afternoons, as we have not, apparently, sunk so low as to appear at the table in slippers. How stupid everything seems! Even my shell combs have grown heavy; when I put up my hair, I swear to you, my arms ache.

Taviye, how has it happened that we are scattered all over the country?

Well, they are calling me to dress. It’s already cold in the mountains and all my gowns are Valley ones, thin silks with open backs. I freeze nightly. Taviye, dear Taviye, do you remember when we were children, how we used to slide across the floor of the avla? Suddenly I remembered that. I think of those days so often and have so much pleasure from it that sometimes I actually burst out laughing. I remember even the terrible things with nothing but fondness now, like Grandmother’s burial day and how we fell into the gorge. Do you remember that? Nenya tells me I’m too old now to be giggling or sighing to myself over my embroidery. “Alas my heart, sudaidi,” she says (for she is a true Kestenyi though she will never lose her pride in calling herself a “daughter of Nain,” and if a new tradesman comes to the door she still looks at the ceiling and snaps her fingers as if she can’t recall Kestenyi words—what nonsense!)—“Alas my heart, sudaidi,” she says, “be sensible and break this habit of laughing and crying all the time, it’s not right for a lady!” As if one’s rank should prevent one from feeling anything in life! But it’s only the memory of those days that makes me feel anything. So come back soon, and let’s go riding over the Oun like we used to, and have wine and raush under the trees by the bridge. You know it was funny when Kethina was here, she said you’d always seemed so stiff and proud to her and without any lightheartedness at all. She said she used to be afraid of you, you were so serious, and I said you were the merriest person I knew.
Vai,
here I am with nothing but memories, like an old woman. Come soon and make us all cheerful.

Love, Siski

On her last night, the night they all left for Nauve, she came upstairs and stood by my bed in her dark gray traveling clothes and a cherry-colored scarf. Her face severe above the brilliant silk bunched at her throat. She held a little round case in front of her with both hands. When she shrugged, it tapped against her knees and stirred her long dark skirt. She looked at me and smiled and then looked at the window.

“After all, it’s been a wonderful summer,” she said.

Dogs barked; the light of carriage lamps gleamed behind the curtains.

“
Siski, don
’t,” I said.

“No, I have to go,” she said. She bent down and kissed me, smiling. “
I don
’t know what’s the matter with me.” Her breath struggled for a moment in the tightness of her coat and then she was calm, at the door, touching her hair, and gone.

3. Blood

The swordmaiden will bleed.

All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women.

The swordmaiden, like all warriors, must transform aversion into pride. She will be aided in this by the knowledge that her path to this achievement, being rougher and less moonlit than the paths of her companions, endows her triumph with a superior glory.

Consider: the unscarred women depicted in the temples are gods.

Consider: very few overcome the worship of the flesh. Bardo of Weis, an exceedingly arrogant brawler, whose skin was so tortured it resembled a carpet, wept in his dreams once a year for the loss of his former body.

There is also the small matter of the swordmaiden’s monthly blood. It is advisable to stanch the flow with rags, and to wash these rags in privacy, if at all possible, as one’s companions may find the subject cause for jest. It is also acceptable to follow the example of Maris, who slew two men in duels prompted by such insults, or of the False Countess, who used to discuss her flow openly in her camp, as she and her men together discoursed on the issue of their bowels.

The question is unlikely to arise except in times of peace; the swordmaiden at war will often find that her flow has stopped. Consider Galaron of Nain, who bled for the first time in her life at the age of thirty, and mistook the pangs and blood for signs that her food had been poisoned.

When my wound had fully healed and I no longer needed the cane, I went into the desert. I dressed in the highland way, in wide trousers and a sheepskin jacket; with my hair loose on my shoulders and the sword worn openly at my side, I was taken everywhere for a young man. Even Fadhian, who met me, as my letter requested, a few miles south of Tevlas, thought I was a boy. He was seated on the fence outside the inn, his horse cropping the weeds nearby, and he nodded to me without expression.

Then I smiled, and his hard face rippled into understanding. He jumped down, I dismounted, and we clasped hands.

“Tavis,” he said.

“Tav.”

He bowed. We rode together in silence until firelight appeared against the dusky sky.

“There’s the camp,” he said. We quickened our pace. Several boys came out to meet us, bearing torches and one broken lantern that gave off an evil smell. They swung the lantern in my face, exclaiming in a dialect I found difficult to understand. I was struck by the rowdy noise they made and the way they did not try to hide the fact that they were talking about me, and also by their jostling closeness, the way they all rode in a knot, which I recognized as a skill but did not like.

Tumbling and clattering, we rode into the camp. Fadhian smiled as girls ran up to greet him and tug his stirrups. He dismounted and embraced everyone and kissed each boy and girl on the top of the head and the women kissed him on the shoulder. Everyone laughed when he kissed Lunsila, who was so tall she had to bend her knees in order for him to kiss the crown of her dark head, and she laughed more than anyone and everyone made jokes that it was clear they had made many times before. The children crowded at Fadhian’s knees and then he was carrying two of them and continued to hold them as he introduced me. I clasped hands with everyone and was overcome by loneliness. Later the boys told me they had feared my angry face. And Fadhian ducked into a tent to greet his wife while I sat by the nearest fire and someone brought me coffee in a tin cup. The coffee, boiled with goat’s milk, had a strong, musky taste, but I drank it all while the boys crouched around me and stared. The men sat with us too and gave me tobacco and asked questions in gruff voices. There were long pauses between the questions, and sometimes the boys broke in with piercing voices, all in the dialect that refused to arrange itself in my mind.

I can speak Kestenyi
, I said to myself.
I have spoken it all my life
. And it was true—in a few days everything would be clear: I would hear the familiar words under tricks of pronunciation, but on that first night the language seemed encased in a thicket of thorns. I heard my own voice, strained and weak like the voice of a Valley official who believes that learning the language will endear him to the highlanders. Some of the words even came out with a strong Olondrian accent, such as I had never affected at home.

That night I slept poorly in the tent they gave me, thinking of how Fadhian’s son Redos had pulled me aside. Thinking of his arrogant face and figure in the black jacket and his question asked with such deliberate slowness.

“Why have you come here?” he said.

I could not pretend not to understand. “
To forget,
” I answered him, “and to begin.”

His black hair, the blackened silver at his throat, and there, at the door of the tent, a string of prayer bells ringing in the wind.

At the end of the Month of Plenty we struck camp and began to move. The sunlight was brilliant, falling in sheets of whiteness. It glittered on the roofs and fences covered with new snow and the leagues of hard flat country under the bird-speckled sky. In the morning we rose and grimaced and worked the stiffness out of our limbs and beat the blankets, throwing off flakes of frost. The boys ran out calling the herds with the curious hollow cries I could not imitate. And the girls crouched under mantles squinting in the smoke of the fires or clicked to call their milch goats, strange thick-haired creatures with cross-eyed stares, who gave off a fierce odor and whose heavy yellowish milk made the crumbly cheese the feredhai carried on journeys. Sometimes the girls called to their ponies too: for this they had a high and trilling cry like the sound of the black eagles of the Tavroun. I watched the girls run, crying, catching up the folds of their mantles with one hand and mounting the ponies with a sudden sideways leap. I was always amazed at how fast they rode, sitting cross-legged and seemingly off-balance but never falling. They would ride to the neighboring farms with hides to trade for coffee and tobacco and, if the trading went well, perhaps a handful of grain.

“So now you have seen the barbarity of the plains,”
Fadhian smiled.

He sat back under the femka, his features indistinct in the gloom.

I watched the glint of his teeth and said: “It is not barbarity. True barbarity exists only in cities.”

“Really,” he said, still smiling, and I knew I had spoken clumsily. He bent to refill my cup from the silver pot. “I realize,” he said, “that you are spending only a season with us. Please refrain from any custom that does not suit your tastes.”

And I wanted to tell him that everything suited my tastes, everything, riding and living in tents and always seeing new parts of the country, eating cheese and hoda in the saddle and the way the boys, with their rough, easy ways, had made me one of them. I wanted to tell him that I could live for days on nothing but raush, that I grew sick unto death on teiva, rich food and wine. I wanted to tell him that my desire was only to sleep in a tent or beneath the stars and never again to have silk or muslin against my skin. But I was silent. After a moment I asked if he regretted accepting me. Then he laughed and reached out to clap me on the arm.

“Sensitivity!” he cried. “It’s the curse of settled folk. By the end of winter you’ll lose your fear of words.”

But he was wrong. I have never lost my fear of words, nor have I learned to master them and bend them to my will, to meet them with confidence and strip and twist them as I saw him do on his stool of judgment under the red femka. His decisions grew from hours of talk and the quiet pronouncements of his wife, Amlasith, who sat beside him in a leather chair, while two girls tossed sweet sandalwood into the brazier at her side. These decisions were final and I never saw them questioned. An unhappy man could ride away if he liked. The feredhai were never anxious unless women were involved in the disputes, for an unhappy woman would take with her the male relatives of her ausk and all their flocks, a blow to the larger clan. This never happened while I was there, but I heard of Nith Rudasa who in the year of the yellow rams had cut herself off from Fadhian’s people. They still remembered her and spoke of her sadly, while the men who had abandoned them were referred to as used shoes.

Winter came after us and we rode faster. We hurried eastward, the wagons clacking over the frozen ground, fleeing into the Duoronwei where the winter camp awaited us and the secret pastures among the folds of the mountains. There was no time to pause on that long run and the women cooked on the moving wagons and cured raush in the flying smoke. The farms we passed were white and still, the doors closed. Bildiri horsemen watched us over the fences, holding their coiled whips. I rode with the feredhai through the stinging sleet and later over the whitened plains, peering through the slit in my wool headscarf, the scar on my thigh aching and my limbs burning with the desire for speed, cold, hunger, and oblivion. After three days the men were silent and no longer stared at me with secretly mocking looks as they had done at first. But the boys who had always loved me for my spurs and my sword in its embossed scabbard remained my closest friends after Fadhian himself.

“
Well,
” said Redos, when I had brought down the great white ram among the Lihoun, “so the lady can shoot.”

The snow was falling thickly. The women, with yells of exultation, descended on the silver beast and in moments had skinned and gutted and quartered it. The children were given handfuls of fleece dipped in the blood to suck, and tottered about in their heavy clothes, sometimes falling and dotting the snow with pink. Around me the men sat on their horses and watched. Weafan rode up on her pony and presented me with the liver.

They watched me cut off a piece and nodded gravely when I had swallowed it.

I had been afraid but did not feel ill.

“You’ve eaten it before,” cried Finor, smiling in amazement, and I laughed when I remembered Loma struck down in the north.

I dug my heels into my horse and dashed away over the snow. I knew that I had a reputation for eccentricity, strange for me who, as a child, had been considered so ordinary that my parents had once forgotten me on a journey to the Valley. Yes, they forgot me, they left me behind with the servants. I laughed as I galloped over the snow, remembering Nenya’s sandals scraping over the flags. She opened the lid of the chest and cried out, “Oh, what are you doing there?” I heard her breath and her soft moan of distress. She reached into the chest and pulled me out, the keys clinking at her belt. My traveling clothes were covered with sawdust, and she dusted me off in haste, sometimes slapping me so that it hurt. I could hear that the house was entirely empty.

“They’re gone,” I said.

She snatched me up into the floury smell of her dress. I clutched her collar as she ran out to the lane, bouncing in her arms, her breath about me and the patches of sun in the lane and the trunks of the trees all leaping madly.

“Here she is,” she cried.

Mother was standing outside the carriage and she clasped me tight and I breathed her different smell of violet perfume. “Why can you not control her?” said Father. I looked up and Siski was at the window, making an evil face against the glass.

I rode until it seemed my horse’s hooves had trampled that face into the snow. Two days later we were at the winter camp, Fadhian filled with satisfaction because we had reached it on the second Tolie of the month of Mur in the season of Earth Ringing. In the cave we slaughtered a bull and drank its blood by torchlight, and that night the boys were restless and could not sleep, knowing that all the married men were lying with their wives. In the morning we ate fresh meat and a pudding of blood and went back to bed. That deep sleep of satiety and weariness under furs and blankets in the tent that was full of the breath of youth. A child woke me in the afternoon and summoned me to Fadhian’s tent where I sat among cushions and drank hot milk with sama.

I told him that I wanted to go with the boys, eastward into the winter pasture, and not remain with the women in the camp. “It will be very hard,” he said. He waited for me to answer, and when I did not he clapped my shoulder in his companionable way. “
Forgive me,
” he laughed, and when the boys departed into the Duoronwei I went with them, treading on the edge of the world. The rigid frost, the blue air, and the animals linked with rope on the treacherous ice took me back to my days in the northern war.

“Are the Lelevai colder than these mountains?” Mantia shouted.

“No,” I shouted back, and we were overwhelmed with echoes. Finor stalked back down the line and hissed for us to be quiet: he was afraid of the avalanche, the shifting dragon. In silence we plodded along the ridge and after three days we saw the valley, a gash in the mountains filled with a whirling mist. It took us seven days to get the animals to the bottom and my hands bled and I ached and was very happy. There was the day when without the slightest warning the sun struck down on us and illuminated a valley of black flowers, of black fir trees and cold streams and enormous birds that rose up honking, blocking the light with the spread of their huge wings.

“
Iloki!
” I cried.

I had heard that they came from the mountains but had never seen them in the wild, where they feed on sleeping fish. The famished cattle cropped the tall black lilies and Amantir smiled and said: “Here is the Paradise of Oud.”

I thought of Dasya then, how he used to speak of the outlawed Kestneyi goddess Roun: he believed she was only another name for Avalei, and that her paradise, called Oud, was a paradise of song. “Song,” he said, “not sign. Speech, not writing.” I wondered where Dasya was, if he was still at his secret work in the Lelevai, carefully testing captain after captain, pulling together the structure of a war. Or perhaps he was in the Valley now, where peasant unrest was growing. Already it was spreading into the highlands: rumors reached us of a carriage waylaid on the road to Bron, two Olondrians slain, tiny bells found in their mouths. Bells, for prayer. I wondered how Fadhian had received the news—if he, so cautious, was ready to hear the words
Kestenya Rukebnar.
Delicious motto of the traitorous dead. Sometimes I could not sleep, thinking of how I would say those words to him.
Kestenya Rukebnar
. In their silver resonance I would be revealed: not merely an eccentric noblewoman amusing herself with highland games, but a link between rebellious Kestenya, the rebellious Valley, and the rebellious north—a key, a chance, a bell, a sword.

Kestenya Rukebnar
. I whispered the words with joy in that cold valley, where I left my sadness among the frosted leaves. All of it, abandoned. It slipped from me in the ache of the rushing streams, in the harsh cries of the iloki. “Do you like
hesensai
?” Mantia asked me, grinning, and I said yes, only realizing a moment later why he laughed.
Hesensai
: to drive the cattle to their winter pasture. Literally, “to travel without women.”

In the spring we climbed out of that valley, forcing the animals up the rocky slopes, shouting and clacking sticks behind them, driving them over the sun-touched snow that broke under their hooves into the camp where blankets were hung to dry on lines. Girls ran out, holding up their mantles, embracing their brothers and cows and horses without any kind of order, and crying with happiness. Their faces glittered dark against a landscape covered with mud and dirty snow and they were bright and warm and alive. I was dazzled by them, by their light voices and quick hands, their odor of wood-smoke and roasting coffee and wool blankets, the flash of their heavy silver anklets and the beads in their tangled hair and their bold movements as they shoved one another and hurried to build up the fires. I felt that I had never seen women before. Amlasith approached me, her arms spread out, and I leaned to kiss her shoulder. The fleece of her jacket made me sneeze and she laughed and pulled my head down and kissed my brow and patted my cheek with her warm hand.