The Winged Histories (11 page)

He remembered holding the child to his chest. And how he carried it out onto the balcony while the women of the leilinhu mopped the floor. He was going to jump. He was going to kill them both. It would be quite simple. He gripped the railing, the newborn child tucked almost carelessly in one arm. Then he paused, distracted by the notes of a hunting horn in the wood. He stood motionless, breathless; the child began to wail. One of Leilin’s women came onto the balcony and scolded him. What was he doing, what did he mean by it? Look at the rain.

It was something he would discuss often with his fellow scholar and Stone worshiper, Lunre of Kebreis, the only man he ever called friend. These tricks of memory. Pink peppercorns in the towers of Velvalinhu, his dead wife’s face at night in the room of the Stone. Lunre felt that such shadows represented the two forms of pain: the loss of happiness and the coming of grief. Such experiences caused lumps to form in the ventricles of the heart; at times of stress, the lumps swelled, causing a slowing of the blood, and with it depression and illness. In addition, the swollen lumps secreted memories into the blood, which carried them to the brain and the inner eye.

“You will make me out to be nothing but a pudding of blood and fat,”
said Ivrom.

“So are we all,” Lunre answered cheerfully.

Lunre was a passionate reader of the physician Ura of Deinivel, known to her enemies as the Bloody Imp. Hers was a happy philosophy, in which any sorrow, however great, might be diagramed and treated with some combination of herbs and baths. Her optimism suited Lunre, Ivrom thought, as the wind blew across the terrace where they sat, lifting Lunre’s dark hair out of his eyes. The younger man leaned back on his elbows, tilting his head to catch the sun on his face. No doubt he believed that lumps in the heart could be cured with mallows.

Ivrom’s idea was different. He held that the phantoms of memory, like ordinary shadows, only appear in the presence of light. Events are lamps of varying strength: a strong lamp, such as a painful or dangerous event, causes shadows to spring out on the wall of the mind.

His daughter, who sat on the floor with her knees drawn up, listening avidly to the two men, decided she agreed with Lunre. She, too, preferred the interpretation of Ura, the Bloody Imp, because, she reasoned to herself with a child’s practicality, all the others were useless. What good was her father’s talk of lamps and shadows? But a swollen heart could be treated, with, for example, oinov to thin the blood. She rubbed idly at the terrace wall with the tip of her finger so that the dried dust, gold in the sun, crumbled away like a morsel of cake. She did not yet know (and it would take her two decades to admit it) that she approved of Ura’s philosophy in part because Lunre liked it, or (and this would take her even longer to admit) that she approved of it because it was a philosophy of the body. Ura’s conclusions were thick with blood and with time, her instructions unwinding in strings of numbers: a five-minute bath, a cupful of edlath, two blows to the chest. The child’s blood had recently begun to obey the moon’s calendar and she felt herself in the realm of flesh and time, the realm of Tenais.

Tenais, who swelled. One month, two months, three, up to nine, and then death. The child dreamt that her mother was an animated clock. Its belly stuck out angrily. Her father was dashing to and fro, small as a dragonfly, dressed in white for some reason, crying “Eternity.” Waking, she found that her sheets were damp with blood. Her father would never make her feel that she was not worthy to study the words of the Nameless Gods, he would never suggest that she was too timebound to touch eternity, he would never even mention that she was a girl. Yet she felt it obscurely, always, this sense of heaviness, of torpor. As she grew older she suffered from headaches and insomnia. On the terrace that day, as she picked at the wall, she experienced the first twinge of a strange resentment. She put her finger into her mouth.

“Think of history,” her father was saying. “Think of the Drevedi, Avalei’s curse. They disappear in times of peace, and resurface in times of unrest. They are the memory of the Olondrian Empire. And war is a lamp.”

“They might be lumps in the empire’s heart,” Lunre said.

A lump in his heart. A shadow in his mind.

You will sever all ties
, he thought. He whispered it to himself the night Tenais died. The words of the Nameless Gods, revealed on the great black Stone drawn out of the desert, scored in it by the Architects of Time.
Sever all ties
. The words in his mouth like ash. It was not the coldness of the words that horrified him, their utter opposition to anything human, but rather his own affinity for them, the way he was drawn to this vision of solitude with a feeling almost of nostalgia. He had the kind of loneliness that battles everything, that makes a person strange forever. If only he had seen it before, he would never have married Tenais or produced the tiny child now pressed against his heart.
Sever all ties
. And he had severed Tenais and she was dead. He’d jump from the balcony, he thought suddenly, taking the child with him. He was a monster that should not live. Her face on the pillow, oh Nameless Gods. He was choking, something terrible was happening in his throat. The misery of his wife’s last days! Without habit, he would explain to Lunre years later, we should all of us run screaming out of doors. It was habit that made life possible, both for individuals and for the empire. For this reason one must be careful to take things slowly. One could not simply outlaw the worship of Avalei outright; one must teach the people, lead them by stages, allow them to keep their rituals as long as possible. Habit is a curtain. It dims the lamp. As he stood on the balcony, he heard horns: Ahadrom II was riding in the rain. Thin, merry shouts rang out like the clinking of jewelry as the whole company of idiots passed on horseback far below, the Telkan and his wife’s insufferable family, invisible to Ivrom but no doubt clad in gaudy cloaks that glistened in the torchlight. His jaw tightened; how he loathed them! And it was this bracing hatred that brought him back from the brink of death that night, that allowed him to think of the vase he would have commissioned in his wife’s memory, a white marble vessel engraved with her name and the dates of her birth and death. It was the sound of those shouts, so bright and ephemeral, quickly erased by a roll of thunder, that saved him even before the child began to cry, and before one of Leilin’s women came out and scolded him. And in fact he did commission the vase, as Telkans commission memorials of war. For the memorial does not preserve the memory of suffering, but rather transforms it into habit. At first he kept a bundle of blooming sage in the vase. But after some time, this gesture toward the afterlife was abandoned. The child would know the vase as the place where they kept the pens.

“Vars, what is happening?”

I went so far as to grip his sleeve, almost upsetting the pewter dish he had brought me, the olives and cured meat. He managed to put the dish down on the table. I never let go of his arm. His fingernails, I noticed, were very black.

“What’s happening? Tell me something, anything! It’s cruel to keep me locked up in ignorance.”

“You are not in prison, teldarin,” he said.

“Am I not? Yet I can’
t go out.
”

“For your safety.”

“Safety from what? The fire? Or a hanging?”

He winced at that and briefly massaged his ragged beard. Vars grows rougher by the day, his jacket stained, one shoulder tearing. Does he bathe?

“Is everything in ruins?” I asked him. “The fountain in the Alabaster Court is choked with rubbish—I see it from my window. Have you done the same to all of them?”

“The water I bring you is all right, I hope?” he asked anxiously.

“
I don
’t care,” I cried. “I wish you’d poison me. What does your prince mean to do?”

He drew himself up then, and a high color came into his cheek.

“He has already done it,” he said. “He has returned us to Avalei.”

A chill ran down my limbs. I dropped his arm. “Very well,” I whispered.

It was his turn to take my arm now. He led me to a chair. He fetched a knife and fork from the cupboard and cut up the meat he had brought me, saying something about preserving my strength.

My laugh was a sob. “For what? So I can abide the torture longer?”

“
Nonsense, teldarin.
” He crouched before me, stabbed at the meat, and held the fork toward me. I took it; the meat was tough and salty, so delicious it brought the tears to my eyes. Vars nodded, encouraging. “There, you see? It’
s just hunger.
”

While I chewed he sat cross-legged and told me he came from the estate of Ollahu, near Feirin. He was the youngest of eight brothers, and his inheritance was so small he could only survive with any honor by joining the army, which he had done at the age of fifteen. There he had met his captain, Lady Tavis of Ashenlo, the Telkan’s niece. As he spoke of her he grew at once more animated and more serious. He and his captain had endured torments in the Lelevai, he told me, such as he would not recount while I was eating. “We understood then that Olondria was going to ruin,” he said. “People were unhappy all over the empire. The Kestenyis had been miserable for generations, of course, kept under the Telkan’s boot, as they put it, but now there was rage in the Valley as well. My mother sent me letters saying our Temple of Avalei had closed for lack of funds . . .” Here he trailed off and gave me an embarrassed glance, no doubt remembering that it was my father who had closed Avalei’
s temples.

I smiled at him coldly. “It’s all right. I feel quite well now. Please go on.”

“
Well,
” he said. He cleared his throat. “Well, teldarin, it wasn’t right. That temple was nearly as old as the War of the Tongues. We’d all been dedicated there—myself, my mother, my grandmother, going back into the mists of time, as it were. You can’t take something like that away from people. And they were saying the High Priestess of Avalei was imprisoned here on the Isle, and it was against the law to interpret dreams or even to read the taubel, and soon the Feast of Birds would be outlawed, dancing, wine—even weddings! And there we were in the Lelevai, dying for the empire like sheep. We couldn’t stand it.” He lowered his eyes and passed me the dish.

“So you all banded together against us,” I said.

“Against the Telkan.”

“And against my father.”

He met my eyes again. “Yes.”

I nodded. My strength was returning; perhaps he was right, and I had been hungry without realizing it. I tried to speak in an even tone, but my voice came out tight and scornful. “You must not think I am surprised to learn that we were hated.”

He inclined his head, acquiescent. An absurdly elegant and formal gesture, something out of a different era.

I looked toward the balcony doors, which are streaked with grime and rimmed with frost. I thought of how, at the end, my father had made an error of judgment. He, who had once advocated caution, had pushed the people too far. And they had broken on him like a wave.

“Today is the twelfth day of the month of Fir,” I murmured. “On this day, the Telkan hears reports from the Master of the Hounds. The Telkan’s nails are cleaned and trimmed and the wax removed from his ears. The High Priestess of Avalei examines the wax and predicts the coming year’s harvest.”

Vars stood up and poured a cup of water from the jug. “
Drink, teldarin.
”

I took the cup. “Our Telkan gave up this ritual,” I told him. “I suppose your prince—
your Telkan
—will bring it back.”

Vars hefted the water jug, drank from the lip, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “He’ll do what’s right,” he said.

2. For they have set forth in a ship of fools.

917–922

Avalei. Love. Ripener of the Grain.

When Ivrom was small he dreamt of gorging himself, as rich children do, on pigs made of almond paste. One year on the Feast of Birds he stole a handful of nuts from a vendor’s cart and was beaten and locked in the coal cellar for two days. The sweetness of cashews, their unctuous buttery flesh, the way they collapsed between the teeth as if in longing to be eaten, combined in his mind with the darkness and cold of the cellar and the struggle he waged with his body before he gave in and relieved himself in a corner. The shame of it, the stinging scent of the lye his father made him use to scrub out the cellar afterward, his terrible helplessness, his rage—all of these insinuated themselves into the atmosphere of the Feast of Birds: into sweetmeats, the worship of Avalei, and the spring. So much so that when he saw plum trees in flower, it gave him pleasure to imagine them shriveling or in decay. And when his aunt asked which god he would serve, he chose Heth Kuidva, whose voice is the knell of doom, and who is no friend to the Goddess of Pigs.

During school holidays he stayed with his aunt in her quiet, leafy neighborhood between the Savra Mai and the Quarter of Sighs. The peppercorn tree presided over games among the cousins, all of whom were handsomer and better dressed than he. There was a game with a key on a string; one of his cousins, shaking with merriment, hid it in the bosom of her dress. There was sweetened lime juice, so bright and cold he couldn’t stop drinking it. And someone pushed him and sent him sprawling among the azaleas.

And on the Isle, on the Feast of Birds, the Teldaire approached him with a star on a chain, her black eyes flashing wickedly, and she stood on her toes—for she was a very small woman, a journalist had once named her the Mantis—and raised her arms as if she would favor him with the star. When he flinched, she lost her balance and placed one hand on his chest. He flinched again. “
I am sorry, Your Highness,
” he said gruffly.

She laughed. “Dear, dear,” she said, swinging the star so that it sparkled. “Are you really so frosty? They told me it was warmer in the Valley, but, by the Rose, you’d make a stone shiver.”

“
I am sorry,
” he repeated. Was she mocking him with that reference to a stone? “I do not wear jewelry of any kind, Your Highness.”

Again a peal of laughter, like glass breaking. “I can see that; my eyes are quite good. I don’t expect to go blind yet, at my age!”

She spun the chain on her finger. It came so close to his face that he stepped back. She did not appear to notice. “I thought you might wear something festive, just to please me. It can’t be entirely forbidden. My dear Ahadrom is wearing his great uncle’
s medallion
—though, between you and me, it suits him very ill! How can something so precious contrive to look like it’s made of tin? I told him to wear his rubies, you know he owns half the rubies in the empire, he has perfectly splendid ornaments, some of them nearly as big as breastplates, but he wouldn’t do it, even for the feast. I suppose that’s your influence?”

“
I hope not, Your Highness.
”

“Why? Surely you hope to influence him, as his priest? I understand you’ve been made a priest now—a priest of the Stone.”

She said the words slowly and carefully, with the shadow of a smile, like a child repeating a lesson and hoping for praise.

“
Yes, Your Highness.
”

“You grit your teeth—are you ill?”

“
No, Your Highness.
”

His legs were trembling. She gazed straight into his face, malicious and amused. He avoided her eyes, looking instead at the amethysts in her high black hair, at the dancers whirling behind her under the lights.

“Veimaro.”

“
Yes, Teldaire.
”

“Look at me. Yes, that’s better. It’s not so terrible, is it? I’m not entirely repulsive to look at, I hope? No, I know you can’t answer that, don’t bother. I wonder what you know about me? I mean, besides what the papers say—that I’m pretty and know how to dance. I don’t suppose my intelligence comes up in the newspapers much—not that I read that trash. But I assure you, veimaro, I am not stupid. My husband is a very young king. Very young. He requires guidance. Do you know what the Old Telkan said to me before he died?”

He thought: You are even younger than the king. She was only eighteen. In her little face, her eyes glowed like a blacksmith’s tongs. “No,” he said.

“He said: ‘My dear, you are more than decorative, and this union is more than political. My nephew is but a man of dough. He needs fire to bake him.’ I can only suppose he meant that I was to play the role of the oven. He said it to me in this very room. At my wedding.”

She smiled sweetly. “The Old Telkan was a very cautious man, though people remember him as a pleasure-loving prince. He was careful to make sure that people thought of him in that way. Olondrians like a king who is large and strong and cheerful. I know this, although I’m Nainish. And you—you’re from Bain, aren’t you, veimaro? So you must know it even better than I. Olondrians rule the world, but their national character is essentially weak. Isn’t that odd? They’re like children. Now, look at Ahadrom.”

He looked. Across the room, the young king sweated under the lamps, buttoned into a black coat that shone like a beetle’
s carapace.

“Gray as a cod,” the Teldaire said, “and miserable as a victim of the toothache. I suppose he looks happier when he’s tucked away with you? With you and your High Priest and his old father. And the Stone, of course. Is he happier? Tell me. Does he ever smile?”

“Our work is not done for pleasure, Your Highness.”

Her eyes widened. “You snap! Very good! I knew you had it in you. I think we might become friends after all.”

She slipped the chain with the star over her own head. “I’ll wear this for you, as a token. And you,” she concluded with her bright laugh, “will leave the bread in the oven.”

Leave the bread in the oven! As if Velvalinhu were a kitchen! And it was, it was, he thought as he stamped out of the ballroom in fury: a stinking kitchen, begrimed with soot, where the empire’s wealth poured in the back door, and princes, like dirty scullery boys, stood with their hands in the pots. But he would not be part of it—he’d starve first! “Who is she?” he raged in the little room where his High Priest sat beside the fire, and the Stone stood heavy in the corner, covered with a black cloth, and Ahadrom I drowsed in his low chair.

“Who is she? This chit of a girl—
she dares
—! Where did she come from?”

“Nain,” the old priest said mildly.

“Yes, but how did she get her claws into the Telkan?”

“You are very angry, my child,” the priest observed. “Remember:
A quiet heart is a clear doorway, through which may enter the horsemen of the gods
.”

Elarom’s puffy, discolored hand wandered over his chest, found the strings of his robe and drew them tight. Even in the spring he felt the cold. His trembling sent a pang through Ivrom’s heart. “
Forgive me, Master,
” the younger man said.

Ahadrom I made a snuffling sound and jerked upright, looking blearily about him.

“You,” said Ivrom, turning to the Telkan’s father. He would not say “
my lord
”; such words had been banished from this holy place; in this room, he did not even call the Telkan “
Your Highness.
”

“Yes?” Ahadrom I said, startled.

Ivrom knelt in front of him, bringing his face level with that of the former Duke of Tevlas. Ahadrom I had a round old face and a pitiful straggling beard; his head was bald, his eyes poor; he rarely managed to speak two words of sense together. But he will speak sense to me, Ivrom thought grimly, if I have to slap him awake. “Tell me about the queen,” he said.

“
Iloni,
” Ahadrom I murmured with a hint of fondness. “Eyes like grapes. Such watercolors . . . on the terrace . . .”

“Not that one. I mean the new queen, Firvaud.”

“Oh,
that
one!” the old man chuckled. “Graceful. Like a little black goose.”

“How did she meet your son?”

“It was . . . they came to Ashenlo. All the family together. For the—was it a wedding? In winter. Tanbrivaud, perhaps.”

“They came from Nain in winter?”

“Yes, in a . . .” Ahadrom I skimmed his hand across his robed knees.

“A sleigh?”

“Such handsome children. The girls had very sharp feet. Marks in the parquetry, you know, from dancing. Then the falcon died. Beilan was so sad. The grave, all afternoon, digging. The ground was frozen . . .”

“Tell me about Firvaud.”

“Oh, that one! A little veil. Little quick hands. In the parlor for hours. The needle flew . . .”

“She made herself look industrious.”

“Eh?”

“And what else? About Firvaud.”

The old man yawned. “A good girl. Came to look at the Stone.”

Ivrom turned to the priest. “She saw the Stone?”

“Oh, yes,” Elarom said, smiling. “In those days we had more freedom. We worked in a little lumber room in the west wing of the house—do you remember that, Ahadrom? The corridor was very long and dark, but anyone who got to the end of it could find us. The servants used to visit at night sometimes. We’d make them tea, Ahadrom and I. Young Firvaud came several times. She seemed quite interested, as I recall.”

That flint-eyed, shiny-haired, dancing wretch. With the Stone.

“What did she wear?” Ivrom asked hoarsely.

Elarom hesitated, but Ahadrom spoke up with sudden confidence. “White. All white. She and her sister and brother. White jackets, white frocks for the girls. White shoes. They’d lost their father that year, you see.”

Ivrom left the room. He was finished with the two old men. They had given him enough to begin. And then, the room of the Stone was windowless, stuffy with the fire burning, and he felt the need of expansion now, of distance. In his own apartment, the nurse was asleep on her cot with the child beside her. He passed the solid darkness of their shapes in the airy darkness of the room. He stepped out onto the balcony, into the smell of rain. His new apartment, bigger than the one he had shared with Tenais, commanded a view of parks and gardens flecked with lamps. He breathed the sweet, humid air, filled with the exaltation of hate, remembering the night his child was born. A company had passed on horseback then, hallooing in the dark. She had been among them—Firvaud of Faluidhen—probably in the lead, her little boots snug in the stirrups.

He saw her. In her dark green cloak. Her face turned in the torchlight, the laughing mouth. He saw her three years ago, before he knew she existed: demure in her white mourning frock, in the formal parlor at Ashenlo, white ribbons in the black cream of her hair. She was doing needlework—very fine, with her fine sharp fingers! She would be sure to put on an attitude of sadness. Her father had died of a catarrh in the autumn. Perhaps, when she spoke of it, she managed to produce a tiny tear. He could see it all so clearly! Her father had been a general in the Olondrian army, fighting the Brogyars along the northeastern border; the handsome award of appreciation the family had received from the empire upon his death had financed this trip to visit the Prince of the Realms. That money had purchased the girls’ exquisite lace stockings, which made it look as if some snowy nymph had breathed upon their calves; their dresses were of the softest wool; their cloaks, in typical Nainish style, were richly embroidered with silver on the inside. Who could doubt that Firvaud, with her sinuous dark beauty, appeared to advantage in her mourning clothes, like a black flower in a silver vase? And then the way she widened her eyes—the way she took the prince’s arm, when they walked among the trees of the frozen gardens! Her vivid face, rosy with cold, peered out of her white fur hood. “Tell me about the Stone, I am so interested!” And Ahadrom II—Teskon, as he was called then—the great, slow, credulous fool, with his mouth half open—he had been taken in!

Nothing Ivrom discovered about the queen’s family afterward caused him to alter this initial vision. And he learned a great deal about them, for he made it his business to know all that could be known about the House of Faluidhen. He knew their names by heart: Mardith, the reclusive matriarch, never married, who controlled the family finances from her castle of Rediloth; her sister Tanthe, petite and pretty, her hair dyed fox-red, who often visited Velvalinhu, her slight frame brilliantly clad in the latest fashions; and Tanthe’s three children: wine-loving Fenya, a bachelor with tea-colored eyes that were large and “full” like the eyes of the heroes in Lindioth’s paintings; Firvaud the queen; and the tall, timid younger sister, Firheia, whom a journalist had nicknamed “the Nainish Rose.” Ivrom knew them all. He endured plays and celebrations, sitting stiff and often too hot in his black robe, in order to observe them: Lord Fenya dancing a stamping Nainish klugh, Lady Tanthe cooling herself with a peacock fan. He observed the pained expression of Lady Firheia, blushing fiercely in a gown that was far too tight across the bust, as her mother surreptitiously prodded her toward the table where Lord Irilas, the Telkan’s brother, tossed back a cup of wine. Ivrom smiled coldly. The Teldaire glided up to him: “Welcome, friend! Look, I am wearing your token.” She pulled the jeweled star from between her little breasts. Let her laugh. That night, in his room, he pored over her history in a book called
The Nains
, written by her great-aunt:

The lords and ladies of Faluidhen are descended in a direct line from Braud the Oppressor, the conqueror of Nain: not from his first union with the unfortunate Nardis of Lokhond, but from his second, with Singheia of Bar-Oul. His kingly relations disputed his choice, for which we are thankful: for their stubborn opposition to the match, their prejudice against the Nains, sparked an investigation in which Singheia’s exalted lineage was revealed.