The Winged Histories (18 page)

B
ook Three

The History of Music

Coming down hard like rain.

You, riding over the fold of the mountain. Coming down hard like rain.

You, riding over.

You, coming down hard.

Coming down hard like rain.

This is the book of song, which means the book of laughter. In Kestenyi, song,
yai
, is related to laughter,
kyai
, which is related to the Olondrian
ke
. Your
limike
: “
doves
’ laughter.” I say “your,” I say it without meaning to hurt you.

In Kestenyi, for book, we say
Bain
. As we do for everything that comes to us from the west, north, or south. Only that which comes from the east is ours: dragons, iloki, rumors, cruel winds, snow. So, the book of song, that is the Bain, the city of laughter.

Laughing city. Capital of the world.

But in the
che
we have another word for book. We call it
hawan
, lamentation. I don’t know why. Perhaps long ago a woman saw someone weeping over a book. Or perhaps it’s because we call every long poem
hawan
. Our many
hawayn
, histories of death and mourning.
We, we women, we sing them, but we don’t compose them. It is said that we don’t compose them. We are always too late for the battle, we come behind it, we compose little songs,
yaili
, we don
’t have time.

So: the book of song. The
hawan
of
kyai
, the lamentation of laughter.

Che
, women’s language, is also related to
kyai
.

The mourning of laughter, the sob of mirth, the tears of joy, are you finished yet, have you got it all?

How slow you are! How slow!

No. Don’
t stop.

Look at old Shernai! She pretends to spin, but she’s really watching us. Clicking and chewing her lip. She doesn’t like to see you writing, Tav, she’s superstitious, she thinks it’s like making the bone map, a dangerous kind of magic. I don’t believe that. I don’t think writing is sorcery, something forbidden. I think it’s more like a comb, it separates your hair more easily than you could with your fingers. It’s like riding a horse to go somewhere instead of walking. You go to the same place, but you can carry more. I think writing is a horse.

Or it might be a knife. An axe.

In the days of the sovoi, they used to stop us with paper. Look, you can’t go here, look, it’s written. No grazing here. No water. There was writing around the wells. They’d ask for our papers, their eyes innocent, their mouths holding cruel laughter. Why, if you have papers, show them, it will be our mistake then, we’ll beg your pardon! And we’d pack up and go, the children crying with disappointment.
Little black marks, little red marks on a page you could chew up and swallow, and they were stronger than us.

That’s why Shernai curses over her spindle.

You will have noticed that all the great songs are sad. “When Tir rode out from Eilam’s halls, he rode to sorrow, oh my brothers!” “Ah, would that I had died before my Sarya, for my life now is a broken desert and a plain of stones.” When I was small, when I was learning music, I didn’t notice this, I simply sang, it didn’t occur to me that there could be happy songs. Not real songs, I mean, not the great ones. Of course there are little ones, songs for dancing. But the great
hawayn
are inseparable from grief. Fathers and brothers fallen, horses slain, bereft women everywhere. Ruined country. Whole lineages snuffed out: this is the greatest horror. The dream of
hawayn
is one in which the world contracts in violence. Everyone dies, their blood flies away like scarlet crows.

When Tir rode out from Eilam’s halls, he rode to sorrow, oh my brothers, oh!

And he was like a reed, and like a field in bloom,

And he was like the moon reflected in a still lake.

Now the horses have gone to drink, the horses have muddied the water,

The moon lies broken, oh bones of Tir on the high crags!

Oh bones of Tir that once, still well-knit, leapt under flesh,

Struck fire from his enemies’ bodies, fire from the jaw of Kavinduor.

Kavinduor, slack-jaw, may your lips never meet!

May you speak with toil and eat with agony,

May the Long Pain sit with you at table, sleep in your bed,

May women turn from you and children flee,

May you curse your own name morning and evening,

May you eat pap like a toothless child!

And when you see us, cry: “Ah, my deliverers!”

We will deliver you, Kavinduor and the sons of Kavinduor!

We will deliver you, sons and brothers,

Male kin as far as the necklace can be reckoned,

Even as far as the smallest bead!

For Tir, Tir, Tir on the mountain, Tir who knelt that night and prayed,

Moon, fill my life with honor as a cup with wine.

Then he turned to Haskon his companion, he of the shattered wrist.

Tomorrow, friend, we nail our stirrups to our boots . . .

Such praise songs. A delirium of honor. When I was younger, I liked nothing better than listening to the
hawayn
. Music makes men immortal. Listening, I saw Tir again, alive, his silver body, and I saw him broken to pieces on the crags. Music so potent you could swoon. A sort of communal fever. People cried out, they sobbed for a man who died a hundred years ago. And music keeps anger sharp: that’s why in the
che
we call the guitar
sevret
, a whetstone. Music keeps everything alive.

That passion for
hawayn
—I think that’s why, years later, I fell in love with a soldier.

Your shoulders and your swinging walk.

That mark on your face. Not a physical scar but a shade of expression, a cast. The look that said: I have killed and will kill again.

A fierce look, I thought then. Now I think: broken. I think: lost.

And Shernai talks to herself over her spindle. An old woman, she has earned the right. Her hands are stiff, but expert. Her thread seems endless. Brightness called out of the air.

The men are going to war and the women are spinning. The women are spinning and the men are going to war. The men are going to war for the women. The women are singing the men to war. The men’s hearts grow hot and sharp as blades from the singing of the women. The women are memory. They are the memory of men, of those who have died. The men sing of the fallen and the women keep their songs and memories alive. The women spin threads that never break. The women are spinning shrouds. All the men and women are singing themselves to death.

You had crossed over. Everyone admired this. The men, who had nothing to lose, admired it easily, almost without effort. For them, it was enough that you rode, hunted, ate raw liver, survived cruel wounds, that you were a veteran of war. It was enough that you were silent and never complained, that you didn’t speak the
che
. And of course you were an outsider, no wife or daughter of theirs. For the women, it was more difficult, but they, too, admired you—I know you don’t believe it, but they did. They do. Envy is a kind of admiration. Sneers are so often the product of longing. Many women would like to do as you do. Some have begun, in the aftermath of war. They wear their hair loose. They would like to dress like men, to kill like men. To kill.

You say: “No more killing. No more.” But you are still a hunter. You bring me the body of a shambus bound to your saddle. Blood for soup, meat grilled over the fire, the pelt for slippers, you joke, to keep my feet from freezing in the cold. This smooth pelt, now, in summer. Tav, I will make you a new vest. I will make you gloves of the shambus you killed for me. “For us,” you say. Before you struck it dead, you begged the creature’s forgiveness. Something you have never done for men.

At night you whisper: “I wasn’
t sure I
’d killed him. I wasn’t sure he was dead . . .”

Fear.

You are afraid of the Brogyars rising from the snow.

You are afraid of the dead in the Valley. The ones who died in the war, your war, the fire that freed Kestenya from the empire. When you entered that war, you believed it would be clean. One swift stroke, a final blow for honor, a farewell to the sword. But the dead in the Valley cling to you, breathing smoke. What you are learning now is not clean war. It is the absence of war.

What you are trying to learn. “No more,” you say. And the dead cling. And your hand remembers the sword, its friend. So true. So sweet.

We need new songs, I think.

Tav, I will make you a new vest. Tav, I will bring you nalua flowers, dark as your hair.

Look, there’s Kaili, laying out feathers to dry. Gray ones, plucked from a Nainish goose: a traveler, like you. Kaili is twelve years old now. Twelve years old. She’ll use the feathers to fringe a shawl. She murmurs to herself, intent.

Tav, I will bring you flowers dark as cloud, dark as your hair, your hair is cloud. My hands are flowers in your hair. Tav, your hair in wind. You, riding over the fold of the mountain, such wild hair we thought you were a boy. You and Fadhian riding over the mountain that first time and into camp. And everyone thought you were a boy. Who is this slight Olondrian boy with hair blown in the wind, ragged in wind? And in every way we were wrong. Wrong about you, the stern boy slipping lightly off his horse, my stern Tav, your shoulders and your swinging walk. Not Olondrian, Fadhian told us, holding in his smile, and not a boy. Lady Tavis of Ashenlo.

You, riding over the fold of the mountain.

And Fadhian gone now. Gone. Dead in your war. Can I say these things together in this way? You riding over the fold of the mountain and flowers for your hair and Fadhian dead. Can I say it? Can you write it?

Yes, you will write it with your rough hand. Your passion now for letters. Something new.

That dark night I told you of Fadhian’s death. After you had come back, so strangely, riding on a bird, an ilok, landing hard beside the camp like rain. Like rain, and that death smell. Everyone came to welcome you. By the fire they gave you meat, stedleihe, tea. “Fadhian,” you said. Then they avoided your eyes—all except me. You gazed at me, stricken. “Dead,” I said.

He fell in the Battle of Bron. The one that gained us all the land between the Tavroun and the Duoronwei. Torn from his horse. Pierced through the throat.

Shall I sing of it? Who was his killer? Shall I sing the name? Should we remember? Should we seek vengeance, even as far as the smallest bead?

I am asking you: What is music?

Tav, so much loss. Fadhian is gone, and Mantia who was your friend. So many gone. If I had the sight of a kalidoh, I’d tell you, I’d be able to see it written in your bones. The kalidai see through flesh, they see the spots where the bones are weak, too starkly curved, missing pieces, full of holes. Every loss creates a gap. This is why the bones of those who live for many years appear to be made of lace.

So many gone. Your sister. Your cousin. Your friends. My father. My mother. Keliar, who loved me. Tosha, who loved me. Haidhas, my brother.

Your father. Your mother. Fled now into the Valley. Your sister, lost. And the beloved cousin who should have been your king.

Haidhas. My brother.

What song can bring him back to me?

Haidhas, my brother, dead twice over. Dead to our house when he ran away, dedicating himself to vengeance. Dead again in the war for Kestenya. They say he died at the gates of Eilam. They brought this news to me as a kindness. Like the song:
Only tell me where he lies
. Knowledge is comfort, they say, even knowledge of death.
Only tell me where to seek his grave
. At the gates of Eilam, they told me. But for me he was already dead, had been dead for years. And I had lived those years in mourning.

It was after he died that I became a singer for hire.

Why not? I couldn’t feel myself sing. And we were moving in difficult country. Farming country, full of roads. The lands around Tevlas, which now are free, or what we have come to call free: available to anyone who can defend them. But then it was hard country, you needed papers, or else money; you had to pay the farmers to pitch your tents in their meadows. So some of us went to make money. We went to Tevlas, we sang in the streets, we sang in cafés, collecting coins in an old skin.

Loublai taught me to sing for money. She scrawled black around my eyes, red on my lips and cheeks, she gave me cheap necklaces and bangles of green glass. She taught me to roll my eyes, to wince, to exaggerate all my gestures, to sob while I sang. “You have to forget your training,” she advised me. It’s true: in order to sing in the towns, to sing at Olondrian houses, you have to forget everything. The delicacy, the restraint. The quality of
chaif
, “
absence,
” which is so highly prized in our music. There is no absence when you sing for money. Everything is there.

I was a good singer. I gave until I was hollow.

Learn to keep the music in your voice
. That’s what Loublai told me. Don’t let it hurt you, don’t think about the words, put all the feeling in your face alone.

This painted, twisting face. No restraint. Only distance.

I sang for you, in the garden at Ashenlo. I know you don’t like to remember. Or rather, you don’t like to remember that you forgot, that you forgot me. A hired girl.

We need new songs, I think.

I will bring you nalua blossoms.

Tav, I will bring you flowers in these two hands.

I will make you gloves, a vest.

Tav, I forgive you.

So much loss. Kaili murmurs, twelve years old. Her father is dead.

Fadhian, her father, died in your war. I say “your,” I say it and I mean to hurt you. Don’t stop writing. Look how Kaili tucks her plait behind her ear, then scratches her ear, the flesh translucent as a leaf. There’s sand there, irritating her. Sand under her nail. Now she flicks the back of her hand against her cheek. This is what we lose when we lose someone. A manner of moving, something no image can capture. The gestures never come back.

I have my mother’s eyes. Haidhas had my father’s. I love to sing. Haidhas loved to ride. Haidhas loved the morning, he’d get up early and ride out across the plateau. I love the night, when the singing starts. I never want it to end.

Haidhas was quiet, he brooded, he held a grudge. My mother said: “
Fire under ashes.
” He would go days without speaking, if you angered him. Me, I’m all on the surface. I shout, I’ll throw sand, I’m ridiculous, too much. I burst in an instant and then I forget everything.

To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There’s no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.

“I’ll always be alone,” you said. You were frozen and trying to melt, speaking to me of your sister who is gone. She’ll never scold you, never laugh at you again. I said: “But maybe—”
You said:
“No.” It was the way she looked at you, you said. The way she clung to you in Nain, on the terrace of an abandoned temple of Avalei, where you left her alone with your cousin. You could tell she was saying good-bye forever.