The Winged Histories (4 page)

We were sitting against the wall. The bottle rolled on the flags. I searched inside my jacket for my leather flask. I opened it and drank. The gaisk was strong and had a flavor of bruised grass and cleared the air of uncertainty. I looked at the smooth flames of the fire piercing the air in long clean waves and the shining bottle empty on the floor, and I thought of the dance of the mountains and how it had gone on since the days of worshiping milk, the same steps over and over. Generations now in rows like corn. And with a twinge, a shift in my heart, I thought of Olondria for the first time. I thought of it as a living thing, not a place to go or settle but a vast entity that grew and breathed and ate. Faluidhen in summer, all those rooms of empty luxury, and then, in Kestenya, the feredha tents pitched on Uncle Veda’s land. Uncle Veda sweating with fury, shouting: “Call me a traitor to Olondria if you like, these people have nowhere else to go. Nowhere, nowhere, we’ve hounded them into the waste and waterless places, it is a crime and Olondria must answer.”

“Olondria must answer,” I said.

And Dasya turned to me in eagerness and whispered: “Yes, you see it, you’re not afraid.”

But I was afraid, and I laughed and my hands were shaking for I knew his mind and that once lit it burned like a dragon’s entrails. I heard myself speaking, half frightened at my own words: “Why should we die for these hills, when we might die for an independent Kestenya?” I said the words in Kestenyi:
Kestenya Rukebnar
. Forbidden words. And Dasya went pale and then red, and his grip on my arm was fire. And lying in the snow with the axe flashing again in the sun I wept because I had lost the chance to die that way, because I was dying in the mountains after all, dismembered in the snow, because I was dying the death of a pig. And in the spring, I realized, I had planned to leave the army, but I did not know it until I lay under the axe. The plan had created itself in the dark of my mind and only now had it come to light, and I recognized it, and I wept. For I had thought to go down to Ashenlo and to the plains. And now, I saw, I would bleed to death in the snow. And all Kestenya blazed before me, flashing across the blue-gray sky, the desert like a ray among the clouds. The axe bit my thigh as the Brogyar fell, pierced by arrows, but the pain could not erase that gleaming sight. And still it glows before me and I see those shining mountains in another landscape, and in another war.

2. Loyalty Like a Necklace of Dead Stars

The swordmaiden will rise each day with the knowledge of her death. This death is a fair coin, which must be spent for a worthy purpose.

It is said that the sword is nobler than the arrow, because the sword extends the body, and to fight with it is to dance. It is said that the sword becomes its bearer’s soul. Thul the Heretic only believed in his body because he saw it reflected in his sword. In the Temple of Tol, it is common to say: “O Scarred God forever gone a-hunting, Thou has left me the pin from Thy hair.”

This pin, claim the priests, is the sword.

Such ideas are poetry and not history. The sword maims and kills. Evil is its essence.

The swordmaiden will hold evil in one hand, or, if she fights with a Nainish blade, in both. Consider then the purpose of each stroke. Maris the Crooked was asked on her deathbed: “What led you to turn against your king?” She answered: “Ask the women of Oululen.” This was a people who had been destroyed by the armies of King Thul: it is written that “their very names became dust.” When the men of Oululen had perished, the women took up arms. The last of them died defending herself with a harrow.

The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.

Maris was a renegade general, Galaron a rebel, the False Countess a bandit. Which of these now reclines on a couch of light?

When I came down from the hills that rainy spring with a shattered thigh they had already sent most of the servants away, and the east and north wings of the house had been shut off and locked and the unused keys hung in a row in Mother’s cabinet. Even from the window of the carriage the house and grounds looked lonelier, as if an expected visitor had failed to arrive. At the time I thought the gloom was caused by the unseasonable rain that dripped from the eaves and darkened the sand in the court.

Mother came out to greet me with a shawl over her head, tripping lightly across the mud in her felt slippers. “Oh Fulmia,” she cried, “have you brought her?”

“Yes, sudaidi,” Fulmia called, “and the two of us can take her, she weighs no more than a chicken.”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “Get Fodok and Gastin.”

Mother had climbed into the carriage and she knelt beside me and kissed my cheeks and brow. Her hair was loose and her face was wet with rain or tears and she wanted to embrace me but since I was lying down she could only squeeze my shoulders.

“Drive on,” Fulmia shouted.

Mother’s shawl had slipped and fallen onto my chest. The carriage shifted, getting closer to the door.

“Don’t try to lift me yourselves,” I said. Her hair blocked the light and the pallor that was her face moved slightly as she raised her hand to her eyes.

“Do you hear her, Fulmia?”
she sobbed.
“She says we’re not to do it alone, we must bring Gastin. Call him, Fulmia. Call Gastin.”

The carriage stopped, the doors opened, and as they eased me out the rain dropped on my face and I blinked in the cold rain-light.

The servants gathered by the door, the children staring at me and sucking their fingers as I was carried across the court. “Don’t let me fall in this mud,” I said, and everyone laughed. They carried me under the lintel into the warm air of the amadesh. There was the same soft yellow glow and the odor of roasting apples and I closed my eyes and let my head roll against Gastin’s shirt; I could hear him breathing and feel him gripping me carefully as they took me down the hall where there was less light. I opened my eyes.

“
Not so quickly,
” Mother was saying.

“And look at your slippers!” Nenya cried. “All over the carpets too.”

At the end of the hall stood Father. He stood very straight at the foot of the stairs where the glassed-in porch opened into the hall and looked down on me sternly and held his pipe. As we lurched past he turned his head aside and muttered something. I craned my neck as we started up the stairs, catching a glimpse of his slightly rounded back and the shawl about his shoulders as he went back to the gray light of the porch.

I lay in that room all through the spring and they brought up my meals on a tray. Outside a milky froth of blossoms came out on the trees, pink and then white, and I rested propped on pillows and watched the changes in the section of orchard visible from my window. When it rained Mother came and read to me, her voice keeping back the thunder. We read Hodis the Solitary and
Tales from the White Branch
, and the whole
Romance of the Valley
and a number of similar stories, all the tales I had loved and listened to as a child. Mother searched in Malino’s old library for the books and she would burst into my room with a happy cry, with dust and cobwebs in her hair, brandishing a book whose leather binding had split and was hanging down in strips.

“Look at this, you loved this one!”

At such times she reminded me so much of Siski that I was almost startled. She leaned in the doorway, laughing, wiping the book on her skirt. Once my father shouted from the foot of the steps, “
Firheia!
” And as she called back a promise of silence, her eyes twinkled just like Siski’s.

She crossed the carpet noiselessly in her slippers and sat in the chair beside my bed. “Look, you remember this one, don’t you?”

The book had fallen open at a picture of the boy Istiwin watching the Queen of the Bears emerge from the hill. His round eyes, his hands thrown up in horror. At his feet crouched the ragged, long-eared hare we had named Atsi as children.

“You don’
t feel well,
” Mother said. Her hand was cool against my cheek, her face reflected in the bowl of the lamp.

“No, I’
m fine,
” I said. She smoothed her skirt out on the chair, the same brown velvet skirt she had worn seven years before. Now the golden pattern in it was faded and the swirling leaves could only be seen in the lamplight on her knee.

“What’s happened to the forests?” I said.

She frowned and turned the pages, biting her lip. Then she said: “Let’s not talk about that now.”

“I know he’s sold them,” I said. “To Uncle Fenya.”

She turned another page. “Please not now, the doctor says you must rest.”

I turned my head on the pillow and looked at her, her wide sad eyes and the delicate skin around them where blue shadows lay. She tried to smile. She did not look like Siski anymore but only like herself. She turned back to the book and tried to find her place. And I thought of her through all those years at the table in her sitting room, her neat accounts, everything slipping away from her like sand. I thought that she must have put her head down sometimes in despair and rested her forehead on the glass of her writing table, and as she had done so I had moved through snow on horseback, killing, killing, watching men die for the glory of Olondria. It seemed right to me that the house was in decay, the avla shut up. I remembered earlier times, and what we had called “the unrest”: how we rode across the bridge on the Oun and heard an insolent song in the meadow: “
Down goes the house! Fire, fire, fire!
”
I don
’t think we knew they meant our house. The song was in Kestenyi and we were Kestenyi, Dasya and Siski and I. But to be Kestenyi, I thought, no longer hearing my mother’s voice, it can’t mean the blood you’re given, it must mean how you give your blood away.

Give it away. But not to Uncle Fenya, who acted for Aunt Mardith
, obeying her orders, pouring our precious forests into her coffers. I wanted to shout:
Don’t you see how we’re changing masters? The Laths have ruled Kestenya with swords and the Nains will rule it with gold
. But I couldn’t say it. Not when Ashenlo had been my mother’s life. Not when this was her work: finding a way to pay the herdboys, to have the carriage repaired, to scrounge up decent clothes for Siski and me as our father sold everything to pay for the bolma he ordered from the south. As he sat like a king in his glassed-in porch. He was the true son of a traitor, the heir of my grandfather who had signed the Treaty of Tevlas. Thinking of it, rage filled me and I ached to crawl out of bed, to hurl myself down the stairs and accuse him to his face.
You. You.
You have supported my grandfather’s act of treason, that disgusting treaty that crushed Kestenya’s chance at independence. And now you’re selling Ashenlo to the Nains so that you can stuff yourself with bolma. I twisted in the bed and my mother touched my brow.

“You’re warm,” she said. Her hand was as soft as gauze. I closed my eyes and remembered the forest, driving out there in the winter long ago. I remembered Mother exclaiming how hard the servants must have worked to clear the road. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said.

“First you complain that I do nothing for the children,” Father said, “and then you complain about what I do.”

“
No, I don
’t mean to complain.” She put her hand on his arm and he shrugged it off and turned and shouted, “Who can see the Snow Horses, eh? Who’s seen them?”

We crowded to the sides of the wagon and gazed at the snowy stillness of the wood, and the shadows of trees moved over us like the shadows of bars, and the trees themselves stood arched above the road or glided by like sentries deep in the long blue corridors of night. The horses kicked up mist and the wagon jolted. In the carriage behind us men were singing, the little red lantern swinging in the dark. “Go on,” Father shouted. Some of the children were playing in the straw and Mun Karalei was afraid they would burn themselves on the bricks. “She hisses like a gander,” Siski said. We stood close in the smell of our coats and looked for alien hoofprints where the moonlight fell. The wagon stuck when the horses turned and everyone had to get out. Uncle Veda carried Siski on his back.

“Come on, Meisye, pull,” she screamed, kicking her feet in excitement, her thin legs flashing in a shaft of moonlight.

“Please don’t let her down,” said Mother, “she’ll soak her stockings and catch a chill.”

“My dear,”
Uncle Veda said,
“she’s stuck to me like a crab.”

While they struggled with the wagon I wrestled Dasya in the snow and struck my face on a hidden root and began to bleed, and I fell asleep on the drive back to the house and the snow they had pressed against my eye slid down my face and soaked my collar. I woke groggily under the lights of the house. They seemed so high, as if the windows opened onto the stars.

“Look up there,” I said.

“Yes my darling,” Mother said, but it was Father who held me and carried me up the steps.

“Take care how you play,” he told Dasya. “She’s only a girl.” In the hall everyone was laughing and giving their coats and furs to the footmen.

“Acres of trees,” said Uncle Fenya. “It’s a silent fortune. I congratulate you.” Firelight filled the mirrors.

Late that summer, I woke in the night to a pounding on the stairs, an urgent clatter that could only mean Siski had come.

“I’m awake,” I called.

“You see,” she cried. She dashed into the room and threw her traveling case down in the corner. And then she was kneeling beside my bed and had flung her head down on my chest and her arms in the tight black coat were about my shoulders.

“Oh, it’s me, it’s me,” she said. “You didn’t think I was coming but I came. I’m sure I got here faster than a letter. I came all the way from Nauve without stopping once, we slept in the carriage.”

Nenya came in with a candle and lit the lamp, grumbling. “It’s not the way to treat an invalid, disturbing her rest.” Light flared up, revealing Siski’s sharp, pale face.

“Don’t look at me, I’m the image of death,” Siski said, tucking her hair behind her ear. Her coat was dusty, one button hanging. “I came so fast I’m wearing all the wrong clothes. It’s warm here, isn’t it? Oh Taviye, we’re home again and it’s going to be delightful!”

Looking at her I could see that she believed it. “
No, don
’t look at me,” she said. “Do I look older? Yes, I must, I’m five years older. And you, you’re lovely but so thin.”

I did not know if she looked older, but certainly she looked different in some indefinable way. Her hair had fallen down on one side, but her embroidered collar gave her an air of refinement and hidden wealth. It was a Nainish look, and her face despite the narrowness and the tiredness had a new and elegant cast.

“We’ll do anything you like,” she said. “Riding, bathing, anything. Can you get up?”

When I told her I could not, she put her hand over my eyes.

“What am I seeing?” I asked her, smiling. An old game. Her voice came clearly and with a fierce undertone: “It’s our rowboat on the Oun.”

“We couldn’t row on the Oun right now,” I said. “It’ll be dry.”

“You’re not playing right. You’re supposed to see it.”

“All right,” I said. “I see it.”

And I did. Sun on the chipped white paint, sunlight on the water under leaves.

The next morning I realized Kethina had come as well. As soon as I saw her, I knew what had made the difference in Siski’s face. The two of them came in together, Siski in yellow, Kethina in rose. They had washed their hair and tied up the long damp plaits. “For the heat,” Kethina explained. “It’s not hot now but later we’ll be so glad we put our hair up early, believe me.” She bent and pricked my cheek with her arrow-shaped mouth. Her fingers strayed in my hair. “So pretty! Siski, you never told me about her hair. Almost blue—
a real mulberry black.
”

She turned, sighing, swinging her arms. “So what are we going to do?”

“What about breakfast?” Siski said.

“Splendid!” Kethina cried, snatching Siski’s shoulders. She pressed her brow to Siski’s, her eyes laughing. For a moment they whirled with their foreheads together, giggling, their fresh gowns lifting and swaying around them. “What would I do without you? I’d never eat!” Kethina cried. “But now I’m terribly hungry. What shall we have? Please not fish or cucumbers.”

“Let’s go down to the amadesh and see,” said Siski.

“We’ll be back to report,” Kethina cried out over her shoulder. And they were gone in a patter of pale house slippers and bubbling laughter and floating gowns and scent, and that was the way they were all summer. Laughing in corners, embracing one another and making journeys which, from what they said, were always perfection itself. On the journeys they wore wide hats and carried baskets. They would come home dusted with chalk from the hills and burned by the sun on their slim arms, Siski’s hair grown wiry and Kethina’s lank with the heat and their dresses creased from sitting on banks or old stone fences. And always they would explain about the wonderful day they had had, and indeed the excitement on their faces suggested extraordinary delights, as did their dusty boots and drooping ribbons and the odor of sweat, like that of pea flowers, which rose from their damp clothes. Siski had moved the two red chairs from Malino’s old study into my room and she and Kethina would collapse on these, their legs stretched out, the toes of their boots turned up, fanning themselves with their bleached silk hats while the scent of burnt grass drifted in at the window. Then they would tell me what had happened. Sometimes they had been charged by bulls, sometimes received from a peasant a gift of butter tied up in a cloth. Later still I would smell their tobacco and hear them whispering out on Siski’s balcony as the moon rose over the orchard. And while I could hear their sudden giggling and even the jingle of Kethina’s charm bracelets and sometimes, I thought, a bare toe rubbing the iron grating, I never heard what they talked about. And the sound of their chatter exhausted me, they talked without ceasing all through the day and night.