The Winged Histories (7 page)

“Did you bring back my Tras and Su?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes and looked across the snow. “Ah yes, there they are,” she said, and I watched her brightening face as she caught sight of her two favorite russet cows.

That night a sheep was slaughtered in our honor and we drank stedleihe from a gourd smeared with pitch that usually hung in Amlasith’s tent, passing it ceremonially around the fire, the boys composing their faces into sternness before they drank. The wind came up and the night grew very cold and the sparks flew and all the children were put to bed in the big tent, except for those who insisted on sleeping in the artusa among the cows and went off dragging their blankets over the snow. Rumios sang a part of the Song of Lo and then a girl in a white cloak recited half of the poem, “When Tir Rode Out from Eilam’s Halls.” When she had finished, Amlasith said to me: “Come, Tavis. It is time you sat with the women for an hour.”

“Tav,” I said, my throat dry.

She bowed her head slightly, but did not repeat my name.
My name is Tav
, I thought as I rose to follow her and the girl in white, feeling suddenly heavy and awkward, not wanting to answer or even look at Mantia and the others who called to me across the camp. I stalked silent in my boots, the light of the lantern brushing my dirty herdsman’s trousers. Amlasith’s tent was the largest in the camp. There were several lamps inside it, and girls and women and children lounged about on low beds covered with stretched hide. Some of them sat up when they saw me, curious, ready to laugh. The girl in white set the lantern on the floor, and Amlasith sank down in a clinking of gold, crossing her legs under billows of red cotton that filled the air with a smoky scent. Her wealth of gold flashed in the light of the lantern. She lit an ivory pipe patterned with dragons, a relic from the south. Her hand curved about the bowl, the fingers delicate and smooth, with sharpened nails and many golden rings.

“Welcome, Tav,” she said.

“Thank you, sudaidi.”

Titters pricked the air, and Amlasith threw an amused, warning glance at a clump of girls. She looked at me again and smiled, a coil of smoke at the corner of her lip. “Do you smoke?”

“Yes, thank you, sudaidi.”

Another burst of giggles, rough as a fall of gravel.

The girl in white, the reciter of poetry, passed me a small enameled pipe. She did not raise her eyes; she looked angry and ashamed, like me. She threw off her white cloak to disclose a leather vest, shiny and supple with grease.

Another girl passed me a tinderbox. I lit the pipe and smoked the heavy Evmeni tobacco, bartered for at the back door of a barn, and Amlasith said, “Seren, give us a tale,” and the reciter of poetry spoke the invocation: “People of the House . . .” Then she told the story of Bel Marfunya, whose blood had dried up. Children gathered as she related the tale, kneeling on the ground, their legs ashen with a mixture of dust and the sparkling goblin silver of the hills. The smaller ones crept close and nestled against the breasts of the women, who stroked their soft hair absently and watched the teller, and Nask fell asleep in the crook of Amlasith’s arm, gripping her finger tightly and trailing saliva on her fiery sleeve. When the story was over Amlasith smiled and snapped her fingers to show her appreciation and her bracelets jingled down the length of her arm. The thinner chains moved slowly, caught on the hairs. “Now,” she said, “does anyone have a question for our visitor?”

“How can you tell if the white snake has struck?” someone cried, and laughter, quelled by the story, burst out everywhere. The feredhai called love “the white snake” and a lover was one who had been struck or one, it was said, who had swallowed dragon’s milk.

“
I don
’t know,” I said. Hot light beat up from the lantern into my face.

“Are you engaged?”

“Have you ever been struck?”

“Will you have a green or gold wedding?”

Suddenly the storyteller, the girl in the leather vest, interrupted, claiming that people in love were unable to eat hoda. She spoke over the protests of the others, telling of somebody she knew, a distant cousin of hers beyond the Uloidas, a man with a beard down to his chest who had gone for a year without eating hoda until he gained the woman he loved as his bride. This cousin had survived only on milk and fish and sama. In the end he grew so thin that his own horse failed to recognize him; it bit him on the shoulder, and the wound went black and he lay in his tent on the brink of death beneath a carpet of flies. Then his uncle, who had refused to support his suit, rode out on his stallion, weeping enormous tears that streamed in the wind, and brought back the girl with her tent on the back of the horse. “That is how it happens,” she said, drawing their laughter toward her, leaving me safe.

To swallow dragon’s milk. The next day she came to me where I sat with Fadhian, once again clad in her pale cloak. She must be in mourning, I thought. My throat thickened strangely when she stopped and looked at me, dark eyes under curving brows. She said Amlasith wanted me: the women were going to bathe. Fadhian watched the cows, half smiling into his coffee. I followed the girl, feeling like a broken, sideways creature, the owner of a body that would not serve.

I told myself that this was a lie. I thought:
My body has fought and lived
. I thought:
I could seize this poet’s arm and break it behind her back
. I thought:
The unscarred women depicted in the temples are gods
. Yet misery covered me like a rash.

At the stream, I removed my clothes as if before an executioner. First the sword. Then the jacket, and then the boots. Some of the girls already splashed in the water, shrieking in the cold, but most stood gazing at me unabashed. Vest, shirt, undershirt. Here then is my map. On my shoulder, a slash received at Orveth. Bar-Hathien across my ribs. One arm is also Bar-Hathien, the other Godol. Now the trousers. This leg: the foothills of the Lelevai.

I stood shivering under their stares. An exquisite self-loathing frothed in me like wine. And then something brown and galloping seized my hand. The poet, whooping in the raw air, pulled me down the bank till we crashed in the stream, like running into a sheet of lightning.

Her name was Seren. She had memorized countless lines of poetry. She spoke the
che
—the secret language of feredha women. It was the language they used to call the goats, a barrage of clicks and humming, but there were words in it too:
klasn
was water,
niernetsa
was thread. She told me, laughing, that she had met me before. She would not tell me where. I thought she must have been one of the girls who came riding to Ashenlo, whirling up to the fence like crows, and my mother would tell Nenya to take them a handful of onions and a sack of rice. Seren wore the white cloak, not to mourn the dead, but to mourn the living: her elder brother had fled and was hiding in the mountains. “Yes, we lost him,” Fadhian told me one night. His jaw tightened in the smoke of his pipe.

“Lost him how?” I said.

We could hear the jingling of anklets and the laughter where the boys and girls were dancing. Seren passed in the firelight, stamping, thin-shanked like a bird. “Lost him to a feud,” Fadhian said.

He glanced at me and gave his hard smile and told the story of how Seren’s father had died in Tevlas, fighting over a horse. And how Seren’s brother stood among the women of his ausk while they wept and each gave him a gold bangle or a ring.

“It was a great misfortune,” Fadhian said. “He had no choice.” Later they had heard of his bloody revenge, how he had crept into the tent, the struggle, his wounds, and his triumph. And he was alive and had fled to the western hills.

“But he can never come back,” Fadhian said. “We lose so many that way. Or worse, they are caught and we lose them to the prisons.
My clipped hawk
, our song says.” He raised the pipe to his lips again and we watched the dancers through the swirling dust.

Dust, darkness, and fire. But soon a subdued air came over the camp, for we had begun to travel among farms. Fadhian forbade dancing and singing, and sometimes we all grew silent as a carriage rumbled past in the dark. It was strange to hear those wheels, or footsteps along the roads. One night the sound of hooves approached, and the boys all mounted quickly and rode out to the edge of our firelight and we heard them talking and soon they returned with a group of black-coated horsemen. Later I learned that there had been eight soldiers from a nearby town as well, but they had remained out there in the dark, beyond our circle. This was according to Fadhian’s law, Fadhian who now slowly put his bowl aside and wiped his hands on his trousers and stood.

He greeted the strangers, courteous and tall in the firelight. The sovos was pale and wore a round straw cap. He did not dismount, nor did his seven horsemen who were armed with whips and long bildiri knives.

The horses shifted nervously as the sovos cleared his throat and explained that we could not camp here, it was forbidden. Where could we camp then, Fadhian asked, and the sovos said he did not know, this was a settled area and a private road.

He waved his hand southward. “Perhaps there,” he said. He did not know, he knew of nothing beyond his master’
s lands.

“That is a shame,” Fadhian said, smiling.

The sovos looked at him but could not decide if he had been insulted.

“I must ask you to move at once,” he repeated.

Listening to him I realized that I had not heard Olondrian spoken since the autumn, and also that I had never heard Fadhian speak it before. He spoke very well, with a soft accent, and his smallest children looked at him in dismay. And I, too, looked at him with a pang. He was so polite and deferential. Yet no one moved until the sovos had gone. Then we began to take down the tents and kick dirt over the fires and I heard women explaining to the children that they could sleep on the wagons.

We rode all night, there was nowhere for us to camp. Lights appeared in the houses as we passed, lanterns in the dark fields. Through everything the scent of a spring night and the beauty of the stars and the sad clang of a pitcher against the side of a wagon. Mantia rode up beside me in the dark and told me about the soldiers and then I thought of them, of their well-fed horses, of how they had probably left a game of londo or even an entertainment in the town: Evmeni singers or dancing girls from the Valley. There would have been an argument and at last those who had been chosen to go had stood up grumbling, securing their belts and buttoning their jackets. I wondered where they were from and if any of them had served in the Lelevai and lost a thumb to frostbite or languished in the hospital at Giva. Outside our circle they had stood, talking softly about the women in town, pausing to spit on the side of the road. At last they had ridden back complaining, bursting into the tavern again. “These idiot farmers don’t know what they want. He called us for nothing . . .”

Sunrise broke out tenderly in the east, through a gap in the mountains. Birds awakened in the trees by the road. We breakfasted on cheese and hoda without dismounting and after an hour we finally stopped and crawled into the wagons to rest. The women who had been resting rose and drove the animals on and I lay under the shelter of the moving wagon, rocking from side to side in the noise of hooves and wheels and cries, watching the points of light through the gaps in the hide roof. Lulled to sleep at last I dreamed of orchards. When I woke it was almost dusk and we were still moving among the farms. I crawled out of the shelter, and Seren, sitting on the back of the wagon, smiled and passed me a pitcher of water.

I splashed my hands and face and drank. “
Will we stop soon?
” I asked.

She shrugged and gave me a piece of raush from her pocket. We were passing a villa where, by the light of the lamp on the terrace, two girls clad in muslin worked on their embroidery. I watched them until they were small white shadows in the darker blur of the house. And perhaps it was the sight of them, or perhaps the sound of Olondrian still ringing in my ears, that made me suddenly say to Seren: “
Niernetsa
.” I mimed the act of embroidering, the pull of the thread. She laughed and shook her head.

She crawled into the shelter and beckoned me after. It was dim and noisy inside, the wagon jolting with us toward the noon country. When she whispered to me, the motion made her nose bump gently against my ear. “Never give away the
che
,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to,”
I told her.

“I know.”

She kissed my cheek. “
Elu
,” she whispered. “Do you know that word?”

I said no, and she told me it meant love. Up close, she smelled dry and fragrant, like wheat. Her eyes were frightened, my legs like water. “Love,” she whispered. “Loving. In the
che
.”

For many days it was dry, our lips grew white and we moved among the wells and traveled by night and there was no sound of singing; then suddenly we would come upon a sacred grove with a woman’s name where we swallowed the soft and fragrant air like milk. Coolness breathed from the wild mimosa trees and the pink acacias and the white and waxy bark of the karhula. We slit the nalua bulbs and drank the juice and dug up asphodels and ate them and peeled the spines from the aiyas leaves. Only we did not cut the trees for fuel, this was forbidden. The cattle wandered and chewed the flowering broom, looking comical with their broad muzzles smeared with yellow when they had browsed among the heavy golden tras. And then one night there was rain, a hard cold rain, and we stood under it and gasped for a moment of agonizing sweetness. The children screamed for joy and in the morning we all looked brighter with the dust beaten out of our clothes and our crisping hair.

How empty it was, how silent in the desert. There was a happy delirium in being with others, in laughter, in song. The notes of a diali under the stars with a scent of clouds on the wind brought me an unfamiliar joy that clenched my throat. Seren and I set snares for rabbits far away from the camp, and we walked out together to check them twice a day. We lay on her white cloak. She rested her head on my arm as I unfastened the long strings of her leather vest. Each string slipped through its hole with a soft
shirring
sound, then the knot at the end caught for a moment, it wouldn’t pull through, I had to pull it harder, her fingers in my hair and at last it gave. They gave one after the other, all released, and I breathed and breathed her skin.

Once I asked: “What if someone discovers us?”

She shrugged, stretched, laughed. A bitter note, for the first time. She said they’d scold and laugh at us. They’d tell us to find men, to get married. “
Chff!
” she said, wrinkling her nose, slapping me on the arm. The gesture of someone reprimanding a child who has soiled itself. “
Chff!
At your age! Shame on you! Susa!”

“They’d call you a susa?”

“
A susa
’s not just a bird. It’s a wrong girl, one who won’t grow up. But the bildiri use it to mean all feredha girls . . .”

Susa. The bird of the desert, with its brief serrated voice.