The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

  “Strength to you, my son.”

  “Thank you, Master,” he said. Something was wrong with his mouth; he thought he might be thirsty.

  “Come closer, child.”

  He approached the hard chair where the priest sat with his legs stretched out on a stool.

  “I should die,” said Ivrom.

  “That is blasphemy,” the old man answered kindly.

  “I should suffer.”

  “You are suffering, are you not?”

  “Not enough.”

  “Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods,” the priest quoted. “A cupful weighs as much as an ocean.”

  In fact—as Ivrom would discover later—a cupful weighs much more. When the time came, he would be able to bear more terrible things with less pain, less anguish than he felt that night, the night he became a father and a widower, the night of my birth, of the death of Tenais. He could not yet say the words to himself: She is dead. Instead, in the priest’s room, he staggered toward the great black Stone against the wall, a block as tall as a man, its surface glimmering faintly in the firelight, and he embraced it, something he had never done before. He had barely touched it. Now he laid his cheek against its darkness. He could feel its etched surface against his skin. The priest did not reprimand him. His cheek pressed hard against the lines: You will sever all ties and pass from your bondage into light.

  At times she came back. Strangely, she did not come when he looked at the child, who was less an object of pity than a generator of duties—the nurse to be hired, the letters from his wife’s relatives to be dealt with—and who grew into a sober, alien little creature, nothing like Tenais. If he thought of Tenais when he looked at the child, it was only in the abstract: what would the dead mother think of her daughter’s progress? But at night, in the room of the Stone, Tenais would come, more often after the old priest’s death, when Ivrom himself was Priest of the Stone, a man of power. Then she came. She was lying on the bed, her face turned toward him. Women were weeping. The air smelled strongly of edlath and jasmine oil. Her face on the pillow, the eyes sunken and withdrawn. Someone put a bundle in his arms: the child. Her eyes sunken, accusing, withdrawn.

  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?”