The Winged Histories (16 page)

Vars brought me a few more bitter olives and, unbelievably, two letters. I explained to him that the letters could not be for me, that I’d never received a letter from anybody in my life, not once. “Nobody knows me as a person,” I said.

He smiled, insisting: “
Look.
” He’s so worn down with poor diet and worry I thought he might be delirious, but in fact my name was on both letters. “To the Daughter of the Priest of the Stone, Velvalinhu.” I stared at the yellow paper. “They came in soon after we took the Isle,” said Vars.

“But who can have sent them?” I whispered.

“Why not open them and see?”

I looked up at him, clutching the letters to my chest. He is gaunt and his lips are cracking but still he wore the curious expectant look of a person for whom it is normal to receive letters.

“I can’t,” I croaked.

“
Oh, come!
” he said, disappointed. “I thought it would please you.”

I sat down slowly, still gripping the letters. “How is the prince?”

“Bad,” he replied. He told me the prince had been unconscious for two days. He smiled as he spoke, his face open and almost boyish in its despair.

“
I am sorry,
” I said, and it was true. I was sorry he had carried his passion for the goddess Avalei up out of the Valley, sorry that he had put that passion into the service of a cruel and mercurial prince who now apparently lay dying. I wondered how long the prince had been ill, how long he had known of this illness. Was it illness that had forced him to seize the throne instead of waiting to inherit it? Was he unable to wait for the Telkan to die a natural death because his own death was slavering at his heels?

If so, then he is not only a parricide. He is not only guilty of hanging my father from a tree. He is guilty of killing Vars and all his companions, of leaving these loyal and eager young men to the mercy of the Duke of Bain. The withdrawn, unhappy boy I knew so briefly is a monster, as surely as if he had horns growing out of his forehead. “Can’t you get away?” I asked. It seems I am fated to tell others to escape, to advise everyone to flee.

Vars lifted his chin. “We will defend our prince to the last man.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. But before I could argue further, wind rattled the balcony doors, shouts reached us from the courtyard, and I glanced at the window smeared with melting frost. It was then that I saw the ilok.

It rose above the Alabaster Court, huge and clumsy as a vulture, chains swinging from its neck. Its beak shone dull bronze. Its wings, impossibly vast, cast a shadow over the roof on the other side of the court. At first I could only stare and gasp and stutter—for the iloki never leave their garden, they are creatures of ancient history, incarcerated like dusty archives in a library, and no one has ridden one of them since the War of the Tongues, yet this one had a rider—two riders—no, three!

“
Look!
” I cried at last.

Vars turned. When he saw the creature, he opened the casement and leaned out with such violence I feared he would fall. “Captain!” he shouted. Other shouts rose from other windows and from the court, while the ilok circled, tentative, as if learning to fly.

“Captain! Captain!”

It was hard for me to make out the faces of the riders, but Vars knew them, and when the bird dipped down for a moment, I recognized two of them: Lady Siski of Ashenlo, and, clasped in her arms, secured with ropes, sagging, apparently unconscious, Prince Andasya. The foremost rider, who seemed to be guiding the creature with his knees, I did not recognize, but this was the one Vars addressed as “Captain,” and when he cried “Captain Tavis!” I understood that the black-haired rider in the military jacket was the prince’s other cousin, Tavis of Ashenlo.

Only she, of the three riders, seemed to hear my companion’s cry. She turned her head. Her face was both sorrowful and forbidding.
It was clear what was happening: the prince’s war was indeed lost, and now the rebellion’s leaders were making their escape.

“No!” screamed Vars.

He thrust himself back from the window and ran from the room, not forgetting, even in his panic, to lock the door, good soldier that he was, and he pounded down the hallway and then the stairs, those shallow stairs of Velvalinhu that resemble floodwaters and take forever to get down, and he had to go through several gardens, at least it was faster that way, though he may not have known that, he may have stayed inside the walls, in which case he would have had to go up stairs as well as down, and through several empty galleries and pointless antechambers until he spilled out at last, lungs aching, into the Alabaster Court—and there, I could see him from my window, a small figure among the others who were clutching their hair and wailing as if at the greatest of disasters, but the ilok had already flown, it had winged away eastward over the sea and Vars was left spinning in circles, as if at the foot of a cataract.

5. For in a field you have found a hidden treasure.

950

What is the difference between a king and a monster?

It was the Feast of Lamps and the towers of Velvalinhu blazed like torches, prefiguring the fire that would rage through them in the coming days and turn the bright halls to a wilderness of ash. The Tower of Mirrors was particularly splendid, strung with lights, colored light spilled over the balconies of the ballroom, and sometimes, from across the Alabaster Court, you could see (if you were a lonely young woman sewing) a lady in brilliant clothing smoking a pipe. Everywhere, on every available body of water (in some places they broke the ice to reach it), Olondrians were setting little boats afloat, each loaded with a tiny lamp or candle and a twist of shiny paper on which was written a name and a message for the dead.
We miss you. Rest easy, the horses have not been sold
. My nurse gave me these examples, for the followers of the Stone do not participate in this ritual, and I never sent my mother a little lamp. “Never?” asked my nurse. “Never,” I replied. She was a kind woman, and shrewd, whatever my father thought. She knew how to arrange her face to hide her feelings, how to change the subject, to spare me the knowledge of how small and sad a life I lived. How often I must have been protected by her bland, circumspect face, which my father said resembled a boiled potato . . .

Write it. Write.

The ships came into the Inner Harbor, floating fountains of light. The prince made no attempt at stealth: that was the trick. He arrived as if on parade, in the sort of ostentatious gesture one expects from a merry, sportive, and profligate prince. To run away to the army, to come home again for nearly two years, enough time to lull everyone into thinking his restless spirit had been tamed, to run away again, and then, on the Feast of Lamps, to arrive with an army of revelers—what roguery, what a prank! I am told they cheered when he entered the ballroom: those fools who would soon be led away in chains. Some of his cousins began a chorus of “Gallop, my little black mare.” His mother was so overcome with joy she leaned on the wall for support, and her beauty turned blue, as if it had been preserved in brine.

Then misery came; then joy was turned to dread. “Kneel!” cried the prince, and “Kneel! Kneel!” echoed the jostling crowd of his followers, and the dancers knelt, laughing, still thinking everything was a joke, save Baron Fidrin of the Isle of the Poet’s Daughters. An elderly man with aching joints, he leaned on the wall, irritated, lips pursed, the Order of the Lamp shining on his chest. And then someone (perhaps Vars, who knows) struck him across the shoulders with the flat of a blade. The old man crumpled, groaning.

An instant of silence. The flutes and guitars of the orchestra dying out.

From music to silence, and from light to darkness.

“Ha!” cried the prince, swelling with exultation, his cheeks as red as his military sash. And he drew his sword and ran around the edge of the ballroom, leaping and striking at the lamps, putting them out one by one—
crash! crash!—
while the revelers cried out in terror. He could not, of course, reach the great chandeliers that hung from the domed ceiling; these dispensed a dim, uncertain, gold-tinged light, which glinted on the drawn swords of the rebels and on the prince’s hair, which glittered with powdered glass as if with frost.

The scene swirls before me like a ruined watercolor, everything blending. These hints I managed to gain from Redis, before she left the Isle. I lay facedown on the tiles and she whispered to me under the door while my father hissed at me impatiently from his chair.

“What is she saying?”

“Shh!”

“And they’ve taken the nobles and locked them up,” Redis murmured hurriedly, “and nobody’s tried to do a thing about it, because all the palace sentries and everyone, everyone’s glad to see Avalei restored, there’s celebrations everywhere, bonfires and noisy dances, and the High Priest and Priestess of Avalei go about like a king and queen, showered with rose petals, it’s disgusting, they go out on pleasure boats and hunts, they’re quite happy to see Velvalinhu burn to the ground around our ears! Whole sections of the Tower of Aloes are gone, and the library—”

“Don’t,” I whispered. “What of the Telkan?”

“Locked away, like the others! And rumor says he’ll be executed.”

“The prince wouldn’t kill his own father.”

“Wouldn’
t he?
”

“What does she say?” my father snapped.

“Nothing, Father. Redis—have you heard anything about us?”

“No,” she whispered. “But everyone with a robe has taken it off. Naris of Ethendria stripped it off as soon as they came to her in her room. Yanked it over her head and stood before them in her shift. At her age. They let her put on a coat, then they took her away in chains. It’s dangerous for you . . . dangerous, I tell you . . . I’ve brought some things for you and your father, clothes—”

“No use,”
I told her,
“
the door
’s locked.” (And even if it had not been locked, I knew my father would never give up his robe, and I—I’ve never worn anything but black wool in my life.)

“Be cautious, then,” said Redis. “Don’t say anything to anger the prince, tell the priest not to shout at him! He’s drawn tight as a bow, everyone says; sometimes he seems delirious; he is as strange a lord as anyone has seen since Wuol dined on his enemies’ eyeballs! He went through the Gallery of the Princes and tore down all the portraits that looked like him, and set them on fire in the Garden of Sated Ambition; and the other night, when it rained so hard, some of his men found him lying at the feet of a stone angel near that hill called the Girdle of Avalei. An evil place, and he is an evil prince, in an evil mood! And Lady Tavis, his cousin—the military captain—she terrifies everyone! A face like the bars of a jail! They say the two of them are planning all sorts of horrors . . . they might set the dungeons on fire, or throw people into the sea . . .”

“She cannot be saying ‘nothing’ all this time!” my father interrupted.

Redis was babbling still, and I stopped her. I told her she must find a way to leave the Isle. No one knew her for a follower of the Stone; she must go away at once, to Bain, to safety, to another life.

“Tell your father I’m sorry,” she sobbed. Then, with a small rustling noise and a flicker of shadow under the door, she was gone.

I sat up, resting on my knees.

“
Well?
” my father said testily.

The light from the window. The curve of his brow. His hands.

In the War of the Tongues, the war that established for all time (or so we have always been taught) the superiority and centrality of the Olondrian language, King Thul sacrificed his daughter Solin. He bound her hands behind her back and hurled her from a window in the Tower of Pomegranates. A direct plunge into the placid waters of the Outer Harbor. In the
Vanathul
, Ravhathos creates a touching scene from this historical fragment. The girl begs her father to leave her hands free. “
No
,”
he answers, weeping,
“
for I would have thee suffer little and die swift
.”

Alas for the king. Alas.

No one knows what Solin thought, or what she said. We only know that her death was a step on the road to victory. A victory that seems less and less certain now, as I sit alone, drinking my water sparingly, nibbling at the last of the dried fruit. I light no lamps, hoping the rebels will forget me, as they roar through the night, smashing vases and furniture in their despair. The moon gleams between the towers and I long for the Stone, its solidity, its dark weight, the solemn cadence of its words.
For you are following a thread. For you are cloaked in dawn. For in a field you have found a hidden treasure
. It occurs to me that perhaps we did not understand its message, that this message may have been concealed in plain view. Why so many languages? Different tongues, different scripts, some of them dead. The hours we spent poring over dictionaries and grammars. We thought the message of the Stone, arriving in such a spectacular form, would unite us. But perhaps its true message was one of disintegration . . . Or perhaps it spoke a message of unity we could not understand, one that did not unfold in language as my father thought, but rather in the way the lines crossed over one another, cutting across each other, one word into the next. If the message is not in the words but in the cutting. How flint etches stone, how diamond enters. How flesh intersects with flesh. Newer languages digging themselves into old ones, accounts of vampires into the meditations of some nameless saint. How we are written into one another. How this is history. Then the meaning of a line like “
Sever all ties
” is not in the words themselves, but in their entanglement with the words written underneath them: “
For in a field you have found a hidden treasure
.”

Alas for Solin, drowned in the waters of the Sea of Songs. Alas for me, that at my age I still weep when I think of my father’
s words.
A painful act, but honorable. And he won the war
. Useless to record this for posterity; he probably forgot about it himself. I’m cold, and I can’t remember what I meant to write.
Writing is power
, he said. Standing over me in the bare room at the center of our apartment. His robe in the corner of my eye. Always in the corner. And his silence. And his breath, tight, irritated, impatient. I risked a glance up at his face; he was staring out of the window. So much distance. But I’m your child. I’m your child. Fanlewas informs us that the Ideiri believed the Sea Goddess rescued Solin. For them, the dead girl was a minor hearth goddess. Her symbol a chain.

And as for the priest’s daughter: she was a bird that flew into a window by mistake, a ragged creature among the fine ladies of Velvalinhu, ignorant as an owl, she knew nothing, no one had taught her, she had only her peasant nurse and of course her dour inflexible father, and she was stunted somehow, stunted and odd, very odd indeed it was whispered, able to converse fluently about anything that had been written in a book, but completely lost when it came to ordinary daily activities like plucking one’s eyebrows or even riding a horse. She only left the Isle once in her life: she went to her maternal grandfather’s funeral somewhere in the Valley with none but her nurse for company, and she ought to have been thrilled at the adventure but instead she cried every day, because birds that are raised indoors lose their tolerance for the sky. The girl had lost her tolerance for the hugeness of the world, or rather she had never developed it at all, and she cried at the horses and cried at the cities and cried at the strange beds and cried at the fields and cried at the people, her relatives, who tried to make her stop crying. She said she would never leave the Isle again, and she never did. But you must not entertain the idea that she was innocent as well as naïve. No, she was crafty, in fact a thief, and she stole her father’s papers and rifled through them when he was working or at a council with the Telkan. And between these thefts and the almanac under her mattess she knew a great deal about the palace even if she could not select a good bottle of wine or tie a sash: she knew that there was a patterned silk called “twilight” that sold for seventeen droi a span, but that a friend of the queen’s had managed to get some for fifteen, and she knew that Evmeni pearls are far superior to the ones brought up around Bain, which are only pitiful little bits of greenish marble, and she knew how very boring Lord Fenya was when he got to talking about rare porcelain, and that Lady Tavis of Ashenlo had run off to join the army, making it impossible for her to be received in decent society ever again, and that this was a shame because she might have made a good marriage. For even though Lady Tavis was very clumsy and her mother let her go about in horrid Kestenyi getups that made her look like a trained bear in clothes, she had the Faluidhen coloring, all of the women of Faluidhen have it, that dazzling dark skin that makes them glow like lamps in the middle of the day, and Lady Siski had it too, and was the only hope of the family now, and the queen was introducing her to one bachelor after another, because she must do something, her sister Lady Firheia was so hopeless, such a peasant really, years of life in the highlands had coarsened her, in fact she had begun to smell distinctly of animals and coffee, and Siski must be spared that awful fate, and the sooner the better, she was not getting any younger, though she was admittedly a vision when she arrived at the Isle in her gorse-yellow traveling suit.

The priest’s daughter read about the life that was going on in the palace. She drew pictures under the beam of her single candle, pictures of ladies and gentlemen walking and dancing and sitting down to meals at elegant tables. She knew all the styles of dress, how bodices changed from year to year, the fashions of hairpins, and whether the gentlemen were wearing their hair short or long, and sometimes she drew herself in the midst of the dancers, in a light carmine frock with a necklace of tourmalines and Evmeni pearls. She read the geographers, Elathuid the Voyager, Firdred of Bain, and she drew herself aboard ships, in hotels, in tents, on the pinnacles of mountains, and then sometimes in cities, in little parlors, among cousins, in the garden of an aunt who passed her an ice decorated with pink dust. She had to imagine the colors, as she possessed only charcoal. She drew in a frenzy of self-loathing and a sick, irresistible craving. Sometimes she made herself eat the charcoal as a sort of penance and vomited ecstatically over the balcony.

At dawn the sky was so clear and almost green. And she felt bright and light. She always burned the drawings before she left her room.

How quickly the feeling dissipated. As she walked to the room of the Stone her bones seemed to sigh.
You will sever all ties and pass from your bondage into light
. She repeated these words to herself. She repeated:
Yours is a negative kingdom
. She felt herself becoming stranger, her loneliness irrevocable. But she never tried to go anywhere else, she never tried to change anything, she only committed one grand act of betrayal, when she helped a little foreigner, an enemy of her father’s, escape the Isle, so that he could deliver her letters to Lunre. Once again she told someone: “
Run
.” And now alone in her room she wonders if she is somehow responsible for the howls and crashes outside, if by telling the prince to run away, and later by setting that foreigner free to aid the prince’s design, she woke this dragon, this new war, its wings blazing, and she wants to run outside, as she did just once when a man named Vars was her captor, pelting down the abandoned hallway only to be caught and brought back in minutes, because Vars had told her her father was dead, hanged by the prince from a tree in the Garden of Quinces, and she wanted to see his body.