The Winged Histories (20 page)

The two oldest sons married noble Nainish women. Success. The empire is a success. This success is really you. You and your sister and your cousin. The three of you weaving the strands of the empire together: the Fayaleith and Kestenya and Nain. These three strains are destiny, one people, a single radiant language splintered on the departure of the gods. You, your sister, your cousin, you are paradise. One in the desert now, and the other two in a ruined temple in the north.

The two oldest sons married noble Nainish women, but it’s the third son who rules Olondria now. Your Uncle Veda, the Duke of Bain. He’s a good man, you say. Not a natural king. You’re sorry for him. I asked, what’s he like, and you said, “Resigned.”

A king on the Isle. Avalei’s temples thriving again, now that the Priest of the Stone is dead. It’s as if everything wants to go back to what it was. Everything wants to go back, except Kestenya.
Kestenya Rukebnar
. It wants to go forward, or sideways. Tav, let’s never go back.

Kestenya going, parting from the Valley. Perhaps Nain, someday.

You say, no. The Nains will never rebel. They want to become Olondrian. They’re passionate about it, even though they pretend to be proud of who they are. You speak of your terrible Aunt Mardith. “A bloodless woman,” you say. She was determined to be Olondrian, but on her own terms. She wished to rule. She was working toward it, amassing wealth, arranging marriages, absolutely cautious and single-minded. Her patience for this game was outrageous, twisted, it deformed her. When you speak of her you remind me of myself talking about my grandmother. You say your Aunt Mardith wore pearls at her wrist and throat. She would have killed anyone for money. Of all your family, you say, she was the most like you.

She is. She’
s still alive.

Your relatives live for a very long time. Mine do not. Let’s say that too. When my grandfather died he was twenty years old. Let’s say that your people live and my people die because that is so and I am an orphan, I was an orphan when we met. My father was killed in Tashuef at a cattle auction, something went wrong, some negotiation and he was stabbed between the ribs one afternoon, and my brother crept out and avenged him slitting the throat of the one who had killed him and then he died, my brother, he buried himself
in the mountains, escaping the sovos. The sovos came to the camp looking for my brother and I burned him with my eyes, I wished all kinds of evil on him, blood and scabs and pests. Women, they say, have a propensity for witchcraft, but in my opinion this is not true, it’s only another joke they play on us, to laugh. I don’t know a single witch. I wish I did. I just looked at the sovos, helpless. Knowing I would not see my brother Haidhas again. The sovos asked us questions and took notes. We were very polite, as always, not causing trouble, that was Fadhian’s way. It was important to have a good reputation if you were feredhai, to be known as docile, to give in to paper every time. My heart, Tav, this politeness. I think it’s politeness that really went to the heads of the men when they rushed into Bron to set fire and kill. They say the library of Bron went up like the world’s most beautiful bonfire. Everywhere it was like the Feast of Lamps. I imagine them leaping and crowing against the flames. They found the sovos of Bron, they forced him to eat all the brass buttons on his jacket. That is the sort of thing my people do while your people are quietly buying land and organizing garden parties. They forced him to swallow the buttons on his coat and then they stood him against the wall and four of them shot him full of arrows. And far away Haidhas died a second time, he died for good in this war you brought us like a garland full of thorns. And Fadhian died and Mantia died and so many others died and we, we women, we were hiding in caves, rehearsing.

The caves. They smell of filth and decay. They sound like children crying. Every night I lay down there I thought I would die.

I could hear women muttering in the dark. Especially the old ones. Practicing. Not my grandmother, though. She was dead by then.

My son. My brother. My silver horse.
The same songs, over and over. And children crying. I pressed my hands over my ears. I thought I would die. The songs were all over me like spit, like a caul. I’d lie there gagging.
My horse, my love, his body broken on the high crags.

My grandmother died. She died of a broken heart. Not because Haidhas was lost to us, but because he had gone without avenging his grandfather. He had avenged his father instead. My grandmother hated her life. My mother died soon after her, of a winter fever.

I was just going in circles then. Spinning.

And in the caves I was spinning. Spinning.

And you were entering Velvalinhu with a sword. Say that. Say that you move with swords in palaces and I lie in my own filth dying and pressing my hands over my ears. Say that you planned death and you ordered death. Look Tav, here it is, your independent Kestenya. More than half the men dead, many others wounded. Tav, they killed Fadhian, they pierced his throat with a spear and the blood came loose.

Fadhian so polite they pierced

who never

and in the Valley the towns on fire, towns that now

and ashes

stinking

they say in places the river

for what? Because you wanted

when you were young

the vultures

where

I don
’t know if you’
re still

Tav

Tav

Tav

Tav

Today it’s hotter. The birds are still, except for the desert susa. That creaking call.

The pen looks strange in your hand. You’re clumsy, everything’s smudged. I think it’s because I’ve hurt you. You’ve hurt yourself. That look I used to think was fierce. You are broken on the high crags.

No. Not that.

New songs, I think.

Your sword-hand writes, a scrawl. You’ll make copies, you say, you’ll leave them in fences, in villages, under stones. I remember in Tevlas once, a professional reader in the square, his wide-brimmed hat, one brown knee crossed over the other. Reading from a tattered book of tales. Men stood around him, smoking. A woman leaned in a doorway, holding a child. A little girl ran up to the reader and gave him a glass of cider. She waited to take the glass back, listening, eyes wide.

Crrk
. Listen, a susa. Making noise.

I am generally happy. Some people are generally sad but I am generally happy. I think that you are more sad than happy. Haidhas was too. And my mother, who kept her son’s milk teeth in a little Olondrian bag. She taught me how to sing. She was very strict. You sit up straight, you keep everything tight. You are not dancing or playing the diali, you are singing. You are carrying the scars of the ausk. You sing with this tightness, it makes the
chaif
, the absence, what you won’
t let go. Don
’t let go, don’t smile but don’t cry either, control your breath. You are singing. My mother sang beautifully, in a hard voice like a tree. I have that same hard voice, but I am naturally sloppy, spilling everywhere, it was easy to learn how to sing for money.

Generally I am happy. Even through loss.

I lost my brother and I was spinning. And after you went away I started spinning again. Spinning in the dark and in the cave. But it’s not normal for me, I’ve never had that natural melancholy. I think this is why I can’t become a great composer, after the first reason I mean—the fact that I’m a woman. After that first, original reason, which is really enough, there is this problem of not being a serious person. I used to watch the little goats and just laugh. In the spring. They’re so comical, and there’s this dense light everywhere. When you throw your head back and gaze at the sky it’s as if your heart is lifting out of your body, just going up, just going up.

Tav, I will make you something new.

“Did I give you to a man, or to another woman?” My grandmother’s jeers, her terrible contempt. This, more than anything, showed me that the life I imagined was impossible. “Didn’t I give you to a man?” My father went to eat outside the tent, though the sun was setting right in his eyes. He wouldn’t give my grandmother a single word. My grandmother inside shrieking. I went out too and sat beside him, feeling cold because I was thinking of Keliar. We were going to meet that night, as usual: we’d sneak away from the artusa during the dancing. Giggling, knowing that nobody cared, it was just play. Suddenly the thought that it was “just play” twisted around itself, making a painful knot inside my heart.

Play. In the Valley, it’s prayer. You told me that. You said love between women was only possible in a temple of Avalei. In the aklidai, too, it was possible, in the old days, under those chalk-white domes, everybody loving as they pleased. Perhaps someday it will be that way again, when Roun returns in her long boat, when she begins her stately glide across the sky. But it’s not the life for you. You were born beneath a wooden roof but you’re a true wanderer: a feredha, like me.

Something new. But what? I spill everywhere, I’m too much. You can’t find a single person in the camp who takes me seriously. Ask them! I’ve never been married, I’m a perpetual girl to them, they indulge me, they’d only laugh if I told them I was composing music. Music—a serious art! Death and remembrance! The soul of the ausk! And me, Seren—so messy, only a susa, laughing too much at everything, holding her ribs and laughing at goats, suddenly angry, shouting at people, forgetting it all in an instant, just forgetting.

New songs, Tav. New songs, I think.

Something fresh, light, like a breath. You must have noticed that things are different now, with the men so few. Girls herd cattle and even hunt. They’re shy, but they like it. Everyone’s wondering what will happen in winter. It’s in their minds that you have gone to the winter pastures. And other things have come to the surface, revived. I remember when you told me about the False Countess, a woman warrior you read about in a book. You said she was Kestenyi, and I laughed. It seemed impossible, but afterward I saw that it could have been true. I remembered stories that seemed to resemble the story of the False Countess. A tale of a group of women defending themselves and their children in the hills. They fought with knives and stones, one with a tent pole. And there was a robber princess who lived without a home, without an ausk. She was said to be terribly pale and death to the Laths. I remembered these stories. Now it seems to me that they’re all tied together, like a web, they seem like a series of gaps rather than a presence but when you lay them out you can see the outline of a skeleton on the ground. The outline of a woman who has died, but who was there. This is the outline of our women now herding cattle on the plain. The outline of your hand remembering how to form letters, how not to use a sword. The outline of our
chadhuren
.

The outline of a group of women riding toward the mountains. A few men among them. Cattle.
Hesensai
: “traveling without women.”

Stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.
Ta-ta-di-dai-di
. Only a foolish person could come up with something like that.

New songs. Foolish songs. Why not?

And at the same time the boys are so precious—like pearls, like myrrh, because their fathers are dead. You can see it in the way the women touch their heads, even women who aren’t their mothers, even me, I feel this adoration for the small boys. An enormous, protective passion, already weeping.
Live. Don’t die
. This is what my grandmother felt for my brother Haidhas.
Live, live, don’t die, my sweet, my clear one, my bright horse
. And somehow “
live, don
’
t die
” becomes “Kill, kill, kill.”

This is why I say that music should not be for remembrance. We remember too much. We need music to forget. Songs that leave no scars. All these women with scarred faces and the men would say, “She goaded me to kill.” It was the common defense in the case of murder, so conventional, like a song, every case of murder seemed to be the same, even long blood feuds among hundreds of people, always the same, it was always a case of honor and there was always a woman who goaded the man to kill. Women like my grandmother, with voices of hot salt. Sometimes at a trial a woman would stand up, screeching. Other women would hold her back. She’d still be screaming for blood. “She goaded me.” I always felt that this defense was true, but also false.

True because of the way my grandmother tried to goad my father, to make him kill. False because something else was standing behind my grandmother. A vast and terrible logic. Formulaic, like a song. The closed and shining logic of men and women.

All of us, singing ourselves to death.

Sometimes, yes, sometimes an aching sadness comes to me across the plain. I think of the girls in stories who are set impossible tasks: count every grain in the field, weave a net out of water. Always a girl. She’s bent over, counting grain. She doesn’t know why. It is her fate. She is the victim of a closed and shining logic. Why does she never stand up? She says: “I have to save the world.” Tav, let’s never go back. Let’s not even remember.

Poor lost bird, you flit from place to place but cannot find your home
.

Forget. But the dead cling. You remember your servant Fulmia. Sometimes you wake in the night, suddenly, calling his name in fear. You speak of the day you understood that he hated you. You had fallen and cut yourself, and he was bending to help you up. His hands were tender, but suddenly you knew. Such thick veins in his hands, you told me, they reminded you of rivers. You went to war for this man, to restore his stolen birthright.
Kestenya Rukebnar
. Stolen by you, by your people. You hope he is free, but he might be dead. In your war. So he clings. And when you’re riding, if a stone falls, you whirl, ready for violence. Your body remembers war. This body I love. War has shaped the beloved body.

Music for forgetting. What kind of music? What’s the point of music that doesn’t want to remember? Why sing at all?

We could remember different things, perhaps. The bones of a woman laid out on the ground. Or the men could remember the
che
.

They know it, these small boys. They learn it in their mothers’ tents. They drink it like milk. Growing fat and happy on the
che
. But they’re not allowed to speak it. The women won’t let them, they slap their heads, lightly but seriously, don’t talk like that, don’t say that, say it like this! You—
slap!
—you’re not a girl! They laugh: shrill, blood-tinged laughter. This thing is theirs, the
che
. They’re going to keep it safe. “Listen to him!” “Are you a girl?” I used to love it when Haidhas got slapped for answering in the
che
, so happy I wanted to hug myself. I was the good one, I never got slapped for talking. He was an outsider. The
che
inside me like a well of gold. And then I grew up and this gold was worth nothing, nothing. You can’t use it anywhere. It’s only for fighting with other women, or for crying.