The Winged Histories (24 page)

She rises, flustered, fighting the urge to giggle. He dances badly, hiding his awkwardness under stamps and misplaced shouts, and overwhelming her with the avid brilliance of his close-set eyes and the powerful, heated gusts of his winey breath. Spinning, she sees Dasya in the clutches of a strikingly tall and slender lady with clumps of powder in her hair. “Table,” he yells when she passes him again, and she laughs at the desperate strength with which he whips his partner in circles.

They meet at the table with their partners, under the potted orange trees. Wine overflows, staining the tablecloth pink. She laughs up into her partner
’
s face, pretending to be interested in the Bainish tam he has ordered for going to parties.

“Just for balls,” he says. “I
’
ll never use her for anything else.”

“Oh, how fine.”

“She
’
ll have red wheels and gold knobs all along the roof.”

“Oh, gold knobs! Did you hear that, Dasya? Gold knobs on the roof!”

“By my heart,” says Dasya, “gold knobs on the roof.”

Having got rid of Red Guldo, she falls laughing against her cousin
’
s shirt. Stars are falling, lights hang in her hair. People are talking loudly all around them as he takes her hand. “Come,” he says. The second arilantha.

How beautiful everything is! It will gleam in her memory afterward, this night, like a pendant flashing at the end of a long chain, after a subtle poison has seeped into everything, a creeping weakness and fog she will recognize, many years later, as shame. Shame seeps into her bones, chilling her limbs, when Aunt Mardith takes her aside at the beginning of summer, in the gray parlor at Faluidhen where priceless porcelain statuettes stand solemn as generals along the mantelpiece. Siski perches on an armchair stuffed so full it seems to be holding its breath. Red plum trees shower scent through the open window. Aunt Mardith, seated upright on a bredis, touches her handkerchief to her lip. “A pleasant spring,” she says.

“Oh yes,” says Siski.

“I believe you particularly enjoyed the ball.”

“Oh, yes!”

Again Aunt Mardith pats her mouth with the handkerchief. Siski swings her foot, then stops. Aunt Mardith clears her throat. Her eyes are bright, unreadable. When she speaks again, her voice vibrates.

“You know, my child, that I have no gift for idle chatter. I am on firmer footing with the essentials. Let us turn to the essentials, then. I have observed—we have all observed, your grandmother, your uncle, and I—your great affection for your cousin.”

The room grows quiet. The figures on the mantel seem to be listening.

“Now,” says Aunt Mardith, with a chilly attempt at a laugh, “don
’
t look so alarmed, my child! I haven
’
t brought you in here in the middle of the day to give you a scolding—quite the opposite!”

She tucks her hands under the bredis and, with a series of small jerks, draws it closer to Siski
’
s chair. She reaches out to pat Siski
’
s knee—a gesture so out of character that Siski freezes, nails digging into her chair.

“
I don’
t intend to scold you, but to encourage you,” her aunt breathes. “You have had a decent enough education—you know that the marriage of first cousins is frowned upon—but you may not be properly familiar with the genealogy of the Telkans! I am sure you know how to recite
Hernas the Shepherd, Beloved of Love
, but the family tree of the Royal House is more tangled than that, I assure you! Rava, the Opaline Princess, married her cousin—did you know? And so did Thul the Heretic—the one the Laths are
always bragging about! His first wife was his cousin through both Houses—exactly the way Andasya is with you. Her name was Arinoe. She died in childbirth, poor creature, and the infant too . . .
but that need not concern us.”

Aunt Mardith touches Siski
’
s knee again. She leaves her fingers there. The spot grows colder and colder as she speaks.

“So there is nothing, nothing at all, to prevent you from marrying your cousin. And what it would mean to us—well, a clever girl like you must see that, surely! A Nainish family on the throne! Not for one generation—which is what will happen if they manage to marry some Lath to your cousin—but for untold years.”

Siski
’
s heart slows, then speeds up again.

“The dynasty of Faluidhen,” her aunt says in a whisper. “Our House bound up with the future of the empire. And you can do it quite simply, quite simply. Without even trying. He
’
s enamored with you, anyone can—”

“Aunt, please stop.”

Aunt Mardith removes her hand from Siski
’
s knee. She laughs. “Come, my child, no false modesty! Let us be candid. We women have special burdens, and we must share them. You are fifteen years old; you cannot be married with propriety before seventeen. These next two years, then, are of particular—”

“Aunt, please!”

Siski stands, her breathing difficult and fast. “You
’
re mistaken. I don
’
t know what you
’
re talking about.”

“Dear me,” Aunt Mardith says. Her eyes are mild, appraising, watchful. “We are very nervous today. Sit down.”

Siski obeys.

In the long silence that follows, it is difficult to tell if Aunt Mardith is breathing. Such wonderful, appalling stillness. At last her lips part. She clears her throat. While outside the window the plum tree waves in the breeze, sometimes caressing the windowsill.

“
Freshness,
” Aunt Mardith says, “is a quality much to be desired. The freshness of happy young things. There is no substitute for it; no cream or paint can achieve it. It is a quality more spiritual than physical, yet it overflows the spirit, as it were, and lends its glow to the flesh.”

She smiles. “I do not have it, of course. Perhaps I never did. I have always been called too serious, too old. Mature, people used to say. Not an attractive word to a girl, but in time I learned to turn it to my advantage. You, however,” she continues, smoothing her skirt over her knee, “you possess that quality of freshness. Your mother did too, as a girl. A kind of interior brightness. It made her very appealing to gentlemen. To arrange her match with your father was really almost too simple—something of a bore! He wanted to marry her when she was only sixteen. He asked for her hand in this very room. I made him wait a year. Irilas of the Hiluen, fruit of a royal House.”

Again the smile. The teeth perfectly arranged. The plum tree performs its perfumed dance. Siski
’
s skin tingles. Her face is too warm.

“Firvaud was different,” Aunt Mardith says with a sigh. “More like me, perhaps, though less disciplined. Certainly she had ambition. Even when she was very small she had to win every game. She always insisted on taking the largest honith, the prettiest of the apples. A tyrant, even to Fenya, though he was older than she. Now, one would think that such a girl would easily get whatever she wanted, and that Firheia, who was more easily contented, would lag behind her in all things. And I believe this is how matters appear to most people. After all, Firvaud married a king, and your mother married the lord of a miserable highland town; Firvaud dwells among princes and your mother among goats. But this view is too simplistic. Firvaud had to work to get the Telkan. It took effort and patience. While Irilas fell into your mother
’
s lap.”

She watches Siski, as if to gauge the effect of her words.

“
I don’
t understand why you
’
re—”

“Of course not. Of course not. That is precisely the point. You do not understand, you do not think. You live, and dance, and laugh, while others understand and think on your behalf. That is the way you have lived until now, and it has been quite successful. Like your mother before you, you are greatly admired. You have grown up without the slightest insecurity or worry, and this has given you a bloom of charming innocence. Very good. I applaud you. I applaud myself. But no woman can afford to keep her innocence forever. We are the doors of the House: we control its borders. We protect. At some point, we all learn how to work a hinge.

“Come now. Why this expression of distaste? I am telling you, you have done well. You have bewitched your cousin, as I hoped. It is only necessary to take care, now that you have begun to go into society, not to encourage another suitor too much. You will have many, despite your mixed blood—dear me!” She laughs. “How easily offended we are! Perfectly crimson! Really, my child, be sensible! Of course your mixed blood is a disadvantage—especially the Kestenyi strain—one wishes it were possible to hide it, as so many others have done—my heart, yes, you
’
d be surprised what
’
s not written in the
Hath
, all sorts of brilliant deceptions have been practiced on unsuspecting princes. They say the Duchess of Ethendria has Panji blood. Just imagine! But you, of course, can hide nothing, being the empire
’
s most illustrious mongrel. This will make some people reluctant to associate with you; but not all of them, not by any means. That is why the next two years will be so delicate. You must avoid any sort of attachment that will give a man a claim on you, but you must not reveal that you plan to marry Andasya . . .”

Siski forces her hands to relax, to release the plush of her chair. A tiny movement. She doesn
’
t want her aunt to notice. She understands now that her body speaks a language of which she is unaware and the thought makes her feel exposed, stripped down to nothing. Aunt Mardith is speaking of parties, of feasts, of balls, she is breaking them down so that they become, not music, not laughter, not the sweet energy of the dance, but functions as carefully organized as military campaigns. She stresses how important it is that Siski keep her love secret. Their enemies—oh yes, they have many enemies!—must not be given the chance to organize themselves in opposition to the match. She says it must be a surprise attack. She says
love
when Siski has never said it herself. The word seems to cringe, revealed in harsh light.

Afterward Siski will go to her room and curl up on the windowseat. The afternoon outside still pulsing with color. She will pick up the anthology of poetry she has been reading with her cousin and let it fall open on her knee. A poem by Arduen of Suoveni, known as the Gray Lady. Not a poet who has ever interested them. Dull, says Dasya, and Siski agrees. When she reads the Gray Lady
’
s poems she has always felt vaguely tired, prone to distraction, as if listening to a pair of scissors. Hardly surprising, as the Gray Lady never left the estate of Suoveni and wrote about nothing except her singularly routine and eventless life. She was, states the brief introduction in the anthology, “the poet of the cushion and the comb.” But now Siski reads her poems, and the words stand out in lonely beauty.
Nine crows on a branch
, she reads,
and seven will not fly
. She sees the Gray Lady closing a door, correct, irreproachable, desperate.
Twilight has fallen, and all the windows fade
.

A fog over everything. At dinner she cannot raise her head. She cannot look at Dasya without blushing. And while the feeling will lessen, becoming bearable, even ordinary, habitual, it will never go away.

The night of the ball is detached from that fog of shame, and so it shines forth even now, when the world is utterly changed and Ashenlo is lost. The way she turns in Dasya
’
s arms, in his odor of cut grass and healthy sweat. Stepping away from him, spinning, arms above her head. Grandmother nodding in the corner, exchanging a roguish look with Uncle Fenya. The best of Nainish society drifting in bright silks. The lights so hot.

She turns to face him again, lowering her arms.

“Do I look all right?” she whispers.

“You,” he says.

3. Beloved the Color of Almonds

Every day, Dai Fanlei meets the others. Every day she turns mattresses, rips out threads, beats, stuffs, sews. Her fingers grow small transparent calluses. Her gums bleed. She does not have the same body anymore.

She is tired. She grows ill. She coughs and spits a pallid sputum on the road. There are flecks of down in it; they blend with the melting snow.

Her feet are bruised, the nails black. Dai Norla teaches her to wrap them in cast-off strips of cloth, to keep them warm and dry.

Every night Dai Fanlei walks up to the abandoned temple. In her mind, she has begun to call it home.

She cares for him. She gathers wood in the forest and builds up the fire. She brings him a drink of snow in her cupped hands. She tears the bread very small in order to push it between his lips, while he gazes at her with his angel eyes.

“Leave me,” he says. His voice slurred.

She lays her hand across his eyes. “Sleep now. Sleep.”

And when he sleeps, she quietly opens the book. The only book they have, the one they brought because he had hidden it in his shirt, close to his heart, against the skin. A very old copy, rare, adorned with the somber woodcuts of the past. The gilt looks fresh, undisturbed by human touch. The heavy pages give off the sour and melancholy scent of volumes that no one has thought to open for many years. It is a book kept only for show. She can’t tell whether even Dasya read it, or whether he merely carried it like an amulet. She holds it tilted toward the fire, the light on the page a pattern of rippling color, harsh in her eyes and red as veins.

712. Three children and one woman forty-five years of age disappeared in the village of Feirhu. A rough man, without horns, and exhibiting wings too small for flight, was netted and beaten to death in the neighboring woods.

713. A pair of twins born with horns near Sinidre. Executed.

725. A cocoon was discovered in a wind tower in the city of Deinivel. The guard lay in wait for the creature, and three died valiantly before it was captured and drowned in a bucket of wax.

726. A knocking was reported in the cellar of the Temple of Heth Kuidva outside Breim. The area was excavated, and a Dreved preparing for its cocoon stage, fortunately very weak, was discovered and destroyed with fire.

727. A woman with black feathers protruding from the flesh of her back was discovered and drowned in melted wax in the Hadmanyi.

731. A child of five years began to show horns in the city of Asarma. Executed by hot wax.

732. A woman with one wing discovered in the Tavroun. Drowned and then burned.

733. A child with no whites to his eyes executed at Elueth.

735. Eiloki. A female reaper, seventeen years old, complained of a headache. Horns developed, and she was executed by fire.

735. An infant with wing marks executed at Yenith.

736. Ur-Fanlei. A child born with blue flesh. Executed.

Tuik died in the autumn. It was cold, too cold to sleep out on the plateau. The chill seeped down from the empty spaces between the stars. The chill of the void, deadening, indomitable. When she wakes the distant hills are black against a ruddy sky.

“
Tuik,
” she calls.

The horse has strayed. It is Siski’s fault: she must not have locked the stable door. She sits behind Dasya on Na Faso, Tav following on her pony. “
Tuik!
” A feathery whiteness leaves her lips and disappears at once in the cold dry air.

“He came down here,” says Dasya.

Tav rides silent beside them, her face sinister and strange in the early light. Following the horse’s tracks, they descend the ridge and discover, in the rising light, a valley of misar plants.

“No,” says Siski.

She slips from the back of the horse. The others sit motionless. She runs. The spines of the misar slash her trousers, cutting her legs. The light becomes harsher, white. Tuik stands very still with his belly bleeding and curving spines protruding from his lips. His gums and eyelids already dark. He looks at her with the same confidence as ever and her heart cracks like a glass held over a flame. Beloved the color of almonds. “When the dew is on the mountains,” she sings to him, taking the halter.

A chant of sobs. In the stable at Sarenha he lies down quietly on the floor. Nenya stands in the doorway shaking her head. Carefully Siski pulls the spines from the tender belly and mouth of her darling and rubs him gently and covers him with a blanket. He will not eat or drink. His breath comes jerkily now, in spasms, and it no longer smells of mornings and of the first snows. She lies beside him, her cheek on the floor, and looks toward the others who squat in the doorway. “You’ve got to come in,” says Tav. “It’s too cold.”

But she is not coming in, not now, not ever. The others go out, leaving the lantern on the floor, and Dasya returns with furs and blankets. He covers her and sits by the wall with a shambus pelt draped over his knees, silent. Outside the doorway the night is blue.

“
I don
’t want you to look at me,” she tells him.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault, it is.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Stop looking at me.”

He looks away. In the morning the grayish discoloration has covered the horse’s head and neck and is creeping toward the heart. She looks at Tuik. She weeps. “I dreamt that none of it was true, that it hadn’
t happened.
” Shadows of trees are playing outside. She covers the horse’s face with her hair, kisses his nose and then recoils from the bloated skin with its repellent hardness. Only his eye recognizable. He has begun to tremble and looks at her as if to beg her pardon for the indiscretion. She feels that she cannot bear this nobility in him but she bears it all that day because the alternative is unthinkable. Her forehead against his neck, her eyes closed. Night falls, the second night. Again her cousin sits silently by the wall. The two of them and the horse awake in the small light of the lantern. Then Dasya says: “
You can
’t go on like this.”

“And what do you know about it?” she cries, savage. “You don’t love him.”

But she knows he is right. She remembers Mun Vidara’s mare that took almost two weeks to die of misar poisoning, lying in the yard. And Mun Vidara came to the house and told the story, sniffing into her handkerchief, and there was an immense silence at the table. And at last Uncle Veda said, his voice thick with emotion: “Forgive me, my lady—you have acted monstrously.”

“All right,” she says. “Quick.”

His Amafeini dagger is very sharp. Ah, would that I had died before my Sarya. Would that I were with her again on the wide plateau, on the wide plateau, in the sweet south wind, beneath a flowered sky.

“No, I’
ll do it,
” she says.

She takes the knife. She has hunted shambusna on the plains, she knows where to find the heart. But she is not strong enough, and Dasya helps her. His hands closing over hers, the sudden pressure, the black blood soaking her knees. Even now, not a sound from the horse. Only an increase in his trembling, which gradually subsides with his surging blood. She keeps her eyes open until the end. It comes very soon, in the light of the lantern, there in the stable at Sarenha Haladli.

In the morning she learns of the universe without Tuik. And the ringing silence without Tuik. News of their coming has gone before them, carried by herdboys, and her mother comes into the courtyard to meet them, wearing her yellow dress and with anxious eyes.

“
Tuik
’s dead,” Siski says. “He got into some misar.”

She holds her mother close, prolonging the embrace so as not to see the compassion and sadness clouding the clear brown eyes. She cannot bear to make her mother unhappy, it makes her want to die even if it is unavoidable, not her fault. And this time it is her fault.

“I’m so sorry,” her mother says.

“I’m all right,” says Siski, drawing back. At the side of the house, in the sand court, girls from the farm are pounding grain in big stone mortars, singing a nonsense song.

“We’re late,” her mother says, following the direction of her gaze. Her smile makes a weak light in the exhaustion of her face. The preserving is behind as well. A smell of jam hangs about the house, as if spring has come to the autumn.

Later, in the evening, Siski’s father enters the drawing room in his scarlet dressing jacket and frayed trousers. A certain elegance in the way he lights his cheroot at a candle. “That horse cost seven thousand droi,” he says.

Home. The hook where she hangs her cloak, the threadbare rug in the hall. Light from an inner room, translated light. It is the glow of the library fire reflected in a mirror and flung out here, to this hall with the flaking walls. Walking past, she drags her fingernail along the plaster and a white chip drops. A little bit each day. She does this absently, as she touches the head of the figure of sorrowing Leilin that stands outside her mother’s morning room.

Inside, her mother. A cheerful blaze on the hearth, a vast white bearskin on the floor. All the curtains drawn back to admit the morning light. Her mother is seated at the big rosewood desk that came with her from Faluidhen. She sets aside her pen, her cheeks flushed slightly with pleasure.

“Siski. Siskiye. Have you been out already, so early?”

Her gentle, fragrant kiss. “There’s coffee in the pot.”

Siski pours a glass and sits on the leather stool in front of the fire, crooking a finger inside the heel of each slipper to pull it off.

The fur of the rug so deep. “Are they still harvesting?” she asks. And receives that gift, her mother’s half-laughing, half-despairing gesture, the optimism that never seems to desert her, that gives even her most dreadful and disappointing stories a piquant flavor.

“My dear, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” She goes on talking in her easy, simple, inimitable way, telling of stolen oxen, storm-damaged trees, a fence that can’t be mended until she finds money to buy posts. As she speaks her hand hovers over the notebook in which she keeps the accounts. It is covered in baize and held together with string. She is not good at sums and always works them out two or three times on the backs of old menus before she enters them in the book.

“Sometimes I’m afraid to open it,” she confesses, laughing and wiping her eyes. Tears shed between amusement and grief. Her delicate skin, scrubbed by the air of the desert, shines beneath the dark wing of her hair where a few pale threads are sparkling. And Siski knows by her resolute smile that despite the catalogue of disasters there will be gifts and a ball again this year on the Feast of Lamps. This is not one of those moments of crisis, occurring two or three times a year, when her mother paces the rug, muttering and counting on her fingers.

During those times the house grows dark; they are ordered to save the oil. Nenya goes about with a fierce stiff face, carries trays to the morning room and makes certain grim allusions which the children are too frightened to examine. At night there are strange bumps and scrapings: their mother, in her dressing gown, is emptying cupboards, looking for things to sell. Worst of all are the Tolie mornings in the huntsmen’s room when she explains to the servants that she can give them only half their wages. The rough hands, clad in gloves if it is winter, close about the coins, and the herdboys shuffle silently toward the door. Afterward her mother returns to the morning room. Her uncombed hair is fastened with pins, her arms hang by her sides. The children crouch at the edge of the door she has forgotten to close and watch her gesturing, animated by desperation. She insists that their tutor go over her sums. “We must think of something!” she cries. “You will surely see something I have missed.”

She makes him sit in the chair and kneels beside him. And the tutor snatches off his skullcap and throws it on the floor, a habit which is comical in the schoolroom but not here, not here. “I am not a steward!” he cries. “You ought to have a steward.”

He fumes, kicks at his fallen cap, sometimes even weeps. Their mother rises at last and goes to the window. A strange half-smile on her lips, she rests her forehead against the glass and gazes out at the desolate countryside.

But today, no, today there is no despair, only the usual struggles, and fires burn in the library and the little family parlor. Siski goes into this parlor, where skins cushion the floor and a pair of Savrahili sabers hangs on the wall. There are no flowers now, and the parlor looks plain, even austere, but it is still one of her favorite rooms. Only, in the air, she can detect the chill that follows wherever her father, that stranger, that interloper, has passed.

All morning he sleeps. Siski and Tav and their cousin wander through the south wing of the house, they look at the books in the library in silence. They are examining pieces of armor in their dead grandmother’s audience hall when a shield slides off the table and falls with a clang.

They look up, frozen in the light from the window. Slowly the clamor dies away and they hear the beating of three hearts. But there is no other sound until noon, when a creak on the stairs admonishes them to seek the amadesh, the orchard, the hills. Usually they go riding at this hour, but Siski will not ride without Tuik, and the others walk with her under the apricot trees. Dragging branches through the fallen leaves. The house stands over them, aloof, pierced with windows like broken mirrors. The house in which he walks, drinks his coffee, sits in the library alone. They stay away, running wild in the orchard and on the farm, eating raush from their pockets and drinking milk behind sheds where goats are being slaughtered. They run filthy, half-frozen, harassed by dogs.

Dasya looks up at the purple sky. “It’s kebma time,” he says.

Slowly they return to the darkened house. Certain formalities are preserved. They bathe, they dress for kebma. Siski wears a pair of agate pins in her hair. In the drawing room she stands near the fire, holding her plate, chewing. She does not know or think about what she eats. And all of them stand like that, just eating, silent, unless her mother clears her throat and begins a tentative conversation.

Then all the children help her. “Oh, did you know?” “I think.” “I saw him too.” Her father stands by the window with crossed arms. His smile is taut, derisive, false. “Is that what you think?” he says. The silence closes. No one looks at him. They eat.

Evenings of candlelight and dread, without innocence, without pleasure. Her high lace collar scratches the back of her neck. In the dining room the candles stand on the table in pallid rows while on the walls the portraits kindle their abstract smiles. Her father eats doggedly, attacking his meat. He mutters: “The meat is tough.”

“I’m sorry,” her mother says softly. “It was roasting all afternoon.”

“That’s why it’s tough, you let them overcook it.”

He beckons and Fodok steps from the shadows with a bottle of dark wine. The liquid curls in the glass with a tinny music. Outside moonlight covers the fields, roads, and canals with a mantle of chalk. Hired men and girls are going home along the roads, singing, stepping vigorously in their rawhide boots. A few herds of cattle and sheep are on the roads as well, being driven home in the dark. The herdboys sing their peculiar
oh-ee, oh-ee
notes. Light shines from a kitchen with a waxed floor. At the Three Falcons, Durs is easing out corks with his heavy tufted hands. Men sit everywhere, on the steps, at the table under the fig tree, reaching for bottles, coughing, pulling off their gloves. Young Osenor, who plays music in exchange for drinks, sits in his special chair and plucks the diali.
With a comb in her hair
.