“But it’s all right,” I said awkwardly, “if you’re young?”
“You’d have to be younger than we are. We’re too old now. It’s for children.”
“
Well,
” I said, “at least they won’t shut us up in a temple.”
I told her of Bain, an excursion to Avalei’s temple, and how I glimpsed, in the upper story, a jeweled hand tugging a curtain. That hand seemed, for an instant, the sign of paradise. In Avalei’s holy house, any person may love any other: love overflows all forms. But a moment later I knew it was not for me, that luxurious hidden life: Avalei’s servants never leave the temple except on feast days. They adorn her crown like insects in a lump of amber. “It’s a kind of half life,” I explained.
She touched my cheek. “Not the life for a soldier.”
“Stop, you’re getting sand in my eye.”
She slapped my face gently, twinkling. “
Chff!
”
“
Chff
yourself.” I grabbed her wrist.
“
Chff! Chff!
”
“For shame!” I rolled onto her.
“Susa!” she wheezed. A storm of giggles.
It was there in the desert that my blood returned, there that Seren taught me to seize black ants and snap them between my teeth, there that my heart came open in two halves and words poured out of it: my heart had not been empty after all. I talked night after night until I was hoarse. There was a curl of whiteness in the dark sky, what the feredhai call the track of the goddess Roun, the wake of her boat in the sea of the heavens and this is what was coming out of my heart, memories pouring out in waves. All of my life. I told Seren about the dance of the mountains, about Ashenlo, about my sister and how she had called me a clown, about Dasya, about my father, how he was forever a traitor and the son of a traitor and so he hated himself and everyone else, about my uncle the Telkan, so weak he allowed himself to be stretched out and then collapsed again like the sail of a boat controlled by the Priest of the Stone, about my Uncle Veda, the Duke of Bain, who also hated his life but with more resignation than my father. I told her about Aunt Mardith in the north, about Uncle Fenya and his money, how I was certain they were buying up land in Kestenya, how the desert was changing hands without anyone knowing, becoming the property of the Nains, as if you could buy this wind and light. I worried that it was too much, this blizzard of words. She said: “No.” She said she would give me a field. “This field is wide enough to contain everything you say.” She told me the field would never be filled. Her hair above me, swinging. She said it was mine. She said she’d never take it back.
There was one thing I could not tell her. I had to tell Fadhian first.
I told him to come with me, alone, through the Land of Flints. We traveled at dawn and dusk through the blackened plain and in the afternoon we slept beneath the white summer femka stretched on wooden poles. The country was very bad and often we walked to spare the horses. I picked up a few stones and rolled them in my hand. Very black and rough they were and stark in the sunlight, painting their outlines on my eyes, their inescapable presence. The feredhai said that a dragon had scourged this country, and I believed them. At the site of the aklidoh there were a few bowed wild mimosas, all dead. Dead palms, dead acacias black and hard as iron, pieces of dead wood scattered on the ground. But the aklidoh was standing, square and silent with its gray domed roof. Inside we found a few bits of ancient straw. We entered the cool of the inner chamber and sat on the mud benches carved into the wall, facing each other in the light from a hole in the roof.
“Now,” said Fadhian.
I took a deep breath, and then I spoke. I told him that I was a Kestenyi. I told him that there was nothing more precious to me, or more fragile, than
Kestenya Rukebnar
, and that this was the reason I had asked him to follow me to this abandoned place. I told him that the war in the north, the Brogyar war, was a ruse, a trick to keep Olondria docile, and he smiled. I told him that the Telkan had made mistakes, that he was weak, the pawn of a priest. I told him that this priest, too, had made mistakes. I spoke of the riot at the Night Market: Valley peasants crushed on the orders of the Priest of the Stone. Fadhian’s face grew quiet; I could see him thinking. I told him that my cousin, Prince Andasya, was gathering disaffected generals in the far north. I told him I wanted men from him, a force that would sail westward; I would claim I was taking them to trade horses in Nissia. That winter, on the Feast of Lamps, Dasya and I would converge and take the Isle. And Fadhian would free Kestenya.
“I know you can do it,” I said.
I knew he could do it: he would know just whom to ask. He listened in silence, sometimes glancing up at the sky through the hole in the roof. Sky of the desert, Kestenyi sky. He listened until I was empty, spent. Rubbing his jaw, his face as still as noon.
Then he told me a story. I had heard it before but not that way, not from the lips of a man like Fadhian. I had not heard the story told so plainly and with quiet energy and pauses in which the afternoon slowly turned. Sometimes he raised his hand. His eyes were fixed on a spot in the darkness of the crumbling wall but I knew that he did not see it. It was as if we had been abandoned at the bottom of a well, a well that slowly filled with the blueness of night.
“It won’t be like that,” I whispered, my voice huge in the broken room.
“Won’t it?” Fadhian said. I could feel him smiling. Then he sighed and said that my grandfather Uskar had not been a monster or a fool but simply a man of incomplete passions.
“My grandfather knew him well,” he said. “He used to speak of what an excellent dancer Uskar had been before he joined the rebels. You know he was terrified of wasps. You see, these are the things we remember. These, and the little children burned alive on the Karafia. Uskar was running up and down the streets of Tevlas shouting and weeping, everyone has heard that part of the story. But who knows what he thought afterward, after he betrayed the rebellion, after he gave his brothers to the noose?”
Fadhian shrugged and crossed his legs, his heel scraping on the sandy floor. He leaned on the wall and looked up at the damaged roof. A single star hung there in a dark blue circle, shifting slightly as if breathing, bright and unguarded and alone.
“Why did they fail?” Fadhian murmured. He said that it was not because they were cowards nor because of feuds among the feredhai. He said that in the end men like my grandfather had not been able to murder their own and so they had been defeated.
“I’m not afraid.”
I could feel him smiling again. “This is what worries me. Do you know what it will take to remove Kestenya from the empire? They have grown together, a tree inside a wall. Separate them and the wall is likely to crumble, the tree to die.”
“Do you think so? Will it be hard to remove the feredhai from laws and fences, from those who are buying and selling the desert?”
“You have misunderstood me,” he said, but when I asked him how he would not answer and for a long time we were silent.
Later, out on the plain, he touched his heels to his horse’s ribs and shot off swiftly with his mantle flying behind him, dark blue in the starlight, and I followed at a gallop in the cold air drifting from the edge of the world.
“Spare the horses!” I shouted. My face was hot with anger but the thin sound of my voice shocked me and I did not shout again. Fadhian had heard me and he slowed his horse and proceeded at a walk. And I was listening to the night.
I listened but could not hear anything for its sound was an absence of sound, a deep absence in which the crunching of hooves over stones was lost, and the stars stood very solemn and bright in a circle and seemed so alive that their silence was uncanny, as if they were holding their breath for their own strange purpose. Their whiteness struck me in the face and I bowed my head. That night I spoke without stopping, although Fadhian did not answer. I told him again and again that this time was different, that I was not my grandfather Uskar, that I was loyal to Kestenya, whatever he thought. I spoke again of the fires in the Valley, the anger of people there, and how that anger was singing the song of Kestenya in a different key. And there was a third note: the anger of soldiers in the north. “Only imagine,” I said, “if we should sing together.”
We slept in the lee of a ridge of hills and I had a dream in which Seren asked me to go with her into a cave: I followed her, and not until she released it did I see that she was bearing with her an enormous dark-furred bat. We stood on the edge of a pit inside the cave and watched the bat fly down in slow circles to join the others. There were cats there too, at the bottom, gliding among the stones. “You’ll never get it back now,” I told her.
In the morning we made a fire of dried dung and boiled coffee in the shade of the hills while the sun came flooding in silver over the plain. I remember Fadhian’s crouch, his fingers lightly touching the handle of the pot, his eyes fixed on the level of the coffee. A little wind came up and raised the dust about our camp. The horses stood with their legs in the whirling cloud, their bellies gray. Fadhian poured the coffee and we shielded the cups with our mantles and drank, chewing the grounds and spitting onto the rocks. He glanced up at me, and his face looked young, young and thin and tired. His smile was a crooked knife hung on a wall. How it cut my heart.
“
Well, Tav,
” he said. “Let’s try it. Let’s have
Kestenya Rukebnar
. Let’s have war.”
“Don’t go,” she said, when I told her.
“I must.”
“Going to Bain,” she sneered.
“I’m not going to Bain.”
She shrugged. “To the Valley, then.”
“I’ll come back.”
I leaned close and told her all our plans. I told her to be ready for independence. She shook her head, her earring trembling against her neck. A silver ring adorned with a red glass bead. Cheap glass from Tevlas. She said that this war would not be mine, I would never triumph. She, who knew nothing of war, told me that I, a woman, would never be remembered, that any victory would be Dasya’s and not mine. They would call it Prince Andasya’s War. I told her it didn’t matter. “We’ll be free,” I whispered. “Free. Even if I’m killed, you’ll live on in a free Kestenya.”
She bowed her head. When she raised it again, her eyes had turned silver. “
You still don
’t remember where we met,” she said.
She stalked to the fire where the boys sat playing the diali and took up the instrument. The look she gave me turned the air to ice. She sat cross-legged and played. She played and sang in an exaggerated manner, tossing her stiff plaits, rolling her eyes where a few tears still clung. And I knew. She had been among the hired singers at my going-away party in the garden at Ashenlo. She had been there, beneath the wooden arch, while I imagined life in the desert and engaged in a stupid argument with Armali.
“Stop it,” I said.
She didn’t stop. The flesh crept on my neck. She sang of the dead who wander among the caves, the dead who haunt the ruins of the aklidai and the girls who meet them there and are transformed into birds and slaughtered and eaten.
She strayed among the stones
, she sang,
and he was waiting there
. Such a terrible song for her pure voice. I listened, enraged. I wanted to smash the diali, to strike her face. I would have swallowed her whole if it meant I could take her with me.
4. Song
The swordmaiden will sing as she rides and the song will cool her spirit. She is happiest when singing the songs of the road. Songs of the hearth may make her body heavy and uncertain: it is difficult to manage a sword at a feast.
All songs that tell of brave deeds are useful, especially those in which the hero is slain. The False Countess was accustomed to prescribe melodies like physic. A man overtaken by trembling would be ordered to sing the ninth verse of the
Vanathul.
For self-hatred, the Countess recommended “The Pass of the Doves.”
Songs sung in childhood may also be used, but with care.
Melancholy music is appropriate only in peacetime, never in war.
At night, wrapped in her cloak, the swordmaiden murmurs the song of her unknown comrades, swordmaidens past and future: a song without words.
If I live, I will find Seren again.
The camp is silent. In three days, on the Feast of Lamps, we depart for the Blessed Isle. Dasya will meet me there, and together we will take Velvalinhu. We’ll have surprise on our side: everyone will think we have come for the feast. My Telkan Uncle and his priest will fall, while in the north whole battalions forsake the army, charging down from the hills to take the Valley, and in the east, Fadhian rides at the head of the feredhai. This is what I think of now at night.
If I live. If I live.
I lay on the sand with Seren and named the stars, the way Malino had taught me in the observatory. Firelight touched my wrist as I pointed: the right wrist, overdeveloped like the whole arm. I told her she ought to call me Tavis the Warped.
She clicked her tongue at me in disgust.
“Is that
che
?”
“Yes. It means who asked about your arm? What’s that one—the bright one to the right?”
The feredhai have their own names for the stars, their own constellations. What we call the Bee they call the Clasp.
If I live.
She told me she had dreamt of me on the night I first arrived. She dreamt I was holding water in my cupped hands. “
Look inside,
”
I told her,
“it’s a taubel.” She bent and peered into the circle of water. It was completely black.
“This field is for you,” she told me once, “I’ll never take back.” But she did take it back. The day I left she stood apart, near the artusa, while the others kissed me and patted my shoulders and wished me luck on the road. Her sunburned arms crossed and her gaze trained on the mountains. No white cloak today, no sign of grief. She was taking it back. Her hair and her voice and her breath and the scar where she had been bitten by a wild dog. “I yelled like fever,” she’d told me. She was taking it all back. I wanted to be the first to turn away. I lost.
So many memories. But one is missing, because it never arrived: Seren performing at the garden party at Ashenlo. It lies like a needle in the back of my mind. I grope for it, desperate to draw it out. I see again the lamps among the sparse-limbed trees. Gowns brushing over the gravel and the musicians under the wooden arch. Were there three or four? Four, say four, Seren and three others. Guitar, diali, and drum. They glance at one another and nod, the drummer taps his calloused fingers, and it begins. Seren in the center, her strong face and supple, easy bearing, her hands in her lap. The light glints on the parting in her hair. Her plaits are tawny where the sun has burned them. She tosses her head and sways from the waist, using all the coarse, familiar movements. It’s not the feredhai style, but a parody of it, something sold all over the empire. She sings the old songs: “The Swallow in Winter,” “The Rose of the East.” Curling one hand in the air, opening and closing her great black eyes. People are listening, drawing chairs closer, mouthing the words. When she finishes a phrase a clatter erupts among the crowd, a burst of snapping, rings clicking on glasses, cries of “
Bamanan ai.
” The words begin as something maudlin and meaningless but repetition gives them power, and she repeats each line in fifty ways. Sobbing and swaying as if overcome by the music. And under the sound of the words comes the true meaning, the one they possessed long ago. How sad they were when they were first composed.
Where are you? I am waiting
.
And once again:
I am waiting. Where are you?
When we were small at the Feast of Lamps the lanterns were lit in the avla and our mother sat at the table smiling and handing out the glasses. Each glass had a flower tied to it, a jasmine bloom or a sprig of mint, and the women fastened them in their hair and the men put them in their boot tops. Our mother sat in her chair all evening and never danced though she loved the music. In those days, I remember, we found it simple to be extraordinary. Everyone watched when I danced a sadh for Father or offered him his pipe on the beaded cushion when he was tired of dancing and sat by the window. And Dasya and Siski clasping hands in the corner would swing in circles until they fell and Siski’s boots left marks like tea stains across the floor. And when they carried me upstairs at every window I saw the lights of the hunters down in the forest where they lived on raush and snow. And she was my dear, my dear. And she sang underneath the wooden arch at a party to celebrate my recovery from my wound. Who can understand the sadness of this? She was singing and I was whole and her song was a wound and the money we paid her was a wound. And all the lamps were wounds, and the beaded cushion, and the avla, and the music. When I was eight years old, still inside the enchanted circle, a strange little boy who had come to play with the servants’ children tripped me in the courtyard and I fell and cut my chin. “Down goes the house!” he sneered. I remember his hard, shiny lips, and how cold he looked. He did not have a proper coat, and his earlobes were red as coals. Fulmia came running around the side of the house, waving a rake and roaring terrible curses in Kestenyi. The boy ran off, and Fulmia helped me up, but not before I saw, in the eyes of this man who had served my House since my father was a child, the eyes of this man looking after the fleeing boy, an expression, not of anger, but of some secret satisfaction. It was gone by the time I was on my feet, and I never saw it again. But I know what I saw: hope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.
Now often at night it seems as if there is something abroad in the wood with wings or something that breathes as it sits upon my chest. I get up in the night and go to the flap of the tent and open it. Farus is instantly awake and rubs against my knee. “It’s only the rain,” I tell him, patting his head. The wind blows in my face and shakes the trees and powders me with rain. The cold rain and the warm dog by my leg. And far away in the dark the lights of the bridge. Everywhere the sound of wings.