The Winged Histories (13 page)

On the night of his vision he had no such power. He was wild, feverish, desperate.

Write. Write. One day he would teach the child: Writing is power. He leaned on the table and added a scrawl to the page. Such pain. He was tearing down walls. He was trampling their starry chains and cashews and peppercorn trees. The Teldaire had wasted away and he broke her sternum and she was dust. He ground her aunt, Mardith of Faluidhen, to a smear of chalk. This woman he had never met but who faced him across the country from her castle in Nain, manipulating the Teldaire, laughing at them all. She had orchestrated the farce of the Telkan’s marriage; she wanted to see a Nainish prince on the throne. She sought power only for wealth—not, as Ivrom did, for change, for a transformation in Olondria’s deepest heart, for the start of a new, quieter, more pious era. He had gathered from his research that this Mardith was regarded as a woman of principle, self-denying, almost ascetic, that she went about clad in the palest colors as if in perpetual mourning, and he hated her even more for this posturing. She was no ascetic—but she’d know asceticism soon enough, when the temples of Avalei fell and demands for wine dried up, when she could no longer make a fortune from her vineyards and frankincense trees, when she was forced to exchange her theatrical white for black! Then she would cry—in his vision the smear of chalk wept icy tears. He was surrounded by a chorus of weeping women. And Time was defeated, and Death. When his book was finished, he’d mock the queen in the title. Wear these jewels, my queen, just to please me.
Jewels from a Stone
.

Today when Vars came in I was holding my father’s book in my hands. That little white leather volume, the edges of the pages touched with blue gilt, has been until recently a bestseller in the capital, ostentatiously displayed on shelves and tea tables throughout the empire. “Even if they don’t read it they have to buy it,” my father said a few weeks ago, triumphant, upright in his chair. I was silent. I never liked his attention to power, so naked—it humiliated me to hear him crow. I felt his ambition threatened the book itself. Those words Lunre called “a healing rain.”
And if you find a stone along the way, pick it up and set it aside. It will leave dust on your fingers but cause no pain. And in this way you will proceed to the Mount of Clouds.
The last words Lunre said to me, the night before he left the Isle forever. Under our favorite stone archway in the Tower of Aloes. The air pulsed blue and his eyes were full of shadows. I thought it was the beauty of the words that made us weep.

Vars unpacked his satchel onto the table with some pride. A heel of bread. “You can soften it in water,” he said.

“Vars, have you read my father’s book?”

He glanced at it, uneasy. “
No, teldarin. My sister
’s read me a few lines.”

“Really? She’s sympathetic?”

He blushed.

“Ah, I see. She read it to mock at it. Is that right? In the garden, after a glass or two of wine? No, no, you mustn’
t apologize,
” I went on, talking over him, “you mustn’t think I’m offended, why should I be? I know how we are used. But Vars, did you never think that we are really on the same side, you and I? We are both rebels after all.”

“Well. But we came to restore the Goddess.”

“Yes. You are rebels who look backward, and we are rebels who look forward.”

I rose and walked toward him, smiling. There was a prickling behind my eyes. The truth is that my morning had been very bad. Had it not been so, I doubt I would have tried to push the book into his hands. He recoiled, of course—as if a moth had flown at him in the dark.

“It’s only a book, it’s only a book,” I soothed him. I reminded him of Uskar, known as Ahadrom I, the grandfather of the prince. How Uskar, like Vars, like all the rebels, was wounded by Olondria, by its violence, the ruthlessness of its ceaseless wars. Like them, Uskar had tried to free Kestenya. But in the end he had relinquished his sword and become a man of peace. He had found another way to turn his back on the Olondrian Empire. He had turned his face to the Stone.

All morning I had been thinking:
I am now the High Priestess of the Stone
. I had been thinking:
How can I survive without my father?

For a long time, it seemed, I tried to make Vars take the book. Its white leather binding nosed feebly at his hands.

At length he took me by the sleeve and led me to the chair. He was saying something—words of comfort, I believe. Something about the prince. That the prince had guaranteed my safety. “No one is to touch you,” I think he said.

The room was coming to pieces. I opened the book, I don’t know where. I don’t need to see the words. I read without seeing: “
Yours is a negative kingdom
.” I thought of my father and how he was like a bird who flew through a window by mistake. Ultimately, we Stone worshipers are a homeless people.

This did not keep us from cruelty. From murder. The children at Nerhedlei dead. Farhal dead. My argument with Vars was flimsy, I see now, hollow. Ahadrom I may have been a man of peace, but everyone knows my father was not. And even Ahadrom, when he was Uskar, betrayed his own kin to their death.

It is the twenty-first day of the month of Fir. On this day the Telkan puts on a blue robe and yellow slippers. He drinks rose-colored sherbet made with snow from Porcelain Mountain. He meets with the representatives of the White Council. They come to see him on the Isle and sit in the Chamber of Midday Reflection, their feet submerged to the ankles in a rug made of white lion’s manes. The rug has been laid down for the occasion; afterward it is combed by the servants and wrapped in seven leaves of waxed paper.

Such polished ceremonies. And the end of it is blood. Such graceful language in my father’s book. Blood.

I have been thinking that I don’t know how to be Priestess of the Stone. I don’t know where our followers live, I don’t know their names. I can’t convince a single soldier to read our book. My father prepared me for nothing. Why did I think that he would never die?

The fire sinks. Vars is gone. The room goes colder. I put on my gloves. The sky is dark today: they are putting out the fires.

No one is to touch you
. The words seem terrible, profound.

Only one person could mourn my father with me: Lunre, who is lost.

3. And gentle from the edge of night the blue.

928–936

Look at his face. This is the face he will wear until his death. A grim face, beardless, chiseled out of jasper. Every morning he washes and shaves the face. The hair grows thinner and whiter and he is the Priest of the Stone and his master is dead. Elarom, whom the gods favored, is dead, and Ivrom still dreams of the chilly morning he entered the room of the Stone, feeling his way toward the lamp and the flint on the table, and he had never lit the lamp himself because Elarom was always awake and reading in its light, and he fumbled with the flint and knocked the lamp over, spilling the oil, and he could just see the white, almost dead log lying on the hearth, but he couldn’t see his master’s bed at all, and at length he realized that the strange, shrill voice crying for help was his own.

Look at his face, at the funeral on a hill overlooking the sea. The king is weeping, as are most of the worshipers of the Stone. The sea wind tugs their robes. Lunre and Farhal, two young men who joined the work of the Stone two years ago, are digging the grave. They are scholars, slender, unused to the work. It takes them half the morning. When the child, now thirteen years old, sinks down to sit on the grass, her nurse quietly pulls her up again. Slowly the light changes from the gray of a dog’s coat to the gray of a coin.

Ivrom’s profile becomes ever sharper, more rigid, more heroic. He does not weep. He notices that the child does not weep either. He is proud of this. He cannot see her young heart shuddering under her ugly homemade frock, in panic, in anguish, in a kind of horror. No one speaks as the body, wrapped in Elarom’s black robe for a shroud, is carried forward in the arms of three sobbing women. They can’t keep hold of it once they’ve sunk down, they don’t have any ropes, the body tumbles into the hole like a sack of rice. Everyone looks at Ivrom. Look at his face, it might be carved on a granite doorpost at the entrance to a temple, except that there is no Temple of the Stone, and if there were it would be without images, decorated only with words. For the image is vulgar, the gods have said; it coarsens the spirit and dulls the intellect. Who but an infant needs to receive the world through pictures? The wise use words. But Ivrom does not speak, and the Stone worshipers are at a loss, for they possess no traditions, no funerary rites.

Look at his face, like a blade. At length Lunre clears his throat. He draws his wrist across his sweating forehead, leaving a smear of mud. He steps forward and begins to shovel earth into the grave. Soon Farhal joins him. And the others watch.

Walking back to Velvalinhu through the fields it grew colder and colder and they stumbled in the stony aisles among the faded vineyards, and had it not been for the child’s nurse, who knew these paths from childhood, they might have lost their way altogether. For though Velvalinhu, with its vast and complicated towers, its hanging gardens like cuffs of precious lace, was ever in view, the way toward it was not direct, but involved a series of unexpected turns and sometimes even reversals around a house or copse. And this, Lunre said afterward, was an apt metaphor for the process of deciphering the message of the Stone, in which so many promising trails had to be abandoned. Indeed, he said, it might serve as a metaphor for any worthy endeavor. This was in Ivrom’s apartment, where the nurse served tea while the child went into her bedroom and curled up, trembling, with Nardien’s
Tales for the Tender
(and when her father came in to say good night he would frown and ask if she could not find something less babyish to read). It was after they had reached the Court of the Sands, vast as a battlefield, where the sentries watched them steadily and in silence, as the Telkan paused and cried out with a loud voice that he had no anchor now, no adviser, no friend, no counselor but Ivrom. “Both my fathers have passed away,” he said, “and I must depend upon my brother.” And Ivrom’s heart, frozen in sorrow, shook itself awake, and he held out his hand to the tall, clumsy, black-robed king of Olondria who knelt on the stones and grasped and kissed that hand. The king had a bald spot on the top of his head and his kiss was repulsive, slick with grief, and the new High Priest of the Stone wore his usual knife-hard face. When Lunre mused about their circuitous journey home, the priest laughed. “Oh,” he said, “but we might have cut the vineyards down.”

Here was Velvalinhu, with its courtyards, its gardens, its mighty towers, its light and darkness, always light in one place and always dark in another, and how strange it seemed, now, that Tenais had been so oppressed by the darkness, that she had lit a fortune in candles one night long ago. How strange that he himself had been disturbed by the salmon-colored stones, half-blinded by the glitter of the ballrooms—half-blinded, if the truth be told (and why not, there was no harm in admitting it now) by the brazen, jetty, taunting eyes of the queen. He looked back in astonishment at his nights spent poring over the
Hath Harevu
, and that idiotic little book
The Nains
, by the queen’s great-aunt, with its anguished clan sensitivities and the bloated, rubicund figures on the cover, who looked less like knights than the inhabitants of a sanatorium. How small the palace seemed now, though they called it a city! It was so little he could balance it on his palm; it reminded him of nothing so much as the music box in the shape of a castle that stood on his aunt’s writing desk in Bain. This castle, manufactured in Feirin or Deinivel, where such trinkets were churned out in great numbers, was graced with gardens of green baize, with trees of wire and felt, balconies of such fine filigree they might have been earrings, and windows of real glass. When the key was wound, the box played the popular vanadel “Bain, City of My Heart,” and the mechanism inside rotated, so that, peering through the windows, one could see tiny smiling ladies and gentlemen passing in a row, in a kind of eseila. Now, bending down and squinting through the window, he could see the queen, no taller than his fingernail, passing with a fixed smile, her paste jewelry glinting as she moved jerkily in the path she must travel forever. Her black hair looked freshly painted (and he knew for a fact that she had begun to dye it, although she was not yet forty, because one of her ladies-in-waiting, a secret devotee of the Stone, spied for him, and even copied out the queen’s letters). She passed to the plinking of the keys. Behind her, holding her hand, came her son, Prince Andasya, now eight years old, stiff as an effigy in one of his marvelous outfits, so thick with embroidery and pearls that he might have been tossed down the stairs without injury. He bumped along in his mother’s wake; he was already unhappy; his eyes brimmed with resentment in his candy-colored face. He would come to the Stone. Ivrom wound the key as tightly as possible, then released it, and the whole company whirled around to the sound of the keys.
Bain, city of my heart!
All the colors blended together; it was no longer possible to make out the black stains on the queen’s teeth (she had begun to chew milim), the red marks on her fingers (she slammed the lid of her writing-box on them deliberately every time she received a letter from her tyrannical Aunt Mardith); the young prince’s glowering brows had disappeared, the melancholy jowls of the Telkan, and the sumptuous oiled shoulders of a thousand court ladies, and the gentlemen’s jeweled scabbards, and all of their boots, wineglasses, prize-winning roses, londo debts, racehorses, intrigues, and affairs. The ballroom was nothing but soup. It looked like the gray, gelatinous, peppery soup he had once eaten at one of the queen’s dinners, back when he had felt that he must always be where the Telkan was, that he must watch over the king to maintain his power. The noxious soup was treacherously threaded with melted cheese, which clung to Ivrom’s spoon, his lips, and the side of his bowl; he found himself in a desperate battle with this cheese, though he tried to copy the cunning manner in which the others spun their spoons in order to break it. At the head of the table, the queen’s eyes glistened with tears of mirth. Muffled laughter ran up and down the room. But they were not laughing now. If they were not careful, he’d make them dance until they fainted; he’d wind the key until it snapped.

No one laughed now, for vineyards might be cut down, and it was not only the Mantis who could have people thrown in prison.
Jewels from a Stone
, Ivrom’s collection of the words of the Nameless Gods, had appeared in print in the winter of 931. It was a particularly cold winter; there was snow on the Isle, and many went hungry in the east. “It soothes me,” choked the Telkan, wiping his face, cradling the little book against his chest in the room of the Stone, “it soothes me to read these blessed words, when things are so difficult!”

The priest bowed slightly. His hard face did not change. He dwelt in a different realm, one infinitely more exalted: the realm, not of those who are soothed by the truth, but of those who draw it forth—those who are torn by its brambles and battered by its stones. It had wrenched his heart (whatever Lunre supposed) to have Farhal imprisoned in order to keep him from spreading his inferior translations. He had wept when Farhal, whose health was poor, had perished in the dungeon after his usual winter cough spread to his lungs. The inner lamp had blazed out at Ivrom then, and his heart, he told Lunre, had nearly stopped. And Lunre, seated at one of the desks in the room of the Stone, with a barricade of dictionaries and prayer books around him, had looked up calmly and said: “
Peace, Ivrom.
”

Ivrom stared at him. “Peace?”

“Peace,” Lunre whispered. Somehow, though his hair was cropped short and his cheeks clean-shaven, he looked disheveled; something about him suggested that he had been rubbing his face, or trying to tear his hair. His eyes glinted flatly.

Ivrom looked at his own papers, but found he could not work. He spent a few moments trimming his pen. “Farhal was ill,” he said.

No answer.

Ivrom tried a sigh. “Perhaps you are right, and this feeling of depression comes from a slowing of the blood . . .”

With a sudden, violent scraping, Lunre thrust his stool backward over the stone floor and stood. The oil lamp on the table lit his face from below; the shadows made him look aged, almost a skull. “Everyone has left you,” he said in a strange rough voice. “Everyone save poor Ahadrom, who cannot go anywhere, and Tialon your daughter. You have chased everyone away; Farhal you have killed, yes, murdered; I am still here. I am still here, and I hate myself. I hate myself. But Ivrom—”

Here he stepped out from behind the desk, his hands outstretched, his voice breaking with tenderness, and clasped both of Ivrom’s hands. “I cannot go. I
will
not go. I will not leave the Stone, and our work, and you. Not yet.”

The two men embraced. Lunre was shaking. “Only,” he said, stepping back, his face warped with grief, and with something else, something dreadful, a kind of warning—and his voice grew in strength and harshness—“only we will never speak of Farhal’s illness again. We will not speak of Farhal at all.”

Ivrom nodded, speechless. And he kept that bargain. It was Lunre who failed, Lunre who went back on his word. Lunre, whom he called friend. They quarreled when Ivrom banned the heretical autobiography of Leiya Tevorova—a monstrous act, Lunre said. They quarreled again, more bitterly, when Ivrom forced the Telkan to burn the school at Nerhedlei and three little children were killed. Have you seen the Ethendrian grottoes? Neither have I; I was happy with the stone arcade in the Tower of Aloes, where Lunre gave me the almanac.

“Read the Month of Lamps,” he said. His smile.

It seemed impossible that he would leave us. But it had also seemed impossible that we would lose Farhal. Things were becoming
more possible. The world was growing larger—terrifyingly so. The Priest of the Stone traveled back and forth to Bain. Everywhere he drew crowds. They came to heckle, then to engage him in serious debates, then to buy his book. Once while he was away, before Farhal died, the priest’s daughter crept down to the dungeons with a copy of
Jewels from a Stone
. She ordered the guard to let her through in a piping, imperious tone. A young girl, only fifteen, her face as green as glass. The guard hesitated; she told him to unlock the door at once or she’d tell her father. The guard obeyed and gave her a paper sealed with black wax. This was her pass to show to the guards on every level of the dungeons as they admitted her into the bowels of the palace. After a certain level the floor was flooded, her slippers soaked. Farhal lay on a bench; she could see him through the bars.

“
Farhal! Farhal!
”

“Here, little mistress, let me,” said the last guard. He banged on the bars with a dented pewter cup. Holding his lamp aloft in the horrible din. Farhal jumped up, trembling pitifully. He stared toward the bars, shielding his eyes from the light.

“
Farhal, it
’s me, it’s Tialon.”

He stood and came toward her, his bare feet in the cold water. His beard had grown and it seemed as though one of his eyes would not open. He coughed against his shoulder: a deep, full sound. The priest’s daughter was losing strength in her knees. She slid the book through the bars. “Here . . .”

“It’s all right,” said the guard. He had checked through the book for hidden weapons. “There might be a needle in here,” he’d explained to the girl. “Someone swallowed a needle once.”

Farhal took the book and looked at it wonderingly. “Is this from your father? He asked you to give it to me?”

“Yes,” she lied.

His beautiful sloe-colored eye, huge in his starved face, brimming with light.

“Thank you!” he whispered.

The guard caught the girl’s arm before she fell. He took her to his chair by the door and rubbed her temples painfully with his great thumbs. “You’ll want to wear boots next time,” he said.

Stop. Don’t go. In the foothills of the Tavroun there is a marvelous rainy valley overgrown with purple gentian. The air tastes of herbs. And we never had to go there, because we had our little hillside above the sea. We had the narrow walkways running through the palace orchards and the parapet overlooking the garden of the iloki—the huge saddlebirds with their raucous honking and prehistoric heads, who give off a terrible odor of decay. Once a day the sentries toss them the carcass of a pig. We used to watch the creatures moving through their gloomy garden, the chains on their necks clanking, their dusty tail feathers trailing in the weeds, till they reached the carcass and shredded it like silk.