The Winged Histories (21 page)

Or could we? Could we compose a song in the
che
? It makes me want to laugh. What kind of song? A song about milking goats? A song about thread? We already have those, scraps of nonsense,
ta-ta-di-dai-di
. And little songs about being abandoned, left behind.

A great song, though. A
hawan
. In the
che
.

What makes a song great?

It has a great subject: war. It’s about male kinfolk and the death of men. It always ends in blood and a call for blood. I’ve said this before. Tav, I’m spinning. Tav, I feel like I’m spinning around.

Spinning and spinning. After I lost my brother.

We sang in cafés. We’d go from door to door. Collecting coins in a bag. Loublai taught me to do it. You have to forget. I sang like an evil dream about singing, someplace you were caught, you couldn’t escape. In the dirty town with the dirty sluggish canal. Carriages everywhere. The dust choked us. I don’t care if I live, I don’t care where I go. I might as well sing for money. I snapped my fingers, rolled my eyes. At some cafés the men tried to talk to us, they wanted to take us home. Loublai got between us and the men and yelled, they said she grated like a susa. Someone splashed stedleihe on her dress. The next day we were walking and someone threw eggs at us from the window of a carriage. I don’t know if it was the same men, or different ones.

Spinning. Just spinning in place.

You have to forget, but at the same time you remember. This is how it makes a circle.

You forget, you make faces, you stretch your throat, you sob. It’s ridiculous, coarse, you’ve become a clown. And at the same time the words of the song are tearing your face. The words tear your painted face and your painted heart.
I am calling, where are you?
Every time I remember Haidhas.

You’re in the garden, listening, or not listening. You. Tav.

This is our story. The beginning. The part we remember over and over. We can’t forget it, and maybe we shouldn’t forget. We shouldn’t forget that you forgot me. I reminded you later and now we can’t forget. I dream of a way of remembering that would not leave a scar. I dream of a way of forgetting that would not mean destruction, burial, loss. A spinning that makes something, that makes a thread, a thread to sew feathers to a shawl, a shawl unfurling in the air.

Feathers. Flying.

I want them to stay up. Even though I wanted you to come down.

You returned on the back of an ilok. The only person I’ve ever lost who came back. The huge wings, bells ringing on the tents, the thunder. Coming down hard like rain.

It was night. We all came running. You were exhausted. Torchlight. They stopped and I kept running. My knees felt weak, it was like I was running into the ground. My legs dissolving into the ground like water. I was running down underground, I was going to be buried alive, I’d never reach you.

You’d landed in other places too. At Mereves. At Bron. Looking for me, for us. The Blue Feredhai of Tosk.

You came out of the sky. A legend. They have begun to call you
Shastuen
now. “The Winged.” And in Kestenyi the word for “vampire”
is
shasladhi
. It means “the flying Lath.” You draw a distinction between the Drevedi, whom you call monsters, and the ancient Laths riding on great birds. We do not. All of them come from the sky and all of them kill. I don’t want to remember this, winged predators from the Valley, and at the same time I don’t want to forget. I dream of a kind of music in which everything would be held together. All the feathers in the air at the same time. Kaili, this girl with plaited hair, and Shernai with her spindle and you on horseback and me singing and all our dead.

Stop, Tav. Kiss me.

This is the lamentation of laughter. This is the only kind of
hawan
I know how to make. When you read it back to me, it makes me laugh. Is this music? All these goats and old women and feathers everywhere.

I will sing of a woman made of lace. She’s so old! So old she’s almost invisible to us now. Her body lies under the sand, intricate and vast. Do you know how to make the bone map? You do it with the shoulder bone of a calf. You ask the bone a question and throw it down, and it answers you by the way it falls. I don’t know anyone who knows how to do it anymore. I want to ask a question of the shoulder blades of my ancient, invisible woman, whose bones are like cobwebs.
What is music?

Kaili is sewing today. Her feathers have dried.

Shernai spins. A sidelong glance. Her curled lip, tufted with fine hair.

It’s hot. We’ll have to move soon. I will sing you the Song of Lo.
I am a fountain and a field of clay
. North.
Clay on my boots, clay in my heart, I am of clay like the Firstborn
. East.
With her necklace of glass beads
.

Glass. Bone. Everything smooth. Ornaments. The future.

Prayer bells made of bone on our black tent.

We’ll move. You’d like to go north, you say, to see if there’s anything left of the forest of hetha trees your uncle sold for timber. A forest, you say, protected by the cliffs. In winter there, there was so much snow. You wonder about your old house, but you’re also afraid to go back. Imagine we go there. Tents in the yard. We’ll dance a sadh in the dusty ballroom, clutching each other’s hands, you and I.

Dance with me! Imagine the children peering at us through the doorway. Convulsed with laughter. Let them laugh. Imagine there’s laughter everywhere. I’m tired, so tired of lying in caves. Let’s go! Write faster! Let’s go riding. Throw me onto the back of your saddle like a stolen bride.

Throw me. Steal me. Let’s go faster. Fly.

A song without
chaif
. Without restraint.

If music is anything then music is everything. Then music is feathers and a field of clay. Then music is played even in the stupidest and most useless of languages.

Ta-ta-di-dai-di
.

We’ll go north. We’ll pass the farm where I went with some of the girls to get onions the other day. The woman there, a bildiri, she was so happy, she gave us a pot of grape preserves. “Take it! Take it!” The war is over.

The war is over. Still, there are rumors carried by the winds. Near Bron, they say, two ausks clashed over the rights to a field of grass. Three killed, two men, a boy. Somewhere near Bron the war is over and they are singing
clear one broken on the crags
.

Broken. I think: broken. I think: lost.

We need new songs. What kind is this?

Brightness called out of the air.

Tav, your shoulders and your swinging walk.

Shernai’s spindle and glass beads, so smooth. Their edges when they break.

The bildiri woman reminded me of Loublai. Generous like that. The same harsh voice, the same extravagant gestures. Loublai, my last mother, who taught me to sing for money, who died of a catarrh on the road to Neiv. She complained to me gently that a demon was sitting on her chest. It was so cold, and she kept asking me to take the blanket off. “Take it off, take it off!” When I obeyed at last, shaking and crying, she sighed so deeply, so happily, in the cold tent. A smoking lamp and her smoking breath in the cold. “Thank you, daughter!” Her breasts were flat and loose, a vein moved in her throat. Her great eyes, deep like wells. She said: “You’re never going to be happy unless you learn to keep the music in your voice.”

Always in your voice. Never in your heart. Her instructions. She was a wise woman. In the morning I told Fadhian she was dead. He nodded, he would do what had to be done. For a moment he put his hand on my cheek. I didn’t cry. I thought I was done with that forever.

But if music is everything, then it can’t be only in the voice.

You, riding.

And the creak of the susa. The ugliest bird in the world.

If music is everything, then music is even my grandmother’s taunting. That ragged note. Then music is even the thunder of my brother’s horse. My brother’s horse when he rode away. My heart was tied to the back of his horse, beaten on all the rocks, smeared by all the dust.
Learn to keep the music in your voice
. By the time I met you my heart was bruised and swollen and still I thought my perfect my exact. When I saw you. Your cold look. Then music is not only in the voice, then music is under everything like bone.

Tav, I will bring you.

A stolen bride.

Roun in her boat. A guiding lamp.

Tav my Tav I will bring you a feathered shawl.

In our tent you are like a reed and you are like a field in bloom and you are like the moon reflected in my eye.

Roun in her boat. And your rib beneath my fingers is a boat. If music is everything then music is also this rib in a darkened tent. Tav, say something. Speak against me. Tell me I’m foolish, too loud, too much, incomprehensible, spilling everywhere. Speak against me and I’ll speak against you, my lips against your rib.
Ta-ta-di-dai-di
. A tapping tongue, a warmth low in the throat. If music is everything. Screeching women and hoof beats and children crying, the susa creaking and children crying in the cave. I crawled out covered with filth, filth in my hair and I was so happy because
I don’t want to die
. I don
’t want to die! Tav, is this music? What would happen if I chanted this song, tonight, in the big artusa, in front of everybody? Tav, this is where you speak. I think they’d laugh. This isn’t music. Now, against me. Right against me. The susa is the ugliest bird. It’s a desert dweller, the symbol of Kestenya, it’s also slang for a feredha girl, for us, noisy, childish, ugly. That harsh, raw voice. And the spindle spins.
Ta-ta-di-dai-di
. Then music is also this rib and my hand tight in your hair. Against me now. Over the fold. Coming down hard like a rain of hot salt.
Di-dai-di
now shatter me like ice.

It was as if I was being buried as I ran. I’d never reach you, but then I did. You slid from the back of the ilok and landed on the ground. Hard like rain. Collapsing in torchlight. I thought, I’ll never get there, but I did. I fell. Tav. I was breathing your hair.

Tav, I will bring you flowers like your hair. Nalua flowers. Black like that.

Brightness called out of the air.

Tav, the men are singing. They are singing, the last men. They are singing to each other about a flower. The women are singing to the men. The men are singing to the women. The mothers and fathers are singing to all the children in the world. The women are singing to each other, they sing a song about feathers. The children are singing each other a song about the goats. The hills are singing to the stars, the horses to the rain, the bells to the wind, and the moon is singing to everybody.

And we are taking the cattle north and east. We are traveling without women. We laugh about it for hours, for days.

Just play. And the susa makes a merry sound: a clicking tongue, dry sticks beaten together, children dancing in spurs.

I who sing this am Seren of the Blue Feredhai of Tosk.

Who will find this script? To you I sing through the pen of my
chadhurei
, Tav.

Give me your hand
.
Fly.

You, riding over the fold of the mountain.

Give me your hand.

Coming down hard like rain.

by the hand of Tav Lanfirheia Faluidhen

lately of Ashenlo, now of Tosk

known as Shastuen

the Winged

From Our Common History

Slowly, Olondria settles.

Veda of Bain accepts the crown. His brother Irilas, escaped from the newly independent Kestenya, moves into the Ducal Residence. By the end of the year, he will be Duke of Bain. Now he paces the gardens, his beard powdered with cigarette ash.

Upstairs, his wife Firheia sleeps, exhausted. In the corner, her elderly servant—her nurse in childhood, and now her personal maid—places a few belongings in a bag. Her face is serene, as always: she might be sewing, or adding a garnish of fennel to the soup. She leaves her mistress a note propped against the lamp.
Dear lady, I am sorry to leave you. But though you will be happy in Bain, I think I will not. In my old age, as the song says, my marrow longs for the north. Bain is too soft for me; and I must see how my niece is keeping the farm.

The spice markets open. Ships fill the harbor. The High Priestess of Avalei returns to her temple.

The Brogyars sign a treaty with Olondria. The war is over—a war that has simmered for generations. The Brogyar chieftains seal the oath in their own manner, sipping gaisk and melted fat.

In Nain, the fighting cools. The separatists have lost. Lord Fenya of Faluidhen throws an extravagant ball to celebrate. His mother, Lady Tanthe, wears a stupendous emerald tiara. They are loud, hectic, making it very clear where their loyalties lie. Sometime after midnight, Lord Fenya goes so far as to burn his nephew’s portrait in the drawing-room fireplace. He listens to the cheering with a fixed and wintry smile. Under the comforting tick of his pocket watch, his heart pains him: he has lost a fortune in Kestenya.

In her grand, gloomy castle of Rediloth, Lady Mardith of Faluidhen sits at her desk. A lamp with a blue shade burns beside her. The fire is low. The elderly chatelaine wears a rich robe the color of periwinkles.

She dips her pen in the ink. She is writing a letter, though she doesn’t know where to send it. She will discover the address in good time.
My dear Siski. I require your presence at Rediloth. Faluidhen has suffered a blow, but we are not quite desperate—

She sets down the pen. Her reflection regards her from the dark windowpane. The image trembles. This will not do at all. “Stop it!” she hisses. If she should fall to pieces, when the rest of the family lies scattered about the ground like a broken necklace! She crumples the paper, dips her pen in the ink and writes on a fresh sheet:

Siski. You will come to Rediloth. You will not stop in the Valley. You will not pay any visits to “friends” with good cellars and londo tables. You will be prompt and obedient. I am most displeased.

Again she sets down the pen. She flexes her fingers; the knuckles crack. This time, when she glances at the window, she looks beyond her own reflection at the image of the strongbox against the back wall of her study, her Uncle Virdan’s strongbox with its gilt edges and magisterial lock.

No one knows of the pleasure she takes when, alone, the maid gone home for the night, she sits at the desk and pretends to busy herself with mundane tasks, feeling behind her the golden, insistent attraction of the strongbox which grows more intense the longer she feigns indifference.
Shall I open it, shall I not? Oh, there’s really no reason to, tonight. She goes so far as to stand, yawn, and walk to the door. Then, when all seems lost, she turns with an avid brilliance in her eyes and falls upon the lock with her little brass key.

Inside, never mind the notes, she has thousands more with her bankers in Loma. But the deeds she takes out and spreads on the desk beneath the frosted lamp. Those forests, lakes, and wheat fields, some of them tiny estates in the Ethenmanyi that she has acquired without telling anyone. She touches the deeds, their rich red ink. Then, thinking she hears a sound in the hall, although there is not a human being within two miles of the castle, she hurls the papers into the strongbox and locks it, flushed and panting as if she has just escaped from a runaway horse or an amorous embrace.

Oh, how she longed for that box when she was a girl! “I should like to have
that
,” she piped, a child of ten, when her uncle asked what gift she would like for the feast. Her tremulous finger pointing at the box with its lead reinforcements and delicious leather strap, for traveling, fastened with iron buckles. Such a cavern it was, a grotto of treasures glowing with greenish magnificence. Her uncle laughed, pinched her cheek and called her his pretty duck. And instead of turning away as he usually did after one of his brief, infrequent caresses, he stood looking down at her with a pleased and curious stare. She dropped her gaze, unable to bear the regard of those splendid dark brown eyes adorned with glittering pupils and regal brows. “Well, you shall have something nice,” he said, patting her cheek with a hand as hard as a mallet and overwhelming her senses with the musk of his sleeve.

She does not remember what she received for the feast. She recalls only the flavor, the tone, the special poetry of those days, of the days when her Uncle Virdan was still alive and master of Faluidhen. The air has never recovered the limpid quality it had then. The very dust smells different, as if parched for want of his footstep. Nor do the doors reverberate with the vigorous clang of the past. As for the sound of his stick on the path, not once has another stick been able to duplicate its fierce and unflagging rhythm. Her father was still alive then, though his end was swiftly approaching, but her memories of him scribbling in one of the smaller rooms of the house, of his cough, the bit of flannel about his throat, and his funeral at which it rained so heavily, are less clear to her now than the image of her uncle. As for her mother, surely she never did anything but sit in the drawing room with her feet up, stroking her pug and complaining of the cold. No, it was Uncle Virdan who provided the charm of those distant days, and what Mardith remembers best is related to him. Waking early on winter mornings, reaching out stealthily to find the dress and shoes she had been careful to lay out the night before, washing and dressing in the dark and sitting upright with glowing cheeks to await the sound of his valet’s step in the hall. And when the valet began striking at the doors to awaken the sleepers, running downstairs, feeling her way because the staircase was still dark, and bursting into the room where, in the feeble light of a lamp with a yellow shade, her uncle was raising his glass of tea. Showing him her copybook on his visits to the schoolroom and hearing his approving grunt as he closed it. Watching her brother and sister, who always turned pale at his approach, quiveringly hold out their soiled and tattered sums. Oh, what a merry crack his stick would raise from her brother’
s palms
—it made her jump! And little Tanthe, who was considered too frail to be beaten, would sob as he took her peremptorily by the ear and made her sit with her nose against the window for half an hour. It seems the weather was always excellent then, either a ringing frost which the gardener’s feet would break with a crunch as he walked by the schoolroom window, or a glorious summer day that dawned on the mountains with a watery brilliance, blue as a columbine and noisy with birds.

On just such a summer day, when she was eighteen, she began to work for her uncle. She remembers the tightness of her new hooked bodice, the curls on her neck, the way her fingers flew when she wrote out the letters he dictated to her and the odor of jam wafting in from the kitchens. And always her awareness of him as he stood at the open window with his hands behind his back, his shoulders square in his brown twill coat, or walked behind her, making the floorboards squeak, or drummed on the table with his hand which wore an enormous emerald ring. And the letters, how she remembers them. Their bold and blustering tone, their scathing irony for some inferior who did not want to pay his debts. Sometimes while her uncle spoke his eyes would bulge and he would pick up a pencil and break it to relieve his pent-up rage. But she was never afraid of him, not even on the moonless night when he called her to help with the corpse of a man he had beaten to death. How could she be afraid of him? His face was as gray as his mustache when he said: “Mardith, come out, I’ve done something dreadful Mardith!”

No, she was not afraid. She held the lamp with the shutter almost closed while he buried the corpse in the wood, and she washed his clothes and wrung them out, and the shirtfront which would not come clean she quickly replaced with one she sewed herself the next afternoon, before the servants had noticed its absence. And she never asked him about the corpse, not once. He flexed his hand which he claimed to have bruised when his carriage rolled into a ditch, and said to her: “A hot temper is a terrible thing my dear. But there, he won’t be missed. And now I can turn that water into the bean field.”

That was the willfulness, the spirit that changed the fortunes of Faluidhen, transforming it from the musty seat of an intellectual family into the frosty, formidable estate, respected throughout the empire, from which Mardith would negotiate her nieces’ brilliant marriages. Uncle Virdan attempted such a move: he sent his nephew Brola to Velvalinhu, bullied him into befriending the young Prince Eirlo, and tried to secure Princess Beilan for him. But the war in Kestenya was too recent, and the princess married Uskar of Tevlas. Alas, Uncle Virdan did not live to see the fulfillment of his hopes. When Mardith was thirty and he only fifty-five, a fit of apoplexy struck him on his way to the mill, and he died in the house of a peasant where he had gone to beg for a cup of water. “First he was red and then he went yellow,” the peasant woman said, gazing down in awe at the master stretched out across her kitchen floor. Mardith fought her first battle with her mother over the funeral, which she knew that her uncle would have liked to keep simple and inexpensive. A battle she won. Her mother retired upstairs with a slam of her door, and the boxes of lilies, the hideous garlands of sentimental chrysanthemums, were returned to Eiloki posthaste. The niece was accused of not having loved her uncle, and smiled for the first time her signature distant smile.

But perhaps the smile was more bitter in those days, when she wore it with a fresh pain unseasoned by the philosophy of the years. No one, no one knows what she suffered during that dark, vertiginous time when chasms opened beneath each step of her undyed cotton slippers. And she has never spoken of it to a single soul. That is pride. Not for her the shut door, the consultations with doctors, the hysterical displays which, when she thinks of her mother’s final years, still rise in her memory to fill her mouth with gall. No. For there was the lawsuit with the Arheni to be settled, there was the wet nurse to be found for her sister’s second child, the rents to be collected, a drunken groom to be delivered to prison, the menus to be written for every meal. And so her mourning consisted only in giving up balls and brightly colored gowns, which had never been much to her taste in any case, and in weeping with both hands pressed tightly over her mouth to stifle sound in the dim and somber privacy of her bedroom. Her smile, which no one can look upon without a creeping awe, has been carved from her face by a cataract of tears. Her face was never to be the same. It would never inspire a sensual love, though people continued to call it beautiful. For years it remained as lifeless as a plate. And it only softened when her goal was achieved: when her niece Firvaud was seated on the throne, her niece Firheia a duchess, and her great-nephew and great-niece poised to seize the throne for the House of Faluidhen.

But oh, these children—careless—spoilt! Andasya, she supposes, will have to be hanged—he who would have been the first Nainish Telkan. The thought of him is like ground glass in her heart. Tavis will be hanged as well, like the soldier she is—a loss that is easier to bear. And then there is Siski, the eldest daughter of Faluidhen, by all accounts a stupid flirt, who might have been the next Teldaire, who might yet be persuaded to marry well. Lady Mardith takes up her pen again.
My dear Siski. The lives of women are very hard.

My dear Siski. You are no doubt as shocked as I am by recent developments. We must pull together, my child, if we are to keep Faluidhen afloat!

My dear Siski. Where have I failed?

Siski. I write to you because you appear to be the least hopeless of a generation of fools.

A pool of crushed paper gathers about her feet.

Siski. I am ashamed of you all!

My dear Siski. Imagine the life of an artist. Imagine she works on a single painting for half a century. And now imagine a child tears it with a razor.

Something strikes the window: a soft blow like a gloved hand. Mardith looks up. She is startled by her own face in the pane. It’s nothing, she thinks. An owl has brushed the shutters. She dips her pen in the ink.
Faluidhen Faluidhen
echoes in her heart. There is war in Kestenya: her niece Firheia, that fresh little girl with the laughing eyes, may be dead. Firvaud is addicted to milim, Andasya and Tavis lost. She presses her elegant pen down hard, her fingertips almost white.
Siski you will not defy me you will come
.

A tear on her knuckle.

How do we know? Why, because we were at the window, peering through the slit between the shutters.

Siski you children are all the same. Siski your duty. Siski your failure.

Siski the lives of women.

Dear Siski. Forgive me.