The Winged Histories (19 page)

I think when we love we look for someone against whom to say: But I am like this.

Say something. Speak against me.

Speak against me as I will speak against you.

I’ll make you a vest. I’ll make you gloves. From the hollowed bones of the shambus: prayer bells for our tent. Bells that sing to the gods all day, on our tent, ours. The two of us here. In the deep night, a small lamp on the floor.

You say it’s impossible. It won’t be allowed.

But why not, why not? Everyone knows. You’re here. You say: “But eventually I’ll have to go.” I say: “Go if you like, but don’t pretend it’s because you have to.” I say: “Listen, I defended us while you slept.”

Yes. While you slept. On that first night. You were exhausted. You had come out of the sky, on an ilok, miraculous. You had left your sister and cousin in distant Nain. Do you remember? I brought you into my tent and you cried yourself to sleep.

Then I went to Amlasith. I said: “Tav is staying with me.”

So much loss. I’m finished with it. No more now.

Amlasith sat on her bed, surrounded by women as always, beautiful as always, dripping with gold, but in white now, in mourning for Fadhian. Her eyes so deep, and the deep lines under them. Someone grumbled when I spoke: Melya, I think. A click of the tongue.

Amlasith looked at me with her deep eyes. She has seen so many die from her ausk. So many have gone, never to return. And I said: “We’ll go. Tav and I. We’ll go away on our own. We are going to be together. We have lost and suffered like everyone else.”

I shout. I burst.

It’s foolish. Tosha told me that. My most distant and difficult lover. “
You little fool.
” During one of our quarrels, she slapped my face.

But there is a song, our greatest song, the longest. The Song of Lo. Most think of it as many songs, they say “the songs.” But really it’s just one song: prophecy, prayer and map. If you know it, you’ll never get lost on the plateau. You sing. You sing and you walk. The line for this place, where we are now, is: “I am a fountain and a field of clay.” And if you walk north, to that ridge of hills, the song becomes: “Clay on my boots, clay in my heart, I am of clay like the Firstborn.”

If you know the Song of Lo you can walk anywhere. It is more faithful than the stars.

I sang a line of it, there in Amlasith’s tent.
I am a fountain and a field of clay
. I said we’d go, we’d walk, I’d take us away, alone across the sands.

Snorts, disapproval, clicking of tongues. Tosha was there, also in white, her husband dead with Fadhian at Bron.

“We’ll go,” I said.

Amlasith wept. She held out her hands to me. She gathered me close, in tears. “
Seren. My little horse.
”

Shernai sings.
Ta-ta-di-dai-di
. It doesn’
t make sense. A woman
’s song. Just a tongue tapping and a warmth low in the throat. It doesn’t mean anything, and so it’s open, always available, a bucket being filled up at a dark well.
Ta-ta-di-dai-di
. It tastes like water. Now the wind blows, and Kaili gives a yelp and jumps up to catch the feathers whirling with the sand. She laughs, look, she’s laughing, the feathers in sunlight and I don’t want them to come down, I just want them to stay up in the air.

In your home, in your cities, I know, the mother and father live together. Your mother and father live together in the same house. You say they’re unhappy. You think, you don’t know, you haven’t been home in so long. But happy or unhappy, they live together. Here it is different. The men and boys follow the cattle, the women keep the children and old ones safe. Father and mother stay in one tent only when he is home: when the season permits it, when there isn’t a war. Such a golden atmosphere, when the men and cattle come back to us in the spring. The season of “earth ringing.” Ringing bells. A bull slain, meat for all. Lovers in each other’s arms again, at last.
Chadhuren
, we call it: “tent heart.”

Chadhuren
, where everything lives. The place that moves, that sometimes
goes dark but can always be revived again, the lamp lit, the rugs shaken out. That’s what I told Amlasith and the others while you slept. “Tav is my
chadhurei
,” I said. My
chadhuren
dweller.

Let’s say this: I who sing am Seren the daughter of Larya of the seventh ausk of the Blue Feredhai of Tosk. I am a singer. I sing and I shout and I love, that’s mostly what I do all the time, I don’t believe I am complicated. My first love was Keliar. She was just my age. Her plaits were always coming out. She had a chipped tooth and she rolled her sleeves up like a boy. When we played she was Hivnawir and I was Taur. We played that story over and over, she was the boy and I was the girl. At first we just repeated the story, forbidden love, the two cousins, a boy and a girl, we’d hold a scarf between us and giggle and kiss through the cloth, but then we started changing it, in our story the scarf came down, the maids went away for some reason, the lovers opened their shirts. And then one day Keliar’s plaits were so tight and her sleeves rolled down to the wrists and she said we were women now, too old for children’s games. I didn’t see why we should stop. She said: Don’t make it complicated. That was all. She got married later that year.

I don
’t think I’m complicated. I think I’m completely simple and clear. I only want to have all the feathers up in the air.

My second love was Tosha. She had two children, her husband was dead. She was one of those dangerous people who take fire with them everywhere. Everyone wanted to be with her. She was vicious sometimes, she sneered, but her warmth was incredible too, when she smiled little lights would come on under your skin. It happened to everybody, not just me. She wanted a husband, but she was taking her time. When she found one, we quarreled, and Tosha slapped my face. It wasn’t our first quarrel, but it was the last. Her second husband is dead now too. Tosha’s alone. I think she prefers it.

Then you. Riding over the fold of the mountain. Everybody thought you were a boy. Everybody except me. Your dark hair and dark brows, and that cold look. You were my exact. You were my exactly. What I was looking for. You were perfect.

Waking in the night, you’re afraid. I soothe you to sleep again. I sing,
Moon, fill my heart with honor as a cup with wine.

Moon, fill my cup.

Lost goddess, come.

This is something they say is changing: they say the goddess is coming back. Roun, in her boat. She was never really gone, of course: the gods, we know, will live as long as the world. But she has been buried, forgotten. Her places of worship, the
aklidai
, destroyed and abandoned. We have learned to think of them as places of haunting and death. Where girls should not go, lest the spirits of the dead
kalidai
discover them, turn them into birds and roast them over hot coals. This is how we have learned to think of the
aklidai
. We sing:
She strayed among the stones, and he was waiting there.
I, even I, when I see an aklidoh, I who long for Roun’s return, when I see those white domes it chills me to the heart.

Still, they say Roun is coming. Roun, the great patroness of Kestenya. In her boat, alone, without father or mother or lover. Her boat which is the moon. We were told that she was Avalei, and then we were told that she did not exist. How changeable you are, you Olondrians! Every ten years another god. For a time we tried to worship Avalei, because it was law. I remember my mother speaking of her as the Rose, this we understood, we have always sung of roses in the highlands, where they bloom so briefly. But the rest—the pigs, the vultures, the grain—this confused us and left us numb. Where is our grain? Where do we bury seeds and revive them in the same place? My mother was vague about this aspect of the goddess. “She dies and then returns,” she explained at last. “Like spring. Like the moon.”

Avalei is untrustworthy. Always in bed with a man. If she is happy, she will produce a line of kings. When she is sad, she goes to bed with the Plague, and produces vampires. You laugh at my words, but I tell you, you’re laughing at yourself.

Avalei wanders. Is she alive or dead? You never know.

But Roun rows. In her moon-boat. She lights the lamp, then dims the flame.

The stars follow her. They are her children, because she loves them. As I am Amlasith’s child, because she loves me.

Roun, fill my cup.

Today there’s a heat in the air. A dryness. Summer is almost here. The end of our year.

How determined you are, my heart. Dear heart.

Your furious scribbling. Nearly as fast as I speak. You miss almost nothing. Your terrible soldier’s hand grasps the pencil like a standard. You say you’ll make copies, leave copies of my words everywhere, under stones, in fences, in Kestenyi and Olondrian, you’re an idiot, copies of what?

Copies of this, you say. What is this
this
?

Copies for others to read. Who?

You say: Bildiri fleeing the farms, lost people, anyone. Anyone who thinks the
feredhai
only make one kind of music. Oh, Tav! You are very Olondrian and stupid.

No. Don’
t stop.

I love you.

Every copy will bear a dedication. To the anonymous reader. Someone who can read.

Give me your hand.

Give me your hand. Give me your hand Tav riding over the fold of the mountains. Give me your hand Tav coming down hard like rain.

But let
’s say it, let’s say what there is to say. Let’s get it out, let’s write it, let’s put it there. You are from everywhere and I am from Kestenya. You are from mansions and palaces and cities and mountains and emptiness and pleasure and I am from the great plateau. Let’s say and let’s get it out that your grandfather was Uskar of Tevlas who signed the shameful treaty that ended the last, unsuccessful war for independence, that he was a pawn and a dupe and also a traitor who knew very well what he did and a mystic in thrall to a man with ribs like gullies in a drought. Your grandfather prayed with the great Olondrian visionary who made your grandfather sleep on planks that brought out sores on his soft and timid body, and my grandfather slept in a mass grave on the road to Viraloi where he was hung by the heels with seventeen others until they died of thirst. Let’s say that. Let’s write it. Your grandfather punished his body, my grandfather’s body was punished. My grandfather was a freedom fighter, or, to use the Olondrian term, a bandit. One of those whose names became synonymous with horror on the Karafia when little children were dragged from their beds and slain. My grandfather was not there, in Tevlas on the Karafia, he was at Viraloi, part of another branch of the resistance, this resistance so discontinuous and diffuse it resembled the skeleton of an elderly person or a piece of lace. My grandfather was holding Viraloi under siege. While at Tevlas, your grandfather with twenty-seven Kestenyi nobles signed a treaty, and welcomed the Olondrian army, I think they were called a “pacifying force,” and they captured my grandfather and hung him by the heels.

Let’s say that your grandmother was the sister of the Telkan. She loved birds. She dyed her hair yellow and wore a green scarf and Kestenyi trousers. She was a Lath of the royal line and she loved the desert and at her mansion she entertained the robber barons who were the last dregs of the resistance. But there was no resistance anymore, only theft and parties at your grandfather’s house where your grandmother served the thieves Olondrian teiva. They were so broken they drank and danced with her. Let’s say that my grandmother was a great singer who died singing of my grandfather.

Let’s say that. In her white mourning robe. Her eyes ringed with thick black paint. When she wept the paint melted slowly, like oil in winter. She sang an old
hawan
, a conventional lament, putting in my grandfather’s name because he was not important enough to have his own song. Thousands had died and my grandfather was not one of the leaders or from a great princely house so none of the men had composed a song to honor him, so my grandmother sang of him as she could, in the usual way, the way most women sing, putting the name of the lost one among the conventional lines.
My clear one. Horse of the dawn. His breath like snow. His body shattered like ice. I will tear my flesh for him, my flesh will not forget.
My grandmother had scars on the sides of her face where she had torn the skin with her nails. Most old women have these scars, it’s normal.

The same songs, over and over.
Horse. Clear one smashed like ice
. It would not have occurred to my grandmother to compose a new song for her dead husband. She sang as she had been taught. She sang like a woman. Always coming behind, picking up the bones that look exactly the same. And she died at the place called the Little Doves, between Suvias and Bron, with my grandfather’s name on her lips. While my grandfather slept in a mass grave at Viraloi. All her life she tried to get her daughter, my mother, to convince my father to ride to Viraloi and avenge the dead.

“Tell him to go. Did I give you to him for nothing? . . . He’s my son! He married my daughter and now he’s my son! . . . If you had brothers, would this have happened? . . . He is your husband, your brother and your blood! . . . Is he a man? . . . Did I give you to a man, or to another woman?”

Over and over, between the laments. This endless, raucous cry. Sometimes in common Kestenyi, sometimes in the
che
. My grandmother was just this woman in white, crying, haranguing, berating, she drove my father away sometimes, or he’d turn and shout at her too. You’ve heard that shouting. Family quarrels. If it happens outside you go and intervene, if it happens inside a tent you pretend you haven’t heard. You can hear it, physically you can hear it perfectly well through the side of the tent, but you pretend you can’t, and then you really don’t hear it. You can sit on the ground right outside, making butter, and you’ll just hear the birds while behind you someone is being accused or beaten or born. It happens like that. It happened like that for us. The terrible voice. The men sing songs about the nagging voices of women.
Your voice is a rain of hot salt
. My grandmother proved them right every day. She loved no one but Haidhas, my brother, her little hope, her dove, her killer-in-waiting, her little stallion as bold as a whip, after shouting she’d take him on her knees and croon to him, kissing him over and over. I hated her.

I hated my grandmother. You were afraid of yours. In her old age your grandmother smelled of bird dung. Feathers clung to her dress.

The eccentricities of royal ladies! She let her eldest sons marry two sisters, a pair of noblewomen from Nain. The whole empire was united now, in blood! The celebrations even reached the desert. Sweets were handed out in little velvet bags. My mother was given one of these bags. She was young, seventeen, the same age as your frightened mother who came to live in Kestenya accompanied by her nurse. My mother ate the sweets handed out by Olondrian soldiers and kept the little green bag. She kept her needles in it, and later my brother’s milk teeth. She didn’t keep my milk teeth, because I’m a girl. I asked her once what had happened to mine, my baby teeth. “What a question,” she said.