A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read online

  He enters, stiffening slightly at the smell of the chamber pot. He will send the scullery boy to take it down.

  Thank you. Thank you for the kindness. Thank you for the soup.

  Do not expose me. Do not send me away.

  “Human minds . . . unbalanced through illness, shock, or intrinsic abnormalities.”

  A lie. She is no illusion.

  Avalei. The Goddess of Love and Death, one of the Gods of Time. According to her legend she is the daughter of Leilin, the Goddess of Healing, and Heth Kuidva, the Oracle God. Her brother Eliya compared her in beauty to the goddess Roun, for which both he and his sister were banished to the Land of the Dead. Avalei is said to return every spring. She is called the Ripened Grain, and rules the summer according to the understanding of simple minds. Fanlewas the Wise, in his book The Serpent and the Rose, describes her in the following terms:

  “The Goddess Avalei is a most mysterious figure, perhaps even more enigmatical than the Moon. She is the presence of grain, of the cultivation of the earth. She was there when first we put our hands into the soil. She is all laughter and love, she is the agreement of the wild things, the acquiescence of earth in our endeavors. . . . And like her mother, Leilin the Mother of us all, she has the strangeness of having been human clay before she was made divine. And yet—O wondrous mystery!—she is also the Queen of the Dead, who possesses, instead of hands, the paws of a lion. It is she who sits on that dark throne. Yet she also walks in the orchards. She is the mother of both kings and vampires. . . .”

  The cult of Avalei flourished during the reign of the House of Hiluen, until the ascendancy of the current Telkan. The goddess was worshipped in many forms, called Velkosri, the “Plague-Lily,” in the north, and in the far south Temheli, the “Queen of Flutes.” The crimes of this cult, their fleecing of the peasants, their lust for political power, and the gross wealth of their temples, are notorious. In recent years their influence has happily lessened, particularly since the outlawing of one of their most offensive practices, the courtship and worship of angels.

  I have been to the Horse Market.

  In the Street of Tanners a stinking breeze made me retch, and I drank the trickle from the mouth of a carved bat near the Architects’ Prison. In the Market the painted beasts, half-tamed, driven out of the west, reared and snorted in the dread smell of skin become leather.

  Merchants argued with dust-streaked horsemen. Horses and cattle jostled together, gazelles, wild ostriches, and the camel, that descendant of the dragon. At the Carriage House I reserved a seat in a coach bound for Ethendria. The first step on a journey toward the body.

  I remember the name of the place she was traveling to: Aleilin. Named for the Goddess Leilin, patroness of healers.

  Yedov: “Will you not have a doctor, telmaro? I know a most gifted and discreet lady. It appears to me that your illness is a stubborn one.”

  No. No doctors.

  “Come, telmaro. Try to be reasonable. Put yourself in my hands. Your suffering makes me suffer.”

  He pulled a rickety chair to the table, set his bulk down carefully. His eyes like melted caramel in the candlelight.

  “Trust me.”

  A curl on each shining cheek. An odor of heliotrope.

  Tears filled my eyes. The desire to confide in him made me tremble.

  “What is your trouble?” he whispered.

  “A dead thing. Something dead.”

  He leaned close, urgent. “An angel?”

  Yes. Yes, I said. An angel.

  I hope I have not done wrong. I fear

  The last words in the book.

  They came for me the following afternoon. Yedov walked in first, twisting his hands in the strings of his morning coat. “I’m sorry,” he blurted, stepping aside to make way for the soldiers.

  There were two of them, one silver-haired, one young. Both wore the dark-blue coats and embroidered sashes of the Imperial Guard.

  The silver-haired man moved toward me. His eyes, behind his enormous hooked nose, were not unkind. He cleared his throat, and the beads clacked on his plaited beard.

  “What is your name?”

  “Jevick of Tyom.”

  “Your trade?”

  “I am a pepper merchant.”

  “Your business here?”

  “The same that brings all manner of merchants to Bain.”

  He smiled, his eyes growing colder, green lakes in a glacial wind. “We have been told of a disturbance. Noise. Screaming. Can you explain?”

  The younger soldier was writing in a book. He raised his head, expectant.

  My mouth was dry. “I,” I said, glancing at Yedov. He was busy examining the frame of the ancient canopy bed, running his finger along the wood as if checking for dust.

  “You told me to trust you,” I said.

  “Pay attention, please,” said the silver-haired soldier. “You are under suspicion of illegal acts. Be so good as to collect your things. You are to come with us to Velvalinhu on the Blessed Isle, to be examined by the Priest of the Stone.”

  “What sort of examination?”

  “Come,” said the soldier. “Our time is short.”

  Then, as I did not move, he added: “Nothing’s been proven yet, you know. The priest may dismiss your case altogether. But if you force us to take you in chains, it will make an unfortunate impression.”

  The younger soldier was trying to unclasp a length of chain from his belt.

  “What are you doing?” snapped his superior. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I thought,” the young man said, blushing.

  “Nonsense,” the older soldier snorted as I gathered my belongings. “You can see he’s perfectly docile.”

  I stuffed my books and clothes into my satchel, adding Yedov’s Lamplighter’s Companion without a qualm.

  “And what about me?” asked Yedov.

  “You!” said the soldier. “You’ll hear from the Isle.”

  “But I acted in good faith! I informed you the moment I suspected—”

  “You can appeal if you don’t like it,” the soldier said.

  I stood up and put my satchel over my shoulder. Outside the day was growing darker, light rain falling among the towers of the city. When the gray-haired soldier saw me looking at him, he flashed his teeth. “That’s right!” he said. “We shall go together, as the lid said to the pot!”

  Then, as if my expression touched him, he added: “Come, have courage. On the Isle we have two blessings. One is music. The other is clarity.”

  Clarity. “We have the sea, the forests, the hills,” he said. “It is holy country. And ours is the Holy City.”

  Book Three

  The Holy City

  Chapter Eight

  The Tower of Myrrh

  The Holy City: a city of pomegranates, of sounding bells. An incandescent city, a city of plumage. By day its lofty balconies are haunted by tame songbirds, and at night by cavorting bats and furred owls. It is peopled with silent figures painted on the walls and ceilings, or hunting elusive game through tapestries, or standing at the end of a passage: blind, with stone curls, but dressed in sumptuous robes with a coating of dust. Solitary, a young gazelle comes skittering down a hall, its dark eyes wide, wearing a ruby collar. It noses its way behind a curtain to eat its meal of mashed barley served in a dish of rare blue porcelain.

  When Firdred of Bain was named to be cartographer to the Telkan, he wrote: “And so, in the way of the ancient sages, I retired at last from my weary life to a house perfumed with incense, in the land to the north of which all journeys end.” This reflects the Olondrian belief that the dead dwell in the north, that the dead land is “the country north of the gods,” and thus that the Blessed Isle is the gate between two holy empires, between Olondria and the place which “is not earth, and is not void.” At certain times of the year the king and queen go to the northernmost tip of the Isle, there to make sacrifices of an unknown nature, on an altar within a hill so sacred that birds do
not land on it. At such times it is customary to say: “They are meeting with the Grave King.”

  Perhaps it is the nearness of death, or the northern obsession with it, which gives the place its peculiar, drowning languor. The rich halls seem embalmed, and the air is saturated with scent. The beds are enclosed in boxes, like carven tombs. . . . And the extravagance, the gorging voluptuousness of court life, the nobles dreaming in baths of attar of roses, the dishes of quails’ brains or of certain glands of polar bears, suggest a greed for life at the gateway of death. There are rooms of painted concubines sleeping in wanton poses. Behind the gardens the iloki, the saddlebirds, squat: those massive fowls the Telkans ride to war, riddled with parasites and stinking of death, whose wild cries ripen the fruit.

  And is it death that gives the festive nights their vibrancy? Is it death that makes the ballrooms echo with laughter, adding a touch of fascination, as a piquant sauce of his enemies’ eyeballs spiced the meat of Thul, the nineteenth Telkan? For sometimes the rooms explode with color, as if in a storm of tulips, and laughing faces are passed among the mirrors; the fountains in the square run gold with fermented peach nectar, and pleasure boats illuminate the lake. Courtiers smoke in the stairwells, their faces ruddy with wine and feasting, and princesses throw lighted tapers from the balconies. Everywhere there are handsome figures, drenched in scent and lavishly costumed—only the loveliest, only the brightest stars, gain this society.

  And perhaps it is this, and not the nearness of death, which exhausts the atmosphere. Perhaps it is simply the grandeur, the over-refinement, the febrile nature produced by centuries of mingling a few exalted bloodlines, the oppressive stamp of the divine. Cries of rage echo down halls where antique paintings glitter. A marmoset is found strangled in an arbor. Two hundred years ago an anonymous court poet prayed: “Defend us from the persecution of our superiors.”

  And they, the superiors, the nobility—they are drunk with freedom, indulging their various tastes without restraint, riding out to hunt before dawn, whipping their favorite servants, or feverishly copying manuscripts in the library. The passions of the aristocrats are famous: there was Kialis, the princess whose experiments poisoned more than a thousand birds; there was Drom, who insisted on lancing his peasants’ boils himself, and Rava whose craving for opals beggared the provinces. There have been Telkans who relished army life and filled the banqueting halls with soldiers who picked their teeth at the bone-strewn tables; there have been patrons of dramatists and musicians, patrons of guilds. And innumerable princes infatuated with roses.

  The light slides down the corridors of that “City of Five Towers.” In the east it strikes the Tower of Pomegranates, with its copper spires and gardens of flamboyant scarlet peonies, where the Teldaire dwells with her children and attendants. It passes on to the Tower of Myrrh, which houses shrines and temples, and gilds it with a pale marmoreal splendor; then it plays over the central Tower of Mirrors, turning the battlements dusky pink and flashing brilliantly through the galleries. In the west it drowns itself in the heavy jade of the Tower of Aloes, where the scribes sit at their desks in the Royal Library; lastly it warms the blue of the Tower of Lapis Lazuli, and the fragrant, shuttered chambers of the Telkan.

  In a moment the sun has dropped behind the hills, like a lamp extinguished. In this city they say “the darkness falls like a blow.” The gazelle looks up, then trots away down an avenue of brocades, leaving a trail of pellets like dark seeds.

  They took me to that city, to Velvalinhu. We traveled on one of the barges of the king, a funereal-looking vessel lined with cushions. A black leather awning provided some protection from the rain, though the soldiers suggested I store my satchel in the hold. I sat with them on damp cushions while the bargemen, wearing dark hats trimmed with silver bells, poled their way down the canal. At the sea they exchanged their poles for oars. They sang: “Long have I carried the king’s treasures. But the corals of Weile are not so red as your mouth.”

  Bain drew away from me, vague in the mists. Then the rain stopped, the sky lightened, and the bright sea spread around me on every side. As Ravhathos writes in his Song of Exile, “I turned my face to the north”—and like his, my heart was “shivering like a stringed instrument.”

  Islands dotted the sea. The imperial barge slid past them in silence: the white, uninhabited knob called the Isle of Chalk, the lovelier islands with mountains and streams, where palaces stood in groves of cypress, the Isle of the Birds, the Isle of the Poet’s Daughters. “Fair are the isles of Ithvanai,” writes Imrodias the Historian, “but fairest of all is the Blessed Isle itself, the fallen star which all the waters of Ocean could not extinguish, the fragrant island, the asphodel of the sea.” It glimmered, at first an indistinct shadow, a gathering of mists, then more solid, its pier a pale ray on the sea and its mountains cloaked in olive trees. We left the other islands behind, and it stood in serene majesty, like a white horn or an amethyst crown, like a city of alabaster.

  A carriage met us at the pier, and we rumbled down the smooth Eagle’s Road, the soldiers smoking, the windows obscured by an anise-flavored fog. I slid open the pane beside me for air. A clement countryside rolled past, its vineyards bedecked with grapes like beads of glass. The thought of the coming “examination” distracted me from those tidy fields, but I gasped when I saw Velvalinhu at last, forgetting everything for a shining instant in the iridescent glow of its pillars of Ethendrian marble.

  In the islands we do not pierce the clouds, for fear of the goddess of rain. But the northerners are prey to no such dread. The pinnacles of Velvalinhu rose to heights I had never seen in the capital, and never imagined even in nightmare. They were varied, no two alike, formed by the separate wills of kings: smooth walls rose beside walls puckered with carvings, marble figures leaned from the balustrades and adorned the towers where spires of obsidian sprang up, somber, drinking the light. Mirrors flashed from conical roofs, jade dogs snarled on the battlements, flights of steps hung shimmering in midair, and ornamental trees grew in the gardens, impossibly high, that peeked from between the richly tiled walls. We crossed the magnificent square in front of the palace, as vast as a desert, and rumbled down a slope into a subterranean carriage house. I thought of the words of Tamundein’s ode: “O lamp of the empire, forest of marble, caravan of the winds, Velvalinhu!”

  In the carriage house our coachman opened the door, holding up a lamp. “What news?” he asked.

  “All bad,” the old soldier answered cheerfully as he stepped out. “Low pay, high taxes, and no prospect of war outside Brogyar country.”

  “I’d like to go to the Brogyar country,” the younger soldier said.

  “You!” his companion exclaimed with a laugh. “They’d pickle you like a herring.”

  The coachman chuckled appreciatively and tilted his head toward me. “What’s this one for?”

  “The Tower of Myrrh.”

  The coachman stepped away from me, and the soldier bade him good-day with a grim smile.

  I followed him down a torchlit tunnel, the young soldier walking a pace or two behind me. We entered a hall with the dimensions of a temple. Three, perhaps four houses like my own in the islands might have been stacked inside it. Light filtered through its high windows, ladders of floating chalk. Such space, such silence. On one wall hung the triumphant painting of Elueth’s wedding, one of the last masterpieces of Fairos the Divine, its gold paint mellowed by centuries of smoke. I knew the picture: I had seen it reproduced in my master’s copy of The Book of Time. The human girl knelt in the foreground, wearing a smile of celestial happiness. Each fold in her dress was large enough to contain me. Her hair was “smooth as a shadow,” and she held one palm turned outward, showing where she had been burned by the skin of the god.

  A second hall. A third. The soldiers’ boots clicked in the stillness. Each window let in, like a secret, a halo of misty light. We climbed a marble staircase, then another. No one accosted us, no one passed. It was as if the great palace were utter
ly deserted. Only when the halls narrowed and began to fill with an acrid smoke did we see a few figures, preoccupied men and women in long robes. They flitted past us without a word, like moths. At last, in an ill-lit room where urns smoked in the corners, the old soldier stopped with a cough.

  “Well,” he said, “we will leave you.”

  I nodded, my fingers tight on the strap of my satchel.

  “Don’t look so frightened,” he advised me. “It never helps.”

  He turned to his young subordinate and jerked his head toward the door. “Come on. They’ll give us bread and tea in the printer’s shop.”

  They went out, the young soldier’s chain clanking softly at his belt, and left me alone in the eerie and stifling darkness. I heard a rustle and turned. A tall, slim figure was moving toward me across the carpet, carrying something white in both hands.

  I do not know what I expected: perhaps a priest in a belted robe or a green-cloaked scholar with the smug air of Olondrian medical men. Certainly not this tall woman in a dark dress, her delicate features lit from below by a lamp in a globe of frosted glass.

  “Are you the petitioner?” she asked.

  “Teldarin,” I answered, “I am a stranger.”

  She gazed at me closely. “But you have come to see my father.”

  “Is he the Priest of the Stone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am—I think—he is to examine me.” I paused, unable to trust my voice.

  “Welcome,” she said. She balanced the light on one hand and held out the other; I clasped her fingers warmed by the lamp like heated wax. “My name is Tialon,” she said. “My father is the Priest of the Stone. He’s waiting for you; we received the letter yesterday.”