The Winged Histories Read online

  Dear Siski, I wrote, I wish I were going to die at Braith. I wrote this inside my swordbox as there was no paper in the room. I thought I would use it later, but when we had passed to the second grade, and they let us write letters for the first time, I no longer wished to die. And by that time it seemed impossible to write to Siski, to come up with answers to her letters crammed with parties and flirtations, and if I wrote to Mother, I knew she would cry. So I wrote to Dasya instead. You should join the army. There’s good fun up here.

  In the mountains in winter the peaks disappeared in the air, so vast and white that they became part of the sky. We craved warmth like bread, we fought the frozen trees for kindling and at night the hills were dotted with small red lights. It was a foolish way to camp and when the Brogyars came they slid down on us screaming and hurling their heavy axes toward our fires, and we ran and slipped and ran again and turning to fight I saw like a burst of shooting stars a sudden fountain of teeth. They scattered beside me, and there was an axe in the snow and a faceless man. The trees shrank, a blue light shuddered over the snow. The Brogyar was huge, an inarticulate figure of hair and shadow, and it was only his own weight that pushed my sword through his leather armor. He fell heavily and twisted my wrist and the sound of his harsh breathing became mine as I struggled to turn him and free the sword. There were black shapes and red shapes, sudden screaming and wet snow soaking through at my knees, and we were all running toward the gorge. Sparks flew over the snow, we ran like beasts for the thin forest. Kestau turned back for his sword and an axe removed one of his arms. It happened as if on a stage, there was a white expanse and a glow from one of the fires and black blood spouting, and he fell. Someone was screaming in the gorge. A Brogyar rushed to Kestau and knelt to cut his throat, bent over and wrapped in scarves like an old washerwoman. I thought I saw the flash of the knife. And only when they were gone did we find Vars lying in the gorge with a broken leg.

  Then I realized that I was warm at last, as we were dragging the bodies into a heap, making long dark tracks, and afterward as we were burying them while the sun came up and the scene of the ambush appeared, ashes and blood in the snow. Vars fainted when they set his leg and Nirai stood above him making a list of the dead and wounded in the White Book. Most of us were smoking. Odra squeezed my shoulder, squinting in the light, and said: “Now you’ve tasted iron.”

  That was the world of the mountains where we stumbled endlessly in the snow, dragging the wounded on sleds of wood and hide, always trying to meet another line of the army that never arrived or waiting for them in the ice-blue winter forests. We were always late or early. If we met them at all, the captains would scream at each other and throw their caps down in the snow. The rest of us sat in silence, watching. At night I wriggled down in my sleeping sack and thought of horses. The horses were marching across the sky and I saw that this was the swordmaiden’s life, filth and starvation and cold and the hills to come. When I couldn’t sleep I would get up and offer to take sentry duty for someone or smoke with Odra who also slept poorly and often sat up counting the stars.

  “I’ve lost the talent for sleep,” he would say, and despite the cold he would pull down his scarf and show me the lines on his neck, running his finger along the grooves. I could see the scars clearly in the starlight reflected from the snow and he would tell me how he had awakened to find a Brogyar at his throat.

  “Sarma preserved my life, but at a price,” he would say, resettling the scarf. “A priestess told me that the goddess had taken my sleep. What she wants with it I don’t know, but it’s true enough that it’s gone. I don’t mind, my life will be twice as long as the lives of men who sleep.”

  When the snow fell we were forced to march so as not to be buried by morning and we tramped in the whirling darkness side by side, Odra and I with the straps over our shoulders pulling Vars on the sled and whenever we stopped to smoke Odra would talk. He told me about his daughters in the Balinfeil who were both unmarried weavers. The elder one rolled her stockings down because they pinched her knees, and Odra was sorry for her because she was moik—a Nainish word meaning silly or strange. “My life, my poor moikyalen,” he said. I laughed, and his gaze deepened in the faint glow of our pipes. He asked me if I felt well and I nodded and made myself stop laughing. Beyond the rock where we sheltered there was a blackness filled with screams where all the gods unknown to us had been released. And we would plunge into it and be pursued by those black winds and find ourselves up to our thighs or armpits in snow, and struggle out of it again and shout to the others and turn and get entangled with those who had failed to receive the order. “The dance of the mountains,” Dasya called it later, with a sneer. And truly it was like being part of a dance. It was like a dance in a dream in which one had a part but did not know what it was, a dance of strange and dreadful figures. When I was convalescent I had a dream of a splendid ball in an unfamiliar house: my partner was a woman with a tall headdress, with much black paint around her eyes and in one figure she gave a graceful bow and clasped the top of her hair and removed her head from her neck. That was a dream about the mountains, it showed the life of the mountains, that new life. At times we were seized by a sudden and absolute happiness. It happened most often when we were beating back an attack and then we howled and dismembered the bodies, choking with joy.

  There was joy, too, when we sighted villages in the gorges: a glimpse of cottages huddled among the pines and snow, and sometimes even a light or two through the cracks in the ancient shutters or a lantern wavering toward a dark mud barn. Then we would come down shouting. They were lost villages abandoned by priests with names like Waldivo and Unisk and Bar-Hathien, separated by blizzards so that they thought they belonged to something larger, forgetting that each had only ten or twelve families. So there was High Unisk and many leagues away, Low Unisk. Dark villages where they melted the snow because the wells were frozen. The peasants were pale and heavy in their movements and wore amulets of straw and some could hardly converse in the common tongue. The women sat in the corners and wept or hovered around their few possessions, muttering, guarding the old tin pitchers and apples of colored wax, while the men sat on the floor morosely wrapping and unwrapping the linen strips they wore in layers around their legs. Sometimes there were immobile children lying in osier cradles. We sat by the fires and smoked the peasants’ winter stores of tobacco, we drank their gaisk until the firelight swam with secret signs, we made them slaughter their beasts and give up their flour and potatoes.

  In one village there was only a donkey and everyone gathered to weep for it. Vars said: “If they take any longer I’ll murder the beast myself.” His leg was still bad then and he was lying against the wall and sweating; his face was pinched and exhausted and I could see that he needed the meat. The room was full of people, it was warm although the door was open and more were crowded around the donkey outside. A stinking old man, perhaps a village elder, in a sheep’s-bladder cap, offered up uncouth prayers to the gods of the hills. I pushed my way to Odra and asked him what they were praying about and he turned on me, tears glinting in the lines on his face, and swore at me, what did I think, the last animal in the village and we were killing it. The women had covered their heads with coarse wool shawls. And firelight shone on the wooden shutters with rags stuffed in the chinks and on the broken lantern hanging on the wall, and beneath the smells of dirty skin and hair and ill-cured leather and burnt potatoes there was the delicious odor of carrots. These were the villages of our desires where we would sleep at last and feel a pleasure even in vomiting gaisk and donkey meat: how clear the air was when I retched outside the door on the crust of snow and saw a few bird prints there, like writing.

  When I was made captain they gave me a horse, a brown mare called Loma. She was quiet and strong and reminded me of Meis, and how Siski had said that Meis’s neck always smelled of strawberries so that one could pick her out in a dark stable. Sometimes at night I stood
and put my face against Loma’s neck, closing my eyes to shut out the strange glow of the hills. Perhaps another soldier, also sitting awake, would begin in a mournful voice to recite a sein of the Vallafarsi such as “The Kingdoms.” Balinu, whence cometh fruit. As always this phrase reminded me of the ring my mother wore on a chain at her throat. Something had happened to me, perhaps I had fallen or been scolded by Malino and she was comforting me by showing me her ring. She unfastened the chain and showed me how the opening phrase of the sein was engraved inside the ring, in both Olondrian and Nainish. Her soft hands, the side of her dress, on the table an ancient knife with a chipped handle. Outside the fruit fell from the trees.

  I clung to Loma’s neck in the storm that almost buried us in the Month of Lamps. I screamed at my men, for there was a village below us, all dark, and we left the sick and wounded on the rise and rushed down on the houses and broke the doors open and shattered the rotting shutters with our sword hilts. Rotting, the shutters were rotting and the beds inside were strewn with rotten sheets. We stumbled into the empty silence of the rooms. Even the cellars were empty and at last we gathered and stared at one another, trailing our clean swords in the snow.

  “It’s deserted,” Vars said hoarsely. Suddenly I could hear him and I realized we were sheltered from the wind, in the lovely sleeping village with the blueness of the snow at night. The stars were breaking the darkness one by one. The others were looking at me and I spoke gently, hearing my own voice without screaming for the first time in seven days. “Bring the others down,” I said. My voice came out so beautifully, simple and full of reason in the silence. Later the same voice said softly and clearly: “Kill the horse.” She was the last one, I did not need to say her name. She was the one who ended the habit of thinking about horses, Tuik had not been able to end it but it ended that night with Loma. After we had eaten I thought, I will have to choose something else to think of at night. It did not worry me, I felt sure I would think of something. We were all together in one house and warm at last with a fire of broken furniture crackling on the hearth.

  Softly the snow fell, and the men died softly. We dragged them out and buried them in the snow, for the earth was frozen. They died against the walls of the cottage in attitudes of sleep, their cheeks faded and their hair brittle with frost. Those of us who were well enough would totter into the brightness, seeking firewood, tugging feebly at doors and shutters. Once Vars and I came back together, and Odra, lying against the wall with his eyes very bright, said something about the sea and its thousands of angels.

  “Don’t talk, Uncle,” Vars told him. “Save your strength.”

  And Odra breathing quietly gave a bright and secretive smile. It hung motionless on his bloodless face so long that I thought he had died with it, and I bent and shook him roughly by the shoulder. But no, he was not dead. He died much later and before he died he made us listen to him and obey his orders, swearing at us, cursing us because his blanket was caught beneath his arm and because he could not bear the diet of snow and horseflesh.

  “Take me out,” he snapped. “This air, a man can’t breathe in here. Look.” He slapped his neck and rolled a louse between forefinger and thumb. “Look at this filth. These aren’t soldiers, they’re animals.” And we carried him out and built a fire for him under the pines.

  The low red flames, the blackness of the earth under melted snow, Vars hunched miserably in his dirty jacket, and Odra in his blankets propped against a tree, thin-lipped with scorn, staring out at the hills, at the snow that trapped us. His voice was harsh, he spoke of his seventeen years in the mountains and pulled down his scarf to show us his scarred neck. “A man is not expected to live for more than three years up here,” he said. “But I’ve lived nearly twenty and killed more men than the fever. They took me into Amafein six years ago and gave me the Order of the Bear, my daughter has it in her basket at home. The duke himself presented it and we were sixty-eight at table that night and everything paid for by the Olondrian Empire.”

  He drew his breath in sharply, sucked his teeth and darted a glance at me. “Yes, I remember, you’re the Telkan’s niece. You’re his niece through both Houses and nobody ever mentions it and most of the men are afraid to speak to you as to an equal. Even you”—he jerked his grizzled chin at Vars—“you’re some sort of nobleman but you’re afraid to approach her ladyship, really approach her. Only I am not afraid and that’s because I know my worth and I’d proven my worth ten times before you were weaned.”

  He stopped abruptly and leaned against the tree. Something went flying overhead, perhaps an eagle, its blue shadow streaking the snow. And then he began to speak again in bitterness, cursing the Telkan and this war that was not even a war. For many days he cursed us and then suddenly he stopped, he grew listless and no longer demanded to be taken outside, but we still took him out for Vars insisted the air would do him good. And we built a fire and sat with him in silence.

  Sitting there, I breathed on my cold gloves and tried to find a train of thought I could use to sleep at night. I tried so many, and finally I found that simply letting my mind drift was often the quickest way to the dark. I remembered Siski singing “The Swallow in Winter.” She was standing with her hands clasped and her thin feet on the rug. There was the knocking sound of Uncle Veda emptying his pipe and I was watching her mouth as it opened and closed. Poor lost bird, you flit from place to place but cannot find your home. The green curtains in the parlor smelled of tents. Yes, and under the chair we found a dagger and an ivory comb. On the sheath of the dagger, a drawing of Tevlas in spring.

  All at once I realized that Odra was saying something, he was saying “No, let’s stay here a little longer.” And it was night, and the stars had come out thickly within the circle of the peaks: they pulsed in the dark, as if trying to break through.

  “That’s a beautiful sky,” said Odra dreamily, “it reminds me of the song, Let’s stay a little longer, the evening is so fair.”

  “Then you’re feeling better, Uncle,” Vars said eagerly. His teeth were chattering and the firelight flashed up strangely on his face.

  When he said these words, Odra began to weep. He was lying on his side and the tears coursed down his gaunt creased face. “My poor moikyalen,” he sobbed.

  He wept for a long time. Vars was biting his lips and tears were on his cheeks. Then Odra grew calmer and smiled. He reached out feebly and Vars seized his gloved hand and pulled the glove off, pressing the rough hand to his lips.

  “You’re a good child,” said Odra. Then he raised his head with difficulty and looked at me, stretching out his other hand. “You’re a good child too,” he smiled, “but why are you so shy?” I had taken his hand, I was kneeling by him in the snow. Vars was weeping openly and I looked at Odra’s face in the light of the fire, searching his eyes which were like two coins.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  Vars was sobbing, bending over the corpse to kiss the sunken cheeks, pressing his living brow to the brow of the dead, and then he rose and rushed into the drifts, thrashing his arms, snatching snow in his hands and hurling it into the dark. While he leaped and screamed I closed the dead man’s eyes and stripped the body, piling the boots and clothes to be sent to the daughters in the south. And very poor and small he looked when he was laid out naked on the snow. And we left him there in a tomb of ice.

  “You could, if you wanted to,” Vars whispered to me later. “You could get us all released with honor. You could send to someone, maybe not the Telkan himself, but someone.”

  “No,” I told him, “it’s not true, there’s no one.”

  “Yes, there must be,” he insisted in a breaking voice.

  I found that I was smiling at the ceiling. “That’s the strange thing,” I said. “Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself. But in fact, there is no one.”

  He turned his face to the wall and began to moan. And I lay or
dering my thoughts while someone stirred and shuffled his feet and someone else kicked Vars and whined for silence, and I put my thoughts in categories such as Games and History and tried to choose something to think about. The memory of Dasya among the pillars beckoned, black eyes, bright face. But no, that thought was too strong and would keep me awake. Instead I thought of the Ethenmanyi and going to visit our grandmother’s house in a country not very far from the Lelevai. It was not far, but how different it was! I remembered going with Mother and Siski in spring with all of our finest clothes in trunks, and wearing my new green traveling cloak as we jolted along the mountain road with the sunlight flickering through the carriage windows. Always there were things to see in the hills, the narrow gorges and then apricot trees in flower among the rocks, and the funny herders’ cottages whose thatched roofs came down almost to the ground, and the children selling milk from pails. We stopped at Mirov and then at Noi. After that the road began to slope downward and the enormous valley opened below the mists, and Mother grew suddenly pensive, letting her jeweled prayer book fall into her lap and watching the land drift by. I believe there is no country more beautiful than the Balinfeil in spring. Great meadows slumbered beneath the soft pink haze of the fruit trees. We would see again the straight white houses standing up with their conical roofs and the fat tame musk deer tied to fence posts. There were the graceful and ordered fields separated by bands of sunflowers, and the peasants’ houses almost smothered in bushes of dark pink aimila. Also the smell, peculiar and fresh, drawn from the mountain winds, and also the strange and inescapable silence.