Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

“All right. I’ll ask for fennel. But I won’t say what I’m going to do with it. They’ll think they’ve picked up a cargo of lunatics!”

I stood, took my satchel from the back of my chair, and left him, swinging myself up the steep stairs to the deck. The wind tossed my hair as I emerged into the sunlight where the great masts stood like a forest of naked trees. I walked to the edge of the gleaming deck and leaned against the railing. As the wind was fair, the rowers were all on deck, slaves and free men together, the slaves’ tattoos glowing like blue ornaments against their flesh, their hands sporting rings of carefully worked tin. They crouched in the sails’ shadow playing their interminable game of londo , a complex and addictive exercise of chance. The planks beneath them were chalked with signs where they cast small pieces of ivory, first touching them to their heads to honor Kuidva the God of Oracles. Some went further: they prayed to Ithnesse the Sea or to Mirhavli the Angel, protectress of ships, whose gold-flecked statue stood dreaming in the prow. The Angel was sad and severe, with real human hair and a wooden trough at her feet; as a prayer, the sailors spat into the trough, calling it “the fresh-water offering.” When a man ran off to perform this ritual, the soles of his bare feet flashing chalk-white, the others laughed and called merry insults after him.

I drew a book from my satchel and read: “ Now come, you armies of glass. Come from the bosom of salt, unleash your cries in the conch of the wind. ” All through that journey I read sea poetry from the battered and precious copy of Olondrian Lyrics my master had sent with me. “ Come with your horses of night, with your white sea-leopards, your temple of waves/ now scatter upon the breast of the shore your banners of green fire .” I read constantly, by sunlight that dazzled my eyes, by moonlight that strained them, growing drunk on the music of northern words and the sea’s eternal distance, lonely and happy, longing for someone to whom I might divulge the thoughts of my heart, hoping to witness the pale-eyed sea folk driving their sheep. “For there is a world beneath the sea,” writes Elathuid the Voyager, “peopled and filled with animals and birds like the one above. In it there are beautiful maidens who have long, transparent fins, and who drive their white sheep endlessly from one end of the sea to the other…” Firdred of Bain himself, that most strictly factual of authors, writes that in the Sea of Sound his ship was pursued by another; this ship was under the sea, gliding upon its other surface, so that Firdred saw only its dark underside: “Its sails were outside of this world.” In Tinimavet there are countless tales of sea-ghouls, the ghosts of the drowned, and of magical fish and princesses from the kingdoms under the sea. I wondered if I would see any of them here, where the sea was wildest—if at night, suddenly, I would catch in the depths the glow of a ghostly torch. But I saw no such vision, except in my dreams, when, thrilled and exhausted with poetry, I stood on deck and watched the glow worm dances of the ghouls, or caught, afar off, the rising of a dreaded mountain: the great whale which the sailors call “the thigh of the white giant.”

Above me, on the upper deck, the island merchants sat: men of my own rank, though there were none as young as I. There they yawned through the salt afternoons under flapping leather awnings, drank liquor from teacups, predicted the winds, and had their hair oiled by their servants. The Ilavetis, slowly sipping the thin rice wine of their country, also had their fingers and toes dyed a deep reddish-brown; the smoky scent of the henna drifted away with the fog from their Bainish cigars, while one of them claimed that the odor of henna could make him weep with nostalgia. I despised them for this posturing, this sighing after their forests and national dishes mingled with boasts of their knowledge of the northern capital. None of them knew as much as I; none of them spoke Olondrian; their bovine heads were empty of an appreciation of the north. The Olondrian boy who knelt on a pillow each evening to sing for their pleasure might as well have sung to the sails or the empty night: the merchants would have been better pleased, I thought, with a dancing girl from southern Tinimavet, plastered with ochre and wearing mussel-shells in her hair.

The boy sang of women and gardens, the Brogyar wars, the hills of Tavroun. He knew cattle-songs from Kestenya and the rough fishing songs of the Kalka. The silver bells strung about his guitar rang gently as he played, and the music reached me where I sat beneath the curve of the upper deck. I sat alone and hidden, my arms clasped about my knees, under the slapping and rippling of the sails, in the wind and the dark. Snatches of murmuring voices came to me from the deck above, where the merchants sat under lamps, their fingers curled around their cups. The light of the lamps shone dimly on the masts and rigging above; the lantern in the prow was a faint, far beacon in the darkness; all was strange, creaking and moving, filled with the ceaseless wind and the distant cries of the sailors paying their londo forfeits in the prow. The boy broke into his favorite air, his sweet voice piercing the night, singing a popular song whose refrain was: “ Bain, city of my heart .” I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

Halfway through the voyage a calm descended. The galley slaves rowed, chanting hoarsely, under a sky the color of turmeric. The Ardonyi unrolled herself like a sleepy dragon over the burnished sea, and sweat crept down my neck as I stood in my usual place on deck. The pages of my book were limp with heat, the letters danced before my eyes, and I read each line over and over, too dull to make sense of the words. I raised my head and yawned. At that moment a movement caught my eye, an object beetle-black and gleaming in the sun.

It was a woman’s braided hair. She was climbing up from below-decks. I closed my book, startled by the strangeness of the image: a woman, an island woman with her hair plaited into neat rows on the crown of her head, aboard an Olondrian vessel bound for the city of Bain! She struggled, for she grasped a cotton pallet under her arm which made it difficult for her to climb the ladder. Before I could offer to help, she shoved the pallet onto the deck and climbed out after it, squinting in the light.

At once she knelt on the deck, peering anxiously into the hole. “Jissi,” she said. “You hold him. Jissi, hold him.” I detected the accent of southern Tinimavet in her speech, blurred consonants, the intonation of the poor.

Slowly, jerkily, an elderly man emerged from below, carrying a young girl on his back. The girl’s head lolled; her dry hair hung down in two red streams; her bare feet dangled, silent bells. She clung to the old man’s neck with a dogged weariness as he staggered across the boards of the deck toward the shadow of an awning.

Several sailors had paused in their duties to stare at the strange trio. One of them whistled. “ Brei! ” he said. Red.

I turned my back slightly and opened my Lyrics again, pretending to read while the woman dragged the pallet into the shade and unrolled it. The girl, so slight, yet straining the arms of the others like a great fish, was set down on it, the end of the pallet folded to prop up her head. Her thin voice reached me over the deck: “There’s wind. But there aren’t any birds.”

“We’re too far from the land for birds, my love,” the older woman said.

“I know that,” said the girl in a scornful tone. Her companion was silent; the old man, servant or decrepit uncle, shuffled off toward the ladder.