Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

Even Leiya Tevorova’s autobiography was absent.

I asked for it at the scribe’s desk on the first floor. The scribe on duty, a dark, angry-looking girl with deep red cheeks, stared at me so coldly her lashes seemed to bristle.

What did I want with such a book?

I told her I had heard it praised as one of the greatest prose works in the language.

“Oh?” she said, her pen raised. “And who said so?”

“I don’t know his name,” I said. “I met him in the spice markets.” And I turned around and left her.

I wish my master were here.

I wish Sten were here.

I don’t want to be alone.

A pile of old cotton lies before me on the table. Yedov let me have the hangings on the skeletal bed in the student’s quarters, which had fallen into rags. Each night I read till I feel the chime, the quiver in the air, that signals the ghost. Then I close my book and blow the candle out. I lock the door, force a wad of cotton into my mouth, and bind it in place with another strip to muffle my cries.

I ask myself: How long? How long can I bear it?

It is not only the light. The light brings pain, but the pain is not everlasting. When the force of it grows too strong, I drop into darkness. No, the pain is not the worst thing. The worst thing is the sense of wrong, like the uncovering of a crime.

Our two worlds scrape together like the two halves of a broken bone.

My world has changed forever, tainted by that touch. Jissavet, my countrywoman, is dead. She is now as vast as a cavern, as small as a bead on a woman’s scarf, indifferent like a landscape. She has died in the city and in the gardens and in the unnameable forests, and in all the great plains and seas of the earth her death lies like a corruption.

She brings me images from her past, like a diabolical dowry. A window. A street.

I writhe against them. They are not mine.

From The Lamplighter’s Companion:

Jewels from a Stone, for the Edification and Uplifting of Eager Hearts.A book of wisdom collected by Ivrom, Second Priest of the Stone, and published by the Imperial Press in 931. The book has been reprinted six times to date. Of particular interest are the chapters on the evils of luxury, idleness, and wine. The chapter on reading includes the verse “And I am helpless before thee like a child,” which is said to have made the Telkan weep.

Ivrom, Priest of the Stone.The second to hold this holy office. Ivrom was born in Bain in 883. On the death of his predecessor, the First Priest of the Stone, in 928, he accepted the leadership of the cult at the Telkan’s request. He has published over fifty books and pamphlets explaining the wisdom of the Stone his predecessor found in the desert of Ludyanith, including the popular and influential Jewels from a Stone. A widower with one daughter, he resides with the Telkan on the Blessed Isle.

Locked gates. Empty roads.

Leiya Tevorova.A deranged woman and moderately gifted writer. Her preposterous autobiography, used in schools for a century after her death, was denounced by the Priest of the Stone and banned in 934.

When I am too ill to go downstairs, Yedov brings me a bowl of soup on a tray. He never forgets me. I am grateful for this, and wary. At the sound of his foot on the stair I peel myself from the floor, clamber onto the bed, touch my head to find any bruises I must explain.

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.