Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

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.”

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.