Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

I stopped, taken aback, as he moved toward me. He did not rise: the chair itself was moving. As it drew closer, I noticed the delicate wheels at its sides, spider-webbed with spokes.

The old man advanced with a slight ticking sound. When he reached me, his gaunt hand, resting on the arm of the chair, gave a barely perceptible twitch, and the vehicle stopped. He tilted his head back to read my face. His eyes were startling, large and light, rich signal lamps still burning in a shipwreck.

“So,” he said. A single word, yet my heart sank at the sound. His voice was thick with phlegm, disdainful, the voice of a tyrant.

“Jevick, please sit down,” his daughter murmured, pushing a stool toward me. I glanced at her and she nodded, her eyes giving back the light from the windows. Something in her gaze, so steady and frank, encouraged me, and I sat down.

“So,” said the priest again. “You claim to have seen an angel.”

“I claim nothing. It is the truth.”

“So you say.” He cocked his head as if observing a process of nature. “But it’s original,” he said. “A ludyaval .”

Ludyaval— an “unlettered one.” Illiterate: a savage.

“I can read and write,” I said, stung, “and speak Olondrian fluently.”

“Ah! And you are proud of yourself, no doubt.” He shook his head, smiling so that his lips whitened, drawn against his teeth. “Well, well. Come, there is no need for this. The matter is a simple one. Tell me who has sent you, and you may go.”

“No one sent me. I was brought here by soldiers.”

“Do not toy with me,” he said more softly. “Give me your master’s name.”

I swallowed. Rain rapped sharply against the windows, the fire stirred in its bed. The old priest watched me, clutching the arms of his enchanted chair. “I,” I said. My blood sang in my ears; a strange sea, white and full of stars, seemed to be rising about me, filling up the room.

“A name!” barked the priest.

I blinked fiercely to clear my vision. His arm in its black sleeve flashed through the mists around me like a wing. Parchment crackled. He spread a map on his knees and jabbed it with a yellow fingernail. “Where did you go in Bain? Where were you corrupted?”

“Corrupted—”

“Yes! Was it Avalei’s priests? I doubt it; they are too cunning for that these days. Was it a merchant? Was it the proprietor of your hotel? What was his name?”

“Yedov,” I whispered.

“Was it he?”

“No—that is—I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t know what you mean.”

The priest turned to his daughter, who had drawn up a stool and sat near us, her chin in her hand, her expression thoughtful and tinged with pity.

“You see?” he said. “That’s why they chose this ludyaval . He can claim he doesn’t know anything, and we cannot prove he does.”

“But perhaps he’s telling the truth,” she said.

“I am,” I interrupted, seizing on this spark of hope. “ Veidarin —”

“I am not a priestess.”

“ Teldarin —”

Again she shook her head, frowning. “No. Call me by name.”

“Tialon, then—by the gods you pray to, help me!”

My cry hung in the air. The priest’s daughter seemed moved by it: her cheeks grew pale, and she sat up straighter, setting her hands on her knees. “I will,” she said. Her father groaned, wrinkling his map in a gesture of impatience. “I will,” she repeated firmly, “but you must help me too.”

“Anything. Anything you ask.” I rubbed my eyes with a trembling hand. The mist of my faintness had receded, the room growing clear again. Beneath the windows, blue in the rain, Tialon leaned forward, her hands clasped, a streak of firelight on her cheek.

“Jevick,” she said in a slow, earnest voice, “this is a serious matter. You have been brought here under suspicion of a crime. Do you know what it is?”

“No.”

“Pretense of sainthood,” she said and paused to watch me.

“Sainthood.”

“Yes. The crime of claiming contact with the spirits of the dead.”

“But I claim nothing,” I said. “I have claimed nothing. I told no one but the keeper of the hotel, and he sent me to you.” I turned from her clear green eyes to the glittering orbs in her father’s face. “I am no saint. I would not call anyone with my affliction saintly.”

“You see, Father,” Tialon said.

“I see nothing,” he snapped. “Nothing but a new ruse of the pig-worshippers of Avalei.”

Tialon sighed and turned to me. “Tell us about your island. Tell us—”

“Tell us,” the priest broke in with a sneer, “do your people worship angels?”

“No,” I said. “That is—we have good spirits which we call angels. But they are not dead. They are not the same as the dead—that is something different…”

My voice sounded very small in the room, but the priest leaned forward, intent, transfixing me with his pitiless gaze. “Not the same?”

In my mind there were vast forests, my mother’s hands, smelling of flour. There were bowls of burning rosemary and janut on their dark altar. The wind sighing in the jackfruit trees, the sound of the doctors chanting, the sound of my elder brother being beaten behind the house. I struggled to put these images into words, looking at Tialon rather than the priest, strengthened by the candor of her gaze. The room grew slowly darker as I spoke. The rain had ceased, but there was a sound of distant thunder over the sea.

“In the oldest time,” I said, “there was only the sea. There were no islands. At this time, the gods were there, but under the sea. And with them were their servants, the lower spirits, who are the angels, who are like the gods, always the same, neither increasing nor decreasing… After the world was divided, they went to live on the Isle of Abundance, which is where we go after death—those of us who die well. Those of us who do not die well—belong to another place.”

“Another place? Which place?” the priest demanded.

“ Jepnatow-het ,” I said softly. “The angel—no, the dead country. Of those who are dead, yet alive. The one place that cannot be reached by sea.”

“And what does it mean—to die badly?” Tialon asked.

“To die unburnt. To die at sea, or to rot, or to die in the midst of an evil passion. This angel, the one who haunts me, died in Aleilin in the north. Her body was never burned, and so she cannot rest.”

Tialon nodded. “I have read, in the books of one of our scholars, a man called Firdred of Bain, about the island people burning their dead—”

“Yes!” said the priest testily. “My daughter adores the geographers. But let me ask you, ludyaval —do you communicate with the dead?”

“No.”

“He shudders!” the priest exclaimed, sitting back and raising his eyebrows. “Well, that is something! That is out of the ordinary, at least! So your people do not seek to reach the dead; they are not grave-lovers. A splendid, a sensible people, you ludyavan ! But our own people, as you may know, have a terrible passion for angels. At one time, one could scarcely dream of one’s dead grandfather without being dragged to the temple. Those who claimed they could speak with the dead were revered, and people came to them with all sorts of questions, as if they were oracles. How will the maize crop be, where is the necklace my mother gave me, whom will I marry, who stole my brown horse—all nonsense, chicanery, a farce! Yes, the love of angels was once a canker of this country, and I am the physician who removed it.”

We had arrived at a moment I must not lose. “If you are a physician,” I said, “then cure me. Help me to find my countrywoman’s body. I need to go to Aleilin, or to have the body exhumed and sent to me here. And I must burn it on a pyre.”