Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

The old man stared at me. For a moment a look of surprise and respect flitted across his face of a bleached old cormorant battered by the snows. Then he looked at Tialon, returned his gaze to me, threw back his head, exposing a skinny throat, and laughed.

“Marvelous!” he crowed. There was no true mirth in his laugh; it was a cruel sound, like the sharpening of a beak against a stone. “He asks me to send people traipsing across the country, to dig up graves, to make summer bonfires as our peasants do when the haymaking is over. What a festival it would be! And you, I suppose,” he went on, bringing his head level to fix me with his predatory glare, “you, no doubt, would lead the procession, loved and revered by all, and we would not hear the end of it for a hundred years. No, ludyaval , it shall not be. I will not have my people duped. I will have them clean, and honest, and able to read the Vanathul . Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.”

He turned to his daughter. “The Gray Houses, I think.”

“Yes, Father,” she murmured. She crossed the room and struck a gong, sending out a clang like a spray of ice. She remained in the shadows, her face like a wafer of stone, the firelight touching only her ankle and the black nap of one of her slippers.

Her father folded his map on his knees, pressing down each crease.

“ Veimaro ,” I said, but he did not look up.

A moment later we heard the tramp of feet, and I stood so abruptly my stool toppled over as the guard arrived to take me to the Houses.

The Gray Houses.A hospital for the mentally afflicted, located at Velvalinhu, on the southern side of the Tower of Myrrh. Built in 732, it was reserved for members of the Imperial House until 845, when, having stood empty for some time, it was opened to other noble families. At present any person, noble or common, admitted by a priest or priestess not of the cult of Avalei may receive treatment there. The Houses are run according to the philosophy of Muirn of Feirivel, who emphasized light, air, and silence in the management and cure of lunatics.

I closed the book and looked up.

White walls, a white floor, a ceiling painted like the sky.

I remembered hearing the words before: The Gray Houses . A crowded café in Bain, scattered talk of an artist everyone knew. “Shut himself in the kitchen,” they said. “Almost bled to death.”

The young woman drinking with me waggled her head. “Poor boy! He’s for the Houses.”

“The what?” I said.

“The Gray Houses,” she replied. Again that curious sideways waggle of the head, the roll of the eyes, the laugh. At the back of her dazzling smile, a single blue tooth.

I returned the book to my satchel— The Lamplighter’s Companion , stolen from Yedov’s library at the Hotel Urloma. The nurse who had brought me in had told me to use the shelves if I liked, but I would not. I would not make a home for myself in that white room. My books stayed where they were. The nurses had taken away my clothes: I wore the pale robe and sash of the Gray Houses. They had taken my purse, “for safekeeping,” my pens and ink. But writing was encouraged. They gave me a soft pencil with a rounded tip.

There were other books on the shelf. I crossed the room in four steps and bent sideways to read the titles. Kankelde, the Soldier’s Discipline. The Evmeni Campaign. A Concise History of the War of the Tongues. Fat tomes in brown calfskin, no doubt donated by some aging former soldier.

I looked up. I scratched at the wall with a fingertip, and some whitewash came off. I walked around the room for exercise, and to forget I was a prisoner. I could have gone out to the common room, where stained white couches lined the walls, but I recoiled from the society of the other patients. At kebma two of them had looked at me and whispered and giggled together: a man with a scarred head and a woman who wore a neat bandage on each fingertip. The woman had bright green paint on her eyelids, a smear of red on her mouth. When she caught my eye she waved those mysterious cotton-tipped fingers…

No, I would not go there. I walked around and around, hopelessly, in an effort to tire myself before night arrived. A lamp burned above me on the lofty ceiling, too far to reach, enclosed in an iron cage so that no one could break the glass.

The door was locked, but the angel still came in.

I burst from sleep with a cry.

She was there, a rust-colored glow, her garment on her like a liquid.

I arched my back and writhed on my cot, the whole room suddenly a grave, my heart a mad instrument beating too hard to be borne. My fear was still an animal fear, immediate and unconquerable like the scream of a donkey that catches the smell of blood.

She said many things before I could hear her over the pounding of my heart. I think that she was speaking to me of the cold. But I only saw her moving hands, her head tilted to one side, the light from her picking out the lines of the volumes on the shelf. I watched her lips as they opened and closed, unreal, a trick of her light. I imagined her hollow inside, or filled with ashes or perfume. She had an earnest look, though her eyes were still inhuman, unreadable. She moved the way I imagined eels would, under water.

Her thoughts, her images, invaded me: I was as open as a field. I saw her mother’s face, then a street corner somewhere in Bain. I knew it was Bain by the shape of the lamps. A lopsided carriage passed me in blue light. Rooftops, a midnight sky so cold the stars rang with it.

I rolled on the floor, threw myself into the walls, to escape that vision. The room went silver and tossed me to and fro like a boat. I fainted, and woke lying on the floor. A light moved above me: the mundane, greasy light of an oil lamp, so steady and natural it brought the tears to my eyes.

“There, he’s coming back.”

One of the nurses, the servants of Leilin, put his arm around my shoulders and helped me sit up. Another nurse held the lamp. The one beside me dabbed my temples with a cold handkerchief, filling the air with the odor of bruised ivy.

“There,” he said. He helped me into bed. His companion watched us, her worried face lit from below, her mustache a thumbprint.

“Can we bring you anything?” she asked.

“You can bring me a dead girl’s body.”

“What’s that?” said the other nurse, bending down.

“Nothing,” I said.

“O benevolent reader,” wrote Firdred of Bain from the road above Hadellon in the northern mountains: “Do not think that a man has ever finished his creation. A soul may always be forged in a new shape; and the fiery hand of Iva now took hold of me in earnest—nay, he even set upon me with his hammer… Ah! you ladies of Bain, lovelier than mimosa flowers, what will you think if I tell you that I bent down, and crawled on my belly into the wretched hovel of a mountainside magician, who wore a cap made out of sheep’s bladders? Only desperation caused me to submit to him, for the wound in my thigh now gave off an evil odor. I looked into his eyes smeared round with fat and told myself: A day has dawned that never was foretold…”

I, too, was set upon with a hammer; and in the clash of it I was ready, like Firdred, to seize any hope of healing. And so when the priest’s daughter, Tialon, came to my room and told me she thought she could ease my pain, I sat up on my cot and said: “Do it.”

She paused. “You are very persuadable. Don’t you want to hear my proposal?”

“I don’t need to,” I mumbled. My lip was swollen, cut by a fall in the night.