Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

She pulled over a bredis , a scribe’s stool covered with leather, from the wall, and sat, one slippered foot crossed on the other.

I lay down again. Her face was just above the level of mine, and I gazed at the whorl of her ear and the blue tattoo on her temple. She had brought a battered writing box with her, and now she opened it on her knees and took out a small book bound in white.

She cleared her throat. Her hands were very brown on the little book. Bars of shadow from the cage of the lamp passed over her when she moved. “It’s really too early for this,” she said, glancing at me, “but I thought it would help you understand the treatment I have in mind.”

She opened the book and read: “ For you are following a thread. For you are cloaked in dawn. For in a field you have found a hidden treasure. Kneel, traveler, and take it. It is a word. Now stand, take up your staff, and travel on until you find another .”

She closed the book, smoothed the cover.

“That’s your father’s book,” I said. “ Jewels from a Stone .”

She looked at me and smiled. “You know it.”

“I saw it in Bain.”

“Did you read it?”

“Only a line or two. I read what it says about angels.”

A faint color warmed her cheeks. “Well. I’ve just read to you from the chapter on reading.”

Reading, she said: this was her proposal. The passage she had read to me had dropped from the mouths of gods. The words were etched in the Stone her father’s late master had found in the desert, where he had traveled at the bidding of a dream. To read the Stone, to take down the words, was her father’s life’s work, and her own work was to assist him. The chapter on reading was one of the first they had written down. She told me her father had groaned when he understood it, curled on the floor, as if in labor with the beauty of the blessing.

She said she would read to me.

“A fine idea,” I said. “What is it supposed to do?”

She frowned, not offended but examining the question. Her face wore an inward look, as if she were listening. “I think,” she said at last, “that what troubles you is an imbalance, a lack of order. And written words possess order, much more so than the words we speak. I believe you should read without stopping, read everything you can. And when you are tired, I will read to you. The method has had some success. I’ve tried it with others. One of them has now returned to her family.”

“I haven’t known many who read more than I,” I told her. But I lay on my back, and she stood up and bent over me with a gilded pen.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. She made two dots above my brows and measured the space between them with a piece of tape. Her lips pressed together in concentration. The touch of her hands was firm, though she was so thin. Her clothes had a dry smell, like earth heated by the sun. When she had finished, she jotted a few lines in a notebook from her box. “Ura’s Conclusion,” she explained. “On the effect of thought on the blood. It’s never been proved.”

She went to the bookshelf and crouched to read the titles. “Have you read any of these?”

“You’re not going to read prayers? To guide me in the ways of the Stone?”

She smiled at me over her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter what we read, but I’d rather not bore you.” She looked at the titles again. “Let’s try this. A Soldier’s Memoir .”

She brought the thick volume with her to the bredis . The print was too small for her to read comfortably, so she took a pair of spectacles out of her box. They dangled from a chain she wore like a necklace. She pressed them onto her nose, opened the book at random, and began.

Of course it was an honor to fight under her, for which I thank Him Whose Face Is Hidden. I remember the midnight watch and how we would see that the lamp was still burning in her tent, or in the tent of one of her concubines. She took all forty-seven of them with her wherever she went, and they did not complain, although some of them were just boys, and their skin was chapped like ours was in the winter and if there was no wood to heat water they went without bathing just like we did… But Ferelanyi was never the same after Drunwe died that spring, although she still had forty-six concubines to console her, which is why we soldiers say, if something in life has lost its savor, “it is just like the forty-six concubines of the general”…

Naturally, the treatment was a failure.

Still Tialon’s voice filled up the hours, and I waited for her with more impatience every day. I never heard her coming. She always knocked, then peered around the door, smiling and hesitant, carrying her box.

Clarity, I thought. Clarity and music. Her voice was low, expressive, not bell-like but vibrant like the limike , the Olondrian dulcimer. She read me the lyrics of Damios Beshaid and the letters of Skendho the Literate, the Brogyar chieftain who had asked to be buried under the Telkan’s library. She read me the plays of Neavandis the Poet with great animation, altering her voice and features to suit the characters. She was disappointed to see no change in me. After a week I no longer needed to shake my head. She could read my face.

“Don’t give up,” I whispered.

She smiled. Her hand strayed toward my pillow, toyed with a wayward string. Propriety or shyness prevented her from touching my hair. Instead she tugged at the string until it broke. She brushed it against her skirt, where it clung, a strand of white against the black.

“Tell me something,” I said, afraid she would go—afraid she would slip away to the place where she lived the rest of her life, a happy and structured region built of bookshelves, enlivened by colored ink, far from the drab misery of the Houses.

“All right,” she said.

She spoke of Neavandis, the great poet-queen. “One of her legs was shorter than the other. Only slightly, but still, she never walked. Her servants carried her in a special chair—it’s in the treasure vaults here. It’s called the Chrysoprase Seat. The Old Teldaire used to bring it out on the date of Neavandis’s death; I saw it several times as a little girl. It’s covered with bright green gems, the color of sour apples. It’s very lovely.” She paused, pulled the bredis away from the cot, and faced me.

“They say she had a lover,” she went on, thoughtful, her arms about her knees. “A groom from the Fayaleith. He was hanged for laming one of the king’s war-horses. Now, of course, everyone says he was hanged out of jealousy—the king was Athrin the Pallid, famed for his cruelty. But they also say that Neavandis poisoned one of the king’s dancing girls, the one called ‘Feet like the Palm-Leaves.’ So who can say? ‘For there are more things under the Telkan’s cloak,’ as my nurse used to put it, ‘than one could name from now to Tanbrivaud Night.’”

She pushed a tawny curl behind her ear and smoothed it down. Strips of shadow hung about her face. “It was on Tanbrivaud Night,” she said, “that they hanged Neavandis’s lover. He had been granted a last request, according to custom. He asked that he might be executed on Tanbrivaud Night. It was a severe blow to the king, who was superstitious—for those who die on Tanbrivaud Night, they say, can easily pass from the Land of the Dead to this one, and many of them become Angels of Persecution.”

“And did he persecute the king?” My voice was very soft.

“It is not known. It is more likely that he persecuted the queen. For though she wrote several more plays, including The Young Girl with Flowers , and a ninth volume of poems after his death, she began to chew milim leaves—a hereditary vice—and died at the age of fifty, as you know.”