Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

The priestess arranged her skirts on the couch. An invisible monkey chittered.

“Well,” said the courtier in a peevish, strangely querulous voice: “If we’re going to hold a secret council, must we do it in such glaring light? My head has been throbbing for the past hour.”

At a sign from the priestess, Miros brought out a fantastically ornate lamp, encrusted with claws and tendrils of old brass, and set it on the table. He climbed on a stool to extinguish the ceiling lamps, jumped down, and retired among the jingling leaves. In the newly mysterious room, the company looked theatrical, hollow-eyed. Faint laughter reached us from beyond the trees.

The courtier shook himself; the dimness seemed to restore his energy. He gave me his small pale hand and said: “Auram, High Priest of Avalei.”

“Jevick of Tyom.”

He laughed. His hair was so dry and black it reflected no light at all, his lips stark red in his powdered face. “I know who you are. We all know who you are. We expended some effort to see you in person, however. Delighted to meet you at last.”

“Delighted,” the priestess echoed. I looked at her. In the gloom she had grown, her breasts and throat monumental above her black dress. Her hair was like the ramparts of a city. “I have heard,” she said, “that you have spoken with an angel.”

Her features wavered in the light cast upward from the lamp. I wished fervently that I had not drunk so much. I wanted to ask the name of the strange youth in the dark suit but decided to concentrate on saving myself. “It is true,” I said.

“Tell us,” said the priestess. And I leaned forward and blurted out the tale of my haunting, my captivity, and the ways of the Rotted Dead.

When I had finished, the priest turned to the others and clutched the arms of his chair. “If it is true, we may hold a Night Market again!”

“Yes,” said the priestess. “Still, it is too early to speak of that now. We must examine him thoroughly first. We must be sure.”

“Of course,” said Auram.

“What is a Night Market?” I asked.

The priestess turned to me, fingering the jet beads at her throat. In the sculptured mask of her face only her eyes, long and black, the lids painted with two streaks of apple-green, lived and brooded. “The Night Market, my child, is one of Avalei’s multitude of blessings. It is held in the provinces, in the countryside. People come from far away to buy and sell, to eat and drink, to be merry together if only for a night. And always at the center of it there is the avneanyi , to answer their questions and comfort them in their distress.”

Avneanyi —a mystic, a saint. “One ridden by angels.”

My blood slowed. “What sort of questions do they ask?”

“All sorts of questions, my child. The angels know all.”

“But I can’t speak to her. I don’t want to speak to her. I only want to be rid of her and go.”

“Yes,” she said. “Naturally you would like to return to your homeland. As we say, the fire of home is brighter than any other fire. And we also say, the cold of home is colder than any other. But an angel must be honored before it departs.”

“Yes,” the priest put in, in his soothing, quavering voice. “Like the Snow Child, whom we summon to cure fevers. It never departs without an offering. When the patient is cured we give it basil leaves and grain, and then it melts…”

Sweat gathered on my brow. “I can’t talk to her.”

“Not yet,” said Auram. “That is natural enough. You have not tried. Our lady will aid you in your first attempt. After that, slowly, it will become easier.”

“No,” I said.

The priest and priestess glanced at one another. As for the young man with the glass in his eye, he chuckled, lit another cigarette, and, with an ugly movement of his throat, blew smoke rings toward the glittering trees.

“But I think you will,” the priest said then, smiling, his teeth perfect as a bar of silver. The black thatch of his hair whispered as he turned his head. He gazed at the priestess, repeating: “I think you will. For my lady is powerful. She has the power to do what you wish. Did you not say that your countrywoman died in the mountains? How will you retrieve her body unless we help you? But with our assistance everything becomes simple, as in a play. Our enemies are strong, but our lady is stronger.”

The priestess drew herself up. A gleam passed through the murky depths of her eyes. “It is true,” she said. “I am a woman of no meager power. I have been since childhood a favorite of the goddess. I say this not, as another would, to frighten you, but to persuade you to accept my offer of help. You are far from home, and the attentions of an angel are at first difficult. You require guidance, guidance that Avalei can provide. You are unlikely, in these evil times, to escape the notice of those who shut you up in the Gray Houses, those whose blasphemous cult is becoming—”

I followed her gaze, for she was no longer looking at me, and saw the youth in the skullcap make a slight gesture. It was almost nothing: his hand, which had been relaxed on the arm of his chair, lifted an inch, the fingers spread out in warning. At once the priestess fell silent, and I wondered at the power of this stranger, who was only half her age. “But you know all that,” she said. “You have already met them. It is I who can help you, I who can bring you the body of the angel.”

Expectancy charged the air. They were waiting for me to speak.

“How will you do it?” I asked.

The priestess gave her low, heavy laugh. “If what you say is true, then while you hold the Night Market I will send my servants northward to Aleilin. They will obtain what you seek. They will come down into Kestenya, into the highlands, where it is easy to hide from the soldiers of the king. You will meet them there, in the village of Klah-ne-Wiy. Our Prince,” she said with a soft, caressing glance at the silent youth, “has a house nearby.”

The prince. His gaze met mine. One of his beautiful eyes was larger than the other, slightly magnified by the glass. His expression was at once disdainful and sad: yes, filled with regret. Seed pearls nestled in the lace at his throat.

I turned to the priestess. “If I do this for you—if I hold your Night Market—you’ll give me the body.”

“Yes,” she said.

“How can I be sure?”

“You cannot be sure,” she answered. “Nor can you be sure that in the end you will want the body destroyed.”

I laughed. “I will burn it, I promise you.”

“In the Book of Avalei, ” the priestess said, “it is written: ‘ Like a wind upon the valley, like a dragon, like a sea of ambergris, and like the striking of a hammer: so is every spirit among the dead .’”

Among the dead.

They took me through the trees, the way the others had gone, and we entered a pillared veranda filled with night. Steps led down to a terrace under the stars, where four lamps burned on brass posts, diffusing a freshening scent of resin. The terrace overlooked a small lake among the towers, a captive pool where lamplight and starlight played. There were other terraces bordering it, and balconies above it, but the others were all deserted, the lamps dark.

There was a shout from the water. I saw pallid bodies swimming there, the hard young bodies of Miros and the other gentlemen. Their clothes were strewn on the terrace along with the gowns of some of the servant girls, who were shrieking and splashing each other in the shallows. There was no furniture on the terrace but a table, and so the company sat above it, on the steps leading from the veranda, but they often rose to go to the table, where there was a bowl of sparkling liquid which they poured into their mouths with a ladle. The notes of the lute quivered. My heart, soaked in los , expanded at the sight of the two young ladies dancing on the terrace, their faces flushed in the lamplight, their beautiful gowns awry, their hair disheveled, hanging about their ears. They were singing a popular song of the type called vanadel whose refrain was: “ Gallop, my little black mare .” The white-haired nobleman, luminous in the dark, had stepped into the trees beside the terrace and was gathering berries to pelt them as they whirled. He wore no shirt.