Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

I stood up. “Miros,” I shouted. My voice a creak.

He did not know me at first. His gaze slipped over me, anxious and hurried, searching among the ruins. Then I took a step forward and his eyes returned to my face and he ran toward me and caught me in a fierce embrace.

“Jevick!” he croaked.

“Miros!”

“I thought you were dead—”

“Your uncle—”

“Alive, in the carriage, hard by the wood. Come.” He seized my arm and began to run. I was slower than he, gasping, my lungs tight. He glanced at me. “Sorry,” he panted. “You’ve got to run. The Guard will be back before long.”

“Back,” I wheezed.

“They’ll have to get rid of the bodies,” he said shortly. “Clean the commons.”

We ran, the silence broken only by our breath. The carriage stood at the edge of the forest, spared like the trees by the slant of the wind. Its sides were sooty, and there was only one horse.

“Where are we going to go?” I whispered.

Miros looked up from checking the harness. “East. My uncle’s servants are coming downriver with—what you wanted. We’ll cross on the ferry and meet them in Klah-ne-Wiy.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded, looking bleakly across the burnt commons. “Let’s go.”

I opened the door of the carriage to receive another shock. There on the seat lay a bald old man, unconscious, wrapped in a blanket. “Miros!” I said, and he answered from the coachman’s perch: “Get in, there isn’t time.” And I obeyed him, and pulled the door shut with a shaking hand. I sat on the seat across from the old man and looked at him. His face was a mass of stains, as if he had been pilloried in some brutal ritual. I recognized in that withered face, that flat head and pointed chin, the ravaged features of Auram, High Priest of Avalei.

The hair. The hair was a wig. I pressed back against the seat, my heart thudding. The eyebrows were painted on, the eyes enhanced with black paint and belladonna, the wrinkles disguised with unguents, embalmed in powder. The whole man was a creation, re-created every day. The lips, of course, had always been too red. The hands must be treated too: I shuddered at the thought of their touch, their white, elastic fingers. And everything clarified as if a veil had been ripped asunder: the priest’s hooded cloak, his unusual, querulous voice. I realized that I had never seen his face in daylight till now. And the thought, coming suddenly, made my hair stand up. I felt my skin shrink, prickling all along my arms as if I had seen Dit-Peta, the island demon “Old Man of Youth.”

He did not wake. As we drew away from the fire, into clearer air, the sun shone through the window onto his creased expanse of forehead. For the first time his face had definition. It was human now: touching and impressive as a skull.

He did not wake for five days. Miros cradled the ancient head in his lap and forced a trickle of water between the dry lips. We bought cured meat at a peasant house and built a fire in a meadow and Miros boiled the meat in a metal bowl to make soup. His eyes bright in the firelight, his face drawn. “I told him to die,” he said. “The night of the Market. We had a quarrel… I told him I wished he was dead.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“It’s not yours either,” he countered, watching me sternly through the flames. “I know what you’re thinking.”

I looked away, at the priest. “He’s so old.”

Miros laughed then, tears in his eyes. “How old did you think he was?”

“Forty… Perhaps forty-five…”

“Forty!” he shouted, falling on his side. “Tell him when he wakes up…” Then he sat up and stifled his laughter, saying hastily: “No—never mention it.”

“His energy,” I said, dazed. “He walks so quickly, stands so upright—”

“That’s bolma . You don’t know it? The Sea-Kings used to take it, down in Evmeni. It’s incredibly expensive. The old man lives on it. Sometimes he chews milim , too, because the bolma makes him crazy.”

“Is it because he’s a priest?” I asked.

“Ha!” grunted Miros. “It’s because he’s an idiotic old camel.”

He cooled the soup and fed it to the priest, the liquid trickling down the old man’s chin, into the ridges of his neck.

We traveled slowly to spare the horse. The country grew rough and empty. Miros made use of cart tracks, avoiding the King’s Road. We drank at a stream and washed there. I found my satchel in the carriage, with all my books and clothes, and Tialon’s letters. The priest’s big traveling trunk was there too, and Miros’s few belongings, consisting largely of tobacco and bottles of teiva . I remembered Auram’s words: “We must expect to be found.” He had lived as he spoke. He had come to the Night Market fearlessly and prepared for flight.

We walked downhill to a stream to gather water. Miros carried the bowl we used for cooking, and I had an empty jar. The jar had once held a preparation belonging to the priest, and when we drank from it the water stung like perfume. Still we filled it everywhere we could. That day the light was tender, and flocks of miniature butterflies hovered in the grass like mist. Suddenly Miros stumbled and sank on one knee. “Oh gods,” he said. Sobbing, undone. Water sloshing over his boots.

That day I took his arm and helped him up, I made him drink, I pulled him out of frenzy. And in the night he did the same for me, for the ghost appeared in the carriage where we slept curled up against the chill and I filled the air with wild smoke-roughened cries. She was close, so close. All the fulgent stars were drawn about her like a mantle, and her face shone clenched and angry, a knot of flame. “Write me a vallon! ” she said. And a landscape burned across my vision, the coast as flat as the sea: her memory, not mine.

“Write me a vallon! ”

When she let me go I was outside, on the ground. A dark meadow about me and all the stars in place. Miros held my shoulders to stop my thrashing. “I’m all right,” I gasped, and he released me and sat panting, a clump of shadow.

“What,” he said. “What.”

“The angel,” I said. I was glad I could not see his face.

“Dear gods.”

He was silent for a time, arms about his knees. I sat up, breathing slowly, waiting for the shaking to pass. A wind slipped gently past us, a murmur in the weeds.

Then Miros asked in a low, troubled voice: “Is it always like this?”

“Always. Yes.”

And I thought to myself: It will be like this from now on . I had refused the angel; she knew that I would not do as she asked; she would hound me across Olondria like the trace of an evil deed. “I am sorry,” Miros said, and I scarcely heard him. His words meant less to me than his hand, pulling me up and guiding me to the carriage, and his efforts to make the next day ordinary: his jokes about water, his tug at the reins, his cracked lips whistling a broken tune.

On the fifth day we stopped at a huge old radhu . The falling dusk had a tincture of violets. I made out a sprawling building in the gloom: broad sections had crumbled away from it, leaving raw holes, and scattered stones lay about the yard along with pieces of rotten beams. The place had an air of decay, yet goats went springing away through the rubble and a girl came out with a yellowed basin of water to wash our hands. She had black eyes, a restless manner and a firm, obstinate jaw. When we had washed she tossed the water into the weeds.

Miros lifted his uncle from the carriage, and without comment, without a single word, the girl led us into the house. There we found a dark, smoky room with a carpet on the floor. Miros laid the unconscious priest down near its edge.