Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

The house stood on the eastern side of the Yeidas. It was the last estate, shipwrecked between the farms and the eternity of the desert. It stood in the sparse embrace of its orchard of plum and almond trees and turned its shuttered eyes on the contours of the plateau. There was the library, there the terrace with its stone balustrades, there the balconies caged in iron flowers. I remember even the creak of the gate and the shadow of my hand as I reached for it, in the argentine light of the snow.

We descended and crossed the stone bridge over the Yeidas. Miros clung to my neck, stumbling, too self-aware to let me carry him anymore. We did not speak. We moved on doggedly through a plain of lifeless scrub where emaciated cattle raised their heads to watch us pass. In the distance stood three fortresses, goats searching for grass along their crumbling ramparts. Farther still, the black pyramids of the feredha tents. A red cloth flashed among them and disappeared. We reached the wrought-iron gate in the granite wall that surrounded the prince’s lands.

The gate leaned, rusting on its hinges, crooked as a leering mouth. We staggered up the path through the desolate orchards. The wind had fallen; Miros’s breath was loud in the still air. It seemed to take a long time to reach the house. When at last we did we saw the domes of the roof spattered with crow dung and the shutters with their chips of timeworn paint, the stone walls streaked and moldering at the corners, and the terrace stretching away in the shadow of the naked rose trees. We stood and looked at the house. The sky had darkened above the foothills, and the walls faced us in the gray and grainy light. The silence had a depth, like the stillness after a bell has been struck and the echoes have died away, and one waits for what has been summoned.

The door was unlocked. It gave with a sigh. A breath of musty air, cold as a draft from a hollow hill, caressed my face. “Wait here,” I said, lowering Miros to the stones of the porch. He curled up on his side at once and closed his eyes.

I pushed the door wide. “Hello,” I called.

The echo mystified me until I stepped inside, into the vast domed hall of Sarenha-Haladli, a name which in the Kestenyi tongue means “The House of the Horse, My Palace,” where once the prince had come for the hunting season. A floor of colored stone spread out before me, dimmed by a layer of dust and mirrored above by the painted glass of the dome. Seven arches of red and green porphyry led out of the hall, each enclosing an impenetrable darkness. The palace, as I was to learn, was circular, like a rose, for the rose is an auspicious sign in the highlands. On that first day its lightless corridors, all subtly curved, tormented me with the sinister mockery of a labyrinth.

“Hello. Hello,” I shouted, running blindly through the halls. I shouted with weakness, with fever, I think—certainly not with hope. The poignant desuetude of those rooms where the tapestries crumbled at my touch was evidence that no servant lived in the house. No servant, no caretaker, no guide, and only an hour before dark. My thoughts narrowed sharply and my movements clarified, losing their desperate quality. I noted the venerable furniture stamped with imperial pomegranates: firewood. The grand floor lamps in the sitting room contained traces of precious oil. At last, with a cry of joy, I discovered a subterranean scullery housing a porcelain stove festooned with shriveled garlic, where my scrabbling fingers unearthed an old tinderbox, several candles nibbled by rats, a tin of flour, and a handful of blighted potatoes.

I lit a taper and hurried upstairs. The light did little to help me find my way: rather it dazzled me, bobbing along the corridor. Its wasp-gold spark flared over sections of grimy paper emblazoned with heliotropes, the lace of a petrified fern, the shoulder of a carved chair. “Miros,” I shouted, my voice absorbed by the dark. I hurried past arched entryways where anxious statues peered out with white eyes, emerging at last into the central hall where the moonlight, flung through the doorway, set illusory crystals in the checkered floor. My bootheels skidded over the cold mosaic. “Miros.” He lay where I had left him, almost in the doorway, sleeping on his side. His cheek had a grayish tinge in the candelight, like stagnant water. I pulled him out of the wind and closed the door.

The rooms were cold, mournful, decayed, full of darkness and stale odors, the beds enclosed in cupboards in the fashion of the kings. I shoved Miros into one of these beds and covered him with everything warm I could find: sheepskins, rotting tapestries, carpets heavy with dust. I made no fires; even the taper I held made me uneasy. I pictured its light seeping out across the leaning roof of the terrace. Would it find its way through the brown arabesques of the rose trees to some wilderness where a herdsman would catch it on the end of his knife?

“Water,” Miros moaned in his sleep.

I gave him the last of the clear, cold stuff we had gathered at the Yeidas in a Tavrouni waterskin. He coughed, rolled over and slept. I touched his forehead: it was hot and dry. No one had looked at his wound in seven days. As we struggled over the pass I had argued to myself that there was no time to examine it; now I knew I was afraid. Tomorrow, I thought. I slipped into the next chamber and the great box bed, where I tossed on a creaking mattress stuffed with horsehair.

No sleep. No peace. I rose and, wrapped in a carpet for warmth, wrenched open the shutters weighted with cumbersome brass bolts. The moon, unveiled like a mystic revelation above the hills, exuded a silent radiance that made me blink. Olondria was gone; it was a desert night that faced me, still and proud. I was in the empire’s most reluctant province, where Limros of Deinivel had remarked: “In this country of perverse inclinations there is no dog who is not a nobleman and no water that is not frozen.” But Auram will come, I thought. He will come, or he will send someone with the body. If he has been slain or captured it will not remain a secret. The High Priestess will learn of it, or the prince, and they know where to find us, and they will send a rescue party over the hills.

But Auram did not come. No one came.

I do not know how long we waited in that house adrift on the edge of the boundless plain. I know that the angel came to me most nights, crying “Write” like the clanging of swords, and that I gritted my teeth in that punishment of light. My weakness was a mercy: I fainted soon. I know that I woke, sometimes in my bed, sometimes on the floor, thinking only of survival. I know that I made a number of crude messes of the foodstuffs I had found in the scullery, thinning them with water to make them last. I drew the water from a well in the garden, the frozen chain searing my hands. The pail was cracked, but I found a sound one in the scullery. It knocked against the side of the well with a fat and cheerful sound as, wasted by hunger and fear, I struggled to draw it up. A breath of wind went whispering among the trees, and they quivered, their shadows glancing over the layer of new snow on the ground. The tiny sound, the movement, emphasized the isolation of that place, so iridescent and remote. I grasped the pail at last and rested it on the lip of the well, holding my aching side, waiting for my breath. When I raised my head the trees all looked like shadows and their thorns like mist, and the sun spangled everything with leaves of ice.

I hauled the pail inside the house. Water splashed on the tiles of the main hall as I staggered through, creating bright spots on the floor, revealing the flowers of topaz under the dust, the stars of broken glass, the encrustations of jasper and chalcedony. I made my way into the nearest room with a fireplace, the formal sitting room, a chilly wasteland where peeling damask dangled from the walls, where hectic blossoms seethed in the obscurity of the carpets, and the glass in the windows shivered in the wind. The room had the desolate air of a place avoided by the living, the scene of an accident or an ancient crime, but it had become my haunt because it was close to the main door and contained a wealth of brittle furniture for my fires. Heraldic greyhounds paced through the stones of the fireplace; they seemed to snarl at me as I seized an elegant Valley chair and beat it against the floor, cracking its legs, separating them from the cushions of dark pink velvet, wreaking havoc on the embossed ptarmigans. Sweating with exertion I sat on an ancient bredis which had escaped my wrath because its sagging leather was difficult to burn. When I held the tinderbox to the broken chair, the stuffing went up the chimney with a blue flame and a whoosh like a cry of alarm.