Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

Is kyitna the sign of the hatred of the gods? Or of their love?

Fading, exhausted, she lay in the open doorway. The heavy light, falling across her stomach like a wave, seemed too much for her body to support. Fragile, she was fragile and impermanent as salt. Like salt she would dissolve, lose her substance. And like salt she would flavor everything with a taste that was sharp and amniotic, disquieting and unmistakable. The gods saw. They saw what I had seen aboard the Ardonyi , this girl with her piquant, pleasing oddity, her lips from which such strange utterances fell, such as when she had said to her mother, “He has the long face of a fish.” They saw the dark and vibrant eyes in which all of her life was concentrated; they knew her erratic moods, her mysterious will, her loneliness which she could not explain to anyone, and her violent rage which had given me so much pain. And they knew more. Into her brain they went, and into her heart. They probed those elusive gardens, those nocturnal roads. They knew the black and sinister wells, the mazes, the sudden traps, and the floating, limpid, inaccessible evenings. Had they not simply recognized, in her, one of themselves? One who, through some cosmic accident, had come to reside on the island of Tinimavet, lost like a star which finds itself, all at once, far from the others. And then the cry had gone out from the Isle of Abundance. And they had crouched, anguished, watching this one who had fallen somehow from the skies. And then with slow and careful gestures, so as not to startle her, they had led her back, and she had departed with them.

“When I was alive, even when I was alive,” she whispered to me, “I didn’t want to live as I do now.”

We went out into the orchard, through the rusty gate, the great flat country glittering before us and the wind rising. The wind, the Kestenyi wind. I called it “four hundred knife-wheeled chariots,” but Jissavet called it “the soldiers of King Yat.” It drove the thin snow writhing over the cracked earth of the plain and set the prayer bells jingling on the goat-hair tents. “That one.” She pointed. “They’ve just traded for some lentils and only the eldest of the sisters is there, the one with the kindest heart.” I called at the tent flap, hoarse in the wind, and a pair of startled eyes peered out from under joined brows like an island hunting bow.

She exclaimed in Kestenyi, a clatter of sounds. I gestured at my loose jacket. “Please,” I said in Olondrian. “Please, my lady, I’m hungry.”

“ Kalidoh! ” she breathed and pulled me in where a low fire burned in the center of the floor, sending up a sweet, rough scent of dung. “Sit,” she said in a mangled Olondrian, forcing me down on a woven stool. Her gestures were quick, her long, large-knuckled hands in perpetual motion. She adjusted her mantle over her shoulder, flicking its beaded hem out of reach of the fire, and squatted to prod at a bubbling pot balanced in the coals. She said something in Kestenyi, her voice raised. I heard the word kalidoh .

“There’s another,” Jissavet said. “Beside you. Her grandmother.”

I looked more closely at the pile of skins on the floor. A thin face watched me, clear-eyed, ringed with fine gray hair.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“No,” the granddaughter advised me. “No Olondrian.”

The grandmother lay still, staring.

“Look at her eyes,” Jissavet whispered.

“I know.”

“She isn’t dying. She only looks like she’s dying. She isn’t, though. She’s going to live for a long time.”

The granddaughter served me lentils and dried meat in a leather bowl. I ate half and showed her my empty satchel: “I need some for my friend.” She threw her hands up, scolding as I made to put the remains of the food in the satchel, snatched the bag away and filled it with dried lentils.

“No,” I said. “Too much.”

She waved her hand dismissively, her face turned away. “For the kalidoh . For the kalidoh . Not too much.”

On her bed the grandmother gazed at me with stricken, watchful eyes. A gold earring curled beside her cheek, lavish as spring.

“Sick?” I asked the granddaughter.

She shook her head.

“No, not sick,” Jissavet said, almost in a whisper.

“Jissavet.”

A warning in the air, an electricity. Grief.

“Jissavet.”

She burned beside me, a bright tear in each eye.

I sank to my knees on the floor, her pain going through me like fire in the grass. “Jissavet.”

“Tell her he’s dead,” she choked. “Her boy. He’s not coming back.”

I looked up, the fires fading. The granddaughter stared, mouth open, the satchel in her hands.

“I’m sorry,” I panted. “The boy is not coming back. He’s dead.”

She dropped the satchel. “Mima,” she cried. A string of Kestenyi words, and then a keening. She drew her mantle over her head.

The old woman did not weep, did not cry out. She lay so still she seemed to be calcifying, turning into stone before my eyes. The light of the low fire sprang back from her cheek, which the terrible hardness descending on her body had turned to mother-of-pearl.

“Grandmother.”

Frightened, I crept to her and took her skinny hand. Her eyes were knots of amber that did not blink. Then, unthinking, I whispered to her in Kideti. “There, daughter. It’s gone out now. Easy and cold, like a little snake.”

The angel, outside my vision, grew still. The weeping granddaughter too; though she whimpered, there was no harshness in her cries.

The air of the room seemed lighter. I heard the gentle crackling of the fire, and a wind sent ripples along the wall of the tent. Just as my straining muscles relaxed, the old woman squeezed my fingers in a vicious grip and burst into a passion of weeping. The granddaughter, gulping, took my place at her side and dried the old woman’s eyes with her mantle. The two wept quietly for a long time.

At length I rose, trying not to disturb them, and picked up my satchel.

“Wait,” the granddaughter cried, beckoning me back.

The old woman fixed her large light eyes on me. She reached down to the earth and dug a series of careful lines with her fingernail. A wolf took shape, coming into being as I watched, alive in snout and limb, the hairs on its belly distinct. She nicked its teeth into place with a few deft twists and lay back, closing her eyes.

The granddaughter motioned at the drawing. “Gift,” she said. “For the kalidoh .”

I gave her a snake she could not understand, and she gave me a wolf I could not take away. It’s fair, I thought, shouldering my satchel over the plain. The wind had fallen; the snowy earth was lighter than the sky, holding the murky luminosity of a coin.

“Jissavet,” I said, and she was there, her smile a garland. We walked slowly homeward under the darkening sky.

When I swung the gate open, its creaking seemed to echo.

“What’s that?” Jissavet said, and I looked up, sensing a change in the air.

“Thunder.”

In the desert a rain of five minutes is like a carnival.

The rains fell in short, sharp bursts, and ephemeral meadows sprang up on the plateau; the snow melted, leaving great empty patches of shining earth and tender flowers of concentrated gold that froze and died in the night. The vines of the yom afer turned green and sprouted all over with saffron-colored blooms, giving off an insipid scent, and frayed like pumpkin flowers; the eerie plant called laddisi burst forth with its flowers like pungent white stars and its green, obscenely swollen sacks of formicative blue milk. The rains washed the marble terrace of Sarenha-Haladli; I skated across it barefoot, laughing after the angel, the rose trees snagging my shirt. Water lay in the bowl of the fountain like a forgotten hand mirror, and all the trees were studded with buds like knobs of brass.