The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Page A

familiar movements. It’s not the feredhai style, but a parody of it, something sold all over the empire. She sings the old songs: “The Swallow in Winter,” “The Rose of the East.” Curling one hand in the air, opening and closing her great black eyes. People are listening, drawing chairs closer, mouthing the words. When she finishes a phrase a clatter erupts among the crowd, a burst of snapping, rings clicking on glasses, cries of “ Bamanan ai. ” The words begin as something maudlin and meaningless but repetition gives them power, and she repeats each line in fifty ways. Sobbing and swaying as if overcome by the music. And under the sound of the words comes the true meaning, the one they possessed long ago. How sad they were when they were first composed.
    Where are you? I am waiting .
    And once again: I am waiting. Where are you?

    When we were small at the Feast of Lamps the lanterns were lit in the avla and our mother sat at the table smiling and handing out the glasses. Each glass had a flower tied to it, a jasmine bloom or a sprig of mint, and the women fastened them in their hair and the men put them in their boot tops. Our mother sat in her chair all evening and never danced though she loved the music. In those days, I remember, we found it simple to be extraordinary. Everyone watched when I danced a sadh for Father or offered him his pipe on the beaded cushion when he was tired of dancing and sat by the window. And Dasya and Siski clasping hands in the corner would swing in circles until they fell and Siski’s boots left marks like tea stains across the floor. And when they carried me upstairs at every window I saw the lights of the hunters down in the forest where they lived on raush and snow. And she was my dear, my dear. And she sang underneath the wooden arch at a party to celebrate my recovery from my wound. Who can understand the sadness of this? She was singing and I was whole and her song was a wound and the money we paid her was a wound. And all the lamps were wounds, and the beaded cushion, and the avla, and the music. When I was eight years old, still inside the enchanted circle, a strange little boy who had come to play with the servants’ children tripped me in the courtyard and I fell and cut my chin. “Down goes the house!” he sneered. I remember his hard, shiny lips, and how cold he looked. He did not have a proper coat, and his earlobes were red as coals. Fulmia came running around the side of the house, waving a rake and roaring terrible curses in Kestenyi. The boy ran off, and Fulmia helped me up, but not before I saw, in the eyes of this man who had served my House since my father was a child, the eyes of this man looking after the fleeing boy, an expression, not of anger, but of some secret satisfaction. It was gone by the time I was on my feet, and I never saw it again. But I know what I saw: hope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

    Now often at night it seems as if there is something abroad in the wood with wings or something that breathes as it sits upon my chest. I get up in the night and go to the flap of the tent and open it. Farus is instantly awake and rubs against my knee. “It’s only the rain,” I tell him, patting his head. The wind blows in my face and shakes the trees and powders me with rain. The cold rain and the warm dog by my leg. And far away in the dark the lights of the bridge. Everywhere the sound of wings.

From Our Common History

    Olondria, land of almonds. Land of myrrh.
    In the words of wine-tongued Ravhathos, our greatest poet: “the gods’ garden. ”
    In a cave on the northern tip of the Blessed Isle, they say, lies Olondria’s navel: the exact starting point of history. Naturally, also, a door to the Land of the Dead. There the poor shepherd Hernas slew a white deer, which revealed itself as the goddess Avalei. Bleeding, weeping, and