The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Page B

buttoning their jackets. I wondered where they were from and if any of them had served in the Lelevai and lost a thumb to frostbite or languished in the hospital at Giva. Outside our circle they had stood, talking softly about the women in town, pausing to spit on the side of the road. At last they had ridden back complaining, bursting into the tavern again. “These idiot farmers don’t know what they want. He called us for nothing . . .”
    Sunrise broke out tenderly in the east, through a gap in the mountains. Birds awakened in the trees by the road. We breakfasted on cheese and hoda without dismounting and after an hour we finally stopped and crawled into the wagons to rest. The women who had been resting rose and drove the animals on and I lay under the shelter of the moving wagon, rocking from side to side in the noise of hooves and wheels and cries, watching the points of light through the gaps in the hide roof. Lulled to sleep at last I dreamed of orchards. When I woke it was almost dusk and we were still moving among the farms. I crawled out of the shelter, and Seren, sitting on the back of the wagon, smiled and passed me a pitcher of water.
    I splashed my hands and face and drank. “ Will we stop soon? ” I asked.
    She shrugged and gave me a piece of raush from her pocket. We were passing a villa where, by the light of the lamp on the terrace, two girls clad in muslin worked on their embroidery. I watched them until they were small white shadows in the darker blur of the house. And perhaps it was the sight of them, or perhaps the sound of Olondrian still ringing in my ears, that made me suddenly say to Seren: “ Niernetsa .” I mimed the act of embroidering, the pull of the thread. She laughed and shook her head.
    She crawled into the shelter and beckoned me after. It was dim and noisy inside, the wagon jolting with us toward the noon country. When she whispered to me, the motion made her nose bump gently against my ear. “Never give away the che ,” she said.
    “I didn’t mean to,” I told her.
    “I know.”
    She kissed my cheek. “ Elu ,” she whispered. “Do you know that word?”
    I said no, and she told me it meant love. Up close, she smelled dry and fragrant, like wheat. Her eyes were frightened, my legs like water. “Love,” she whispered. “Loving. In the che .”

    For many days it was dry, our lips grew white and we moved among the wells and traveled by night and there was no sound of singing; then suddenly we would come upon a sacred grove with a woman’s name where we swallowed the soft and fragrant air like milk. Coolness breathed from the wild mimosa trees and the pink acacias and the white and waxy bark of the karhula. We slit the nalua bulbs and drank the juice and dug up asphodels and ate them and peeled the spines from the aiyas leaves. Only we did not cut the trees for fuel, this was forbidden. The cattle wandered and chewed the flowering broom, looking comical with their broad muzzles smeared with yellow when they had browsed among the heavy golden tras. And then one night there was rain, a hard cold rain, and we stood under it and gasped for a moment of agonizing sweetness. The children screamed for joy and in the morning we all looked brighter with the dust beaten out of our clothes and our crisping hair.
    How empty it was, how silent in the desert. There was a happy delirium in being with others, in laughter, in song. The notes of a diali under the stars with a scent of clouds on the wind brought me an unfamiliar joy that clenched my throat. Seren and I set snares for rabbits far away from the camp, and we walked out together to check them twice a day. We lay on her white cloak. She rested her head on my arm as I unfastened the long strings of her leather vest. Each string slipped through its hole with a soft shirring sound, then the knot at the end caught for a moment, it wouldn’t pull through, I had to pull it harder, her fingers in my hair and at last it gave. They gave