I stood looking down at it, forgetting the wind. Miros, pale as wheat, rolled onto his side and stared over the edge with me. “It is a mystery,” writes Firdred, “how man ever had the temerity to enter a place so forbidding and forlorn.”
The sight of the desert from the pass had all the mesmeric power of a clear and moonless night resplendent with stars. It provoked the same greed of the eyes, the feeling that never, no matter how long one looked, would the image remain undamaged in the memory. It was too vast, mystic, impenetrable. And yet, as one Telkan wrote, it was nothing: “May Sarma forgive me,” wrote Nuilas the Sage, “for I have caused the blood of our sons to be shed for this utterly hostile wilderness, this annihilating void of the east.” Perhaps this was why I felt, dazzled, that I could never contain that sweeping vision—because it was nothing, pure nothingness: an almost featureless wasteland, golden, streaked with incarnadine, as Firdred wrote, “the color of a fingernail.” To the north the chain of hills stretched on and I saw the city of Ur-Amakir in the distance, poised dramatically on a precipice over the sands, and as I stood gazing at its high stern walls the wind began to shriek and a diamond burned my face. It was the snow.
Book Five
A Garden of Spears
Chapter Seventeen
The House of the Horse, My Palace
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.