The Winged Histories Read Online Free PDF Page A

speak for joy.
    Soon he would laugh as we had laughed as children in the inner courtyard of the school when the door was raised and the pigs came clattering in, their smooth backs and bobbing ears passing us in the torchlight as we stood trembling and holding our bare swords. “A pig screams like a man,” we had been told by Master Gobries that afternoon, “and also he has flesh similar to man’s.” We struck them clumsily across the eyes and along their bony heads and they cried out as the blood began to flow. And after a moment we began to laugh. A tall boy slipped in the blood and fell and Vars had a stripe of black gore on his cheek. When we caught one another’s eyes we crouched with impossible laughter while an unearthly clamor of woe rose to the sky. Stumbling over bodies, sliding, chasing the last survivors. At that moment I thought, Joy is one of the secrets of war . And now I saw that exultation on the Brogyar’s face and thought, He is going to kill me. This is death .
    And if it was death, then why not think of dancing in the avla, of my mother’s ring, of milk, of Uncle Veda? But only one thing came to me and it did not come with pleasure but with regret, such sharp regret that my eyes flooded with sudden tears. I remembered our camp along the Firda, near the end of autumn, when the sable geese were flying in long arcs. The wind came from the north bringing the gusts of early snow and there were dark leaves massed on the surface of the river. I went up to the hills alone. Riding along the stony paths I heard the wind as it sang in the dry grasses, battering the little oaks so that they threw their acorns to the ground. A few hawk-apples withered on the crags. And I was lonely and happy going up to where the snow lay in the grass, urging my horse through the rocky passes, camping by myself under the trees, making my fire and cooking beans and drinking bitter gaisk from a flask. Sitting by my campfire I would take the letter out of my coat and read it again while the pines creaked in the wind. If it is possible make haste for I have much to tell you that I cannot write and will not be able to say in front of others . . . Deep blue skies with the mountains sharp against them and a sad twilight that promised an icy storm out of the north, and I was riding upward with my mantle wrapped about me when I saw the first broken pillars, gray in the dusk.
    A smell came toward me, stone walls under the rain. There was a hissing sound and rain streaked down my hood and over my face. I had not seen Dasya in four years. There were no lights in the school and I supposed they had camped beyond it in the gorge. But a red glow touched the old pillars of the temple. I rode in through the archway, throwing back my hood in the sharp thunder of hooves on the stone, the sounds of the snorting horse and the jingling reins enormous under the lofty roof, and then I had slipped from her back, and he was there.
    We greeted one another in whispers, standing back from our embrace to stare, and then he laughed and shook my shoulders. And I was laughing too. “Tav,” he said. There was a fire on the floor and a bottle of Nainish wine on the stone table.
    “ Vai , my life,” he said. He looked older and he had put on flesh and he moved with energy like an athlete, a soldier. He sat on the table and rested his feet on the bench and put the bottle between his knees to open it and passed it to me, and I drank.
    “So you’ re alive, ” he said. He was still laughing and I thought how proud and joyful he seemed in his scarlet tunic trimmed with gold, and how as always he wore such finery easily, careless of how the wine dripped on his rich Feirini velvet. He passed the bottle to me again. My cloak steamed in the warmth. And we spoke of the war and our regiments and our losses, and that was when he sneered and spoke to me of the dance of the mountains and his laugh turned hard and rattled in the dark hall. For he had been at Gena when a