The Winged Histories Read Online Free PDF

regiment of new recruits had died in a snowstorm under the Miveri Pass. “They swallowed the snow,” he said. He waved his hand. “They just lay down and it closed over them. They were lying in rows like corn . . .”
    We passed our bitterness back and forth, our years in the Lelevai, Dasya listing the errors of Uncle Gishas and Prince Ruaf: “Stupid old men,” he said, “who only wish to prolong the war because they’re tired of life at home and burdened with debts.” And we did not speak of the past, which seemed so distant now, but only of the future. His strange pallor in the firelight, his brooding eyes. “All this death,” he whispered. “It’s as if we’re eating—eating them. These men. As if Olondria can’t stop eating.”
    We were sitting against the wall. The bottle rolled on the flags. I searched inside my jacket for my leather flask. I opened it and drank. The gaisk was strong and had a flavor of bruised grass and cleared the air of uncertainty. I looked at the smooth flames of the fire piercing the air in long clean waves and the shining bottle empty on the floor, and I thought of the dance of the mountains and how it had gone on since the days of worshiping milk, the same steps over and over. Generations now in rows like corn. And with a twinge, a shift in my heart, I thought of Olondria for the first time. I thought of it as a living thing, not a place to go or settle but a vast entity that grew and breathed and ate. Faluidhen in summer, all those rooms of empty luxury, and then, in Kestenya, the feredha tents pitched on Uncle Veda’s land. Uncle Veda sweating with fury, shouting: “Call me a traitor to Olondria if you like, these people have nowhere else to go. Nowhere, nowhere, we’ve hounded them into the waste and waterless places, it is a crime and Olondria must answer.”
    “Olondria must answer,” I said.
    And Dasya turned to me in eagerness and whispered: “Yes, you see it, you’re not afraid.”
    But I was afraid, and I laughed and my hands were shaking for I knew his mind and that once lit it burned like a dragon’s entrails. I heard myself speaking, half frightened at my own words: “Why should we die for these hills, when we might die for an independent Kestenya?” I said the words in Kestenyi: Kestenya Rukebnar . Forbidden words. And Dasya went pale and then red, and his grip on my arm was fire. And lying in the snow with the axe flashing again in the sun I wept because I had lost the chance to die that way, because I was dying in the mountains after all, dismembered in the snow, because I was dying the death of a pig. And in the spring, I realized, I had planned to leave the army, but I did not know it until I lay under the axe. The plan had created itself in the dark of my mind and only now had it come to light, and I recognized it, and I wept. For I had thought to go down to Ashenlo and to the plains. And now, I saw, I would bleed to death in the snow. And all Kestenya blazed before me, flashing across the blue-gray sky, the desert like a ray among the clouds. The axe bit my thigh as the Brogyar fell, pierced by arrows, but the pain could not erase that gleaming sight. And still it glows before me and I see those shining mountains in another landscape, and in another war.

2. Loyalty Like a Necklace of Dead Stars

    The swordmaiden will rise each day with the knowledge of her death. This death is a fair coin, which must be spent for a worthy purpose.
    It is said that the sword is nobler than the arrow, because the sword extends the body, and to fight with it is to dance. It is said that the sword becomes its bearer’s soul. Thul the Heretic only believed in his body because he saw it reflected in his sword. In the Temple of Tol, it is common to say: “O Scarred God forever gone a-hunting, Thou has left me the pin from Thy hair.”
    This pin, claim the priests, is the sword.
    Such ideas are poetry and not history. The sword maims and kills. Evil is its essence.
    The