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Authors: Sofia Samatar
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Fadhian ducked into a tent to greet his wife while I sat by the nearest fire and someone brought me coffee in a tin cup. The coffee, boiled with goat’s milk, had a strong, musky taste, but I drank it all while the boys crouched around me and stared. The men sat with us too and gave me tobacco and asked questions in gruff voices. There were long pauses between the questions, and sometimes the boys broke in with piercing voices, all in the dialect that refused to arrange itself in my mind.
I can speak Kestenyi , I said to myself. I have spoken it all my life . And it was true—in a few days everything would be clear: I would hear the familiar words under tricks of pronunciation, but on that first night the language seemed encased in a thicket of thorns. I heard my own voice, strained and weak like the voice of a Valley official who believes that learning the language will endear him to the highlanders. Some of the words even came out with a strong Olondrian accent, such as I had never affected at home.
That night I slept poorly in the tent they gave me, thinking of how Fadhian’s son Redos had pulled me aside. Thinking of his arrogant face and figure in the black jacket and his question asked with such deliberate slowness.
“Why have you come here?” he said.
I could not pretend not to understand. “ To forget, ” I answered him, “and to begin.”
His black hair, the blackened silver at his throat, and there, at the door of the tent, a string of prayer bells ringing in the wind.
At the end of the Month of Plenty we struck camp and began to move. The sunlight was brilliant, falling in sheets of whiteness. It glittered on the roofs and fences covered with new snow and the leagues of hard flat country under the bird-speckled sky. In the morning we rose and grimaced and worked the stiffness out of our limbs and beat the blankets, throwing off flakes of frost. The boys ran out calling the herds with the curious hollow cries I could not imitate. And the girls crouched under mantles squinting in the smoke of the fires or clicked to call their milch goats, strange thick-haired creatures with cross-eyed stares, who gave off a fierce odor and whose heavy yellowish milk made the crumbly cheese the feredhai carried on journeys. Sometimes the girls called to their ponies too: for this they had a high and trilling cry like the sound of the black eagles of the Tavroun. I watched the girls run, crying, catching up the folds of their mantles with one hand and mounting the ponies with a sudden sideways leap. I was always amazed at how fast they rode, sitting cross-legged and seemingly off-balance but never falling. They would ride to the neighboring farms with hides to trade for coffee and tobacco and, if the trading went well, perhaps a handful of grain.
“So now you have seen the barbarity of the plains,” Fadhian smiled.
He sat back under the femka, his features indistinct in the gloom.
I watched the glint of his teeth and said: “It is not barbarity. True barbarity exists only in cities.”
“Really,” he said, still smiling, and I knew I had spoken clumsily. He bent to refill my cup from the silver pot. “I realize,” he said, “that you are spending only a season with us. Please refrain from any custom that does not suit your tastes.”
And I wanted to tell him that everything suited my tastes, everything, riding and living in tents and always seeing new parts of the country, eating cheese and hoda in the saddle and the way the boys, with their rough, easy ways, had made me one of them. I wanted to tell him that I could live for days on nothing but raush, that I grew sick unto death on teiva, rich food and wine. I wanted to tell him that my desire was only to sleep in a tent or beneath the stars and never again to have silk or muslin against my skin. But I was silent. After a moment I asked if he regretted accepting me. Then he laughed and reached out to clap me on the arm.
“Sensitivity!” he cried.
I can speak Kestenyi , I said to myself. I have spoken it all my life . And it was true—in a few days everything would be clear: I would hear the familiar words under tricks of pronunciation, but on that first night the language seemed encased in a thicket of thorns. I heard my own voice, strained and weak like the voice of a Valley official who believes that learning the language will endear him to the highlanders. Some of the words even came out with a strong Olondrian accent, such as I had never affected at home.
That night I slept poorly in the tent they gave me, thinking of how Fadhian’s son Redos had pulled me aside. Thinking of his arrogant face and figure in the black jacket and his question asked with such deliberate slowness.
“Why have you come here?” he said.
I could not pretend not to understand. “ To forget, ” I answered him, “and to begin.”
His black hair, the blackened silver at his throat, and there, at the door of the tent, a string of prayer bells ringing in the wind.
At the end of the Month of Plenty we struck camp and began to move. The sunlight was brilliant, falling in sheets of whiteness. It glittered on the roofs and fences covered with new snow and the leagues of hard flat country under the bird-speckled sky. In the morning we rose and grimaced and worked the stiffness out of our limbs and beat the blankets, throwing off flakes of frost. The boys ran out calling the herds with the curious hollow cries I could not imitate. And the girls crouched under mantles squinting in the smoke of the fires or clicked to call their milch goats, strange thick-haired creatures with cross-eyed stares, who gave off a fierce odor and whose heavy yellowish milk made the crumbly cheese the feredhai carried on journeys. Sometimes the girls called to their ponies too: for this they had a high and trilling cry like the sound of the black eagles of the Tavroun. I watched the girls run, crying, catching up the folds of their mantles with one hand and mounting the ponies with a sudden sideways leap. I was always amazed at how fast they rode, sitting cross-legged and seemingly off-balance but never falling. They would ride to the neighboring farms with hides to trade for coffee and tobacco and, if the trading went well, perhaps a handful of grain.
“So now you have seen the barbarity of the plains,” Fadhian smiled.
He sat back under the femka, his features indistinct in the gloom.
I watched the glint of his teeth and said: “It is not barbarity. True barbarity exists only in cities.”
“Really,” he said, still smiling, and I knew I had spoken clumsily. He bent to refill my cup from the silver pot. “I realize,” he said, “that you are spending only a season with us. Please refrain from any custom that does not suit your tastes.”
And I wanted to tell him that everything suited my tastes, everything, riding and living in tents and always seeing new parts of the country, eating cheese and hoda in the saddle and the way the boys, with their rough, easy ways, had made me one of them. I wanted to tell him that I could live for days on nothing but raush, that I grew sick unto death on teiva, rich food and wine. I wanted to tell him that my desire was only to sleep in a tent or beneath the stars and never again to have silk or muslin against my skin. But I was silent. After a moment I asked if he regretted accepting me. Then he laughed and reached out to clap me on the arm.
“Sensitivity!” he cried.
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