Kalyna the Soothsayer, page 1
Kalyna the Soothsayer
Dedication
Epigraph
Some of the People Who Made My Life Harder
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
Guide
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Brittany Marie, who told me to stop working on an irretrievably broken novel and start on this one instead.
But everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes.
—Orson Welles, F for Fake
Some of the People Who Made My Life Harder
My Family
Aljosa Vüsalavich: My father, the greatest soothsayer I have ever known. (His second name means “son of Vüsala” in Masovskani, because he was born in Masovska.)
Vüsala Mildoqiz: My grandmother, the worst person I have ever known. (Her second name means “daughter of Mildo” in Cöllüknit, because she was born in Quruscan.)
Those Who Have Their Own Armies
King Gerhold VIII: King of Rotfelsen. Quite blank in face and mind. His army: the Reds.
Queen Biruté: Wife of King Gerhold. Originally from Skydašiai. Her army: those amongst the Reds who obey only her.
Prince Friedhelm: Younger brother to King Gerhold. Seems to be a thoughtless, sybaritic prince; is both more than that and exactly that. His army: the Yellows.
High General Franz Dreher: The somewhat avuncular defender of Rotfelsen. His army: the Greens, who actually fight wars and guard the borders.
Court Philosopher Otto Vorosknecht: A dangerous fool who talks a lot. His army: the Purples.
Those I Met in Masovska
Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way: The name tells all you need to know.
Ramunas: A flamboyant legal advocate and informant, who likes to send messages by terrifying bird.
Klemens Gustavus: A very important little rich boy. Heir to a number of changing banks.
Bozena Gustavus: His slightly smarter sister, whom I heard of in Masovska.
Lenz Felsknecht: Best forgotten.
Those I Met in Rotfelsen
Tural: The Master of Fruit, and my neighbor. Eccentric, but nice.
Jördis Jagloben: Chief Ethicist, and my neighbor. Perhaps also nice?
Vondel: Tenth Butler to High General Dreher. A real stickler for etiquette and tradition, but not in an overbearing way.
Gunther: The tall barkeep at the Inn of Ottilie’s Rock. Beautiful smile; supplier of starka.
Aue: A talented doctor who looks after royalty and nobility.
Gabor: Very chipper for a man who lives in a cave.
Martin-Frederick Reinhold-Bosch: A young swordsman employed by the High General. Within spitting distance of the throne. Arrogant, but pretty.
“Dugmush”: A tall and frightening soldier in the service of Prince Friedhelm. I had trouble remembering her name.
Behrens: A sharpshooter in the service of Prince Friedhelm. Quite friendly, when he isn’t looking down the barrel of his harquebus.
Alban: A brute in the service of Court Philosopher Vorosknecht.
Selvosch: The Lord High Quarrymaster. Unpleasant.
Edeltraud von Edeltraud: Mistress of the Rotfelsen Coin. A powerful and nervous noblewoman.
Andelka: An emissary from Rituo, one of the countries that make up the Bandit States. Acts as though she is very important.
Olaf: A lucky drifter.
Chasiku: A threat.
Part One
My Mother
“You killed your mother twice over, you know,” said Grandmother.
She pinched my cheek ironically and chewed on her gnarled, old pipe stem. Grandmother seemed to get more from rolling it around between her white teeth than from the scant smoke that leaked out.
I sat still in the dirt at her feet and rubbed my cheek where her thumbnail had left a deliberate indent.
“You killed her first, of course, with your birth: when you selfishly tore your way out, making your poor mother bleed so, so much.” Grandmother removed the long wooden pipe and curled her papery lips to luxuriously exhale a small amount of smoke.
I nodded slowly. I meant to show I was listening, but it looked like I agreed.
“And you killed her again two days later, when she, weakened and bloodless as she was, learned from your father’s visions that you would never possess the Gift.”
I nodded again from where I sat, looking up at Grandmother as she noisily replaced the pipe between her teeth. Her hard face, the small tattoo above her left eyebrow, peeking out from her scarf, and her thin old nostrils, full of char.
“Maybe,” I hazarded, in a squeak, “maybe she only died from the bleeding? Maybe . . . maybe I only killed Mama once?”
Grandmother looked down at me, then closed her eyes as though she need see nothing else ever again.
“Finally,” Grandmother sighed, “she admits it.”
As she sat back in her red velvet chair, unmoving, I wondered if Grandmother had died. If she had savored a last bitter happiness after I admitted the evil I’d done in this world and then, pleased with herself, expired.
If only.
Had I the Gift, I might have known better. I might have known that as I passed through the years, I would do so with Grandmother always at my back—remaining stubbornly, infuriatingly, alive and lucid.
Two of those decades later, I was twenty-seven and still sitting in the dirt at the foot of her chair, from which the velvet was all gone. Grandmother was unchanged since the day she told me I twice murdered my mother, except that her pipe was empty and unlit: she couldn’t smoke anymore, said it made her cough too much, so she spent her days chewing the cold pipe stem and spitting.
Grandmother was my father’s mother, and she cared for him above all else. Nothing ever seemed good enough for her son, and so we couldn’t understand how she had come to genuinely love and miss her daughter-in-law. But she did, fiercely.
It was to Papa that Grandmother had passed the Gift, and through him that it was meant to go to me. The Gift had been in our family for generation upon generation, through thousands of years; farther back than even Loashti nobles traced their lineages, let alone poor nomads like us. The Gift cared not for gender, legitimacy, national boundaries, nor family name, and was all that delineated our family down through the ages.
Until me.
Autumn Furs
At the end of autumn in that, my twenty-seventh year, our horse died. The following day, I untied the furs that had been stored neatly at the peaks of our tents. The soft remains of long-dead polecats, wolves, and marmots tumbled down, thick and stale, smelling like the previous winter in the kingdom of Quruscan: all cold mutton and maple and mildew. We had spent this autumn, which was now ending, on a grassy hill in the Great Field, north of the town of Gniezto, in the kingdom of Masovska.
Our goal was to keep from starving to death during the onrushing winter, just like it was every autumn. But now we were stranded with no horse, serving our few customers and building up meager winter supplies, which would mean nothing if we froze in our tents. I tried not to think of all the ways we could die before spring, nor of how we would ever afford a new horse. For now, I could only roll down the furs to keep out the cold winds.
These winds had cut through the Great Field all autumn, and would only worsen in winter, as I remembered from previous years we had spent here. At least when the snows came, we could winter among the tents crowding the Ruinous Temple. Perhaps it would have been better to go broke buying Papa a room in an inn, with four walls and a roof, but our family’s way has always been to move. Walls are traps.
In my time, we moved from place to place at a greater speed than even my ancestors had. We did so to escape reprisals, you see: sometimes long before my ruses were discovered, and sometimes fleeing angry mobs. I was, after all, lacking the Gift, and therefore an inveterate liar.
The Gift
The Gift is that of prophecy and soothsaying. Anyone possessing it can see the future, with limitations: the most important being that the better known a subject is to the bearer of the Gift, the less can be seen. Such a future is, to put it simply, blocked by the clarity of the present. This is why Papa and Grandmother couldn’t see my future, nor their own, nor each other’s, and why no one saw my mother’s death coming. This is also why a fortuneteller must make her living telling the futures of strangers, rather than making herself very rich by knowing whom to befriend, whom to kill, or where to open a changing bank. The moment any threads threaten to involve the soothsayer, she is less likely to see their ends.
This limitation can be stretched and twisted when the bearer of the Gift is near death. Papa almost died of sickness and starvation when he was looking after my mother in her final days, and it was in a fit of near-death, when his spirit was not so close to us, that he gained the distance to see that the Gift would never be mine. Knowing this, of course, killed my mother. Finally. Again.
These capricious workings of the Gift are another reason I prayed for Grandmother to finally die, as was her due. Perhaps on her deathbed she could tell us if there was any chance of the Gift skipping a generation, of my child not being hollow like its mother. However, by the time I hit my mid-twenties, she seemed to have decided the line ended with my father. Perhaps, in her old age, she once came closer to death than she ever let on, foresaw my failure, and then clawed her way back to life to continue tormenting me?
I often wonder whether the Gift is in me somewhere, and instead of being broken, I am simply too stupid to access it.
The Great Field
Masovska’s Great Field was not very great. It was less than a mile wide, and only a few miles long. In Quruscan’s minor steppes, for comparison, the grass could stretch in every direction until you got lost and spun in circles and felt as though you were drowning on a dry sunny day. I have heard that the major steppes drove travelers insane, and had oak-high grasses riddled with the corpses of birds in sizes never seen by polite civilization. The birds had, supposedly, lost their minds and their way as surely as any human traveler.
The so-called Great Field, however, was just a patch of shrubs and hills, with a sad old ruin in the middle. This Ruinous Temple had been constructed long before recorded history, from that supposedly unbreakable stone of the Ancients, before it was, somehow, torn apart. The prevailing theory was that the Ancients built the place to enact the hubristic, and ruinous, act of speaking the gods’ names out loud, thus dooming themselves. (No one ever seemed to ask how many names they got through before disaster struck.) Whatever its origin, from the Ruinous Temple you could see, and hear, the forests at the Field’s borders. I suppose the Field was considered “Great” because most of Masovska was forest: the kind where trees grow so tightly into one another that there’s no room for air or light, yet somehow giant boar and packs of wolves can slip between. The Great Field may well have been Masovska’s only field that was not human-made.
But, I suppose, to those who had seen no better, the Field could be “Great,” and in those days, it bustled with commerce right up to the edge of winter. Due to a local ordinance about A Certain Sort of Business, one could always find merchants, hucksters, prostitutes, mystics, messiahs, revolutionaries, and others who didn’t fit Masovska’s mores camping out in those shrubs and hills outside of Gniezto. The most lucrative ones formed a marketplace in the Ruinous Temple, which led to fistfights and sales wars, until winter chased away those who could afford to run.
We untrustworthy parties banished to the Great Field maintained cold cordiality with one another: businesslike, but never trusting. I have heard of fanciful thieves’ guilds—secret criminal societies buttressed by codes and mutual respect—that may or may not have existed outside of stories, but the trick of the Great Field was that everyone there felt themselves to be more legitimate than the rest. Surely one was dishonest, but he was not sacrilegious; while another was sacrilegious, but not foreign; and the foreigner could at least be sure that she was not unladylike; and the unladylike knew that she was not some disloyal dissident; and so forth. This way of looking at one’s neighbors was not conducive to respect or professional courtesy.
When winter arrived, most residents fled to more sturdy surroundings in towns and villages, where they continued to bicker, but those like us who could not afford traditional lodgings would crowd uneasily beneath huge canvases, heavy with snow, in the Ruinous Temple. I had pleasant memories of this arrangement from childhood, back when new smells, new voices, and excessive cold made things exciting. Papa told stories back then, and made it an adventure, but later I saw how close we came to having our food, clothes, and furs stolen. Not that a stable community has ever been quick to shelter my family either: few care for the survival prospects of an invalid huckster, his diminished shadow of a daughter, and his rancorous mother.
It lay upon me to keep Papa (and, I suppose, Grandmother) from starving in winter, and this year I was doing a terrible job. We did not have enough salted meat or kasha for half the season, and we could not even eat our poor horse. Yellow blight had sent the poor beast off to canter unsteadily across the sky with his twenty-legged horse god, and his meat was quite poisonous (although his hide would serve to patch up our tents). So, on the morning that I set the tent-furs, I saw a horrid bird landing on our hill, and hoped that it carried good news.
A Lammergeier
The bird was a huge, red-eyed lammergeier, with black and white streaked wings longer than I was tall, and a body the bronze of sunset. It carried a message from Ramunas, for whom a gray messenger pigeon would have been passé.
The curled parchment tied to the beast read: “GNIEZTO SQUARE, TOMORROW MORNING. FOR EIGHT-TOES. —RAMUNAS.” As though such a message could have come from anyone else. For tasks like this he had bought this terrifying bird, had it trained, barely, by handler-mages, and forced me to disengage the parchment from its gnarled, angry claws. I think the thing sneered at me as it flew away.
Ramunas was an ostentatious informant who often helped me form my false prophecies: he seemed to know everything that went on in the town of Gniezto, and the greater Gniezto Oblast that surrounded it. I had met him early during this stay in the Great Field, and his information had more than once paid for itself. Whether or not I liked him, he was effective and cheap, and always seemed to know a little more than anyone else I could afford. How such a flamboyant and theatrical man learned so many secrets was still beyond me. I had told him that even a prophet needed a bit of help and context for her visions, at times—which, in my father’s day, had been true—and Ramunas either believed me or did not care about my legitimacy.
What Ramunas had to tell me about a customer I knew as Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way, or why it needed to be said in Gniezto proper, I did not know. But a promise of decent information, even for a price, was welcome. All good news was holy, just then.
Once I was sure the flying beast was gone, I checked in on Papa and assured him that, yes, there actually had been a great bronze bird. I held his shaking, sweaty hand and kissed his red-brown brow until he went back to sleep.
Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way
When he had been able, Papa had taught me how to get by as a soothsayer on observation and generalities, which even those with the Gift must employ. I can often tell a man he will throw out his back if I see how he carries his goods, or tell a pretty young woman she has an admirer because of course she does. One with no skill, like myself, can do decent business with finesse: telling customers what is apparent, what they want to hear, and what is deeply vague. The rest is made up through theatricality, distraction, and research, such as that which comes by lammergeier.
Which brings us to Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way. Gustaw was the best sort of customer: a returning one. Fourteen years previous, our travels had brought us to the Great Field. Back then, Papa had still been the soothsayer, even as his health failed and his mind hiccoughed, and Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way had possessed a shorter name.
On a summer day in that year, Gustaw and his stupid friends drank at the Ruinous Temple market and stumbled about the Great Field, laughing and fighting and sweating as men in their early twenties do when they’re drunker on blazing sunlight than ale. Sallow Gniezto residents lose their minds when they are not shaded by trees. At our tents, Gustaw’s stupid friends dared him into a session with the spooky, exotic, legless soothsayer. I curtsied carefully and pivoted to usher Gustaw inside to see my father. His stupid friends leered at me and retched shredded goat meat onto the green grass.
Papa could barely do his job by the time I was thirteen. He was no longer the unflappable, endlessly confident prophet of my early years, who could recite perfect mixtures of truth and lie while running about on his hands faster than most men did on their legs. No, that day, seated on his great pillow, his hands shook, knocking over candles and ruining the mystique, and he often forgot the very real futures the Gift showed him. He did manage to blurt out that if Gustaw wasn’t careful, his left foot would be injured. Gustaw laughed his way outside, where his stupid friends burned their pale skins in the sun and suggested that the legless man only wanted to put a scare in him.
Based on the name Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way, I’m sure you can guess what followed. Gustaw and his stupid friends got into a drunken altercation that night with a man who was not drunk, and who was armed. A cross-guarded sabre took off Gustaw’s big toe and the one next, along with a triangular section of his foot.
