‘I. Am. The. Song.’
THE SINGER
The source, Singing City, Pechacan, Empire of Songs
I am the song and the song is me. The song is bloody and needful and will be fed.
This is my will, and cannot be opposed.
This Empire that I have created resounds to my song, my name. The people are mine to use as I need. It is my will that drives them, my rule that cows them, my desires that shape them. I exist in the blood of them and they will give me blood in return. It is I who allows them to sleep and I who rouses them to war. I who strengthen the weak and discard the useless.
I will feed from them and my song will grow.
I am their strength and will, and they are the knife and club of my retribution and we will sweep through the Yaloh and Tokob and batter them into the ground. Their fields are mine, their homes are mine, their lives are mine.
Their blood is mine.
The Melody will bring these ejab to me and I will peel their flesh for the Setatmeh to feast on. I will cut their spines from their bodies. I will roast them over coals from the feet up and feed their meat to my council.
My song will drive them to ruin. Those who live will do so in the agony of their wrongdoing.
I am the song and it is bloody.
I am the song and it is war.
LILLA
Southern Yalotlan, near the border with Xentiban
196th day of the Great Star at morning
So thirsty, and throbbing pain in his head and jaw exacerbated by dehydration. All around him the groans and mutters and low, hopeless laments of Tokob and Yaloh.
As he had for the last however many days, Lilla woke and tried to remember what had happened. Just fragments, scattered, parts of it coming to him at odd moments or out of sequence, other parts of it lost, maybe forever.
There’d been darkness and then arrows, he knew that. Shouting orders, one of them for someone to stay low and hidden, but he didn’t know who. Couldn’t remember their face or name. Warriors in the dark, and a dart that went into his elbow, sharp and hot like fire, and then he was running and fighting, but his arm was going numb and his tongue was getting thick in his mouth. Warriors, more fighting, and he couldn’t find a clear space to stop and identify the poison or the medicine to counter it. His throat was a thin hollow reed that whistled and his tongue flopped over it, blocking it, and he couldn’t breathe and he was on his knees and there was a club, arcing into the sky above him and then falling, falling, falling.
And then nothing.
And then pain in a band around the back of his head, in his ears, and his jaw that clicked whenever he worked his mouth. Pain that made it hard to think, that made him slow to hear and to respond and to move, his limbs not under his control.
Lilla lay in the leaf-litter with the others, some huddled together against the chill, the rest separate, as far as the ropes would allow them to get. Together or apart, each was alone, locked in a private misery of hurts and fears.
Footsteps passed his head and Lilla tucked his chin to his chest and tensed his sore muscles. Nobody hit him this time and slowly he uncurled and blinked at the greying dawn and the small fire where the dog warriors of the Empire of Songs were clustered.
‘… awake? Lilla, you awake?’
He knew that voice. Maybe. Blearily, and wincing at the clicking in his neck, he turned his head. A woman. A warrior. Scar on her chin. Couldn’t remember her name.
‘Are you with us? We’re going to do it today. In an hour, just before we start to march. All right? You’re with us, Fang, yes?’
Lilla put his head down in the leaf-litter and closed his eyes. Fang? The constant whine in his head was a little quieter today; perhaps whatever had broken inside him was healing. Would heal faster if he had some water. So thirsty.
Daylight bright behind his eyelids and sudden chaos. Lunging and shadows flickering. A wrench on the rope around his neck, the one that tied him to the others, and Lilla’s eyes opened and he squinted. Eight lines of twenty. Eight long ropes with twenty warriors on them. He knew that; he’d counted that. Yesterday?
The warriors on Lilla’s rope were on their feet, kicking and lunging, trying to scramble away or grab weapons from the dog warriors, but it was hard; everyone had a second rope around their waists, and their hands were tied to it. They had some movement, but not enough to wield a knife at anything other than the closest of quarters. The dogs guarding them, of course, didn’t need to get close. They had spears.
He rolled onto his knees, pain lancing through his head so he made a noise low in the back of his throat. He stayed there a few seconds, fighting down nausea, and then planted his right foot and pushed, stood wobbling.
‘Fight,’ screamed the woman with the scarred chin. ‘Lilla, fight.’ But then she couldn’t say any more because there was a spear in her chest and it had stolen her words and her breath. Her heart. Her life. They ripped the obsidian out of her body – a pretty green glass, unusual and winking in the sun where it wasn’t stained red – and she fell, and all over the clearing other people were falling, strings of them, one after another or in clumps. Some were screaming or praying and a few simply cowered, and everyone on their feet was cut down.
The man next to him pulled back onto his knees. ‘Stay down. It’s over. Fucking over,’ he said. Young, he was, and big. Lilla didn’t know his name.
He tried to make sense of it all, to understand the faces that leered at him and screamed up close, jeering and prodding him with the butts of spears. Were they spirits? His ancestors? Something hit him in the back, pushing him off balance. He tried to put his hands out but they wouldn’t leave his sides – oh, the rope – and his cheek slapped the dirt and the pain exploded in his head again and it went dark. Not the world, just his eyes. Black.
Water. Blood-warm and sweet, in his mouth. Nectar. Lilla swallowed and there was more, the pressure of a vessel against his lower lip, and the sensation of someone lifting his head, their fingers digging into the monstrous hurt that was the base of his skull, but the water … oh, the water was good.
He drank again, and again, and they let him have as much as he wanted in small, patient sips and the more he swallowed the clearer his vision seemed to get until eventually he looked up and saw a face he knew. Male, a string of red beads in a braid hanging by one ear. A small wooden stud in his lower lip.
‘Hello, Lilla.’
‘Hello,’ Lilla whispered, but then the name floated away again.
‘Time to walk. Up you get.’ The man helped him to stand, carefully. ‘You’ve got some stitches in the back of your head and the shaman thinks your skull might have cracked. You should be feeling better by the time we reach the Singing City and they’ll assess whether you can join the Melody.’
Lilla nodded, not understanding most of it, just happy to see a friendly face. The line of people in front of him began to move and there was a tug on his neck as the rope tightened. Lilla followed.
The movement and the water focused his mind as it had focused his eyes and he looked around. They were moving east and south, as far as he could tell. And now that he concentrated, he recognised most of the faces around him, sullen and bloody and filthy though they were. The warriors – the survivors – of his war party.
Stay.
The word echoed in his head and Lilla remembered it. Remembered saying it as the ambush was sprung and his people began to die around him. Stay.
Tayan.
Stumbling, Lilla scanned the lines for his husband’s familiar slender form, the blue of his kilt or the particular set of his head when he was being stubborn. Couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see him.
The survivors of Lilla’s war party gathered together, tied like sheaves of palm, and Tayan wasn’t with them. Tayan, called the stargazer. Shaman. Peace-weaver. The keeper of Lilla’s heart. Gone.
Lilla put his head on one side and let a thick cable of wet hair fall across his mouth; he sucked the rain out of it, licked the moisture f
rom his own shoulders, his upper lip. It wasn’t enough.
As if he’d been waiting for this, the familiar man, the face he knew, appeared at his side. He matched his pace to Lilla’s and held a gourd to his lips – the warrior managed a few awkward gulps that were gone too soon, barely wetting his throat. But then, there in his mind, as if washed clean by the water, was the name.
‘Dakto,’ he breathed.
The Xenti smiled. ‘Ah, you’re back with us. You’ve been unconscious or just gone for days now – we were starting to think you were permanently damaged. I suppose you still might be. We’ll know in time.’
‘What are … Why …’ Lilla looked at his own bonds and then glanced back at the warrior behind him; she was staring at Dakto with fixed, unrelenting hatred. ‘Why aren’t you roped?’
‘Because I am loyal.’
‘I don’t … I don’t understand.’
Dakto snorted and gave him a little more water, brushing the hair back out of Lilla’s eyes for him. ‘Of course you don’t,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a broken head. The others all figured it out days ago. I am a Whisper, a macaw of the Fourth Talon of the Melody. Ilandeh and I were sent to Tokoban to learn about you so that we could bring you under the song with the fewest possible lives lost. To save you.’ His smile seemed genuine and Lilla smiled back. It was only polite.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said again, apologetic.
Dakto squeezed the back of his neck. ‘Don’t worry: everything will make sense when you’re under the song – we’re only a few sticks away now. Everything will change then, Lilla.’
They walked for a while in silence. None of it made the least bit of sense. ‘Where’s Tayan?’ Lilla asked suddenly, remembering.
Dakto’s mouth went thin. ‘Dead, most likely,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s best just to forget him now. Concentrate on carving a new life for yourself. One dedicated to peace and discipline and prosperity for all. You’ll love it, Lilla,’ he added, light in his face. ‘Oh, how you’ll love the Empire of Songs and the knowledge you’re part of something truly great, truly unique. A warrior with a purpose.’
‘Malel. The ancestors,’ he managed, but his mind was clouding over again as if Dakto had stuffed it with too many pictures and ideas. He could only cling to one. Tayan was dead. Tayan was dead.
‘Lilla?’
Knees striking dirt.
‘Lilla? Wait, stop! One of the injured is down again.’
Black.
‘So you’re a Pecha?’
Dakto grinned at the belligerence in his tone. ‘Someone’s feeling better. You look it, too. Don’t have that moon-mad, blank-eyed gaze your frog-lickers walk around with any more.’
Despite the insults, he was quick to hold a gourd of water to Lilla’s lips. It was warm and bitter with herbs. Lilla balked at the first mouthful, but then identified the familiar taste of healing medicine. He drank it gratefully and his head, which hurt just as much today but seemed to work better, cleared some more.
‘But to answer your question, I’m half-Pecha. My mother was a shaman of the Xentib. Her ancestors told her that Xentiban would be brought under the song. When she tried to tell her village elders, they refused to heed her word. Blind and stupid, like your people, like the Yaloh. She lived near the border with Pechacan, so she crossed over and she listened to the song and she learnt its truth. Its greatness. She tried again to tell the village the best thing they could do when my people – my father’s people – came was to embrace the song. Again they would not listen, but this time in their ignorance the elders banished her. She returned to Pechacan and offered her services as a shaman to my father, as a paid servant. He agreed, intrigued by her cleverness. A few years later, I was born.’
‘She sold herself into slavery?’
Dakto’s punch doubled Lilla over, and the warriors he was tied between stumbled as he dragged, wheezing, at the rope around their necks.
‘My mother was never a slave. And neither am I.’
Dakto hauled Lilla upright. ‘I am half-Pecha and a Whisper. I am elite among the macaws. You are nothing, lower than the mould beneath my sandal, and you will die as nothing unless you take the song within you and become a Pecha in your heart as you never can be in blood.’
Lilla breathed around the fire in his ribs. Dakto had held nothing back in that punch and it had woken the agony in his skull. He pushed, regardless. ‘Nothing, am I? That’s not what you thought when you wanted to fuck me,’ he said and blew a kiss at Dakto. The warriors tied before and behind him jeered and whistled. ‘Do you have to practise being Pechaqueh in your heart, too? Seeing as you’re only a half-blood.’
‘Nothing you say will affect my loyalty,’ Dakto said, but without heat.
‘You knew freedom in the Sky City for a year,’ Lilla croaked after a long pause to collect his scattered thoughts. A half-blood would never be as respected as a full Pecha. Perhaps that gave them some common ground. ‘You had friends among the Tokob, a home, and food. You hunted with us; you fought with us. You had a life with us, Dakto. You could have that again. A partner, children. Freedom.’
‘I am already free. And I am loyal to the Empire.’
‘You may be loyal, but are you really free?’ Lilla asked. ‘Your mother may never have worn the slave brand, but it sounds like she sold herself to your father nonetheless. How much did she get to choose what happened to her after that – and how much do you?’
The medicine had dried his mouth and added an almost manic edge to his thoughts. He had no idea whether his words were making sense, or what Dakto’s reaction to them might be. He did his best to brace himself for another punch.
The Whisper was silent for twenty steps. ‘Fuck you, Toko,’ he snarled eventually, and stamped off towards the head of the column.
‘Nicely done,’ the woman behind him said. ‘That piece of shit.’
There were still many things Lilla couldn’t remember, but the pain and rage he felt confirmed one definite truth: Dakto had been a friend, part of Lilla’s Paw, and a trusted warrior. And it had all been a lie.
In return for his betrayal, Lilla would find his weakness and he’d slip a chisel into that crack and split him open for the vultures to feed upon. He clung to the notion, gripping it tight so that he didn’t have to acknowledge the agony in his head or the persistent scream in his ears. Or Tayan being dead.
They walked for a few more hours and then the song was there, without warning, impossible and overwhelming and there, outside him and inside and everywhere in between. Music in his blood and muscles, in his bones and organs, heart and balls. Entrancing, beautiful, possessing. As if he belonged to it. The string of captives came to a ragged halt, those on the other side of the invisible line of magic asking what was wrong, those within the song stumbling, shaking their heads like dogs dislodging flies.
The dog warriors were laughing, though surely it had been the same when they were first captured.
‘Here.’ Dakto had appeared by his side again, a lightness in his step and smile. He reached out and put both his hands over Lilla’s ears; the song continued unabated and unmuffled. He wasn’t hearing it normally, the way he heard everything else. It was inside him. Lilla’s mouth dropped open.
Dakto was watching him intently, that lopsided smile still there. He removed his hands and took a deep, satisfied breath. ‘Now do you see who we are, the blessing and power of our magic? Now you know the merest sliver of our glory.’
‘Glory?’ Lilla asked, raising his voice over the song and provoking another burst of laughter from the warriors guarding them. ‘How is being forced to listen to something glory? It’s just another form of slavery – we have no choice but to listen, as your slaves have no choice but to obey.’
Dakto sighed, his disappointment clear. ‘You’ll learn,’ he said. ‘You’ll come to understand it eventually. And I hope you do, Fang Lilla. You’re a good man despite your pettiness earlier; I’d be pleased to fight alongside you for the glory of the
Empire.’
Lilla bared his teeth. ‘I will never fight for the song or the Empire. You don’t have to fight for them either. If we’re in the song, then we’re in Xentiban. Your homeland. You could—’
Dakto laughed, cutting him off. ‘I was born in Pechacan. The only time I’ve spent here has been while bringing these people under the song. I am a macaw of the Melody, a Whisper. I have Pechaqueh blood in my veins and the song in my heart.’
‘You have Xentib blood in your veins too, the blood of free people enslaved. That blood gives you a choice.’
‘No.’ Dakto’s voice was cold. ‘Stop now, Lilla. Listen to the song; embrace it. You’ll understand soon enough. And when you do, your life will truly begin.’
PILOS
Melody fortress, the dead plains,
Tlalotlan, Empire of Songs
204th day of the Great Star at morning
For the second time in a month, the song had swept out of control and cut through them all with clangouring hate and violence and need. And for the second time in a month, Pilos hadn’t been there to help his Singer.
Again, Enet had refused to communicate with him, and all Citla could tell him was that the song contained a power she had never felt before. Enough to shake her spirit almost out of her flesh and send her into a faint from which she’d been slow to recover. The hairs stood up on Pilos’s arms at the thought of what might have happened to him if he’d been communicating through the song at the time. He had none of Citla’s strength or skill; surely he would have been lost.
It was because of the changes to the song, clear even now, ten days later, that they were ready to march early. Eagles, macaws, dogs, and even the more experienced slave warriors had tripled their efforts in response to the unknown threat to the Singer’s safety.
The hawk Talon would accompany the Melody to the capital and take up residence in the large compound on the outskirts to continue their training there. If the war went badly – praise Setatmeh it will not – then they were already a week’s march closer to Yalotlan.
The Stone Knife Page 32