Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  The children made up stories, imagining a lonely goatherd looking for a missing animal, following an obscure path through the rocks up the mountain to find a silvery stream where he bent down to drink, and stopped, hand cupped, hearing a divine wordless song from the spring; or someone from the plains, like, say, a great leader, or a boy everyone laughed at, haunted by dreams of music, leading their people up to find the music’s source. Something like that might have been true.

  The Voice had a number of other names; sometimes they called it the Great Music, or the Chord of Chords, or the Immaculate Chime or the Golden Drone or the First or the Final or the Seven-Fold or the Thousand-Fold or the Constant Echo. The names of the god were as multiplicitous as its nature was simple, but that was a deficiency in the men who’d named it, not in the god itself. Arjun always favored Voice. Why not? It spoke to him.

  The Choir, the Mothers and Fathers said, was an echo of the Voice. They devoted their lives to that echo, bringing it out into Gad and down onto the plains. And in the Choir’s corridors, or out in Gad, you could sometimes hear a tiny pure fragment of the Voice itself, as if it was carried on the wind, or as if it unfolded itself out of silent space within you.

  (Years later, as they lay in bed together in her flat in Ebon Fields, Arjun would try to describe it to Olympia: “Sometimes, you could be talking to someone right next to you, and they would hear it, though you couldn’t. They’d tilt their hands to one side and fall silent. Smiling. Or sometimes they cried, but with relief. Or both. We’d wait for it to pass: we knew what it was like. It was very important. I don’t think I can explain.” She didn’t quite understand; he didn’t mind.)

  The Voice was present in this intermittent and reflected way everywhere in Gad, but there was only one place where it was perpetual and pure. The Voice was alone, high in the central spire, above the hall where the Choir sang at twilight. When a student was ready to be elevated, it would communicate an obscure signal to the Choirmen, and they would bring the student into its presence, to be sounded.

  Arjun should have felt pride, but he was hollowed out by fever. When Mother Abayla and Father Julah came for him at dawn, two days later, he went with them quietly.

  They led Arjun up the winding stair in the central spire. His legs were still unsteady. They climbed into the round hall where the Choir would meet that evening.

  The stairs wound up around the outside of the hall into the rafters. Silver bells hung in the darkness beside them, ascending in a stately spiral. The heaviest and deepest tones, known as the Oxen, were the lowest-hanging; at the peak of the spiral the highest were delicate as little silver birds. Father Julah flicked dust from the highest bell with his sleeve and a shiver of sound ran down the spiral, plunging down the octaves into the shadows. Mother Abayla clucked at him and he hung his bearded head, shamefaced.

  Mother Abayla unlocked a door under the shadow of the eaves and they walked through a dim attic. A wrought-iron staircase at the end of the attic spiraled up into the roof. At the top of the stair, Arjun opened a hatch and climbed up into the Chamber.

  It occupied the pinnacle of the spire. It was impossible to see the Chamber from the ground; Arjun was surprised to learn that it was made of glass. The sheets of clear glass were supported by a frame of black iron girders and beams and struts of dark wood. The sky outside was the pale grey of dawn.

  Arjun sat cross-legged and waited. He heard no music, only the quiet creaking of the glass and iron and wood of the frame around him. The wind whistled through the cracks. The room swayed slightly, barely perceptibly, there at the spire’s tip.

  He sat in silence, listening to the wood’s tense creaking. At the edge of hearing, the glass panes produced a shrill, silvery, drawn-out screech as the frame stretched and squeezed and swayed in the wind. His mind was very clear and empty.

  He focused on the creaking of the wood for a long time. The sound was senseless and shapeless. So he adjusted his attention and brought the sound of the wind within his grasp as well. The two sounds worked quietly against each other. There was the echo of a melody, and the beginnings of a rhythm, so slow and quiet that a less well-trained ear could never detect it.

  He let his head hang down and expanded his attention again to encompass the sounds of the glass and the iron, then the silent sounds of the stone; then the sounds of the birds outside, the building, the quiet paths worn by the robed Choirmen; the sounds of the town and the river. He felt for a shape, a structure in the drifting susurrus.

  At the edge of his focus, he found it. It was so quiet and slow and simple that it was barely there at all. Music came from the walls and from the sky, and from beyond and behind the sky. The edge of a vast presence was reaching gently into the Chamber. If he reached out, he could touch it. It worked a transfiguration on all the sounds it entered into; it played an impossibly beautiful music on the strings of the Chamber, and on the dome of the world. Arjun felt the clutching weeds retreat. He felt very clear and pure. He felt sad, but capable of great goodness and strength. The Voice whispered to him and held him.

  He came down in the evening with tears dried on his face. Mother Abayla and Father Julah helped him down in respectful silence, holding his thin arms, locking the door behind them.

  The next day, Arjun took the tonsure and put on the black robe. He moved into a journeyman’s office, on the second floor. He took on students in the evening, teaching them languages. Some of them were his age, or older. None of them shared his talent, but he tried to be patient and kind with them. For a long time, he felt reconciled to everything, and gladly so.

  A rjun was not the last person to hear the Voice, but he was nearly the last. In the months after he left its presence, it called for only two more students, two girls a little older than him. They were the last students to be elevated.

  No one knew exactly when the Voice started to withdraw. That made it harder. Four months after Arjun heard it, Father Pulli returned from the Chamber confused and frightened, and confessed to Mother Abayla that he had listened for a whole day and heard nothing. The Mothers and Fathers assembled to discuss his problem. They were very concerned. Was he too impatient? Was he distracted, somehow? They let him know that they loved him and wanted to help him.

  Later, they realized that Father Pulli was surely not the first to come back from the Chamber without hearing the Voice, but only the first to admit it. They remembered how many of their colleagues had seemed distant, irritable, and confused. How many had been lying, perhaps for weeks? Mother Kinnaka came back from the Chamber claiming to have heard the Voice when no one else could, but said that it was dwindling, losing its way, falling into mere noise. No one knew whether to believe her.

  They could only conceal it from the students for so long. Their fear and confusion were too obvious to hide. And it was no longer possible to hear the Voice drifting on the air. The absence was hardly noticed at first—it had never happened very often, anyway—but it became more painful as the months went by.

  The Choir was like a fading echo. Without the Voice reverberating through its walls, the Choristry was just a big ugly black building, cold and shadowy and cluttered. What was its point? There was no music in it. Quite literally there was no music in it: the walls and spires had been carved artfully with flutes and runnels and chines, molded and mouthed with reeds of steel and silver and glass so that, while the Voice was present, the whole structure whistled and murmured a soft constant chant that rose and fell with the wind; now the noise alternated shrill and flat, and arrhythmic and senseless like the whine of mosquito wings, and it kept everyone awake at night. During the day, their rituals seemed empty and pedantic. The children became like any other children who had been taken from their parents and set to work hard in dark rooms. They became nervous, angry, bitter. The Voice wasn’t there to comfort them. The Mothers and Fathers were hard teachers, unsympathetic masters.

  (Years later, Arjun would try to tell the city how it felt; Olympia would be polite, while others, many
others, laughed or rolled their eyes, but no one understood; Ararat was too rich in gods to understand poverty.)

  Fewer and fewer students came to Arjun’s office to study. The words came much harder without the Voice. Most gave up.

  Every evening, Arjun passed by the workshops on his way to dinner. They grew emptier as the Voice’s absence stretched out. The wires and springs twisted out of the students’ hands; they lost their patience and dashed their work against the wall.

  Two years went by. Some of the older students realized that the Voice would never call on them now, and walked out into Gad, or onto the plains. Two of the apostates found work in the office of Gad’s Headman, where they raised bitter, pointed questions about the Choristry’s tax status. The Choirmen created a committee to handle negotiations with Gad. Then there was fighting in the market, between some students and the boys from the town. The debate over who should punish them was tense.

  Three years after he last came back from the Chamber, Father Pulli hung himself in his office. It was days before they found him. Others followed, as if Pulli’s death had finally given them license.

  They still went down onto the plains sometimes, and the plainsmen were still grateful for their medicines, but it was hard to find any song to sing them. And the plainsmen kept their children back, if they were elder sons or useful on the farm or in the business; they brought only surplus children to be tested. The Choirmen couldn’t bring themselves to take the sniveling, distrustful infants, even if they showed promise. They couldn’t see the point.

  Gad was no longer willing to supply the Choristry, and the Choristry was no longer willing to share with Gad, so they started to trade. They put Arjun to work on the accounts, with Father Uttar’s group, for a couple of years. He believed the Headman’s office was cheating them. He made a report to the committee, and negotations went on over his head. The graft continued and his next report was ignored. He supposed they got something in exchange for turning a blind eye, but he never knew what it was. He couldn’t see the purpose of what he was doing.

  The Voice kept him going. He held it close as long as he could, but it grew pale and thin and brittle, slipping away like any other childhood memory.

  W orking in the archives, digging through forgotten texts, Arjun conceived a plan. He went to Father Julah first. He sat on the edge of the sofa and thought about how to make his point.

  There was a mirror sitting behind Julah’s head. Sometimes, while he conducted tutorials, Julah would look into it and groom his beard (greying now) with a pair of tiny gold scissors; he seemed to enjoy company for the act—though he did that less often these days. Arjun could see his own reflection in it. Thin, dark, and intense. Perhaps too intense. He tried to compose his face into a persuasive compromise between reason and passion. But this was no time for too much tact, and he spoke firmly.

  “Father. The Voice is gone. We are like an unstrung harp. There is no breath in us. It will not come back.”

  Julah was silent for a moment. “Arjun, I’ve always tried to help you. I think you know that. But all I can counsel now is patience. These are hard times.”

  “Patience? What are we waiting for? Without the Voice, we have no purpose. We can’t go on. Another decade, maybe, no more. Gad will swallow us. The plains will turn their back. We can’t take any more students. It wouldn’t be right. What do we have to offer them? The Voice is not coming back. It’s been too long. I don’t know whether it can’t reach us anymore, or whether we drove it away, or it tired of us…but it is not coming back.”

  “Do you remember Leb? He came to me, talking like this, not long ago. He left us, Arjun. I don’t want you to do that. Are you asking me whether you should leave?”

  Arjun looked Julah in the eye. “Yes. I am asking you for permission to leave. Wait; listen: I ran away, once. You brought me back, and up into the presence of the Voice. Now I need to go away again. This time, I’ll bring the Voice back to you.”

  H e told Julah, and he told Abayla, and then he told various subcommittees, and finally, standing in the great shadowy hall, he told all the Choirmen assembled in council, like big black crows in their robes. He asked them if they had heard of a city called Ararat, to the north, on the other side of the world.

  They’d heard the stories. A city of unthinkable size and age, marking a line across the northernmost edge of all the Choristry’s maps; beyond that line was nothing but the city, borderless, un-charted, a great question mark. A hundred counts and dukes and parliaments and churches fought over those mazy streets.

  They had heard the stories about the gods in Ararat. Everyone had: in Ararat, a thousand gods walked the streets. The city itself gave birth to gods, they said, and was half fevered with their worship. The Choirmen had heard that a great bird visited the city’s skies; that a haunt of smoke and mirrors slipped through the theaters, behind the red curtains, crazing the city’s dreams; that there was a hunger in the canals. In Ararat, their own dear Voice would be just one presence of many. It was painful to think of that.

  Arjun dug out texts scavenged from the vaults, works of theology and science by Ararat’s scholars, and read the relevant passages to the Choirmen. He made his case to them. First, the Voice had removed its presence from Gad. They could sit in the Chamber straining their ears until they starved and they would not hear it. Gad was dying. Second, Ararat was alive, its streets were fertile soil for divinity; and third, Ararat, he told them—jabbing his finger at the relevant sections of Kamisar’s Discourse on Theogeny (Consider the city not as a spider in the center of her web, but as a ball sitting on a sheet of gum-rubber; consider the depression it causes in the stuff of the world)—drew the world’s divine presences to it. Hungry for gods, it stole them from the rest of the world. He offered examples drawn from history books and scribblings in the margins of old scrolls. Where else but Ararat could the Voice have gone? Perhaps it was lost in Ararat’s streets now, or sounding in some empty steeple; and finally, therefore it could be followed. Arjun could follow it, find it, bring it back to them. At the very least, if he searched the streets of the city of gods, he could find some clue as to where the Voice had come from and where it had gone.

  The Council was skeptical. He thought they wouldn’t have let him go if Julah had not persuaded them, and he thought Julah had only done that because otherwise Arjun would slip away like a thief in the night, and Julah wanted to spare him the disgrace.

  Arjun himself had little hope that he could bring the Voice back to Gad. In fact, he couldn’t even imagine how that could be done: he was glad they didn’t ask too many questions. He just couldn’t bear to wait anymore; he thought that if he could find the Voice for himself, in some alley, and hear it one more time, that would be enough for him, and it was all he could do.

  B y the time Arjun finally secured the Choir’s blessing, snows blocked the path down from the mountain. He passed the time in his room reading about Ararat and the route there.

  He knew the journey would be dangerous. He found a copy of the soldier-courtier-seducer Anian Girolamo’s Techniques—Military and Amatory, and practiced Girolamo’s instructions for handling a blade, trying to follow the illustrations. He had no way of knowing whether he was getting better.

  He went down in the new year. The Choirmen provided well for him. He had money, and a supply of toys and medicines to trade in places that didn’t recognize money. He took the Girolamo, the Kamisar, and a few other texts, and a knife. Down on the plains, in an alley behind a dance-hall, he bought a pistol.

  He went north slowly over the dry plains. For a while, he traveled with a caravan much like Tsuritsa’s. Later, he rode with a group of cattle hands, lying to them that he was handy with his pistol and on a horse, but he slowed them down and they left him behind.

  The rainy season came and the heavens turned on their axis and poured the seas down over the plains, and the world turned to mud and white floodwater. He stayed in a town called Happal, where he tended the oxen. He slept in the
barn and sang at night to the huge odorous beasts. When the rains lifted, he left the plains; he bought passage downriver on a flat-bottomed barge, which took him north through stinking swamps. Skirting the mountains, he crossed the hills on the back of an ass he bought in a town in the valleys. Winter fell again; he lived in pine-timbered Hokkbur with Ama, the village doctor’s daughter, where they found him exotic and fascinating; he taught her children the piano until it was safe to go on. He paid his way over the vast northern desert on a great machine that roared black smoke and ran on iron tracks over the sand. He had never seen or heard of such a machine. He suspected that the fierce, dark men who claimed to own it understood its workings no better than he did.

  His tonsure grew out. In the desert his skin grew darker and harder, going from brass to stewed tea to old teak, under a gathering black storm of beard. He got used to hunger. He’d always been slight, and delicate; he grew wiry. He had occasion to practice with his gun.

  He crossed the Peaceful Sea on a trading ship out of Ghent. Arjun asked what cargo the small ship carried. With a gap-toothed grin, the captain explained that larger, slower ships might take timber or food, but the real riches and risks in trade with Ararat lay with more esoteric cargoes. That year, his hold was full of animal teeth. Various species. If his intelligence was good, the order of Uktena was flush with money and still persuaded of the sacred significance of these little fetishes. A big if: two years ago, he had brought a cargo of double-backed mirrors for sale to the followers of Lavilokan, only to find that they now considered double-backed mirrors blasphemous for some fool reason. It had nearly ruined him. He touched the mast for luck and shrugged: the city was crazy, what could you do?

  The ship came into the Bay on a bright morning. Arjun barely saw the passing of the Bird. All he saw was a rush of white that lost itself in the city’s skyline. The captain fell to his knees, moaning. Arjun waited tactfully, pleased to find that it didn’t frighten him at all. Perhaps it was an auspicious sign.