Sword and Song

by Kate Story

  “Tomorrow? When?”

  “Let’s say after sundown.”

  “Where?” He can’t know whether to believe all the man says, but he’ll do anything, anything to see Ari again.

  The Councillor points toward the ruined domed building. “Just past that building there’s a broad, fair avenue. Follow that up, to the top. My home is there.” The man stands, he melts back into the crowd, just another person at the Rush dressed in cheap robes. “I’ll be expecting you.”

  And he is gone.

  “There you are.” It’s Yonah, belly-woman costume awry, face full of relief. “I thought I’d lost you, lad.”

  With a heavy heart, Rowan lets the brothers help him up, and lead him home.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  An Ignorant Legend

  Rowan does not tell the Whetungs about meeting with the Council leader. The whole thing, he considers, is likely a trap. The man obviously knows far more about what’s going on than the brothers hope he does. But it’s a chance, and Rowan decides, after spending all the next day alone in the Whetung’s house, to take it. A chance to help Ari.

  And he remembers Bob’s words. There’s no one to tell you what to do, boy. You must decide.

  That evening, to his relief, the brothers have a meeting to go to. “And you’re staying here,” Yonah says. “You’ve caused enough trouble. Just guess what songs are on everyone’s lips today?”

  “Um . . . songs?” Rowan’s afraid he already knows.

  “From the meanest dock to the top of the city. Something about fake trees, and then some other thing about a knitting devil.”

  “Oh.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “The main question is, what was Sigrid thinking?” Yishay points out.

  “You know musicians. They’re all the same. Hungry for new songs.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rowan says.

  “You don’t understand wanting new songs?”

  “Well, I do, but . . .” There’s something different here. If Sigrid knew it was dangerous for him to sing, then why did she encourage him? And why has everyone learned those two songs so fast? And how in God’s name did they know about The Beatles?

  “Stories and songs come from hell, my beauty,” Yishay explains, as if to a child.

  “All your songs . . . ?”

  “Come from hell. Where you come from,” Yonah elucidates.

  “You don’t write songs?”

  “Write songs?”

  “You know. Make them up for yourselves.”

  The brothers look at him blankly.

  It’s preposterous. “Even I write songs. Not good ones, I grant you, but why can’t you just—”

  “Look, there’s no time to get into every little thing. Ask your new girlfriend next time you see her. Maybe a musician can give you a satisfactory answer. I can’t.”

  “Sorry,” Rowan mutters. His hunger to play a guitar put the brothers in terrible danger. “I really didn’t realize.”

  The brothers’ faces soften. “You keep quiet here now. We’ll be back in a few hours.”

  Rowan can’t bear to lie to them. He tries to smile, and sees them out the door.

  —

  One thing about carrying a sword: if you don’t have a scabbard or a belt, you have to carry it in your hands.

  Rowan puts on the cloak the brothers loaned him before, hoping it will be enough to obscure his identity, and heads out into the city.

  All is quiet; probably most people are recovering from the excesses of Great Night. After a few wrong turns, and a bad interval where he finds himself heading in a direction precisely the opposite of the city square, Rowan gets himself there. The square is abandoned. A waning gibbous moon shines down. Skirting the edge of the open space, Rowan finds the avenue that, as the fake Render said, goes up past the old domed meeting place.

  His heart beats hard, his palms on the sword hilt sweat.

  He heads up the avenue.

  Moonlight illuminates stone buildings, bigger and grander than the ones in the Whetung brothers’ neighbourhood. Wealthy people might live here, or perhaps they’re public buildings. There are no lights, no signs of life. The avenue tilts up, climbing higher. Some voices ahead. Rowan pulls himself back into the shadow of a doorway. The voices echo, pass on unseen.

  He forces himself to continue.

  Footsteps, behind him now.

  He hides in a doorway again. A small group, not talking, pass him by.

  He waits. Nothing.

  The moonlight pulls him forward like a fishing line, reeling him into a world in which things have shifted just a little to one side, fallen out of place, everything now slightly and horribly wrong.

  He turns his head just in time to see the bow staff coming down on him. It strikes him a ringing blow on the side of his skull.

  Rowan falls. The sword jolts out of his hands.

  Through a miasma of pain and blood, he hears metal ringing on cobblestones, sees feet, hands grabbing. A howl of pain as hands touch the sword.

  Curses.

  Another grab for the sword, this time with some garment protecting the hands.

  Before he can do anything, a kick at his head.

  Darkness.

  —

  It feels good to run.

  Rowan was a bit of a track-and-field star in junior high school. In fact, at a school district meet where he cleaned up in the medal department, some guys from other schools dubbed him “Too Tall to be Twelve.” He stopped all that in high school as music became more important.

  But he can still run. He swipes at blood seeping into his eye; his second head wound, here in Antilia. He pushes himself, strides eating up the ground. The thugs have a head start on him, but he’ll catch them.

  He has no idea what he’ll do then.

  He is almost at the top of the city before spotting them. Six guys. Rowan drops back into a shadow and listens.

  One of them is whining about having burnt his hands on the sword. This fills Rowan with satisfaction. The others are telling him to shut it, and one guy—this one sounds like he’s a bit of a leader—says that soon they’ll be able to pay for bandages and more, so shut the fuck up.

  He really says that. It’s so familiar that Rowan feels almost homesick for it. Rallying cry of bullies in this world and the other: shut the fuck up.

  Rowan watches as they make their way over a flight of stone stairs. They seem excited; one broad-shouldered fellow hops and crouches from step to step, throwing his head back and howling at the moon in wolfish facsimile. Leader-voice is a big guy with a square head, shaven bald, which Rowan hasn’t seen much of in this land. Rowan waits until the last has just crested the staircase, then darts out to follow them.

  Grand houses here, carved stone around doorways and windows, beautiful lacy figures and gargoyles; little patches of garden with early spring flowers scenting the night. He moves quietly, as close to the six as he dares.

  As the grand houses lean over them, the thugs get quieter, their voices muttering over the stones like a subterranean stream. Where could they be taking the sword, and why? The bald leader seemed to think they’d get rich off the theft; has someone hired them to do it?

  If Bob Song Tao is right, the sword is a potent symbol. The Council leader has obviously set him up. He wants to take the sword away from Rowan, the Chosen. Stop him from doing anything useful with it.

  Not that he has been—doing anything useful, that is. He wants to hit himself in the face. He’s no good at strategizing—taking a clear-eyed view and coming up with long-term plans—he knows this about himself, his mother has been riding his ass for the last two years about his lack of planning for after high school.

  What, he wonders, would his mother do?

  The six push through a narrow stone archway, and Rowan follows. They must be near the Councilman’s house now, unless he lied about that, too. Rowan looks up and sees, against the almost full moon, something that is big enough to be a
castle. It is dark against the stars, turrets pointing impotently at the sky.

  His mother is possibly one of the most ruthless people he knows. She, Rowan thinks, wouldn’t have hidden in a cellar. She would gather information, and then she would create a noise. Create publicity, use every weapon at her disposal. She wouldn’t think of her own safety—Rowan knows she’s gone into war zones, and remembers a story about her being kidnapped by terrorists before he was born—he can’t remember where, it doesn’t matter . . . Yes, she’d look at everything and say, “I see a council which passes new laws that the people dislike, there’s a sense of discontent and poverty and oppression. There is an organized resistance. I am a person from another world, mistrusted, but my coming is foretold and I even seem to frighten people, especially when I’m clutching this goddamn sword. . . .”

  I am an ignorant legend, but a legend nevertheless.

  Yes. His mother would take all that and . . . and do something.

  They are very close to the castle now. The alley opens out into a sort of small square, and the air is frosty, scented with grass. There are some trees, the first Rowan has seen in this ancient stone city where the buildings are so close together. The gang has gone silent now, their steps have quickened. Rowan can see one of them cradling the rag-wrapped sword in his arms.

  Rowan breaks into a run.

  He sees them turning, senses their shock, and he launches himself through the air.

  He hits the one cradling the sword squarely from behind, arms and legs flailing. They both go down with a crash. Rowan feels the guy’s breath coming out of him with a humph, feels the guy’s forehead crack down on stone. Rowan scrambles to get the sword. Goddamn rags—which end is which? He senses something flashing down at him, flinches away and brings the sword up like a club, knocking the guy’s arm away. Wrapping flying off—there’s the hilt, he has it.

  Rowan surges to his feet, sweeping the sword around in an arc. He feels it connect with something, hears a cry and a guy falls back holding onto his arm.

  “Stay back!” Rowan says. “I don’t want to hurt—”

  But another fellow is coming in— the howling one—and he howls and jumps forward. Christ, this guy is psychotic, and big, a big ape. Rowan backs up, holding the sword in front of him, but the guy keeps coming, he’s not stopping, he’s howling and leaping and—

  Rowan brings the sword down onto his shoulder.

  It’s a shock, how easily it cleaves into flesh. The psycho howling turns into a scream like an animal’s, a high, panicky sound of pain. The guy whirls sideways, dark blood fountaining out from his shoulder in a wet, warm arc. Rowan barely remembers to keep his sword up; another one is coming for him.

  “Stop!” Rowan screams, but they’re not stopping—this one’s launching forward and Rowan tries to slap him aside with the flat of the sword.

  It doesn’t work. He cuts into the guy, feels the sword skipping down over ribs, and then biting deeply into softness. Soundless, the guy crumples onto the ground.

  Two remain on their feet. They’re wary now, staying back out of the reach of Rowan’s sword.

  The guy with the hurt shoulder is screaming. He’s dragging himself along the ground and—no, it’s the one with his guts looping out, he’s trying to stuff them back into himself with his hands, and the sound that’s coming from his mouth—

  “Shut up!” Rowan shouts, idiotically.

  In the moonlight he can see the faces of the two still facing him. One has eyes and mouth gaping open, black in the night like holes. The other is the bald one he pegged as the leader. He’s on his toes, looking for a way in. He’s not giving up.

  “You,” Rowan says, pointing the sword at the bald guy’s chest. “Where were you going? With, with—” he brandishes the sword “—this.”

  The guy doesn’t answer.

  “Tell me!” Rowan hears a hysterical edge to his own voice. Hold on, hold on, stay clear.

  The guy hesitates. Then a smile spreads across his face and he makes a slight turn, a gesture upward.

  Above them, at the top of a wide stone staircase, a great wooden door opens, spilling gold light into the blue air.

  “To the Council,” the thug says.

  And with that he backs off, melting into the shadows. The frightened guy looks from Rowan to his injured mates, and then takes off after the leader with a sound between a sob and a gulp.

  Rowan turns to face the light.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  What Did I See?

  There’s a place, a place where the dead gather.

  Ophelia’s hands are held. Her right is grasped by the frail little hand of the Mender, her left by the firm grip of the Virgo, the one with the blonde hair. The room is impenetrably dark. What she sees is elsewhere, but inside her, too, as if inscribed on the underside of her skull.

  It is a barren plain. Soughing grasses and thistles tuft up between stones, many millions of small, smooth stones carpeting the ground as if left behind by a nameless and long-drained sea. Larger stones loom here and there, punctuating the waste: pointless sentries, megaliths flung by a mad giant.

  The sky never changes. It is grey, like the long twilight of a cloudy day in a season where the sun never sets. It glows without casting light, one can never be free of this half-light. There are no shadows here.

  Around the far edges of the sickly phosphorescence is a pressure-ring of dark. It recedes as Ophelia moves toward it. She is hovering above the landscape like a hummingbird, suspended within the singing.

  The horrible sound twines through her body: threaded, high-pitched wheezing notes, the inhaled breaths of childhood nightmare visitors. There are words, indistinguishable, the edge of one sucked into and blurring the next. The singing penetrates all, carrying Ophelia toward the forever-receding horizon. The darkness encircles, it is the edge of all things.

  Dark shapes, not birds, flit across the sky, pieces of the outer dark.

  Gradually she sees that some of the grey shapes are bodies. People crouch, frozen—no, they move, barely. The movements are purposeless and small. In the distance is a tower: pale, irregular, a stalagmitic excretion of stony soil thrown up toward the sempiternal sky.

  As she moves toward the tower, more bodies come into view. They crouch in postures of pain and boredom, caged in wretched solidity of flesh and bones. The creatures are nearly indistinguishable from the stones. Children, so many children. Many are horribly thin, with the swollen bellies of the starving. Adults, too, also starved, or with bodies that look like they were bludgeoned to death. Others have the bloated, semi-eaten bodies of the drowned; there are many of these.

  Some raise their faces up. They look like they died of grief.

  Ophelia sees non-human people beneath her, too. Parched mermaids, slit from tail to gullet. Centaurs clubbed and beheaded, and satyrs like The Gor dismembered. Demented dryads, their spirit tree cut at the root; cow-headed women stabbed through the heart.

  They crouch too near, lie with and on each other, flesh bruising and softening, melting into each other, seeping endlessly into the parched plain.

  She reaches the tower. At the foot of it lies a maimed and broken warrior. His greenish skin is weeping, his severed head lies on his chest.

  And a dragon. She curls around the broken warrior. She leaks corrosive black blood from her neck, and her eyes weep blood, as do her broken claws and maimed tail and uprooted stump where once was her tongue.

  The dragon weeps and waits in the land of the dead.

  —

  Ophelia snatches her hand away from the Mender.

  The Virgo on the other side of Ophelia stops singing. Her name, Ophelia has learned, is Nancy. It was Nancy who sang at the Games in the coliseum, not the Mender; that’s another thing Ophelia has learned. The Mender is too ill to sing anymore.

  Ophelia sinks to her knees. The carpet, she notices dully, is soft, a pink paisley pattern swirling and reforming. A soft carpet. The copper lamp, the Night Light, flickers at the
Mender’s bedside.

  Pest nestles into her side, looking at her with big eyes. Pim sinks to her haunches, wrapping her arms around Ophelia. The Gor is there, too, and Doctor Capricus. He rarely leaves the Mender’s side.

  “Are you all right, my friend?” asks Pim.

  Ophelia nods. She’s still trembling.

  The Mender lies in a bed with a pale-pink, lacy canopy and pink coverings. “Is everything here pink?” Ophelia had asked Pim days ago, so long ago. Time compresses and extends like an accordion.

  It has been days since the tsunami, but it feels like yesterday, and years ago, too. So much has happened in the ruined city, but also between Ophelia and Nancy and the Mender. For during these days, they have been teaching Ophelia to See.

  Ophelia looks to the Mender. She is so small, her face sunken with exhaustion. She almost disappears beneath the pink covers, that’s how small she is, but is so different from a little body like Pest, who even in sleep radiates energy. She rarely speaks, choosing instead to let Nancy order everything. But Ophelia has seen flashes of something like humour in the dying woman’s eyes. And once or twice, she has caught the Mender looking at her with something almost like hunger. Her frailty makes you want to feel sorry for her, or protective; then Ophelia reminds herself that this is the person who organized the Games, and the executions.

  “What did you See?” Nancy’s deep voice commands an answer.

  Ophelia looks back at the figure in the bed, and The Mender nods, ever so slightly. “I Saw a crowded place.”

  “Crowded?” Nancy’s voice sharpens; she almost looks like she wants to contradict Ophelia.

  “Yes. Full of . . . dying people.” They weren’t exactly dying, but Ophelia can’t think how else to describe them. “And others, too, not just human. Mermaids, and women that looked like trees. . . .” She trails off.

  “What else?”

  There is something about Nancy that makes people want to please her. She rarely smiles, but when she does it’s like the sun comes out; someone would do a lot, Ophelia thinks, just to see that smile. “There were many children, and . . . starved, many of them. And drowned. Beaten. Closer to the centre they were on top of each other, piled up . . .” She shudders and closes her eyes.