Not for hours, and he rubbed his face back and forth against the wood, and threw himself to the stone floor, so the pain would drive all the other voices out of his mind, would let him hear the one voice he searched for, because that was the voice that would save him from the terror that swam every moment closer to the surface where he watched and waited helplessly.
22
The vigil lasted all night. Esste watched as Ansset drove the splinters of the door into his nose and brow and cheeks until blood flowed. She watched as he tried to grip and tear the stone until his nails broke. She watched as he slammed his face into the rock walls until he bled and she feared he would cause permanent damage. It seemed he would never sleep. And in between the self-mutilation he would, in a wooden, controlled voice, his body held as rigid as he could hold it for all the trembling, say, Now please. Now please. Help me. There was Control, but that was all. No music. His songs were gone.
Just for the moment, she told herself. Just for now. His songs, his good songs, will come back if I just wait for this to run its course, like a fever that has to break.
Morning came and Ansset was still awake. He had stopped thrashing, and Esste went to the machines for food. She set it in front of him, but he did not eat. She reached a piece of it to his mouth, but instead of taking the food he bit her, he set his teeth into her fingers with all his strength. The pain was excruciating, but Esste's Control was not even tested by this-physical pain, at her age, was the least of her weaknesses. She waited patiently, saying nothing. Blood from her fingers drooled out of Ansset's mouth for minutes as both silently looked at each other. And it was Ansset who made the first sound, a moan that sounded like the slow breaking of rock, a song that spoke only of agony and self-hatred. Slowly he released his bite on her fingers. The pain rushed up her arm.
Ansset's eyes went blank. He did not see her.
Esste went to the machine and covered her fingers with salve. She was exhausted after a night of no sleep, and Ansset's savage bite had disturbed her far more than the mere pain. I will stop. This has gone too far, she decided. Her hand shook, despite Control, despite the calm she tried to enforce on herself. I can't do this anymore, she said silently.
But for twelve days she had been silent, and sound did not come easily to her throat. Came with such difficulty, in fact, that as she looked at Ansset's blank face she could not make any sound come. Instead she lay down on her blanket, unused that night, and slept.
She awoke to the sound of wind howling through the High Room. It was cold, icy even under the blanket. It took only a few moments for her to realize what that meant. She leaped up from the floor. It was afternoon, but dark with wind and clouds. The clouds were so low that mist trailed into the High Room with every gust of wind, and the ground was invisible. Every shutter of every window was open, some of them banging against the stone walls outside.
He has jumped from the tower. The thought screamed in her mind, and she gasped aloud.
Her gasp was answered by a moan. She whirled and saw Ansset lying on the table, curled up with the thumb and little ringer of his right hand in his mouth, the other fingers pressed into his forehead and eyes like an infant's involuntary pose. The relief that swept over her forced her to lean on the table, taking her breath in great gasps. Any illusion of Control was gone now. Ansset had won, forcing her to break before her task was completed.
The cold forced her to take action again. She went to the windows and closed them all, leaning out over the sills to catch the handles of the shutters and pull them closed. The mist was so dense that it seemed to swallow up her hand as she reached into it. But inside she was singing. Ansset had not jumped.
The windows closed, she returned to the table, and only now realized that Ansset was asleep. He trembled with cold and, probably, exhaustion, but he had not seen her panic, her relief, had not heard her gasp. Her first thought was gratitude, but she realized that it might have been good for him to see that fear for his safety could overcome even Esste's iron reserve. It is as it is, she told herself, and looked in his left hand for the key to the shutters, found it, and went around and locked them all, then replaced the key on the chain which had fallen to the floor after he took it from her neck in her sleep.
She went to the computer and turned up the heat in the High Room. Instantly the stones under her feet grew warm.
Then she took her blanket and Ansset's and covered the boy where he lay on the table. He stirred slightly, moaned and whimpered, but did not awaken.
23
Ansset's face was stiff when he awoke. He was not cold anymore. His head ached, and where the splinters had been driven into his face, the stinging was a constant undercurrent. But he felt something cool touching his face, and wherever it touched, the stinging went away. He opened his eyes just a little. Esste leaned over him, dabbing salve on his face. For the moment Ansset forgot everything bad and carefully said to her, I didn't jump. They told me to jump and I didn't,
She said nothing. She said nothing at all, nothing at all, and her silence was a blow that knocked him back in on himself, and his struggle returned. The water was rushing up to meet him, a vast whirlpool sweeping higher and higher and Ansset was at the top and there was nowhere higher that he could go to escape it. He looked inside himself and there was no escape and as the water touched him, swept his feet out from under him, bore him in fast, dizzying circles around and around, he screamed. His scream was a voice that filled the High Room and echoed from the walls and shattered the stillness of the mist outside.
He was no longer in the High Room. He was being sucked down into the maelstrom. The water closed over his head. Spinning faster and faster he plunged deeper and deeper toward the mouths of the waiting terrors below. One after another they swallowed him up. He felt himself being swallowed, the massive peristalsis driving him into gullet after gullet, hot warm places where he could not breathe.
And he was walking into a room. Walking and walking but getting no farther into the room than he had been before. And all alone, no other sound, he heard the song he had been searching for. Heard the song and saw the singer, but could not hear and could not see, not really, because the singer had no face that he could recognize, and the song, no matter how carefully he listened, kept escaping the moment after he heard it. He could not hear the melody in his memory, only in the moment, and as he looked at an eye, the other eye vanished, and when he looked for the mouth, the eye he had seen before disappeared.
He was no longer walking, though he had no memory of reaching the woman who lay on the bed. He reached out. He was touching her face. He was stroking her face so very gently, tracing the features, the eyes, the mouth, and the voice sang, Bi-lo-bye. Bi-lo-bye, but the moment he understood the words he lost them. Lost them, and the mist came and swallowed up the face. He clutched for it, held it, held it tight; she could not disappear from him in the mist which was all white invisible faces that swallowed her up. This time he held on tightly and he would not let go, nothing could pull him away.
He heard the song again, heard the song and it was exactly the same song and this time the words were:
I will never hurt you.
I will always help you.
If you are hungry
I'll give you my food.
If you are frightened
I can your friend.
I love you now
And love does not end.
He knew where he was now. Somehow he had been pulled from the lake. He lay on the shore of the lake and he was dry and safe and the song he had been searching for had at last been found. He still gripped the face tightly, clinging to the hair, holding the face close over his own as he lay there, and he knew her at last, and cried for joy.
24
Ansset lay across Esste's lap, his hands frantically gripping her hair, when at last his violent shaking stopped, and his jaw slackly opened, and his eyes at last focused and he saw her.
Mother, he cried, and there was no song but childhood
in his voice.
Esste opened her mouth, and tears poured from her eyes and flew as she blinked to Ansset's cheeks, and she sang from the deepest part of her heart. Ansset, my only son.
He wept and clung to her, and she babbled meaningless words to him, sang her most soothing songs to him, and held him tightly. They lay on the blankets in the warm High Room as the storm raged outside. As she held his bruised and cut face into her shoulder, she also wept; for two hidden places had been plumbed, and she did not know or care which had been the greater achievement. She had locked him into silence in the High Room in order to cure him; he had returned the favor, and she, too, was healed.
25
It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day. Sunlight streamed through the cracks in the western shutters. Ansset and Esste sat on the floor of the High Room, singing to each other.
Ansset's song was halting, though the melody was high and fine, and his words were all the agony of loss and loneliness as he grew up; but the agony had been transformed, was transformed even as he sang, by the harmony and countermelody of Esste's wordless song which said not to fear, not to fear, not to fear. Ansset's hands danced as he sang, played gently along Esste's arms, face, and shoulders, kept capturing her hands and letting them go. His face was alight as he sang, the eyes were alive, and his body said as much as his voice did. For while his voice spoke of the memory of fear, his body spoke of the presence of love.
26
Riktors Ashen was not sure what to do. Mikal had been emphatic. The Songbird was to return with Riktors Ashen. And yet Riktors knew that he could not achieve anything by blustering or threatening. This was not a national council or a vain dictator on an unsophisticated planet where the emperor's very name could inspire terror. This was the Songhouse, and it was older than the empire, older than many worlds, older than any government in the galaxy. It recognized no nationality, no authority, no purpose except its songs. Riktors could only wait, knowing that delay would infuriate Mikal, and knowing that haste would accomplish nothing in the Songhouse.
At least the Songhouse was taking him seriously enough that they left a full-fledged Songmaster with him, a man named Onn whose every word was reassurance, though in fact he promised nothing at all.
We're honored to have you here, Onn said.
You must be, Riktors answered, amused. This is the third time you've said so.
Well, you know how it is, Onn said with good cheer. I meet so few outsiders that I hardly know what to say. You'd hardly enjoy hearing the gossip of the Songhouse, and that's all I know to talk about.
You'd be surprised at how much interest I'd have in gossip.
Oh, no. We have singularly boring gossip, Onn said, and then changed the subject to the weather, which had been alternately rainy and sunny for days. Riktors grew impatient. Weather mattered a great deal, he supposed, to the planetbound. To Riktors Ashen weather of any kind was just one more reason to be in space.
The door opened, and Esste herself entered, accompanied by a boy. Blond and beautiful, and Riktors recognized him instantly as Ansset, Mikal's Songbird, and almost said so. Then he hesitated. The boy looked different somehow. He looked closely. There were scratches and bruises on his face.
What have you been doing to the boy? asked Riktors, appalled at the thought that the child might have been beaten.
It was Ansset himself who answered, in tones that inspired absolute confidence. The boy could not lie, said his voice: I fell on the woodpile. I knew better than to play there. I was lucky not to break a bone.
Riktors relaxed, and then realized another, more important reason why the child looked different. He was smiling. His face was alert, his eyes looked warm and friendly. He held Esste's hand.
Are you ready to come with me? Riktors asked him.
Ansset smiled and sighed, and both melted Riktors's normal reserve. He liked the boy immediately. I wish I could come, Ansset said. But I'm a Songbird, and that means that I must sing to the whole Songhouse before I go. Ansset turned to Esste. May I invite him to attend?
Esste smiled, and that surprised Riktors more than the change in Ansset. He hadn't thought the woman knew how to seem anything but stern.
Will you come? Ansset asked.
Now?
Yes, if you like. And Ansset and Esste turned and left. Riktors, unsure of himself, looked at Onn, who blandly returned his gaze. I was invited, Riktors decided, and so I can follow them.
They led him to a large hall which was filled with hundreds and hundreds of children who sat on hard benches in absolute silence. Even their bare feet on the stone made little noise as the last of them filed into place. Scattered among them were many teen-agers and adults, and on the stone platform at the front of the hall sat the oldest of them. They were all dressed alike in the drab robes that reached the floor, though none of the children seemed to have clothing that exactly fit. The impression was of poverty until he looked at their faces, which looked exalted.
Esste and Ansset led him to the rear of the hall, at the end of the center aisle. Riktors was surprised to have been given such a poor seat; he did not know, and no one at the Songhouse ever told him, that he was the first outsider in centuries to witness a ceremony in the great hall of the Songhouse.
He did not even know it was a ceremony. Ansset and Esste merely walked, hand in hand, to the front of the hall. Esste stepped onto the platform, then reached down a hand to bring Ansset up. Then the Songmaster retired to a chair on the platform while Ansset stood alone in front, at the head of the aisle, where Riktors could see him clearly.
And he sang.
His voice filled every part of the hall, but there was no resonance from the walls to distort the tone. He rarely sang words, and those he sang seemed meaningless to Riktors. Yet the emperor's envoy was held spellbound. Ansset's hands moved in the air, rising, falling, keeping time with odd rhythms in the music. His face also spoke with the song so that even Riktors, at a distance, could see that the song came from Ansset's soul.
No one in the hall wept, not even the youngest Groans with the least Control. Control was not threatened by Ansset's song, and it did not reflect the feelings of the audience. Indeed, the song divided the audience into every separate individual, for Ansset's song was so private that no two people could hear it the same way. The song made Riktors think of plunging down between planets, though the child could not possibly have experienced a pilot's thrill of vertigo. And when Ansset at last fell silent, the song lingered in the air and Riktors knew he would never forget it. He had shed no tears, felt no terrible passions. Yet the song was one of the most powerful experiences of his life.
Mikal has waited a lifetime for this, Riktors thought.
All the children and adults in the hall arose, though he had seen no cue given. And all of them began to sing, one by one, then all together, until the sheer weight of sound made the air in the hall feel thick and aromatic with melody. They were saying good-bye to Ansset, who alone was silent, who stood without weeping on the platform.
They were still singing as Ansset stepped from the platform, and without looking to the left or the right walked down the aisle to where Riktors waited. Ansset held out his hand. Riktors took it.
Take me with you, Ansset said. I'm ready to go.
And Riktors's hand trembled as he led Ansset from the hall, as he took him to the flesket waiting outside that would carry them both to Riktors's starship. Riktors had seen wealth, had seen the opulence of Mikal's palace at Susquehanna, had seen the thousand most beautiful things that people made and bought and sold. None of them was worth the beauty that walked beside him, that held his hand, that smiled at him as the Songhouse door closed behind them.
MIKAL
1
Susquehanna was not the largest city on Earth; there were a hundred cities larger. Perhaps more. But Susquehanna was certainly the most important city. It was Mikal's city, built by him at the confluence of the Susquehanna and West Susquehanna rivers. It consisted of the palace an
d its grounds, the homes of all the people who worked at the palace, and the facilities for handling the millions of guests every year who came to the palace. No more than a hundred thousand permanent residents.
Most government offices were located elsewhere, all over Earth, so that no one spot would be the center of the planet more than any other. With instant communications, no one needed to be any closer. And so Susquehanna looked more like a normal suburban community-a bit richer than most, a bit better landscaped, better paved, better lit, perhaps, with no industrial wastes whatsoever and utterly no poverty or signs of poverty or even, for that matter, decay.
It was only the third large city Ansset had ever seen in his life. It lacked the violent, heady excitement of Bog, but neither was it weary, as Step had been. And the vegetation was a deeper green than any on Tew, so that while the forests did not tower, and the mountains were sleepy and low, the impression was of lushness. As if the world that had spawned mankind were eager to prove that she was still fecund, that life still oozed out of her with plenty to spare, that mankind was not her only surprise, her only trick to play on the universe.
It's a proud place, Ansset said.
What, Earth? Riktors Ashen asked.
What have I seen of Earth?
The whole planet's like this. Mikal didn't design this city, you know: It was a gift to him.
The whole planet's like this? Beautiful?
No. Trimmed. With its nose in the air. People on Earth are very proud of their place as the 'heart of humanity.' Heart, hell. On the fringe, that's all they are, an Insane fringe, too, if you ask me. They cling to their petty national identities as if they were religions. Which they are, I think. Terrible place for a capital-this planet is more fragmented than the rest of the galaxy. There are even independence movements.
Songmaster Page 9