Song of the Beast

by Carol Berg

  “Nah. I was in Smith’s Alley, catching my breath from a fine, strapping fisherman, when the villain takes a wrong turn from the Alewife. Drank up half their stock from the smell of him. It was dark so’s I didn’t see the Ridemark on him until he had me to the stable.” She threw down her rag and buttoned up her dress, then came to retrieve her wine. After a long pull at it, she dropped it back in my lap and bent over me, permitting an unavoidable glimpse of what her bodice couldn’t hold, while planting a kiss on the top of my head. “When you’ve mended yourself a bit, I’ll thank you proper. Till then you can claim anything else I’ve got for as long as you need. I do dearly love being alive.” Her eyes sparkled with more than the wine, and she skipped through the door, her footsteps dancing down the stairs out of hearing.

  The Elhim watched her go, smiling a crooked smile. “Callia has charged me to coddle you until she’s back. She’s a kindhearted girl.”

  I nodded and tried to remember how to smile, even as my eyelids sagged.

  “Here, here, good fellow. I dare not let you sleep just yet. See what Callia’s brought you.”

  With effort I dragged my eyes open again and identified the smell wafting through my bordering dreams. Soup. A steaming pail of it. Narim filled a dented tin mug and held it out. “Can you manage it?” His eyes studied my hands as I carefully cradled the hot, dripping cup between my palms. I could not yet make myself look at my hands, so I concentrated on the soup, inhaling the glorious aroma—a touch of onion, a sprig of parsley, and mayhap somewhere in its past a knucklebone had touched the broth. I could hardly bear to take the first taste, for the reality could be nowhere near the glorious delight of anticipation.

  I was wrong. The broth was watery, but rich with barley, and imminently, delectably satisfying. I took only a small sip at a time. Held it. Savored it. Felt it go down and outline the hollow places. Strengthening. Saving my life.

  Narim was kind and let me enjoy an entire cup without interruption. But as he refilled it, he served up the question that had been quivering on the edge of his tongue. “How long were you there?”

  I saw no reason to alter the dismal truth, so I held up five crooked fingers once, then twice, then again, and two fingers more after all.

  “Seventeen ... seventeen years? Hearts of fire. Is it possible?” His voice was soft, filled with wonder and a thousand unspoken questions. But he said nothing more, only stared at me as if to map my bones.

  When I finished the second cup of soup, he offered me another, and it was all I could do to refuse it. Starvation knows nothing of reason. But I had once traveled the poorest places of the world, and I’d often witnessed what happened to those who gorged themselves after too long without. Narim must have read the panic in my eyes as he hung the cup on the rim of the bucket, for he smiled and said, “It will keep. When you wake again, the ovens down below will be primed and roaring, and I’ll whisper compliments to my friend the cook, who’ll heat it up for you. Will that do?”

  This time I managed the smile, and I cupped my hands to my breast and bowed my head to him as if he were the king’s own chamberlain.

  “You will return the service someday, I think,” he said, putting a strong arm behind my shoulders so that I could lie down on my stomach again without too much pain. “You have returned from the netherworld with the flame of life still lit within you. The gods do not ignore such a heart.”

  It was kindly meant, but I did not believe him. I had no heart left.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Goryx. My jailer. The one sworn to bring me to heel. The only face I saw for seventeen years. He was a burly, round-faced fellow with iron biceps, a cheerful disposition, and shining little eyes that crinkled into slits when he was pleased. He lived outside my cell and brought me enough pasty gruel and stale water that I would not die. His own rations were little better, and his room, though larger than my fetid, airless hole, was windowless and dim. He was a prisoner as much as I in many ways, only he had nowhere else he would rather be.

  When my god would call me, there in the darkness of Mazadine, Goryx would listen while I made my answer, and when I was done, the exaltation of the holy mystery still nourishing my soul, the iron grating of my cell would open, and his smiling face would appear. With a long-suffering sigh he would hook a chain to my neck collar and haul me out, then drop the black canvas bag over my head. Once I was secured to a chair, he would spread my hands on his worktable, clucking over them like a mother hen, stroking my fingers and commenting on the efficacy of his last work. If the bones had begun to knit back together, I would hear the rasp of the metal jaws as they were laid out on the table, and I would feel the cold steel clamped onto the finger he’d decided would be first; then one by one he would break them all again. Only when he’d poked and prodded me enough that I was awake would he chain me to the wall and begin with the lash. He was an artist who took great pride in his work, able to make it last all day, able to take me to the edge of death, yet not quite beyond. That was forbidden. I was not to die. I would not be on my cousin’s conscience as long as I lived. And when he was satisfied, Goryx would put me back in the tiny cell where I could not stand up or stretch out, and he would leave me in the dark until Roelan called me to sing for him again and, like a fool, I would answer.

  For ten years I endured. Roelan comforted me, whispering in my heart that my service was valued, though I could not understand why, since no one could hear me but my god and my jailer. But I clung to his voice, reveled in his glory, let his music soar in my soul while I willed the pain to pass by. Somewhere in that time, though, after so many years of faithfulness, the whispered call grew fainter, and the darkness grew deeper, and I sang the music of my heart but heard no answering refrain. Soon all that was left to me was the pain and the darkness and the shreds of my defiance, and it was not enough.

  Goryx saw it. He nodded and smiled his gap-toothed smile when he peered through the grate, and said, even as he pulled me out to do it all again, “Not long now.”

  He felt me tremble as he laid out his tools and stroked my knotted fingers, and he heard me whisper, “No more. Please, no more. Not again.”

  “Yield. Obey. And there will come a day seven years from this one when you will see me no more,” he said, as he laid my bones bare yet again. “Nothing more is required of you. Seven years of obedience and you will be free to go on your way.”

  As he expected, the day came when I broke. I’ve heard that there have lived those extraordinary men and women who cannot be defeated by such means, but I was not such a one. Goryx had broken all the fingers on my left hand and had clamped the jaws on my right thumb, ready to begin. “No more,” I begged. “By the Seven Gods, no more.”

  “Do you yield?”

  “Please ...”

  “You will obey and be silent?”

  Head fogged with pain, I did not answer quickly enough. So he finished my right hand, and when I begged for mercy and swore I would be silent until the end of time, he said he could not believe me. So he laid my back open again, and I thought I would go mad from it, for I had not even my pride to sustain me any longer. But his work was done. When next I heard the god’s faint call, I could not answer. I huddled in the darkness and clutched my ruined hands to my breast and begged Roelan’s mercy, but I could not sing for him again. The music in my heart had bled away, and I was left with only darkness and silence. And in the formless years that followed, there came a time when I no longer heard the call, and I knew that I was truly dead.

  Chapter 3

  In the matter of a week, Callia and Narim had me in some semblance of order. I could take a deep breath without passing out, though my constant coughing was a matter of extreme gravity, and a sneeze out of the question. Their modest fare of soup and bread, with cheese added when I could stomach it, was finer than the delicacies of a hundred noble houses where I’d eaten in my youth. I gained a little weight, and Callia said my color was improved a thousandfold—surely her casual habits in matters
of undress kept the blood flowing in my face. She brought me a shirt of coarse brown wool and a pair of tan breeches that were immensely cleaner than the rags I’d worn, even a shabby pair of farmer’s boots only slightly too tight, “gifts,” she said, from one of her admirers. I had not yet convinced myself to speak, a failure which made me feel stupid and weak, just as when I would stand up too long and get shaky at the knees.

  Callia left me with far too much time to think about what I was to do with myself. For seven years I had worked to erase every remnant of my identity, every memory of my past life, every thought, desire, and instinct. Absolute emptiness had been the only way I could fulfill the terms of my sentence, the only way I could be silent, the only way I could survive. I’d had to be unborn. In the last years of my captivity, I could sit for days and have no image impose itself on the darkness of my mind, no trace of thought or memory. Now I could not fathom what I was to do next.

  By the middle of the second week, the bump on the back of my head no longer throbbed a warning every time I moved, and I could stand up for moments at a time without falling over, so I picked a night when Callia and the Elhim were both out and started down the stairs. I had depended on the girl’s meager livelihood for far too long, yet I didn’t have the courage to face her as I took my leave. Halfway to the first landing, the steps dropped out of my vision as if they’d tumbled down a well. My foot could not find purchase, and I tumbled headfirst down the stairs. When my cracked ribs hit the splintered wood, I lost track of at least an hour.

  Fumbling hands ... a knife in my side ... “Come on, then, arm over my shoulder.”

  I tried to stay still. Every movement, every breath, sent a lance through my middle. But the hands were insistent and my feet found the steps. Fortunately Callia was the first to discover me, and she hauled me back to her room with many protests of dire offense at my attempt to leave without telling her. “A life for a life,” she said. As I could not yet muster words, she made me raise my hand in an oath to stay until she and Narim had judged my condition sound. As she was in the middle of binding up my ribs again, I had no choice but to acquiesce. The swearing was not so difficult as I made it out to be. In truth I was terrified at the thought of leaving the haven of Callia’s room, and I blessed the injuries that kept me from having to face the world now that I was so irrevocably changed.

  Outside of Callia’s window was a goodly section of roof, and I’d made it a habit to crawl out onto it whenever anyone came up the stairs. Once Callia went back to work in earnest, she began bringing men back to her room, which sent me out for most of every night. I would lie wedged in a crevice behind a chimney, trying not to listen to what pleasure five coppers could buy. At first the open sky left me sweating with unnameable, unreasoning panic, but after a few nights I didn’t want to go inside anymore. As I watched the stars pass over me in their eternal pavane, I began, ever so slightly, to believe that I was free.

  One hot, still night as I was sitting on the roof, watching the wedged moon wander in and out among the wispy clouds, Callia climbed out of the window to sit beside me. She carried a linen kerchief, with which she was blotting off the sweat of her most recent encounter, and a flask of wine, which she offered to me. I gave her my customary gesture of thanks and drank deep of the sour vintage.

  “What do you do out here all night?” she said. “You never seem to be asleep no matter what time it is. You’re always just sitting and staring.”

  I pointed to the dancing moon and the stars, shining dimly in its light, and to my eyes while I held them wide open. Then I pointed to the dark heights where Mazadine lurked, and I passed my hand over my eyes, closing them tight. She had learned to understand my awkward signing very well.

  “You weren’t allowed to see the sky while you were in prison?”

  I waved my hand at the dark, squat houses crowded together in the lane, at the few stragglers abroad, at the shadowed trees of the local baron’s parkland across the sleeping city, and the ghostly mountain peaks of the Carag Huim looming on the distant horizon. Then I passed my hand across my eyes again, leaving them closed.

  “Nothing. You weren’t allowed to see nothing?”

  I nodded.

  “Damn! I can’t imagine it. So I guess you’re making up for it out here.”

  I smiled and returned her flask.

  She drank, then peeked over at me sideways with the usual lively sparkle in her eyes. “I’ve no right to ask it, but I’m devilish curious and not used to minding my own business. Whatever was a Senai doing in Mazadine? I told Narim you must be a murderer at least, for the only thing worse is a traitor, and traitors are hanged right off, but you saved my life, and your ways ... well, maybe it’s only they’re such gentle ways because you’ve been in such a wicked state, but I won’t believe you a murderer. Are you?”

  I shook my head and wished she would stop.

  “Then what?” She picked up my knotted and scarred hand and held it in her warm, plump one. “What made them do this?”

  I shook my head again, retrieved my hand, and was glad she accepted my inability to speak. Even if I could have convinced myself to say the words aloud, I could only have told her it was to silence my music and thus destroy me. But in a thousand years of trying, I could not have told her why.

  Perhaps she thought I was too ashamed to tell her. She didn’t press. “You don’t mind my asking? I’ve not offended you?”

  I smiled and opened my palms to her, and she passed the wine to me again.

  She changed the subject to herself and chattered for half an hour about the peculiarities of men, beginning with her father, who began using her when she was eight and selling her when she was nine. Then she branched into detailed comparisons of Senai and Udema and all the others who had the money to pay for their pleasuring. “I think it’s why I’m such great friends with Narim,” she said. “My other friends ask how I can go about with a gelding child, but I tell them he’s the only one I know who’s got nothing to gain from using me.”

  I was listening with only half my attention, happy I was not expected to comment, when there came a low rumbling from the west. As it swelled into an unrelenting thunder, from the western horizon rose a cloud of midnight that quickly spread to blot out the stars in half the sky. Streaks of red fire ripped across the arch of the heavens. The moonlight that flickered behind the looming darkness was carved into angled shapes by ribbed wings that spanned half the city, then was transformed into intricate patterns of green and gold swirls and spirals by translucent membranes. Red fire glinted on coppery-scaled chests so massive they could smother twenty men and horses, and on long tails rippling with muscles so powerful they could knock holes in a granite wall.

  “Vanir guard us! Dragons!” Callia dived through the window as the flight passed over Lepan—five or six dragons, soaring on the winds of night. A hot gust lifted my hair, and it was heavy with musk and brimstone, the unmistakable scent of dragon. Soon, from above the blast of flame and the thunderous wind of those mighty wings, would come their cries—long, wailing, haunted cries that chilled the soul, cries that spoke an anger too powerful to bear, deep, bone-shaking roars of fury that caused the enemies of Elyria to cower in their fortresses and bow before the power of our king. Unheard from below would be the harsh commands of the Riders, each man a tiny knot of leather and steel behind the long, graceful neck of his mount.

  I did not move from my place on the roof, only craned my neck to watch their passing, telling myself every moment to look away—that only danger and grief could be the result of my gaze. Not allowing myself to think—I was well practiced at that—I clamped my arms over my ears. I dared not listen to their cries, but by every god of the Seven, I would not fail to look.

  “You’re a madman!” said Callia, poking her head out of the window once the sky had regained its midnight peace. “You’ve been put away too long.” She climbed out and plopped herself on the roof beside me. “You never know when one of the cursed beasts is going to gla
nce down and decide you’re ugly or insolent or breathing ... whatever it is sets them burning. You could have ended up as crisp as Gemma’s solstice goose!”

  I scarcely heard her. My arms still blocked my ears lest I be undone by the sounds of their passing, and my eyes strained to see the last flickers of their fires as they disappeared in the eastern darkness.

  “Are you all right?” The girl pulled my chin around to face her, and her eyes grew wide as she gently touched my cheek. “What in the name of sense ...? Why ever didn’t you go inside? If you’re so fearful of them as to make you weep, then you oughtn’t even look.”

  But of course I had no words as yet, so I could not tell her that my tears had nothing to do with fear.

  A few days later, Callia presented me with perhaps the finest gift of thanks I have ever received for any mortal service rendered. In response to her insistence that I let her know something that would please me—my being not yet ready for the favors she was most willing to dispense—I induced her to indulge me with a bath.

  “Hot water poured on you in one of those tin tubs?” She looked from the drawing I had made in the dust on the floor to my absurd mime of washing. “Can’t possibly be healthy. You’ve still got that beastly cough. And what if it makes your ribs loosen up again just when they’re getting stuck back together?”

  Impossible not to smile at her. I shook my head and tried more inept playacting to demonstrate that such activity would do no harm, but rather a world of good for my spirits.