Till Human Voices Wake Us

by Victoria Goddard

  “What ship is that?” Kasian asked, as they slowly made their way from the road into the restaurant. Raphael’s ankle had made itself known to him and he felt rather more wobbly in his person than he had any intention of admitting.

  “It’s a replica of a famous galley that sailed for England for a pirate, privateer, and adventurer named Sir Francis Drake in the sixteenth century. That’s when Will is from originally.”

  Kasian’s next question was forestalled by the arrival of the waitress. She glanced from him to Raphael and then said faintly, “A table for two?”

  Raphael smiled. “Please.”

  “Of—of course, Mr. Inelu.”

  Her words fell into a dead silence, at which point he realized that he was the object of the room’s attention. Since it was a Thursday in March it was not as busy as it might have been: but he was not the only person to know it did the best mixed grill in London.

  Raphael tried his best to think about what to say, but his head was hurting very much—he desperately wanted food and coffee—and, really, what did he expect from five years acting in films with Circe ensuring he was known to the world? (And his own efforts; he couldn’t deny that he had gone to some lengths to be successful in Hollywood.)

  Conscious of open-mouthed stares—though not, yet, much in the way of camera phones—without thinking further as he stepped to follow the waitress to the table he stepped forward into James Inelu-being-a-film-star.

  This meant a smile that both acknowledged and broke off the attention without anxiety, difficulty, or embarrassment for any party. This was a great deal to ask from a smile, which is why he had spent quite a lot of time crafting it.

  The smile conveyed gracious acknowledgment and pleasure at the encounter, a certain charisma together with friendliness and warmth like the sun coming out of a cloud. More importantly, it also conveyed mysterious depths such that its recipient responded with a kind of awe that was really a thrilling, crescendoing, almost primeval recognition of the sudden awakening of romance—possibility—glamour. It was what people of old Astandalas had felt at the mere rumour of the Red Company. It was everything modern Ystharians wanted from a film star. It was fey and mysterious as all get out. On occasion it made people faint.

  The waitress and three-quarters of the other people in the restaurant took a deep breath in unison. The other quarter were still staring.

  Well; with one exception. After one sideways smile Kasian put on a political face. The waitress sashayed over to the table before leaving them with the menus.

  Kasian said, “I can’t read this script. Could you translate for me?”

  Raphael looked down at the menu, which was written in a particularly obnoxious faux-Gothic font in honour (he guessed) of the cathedral, the Golden Hind, and the ancient prison that was also just around the corner. “Eggs Benedict, omelettes, ah …”

  “I have no idea what either of those things are.”

  “An egg is the reproductive body of a chicken.”

  Kasian frowned at Raphael’s tentative effort at a joke. “All right, all right, you know what I mean. Have you been here before? The servant recognizes you.”

  “I have been here a few times,” he said, which was true. “Kasian, to be honest all I ever get here is the mixed grill. I have no idea if anything else is worth having.”

  “I thought, according to Ser Maximilien mir Daniroth, that you were a man of few fixed preferences.”

  “One of them is the mixed grill here.”

  “You say that so demurely.”

  “Why do you always say Max’s full name?”

  “I like how it sounds. Don’t you? Maximilien mir Daniroth of the Onagel srovârel.”

  “Is that the ‘seven magpies’ in Calandran?”

  “Yes. Iô, dev, taere, gîl, nim, senn, srovâ, figin, rôm. One to ten.”

  The words reminded him of the old stories their parents had told. “Da used to live in Targîleng-vad.”

  “Three-Quarters-Off is what it means in Calandran, because of a market held there that once ruined an invading army and thereby prevented Ixsaa from being annexed to Kisare. But it sounds much fancier when you say it with that lovely rich accent you’ve randomly assumed.”

  “It’s not randomly,” he replied. The waitress came over with a coffee pot and another melting glance, to which he returned a slightly less brilliant version of the film-star smile and said, “Two mixed grills. Kasian, would you like coffee or tea?”

  “Oh, coffee, please.”

  She poured, paused, said confidentially, “The Pirate King is my favourite movie.”

  “Thank you,” he replied gravely. She blushed and hurried off to the kitchen and some muted giggling with the other waitress.

  Kasian took a sip of his coffee, then raised his eyebrow quizzically. “And what is ‘the pirate king’?”

  “A pirate is—”

  “I know. A scofflaw of the high seas. As the knight whose ship we passed, you said, was for his own queen. Or as our Tefen is in her own right.”

  “Tefen is a pirate?”

  “Tell me your tale first and I’ll tell you about her in return.”

  Raphael glanced outside to meet a startled businessman’s curious glance. He suppressed a sigh and drank some of his own coffee. He was deeply relieved that the cook hadn’t changed for the worse in the period since he’d last been to the restaurant. “The Pirate King is the name of one of the, ah, films I was in. The most well-known one. Really the best.”

  “And a ‘film’, when it is not a layer of scum floating on something, is what, exactly?”

  “It’s a craft people use to record images.” His head was throbbing and he didn’t know how to keep explaining. “Moving pictures—some people call them movies on that account. But it uses a piece of film, or it used to, made out of cellulose, which is a thing they extract from plants … Do you really want to know?”

  Kasian chuckled. “No. Gabriel showed me one of them. He said it was a way of recording plays. I was just enjoying watching you try to explain in a language that doesn’t have any of the right words.”

  Raphael smiled reluctantly. “You were saying about Tefen?”

  “What is this? A question? About our family! Raphael, are you feeling quite well?”

  He didn’t mean to answer aloud, but nevertheless said, “No.”

  Kasian laughed again. “Tefen has her own ship, the Pantarches, which is a pirate ship in the sense that she does not fly any flag but her own—the Realm being a landlocked country, you know, otherwise she could well fly my flag, but she refuses to out of a sense of propriety—”

  “Naturally,” he murmured.

  “We’re not all barbarians on Daun, you know. Not like you lot on Ysthar.”

  Raphael had an unexpected sense of being offended, but he constrained himself merely to adding sugar and cream to his coffee.

  Kasian gestured at him. “You didn’t take either before.”

  “I’d run out of milk,” he said. “Also …”

  “Also you’re a man of few fixed preferences. Usually how one takes coffee is one of them. Anyhow, Tefen is a pirate, but mostly in the sense that she sails for herself and occasionally boards other people’s vessels. Most of the time I think she engages in smuggling. You were saying about your change of accent?”

  “We are in public. The waitress recognized me as one character, and this is how I play it.”

  Kasian added sugar liberally to his own coffee. He seemed to be debating with himself, for he stirred it carefully before going on to say, “I’ve seen at least three roles of yours so far, I think.”

  “Hamlet …”

  “Four, then. Hamlet; this one; the one with your friends; and the one you showed me first, which was close to the real you, wasn’t it? But not quite.”

  Raphael arranged his bearing into nonchalance. Kasian responded to the subconscious cues with a certain regal composure. Anyone looking at them would see them having an unemotional luncheon meeting.


  “Layers upon layers of masks. Don’t you get tired of them?”

  “Of course,” he replied flippantly, “but we are in public now.”

  “So if I ask you why you refuse all discussion of our family, why your dearest friends think you an orphan, why you do not ask after our brothers and sisters, why when Maximilien mir Daniroth suddenly realized whose son you are you cut him off—you will say nothing?”

  He was in character of James Inelu having-been-recognized, Raphael reminded himself. “What is there to say?”

  “I will take a letter back for you. Though of course you could have sent word by Gabriel if you had wanted to.”

  The waitress went by on her way to another table, bringing them butter and brown sauce. Raphael smiled at her and then at Kasian, defusing any apparent tension in their bearing by shifting his to calm. Tell it to the Lord of  Ysthar, he thought suddenly: All your secrets are safe with me. He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased at the confidence or shamed at the secrecy.

  “Mother and Da will be so delighted to know you’re alive. Don’t you have any feeling for them?”

  “They are the captains of the Red Company. They could have found me if they had wanted.”

  “The company is defunct, as you well know. And it’s not that easy. It took me a phoenix dream to find you.”

  “No,” Raphael said; “it took looking.”

  Kasian sat back sharply, a gesture masked by the return of the waitress with their food. They both waited until she had finished serving. With the food in front of him Raphael was no longer hungry, his stomach feeling roiled again. He picked at some of the potatoes.

  “How dare you suggest that, when you never looked for us? We thought you were dead, Raphael. Astandalas had fallen. Do you have any idea what the destruction was like?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The words hung coldly in the air. Kasian slowly lifted his attention from his food to Raphael’s face. Raphael unfocused his eyes the slight amount that let him look without hurting. Hurting others. Everything about him hurt at the moment.

  “You didn’t look for us,” Kasian repeated after a moment. “Didn’t you care?”

  Raphael shrugged, as lying a gesture as ever he had made. I denied my name, denied my heritage, denied my family, denied my people, because I cared, he did not say. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t say it, except he was in public and he would never say such a thing. No. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to say it. That was a completely different sensation to his usual reticence. He slowly ate some of the black pudding.

  “I ask you three times: why did you not look for us?”

  I ask you three times. In Fairyland that meant you must answer, and the asker hear the reply, regardless of consequences. Raphael was not bound by Fairy magic, but he felt the tug of some other binding on him. Not magic, but … courtesy, perhaps. He looked down at his plate, moved around a mushroom. Kasian sat silentlyeating his. Finally Raphael said, “I did not want to learn your reaction if I found you.”

  “My reaction? Why would you be afraid?” He frowned. “Were you afraid of what I would say, to learn of the black magic? … You can’t seriously have thought I’d be ashamed of you for not being able to escape. We were barely fourteen, and they destroyed Astandalas with their magic. You survived.”

  The waitress came back with more coffee and to ask if they were enjoying everything. Raphael smiled charmingly at her, wishing he had picked somewhere where he wouldn’t be recognized. Usually he would have been able to not be recognized.

  Kasian kept sounding out the lines of his thought. “What I don’t understand is why you were able to be caught by magic at all. After Gabriel’s family—after Gabriel came to live with us, Grandmère performed that spell to protect us from bad magic. She gave up her life to protect us.”

  That had been a work of deep magic, Raphael thought with his adult knowledge, though he didn’t know any of the details of what she had done, what bargain exactly she had made with the One Above. The rest of Gabriel’s immediate family had been murdered one dreadful night. Their grandmother had brought him to their house in Astandalas—a journey of great difficulty in itself, from Ixsaa on Daun to the heart of the Empire—and then, a short while later, left them a note to the effect that she was trading their protection for her life.

  They had always assumed that meant she had died, but Raphael, thinking of his own existence, wondered if it meant she had just given up her life with them. Not that he could answer that unless he saw her, saw what magic she had wrought, what divine light might linger on her. But no one had seen her since that day.

  A courageous woman, Kasiar Ounlalin. Kasian had been proud to be named after her.

  His Kasian spoke. “That spell should have protected everyone in our family. How could they have broken through it? Were they so very powerful?”

  “Yes,” he said, which was true, but the truth pushed another step out of him: “They didn’t have to break it.”

  “What?” His voice carried through the room so that several of the other diners turned to stare at them. Raphael immediately smiled with such brilliance Kasian put on what must have been his own court expression and smiled back as if they had just struck a superb deal. People smiled in return, laughed a little, returned to their meals. Kasian’s voice was intensely at odds with his bearing when he continued. “Raphael, what do you mean?”

  Raphael kept the smile on his face and the lightness of tone, but the words were all the bitterer for that incongruity: “They didn’t have to break it.”

  “Repeating that won’t make me understand better.”

  This was after, Raphael reminded himself, when he could learn to tell the truth outside the parameters of the Game. He would rather have had the parameters of the Game to guide him. That was a terrifying thought. He shied from it—and knew, with a quiet resignation, that he had gone too far not to say the rest.

  It was not Tuesday night when he could get away with simply leaving at the awkward moment. He could not claim this emotional turpitude was in service of a greater good. This was after.

  “Da disowned me. That broke the protections.”

  “But Grandmère put them on our family.”

  “What do you think disowning means? It’s not just a legal term.”

  Kasian sat back, his toast half-buttered, gazing searchingly at him. “Magic answers to such things?”

  “Magic is such things. High emotion and strong words and fierce intention: what else do you think shapes it?”

  “He couldn’t have meant it.”

  Raphael drank his coffee so he didn’t have to keep up the inane smile any longer. “The evidence suggests otherwise.”

  “We looked for you. He looked for you.”

  Too late, he thought, carefully not remembering those three days he had thought one. “Well,” he said, “he didn’t find me. And he has never written, and I would be willing to bet that he has never asked Gabriel after me. I should imagine he doesn’t talk about me if he can avoid it.”

  “How could you think we agreed with him?” Kasian’s voice was soft, unhappy, a little broken.

  Something in Raphael wanted to reach out to that brokenness. He didn’t know how, or what to say beside the truth. “You didn’t come looking.”

  Kasian’s mouth twisted. “What about Gabriel? He came to Ysthar long ago. His first sending was here, to the Lord of  Ysthar.”

  Was that Gabriel’s first official message, when he had brought the news that Circe had challenged him to the Game? Raphael had been sitting on the banks of the Euphrates watching the boats come and go bearing stones to Uruk when Gabriel came to tell him.

  The first time Raphael had heard those rules that would shape his life was after Gabriel had taken one look at him, then bowed with the utmost formality and called him the Lord of  Ysthar.

  Raphael decided there was no way he could handle the egg and pushed it under the remains of the potatoes. “The first time he saw me he declined t
o greet me by name. I can take a hint.”

  “Gabriel? Something else must have happened. Perhaps he was told not to be informal, or didn’t want to be, for his first sending. I know he was nervous. He would never let anyone down like that without good reason. He wouldn’t have let you down.”

  “He has never asked me. I never asked him. We pass occasionally as our duties cross. That is all.”

  “And you’ve been content with that?”

  Did Kasian not understand? Raphael sipped his coffee, smiled for the benefit of the others in the restaurant, glanced out the window, and saw a crowd starting to gather. They were whispering and pointing, and not at the Golden Hind.

  “Oh, hell,” he said, realizing at that moment he’d forgotten his wallet. No; not forgotten; it was in his bag that was now in the river. He hadn’t picked up enough change for more than the taxi.

  Kasian started. “What is it?”

  “My wallet is in the river.”

  “Is that a major problem?”

  “We have to leave. I should probably get to the theatre, anyway.”

  “Raphael, how can you simply stop there?”

  “Those people are there because I am well known for my acting, and they will not behave well if I stay.”

  Kasian considered him with a disquieting expression. Raphael’s head felt muzzy despite the coffee. He couldn’t quite make himself turn from his brother’s regard. “Your pupils are still dilated. I don’t think you should be going to the theatre. I shouldn’t have let you convince me to come out at all.”

  “It’s the last night of the play, Kasian.”

  “And is that worth your health?”

  The waitress had disappeared. Raphael looked around carefully to see where she had gone, but now that he was again reminded of his body everything hurt to move. He focused on a middle-aged man in a suit standing by the kitchen who was looking in astonishment at the gathering crowd.