The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  No one on the dais moved. The Ambassador might have been delivering her speech to a collection of statues.

  “Our second complaint is more serious still. We understand that one in particular among the Karket-soomi you have called here and caused to be brought here has extraordinary powers, and that this person, a female, might be in truth the key to the salvation of Yount. In short, the Hierophants in Orn believe that this person might be the sukenna-tareef, the Saviour. If this is true, then Yount Major has no right to hold her for its own narrow, selfish, and misguided purposes, but must release her for the greater good of all Yount. If the female in question is, in fact, the Rescuer, then the time of Yount’s deliverance is at hand, and anyone denying, obstructing, deterring, or in any fashion standing in the way of that event must be considered anathema, enemies to be destroyed in the righteousness of the Mother’s merciful cauldrons.”

  A ripple ran through the audience hall. The figures on the dais moved.

  The Ambassador put up her hand and continued: “Allow me to finish, for I am almost done. Our demand is that this female, known in her native language as Sarah Margaret McLeish, be brought immediately by us to Orn to be examined by the Hierophants, so that they can determine if she is the sukenna-tareef.”

  Queen Zinnamoussea remained seated but gripped the arms of her throne, leaned forward, and said in the coldest voice Sally had ever heard, “Ambassador, by our count, the Coerceries of Orn have broken the treaty eighty-seven times since it was signed. Your complaints have no standing, rationale, or basis in principle that merit their discussion. We find them groundless, at best a willful misreading of facts ill understood. As for your demand, even if your complaints had merit — which, as I assert, they do not — it is so odious as to be beneath our dignity even to think about it. The one you demand is an honoured guest here. In short, we utterly reject your complaints and your demand.”

  The Ambassador smiled at this, knowing she had come to the real point of her embassy. She stepped two steps back and said, “Suspecting that you might respond thusly, my government has instructed me to make the following declaration.”

  She took her sword out of her scabbard and held it easily, as a fencer does, dangling at an angle in front of her with the point facing the floor. The Ambassador, with an ironic bow, knelt and placed the sword on the carpet leading to the dais, with its sword pointing directly at the Queen.

  “My delegation and I will sail for Orn in forty-eight hours,” said the Ambassador. “We maintain our demand to take with us, for Yount’s sake, the female we have named. You have until then to reevaluate your response. Your failure to re-evaluate will mean Yount Major wishes to flout the wishes of the Mother by denying Yount an opportunity to host, foster, and encourage properly the one who may be the sukenna-tareef. Your failure to change your decision will be tantamount to a declaration of war on the Coerceries of Orn and all other right-thinking Yountians. Much as we will regret having to do so, the Coerceries of Orn will respond in kind to your unjust and provocative action.”

  The room was so silent when the Ambassador finished that Sally heard her heart racing, and thought she heard the hearts of everyone in the hall. She moved her hand to Reglum’s arm without knowing she did so.

  The Queen stood up slowly, walked to the edge of the dais, and said, “I am Queen Zinnamoussea, sixth in direct line of the Hullitate dynasty, the House which emerged to rule Yount Major during the War of Affirmation. I have prepared my entire life, as my forebears did before me, for this moment. Orn will receive no different answer in forty-eight hours, or in forty-eight years, from the one I gave you, Ambassador, just now.”

  The Queen held out her right hand, without looking back. The Lord-Chancellor and the Arch-Bishop stood up, together picked up a scabbarded sword from behind the throne, and walked the sword to the Queen. Zinnamoussea took the sword and with a practiced motion swept the sword out of its scabbard. A throaty sigh went through the room. She held the sword in front of her the way a fencer does, perhaps not with quite the balance of the Ambassador but with easy resolve nonetheless. She walked down the five stairs of the dais, and paused on the carpet with her toes almost touching the point of the Ambassador’s sword. She looked at the Ambassador but did not bow before kneeling down to place her sword at right angles to the Ornish sword.

  The Queen stood up and said, “Ambassador, your embassy is at an end. By our laws and the treaty, you are granted safe passage from Yount Major back to Orn, provided you leave within forty-eight hours. From this moment, as a result of your egregious and wholly unfounded demand and subsequent hostile actions, Yount Major and the Coerceries of Orn are at war with one another. I bid you farewell.”

  Queen Zinnamoussea turned and walked up the stairs. She stood in front of her throne and signalled to the soldiers guarding the doorway, who opened the doors. Outside stood a company of drummers, headed by two soldiers bearing flags. The drummers, twenty in unison, began a tattoo the instant the doors opened. In they marched, with the dolphin, tree, and moon of Yount Major flying in front of them. The sound, coming after the close exchange before a near-silent audience and in an indoor space, was remarkably loud.

  The drummers lined the carpet, ten to a side, beating the tattoo, with a flag-bearer at the head of each line. The Ambassador from Orn retrieved and sheathed her sword, paced through her cohort with the same grace as she showed when she entered. With the drums drowning out all else, the Ornish put their hats on as one and marched down the carpet, past the hundreds assembled, past the standard-bearers, past the twenty drummers and the guards and out of the hall. The drummers played on and on.

  Within the hour the drum-ships beat in the harbour of Yount Great-Port, ketches holding enormous drums which were each beat by five drummers, the sound echoing off the windows of all the buildings, putting the gulls to flight, pulsing into the sea. All day and all that night the ship drums beat, like giants clapping over the entire city. The drumming was heard in the outlying precincts of the city, where drums were set up in the market-squares to pass the message to the industrial suburbs, where in turn drums beat, passing the message to innermost market towns and so on out to the villages and to every remote hamlet. The drumming spread from the Great-Port down the coastal roads, relayed to every city and every farmstead. By dawn the next day, all of Farther Yount knew the War of Affirmation had begun again, and drum-ships were on the way to the Margravate (Yount Major’s march-land on the island of Orn itself), to the Northern Fief-lands and the Liviates, to confirm what alarm blasts by ansible had already transmitted.

  That afternoon Queen Zinnamoussea went to the Winter Garden with her counsellors and had all the blood-red carnations harvested. She went herself to the royal flagship in the harbour and, to commemorate the sacrifice of the Lanner in the first war, she nailed a large bunch to the mast. She turned on the deck and raised her arms, and from the ship and from shore came a roaring call, “For the Lanner! Death to Orn!”

  Sally and the other McDoons, watching from the Palace windows, felt both dread and a fierce will to action. Sally reached for her St. Morgaine medallion, but she did not recite the Hamburg churches. Down below she saw blue-uniformed companies marching on the promenade to escort the Queen back to the Palace. Shouts and cries cracked off the cold building facades. The boom-boom of the drumships did not stop.

  So, they think I might be their saviour, the sukenna-tareef, Sally thought, holding Isaak up to the window. If I am, I do not feel like it, no matter how far or deep I sing. If I am, then I do not think I want to be. Me, the saviour?! As the cook would say, “There’s more boke than corn in that bushel.” Well, whatever I am or whatever they think I am: one deep breath and forward we go!

  Aloud she said, “Kaskas selwish pishpaweem, dear Mother protect us.”

  The debut staging of “Hero of the Hills” in Yountish had gone forward as planned, in fact had become a royal command performance. Given the declaration of war, Nexius, Reglum, and the other Fencibles had assumed
that the production would be cancelled but, at the Lord-Chancellor’s recommendation, the Queen had asked that it be staged as scheduled. She felt it would be good for morale, especially once she heard of the play’s martial theme, and most especially because it was to be staged as part of the Marines’ spring soiree.

  The play was an enormous success. The Queen sat in the front row, feeding sausages to Isaak. Nexius received thunderous applause when he rambled on stage as the Old General, and the climactic battle scene had everyone on the edge of their seats. Barnabas’s mangled Yountish caused great mirth; some of his deliveries were repeated for days in the mess-halls and muster-rooms. Above all, the audience was caught up in Playdermon’s loss of his beloved Alexandra on the eve of battle, and her miraculous return after he wins the day. There was not a dry eye in the house when Playdermon and Alexandra are reunited on the crag above Killiecarnock, and many wondered if the script called for the passion that Tom and Afsana showed in the roles.

  Their good spirits were reduced a few days later when they received news of the war’s first encounters. The Ornish invaded the Margravate on the Island of Orn, overrunning Yount Major’s defences and besieging the Margravate’s lone city, Arreniuble. An Ornish fleet was seen heading for the Northern Fief-Land. At least one Ornish contingent had landed in the Liviates. The mood in Yount Great-Port plunged when the first ship arrived from the Margravate, bearing wounded and ill news.

  Crew from the march-land ship whispered of the Ornish war cries and the long lines of captives being led away in chains to work in the Ornish iron mines, saltworks, and collieries. The stories spread rapidly in a nervous city and by dawn the magnitude of Orn’s victory had grown six-fold in the telling. In some corners talk was heard that the Ornish invasion was punishment for Yount Major inviting so many Karket-soomi and particularly for bringing in the Key-bearers and the Whale-singers, or maybe it was retribution for the failure to hold open the Door, or perhaps because some of the Karket-soomi were in league with the powers that guarded the Door, and so on. Some whispered that the Queen should have handed the lail-obos to the Ornish. After all, what business was it of Yount Major’s what the Ornish believed or wanted, if it meant avoiding a war? Some wondered if the Hullitate dynasty, heirless, had run its course: having emerged in the first Great War, perhaps it was fate that the Hullitates would end in the second Great War, or the War of Continued Affirmation as it was being called.

  Nexius, called to a meeting with the Queen by the Major-Captain, visited the McDoons. He was in a foul temper, both about the early outcome of the war, and about the rumours in the streets.

  “People are frightened,” he said. “Understandable. And understandable that frightened people will believe and say foolish things. But there is more to this talk than random fear. It is orchestrated, that’s what I think. This is deliberate rumour-mongering, stoking the fear that people feel.”

  Sally said, “The Arch-Bishop?”

  Nexius grunted. “Loositage, yes. That’s what I think. Oh, not he himself, of course. He is far too clever for that. But somewhere in the dark, his minions write his words on the backsides of apes, and send them scampering through the city to do their mischief.”

  More ill news soon reached the city: one of the Liviate islands had been taken, and the entire Yount Major garrison destroyed, five hundred soldiers slain. The fear in Yount Great-Port rose and the mutterings about Karket-soomi grew louder. Talk of Big Lander conspiracies, of treason in high places, and the involvement of diabolical forces moved from back alleys and the kitchen hearth to impromptu gatherings at the well or at the market-stalls. Others held opposite views, that the Key-bearers and Whale-singers would soon lead Yount Major to victory, so arguments and fights broke out. People talked of a great Ornish fleet bearing down on Yount Great-Port, and Ornish soldiers armed with weapons against which there was no defence. The McDoons did not leave the Palace.

  The Queen sent embassies to the Land of the Painted Gate and to the Free City of Ilquajorance, seeking allies or at least neutrality. The Pratincole was fitted out for a run to Karket-soom, to inform Yount Major’s network there of the war. The Arch-Bishop and his colleagues said little in these discussions but said much with their silence. The journalists would duly print the official demarche from the government in their newspapers, but they would also run up separate handbills and broadsheets with lurid banner-sentences and many exclamation points. Many of the more fantastical claims flouted the libel laws and would have been suppressed by the government censor but, since that function was controlled by the Sacerdotes, no actions were taken against even the most scurrilous speculations. The public, in any event, could not get enough of the broadsheets, which, as the Yountish expression has it, flew out of the print-houses and booksellers like star-ducks in mating season. Nexius ripped up a particularly scabrous example in front of the McDoons, saying only, “If one baits a bear, one must reckon with the consequences.”

  Sally looked out the window at the crowds in the streets. To her they looked like fields of wheat swaying in the wind that leads a thunderstorm. She turned away from the window and sat the rest of the day with Isaak in her lap.

  Chapter 15: No More Pint o’ Salt

  That evening, still in the chair with Isaak in her lap, Sally dreamed that she walked at night on a road winding between low, barren hills. An enormous moon dominated the sky. The stars were alien, unknown to Big Worlders and Small Worlders alike. Sally walked a long time on the silent road under moonlight, accompanied only by her long shadow leading the way. The moonlight should have been a pleasure except that she feared what lay at the end of the road. She walked up an incline until she reached the top, where the road fanned out in a dozen directions. The new roads sloped up another hill. At the point immediately beyond the fork in the road was a white pillar with thousands of names and dates inscribed on it, a cenotaph. On the top sat the Wurm-Owl, gleaming in the moonlight, whiter than the pillar. He did not move as Sally approached, except once to fluff his wings slightly and shift his scissor-tail that hung far down the cenotaph pillar.

  Sally stopped in the middle of the fork in the road, directly in front of the pillar, and looked straight up. She saw that the four-sided capital, the top of the pillar upon which the owl sat, had writing on it as well but the Owl’s shadow obscured the words. The Owl looked down at her with his blazing yellow eyes. At length, Sally said, “Here is where you hide the moon then, Orb-Reaver!”

  The Wurm-Owl snapped his beak at her but made no other reply. Sally saw now that the pillar was streaked with the Owl’s excrement, fouling the names, that its base was littered with the regurgitated bones and hair of the Owl’s prey, skulls of men and women among the detritus. The eye-sockets of the dead stared at her, sharply etched in the moonlight. A shinbone, shining and blank, stuck up from the mound, seeming to point like a signpost to one road in the fork.

  Sally looked down that road, and then at each of the others. So many, how to choose? She decided one was as good as another and, with a glance at the Owl above her, set her foot on the road indicated by the shinbone (I salute you, whoever you were, she thought. Rest in honour). Before she had gone three steps, the Owl opened its wings with a rush and boomed, “Not here, not this time!”

  Sally stepped back and tried another road, and a third, but each time the Wurm beat his wings and cried the same words. Try as she might, she could not pass down any of the roads, so strong was the Wurm’s will. Instead, Sally floated upwards, past the outraged face of the owl. His power prevented her from moving forward but she was able to rise higher and higher until she hovered a hundred yards above the road. Once as a child she had looked through a kaleidoscope at the Covent Garden fair: it was like that now, as the horizons shifted, fell into place, and she saw a plateau laid out below her. From the Owl’s pillar the roads wandered over the plateau, each of them in turn forking into more roads that disappeared into the distance. At each new fork was another cenotaph, upon which sat a great figure, not an owl but a
different creature on every pillar: a hoopoe with glowing eyes, a jackass-eared toad, a boar, and many others. The plain was filled with grotesque stylites, all staring with hostility at Sally, none moving except that once the toad’s tongue shot out of his mouth and, like a squamous arm, groped down its pillar before sliding back. None spoke but in her mind she heard their words, Not here, not this time!

  She floated for a long time, unable to go forward, tethered like a balloonist to one spot by the Wurm-Owl and rebuffed by the army of his kindred arrayed before her. All eyes were on her. The moonlight showed only the funereal plain and the snaking roads that dwindled into darkness, and the forest of pillars, with the shadows of bones everywhere, like ossuary-gardens at the foot of every column. She had learned nothing in this place, unless it was that she had no power here. Sally desperately wished for the dream to end, fearful now that some part of this dreamworld would attach itself to her, return with her. “Wake up,” she called to herself, “Oh, wake up!”

  From below came a dry, gurgling sound: the Wurm-Owl was laughing. Sally felt herself descending. She sought within herself for music, but held no music, not a simple arpeggio, not an ostinado, not one tiny note. Nothing. She descended and the Wurm’s beak opened to receive her, while the Wurm gurgled and slobbered. Before she fell beneath the level of the plateau, far off she saw something moving on one of the roads, a small knot of men perhaps, led by one who glowed a dull red, the only colour in that entire landscape. Whoever they were, they were coming closer, approaching the rows of watchers from behind, moving steadily but slowly, or it might be that the distance was so great it only seemed that way. Sally had no hope of succour from them, with the Owl’s beak only feet away.