by John Grant
~
Qinefer, my flass, is telling the weans a story. They are draped, one to either side, across her thighs as she sits cross-legged on the sand; their eyes are upturned shiningly towards hers, which are brown and deep like peaty, slow-moving river water. Tickles and hair-tugs punctuate the tale.
"So Brightjacket speaks again to the gathering," she says, for she is well past the once-upon-a-times in her telling, "and this time he punches his chest like so and he draws himself up to his finest height, and he says, 'The Ironfolk will see us dead, or will bend us to their chores. Have they not already banished the songs out of the streams? Is not even the cool voice of moonlight stilled, so that she and the wind can no longer sing their wistfulness together in the pine-branches? Have they not cast their nets of crafted metal across all the land, caging us? Yes!' – and here he strikes his chest again, only harder (harder than I would strike yours, my little glad) – 'All of this destroying they have done in their lack of grace, and there is no one who can tell when they will cease to do so. We have watched them in silence, if we have dared not to flee.'"
It's an old story, of course, one that dates right back to the times on Earth before it melded with The World. I grin and listen in on it, pretending that she won't know I'm doing so.
"'The Ironfolk's railways,' says Brightjacket, 'are like the spores of a dandelion clock, drifting everywhere, coming down anywhere, stiffening the land's music – our music – with the crafted metal of which they are shaped. When was the last time the Finefolk could dance in the Vale of White Horse? Or in a ring around the Cairngorms? Or among the tors – the tors our folk built – of Dartmoor? Twenty years? Fifty?'
"And the eldern among them nod, as so do the fly weans – even those who can ill recall ten years past, leave alone fifty. For metal that is shaped is graver to our kind than viper's bite or scorpion's sting – which are, my bonny young flass, more painful far than even your mother's skelp."
The two of them laugh together, the mother and her daughter. In this moment the two of them are of a single age. Which is as it should be. For all her words, Qinefer has felt neither snake's nor scorpion's wrath; the creatures of my world are peaceful with us, obeying the notes I instructed the inshore breeze to pluck on the sea-reeds. But I gave her my memories when first she swam ashore from the probability sea, which is why she knows of bites and stings. And why she knows the story of Brightjacket, and of how he led our kind to the Freedom. Though some memories I kept from her.
"'You nod in the simulation of wisdom!' cries Brightjacket angrily, and all hush at the anger in his voice. 'Wooden puppets can nod like that, when their strings are tweaked!' he says. 'But wisdom is more than knowing, or its pretence: wisdom is also doing, when the doing is wise!'
"None of them there like this overmuch. The eldern can recollect the times before the Ironfolk came, and all the Earth was a room for play. Even after, once the shaping of metal had begun, there were places in plenty where people could escape its bindings. Such places, indeed, there yet were; but they were shrinking, like rainpools in the hot sunlight. Always there still seemed to be enough, even if this year's enough had to be a bit less than the last year's. Even here where they've forgathered, deep in a cavern that some forgotten hand once carved out beneath Snowdon, it's as if they can hear the dead noise of the chains wafting close to them. What Brightjacket was doing, my wind-haired ones, was looking ahead, seeing a time when the rainpools would be all gone, as the interstices in the net of the railways were filled in by the roads where crafted-metal creations likewise roared. The seas were not immune to these monsters, and neither the skies overhead – although not even Brightjacket foresaw how the scattered metal birds would one day flock. Our folk have never been too good at looking forward, you see: that's another thing the assembly doesn't like – being reminded of the future.
"'All the time it's getting worse,' he says into the silence of their resentment. 'Soon there will be no room for us even to pipe simple Changing-spells on a fipple-flute, or to sing the song that brings Sirius's winter rising.'
"'But what can we do?' says an eldern dismissively – or maybe it was several eldern, or all of them together, their beards making a sound like cuckoo-spit shaking loose. 'We cannot fight the Ironfolk, not without weapons of crafted metal we can't; and they alone of all the Earth's creatures have ears that are deaf to our music. I have myself hurled a Chord-of-dying straight into the face of one, and he heard not a gnat's whine!'
"'You're right,' says Brightjacket forthrightly. 'We cannot fight them. The time when we could have done that is a million years gone. And we cannot stay, and let ourselves be destroyed. So surely you must see there is only one course open to us?'
"All is silence again. They know what he is talking about – naturally they do, for our folk have never been without wits, although often stupid, and blinkered, and loath to change their doings. But knowing a thing and admitting you know it are two quite different matters."
"Like you not knowing that Daddy's been listening to you the past few minutes?" says Larksease. She looks at me, then cringes back into the crook of her mother's arm as I glower my most impressively.
"That's not quite the same," says Qinefer, a laugh briefly splitting her voice into separate strands, "but it's near enough. Now, pay attention to me, you impudent minx – and you, too, my twitch-nosed buffo – and let your father do as he wills. Otherwise you'll never know what happened to Brightjacket."
They pay dutiful attention, even though they've heard a thousand times what happened to Brightjacket.
"'We cannot fight, and we cannot survive if we but bide,' he says at last, his chin in his palm as if he were thinking all this afresh. 'So what is there that is left for us to do? Why – we must surely flee!'
"This makes a growl rise above the heads of young and old alike, as if Snowdon had heard Brightjacket's words and was registering gruff disapproval. If you've never heard an angry mountain speak its anger, then you don't know what anger sounds like." Two pairs of wide eyes on hers. "For a while it looks as if they may join their voices in a song that would rend Brightjacket one limb from the other, but he holds out his palms to them, and at last the moment is past.
"Another eldern pushes his way to the fore. 'Our people do not flee!' he bellows. 'We have always faced down peril. We are not cowards, are we?'
"And there's a huge bay of agreeing to this, of course. Fine words are always good to cheer to; they've killed more armies than weapons have. Not one of the folk gathered there wants to stand up and say, 'Yes, I'm a coward. I admit it, and I want to save my furry skin.' Not one of them except Brightjacket, but he doesn't put it quite that way.
"'It is our duty,' he says gravely, 'to do all that we can to preserve our kind. To stay here is to accept not just our own deaths but also those of our weans; and from their weans we would be taking away the chance of their first opening of their eyes. Can any among you here say that we have the right to throw away those lives?'
"Once again there's a hubbub. Some folk say he's right; others say he's just weaving spoken-words, making a Deceiving-chord too subtle for any of them to recognize as such. But the end of it all – and the end is a long time in coming, I assure you – is that more than three-fourths of the folk in the cavern say that Brightjacket's right, and that only flight can save the Finefolk. But where can they flee to? Even the ocean's deeps are being plumbed by the Ironfolk and their tools of crafted metal.
"'To the stars,' says Brightjacket in response to their question, and he begins to laugh a little-boy laugh. 'To the stars – that's a place where we gallant lads and fair lasses can hide from the Ironfolk.'
"I told you that our folk are not fine at looking to the future, so no one thinks to say there are only so many stars in the skies, and that sooner or later the Ironfolk will take themselves and their machines to those places, too. If anyone thinks of that, they believe it to be so many millions of years away it hardly matters. Even Brightjacket – who keeps quiet on
the subject, as he would – believes that at least thousands of years must go by before the Ironfolk learn the simplest music, let alone the complicated harmonies that must be meshed to open the pathways across the greater seas to the stars. And he's right, of course – the Ironfolk have still never learned to play the living music, and I doubt very much if they even know it exists. What he doesn't reckon on – none of them do – is that the crafted-metal machines might become strong enough to batter their way across the interstellar oceans; and then, later, discover a way of skipping across the crests of the probability waves."
~
When I gave Qinefer my memories, there were a few I held back, not wishing that she should live a life of fear. By the time the Ironfolk had discovered how to skip the waves, they'd also encountered enough of our worlds to have found out about the living music. I doubt if any of them will ever learn to play it, still less to sing it; yet they are aware enough of its existence to know that they should fear it, and to take precautions against letting any of our kind give voice. They know, too, that it is their crafted metal that stiffens the living music in us; that is why, when they come to each new world, they swiftly ring it with their steel-and-aluminum space-sailing vessels, so preventing as many as possible of us from opening up the oceanic pathways and escaping. The rest of us can soon be caught and enslaved; all the Ironfolk need to do is capture one of us alive, and threaten to cut out his or her vocal cords with a steel knife ... The rest submit themselves, rather than hear that happen.
My world was taken that way. I remember it as if it were only a century or two ago. Qinefer's recital of a bugaboo tale for the weans, even though I know it better than she does, has picked the scabs off memories. Ours was a well populated world, with upwards of a hundred thousand of us – almost as many as had once dwelt on Earth. Perhaps fifty score escaped; another fifty score died in futile fighting; the rest of us were loaded into colony vessels much like the Ten Per Cent Extra Free, so that we could slave for their owners and in due course their passengers. In the last, of course, we were intended to be still slaving for them on the worlds in the Spiral of Andromeda.
The inside of the Ten Per Cent Extra Free was a horrible place of silence. Oh, there were spoken-words of course, both Ironfolk and Finefolk, but the metal walls shut us off even from the faint music of starlight. There were birds aboard, but they were kept frozen in the hold; I do not know if this was to spite us, or just if the Ironfolk were not only deaf to birds' singing but also blind to the colors of their feathers and the thought-focusing hardness of their eyes. Not even the soft susurration of insects was permitted: they were killed on sight, or poisoned in their nests.
We plotted. We dreamed strange, music-less dreams. Some of us cursed Brightjacket, wherever he might now be, for having led our folk out into the archipelagos of the probability sea; others, wiser, knew that he had at least postponed our fate until now, which was something we should be thanking him for. There was much foolish talk of sundering the walls of the vessel, so that air and water and bodies and all would be flushed out into the ocean voids. It seemed like a pointless aim for rebellion, whatever its appeal – that kind of death, bathed in the chants of starlight, must surely be better than the life we were leading, but we had no wish to die. Besides, there were weans and other innocents among the Ironfolk families who had been brought on board; did we want their metal blood on our hands?
But, if we could have found a way of leaving, we'd have taken it. Or if we'd known how to wrest control of the Ten Per Cent Extra Free from its officers, then we'd have done that, too.
Scheming is as good as a log fire for keeping the body warm; that's really why we plotted such a lot.
I had a secret which I talked about to none, not even the flass who then shared my bunk and my hopes – and whose name I have written out of my memories. She would never consciously have let the knowledge of my secret color her thoughts, but others might have detected it nevertheless; and then I might have been surrounded by hotheads, demanding that I lead them in a doomed revolt against our oppressors.
Buried in my meager baggage was a tiny five-stringed harp. It had been crafted worlds away from where I had settled myself to live; its wood was of a mustard yellow unlike any I had elsewhere seen (although there are copses of it here on this world of mine). My mother had given it to me at one of the times I had wedded a flass, and had lied to me, as mothers do, that it was once her own grandmother's, even though it was patently new-made. The strings on it were not to my liking – the first thing that I did after my wedding was replace them with good twisted fishgut – but the frame was well enough constructed to sound a fine note. The whole instrument was barely bigger than my flattened pair of hands, and it could sustain only the simplest of melodies – certainly nothing of the complexity of even a Changing-spell – yet it made a pretty noise, a merry tinkle, like the sound early-morning mist makes on glass, which you can hear only if you listen carefully enough.
Why the Ironfolk guards should have let me keep it, I have no idea. They had searched through the few belongings they'd allowed us to bring with us – not once but twice or three times, hurling anything that looked in the slightest like it could make music into one of their cruel shredding machines. (The tale was told that sometimes, for the sport of hearing screams, they did this also to Finefolk weans, but this I never saw myself, and I believe it to have been only a story.) Perhaps they had never seen a harp so small, so that when they came across it in their rootling they thought it was something else. Maybe the Ironfolk have objects of quite different purpose that look like that. I have no knowledge. Whatever the truth was, I was not going to give them the instrument if they were too stupid to see it when it was in front of their eyes.
Not, I repeat, that it was in itself much good for anything. Even had it been a full clarsach – the most alive of all instruments – it would have been unable to play any living music in that vessel, surrounded as it was by crafted metal. It was a toy, and had never been anything more; here on the Ten Per Cent Extra Free it was just a way of reminding myself of the music I had once played, when I had been free to walk on worlds. There is a pleasure to be found in painful nostalgia; sometimes, when all slept but me, I plinked a lifeless note or two and tormented myself ecstatically. So softly did I pluck its fishgut strings that even the flass slenderly snoring beside me was unwakened.
But once an Ironfolk warder heard.
I have no inkling of why I didn't know that he was coming. Normally we Finefolk could tell where they were even as far as a league away, with their iron-nailed boots clanging echoes out of the loathed steel walkways. Or the guards would come to an aluminum door which would slide back from them into its aluminum niche, the scrape of the two aluminums together sounding out an alarm that struck across voices and, as it was this time, snores. (Some Ironfolk snore hardly at all, which is very strange. But, to make up for that, those that snore loudest make a deafening din.) Perhaps I was thinking too much of the fact that we were nearing the time when the Ten Per Cent Extra Free would throw herself clear of the Galaxy and set out across the gulf to the Spiral of Andromeda; that would be the moment when all of us knew that our last farewells had truly been said to our homeworlds. Perhaps I was too engaged in my delightful misery to hear what my ears were trying to tell me. Or perhaps I was, secretly, eager to be discovered – as if the part of me that did not enjoy the pain wanted an end of it, and of the little instrument that conjured it.
The door to our cabin – mine and my flass's – was not of the sort that slid away like a horse's pizzle, but it was of painted aluminum all right, and its crash against the painted aluminum wall as he threw it open returned me from wherever my sadness had blown me. I saw his eyes – his sightless Ironfolk eyes – bulge like a frog's when he saw what I was doing. In a second there was a heavy metal weapon in his hand – one of the spitting-weapons, that could be built light but are instead built heavy by the Ironfolk, to enhance their bullying demeanor. I sat on my bunk, ha
lf-raised, staring over my slumbering flass not so much at the intruder but at the serpent-eye black of his weapon's nozzle. I could hear his muscles tense as he prepared to make me die (although I kindly know he knew it not) with its dart, and I prepared myself for that; I would not have brought death willingly upon me, of course, but my sorrow was great enough that I had little regret about dying.
Which would have happened, except that the scream of metal against metal had woken my flass. Just as the guard's finger stressed she raised herself up on her elbows, taking the dart in the center of her forehead. At once the tiny metal point spread its evil cacophony all through her, and her body flailed its revulsion; the pain was overly great for her to scream before she died, or even to try to sing the notes of the Dying-song.
I think the guard was too terrified to shoot at me after that; I know he had not had the intention of bringing about a dying. The lives of we slaves had not been expensive up until now, but the Ten Per Cent Extra Free was close to the time of leaving the Galaxy, so hereafter our numbers could not be simply replenished by a raid or a trade. The Ironfolk forget that even their "harmless" trinket darts, loaded with synthetic stuffs that render Ironfolk themselves sleepy but not damaged, being tipped with metal are death to us. They also forget that they are all, sometimes, guilty of forgetting; the guard was likely to be punished for doing something that his punishers did as often as he. He had not a wish to add a further dying to the tally.
He gestured with his spitting-weapon at me, and I made my eyes flare as if in fear of it. I curbed the grief I felt for my flass, although I vowed that one day in the Spiral of Andromeda I would find a place far from the crafted metal so that I could sing for her her Dying-song in all its entirety. I picked myself off my bunk and moved away from her, as he had indicated. Another jerk of the weapon, and I threw my pitifully small harp towards him across the metal floor.