Epic: Legends of Fantasy

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Epic: Legends of Fantasy Page 55

by John Joseph Adams


  Three Ripenings passed before he began to hear the Songs, and before she let him sing one he was already a man. Halli chafed against her restrictions. Why did she hold him back thus? He could do it, he knew he could. Didn’t she trust him?

  “You must learn humility,” Bard said. “We are vessels, no more.” His anger troubled her. Dreams came, and left her weary.

  In his eighteenth summer Halli gave the Folk his first Singing. Bard listened as he told of early frost and the coming of whales; of a far shore where green fields and fruitful vines might be discovered; of the building of boats. His Singing was like the call of a war horn, deep and resonant. By the end of it, the young men’s eyes were alight with excitement: here was a challenge beyond any yet imagined. Did not the ancestors bid them set forth on a great adventure? In the crowd Sifri stood quiet, her three fair daughters by her. There had been no more sons.

  Before the turning of the season they made a fine ship of wattles and skins, tarred for seaworthiness, with oars of larch wood. On the prow they set the great skull of a whale. They called the vessel Seaskimmer, and in her the young men of the island journeyed forth one sparkling dawn in search of the fruitful land to the west, a land where one day they might all live and prosper under a smiling sun. They did not return at Reaping. The women, the old people, the children cut the barley and stacked the straw. They did not return as the year moved on and the days began to shorten. It was in the shadow time that they came back to the island, those bold venturers of the Folk. A boy and his dog wandered the cold beach of Grimskaill, gathering driftwood. Shrouded in weed, cloaked in ribbons of sea wrack, the young men of Storna and Settersby, Grimskaill and far Frostrim lay quiet under the winter sky. For seven long days the Folk stood there by the water as the ocean delivered up their sons, each at his own time, each riding his own last wave. Then there was a burning such as the island had not seen in many a long year. The people looked at Bard with doubt in their eyes.

  “This was wrong,” she told him afterwards.

  Halli lifted his fair brows. “How can the Singing be wrong? I told only the Song the ancestors gave me.”

  “It was wrong. The Songs help us avoid such acts of foolish waste, such harvests of anguish. It could not be meant thus.”

  “Why not?” her student said. “Who can say what the ancestors intend?”

  “Surely not the wiping out of a full generation of young men. Who will father sons here? Who will fish and hunt? How will the Folk survive this?”

  He smiled: his father’s sunny, dimpled smile. “Perhaps the ancestors see a short future for us. Perhaps raiders will come and beget children. Who knows? I cannot answer your questions. You said yourself, we are no more than vessels.”

  That winter grandmothers and grandfathers swept floors and tended infants and stirred pots of thin gruel, while women cleared snow from thatch and broke ice from fishing holes. The few men of middle years slaughtered stock and hauled up the boats. It was a harsh season, but wisdom was remembered from times past, and they survived. At Waking, when the air held a deceptive whisper of new season’s warmth, she would not let him listen for the Song.

  “I am Bard,” she told him, “and I will do it. You are not yet ready. You must learn something more.”

  “What?” Halli demanded fiercely. “What?”

  But Bard gave no answer, for she had none.

  The Song was an anthem to the lost ones, and a warning. The Folk must keep the balance or perish. Their children had survived the savage winter. Now all must be watchful. Bard thought the ancestors’ message was not without hope. But she was tired, so tired that she stumbled as she went to stand before the Folk in the ritual place; so weak that she could scarcely summon the breath for the Singing. Afterwards her mind felt drained, her thoughts scattered. She could hardly remember what she had told them.

  The weariness continued. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she should get a potion from the travelling folk, ever renowned for their elixirs. There was wisdom amongst that colourful, elusive band of wanderers: they had sent no sons voyaging across the ocean to return in a tumble of bleached and broken bone. But she was too tired to seek them out.

  Halli was solicitous. He brought her warm infusions. He ensured the fire was made up and the floor swept clean. It was he who performed the Singing at midsummer, telling of fine shoals of fish south of Storna Bay, and favourable winds. Before the season’s end deer might be taken and the meat smoked for winter.

  The few men left on the island were not over-keen to put to sea, but the Singing removed any choice. They came to her afterwards with questions. How many deer? How many days may we fish in safety? With our young men gone, who will lead the hunt? She could not answer them. She had not heard this Song, for the stones were far, a weary distance up the hill. It was Halli who answered.

  “Since the Singing did not tell of this, take what you will,” he said.

  There were some men of middle years, too old to sail for new horizons, still young enough for work. They found mackerel in great numbers and, thinking of winter, brought in netful after shining netful. The salting huts were crammed to bursting, and still there were more, a bountiful harvest. They went for deer, and found them in wooded valleys beyond Settersby. They were gone seven days; they returned bearing two great antlered carcases and the body of a fine, fair-haired man. Ekka was dead, slipped from an outcrop as he readied his spear to take the stag cleanly. Bard could hear the sound of Sifri’s grieving all the way up the hill and through the shutters. She looked into her student’s clear blue eyes, reading the iron there, and something shivered deep inside her. This was her doing. This was her Choosing. The boy had killed his own father. A Telling came to her mind as she lay shivering under her thick blankets, a Telling of times to come: of a spring with no mackerel, a spring where the young of puffin and albatross starved on the cliffs for lack of nourishment. In the season after, their numbers were less, and less again next Waking. Then weasel and fox, wolf and bear grew bolder, and neither chicken nor goose, young lamb nor younger babe in cradle was safe. The men grew old and feeble, the women gaunt and weary. Children were few. The Telling turned Bard’s bones to ice. In such a time, all it would take was one hard winter to finish the Folk.

  “You look tired,” Halli observed. “You must rest. Leave everything to me.” And indeed, there seemed a great urge in her to sleep; to melt into darkness, and let it all slip away. After all, what could she do? She had made her choice long years ago. All stemmed from that, and there was no changing it.

  On the edge of slumber she heard again the sweet voice of a whistle, played somewhere out in the night, as deep and subtle, for all its simplicity, as the voices of the ancestors themselves. Bard slid out of bed, careful to make no sound. From Halli’s chamber the small harp rang out. Still he drilled his fingers, the patterns ever more complex, as if he would never be satisfied. The sound of it frightened her. He frightened her. Unchecked, he would be the end of them all. But she felt so weak. The Folk no longer trusted her. Ekka was dead. She was alone, all alone...

  A long time she knelt there on the earthen floor, shivering in her worn nightrobe. The old learning seemed almost forgotten: how to empty the mind and slow the breath, how to calm the body and control the will, how to listen. Somehow it had almost slipped away from her. She had forgotten she was Bard.

  Of course you are alone, she thought fiercely. Bard is always alone. Have you let even that most basic lesson escape you?

  “Not quite. But you have misremembered.”

  Her head jerked upwards. For a moment she thought—but no, the harp still sounded from the far chamber, servant of his will. The figure which stood before her was another entirely, and yet as familiar as the image she saw when she bent over the water trough to cup hands and drink. This wraith with hollow eyes and pallid cheeks, with shaven head, with ragged cloak and long hands apt for the making of music, this phantom was...herself. And yet...and yet...

  “You know me,” said her visitor, movin
g closer. She reached out a hand to touch, scarcely believing what she saw, and her fingers moved though him, cloak, flesh, bone all nebulous as shadow.

  “You are my brother,” she whispered, her eyes sliding fearful towards the inner door.

  “He will not hear us.”

  “Why have you come? Why journey from—from death to seek me out?”

  “You are afraid. You see no answers. Yet you hold the key to this yourself, Bard.” His voice was grave and quiet. “The pattern is gone awry; that is your doing. It is for you to weave it straight and even once more.”

  “Why didn’t you come before?” she asked him urgently. “I needed help. Why not come before good folk died, before he did what he did? Where were you?”

  “You have carried me within you all this time, sister. If not for your error, you could have heard my voice, stronger as the years passed. Bard is never truly alone; always she has her Otherling. But you disobeyed the ancestors. Your choice was flawed. Now its influence spreads dark over you.”

  Bard stared at him, aware once more of her leaden limbs, her burdened heart. “The Folk will perish. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but in time all will be lost. I’ve seen it.”

  The Otherling gazed back. His eyes seemed empty sockets, yet full of light. He was both old and young: an infant in a rush basket, a strong man in his prime, an ancient wise in spirit. “You made it so,” he said quietly. “Now unmake it. Do what you could not do, long years ago. One does not lightly disregard the wisdom of the ancestors. Since the day you did so the Folk have walked under a shadow, a darkness that will in time engulf them. You hold their very future at the point of your knife.”

  “But—”

  “The Otherling must die, Bard. There is no avoiding it. He cannot live in the light; he cannot be left to walk the land and whisper his stories in the ear of farmer and fisherwoman, merchant and seamstress. And Bard cannot do her work without him. The two must be one, for they are reality and reflection, light and dark, substance and shadow.”

  Bard shivered. “You mean the Otherling is—evil? That if he lives he must inevitably work destruction?”

  “Ah, no. It is not so simple. The two are halves of the one whole: complement and completion of each other. Can day exist without night, light without shade, waking without sleeping? Can the Folk survive without the death of the mackerel in the net, the spear in the seal’s heart, the hen’s surrender of her unborn children? The Otherling must stand behind, in darkness, to make the balance. Only then can Bard sing truth. Now go, do what you must do before it is too late.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “I will help you.” He moved to embrace her; his encircling arms were as insubstantial as vapour. She felt a shudder like a cool breath through her, and he was gone.

  The travellers were encamped by the seafront, children gathering shells under a blood-red dawn, the smoke of campfires rising sluggishly. There was a rumble of approaching storm, its deep music a counterpoint to the whistle’s plangent tone. The young man sat watching the sky, as if his tune might coax the sun to show himself between the rain-heavy clouds. As Bard approached him the melody faltered and ceased.

  She had not known how she would speak to him. How can you say, Come with me, I will tell you whose brother you are, and then you will die? Ah, those eyes, those fine, merry eyes she had seen gazing up at her once, open and guileless. He had been so quiet. He had been so good. Never a sound from him, as she had borne him forth, basket closed tight, all the way up the hill to her hut. Never a peep out of him, as she bribed the little girls to take him, the little girls with plaited crests to their hair, and faces all painted in spirals and dots of red and white. What was one more infant amongst so many? Who would know, when every one of them wore a guise of rainbow colours, a cloak of dazzling anonymity? She had paid handsomely; the women would feed him and care for him. They were a generous kind, and made their own rules. The rush basket, weighted with the carcase of a fat goose, had burned to nothing. Nobody had known. Nobody but Bard, whose heart shivered every time the travellers came by, whose eyes filled with tears to hear the voice of the whistle, so sad, so pure. What had she done to him? What had she done to them both?

  “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  He had no questions as they walked together under dark skies, up the hill to the place of the stones. She asked his name; he said, Sam.

  “Were you at the last Singing?” she asked him.

  He nodded and said nothing. At the old water trough they halted.

  “Wash your face,” Bard told him. Washed clean, the two of them, naked and clean.

  The young man, Sam, looked at her a moment, eyes wide. His features were daubed with spiral and link, dot and line. His hair stood in rows of hedgehog prickles, waxed honey-dark. He bent to the water and splashed his face, washing the markings away. The water clouded.

  “Wait,” Bard said.

  The water cleared. The sun pierced the cloud for one bright moment.

  “Now look,” she said.

  The image was murky; specks of coloured clay floated across his mirrored features. But it was plain enough. He glanced up at her.

  “I did wrong,” Bard said. “He is your brother. I saved you, because— because—no matter. Now all is awry because of what I did not do.” In its way, it was an apology.

  There were no desperate denials, no protests.

  “Can I see him?” Sam asked. “I’d like to see him first.” It was as if he knew. Clouds rolled across, heavy with rain. The sky growled like a wild beast.

  “Come, then,” said Bard.

  Halli was by the watchstone, hands outstretched, eyes shut in pose of meditation. Often before a storm she had found him thus; the soughing of the wind, the uneasy movement of trees, the air’s strange pungent smell excited him. At such times of danger, he said, who knew what powerful voices might speak from the stones?

  They stood by the hollow’s rim, Bard and the young man Sam. Under the dark folds of her long cloak, her fingers touched cold iron.

  “He is your brother,” she said again, and Halli’s blue eyes snapped open. No need for explanations. The two stood frozen, one in astonished wonderment, the other in sudden furious realisation. There was a moment of silence. Then Halli drew ragged breath.

  “You saved him!” he whispered, accusatory, furious. “No wonder I was never good enough, no wonder I could not hear them! You saved the Otherling! Why? Why?”

  Because of love, Bard answered, but not aloud. I did wrong, and now he must die.

  “Brother, well met indeed!” Sam’s dimpled smile was generous. Below the bizarre spiked hair his blue eyes spoke a bright welcome. He took a step forward, hand outstretched in friendship. Now she was behind him. Halli’s agonised eyes met hers over his twin’s shoulder, their message starkly clear. Do it now. Do what you could not do before. Make it right again. Perhaps it was her own Otherling who spoke these words: the shadow within. She drew out the knife. She saw the dimple appear in Halli’s cheek, the curve of his mouth as he watched her. Sam went very still. He did not turn. Bard raised her hand.

  A great blade speared down from above; there was a thunderous crack like the very ending of the world, and a sudden rending. It was not her own small weapon that set the earth shuddering, and came like a wave through the damp air, hurtling her head over heels to land sprawling, gasping, face down in wet grass with her two hands clutching for purchase and her ears ringing, deafened by the immense voice that had spoken. Her heart thudded; her head swam. Slowly she got to her knees. The knife lay on the ground at her feet, its blade clean as a new-washed babe. She looked up. The watchstone was split asunder, its monumental form chiselled in two pieces by the force of the blast. One part still stood tall, reaching its lichen-crusted head to touch the storm-tossed sky. The other part lay prone now, like shadow given substance: dark testament to the sky’s ferocity. This slab would never be lifted, not should all the Folk of the island come with ropes and oxen. It
was grave and cradle; ending and beginning. After all, she had not had to choose. The ancestors had spoken, and the choice was made.

  “You’re weeping,” she said. “Bard does not weep.”

  “How can I not weep?” he asked her. “He was my brother.”

  “Come, Halli,” said Bard gently. “There is no more to be done here. And it’s starting to rain.” She unfastened her cloak and reached to put it around his shoulders.

  He stared at her, face ashen with the shock of finding, and losing, and finding again. “I have so much to learn,” he whispered, and she saw that he had recognised her meaning. “So much.”

  Bard nodded. “I am not so old yet that I cannot teach you what you must know. Already you are rich in understanding. Already you hear the Songs and tell them, unaware. He will help you. His fingers know the harp, his lips the pipe. The heart that beats new wisdom into the Songs belongs now to the two of you.”

  He bowed his head, looking towards the gentle hollow, now hidden beneath the huge slab of stone. Rain fell like tears on its fresh-hewn surface, making a pattern of spiral and curve, dot and line.

  “Best put that hood up,” she said, “until I attend to that hair of yours. No student of mine goes unshaven. Now come. There’s work to be done.”

 

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