Alison Croggon - [Pellinor 04]

by The Singing (lit)

  But as the shadows lengthened, a soft, melodious voice wound itself into her mind. She had never heard a voice of such bewitching beauty, and despite herself she opened her mind to listen.

  Elednor, said the voice. Elednor, at last I have found you whom I have sought long, through fire and shadow, this other part of myself...

  With a thrill of fear, Maerad looked about her, but she could see no sign of any semblance.

  Who are you? she asked.

  I am your other self, said the voice. The other whom you have always desired to be. I am the end of all your longing, all your search­ing, all your dreams.

  This woke all of Maerad's perverse stubbornness, and the voice's enchantment wavered. That's no answer, she said, her voice like a whiplash. She felt the other flinch. J think that you are Sharma.

  If I am, what I say is no less true. Consult your heart, Elednor, Elednor Edil-Amarandh na, and see if what your heart tells you is not true. After all, here we can speak as equals.

  Disgust rose in Maerad's throat so that she nearly gagged. Equals? she said. I think not. I would never do what you have done. I would never ... How dare you speak to me. How dare you come here, after everything that you've done.

  The voice was silent for a time, and then it laughed, and its laughter was warm and intimate in her ear, so that Maerad recoiled.

  My dear one, it said. You are very young, hut you have killed without mercy, because it was necessary. Do not pretend to me that you have not. Do not pretend that you are better than you are. You have caused suffering and grief and pain. It is the price of power, is it not? Why should you think that I have acted any differently from you? I have lived longer than you. I have tasted the joy and terror and price of power. So it is, always. Do you think your noble friends are any better than I am? Do not tell me that you have not thought these things yourself. You, of all people, are not stupid.

  Maerad tried to close her mind against the voice, but it insinuated itself through all her defenses, and she could not but listen. And now doubt rose inside her; she had indeed thought these things. She bit her lip. And the voice continued—soft, persuasive, its melody a tormenting pleasure that she could not resist.

  Now I have found you, I can at last ask you: why do you seek to destroy our powers? You do not understand what it is that you do. Elednor, Elednor, you are misled. There is another way...

  Each time Sharma said her Name, the enchantment deep­ened, although Maerad struggled against it. She looked around again; it was strange talking to someone she could not see, not in her inner vision nor before her naked eye. But Sharma kept himself hidden.

  What other way? she asked unwillingly.

  You are misled by those who claim they are your friends. They envy your power and wish to destroy it. But Elednor, you are mis­taken. You are the One. In you the Treesong is made whole. This— sickness—you see around you is but the sickness of the Split Song. If we take this power wholly for ourselves, we can remake the whole world. You and I, Elednor: King and Queen of all creation. We can make the world a perfumed garden; the rivers will flow with milk and honey. We can mend all hurts and right all wrongs. It is this that you throw away, Elednor, if you release the Treesong. You will lose every­thing if you do this; and having known the possibility of such power, how could you live? It will be a stale life, Elednor Edil-Amarandh na, if you turn away from your destiny, a dull life, knowing the shining that could have been you.

  Beneath the beauty of Sharma's voice, Maerad could feel the anguish that inhabited him, an endless anguish that filled her with pity. Sharma was right: he was not a whole creature, and his crimes and cruelty grew out of the agony of the wound that was his being. She saw herself as Queen of Edil-Amarandh, stern and just and immortal, as beautiful as Ardina, as stern as Arkan, more powerful than both. She would rule over a world in which there would be no sadness, no injustice, no ugliness. If she had this power, did she have the right to relinquish it? Perhaps she had been mistaken all along . . . even Cadvan admitted that he didn't know all ends, and perhaps this was the true reading of the prophecy, the true new age of the world.

  But as she thought of Cadvan, she remembered vividly the shape and warmth of his body in her arms, the dull thud of his heartbeat, the solid presence that had kept her from madness on the terrible journey through the Hutmoors. And then she remembered Saliman and Nelac, Nerili and Ardina, Dernhil and Dharin, all her friends who had placed such faith in her, who had suffered so much, and had even died, so that she might come to this place. And she thought of her mother and her lonely death, and her father, cut down in the sack of Pellinor, and of Hem, her brother, taken by Hulls as a baby.

  Your friends will understand in the end, said Sharma, sensing her thoughts. They, too, will see the wisdom and justice of your deci­sion, and they will bow before you. And if they do not see that, they will have no power to resist you. Why do you think they fear you? They fear you rightly. You are no longer a child, at the whim of your elders. Put your lyre down, Elednor, Elednor Edil-Amarandh na. Give your lyre to me, and step into your true destiny, blissful queen of all creation. Let the true age of justice begin!

  justice? said Maerad, with a sudden biting scorn. She clutched her lyre close to her breast. What do you know of justice? The pretty visions vanished, and she remembered the corpses that had choked the Findol River so that its waters were poi­soned, and the slaughtered children of the Firman Plains. And at the same time, she knew that Sharma did not know her other Name, the Elidhu Name that lay deep within her and that even Maerad herself did not know; and she understood, with a sud­den glad knowledge, that without her third Name he could not utterly bewilder her. Nor could he harm her, any more than she could harm him, while she did not open her powers. The bewitchment of the voice fell instantly away; she saw his enchantment as a cheap trick, and wondered why she had ever listened.

  The bile rose in her throat, and she spat on the ground. Get away from me, traitor! she said. I am not your fool, to be flattered and threatened. Go!

  She felt his surprise and then his impotent fury, and all sense of the voice vanished. But now Maerad was wary, and she lifted a great shield so that he could not strike her or her com­panions. And for the first time since she had arrived at Afinil, she began to feel afraid: Sharma could not touch her now, but when she began the Singing, she would be open in her powers, and vulnerable. She felt the force of his cold anger gathering about her in the deepening shadows, and she knew that he, too, was afraid of her, and that like any cornered, desperate beast, he was most dangerous when most afraid.

  Hem felt a little better after eating. Although the stew of dried meat and pulses was hardly tasty fare, it was warm and wholesome, and gave him some ballast, staving off the nau­sea that ran in waves through his body.

  As the sun sank in the sky, he found himself becoming uneasily aware of the tuning fork; it vibrated against his skin, as if it were a live thing. Since the Hollow Lands, he had forgotten it; the fork had just been a lump of metal that nestled next to the cloth bag he always wore around his neck. Now he remem­bered that this object had hung for millennia about the neck of the Nameless One himself, that it had been made by Nelsor in this very place; that the tiny, mysterious runes scored on its dull surface held the secret of the Treesong, and perhaps the key to the binding spell that placed the Nameless One among the immortals and gave him his powers ...

  As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Hem tried to unthink it. After speaking to Saliman, he had been quite sure that the presence that was darkening his mind, that filled his steps with loathing and prompted the wracking nausea in his stomach was the Nameless One. He couldn't escape the convic­tion that it was unlucky even to think about him; but it was very difficult to think of anything else. Involuntarily he looked over his shoulder toward the south, as if he could see Sharma riding toward them on a giant black horse that breathed fire through its nostrils, with an army of wers and Hulls at his heel.

  All he saw was the bleak
expanse of the Hutmoors, darken­ing under the shadows of evening. It was utterly lifeless: no birds swooped in the sky to catch late insects; no wild deer skit­tered nervously in the wind; not a vole, not a rabbit, not a mouse, not even the fleeting shadows of the dead, stirred at the edge of his vision. The wind moaned through the reeds and sedges of the marsh but he could hear nothing else: no marsh birds piping, no curlew calling its forlorn cry. A great stillness lay over the landscape like a paralyzing dread.

  He won't arrive on a horse, Hem thought, scorning himself for his fancy. His body is in Dagra. But Saliman is right: he hunts us down. He knows we want to destroy him. He is com­ing closer and closer. Maybe he even hears my thoughts, and they draw him here.

  He glanced toward Maerad. While they had cooked and eaten their meal, Maerad had stood unmoving at the edge of the marsh, a tiny figure under the great bowl of the sky. The dis­tress and pain that she had suffered as they traversed the Hutmoors seemed no longer to trouble her; if anything, her expression was serene. To Hem it seemed that her small figure held such power that she was vast: her shadow seemed to stream back from the westering sun like the brooding darkness of a mountain. For the first time, Hem felt a tremor of fear of her. Maerad was now beyond his understanding, beyond any homely call of kindred. He no longer knew who she was.

  He turned his gaze back to his three other companions. They all huddled close to the small fire, trying to catch its vagrant warmth before it was blown away. All of them were stained with travel, gaunt with exhaustion. Hekibel and Saliman sat very close together, and Hem saw that Saliman had taken

  Hekibel's small hands between both of his own and held them fast. Cadvan sat a little apart, his eyes fixed on Maerad, his face inscrutable. No one spoke much, and if they did, they spoke of unimportant things. There seemed, in truth, very little to say. They all knew that they stood before an abyss, and none of them knew whether they would see the following dawn.

  Together they watched the sun set through black bars of cloud. It cast a ruddy light over the moors, so that they seemed stained with blood, and Hem shuddered. The light slowly ebbed out of the sky, and the silence deepened around them. Maerad was a dim figure a few spans away, unmoving as a statue. Above them the sky was clearing, and the stars opened one by one until the dark field of the night was strewn with sil­ver points of light. The world held its breath. Everything was absolutely still.

  Now their eyes were fixed on the horizon, where soon a pale glimmer presaged the rising of the moon over the distant peak of the eastern mountains.

  Cadvan looked over to Hem. "I think it is time," he said gently.

  Hem nodded. With trembling hands he took the chain from around his neck and held the tuning fork in his hand. Then he embraced his friends one by one, Saliman last of all. Saliman's warm, strong arms felt like a final bulwark, and to Hem it seemed that to let go was to fall into a darkness whose depth he could not guess. But at last he stood back and took a deep breath. The rim of the full moon had just broken over the edge of the world.

  "Right, then," he said.

  Hem walked over to Maerad with shaking legs. But although his body was trembling, something inside him was hard and certain. He was more frightened than he had ever been in his life, but he knew that his fear would not stop him from doing what had to be done. The time for fear or doubt was long past. As soon as he turned away from his friends, he forgot them; it was as if a curtain had fallen between them. He felt as if time itself had been waiting for him and Maerad since it had first hatched from the egg of the cosmos, that all pasts and all futures intersected in this one moment.

  When he reached Maerad, he put his hand on her shoulder. She turned to him and smiled, and for a moment that smile made Hem's vitals shrivel with fear: it was fey and wild, cold as the storms of winter, a smile to freeze the heart.

  "We have not long to wait, my brother," said Maerad. "See, the moon is impatient, she rises fast over the world."

  Hem watched as the moon lifted over the horizon. It was huge, huger than he had ever seen it. As it breasted the horizon, its light poured over the moors in a bright stream, catching the filaments of millions of tiny, dew-pearled cobwebs strung through the turf, so it seemed to Hem that a path of silver ripples opened before him, and that he could step lightly over it to the very door of the moon. And as the bright pathway ran up to his feet, he heard a high, beautiful melody that pierced his heart, and in that moment it seemed to him that he and Maerad were caught up out of time, and that the shimmering path was made of stars, like the Lukemoi where the Dead were said to walk on their way to the Gates.

  As he thought this, he saw that the road of light wasn't empty. Out of the silver disk of the moon, as if it were a door to another world, there came a great crowd of people, and they walked solemnly down the narrow road through the darkness toward Hem and Maerad. Hem gasped and found that he was trembling, although he trembled not with fear, but with awe and wonder.

  Before long the first of the people reached them, and they looked straight into Maerad's and Hem's eyes, and then they bowed their heads and walked behind them into the dark night and vanished. Their faces were expressionless, neither happy nor sad, but as they passed, Hem's heart grew heavier and heavier, as if he were weighed down by an immense sorrow. He saw people of all ages, ugly and beautiful, young and old, mothers with babies at their breasts, small children holding the hands of their elders, face after face after face, and in the brief moment when he beheld them, he saw the story of each life in each face, their fragile hopes and passionate desires and impos­sible dreams, and at the same time the ending of all these things. And it seemed to Hem that each face imprinted itself on his memory, that he would never forget any person he saw.

  Then he caught his breath in a sob. Zelika walked slowly toward him and as he recognized her, he cried out her name in pained surprise. She looked him full in the face with cool recog­nition, but said nothing. Then she bowed her head and passed behind him with all the rest. And Hem understood then that the endless stream of people were Sharma's dead, those whose lives had been untimely snuffed out because of his wars. He knew that Maerad recognized others: as if he were touching her, he felt her body thrumming with emotion like the string of a harp. He knew the names she spoke—Dernhil, Dharin—but then he heard one he didn't know. liar. Maerad reached out her arm and said something softly that Hem did not hear, and although he did not look, he knew she was weeping.

  And then he looked into the faces of two who stepped before him, a tall man and woman who gravely met his gaze, and he understood that this was the only sight he would ever have of his mother and father, and he felt as if something broke inside him. And still the dead came on, in this bubble of time that seemed to have no end, and Hem saw the face of each one of them.

  But at last the crowd thinned and then ceased, and the music sounded again, and he stood on the moors, the rocky ground beneath his feet, and the moon had lifted up from the black horizon and the silver path had vanished.

  Maerad turned to him, her face shining with a joy that he did not comprehend, although her eyelashes glittered with tears.

  "The dead ask for their accounting," she said. "And those I have killed forgive me. Oh Hem, I am forgiven."

  Hem nodded. He did not understand what Maerad said, and he didn't trust himself to speak.

  At that moment, Hem became aware that someone was watching them. The skin on the back of his neck prickled with a premonition of menace, as if an archer now trained his arrow on the center of Hem's back, and he felt as if the air thickened around him, choking him.

  "Don't take any notice," whispered Maerad. She lifted her lyre. "Now, Hem. Now!"

  Hem hastily bent and struck the tuning fork on a stone at his feet. At first it made no sound, but then the note rang, sweet and clear on the cold air. Just as it began to vibrate, something hit him with a force that knocked him over, and he almost dropped the fork.

  He heard Maerad's voice, sharp and impatient over the ris­i
ng note that now began to fill the whole world. She sounded suddenly like his sister, not the strange, distant, tormented being he had seen over the past days.

  "For the Light's sake, Hem, don't drop it!" she said. "Hold on to it if you love your life."

  The blow came again, and then again. An instinct told Hem that this was only a muffled attack, that something shielded him from a force that would otherwise have destroyed him as easily as if he were one of the tiny spiders that spread their webs through the Hutmoors. Staggering to his feet, his ears popping, Hem clutched the fork in both of his hands, holding it high over his head. It was blazing with such intensity that he could see the bones inside his hands through the pink clothing of his flesh. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Maerad's lyre was shining with the same light. She lifted it in her arm and raised her left hand, waiting for the right moment. It was a hand of light, a hand that was not maimed, and at the sight Hem's spirit lifted. It seemed to him that at that moment she had never been wounded, that she had never lost her fingers at all, that the terrible things that had happened to both of them had been only a dream from which they now would wake, for­ever whole.