Magesong

by James R. Sanford

  For two days the welfare of his instruments didn't much concern him, as he was tossed about on waves of fever, chills, and painful spasms of coughing. Syliva poured a hot pungent broth into him every few hours, and her son Jonn, a big young man who looked strong as a lumberjack, kept a fire burning in the central hearth all that time. In Syrolia, where Reyin was born, only the estates of the wealthy had outbuildings for guests. Yet these folk had every mark of being commoners — landowners, yes, with a well-built house of fine timbers that he could see through the window, but commoners all the same. In this untamed region, he supposed, land must be free to any who could live on it.

  On the morning of the third day he woke at the first hint of light, feeling clear-headed, his back aching from the days abed. He would spend this day sitting up if nothing more. He rose and tested his ankle. Useless, but he could hobble a short way. He hopped to the small window and pushed open the shutters to look out at a grey and yellow valley patched with dark fallow fields, and at the lower end of the valley a ribbon of blue — the bay he had tried to cross. The farmhouses ranged from one-room cabins to stout two-story lodges with shingled roofs raked very steeply. Large or small, all of the houses had an enclosed porch with its own steep roof in front of each door. All the windows were small, and none lower than head high. Reyin imagined a winter that buried the land in snow. To the west a sheer crag, shaped much like the horn of a goat, stood aglow in the light of the sunrise.

  He dressed then noticed that all was quiet, that no one was outside, so he checked his pocket watch. It was only a quarter to four. Perhaps he was far enough north to see the famed midnight sun come summer.

  Later that morning Aksel presented him with a long crooked stick that served as a crutch. After breakfast he watched as Jonn, with a bedroll and a sack of flatbread slung across his back, unpenned all the goats and drove them up the valley, two short-legged dogs darting up and back along the flanks of the herd barking and nipping at any nanny or kid that tried to stray. In the afternoon Reyin went out into the delicious sunlight to hobble about the yard and garden. He saw nothing but old dead grass and bare earth. He knew little about farming, had never planted a seed in his life, yet he felt that it should not be, like the wrong he had felt in the wilderness. He sat on a large stone and gazed at the range of peaks and pinnacles that followed the coast northward.

  The other dark man came to visit him there. Reyin felt his coming before he saw the man pass the gate. Syliva came out to greet him, smiling and gossiping as they walked the length of the yard to where Reyin waited. The man was certainly a countryman of Reyin's. He had the hawk nose, and even under the thick untrimmed beard Reyin could detect the jutting chin — classic Syrolian features.

  The man forced a thin smile and spoke to Syliva politely, but his countenance was one that had always been grim. His stride was the stalking movement of a hunting cat. When he stood still, he stood ready for something to happen, and his hand never strayed far from the long knife at his belt.

  The man stopped, facing him just beyond arm's reach. Reyin rose, balancing himself with the crude crutch, finding that the other man stood half a head taller, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest set in a manner that could be thought of as military. The man's unkempt beard, rising high along the cheeks, grew patchy and streaked with white along the left side. The strip of skin between the beard and the eye was pink and grey, twisted and wrinkled. No doubt he had suffered a terrible burn there and wore the beard to hide the scars. Strangely, his hair was cropped close to the scalp, without any thought to style, and one might think him an idiot except for his eyes.

  Those eyes had seen much evil. And they were the eyes of a man who had killed other men. Not anonymously, a hundred yards across a battlefield with an arquebus volley, he had killed with his hands, close up, his eyes seeing the last spark of life fade away in those of his enemy. Reyin had no need of his secret ways to know this. It was plain.

  The man spoke in native Avic. "Syliva has told me your name. You can call me Farlo."

  Neither man offered his hand in greeting. "I found your gear in the woods," Farlo said, "and brought it back to my house. You can leave it all there, or I can bring you what you want. It don't matter to me, but it'll all be safe either way."

  "I thank you for that," Reyin said cautiously, feeling those deadly eyes looking at him in judgment. "I am, by trade, a troubadour. Perchance you found two cases with a mandolin and a flute in them?"

  "Aye."

  A seafaring dialect? Or simply that of a provincial?

  "Oh I would very much like to have those with me. As long as I cannot walk, I may as well practice. And — "

  "You any good at singing?" Farlo asked with serious interest.

  "I can sing well."

  Farlo turned to Syliva and spoke to her briefly in fluent Pallenor. She smiled and nodded a happy assent. He turned back to Reyin. "The whole village comes together every night around a fire to sing a song. We want you to join us while you're here."

  Yes, the firelight had guided him, and he remembered the tune very clearly now.

  "Every night?"

  "Yes. It's sort of a custom. In the springtime."

  "Very well. Tell Syliva that I would be honored to join all of you in song, and it would please me to give an entertainment afterward in an attempt to thank everyone."

  "For what?"

  "For saving my life. If there had been no fire and no singing, I would never have known this place was here."

  "No, a minstrel show wouldn't be right. Not at the circle of the Song of Returning." Suddenly the eyes of the inquisitor were again on him. "You say you didn't know this village was here?"

  Reyin nodded. "I was going to Noraggen for a troubadour gathering. A squall forced me ashore and wrecked my skiff in the night, and I walked around the inlet the next day. I couldn't have kept going if I had not seen the firelight."

  Farlo seem eased, almost satisfied with the story. If not very likely, at least it was plausible and could be confirmed.

  "Which reminds me," Reyin said. "I'd also like to have the oilskin bag with the quadrant and the pistol."

  "Oh, I didn't tell you. Some critter, probably a fenwolf, got into your kit. Popped open your powder horn and somehow poured it all out. 'Course we don't have any here, so your pistol 'll be useless for a while. They're very clever, those fenwolves. They can get into anything." And with that, Farlo looked at Reyin with one eyebrow cocked, defying him to challenge the explanation.

  Odd. The man was lying about the gunpowder. Reyin knew that he was lying, and he knew that Reyin knew he was lying. But why did Farlo feel the need to disarm him?

  "What's a fenwolf? Is it something like a timber wolf?"

  "No, a fenwolf is smaller and not really a wolf at all. They're shaggy little scavengers. They ain't vicious, but they aren't afraid of people. And you can't even eat them — they have a bad smell and carry some kind of disease. If you get bit by one, you'll take sick for certain."

  "They must have quite a set of teeth to crack into a powder horn. And some nose, too."

  "Um-hmm."

  Reyin decided to let it go. He looked around at the empty plowed fields, the barren garden, then up at the cloudless, birdless sky. "Farlo, is nothing growing here?"

  "Aye. No grasses of any kind. No buds on the trees. Naught."

  "Why is that?"

  "I'm not a farmer," he said, "I guess Syliva knows as much as anyone about growing things." He translated the question and the answer. "She says that no one really knows. There's been a drought, but even with water from the stream our gardens won't sprout, so some think only rainwater will help. Some think the land has been blighted. Others say that the soil here is exhausted."

  "You don't sound like you really believe any of that, Farlo."

  "No one is saying what they really believe. But you'll see. Tonight."

  The meeting place lay only a few hundred yards from the house, but Reyin's good leg had tired and the makeshift c
rutch began cutting into his armpit as they reached the crowd of villagers. Aksel went ahead, bent under a bundle of large sticks, and younger men ran forward to meet him and take the kindling to the fire circle. Syliva walked easily beside Reyin, taking his arm the last few steps to show him an old stump where he could sit.

  He had spotted Kestrin at a distance without difficulty. Children chased each other carelessly, laughing wildly as they ducked and dodged and collided with adults, and she sidestepped them as she made her way to Syliva and gave the subtle bow of the head that these people used for a greeting. Most of those who did not approach Syliva still made the nod of respect, and indeed it seemed to Reyin that everyone began arranging themselves as soon as she arrived. He had supposed that she was simply the village midwife. Now she seemed to be a leader in this community. He saw no one there in the role of chief or mayor, no overlord or council of elders.

  Kestrin seemed not to notice him, though he sat no more than twenty feet away. What was it about her that drew him so readily? She was pretty, and a little exotic, but he had met a hundred young women as beautiful as this freckle-faced redhead. And what did he know of her? Nothing. He simply needed to speak to her and this enchantment would pass. He had learned six new words of Pallenor in one day. Within a fortnight he would be able to hold a pidgin conversation. Yet in a fortnight wouldn't his ankle be healed and he on his way to Noraggen?

  Greetings done with, everyone seemed to be waiting now, some glancing skyward as if expecting a sign from the heavens. The sun had sunk well behind the western ridge. It was almost twilight.

  Then Kestrin was standing next to him. "Good evening," she said in Avic, unsure of her pronunciation.

  "Good evening," he returned in Pallenor. "You know some of the Avic tongue?"

  "A very little." She smiled. "Farlo divias," she said as if to explain, pointing to the other Syrolian. Farlo now circled the small pyramid of dead wood checking its structure, making sure it would not topple over when lit.

  He thought that if he just sat there staring at her she would become uncomfortable, so he tried to think of something he could say. All that leapt to mind was traveller's phases such as "I would like a private room", or "How much for the soup?"

  "Tell me, please," he ventured, "the words for the song."

  "I do not to know," she said, still trying to speak Avic.

  He smiled. "No, no, tell me in the Pallenor tongue."

  She laughed at the misunderstanding. She leaned close to his ear and spoke softly. The words had the rhythm of days following nights, the timbre of spring showers, the silences of melting snow.

  It was a simple song. The second verse had the same meter as the first, and the lyrics changed in the second chorus, but then it was done. That was it, the whole song. Reyin figured, the words being foreign, that he would have to hear it sung through twice before he got it down. Remembering other folks' songs was what he did best.

  "Very pretty," he said

  “The words?"

  He looked at her. "This place."

  A women silenced her children with a loud shush. Kestrin looked up, and Reyin saw that the first star of twilight had blinked open. Everyone quietly formed a circle around the fire pit.

  They sang a simple melody to the simple lyrics, the sound of bright sunlight on a sea of ice. Someone, somewhere in the circle, a woman or a boy, sang a harmony pure as a waterfall. He listened to them as a whole, and it was sublime in its simplicity, its cheerful austerity, the verse echoing the silence between the words as an eye opening in the darkness of a deep cave sees colors.

  The fire, having been built of kindling only, flared up tall and bright for a time and burned out quickly. Deepest dusk had fallen. A gentle breeze drifted down from the upper valley with the night, and people began leaving in small groups amid the goodnights of their neighbors. A few of the oldest boys had brought buckets of water to quench the flickering coals, and they stood near the fire pit, chatting, in no hurry to douse the embers and be gone.

  When Aksel and Syliva stepped aside to speak to Kestrin and the older man that seemed to be her father, Reyin slipped away from the ring of light, finding the stump he had sat on earlier. The cold hard wood felt comforting somehow, like it was the right place to sit. The silhouette of a man, Farlo, came at him in long strides from out of the dying light, holding out his hand in greeting, not quite the same man he had been that day. But Reyin could not see his face in the darkness. And he wanted to look into those eyes.

  "Thank you," Farlo said, shaking his hand as if they were old friends, "thank you for coming. I thought you might like the song more if you knew what it meant."

  Reyin thought it was not possible to love the song better than he did right then. He said, "Of course I would like to know what the words mean."

  "Well, if I say it word for word in Avic, it'll sound sort of backward in some places, and some of the words I only have the gist of, but in short it says that the returning time of the spirit of spring is here, and we are waiting. You see, everyone here thinks that it's a magic song. It calls the springtime spirit down from heaven to renew the land."

  Reyin looked at him without blinking. "A magic song?"

  "A rune, as they say." Farlo looked out into the night. "I suppose you don't believe in such things."

  "To tell you the truth, I do."

  "That's unusual."

  Reyin shrugged. "So why isn't the magic working? You sing the song every night and still nothing is growing."

  "That's why everyone is afraid. Winter here is very harsh. The snow gets so deep that you can't even hunt or trap. The seasons here are very different from each other, not like back in Syrolia. In one year, we pass through four worlds."

  Reyin looked past Farlo to where Kestrin stood. Wood smoke clung to her as the last flames from the fire died. She was laughing, touching Syliva lightly on the arm.

  "Did you grow up in the country, Farlo?"

  "No, spent my younger days in Port Rascina."

  "Do you like it here?"

  "It's the best place I've ever been. I'd have to be mad to leave it."

  "If nothing grows here, might it not be that everyone will have to leave?"

  "There's really nowhere to go."

  "What about another town, another valley?"

  Farlo sat down on his haunches. "To the north there's nothing but barren mountains and ice fields. A strong man travelling light and moving fast can make it across, but it's dangerous. To the east there's the highland forest, but the hunting is sparse these days, and no grass is growing in the summer pastures. And if you go past that you'll run into the mountain nomads."

  "Could you ask them for help?"

  "They're not truly savage, but they are barbarians and they don't tolerate outsiders — just going into their territory would be a mistake. No, no help from them. There's no civilized place until you get close to Noraggen. And besides, there isn't a single pack animal in this whole valley."

  Reyin didn’t know what to say. Farlo rose to his feet. "Well I'm off to find my wife, and then my home. I'll see you tomorrow."

  Reyin watched him go. He sat alone on the old dead stump. The night veiled him from the others. Then the breeze changed in a way Reyin, over the years, had come to recognize. He listened to the shifting of winds, unable to shake the feeling that he had lived this moment many times.

  With the hiss of water meeting red-hot coals, the fire at last went out. The voices of the boys seemed loud in the sudden dark. Someone came near, a slender shadow against the night sky full of stars. "Good night, Reyin," came a voice, a young woman speaking in Pallenor.

  He reached down for his walking stick and began to hoist himself up, but she was already gone. "Good night, Kestrin," he said.

  Then the weird came unexpectedly, quick, jolting in its clarity, and he saw all the folk around him as skeletal shapes amid the flurries of the winter yet to come, people emaciated beyond recognition, the living too weak to bury the dead.

  At th
at moment, he wished to be just a young musician in a smelly roadhouse again, playing for his dinner and the few pennies the drunken patrons might toss. He wished it very hard.

  CHAPTER 4: A Message for the Stranger

  His discolored ankle returned to its natural hue within a week, and the stranger called Reyin began limping to the nightly gathering without the aid of a walking stick. In another ten days he would be well enough to go on his way, and Syliva was sorry for that. She had quickly grown rather fond of him.

  Kestrin visited daily, for fabricated reasons such as checking to see if Syliva's garden had sprouted or asking how Lovisa's pregnancy was coming, which was funny to Syliva because Kestrin spent more time with Lovisa and Farlo than anyone. Lovisa had mentioned that Kestrin stopped at her house each morning to ask Farlo how to say a new word in Avic. And, perhaps by like impulse, Reyin pestered Syliva with questions of the names of things in her own language, sometimes having to perform silly pantomimes that would make her laugh.

  The first day of the week usually saw Syliva pay call on those with continuing ailments, and she liked to see Lovisa in the morning while they were both fresh and had a spare moment to talk. This morning, though, Syliva didn't like what she wanted to say.

  The dirt streets of the village had grown hard as stone in the drought, and as Syliva walked to the young woman's house, the rough ground jabbed at the tender places on her feet. She would have to leave her soft shoes at home and begin wearing field boots on her rounds. Squalls had passed, out on the ocean, and thunderheads had risen in the distant mountains, but no rain had fallen in Lorendal since before winter.

  Thankfully, Lovisa was alone. “How do you feel today?” Syliva asked.

  "It's beginning to feel like I'm carrying the stone instead of a baby."

  "Sickness this morning?"

  "A little."

  "Hmm. You're too far along to be getting that."

  "Didn't have much to throw up really. My stomach turned after the first few bites of supper last night."

  "Oh, I know how it is. While I was preggers with Jonn I would get sick whenever I cooked meat. I'd get a good whiff and have to duck out the back door and let fly. And when I ate, no matter what it was, the heartburn would soon follow."