Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  The offer was from Hard Goth, which was the sort of band that wore pink leather codpieces with jewelled studs and broke their guitars after a performance. But Ember did not care what happened to the music once she had made it. Let it be sold to whomever would buy it, she told Glynn, since they needed the money. Just so long as she was not bothered.

  They had gone to see the music agent with the letter of offer sent by the management of Hard Goth and a deal was struck. Ember wrote whatever she wanted and Glynn gathered it up and sent it off to Hard Goth via Harrison Bonn. Before long, money started trickling into their account. Gradually the trickle increased to a steady flow and finally to a very healthy gush as Hard Goth rose up the charts both in Australia and the UK. But Glynn and Ember continued to live modestly, aside from the trips, saving most of what was made against future need.

  Glynn had been excited when the first songs based on Ember’s scores reached the popular media and later the music shops, but Ember had been genuinely uninterested. The creation of music was all she cared about. She did not listen to the taped copies of final arrangements before signing the releases, as Harrison Bonn advised, because she did not mind how they altered her scores. Glynn would have dealt with that too except she was tone deaf, an affliction which the sisters never discussed except obliquely. This reticence had its roots in their childhood.

  Like many twins, they had been close as young children, even speaking their own language for a time, but there were some irrevocable differences between them, one being Glynn’s inability to hear music. This made her unable to comprehend Ember’s love of it. As they grew older music created a more obvious distance between them. Ember’s studies consumed her time and Glynn concentrated on her physical activities. Because Ember had always been delicate, this drew them further apart.

  Ember’s illness completed her estrangement, not just from Glynn, but from the world.

  She had always loved music and had meant to devote her life to it. Then she had become ill. There had been mysterious pains, blackouts and moments of blindness, migraine and dizzy spells. Finally she had become blind in one eye, and after a barrage of complicated tests, the verdict had been delivered.

  ‘There is a large tumour in the frontal lobe above and behind the eyes.’

  Her parents had asked if it could be removed.

  ‘Inoperable. Worse, before death will come complete blindness. No cure, no hope.’

  Her mother and father held her tightly as the doctors explained that she had a year or two, maybe more. Maybe less.

  The world convulsed in a consuming spasm of terror that shaped itself into a smooth black mountain which must henceforth dominate and utterly shadow the landscape of Ember’s existence. That unassailable mountain was knowledge of her death and there was nowhere to hide from it. A madness of fear tormented Ember. It was as though the mountain was falling towards her and must crush her. Incredibly, it was physical pain that saved her. As the doctors continued their tests, trying to find something to inhibit the ferocious growth of the tumour, there was a great deal of pain. This devoured so much energy that Ember had nothing left to feed her fears. In the exhausted moments when she was free enough of pain to think, Ember devised a strategy to keep her sanity.

  I fear the mountain that is my death because I fear losing what I love, she reasoned. Therefore I will love nothing and no one. She would not hide from the fact that she was dying or pretend it did not exist. She would not care about the search for a cure. She would undergo whatever treatment was suggested passively, and inwardly embrace her death. She would build herself a hut in its shadow and worship the mountain.

  When the doctors used experimental drugs to stabilise the tumour, her parents urged Ember to play her songs and find solace in music, to nurture the hope that a final cure would be effected. She had set aside her instruments and asked if they would sell them. They had refused, convinced that she would change her mind after a time, but she had not weakened in her resolve. She did not touch her music books or hum any songs or listen to the radio. She left the room whenever there was music playing. Music was her greatest love. If she could cease to care for that, then she would have conquered her fear of death.

  But she had not reckoned on her dreams, for when she slept, all the music she had ever heard or written rose up out of her subconscious to haunt her. She tried to fight it, listening for a time to bad music, but even in the most trite or crude songs, she could find beauty that would touch her. It was as if all music had some common seed against which she had no defence: something in her blood and marrow resonated. Still she resisted the temptations of music, believing that she could starve her need for it out of herself. Night after night she tossed and turned, lost in dreams of music from which she would wake trembling and drenched in her own sweat.

  The mountain loomed, and madness capered at its feet waiting for her to give in.

  One night she got up and took out her guitar. She played all night until her fingers bled and her body was blue with cold. Knowing she had nothing left to fight with, she strove to burn it out of her. She opened herself wide and filled herself up with music, hoping it would consume itself and leave her free at last. Instead, the music swelled to encompass her fear of death and her determination to accept it, and there was no room in her for anything else.

  She had let them lead her to bed then, blood oozing from her ruined fingertips. She lay unmoving for three days in a sleep so deep it was almost a coma. She dreamed she was on the mountain, singing; she dreamed she was singing the mountain into existence. When she wakened, it was to a grey numbness in which she no longer felt afraid of dying. She saw her parents and her sister as though they were strangers. She felt nothing for them or for anything else.

  ‘I am fine. Leave me be,’ she told them softly and with such remoteness that they had no alternative but to obey.

  She began to compose endless songs to her death. Nothing could reach her through them. Not fear, nor love, nor hope.

  She had succeeded so well that neither Glynn’s grief over the suicide of her beloved martial-arts instructor, nor the death of their parents in a car accident, disrupted Ember’s calm inviolability. The estate left by their parents freed them from the immediate need to worry about money and enabled Glynn to care for Ember rather than finding work.

  Ember existed, she made music, she waited to die.

  Ember strummed the a’luwtha with fingers that had gone numb, struggling to reconcile the two halves of herself; past and present.

  She was Ember who had been born of the dark sea and rescued by a fabulous manbeast who had communicated with her telepathically. She had listened, fascinated, to the stories of the young myrmidon, Tareed. She had laughed with the urchin boy, Anyi, who would one day rule Keltor. She had escaped from Ramidan and was travelling to Darkfall where she had been promised healing. But she was also Ember-the-dark and Ember-the-numb, who had lived with the mountain; who had given up life and was waiting to die.

  The two warred, fought to exert themselves, and failing, reconciled uneasily.

  The old Ember was powerful, for the mountain flowed through her as music, and the memory of the pain she had endured was a huge dark chimera around her. She did not believe that the white cloaks on Darkfall could cure her any more than the doctors on her own world had been able to do. They had arrested the tumour, but they were no match for death. Ember existed in sanity only because she had accepted that. She did not want to hear about hope and the healers of this other world. She belonged to death.

  But the newborn Ember had not given up, and would not let go of hope. She had been terrified when the soulweaver told her that she was dying, but she had been offered healing on the island of Darkfall.

  ‘They will be able to help you on the misty isle,’ Alene soulweaver had promised.

  Do you dare to believe that? the old bleak Ember demanded. Think of what waits if you are wrong. There will be a despair so great as to extinguish hope, and in its aftermath, the gate to f
ear and madness will open again. This time we will not be able to close it. Can you imagine how it would be to face death screaming, leaking vomit and tears?

  The new Ember trembled, having only recently absorbed the memory of the terror her older self had suffered. Even as memory, the pain had been unbearable. The new Ember had suffered some pain and would perhaps suffer more before the journey to Darkfall ended, but nowhere near what dark Ember had endured.

  The new Ember did not think she could face it, let alone the fear that madness would obliterate her, so she clung to the knowledge that she had been promised healing on Darkfall.

  We will go there, then, the old Ember responded grimly. But we must go without hope. We must accept that death will find us wherever we go. We must be ready to be eaten by it. We must have no reason to regret the passing of life. If there is pain, we must take it up as a shield. If we must die, we will die without terror. We will go into the dark gently.

  And so, the new Ember permitted herself to be submerged in the hopeless serenity of the older stronger Ember. Hope froze into a flat grey peace. She strummed a skilful run of notes from the a’luwtha that were beautiful but without brightness, and only then did she allow herself to go on remembering the night she had crossed to Keltor.

  She was sitting in the Greek cafe opposite Glynn. It was dusk and their meal almost done when an old man came through the kitchen doors carrying a guitar and a stool. He set himself up near the batwing doors and, without any fanfare, began to play.

  Ember let her fingers pick out the music he had played, and remembered uneasily how the notes had run through her veins like ice, or like fire, opposing the numbness she had made of herself; opposing the grey despair of the music shaping itself in her thoughts. She played a discordant note, but in her memory, the old man’s music continued, seeming to contain some deeper truth than her acceptance of death. It negated her acceptance by encompassing and elaborating death into a theme, threading through it a thin, dangerously bright skein of hope in despite of hopelessness.

  The old man began to sing to the music in a sweet rough voice. He sang in English of a horse drowned while searching for its beloved mistress and Ember concentrated on the words, trying not to hear the music. But even the words dealt with hope, for they told how the drowned horse had called for its mistress in ghostly longing, never knowing she had perished, too. Its yearning was so profound that it reached beyond its own death and beyond all ends, daring to hope, daring to call. The song was about death and loss, but there was, hidden in the words, something deeper and higher which resonated to the bright thread in the music.

  Ember remembered the chorus unwillingly.

  When night falls

  and the dark song calls,

  will you hear?

  Will you tread the moon paths?

  Will you sing the lost soul home?

  Fool, Ember told herself coldly. Fool to hope. No one will hear, or come. No one will sing you home. Death is too final. Death eats hope.

  She had wanted, then, to turn away from the relentless beauty of the music but it would not let her go. The old man’s face glistened with sweat as he bent over his guitar, and the muted crash of the waves seemed to roar softly within the music.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the memory-Glynn had asked, leaning over the table towards her.

  ‘That song. I’ve heard it somewhere …’ Ember murmured, and Ember remembering, realised it was true.

  But where?

  Tea came, and Ember drank like an automaton as Glynn paid the bill. When they left, the old man was still playing. Ember followed Glynn down onto the beach as if in a stupor. The moon had risen and Glynn stopped to stare out over the gilded waves. Ember saw nothing except the old man’s fingers, swooping and caressing the strings of the guitar. She felt as if his song had peeled her skin off – to reveal what?

  ‘Look,’ Glynn cried, pointing. ‘The first star. Make a wish.’

  Ember had been unable to respond. Her head had begun to throb painfully. She had delayed taking the pill and this was her punishment. She tried to welcome the pain as an old ally, but it did not kill the music running through her mind. The old man’s song swallowed her pain and made it beautiful.

  Leave me alone! her soul shrieked to the music.

  Sitting with her fingers clawed over the a’luwtha, Ember trembled violently at that remembered desperation. She had believed herself beyond fear, but she had been wrong. The old man’s music had proven that an illusion. Was it this realisation that had caused her amnesia? Was that what had allowed new Ember to be born and to weaken her still further? As Ember strummed the a’luwtha, her memory continued to unspool. She had stood watching distractedly as Glynn stripped off her outer clothes and entered the moonlit water. She swam away from the shore with her usual effortless grace, and turned to float on her back even as night coalesced into a cloud which reached out a dark hand to clasp the moon.

  In the fallen dark, Ember heard the song the old man had played in the restaurant. Then the moon slid free of its cloudy fist and she saw that Glynn was struggling. Puzzled, Ember had taken a step towards the edge of the sea and then another, squinting against the moon. Was Glynn in trouble or simply splashing? It was hard to see properly because of the shifting cloud. Being blind in one eye made it difficult to judge distance.

  Glynn vanished beneath the waves.

  Ember gasped, and something long buried in her cried out that this was her twin that was being swallowed by the sea. She who believed feeling had died in her, discovered she could be made to feel; made to fear!

  She looked around for help, her head throbbing as if it were being squeezed in a vice, but the steep, stony beach was empty; the caiques tethered along the shore, dark and lifeless. The restaurant was more than a kilometre back along the beach. Without being conscious of making a decision, or even of moving, Ember found herself up to her knees, chilly sea water seeping through her clothes to her warm skin. Floating forward she had begun a slow, careful crawl, keeping her good eye trained on the place she had last seen Glynn’s struggling form.

  Her dress wrapped around her legs and she kicked sluggishly to free them. Strength was running out of her like sand from a bottle but, galvanised by the image of Glynn sliding under the skin of the sea, Ember ignored the warning voice telling her to turn back, straining her eye for the slightest movement. The silvered moon-path was still.

  ‘Glynn!’ she cried, but it came out merely as an exhausted croak. ‘Glynna!’

  To which there was no response.

  The two Embers merged seamlessly in this joint memory of swimming and of growing swiftly weaker, of finally floating numbly, without any knowledge of who she was. The memories overlapped just as, somehow, two worlds had momentarily overlapped, allowing a strange crossing. Under the cover of the shifting clouds, one yellow moon split into the green and blue Keltan moons and, without knowing, Ember had swam between worlds and lost herself.

  Neither of the two sets of memories contained the moment of forgetting. She had missed it. Doggedly Ember returned to the memory of the moment before the crossing, determined to pinpoint the forgetting. She must allow herself to be absorbed by the memories in order to experience them more minutely. So she became the memory-Ember sinking beneath the surface, ready to die; relieved to give herself up to the seductive undertow. She sensed her own willingness with horrified fascination. Blood beat in her ears and her lungs screamed for air, for she had waited so that she would be too late for second thoughts when she breathed the sea into her.

  Suddenly she heard a horse whinny.

  The sound spiralled into neighing bubbling screams that froze her blood in her veins. Instinctively, she struggled for the surface to escape the dreadful tormented sound, but now the screams of dying horses seemed to fill the water, as if there was not one but a thousand horses, screaming and drowning all around her; all of the horses in the world. She was drowning in their terror.

  The a’luwtha gave a discordant shriek,
then was silent.

  2

  So did the Firstmade pass from the light

  So did the light pass from the Songborn …

  LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN

  Revel strode into the cabin. ‘It would be best if you do not play now, visionweaver,’ she said brusquely, gesturing to the a’luwtha on Ember’s lap. ‘We are in an area where other ships may pass nearby. Better that they do not call to the citadel with a tale of such music coming from the Stormsong, since we carry no registered passenger. By now, your disappearance will have been discovered.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ember said, rising to rest the a’luwtha on the floor against the wall. Her mind was still reeling from the shrilling terror of the horses.

  Revel shrugged. ‘I did not hear it said that you were a maker of songs.’

  Ember did not know what to say to that. She had not played any music on Keltor. For most of the time she had not even known that she could play. ‘I was ill,’ she managed to say.

  There was a flash of pity in the other woman’s eyes which told Ember that Revel had heard the rumour that she was dying. There were deep lines between her brown eyes and Ember guessed that the shipmistress was worried about what would happen if it should be learned that her ship carried from the citadel the vision-weaver who had saved the life of the Keltan ruler. There had been no public bar on her departure, but all knew Tarsin was infatuated with Ember, and had demanded that she remain by his side while he sought a cure for her illness.

  Revel would be far more concerned if she learned that the unconscious man who had been brought aboard with Ember was the very man accused of engineering the poisoning attempt, Ember thought soberly.

  ‘How many days before we reach Myrmidor?’ she now asked, aware that she had been silent for a long time. She did not ask how long before they reached Darkfall because, although this was her ultimate destination, she knew that the misty isle lay within a bay formed by the pincer ends of the far larger Myrmidor island, and was inaccessible by sea. To reach Darkfall, one must go to Myrmidor.