Libyrinth

by Pearl North

“Thank you, Gyneth,” she said. It couldn’t be too soon to establish good relations with what appeared to be her principal jailer.

  Of course she knew what they were trying to do, with first the harsh treatment and then the reprieve. Many a book had told her of it. “Good cop, bad cop” was what the late period Old Earth crime novels had called it. It was a way to soften her up, to get her to do what they wanted. Just then, her mouth gloriously full of smoked fish, she didn’t care.

  Gyneth waited politely in a chair by the door until she’d consumed every last scrap of food. Then he took the tray and the used wash water, set them on a small marble-topped table, and returned to her, a jar like the one Ithaster had used in his hand.

  At the sight of it Haly started back and frantically kicked the chair out from under her. A low moan escaped her lips, “No . . .”

  “It’s only salve,” said Gyneth. “For your cut—it’s infected.”

  The lye Ithaster had put on her cut had been in a jar like that, and it was supposed to stave off infection, too. She remembered vividly the burning pain of it. She managed at last to free herself from table and chair, and she sprang to the windows, which were barred.

  She spun around, facing Gyneth. He still stood beside the table, the jar in his hand, looking nonplussed. Haly searched the room for a weapon of some kind. The food tray had come with nothing more lethal than a spoon for the porridge. There was no fireplace, and therefore no fire irons. There was nothing.

  Gyneth edged slowly toward her. “Listen. Censor Siblea told me to treat the cut on your face. If I don’t, I’ll be in trouble.”

  She sneered at him even as she pressed herself back against the windows. Perhaps she could break one and use the broken glass . . . “What will he do, send you to the dungeon?”

  Gyneth, still looking perplexed, gave a little shake of his head. He cleared the table and came around toward her, the jar in his outstretched hand.

  Haly gripped the window ledge. “No? No prison for you? No peabea? No mind lancets? But then, you’re not a witch, are you? But I am. I’m a witch, and if you take one step closer, I’ll curse you.”

  He hesitated. “Censor Siblea says you’re the Redeemer.”

  “That’s right. So who are you going to obey—him or your Redeemer? I’m your Redeemer and I say put the jar down and get out of here.”

  Gyneth gnawed his lower lip. “He hasn’t tested you yet. He says he has to test you first, before he can be sure. . . .”

  A test? Seven Tales, was there no end to their ordeals? She felt stronger from the good food, and was suddenly filled with reckless, desperate energy. She eyed this Gyneth closely. This was no Ithaster. He was barely taller than she was, and slight of build. Why not, she thought. What difference did it make? They would do with her whatever they wanted, no matter what she did. She might as well give a little back, while she could, to whom she could. Without another word she launched herself at Gyneth.

  She grabbed him around the waist and took him down. He gave a soft grunt of surprise as he landed on his back. She scrambled on top of him, straddling his chest, pinning his hands to the floor. He still clutched the jar and she lifted that hand and slammed it back onto the floor. He cried out and the jar rolled out of his loosened fingers and away across the floor. He struggled, trying to free himself, but she hung on tight. “You want to hurt me?” she panted. “I’m going to hurt you.”

  “No. Please,” he said. His eyes were very wide, his chest heaving. Was this what she had looked like in the vault? She stared down at his sweating, fearful face, and suddenly her grand breakfast turned in her stomach. She scrambled off of him and dove for the jar, which had come to rest just beneath the bed.

  Gyneth sat up, but made no move to approach her. “It’s just salve,” he said, rubbing his scraped knuckles. “See for yourself.”

  She unscrewed the jar and took a quick glance inside. It looked innocuous enough. She lifted the jar and sniffed it. It smelled like the camphor with which Palla the crèche nurse had dressed her childhood wounds. She touched it experimentally with her left pinkie. It felt cool, that was all. She walked cautiously toward Gyneth. “Don’t get up,” she told him. “Just give me your hand.”

  Calmly, Gyneth lifted the hand she’d bashed against the floor. The skin on his middle two knuckles was split and bleeding slightly. She watched his face as she spread a generous dollop of the salve on his wound. He smiled encouragingly. His hand never trembled.

  Experimentally, she put a tiny dab of the stuff on the cut on her face. It didn’t hurt. It felt good; cooling, soothing. She took a solid dollop and ran it along the cut. It eased the tightness and burning that had been so constant for the past five days, she almost didn’t notice it anymore.

  “You should apply it every four hours,” said Gyneth, sitting back on his haunches. He cocked his head, peering at her. “You missed a spot, up by your temple.”

  Haly was suddenly overtaken by trembling. She thought it was exhaustion catching up with her again, but then why was the room blurred and the heat that had been in her cut now in her eyes and nose? Don’t cry, she told herself, not now, not in front of this Eradicant. She tried to put more salve on her wound but got it in her hair instead, and then the first, humiliating sob burst forth. She sank to the floor and lowered her head to her knees, hiding her face with her arms. It was all she could do—that, and shake.

  At last she mastered herself and sat back, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her robe. Gyneth was still there, staring at her with curiosity. “I didn’t think the Redeemer would cry.”

  She gave him a bitter grimace. “Maybe I’m not the Redeemer. I haven’t been tested yet, right?”

  “True,” said Gyneth.

  Haly hesitated, then blurted, “What is the test? What are they going to do to me?”

  Gyneth shook his head. “They’re not going to do anything to you. It’s just to verify that you can hear text as if it were song.”

  Frustration and fear made her words sharp. “And how are you going to do that? You people don’t have any books.”

  Gyneth looked down, biting his lip. “Not the Righteous Chorus, no, of course not, but some criminals do.” He glanced at the door. “Last night Censor Siblea received information that a family was harboring a book beneath the floor of their house. They were arrested and the book was seized. One of them will recite it for a chorus. Then the book will be brought to you, but you won’t be permitted to read it. You’ll be asked to recite it while it’s in a locked box. That’s all.”

  So she wasn’t going to be tortured again. She swallowed against the relief that threatened to undo her again. Then another thing occurred to her. “What if the prisoner lies in their recitation?”

  Gyneth gave her a reassuring smile. “People don’t lie to Censor Siblea.”

  She stared at him. He had a good point. “When?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  It was too soon. She was too tired. She needed to think about all this, but she felt as if she was going to drop where she sat. “I need to rest,” she told him.

  Gyneth nodded. He helped her to stand, and guided her to the bed in case she should falter. Sliding between the clean bedsheets was a luxury past all description. Just as she was about to rest her head on the soft pillow, she smelled camphor. Gyneth stood beside the bed, the jar of salve in his hand. “You missed a spot,” he said.

  With a sigh, Haly nodded.

  His fingers were deft and cool. There was apparently a whole section of the cut, extending across her temple, which she’d not been aware of—or had forgotten, in the midst of everything else. When he was finished, Gyneth stepped back, his eyes downcast, a blush rising on his cheeks. “I’m sorry Ithaster did that to you. He’s in a lot of trouble now. He should have known. He should have recognized the signs. And they shouldn’t have put you in the dungeon.” He looked up at her. “That’s only for the wicked.”

  Haly thought about Mab and the family that had hidden the book. She st
ared into Gyneth’s clear, pale eyes and realized that he really believed it. “How long have you lived in the temple?” she asked him.

  “Since my sixth year.”

  And she had been born in the Libyrinth, and lived there all her life until now. How much choice did either of them have in what they believed?

  Gyneth closed the door behind him as he left. The soft click of the lock turning was the last thing she heard.

  Until she awoke again sometime in the early afternoon to the smell of roast pork and the sight of Gyneth standing at the foot of her bed with a laden tray.

  The meal was roast pork loin with apricot sauce, braised greens, and millet cake. It wasn’t going to work, she resolved. All this wonderful food and luxurious treatment was not going to make her forget that these people were her enemies. But there was no reason they had to know that. She ate everything and silently relished every bite, while Gyneth waited patiently beside the door. When he collected the tray, he hesitated at her bedside. “Holy One . . .”

  “You shouldn’t call me that. It hasn’t been proven yet,” she pointed out.

  Gyneth nodded. “I would ask a favor of you, miss.”

  Haly arched her eyebrows. “A favor? Of me? What could I possibly do for you?”

  Gyneth bit his lip and then looked at her, his silver-blue eyes earnest and intense. “Let me attend you at the test. I wish—I wish to be present.”

  “You want to be there.”

  Gyneth nodded, his cheeks coloring. He looked at her from beneath his very straight, flat brow, his eyes shining. “Yes. To be one of those present at the Confirmation of the Redeemer. To be witness to the opening moment of the Redemption of the Word. The Redemption is all we dream of, we devout of the Chorus.”

  Something in the gleam of his eyes made her very uncomfortable. She frowned and blew out her breath. “There’s more to this than the Maker of Eggs, isn’t there?”

  Gyneth looked surprised at first, then nodded. “You know about the Maker of Eggs.” He shrugged in admission. “That is the most worldly benefit of the Redemption, but there is so much more to the Liberation of the Word.” He began to sing in a clear, liquid tenor, “When the Song and the Word are reunited, the Song will be heard by all the multitudes, and each in his own voice will Sing.”

  He looked at her penetratingly, and with what she could only describe as love. Not love for her personally, but for a savior. Seven Tales, she was an object of religious devotion. Haly sighed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Gyneth was confounded. “Mean?”

  “Yeah. Mean. The song will be heard by the multitudes. What song? Each in his own voice will sing? I’d like to know how else they’d do it. So everybody sings the same song all over the world at once. So what?”

  Gyneth was stricken. “But it is the Song.”

  “Oh, the Song, I see. What’s the Song?”

  He looked utterly amazed and dismayed. “Oh, you don’t—of course—you . . .” He tilted his head to one side and leaned toward her, peering at her like she was a wounded bird. “You don’t know the Song.”

  “Does it go, ‘Oh Susanna, oh don’t you hide from me, I’ve come from old Ilysies with a ten-pound block of cheese’?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “It doesn’t have words—at least, not yet.” He nodded at her knowingly. “But it’s the voice of the world. The . . . song that is in everything. It is what makes us alive. It moves through us, and through everything around us. The Song is what makes everything happen.”

  “Oh, no, sorry—that’s Time.”

  Gyneth screwed up his face and leaned back, eyeing her with skeptical derision. While he had all the regard in the world for her holiness, he apparently had none for her opinions.

  “You know,” she insisted, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. Oh, right, I guess you don’t know. See, there are the Seven Tales: Birth, Peril, Hunger, Balance, Love, Death, and Mystery. They combine together to make bigger tales, and Time determines what order they go in. It makes a big difference: If you have Love and then Peril, that’s bad, but if it’s Peril first and then Love, that’s good, see? The Tale of Tales, now, that’s the story of everything that has ever happened or will happen. We’ll never know how that story goes, because that is the one that only Time can tell.”

  Gyneth still had that scrunched-up look on his face, like he’d bitten into a green apple. “I thought you people worshipped animals.”

  Haly shrugged nonchalantly, thrilled at being able to shock this earnest, devout soul. “Oh, we don’t really worship anything, you see. We acknowledge Time as a force beyond ourselves, and revere it, I guess you’d say, but it’s not like you with your prophet and your song. The animals are the characters in the Tales, and when you’re old enough to um . . . you know, get your first blood, the healer consults the signs and determines which Tale you’re under. The animal for that Tale is your guardian.”

  Gyneth narrowed his eyes. “What about the boys, then?”

  Haly blinked. “What about them?”

  “Well, boys don’t bleed. So does that mean they don’t get a guardian?”

  “They bleed when they get initiated. Didn’t you?” she challenged. What was he talking about, boys don’t bleed?

  Gyneth looked alarmed. “Initiated?”

  “Yeah, to become men.” She shook her head. “You don’t do this? Get an operation so you can’t accidentally father children? How do you keep from overpopulating the temple here?”

  Gyneth gave her a blank look. “We don’t have women priests.”

  “Well, that’s stupid.”

  Gyneth’s eyes flashed. “It’s a lot better than mutilating half the population.”

  “Oh for Time’s sake, it’s not mutilation! It’s a tiny little incision in the base of . . . um. Anyway, the point is, everyone has a guardian. Mine is the Fly.”

  Gyneth looked like he was as relieved as she was to change the subject. “The fly?” He snorted. “The Redeemer should have something better than that.” He stopped short, suddenly looking worried. “I think this is blasphemy.”

  Haly shrugged, noncommittal. “The Fly is for Mystery. Mystery is a two-way story, which means it can be good or bad. The Fly spots a drop of honey, lands in it, and gets stuck. That’s bad. But then when the Fly is on the Cow’s rump, the Cow swats it with its tail and the Fly lands on a pile of dung.” Her voice faltered a bit. “That’s . . . good.”

  Gyneth stared at her in appalled silence. Haly’s cheeks became hot. She’d never thought before how disgusting that was. “Well, Mystery really isn’t the best one to start with,” she blustered. “Peril is better. Peril is the Goat. My friend Clauda has the Goat for her guardian. The Goat is grazing in tall grass. The Lion is hiding in the grass, stalking it. See, even though Peril is bad, it doesn’t always turn out bad. The Goat is brave, and if the Goat is brave and smart, it might get away.”

  He was still unmoved.

  Haly closed her mouth on further justification. That’s what she was doing, she realized—trying to justify her faith to this Eradicant. Because she was embarrassed, all of a sudden, to be a Libyrarian. The Seven Tales and the Tale Time Will Tell felt threadbare and homely in the glare of this Yammon and his Song.

  At last Gyneth gave her a conciliatory smile and said, “Once you pass the test, you will set aside such ideas.”

  Anger sparked in her heart. “I don’t care what happens with the test. I’m not going to become an Eradicant.”

  He frowned. “Singer.”

  She bared her teeth. “Book burner, torturer, ignorant, illiterate savage!”

  Gyneth jumped up. “You’re going to fail the test! You can’t be the Redeemer!”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be your stupid Redeemer, you ever think of that? Maybe I’ll fail the test on purpose.”

  Gyneth’s chest heaved and he stalked to the door. “Go ahead then, if you miss the dungeon so much.” He paused at the door and looked over his shoulder at her
. “You should fail,” he said. “How can you be the Redeemer when you don’t know the Song? When you don’t even want to know the Song?” He opened the door and turned to face her. “And we’re not ignorant, in case you haven’t noticed.” He toggled the switch by the door, making the lights flicker on and off, and then he left.

  Dinner was roast squab, bean shoots, and barley bread. Haly ate it in determined silence as Gyneth waited sullenly by the door. Breakfast was much the same, but at lunch, Gyneth entered with Siblea behind him, and the censor stood with his hand on the back of Gyneth’s neck as the boy told Haly that he was sorry for raising his voice to her, for wishing ill of her, and for presuming to instruct her in holy doctrine.

  Siblea beamed at both of them and patted Gyneth on the shoulder. He turned to Haly. “The boy was right about one thing, my dear. It is the shame of the world that you don’t know the Song. It would give you a better appreciation of your exalted role. But we can do something about that right now.” He cocked an ear. “Services are just starting.” He held out his hand to her. “Come along, now.”

  Haly, who had sat silent in her chair all this time, shrank back from that hand, but she did stand. She would go with them. Why not? Why not hear this stupid song of theirs? If nothing else, it was a chance to get out of her comfortably appointed cell.

  They walked side by side down the broad stone corridor—Haly in the middle, of course. Siblea held her elbow gently as if he were guiding her, which of course he wasn’t—he was making sure she didn’t try to run for it.

  The temple halls were built out of slabs of the same gray stone she’d seen elsewhere in the Citadel, the high, arching ceiling supported intermittently by buttresses. Occasionally they passed a slab that was larger than the others, and decorated with flowing lines and spirals. “What are those?” she asked, pointing at one.

  “Songlines,” Siblea explained. “They represent the flow of the Song through all things.”

  “Is that why you carve them in the faces of your prisoners?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said Siblea placidly. “All disease, physical, mental, and social, results from being out of harmony with the Song. It is a way to remind people of their eternal connection.”