The Singing

by Alison Croggon

  They sang in close harmony, Cadvan's baritone and Maerad's pure, husky voice filling their shelter, and Maerad felt all her sorrow and anxieties lift and dissolve in the sheer beauty of the music.

  "First was dark, and the darkness Was all mass and all dimension, although without touch And the darkness was all colors and all forms, although without sight

  And the darkness was all music and all sound, although

  without hearing And it was all perfumes, and all tastes, sour and bitter and

  sweet But it knew not itself.

  And the darkness thought, and it thought without mind And the thought became mind and the thought quickened And the thought was Light, was the Light in darkness, And where Light fell, there was its shadow, And the shadow moved and a dark eye opened ..."

  It was the first song Maerad had chosen to sing in her daylong preparation to meet Inka-Reb. She had been taught this song when she was a child, and had heard it many times in the past year; and every time she heard it, it showed her new, more complex meanings. As she sang the opening stanzas, she realized how deeply it chimed with her recent thoughts. I need, she thought, my own dark eye to open ...

  As the final chords died on the air, she bowed her head and let the light of magery die out of her, and both she and Cadvan were silent for a long time. Finally Maerad lifted her head and looked Cadvan straight in the eye.

  "I will begin now," she said.

  Cadvan nodded. He did not seem in the least afraid, but he looked very sad, as if he were bidding Maerad farewell as she left on a long journey.

  Maerad took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

  She entered the darkness that was her inner self, the place from which she began all her magery. The desire to move on was strong within her; from this place, she would either plunge down through her deeper selves or quest outward with the heightened perceptions that the darkness generated. With an effort of will she remained just where she was, suspended on the threshold of possibility, waiting to see if anything might happen.

  Nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. Maerad found it hard to concentrate; in this place, she felt blurred, as if she were only half present. She tried to keep focused and alert, to feel the mysterious contours of this inner world, attempting to sense any thickening of shadow around her; but nothing seemed to happen. She began to think that she had been mistaken, that perhaps this was not the correct place to begin, when she noticed that there seemed to be a faint illumination, as subtle as starlight, growing around her, as if her inner eyes were adjusting.

  After a while she was sure that her awareness had grown inside the space, but it was happening so gradually that she almost hadn't noticed. Again she felt the desire to move on (was it onwards? she wondered briefly to herself: in this place there was no sense of dimension, no sense of time). But again she resisted the urge, and stayed where she was, concentrating on the thought of making herself bigger. Bigger? said the voice in her head again; all you are trying to fill up is yourself, this makes no sense ... As soon as her doubts voiced themselves, she lost her focus, and the seeming illumination vanished. She almost withdrew in frustration; while it wasn't exactly unpleasant to be in this strange limbo, it wasn't pleasant either. But a stubbornness kicked inside her, a refusal to give up at the first hurdle. She tried again, this time without letting her doubt rise to the surface of her mind.

  Slowly she regained her focus, holding herself in a strangely agonizing pose of suspension. This time the dim illumination—if that was what it was—arrived a little more swiftly. She still couldn't sense anything about this inner space; it’s strange formlessness simply existed around her (or within her) without revealing any kind of contour. She wondered whether she should exercise some kind of will rather than the passivity she was having such difficulty maintaining, or whether to do so might obliterate what little she could already sense. At first she decided against it, but when nothing further happened, she began to feel impatient. She didn't want to go anywhere; but she did want to know more about where she was. She thought of her earlier idea, that she wanted to be like a lake, and imagined herself as a great body of water, as formless as this faintly glimmering darkness, pushing outward in all directions, filling it up.

  At first it seemed to work; or at least, the lumination began to coalesce into tiny, blurred points of light. The dim lights looked like stars seen through a mist. She was at first astonished: surely it was, not just like starlight, but starlight itself? Was she full of secret constellations? And then another sense began to rise within her, a fluidly brilliant perception unlike any of her normal six senses, although this too seemed blurred, like a song that she knew intimately, but that evaded her recognition because it ran beneath her hearing. Or perhaps it was like a picture that she couldn't quite see, a half-remembered image from her childhood, perhaps . . . only it was really like none of these things, but something else entirely that she had no words for. But neither of these things—the stars, if they were stars, or this other, new perception—became any clearer, although now she strained to perceive them.

  The feeling of suspension, of being neither here nor there nor even in between, of being unnaturally still rather than naturally in motion, was beginning to be unbearable, a kind of suffocation of her mind. It grew until she thought she couldn't stand it, that she would have to move outward or inward, anywhere but where she was, and she felt a helpless anger welling up through her. It was then that she remembered her reason for being there. Up until now, in the sheer strangeness of this limi-nal no-space, she had forgotten it, as completely as the most important details of a dream slip from the waking mind.

  Normally Maerad would have pressed this anger down, and attempted to keep her thoughts cool and rational. Anger only possessed her in extreme situations where it was powerful enough to outstrip her conscious control. This time, with an effort of will, she allowed it to grow. At first she disliked the feeling almost as much as the suffocation that had prompted it; she felt a quiver of fear as its red tide rose within her. Like the flood, it brought with it a strange detritus; random fragments of memory swirled through her, things she hadn't thought about for years. Old slights unanswered, injuries unrevenged, injustices suffered—all trivial events that she had at the time set aside, too proud to respond to—returned with their original force, their humiliating stings undiminished. On their heels came memories that were not so trivial: her mother, broken and defeated, dying in the squalid slaves' dormitory in Gilman's Cot; her father's murder during the sack of Pellinor; the point of Enkir's dagger at her childish throat as he blackmailed her mother into revealing where Hem was taken to be hidden. All her lost, blasted childhood. And all the deaths that had followed her: Dernhil, Dharin ...

  None of these things was fair, none of them was just, none was her fault. Each memory possessed her, filling her with bitter despair, and then a terrible hatred tore through her like raw flame. She cared about nothing except her own pain, her loss, her maimed life ... for a moment she wanted to howl, and she almost sank out of the protean darkness into her wolfskin; but some remnant of her purpose remained, and she stopped herself, pulsing with an extreme, amorphous hatred. And within her, as if her hatred and anger had undammed a violent river, there rushed a brilliant, luminous sense of power, as deadly and implacable as a flood, as a wolf at the kill.

  A thrill went through her, and she forgot her hatred; now she basked in the pure pleasure of power. She had felt something like this when she had first become a wolf, delighting in her physical strength; it had felt something like this when she had killed the Kulag, although she had dreaded that joy. But now she saw clearly the dark coils woven into the bright currents that coursed through her being. She could do anything. She could kill; she could destroy; she could reach out her hand and shrivel the root of all living things; or lean forward to kiss the dead into life. And the thought did not shock her.

  She looked around her and saw the stars, bright and huge as sh
e had never seen them, aligned in patterns that were made legible by the other sense that had so puzzled her earlier. It was a sense that could trace fields and vortices of energy; she felt how the stars moved each in its orbit, how the earth rolled beneath her, how the tides undulated to the moon; she heard the slow pulse of rock, the quick heartbeat of birds. She was suddenly aware of Cadvan's stubborn, intent presence, his thoughts bent solely on her, and she knew that he had been watching her for hours, and that the sun had long set. It was now deep night, under a clear and moonless sky thick with an infinity of stars.

  She widened her field of perception and her being filled with awareness. She heard voices echoing, many voices, cries and whispers and howls, and she could sense dim presences, outlined with a vagrant luminosity. She knew without thinking that these were the dead in the Hollow Lands, the faint murmur of their voices arcing across uncounted years, the warmth of their hands vibrating still in the stones they had raised, in the tombs they had dug beneath the stones. She cast wider still, curious and exhilarated by this new sense, and felt the dark presence of Hulls, not far away, not close, and she knew that their heads were raised, questing, and their nostrils flared as they caught the scent of the power that briefly touched their minds. For the first time she did not fear them; contempt curled in the depths of her being. They were nothing, no more than wisps of smoke on the wind.

  She hunted further still, learning as she went, refining and directing this new sense. She knew by the alignment of her inner stars that she was questing south, over the drenched lowlands. She heard the voices of those who had drowned, the grief of the homeless, the panicked lowing of cattle, the sharp fear of goats and sheep, the feathered terror of birds, the slow agony of trees. She paused, dizzied and confused by the chaotic babble of presences. She was no longer certain what the present meant;

  the voices came from the present, but she could hear also into the recent past, and behind that, fainter voices rose through the years, through decades and centuries, stretching back to a time that she could barely comprehend.

  In all this cacophony, she sought one particular light, one particular smell, one particular voice, one particular time: now. A word formed in her mind, a word of the Speech, and it hung before her like silver fire, one utterly clear thing in this world of shifting shadows and light, and all her desire flowed into it, and it intensified to an unbearable brilliance. Riik. Crow. The silver flame poured through her and became a voice, and she sought through the lowlands, through all the voices, all the dead, all the living, and found the one person whose Truename it was, the one person who would hear his Name coursing through his blood like fiery bells, like the voice of starlight. Riik, she said, Riik, my brother. Come to me.

  Leagues away, in a shepherd's hut on a dark hill, in the nameless depths of sleep, Hem started awake and scrambled to his feet, looking around him with wild eyes. "Maerad!" he said, and stumbled out of the hut's low door. "Maerad?" And then his earth sense rose inside him, a hunger that pulled him with a force so powerful that he almost doubled over with the pain of it.

  Come to me, said Maerad.

  Hem realized, with a disappointment that hit him almost as painfully as his earth sense, that Maerad was not there. But the force of her summoning had been so strong that he could almost see the way toward her, like a shimmering pathway of silver through the darkness. It was as if Maerad were the moon rising over a calm sea, and the path toward her was a road of white ripples that swept northward from Hem's feet.

  I will come to you, he cried, but the summoning had released him, and he didn't know if she heard his answer. Maerad, I'm coming.

  Chapter XIV

  NEWS OF HULLS

  HEM sat down on the dew-damp grass, weak with the shock of what had just happened, and stared northward over the shadowy hills that humped darkly under the star-strewn sky, and which now seemed emptier than ever.

  Maerad. He had been so sure that she was just outside the hut, calling him; he could have sworn that he could smell her, a faint, sweet musk on the night air. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and ordered his distracted thoughts. The blazing pathway he had seen had now faded, but he felt its pull vividly; he knew, at last, exactly where to go. His first impulse was to go back into the hut and wake Saliman and leave at once, but he thought again and decided to wait until morning.

  He looked up at the stars, seeking Ilion, the dawn star: it was already low on the western horizon. It would not be long before the sky began to pale toward morning. He shivered. There wasn't much point in going back to sleep. He returned to the hut and began to blow on the embers of the damped-down fire, coaxing a small flame onto dry wood with shaking hands. Irc stirred sleepily on his perch on Hem's pack and gave a small protesting caw at being woken, and then instantly fell asleep again.

  Hem tended the fire until his hands stopped trembling. It was certainly Maerad who had called him, but he had never felt such a powerful summoning. And she had called him by his Truename. Riik. Crow. He glanced across at Irc, and almost laughed aloud. Of course that was his Name; that was what everyone called him, after all. Lios Hlaf, the White Crow, had been his nickname in Turbansk. But how did Maerad know? He hadn't been instated as a Bard yet; he didn't have a Truename. Maybe, somehow, Maerad had instated him? Or maybe he could have a Bardic Truename without being properly instated, after all? He would have to ask Saliman.

  Saliman was sleeping against the far wall of the hut, wrapped in his cloak and blanket. Hem could hear his easy breathing underneath the crackle of the fire. Saliman was clear of the White Sickness, but Hem was shocked by how weakened he was. And he had healed him in the early stages of the illness; Hem knew now that had he been any more sick, their chances would have been slim indeed. When he looked back at the risk he had run, Hem went cold. Saliman was correct; he had been mad to try it. And even so, it had taken everything he had, and more that he didn't know he had.

  After that last terrible moment when he had called Saliman's Name and collapsed over his body, he had lain in a swoon until late the following day. He had opened his eyes to the soft red light of the sinking sun, which shone straight into the doorway of the hut. At first, he hadn't known where he was. He was overwhelmingly thirsty, and his body ached from the top of his head to the tips of his toes: it was as if he been beaten all over, he groaned, clutching his head, and sat up.

  Saliman was sitting next to him, stirring a stew that smelled very good. When he heard Hem move, he turned around. "I am sorry for the smoke in here," he said. "But I do not have the energy to light a new fire outside the door. Eating and warmth seem more important at the moment."

  Hem stared at Saliman as memory trickled back. "You're alive," he said. His voice croaked with dryness, and Saliman wordlessly passed him a water bottle. Hem took a long drink, and wiped his lips. Never had plain water tasted so sweet.

  "Aye," said Saliman. "I have pinched all my arms and legs, and even my nose, and I am not dreaming. Beyond hope, I am still alive. A little the worse for wear, but I am not complaining. I can't but feel glad that you so wickedly disobeyed me. I owe you my life."

  "I thought you were going to die," said Hem. He wanted to shout, to sing, to rush around the hills dancing for joy, but he seemed unable to do anything at all except say obvious, foolish things. He was so tired, he could barely hold himself upright.

  "Don't speak," said Saliman. "There is no need. And this stew will be ready soon."

  The stew, too, tasted excellent. Even the fuggy, smoky air in that tiny hut seemed as fragrant as a rose garden in the palaces of Turbansk.

  "I suppose that everything tastes so good because I thought I wasn't going to taste anything ever again," said Hem, scooping up the last spoonfuls of stew from his plate. Saliman smiled, but said nothing.

  Irc had come in, with unerring timing, just as Saliman was dishing out their meal, and was crooning contentedly in Hem's lap. Hem put down his plate and tickled Irc's neck. The crow had been unusually quiet; he s
ensed how close he had come to losing his friends, although Hem hadn't told him how desperate their situation was. And he had been more frightened of the floods than he cared to admit. The water had risen until the ridges where they had taken refuge had become a series of islands, and Irc said some of the islands were crowded with damp, miserable animals.

  I saw chickens and foxes together in the mud, he told Hem, wiping his beak on Hem's trousers. And the chickens were not running, and the foxes were not chasing them. Neither wanted to speak to me. It was very strange.

  They were frightened, Hem said.

  Well, I suppose it won't be long before everyone is hunting again.

  Irc demanded a scratch and then perched on Hem's pack and went to sleep. Hem and Saliman chatted for a short time about trivial things, like Irc's observations, or the sorry state of Hem's boots; neither of them felt able to speak about anything serious, such as how close they had both been to death, or what they should do next. Hem was trying to conceal his concern at how much thinner Saliman had become in the last couple of days: already lean from hard traveling, he was almost skeletal, and his face was haggard. He scarcely looked less drawn now, despite the fact that both of them had spent much of their time sleeping, only waking for meals.

  And now that he had been summoned, Hem knew they had to move on. He looked at Saliman's sleeping form and wondered how he would fare. He couldn't leave without him; but the urgency of Maerad's call burned inside his body like a blazing hunger.

  For the moment Hem put aside these worries. He realized that the exhaustion that had weighed him down the past couple of days had vanished. He felt no tiredness at all; as his shock dissipated, a rare joy began to sing through his veins. Ever since they had left Til Amon, he had been pursued by a nagging doubt: perhaps his conviction that he ought to find Maerad was mistaken; perhaps he was misled by his hope and love, as he had been when he had so desperately sought his friend Zelika through the cursed realm of Den Raven. Now he knew that Maerad was alive, that she sought him just as he sought her, and the knowledge filled him with relief. At last he knew what to do.