Midway through the loading, one of the cranes had begun to stall as it lifted a huge cube of stone. A piercing screech had sounded and the mertzers had scrambled away to all sides as the block began to twist, dangling from the cables. When the cables finally gave way, the block struck the ground and shattered and a plume of white dust had shot up into the air from its heart. The mertzers had sauntered back and dragged the fragments off to one side of the loading area.
It had taken all day to load the two years’ accumulation of the quarriers labor. The mertzers were working in the illumination of the caravans’ great searchlights when the last blocks were grappled and hoisted aboard. The cranes had then folded back onto the decks, still at last.
Hours after Daenek had left the cliff’s edge and gone back to the house and the Lady Marche’s supper, he could hear the great engines roaring and coughing in the bellies of the caravan. The noises had faded as the machines pulled out of the quarry and back onto the wide road that led away from the village. There would be no return of the mertzers for another two years.
But now here was this one, trudging steadily through the fields—what was he doing here, off the decks of the huge machines mertzers called home? Daenek stood up on the boulder and shaded his eyes with one hand to see him better. The mertzer’s face was ruddy beneath the bill of his cap, pulled low over his eyes to shield them from the sun. A bushy grey beard brushed against the top of his chest. His blunt hands held the straps of the small pack on his shoulders.
Daenek jumped off the rock and ran down through the fields above the house as the mertzer approached the door. He cautiously moved sideways around the house’s curving exterior until, unobserved, he could see and hear the mertzer speak to the Lady Marche at the door.
The mertzer had let go of one of his pack’s straps and used the free hand to take off his cap. The top of his bald head was as red and shiny as his sweat-covered face. “They told me in the village,” he said in a deep, rumbling voice, “that I might find a place to sleep here.” He spoke in the villagers’ language, the words stiffly accented with the inflections of the mertzers’ guttural tongue.
“Why did they tell you that?” The Lady Marche’s face and voice were cold. “This is no inn. There are beds for hire in the village.”
The mertzer looked down and studied his dust-covered boots for a moment. When he looked up again, something seemed to have altered beneath the surface. Quietly, he spoke for a few seconds in that other language the Lady Marche knew.
The hair on Daenek’s neck stiffened as he watched her face.
She stood looking at the man before her, then answered him in the same tongue. The mertzer followed her as she turned around and stepped back into the house.
Daenek ran and caught the door before it shut. He held it open a creek and watched as the mertzer, framed by the kitchen doorway, sat down heavily at the small table inside. The Lady Marche set before him a cup of water and half of one of the coarse brown loaves she brought back from the village marketplace. A few words of the different language they shared floated out to Daenek. He let the edge of the door slide from his fingers and turned away.
Deep in thought, he walked slowly through the rustling yellow stalks towards the cliff overlooking the quarry. The mass of words he had heard but did not understand seemed to gather inside his head like the stones of the necklace in the Lady Marche’s locked trunk. He squatted down at the edge of the chasm and gazed, unseeing, at the grey walls of the quarry.
After several minutes, he looked up and searched the opposite rim for the familiar watcher. The stonecutters always took several days off after their two years of work had been hauled off by the mertzers’ caravans—they would all be in the village now, drinking and idling on the street where the women were. Except for the mute, hulking watcher. Daenek spotted him in his usual crouching position on the quarry’s far side. With no rock chips to be gathered, he spent all day there, occasionally chewing on a scrap of dried meat or hard bread he took from the pockets of his dusty work apron. Daenek remembered the watcher’s vigil from the last time two years ago.
Their eyes met across the gulf, the boy and the powerfully built man looking into each other’s distant face. The words with which the Lady Marche had ordered the watcher away from the house were still solid in Daenek’s mind, though that was seven years past now. The watcher’s skin had greyed with time spent in the quarry’s dust, and when he walked about his job on the bottom he stooped low whether his bag was full of rock fragments or not. But the face was the same, silent and patient as the rocks he crouched among. Words, thought Daenek. What were they all saying with them?
The mertzer propped himself up on one elbow as Daenek stood in the little room’s doorway. The wide, ruddy face looked up at the boy from the makeshift bed formed of the blankets the Lady Marche had placed in the unused room.
“Hello,” said the mertzer gravely. He sat up on the blankets and made a slow gesture around the room with one hand. “Come in and talk.”
Daenek saw that he kept one blunt finger of his other hand inserted in a small book with a frayed cloth cover. What language is it in? wondered Daenek. The mertzers’ or that other tongue? Probably not in the village’s words, like the poorly bound volumes kept on the shelves downstairs. The mertzer had other books as well, equally old and battered-looking. They tumbled out of his open pack lying in one corner of the room on top of his jacket and cap.
“Why didn’t you go with the others?” Daenek stepped into the room and stood at the edge of the blankets.
The mertzer leaned back against the wall and gazed up at the boy with half-closed eyes. He sighed. “No good reasons,” he said finally. “Lots of bad ones, I suppose.” He reached over and pulled his pack to him by its straps, a few of the books spilling out on the floor.
“To tell truth,” said the mertzer, rummaging through the pack’s contents, “I was landed, as the mertzers say. Kicked off. Which is a hard, a cold thing for them to do to one of their own.”
He straightened back up with a small object clutched in his hand. “They wouldn’t have done it to one who’d been born a mertzer. That’s sure.”
He held the object out to Daenek. It was a small glass tube sealed off at one end. “Would you do me a kindness,” the mertzer said, “and go fill this with water, up to here?” One of his fingers tapped at a line inscribed on the side of the glass.
Daenek filled the tube at the bathroom sink, then returned it to the mertzer. “Thank you,” he said, nodding his shining dome of a head. He seemed to forget Daenek’s presence as he methodically poured a tiny bit of powder into the tube from a metal container that he fetched from his pack. Sealing the open end with his thumb, he shook the cylinder until the water had turned a milky white. He threw his head back and quickly gulped down the contents.
Fascinated, Daenek watched as the man’s face paled, as if the blood were falling back to his heart. Slowly, the ruddy complexion returned and the mertzer leaned back heavily against the wall with his eyes closed.
Several minutes passed with no further change. He must’ve fallen asleep, thought Daenek. He turned away, feeling a little disappointed, and started to walk quietly out of the room.
“A cold thing,” rumbled the mertzer’s voice behind him.
Daenek looked over his shoulder and saw him lean forward, his eyes blinking, and run his thick fingers through the tangled grey hairs of his beard. Back to the edge of the blankets Daenek walked, and looked down at the mertzer. “Why did they kick you off?”
The mertzer gazed at him with a puzzled expression, still blinking furiously. The look disappeared as the eyelids slowed and finally stopped. “Eh?” He shook his head. “The captain—that young fool. Been two years since his father, the old captain, died and already his ears won’t open to anything anybody else can tell him. Knows it all, he thinks.”
Daenek sat down beside the man, drawing his legs up beneath himself on the blankets. “What did you try to tell him?” He was abso
rbed in what was the longest conversation he had ever had with anybody other than his mother, the Lady Marche.
“Ahh, the engines.” The mertzer scowled, gazing sourly at the empty space before him. “All rusted and patched together, exploding and falling apart with every cog’s turn. Metal so fatigued you can write your name on it with a sneeze. Lay up for a year, I told him, spend the last run’s profits on parts, go in debt to the buyers in the Capitol, if need be. Better that, than to soon trudge with every damn village’s wares loaded on our backs!”
He struck the wall behind him with his fist—his face was even redder than before, the skin darkening with the pressure of his anger.
“And what did the captain say?” Daenek leaned forward eagerly.
The mertzer sat without speaking for a few moments. His face was paler, almost ashen, when he finally spoke. “That the engines were running so well as to need one less machinist tending them. And not one of those fine fellows I’ve lived and worked with all these years would say a word for my sake. So here I come walking up to you and your mother’s house, a mertzer with only his own legs to move him about. Irony, of a sort.” He fell silent, then very softly spoke a few words in that other language.
Daenek recognized the words. It was a line from one of the songs he had heard that night, years ago, when he had watched the Lady Marche pose in front of the mirror with the veils from her locked trunk. Without knowing what any of the words meant, Daenek carefully pronounced the next line of the song. It was the first time he had ever said any of the remembered words aloud but they came from his lips clear and with no hesitation.
The broad face of the mertzer turned towards him, the eyes widened a fraction. “Your mother’s taught you the Capitol tongue as well, then?” He smiled for a second and then the eyes shifted away, following some path of his thoughts. “That’s a good thing, to know a language just for its songs.”
“She’s not just my mother,” said Daenek. “She’s a lady—the Lady Marche, and—”
The mertzer turned quickly and studied the boy’s face. “She’s who?” Without waiting for an answer, his blunt finger tapped the boy’s chest. “And if that’s her name, then who are you?”
Daenek shook his head and tried to stand up, but the mertzer’s hand gripped his shoulder and pressed him back down onto the blankets.
“The Lady Marche,” said mertzer, marvelling, “and she didn’t even tell me. Though what was I supposed to think when those wretched stone-cutters told me a woman lived up here who spoke the Capitol’s tongue, and might have some hospitality for one who was also born in that city. The Lady Marche . . .” He turned Daenek around to see him better. The mertzer’s face was transfigured, his mouth slightly open. “Then you must be,” he said, “of course, you’re—”
“My name’s Daenek.” He looked warily at the mertzer, wondering what change would strike him next.
“Yes.” The mertzer nodded, his face grown solemn. “The thane’s son.”
“So what of it?” said Daenek sullenly. He twisted free of the mertzer’s hand and stood up.
Sad eyes followed him as he backed away. “Ah, child,” murmured the other. “What have they told you here, about your father? What lies rotted that part of him that’s inside you?”
“Nothing,” said Daenek truthfully. “They never told me anything.” Suddenly, like a hollow space opening in his body, he felt a sense of shame. Shame at the way he had felt before.
“That’s how it’s done.” The mertzer’s gaze didn’t move away from him. “Slandered well, when the details are left for each to fill in with his own little fears and hates. Until a thane’s memory is painted over with a traitor’s.” He closed his eyes and slumped against the wall.
Daenek retraced his steps until he was standing just before the mertzer again. “He wasn’t a traitor?” he asked the silent figure. “My father?”
The mertzer opened his eyes and looked at Daenek for several seconds. “No,” he said. “Traitors they who call your father a traitor.”
“Did you know him?”
A small, bitter laugh. “I was only one of his followers. I even signed aboard the caravans, became a mertzer, so I could tell people in every village I came to about your father’s plans. You see,” he leaned forward and looked up at Daenek, “even back then it could be seen how things were going. Things breaking down and not being repaired, people running out of—whatever it is that you hold onto your life with. Will, perhaps it’s called. But I thought the thane, your father, would change all that.”
“How could he do that?” Daenek squatted down in front of the mertzer. All this sudden knowledge was making him feel dizzy—like suddenly finding yourself at the edge of a precipice you hadn’t seen.
Another laugh. “I never even really knew,” said the mertzer. “Or what little I did know isn’t worth telling now. Just a few fragments of a memory, with enough edge left on it to draw blood.” He fell silent, his eyes seeing nothing but some inner scene, filled with regret and pain.
A storm of questions surged up inside Daenek, each seeming to strain at the confines of his chest and throat. He wanted to ask more about the thane—what his father had looked like, what words of his could be remembered—but didn’t, as he studied the mertzer’s lowered head. Instead, he bent down to intercept the mertzer’s line of vision, and asked: “What did that song mean? What do the words say?”
“What?” The mertzer looked up. “Song? Oh . . . that one. It’s about leaving. Being in strange places by yourself— Why do you ask? You know the words to it.”
“But not what they mean.”
The mertzer looked at Daenek in puzzlement, that finally broke into comprehension. “You are your father’s son,” he said. “Nobody’s ever taught you anything but this whining stone-cutter’s tongue, yet . . .” He pulled Daenek closer to him. “How many times have you heard that song before? Once?”
Daenek nodded.
“Listen.” The mertzer sang a line of the song, in a high, sad-tinged voice, then dropped to his usual bass. “That means, Not a friend in the whole wide world.” Another line in the same tone as the first. “Now, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” But Daenek sensed a small, microscopic event in his head, like the cracking of a seed’s hull. “Something . . . something that also isn’t.”
“And nobody knows my name,” translated the mertzer.
Daenek listened as he sang the entire song, pausing after every line to give the words’ meanings. Every word that Daenek had held for so long intact within himself now swelled with radiance.
He would never forget the song.
“Now,” said the mertzer, “what does this say?” He recited another line, slower, one that Daenek had never heard before.
Gaps . . . there weren’t enough words yet. But still, some of the words the mertzer had explained from the song—they sounded, no, felt like these. “Oceans,” said Daenek. “An ocean that isn’t there?” He shook his head in confusion. What could that possibly mean?”
“The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” The mertzer reached over to his pack and took up one of the tattered books.
The yellowed pages fluttered under his thumb until he stopped midway through the volume. He began to read, the other language’s words exact and powerful sounding.
For Daenek it was like seeing some vast, mysterious object through a dense fog that at times thinned or vanished entirely.
The mertzer would turn the pages back and forth in his hands, then stop and read another section aloud. Sometimes his eyes closed for several seconds, but the deep voice continued.
Silence in the little room at last, and the mertzer handed the book to Daenek. “Take it,” he said. “Learn to read it.”
“It’s so big.” Daenek weighed it in his hands. “It’ll take me forever to know all these words.”
“No.” The mertzer lightly touched the boy’s forehead
with his finger. “A day, perhaps. You have a thane’s gift for languages.”
He paused for a moment, searching for an explanation. “You see, there’s a language underneath all languages, and when we’re infants a part of us knows that language and can suck out the meanings and ways of any human tongue as though it were air. But the part dies a few years after our births, except for thanes. Like you. It stays strong in you, becomes stronger, a tool instead of a gift. So that, like your father, you could someday rule a world where every piddling village has its own language. There are some people who can pick up a solid thing, and tell you the face of every person who’s ever handled it. You,” the finger tapped the boy’s chest again, “can hold words and draw out whatever their speakers were saying with them.”
Daenek studied the faded gilt lettering on the cover of the book. The other language used the same alphabet as the stone-cutters’ language. He held the tip of his ringer under the first word of the book’s title and turned it towards the mertzer.
“Does that mean thane?”
“Close.” The mertzer nodded. “The book is called Master Poems of the English Language. ‘English’ is what they speak in the Capitol and, so I’ve heard, on some of the other worlds way beyond this, and even Earth itself.” He suddenly noticed the empty glass tube and the metal packet. His hand reached down and pushed them out of sight.
The pages slowly passed under Daenek’s hands as he opened the books. Words that were already becoming a part of him, sinking into the flesh under his flesh.
“It’s late,” said the mertzer. “Go to bed. We’ll start on the first page tomorrow.”
When Daenek got back to his room he opened the book and saw a single word inscribed inside the cover. Stepke. He switched off the light and got into bed. That’s his name, he thought. It joined the other words massing at his heart.
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