Pellinor 04: The Singing

by Alison Croggon

  Saliman's skin was dry and rough like paper, and very hot. Hem could feel the beat of his blood, a light, hectic pulse that had no regular rhythm. Swiftly Hem scanned his body, sending a White Fire running along Saliman's veins. It was a first test of what he would be facing when he began the healing. At once he felt the truth of what Saliman had said to him earlier; the sickness was like a foul, oily smoke winding in infinitely complex patterns through Saliman's being. It withdrew from the edges of the White Fire, retreating before Hem's advances, seeming almost to disappear, although a deeper sense told him that it was there, undiminished, at the periphery of his vision.

  A sudden nausea flowered in Hem's belly. It was the same nausea he had felt in the forests of the Glandugir Hills, and with it came a visceral sense of revulsion and horror, as if he were about to lower himself into a pit that crawled with spiders and scorpions. He withdrew his mind and sat for a moment, gasping and sweating with the shock of it, trying to gather his wits together.

  He had barely touched Saliman, and it was already that bad. For a moment Hem considered leaving the hut, taking his pack, and fleeing as far as he could from the horror that was the White Sickness. Saliman stirred, and then kicked out wildly, mumbling something incoherent in his sleep, and Hem jumped. He looked a long moment at his friend's face. If he abandoned Saliman, that beauty would be destroyed forever. He would never again see Saliman's smile, never hear his voice raised in song, nor his long, improbably absurd stories, told for the pleasure of delighting his friends.

  "No," he said aloud, pushing away the cold voice inside him that mocked his weakness. "I said I would heal him. I said that even if I caught the sickness, I would not regret it. I will not regret it."

  He took a deep breath, picked up Saliman's hands again, and began the task of healing.

  Afterward, the only memory Hem had of that night was of a confused and endless torment, a long, exhausting struggle with a sickness that embraced him until it wound through into his own vitals, skewering him with an anguish he had never known before. He hunted down flickering snakes of fire and extinguished them, only to see them spring three-headed out of the clean darkness; he wrestled with demons of smoke and oil that smothered him; he chased the sickness down the infinitely tiny byways of Saliman's body, only to see it creep back, stronger, more insidious than before; he ran down dark, empty roads, and before him glided a shadow haloed by light that he knew was Saliman, but ever more distant, ever more faint.

  Hem called out Saliman's Name—Arundulan! Arundulan!— and his voice died on the thick, dark, choking air. There was no way out of this nightmare, it closed around him, and he smelled his own death rising from his stomach, his own sour and corrupting flesh, and his sight was failing, his ears were stuffed with mud, his hands were numb and felt nothing. He stumbled and at last he felt himself falling, and the road before him broadened and darkened, and he saw a great light growing out of the distance before him, and he knew that he was near death. In despair he reached more deeply within himself than he had ever touched, far beneath the layers of self that he understood, to a place that was at once hot and cold, fluidly passionate and infinitely obdurate, like the living heart of rock itself. He flung himself toward the fleeing figure before him, no longer knowing what he was doing, and he cried out Saliman's Name— Arundulan!—with every fiber of his being. For an endless moment all his senses were quenched, and he seemed to exist only in a void that stretched around him, suspended endlessly between life and death. And then he knew that his hand clutched Saliman's living hand, and that he bent, sobbing with exhaustion, over Saliman's softly breathing body, and that the sickness was gone.

  THE HOLLOW LANDS

  N or was such love often seen, as that between Saliman and Hem; for each held that to lay down his life were a small price for the other's good. As the reeds standing in the river, they bowed side by side before the gentle breeze; as broad oaks in the forest, they resisted the fierce tempest together; nor did one ever fail the other in his promise. Truly he is blessed, who rejoices in such a friend!

  From The Tale of Saliman, Maerad of Turbansk

  XII

  ARDINA

  T

  HIS is hopeless/' said Maerad. Her gaze swept, smoldering with irritation, over the lonely, bare hills of the Hollow Lands. "I swear the Nameless One himself sent this rain. Curse him. Curse him and blast him."

  Cadvan, who was, with great difficulty, attempting to light a fire in the face of the biting wind, looked up. "There is no doubt that the Nameless One is a powerful sorcerer," he said mildly. "But I think this weather has nothing to do with him. Such floods have happened before—not for a long time, I grant you—and we were about due for another."

  "It's mightily convenient, all the same," said Maerad darkly. "How do you know he hasn't called out the rain clouds just to get in our way? If we ever get the better of him, I'll sentence him to an eternity of numb fingers and wet clothes. It would serve him right."

  Cadvan laughed, and then was silent as he tended a flame that had finally caught, cradling it carefully from kindling to wood. Maerad turned her back on the Hollow Lands, and concentrated on helping him to build the fire until at last they had a healthy blaze. Then they prepared an unappetizing but sustaining meal, consisting mainly of hot bean gruel and turnips pushed into the coals to roast. Once the meal was over, Maerad sighed and stretched out her hands to the flames.

  They were huddled under a rock formation that made a natural shelter. Underneath the ground was dry, and there was even a little protection from the shifting wind. The horses, unsaddled, wandered close by, cropping the turf, their backs hunched miserably against the cold.

  "What are we to do?" said Maerad, returning to her earlier grievance. "We're going in exactly the wrong direction, I'm sure."

  Cadvan studied her face as she stared frowning into the fire. "We have two choices. One is to wait for the floods to subside. The worst of it will probably be over in a few days at most. Or we can try to go around them, although my wager is that if the Imlan has flooded so badly, the Aleph will perhaps be worse. And we have no way of knowing if the Milhol is any better. We might be hemmed in by flooding to the north as well, once we leave the hills."

  "We don't have time."

  "No. But they are choices we have, all the same. At the moment, the south is barred to us. My best guess is that we try to head east, bearing south toward Desor."

  "I don't want to go anywhere near Desor," said Maerad, remembering some Desor Bards she had once met in Innail. "I'm sure that School is as corrupt as Ettinor. We'd be sure to run into Hulls."

  "I wasn't suggesting that we actually knock on the door of the School."

  Maerad was silent for a time, turning over their options. At last she sighed, poking the fire so sparks twirled idly up toward the rocky roof. "I know you're right, and we have no choice," she said. "But I don't like it, all the same."

  Until it began to rain, their journey from Innail had been swift and uneventful. In a way, Maerad had been glad to leave Innail; she couldn't get used to her newfound celebrity, and it was pleasant to be anonymous again, away from staring eyes and pointing fingers. By now, she and Cadvan were very used to traveling together, and they made good progress. They had left Innail Fesse in the first couple of days and ridden swiftly down the West Road, the dark trees of the Weywood to their right, and camped alongside the road. The first night, as she stared into the darkness that gathered under the tangled, ancient trees, Maerad remembered her first meeting with the Elemental Ardina, which had been in this very forest. The song Ardina had sung that day lilted into her memory:

  "Fleet as an unseen star in the dwindling glade Old as the hidden root that feeds the world Hard as the light that blinds the living eye I am this, and this, and this"

  It was a strange song, and Maerad had often puzzled over its meaning. It was, she was sure, about the Treesong; surely the "hidden root that feeds the world" could mean nothing else. And Nelac had said that the Treeson
g was something to do with the Speech, the inborn language of Bards, which was the source of their powers. It seemed likely to Maerad that the magery held within the Speech stemmed from the Treesong itself.

  After the past year, she felt a little closer to understanding what the Treesong was, but it remained, all the same, mysterious and elusive—as was Ardina's song. What did she mean by an unseen star in a dwindling glade? Was it something to do with Starry Groves beyond the Gates where, according to Cadvan, Ardina herself had once wandered, following her lover, Ardhor? But the star was described as "fleet"; surely that meant something that didn't last, whereas the Starry Groves were eternal things that didn't change. Unless, of course, the Starry Groves were something Bards had made up; Maerad was already becoming familiar with the Bards' complex ideas about truth, which some said could be seen more clearly through the lens of the untrue. Arkan had told her that humans always lied. . . . Perhaps that was part of what he meant. On the other hand, he had told her that the Elidhu did not lie. And this was an Elidhu song.

  Maerad found, yet again, that she was going around in circles, and she sighed. Part of the frustration of the past year had been that she had never quite known what she was supposed to be looking for, and what to do when she found it. And yet everything depended upon her. And on top of that, she had powers that she didn't understand and that no one could tell her how to use. Those powers didn't terrify only Maerad; they frightened everyone around her, even her friends. She was monstrous. That was what the Winterking had meant when she had defeated the Landrost, when he had said that he didn't know what she was. Yet Maerad had never asked for these abilities, and if she had had a choice, she would have refused them. It didn't seem fair.

  She stared balefully into the depths of the Weywood, wondering if Ardina was nearby, and whether the Elidhu, too, would be frightened of her. Sometimes it had seemed to her that Ardina was the only living being who understood her. If even Ardina feared her, Maerad truly would feel alone.

  This time they didn't turn into the Weywood, but kept to the Bard Road, intending to travel as swiftly as possible toward Til Amon. Once they left the Fesse, they kept a careful watch for bandits or the groups of rogue soldiers that rumor said now roamed Annar. The only sign of trouble, as Cadvan observed, was that the road was utterly deserted. He said that normally, even this early in the year, there would be some movement— farmers taking their goods to market, or the first Pilanel artisans coming down from Zmarkan, or Bards going about their busi

  ness; but they encountered no one. The people who lived by the road, who made a good part of their living from such travelers, confirmed Cadvan's observation; now the walled villages and towns kept their gates locked even by day, and those that were unwalled were mainly deserted. The reason why was evident in the burned and ruined houses they occasionally passed.

  The rains began once they left the Weywood, and initially merely slowed their progress to a crawl. But when the Imlan burst its banks a few days after they left the Weywood, they were forced to leave the West Road and turn north, riding hard before rapidly rising floodwaters. They were not the only people fleeing; the area south of Desor was a fertile plain dotted with many farms and villages, and the floods affected them as well. Suddenly all the people who had been invisible until now became very visible: Maerad and Cadvan saw many small groups steadily plodding in the rain to higher ground. Most were on foot, many were driving livestock, and they led wagons, pulled by oxen or horses, that were loaded high with their possessions. The rapidity and scale of the flooding had taken Maerad aback. In the mountains where she had lived as a child, there had been no such thing as floods, and she had not imagined such devastation.

  Maerad and Cadvan had decided to press northeast, since they preferred to stay away from the refugees, and soon found themselves separated from the others by an ever-widening lake. In the end, they were driven past the edges of the Weywood to the eastern edge of the Hollow Lands before they finally escaped the rising waters.

  When the floods stopped spreading, they looked back over a massive brown lake, punctuated by trees or ridges of higher ground, which had now become islands. Some of these temporary islets were crowded with unlikely menageries of goats and cows and foxes and sodden rabbits. There was no sign of people; they were now far beyond the inhabited lowlands. No chance of another tavern for miles, Maerad thought gloomily.

  "We should have followed the farmers," said Maerad, after she and Cadvan had finished their meal. "Then we'd be closer to Desor. Nobody would have noticed us in that chaos."

  "Perhaps you're right," Cadvan answered. He was leaning back against the rock, his eyes shadowed in the firelight as he rubbed his boots with a mixture of tallow and oil. "But it's hard to say whether we would be better off if we had."

  "We're running out of time," said Maerad.

  Cadvan gave her a sharp glance. "I know, Maerad. Even I can feel that. But unless you can access some hitherto unknown power that can transport us over several leagues of water—not, I confess, that I rule that out entirely—I fear we are stuck here."

  "You mean, sprout wings or something?"

  "Is it so strange? You can become a wolf, after all. Perhaps you could shapeshift into another animal. Not that that would help me, unless you became a giant bird like those that are said to live in the southern deserts and lay eggs as big as a man."

  A silence fell between them, and Maerad took the tallow and attended to her own boots. She hunched her cloak around her as she rubbed the leather, pondering what Cadvan had said. She knew he had meant it as a joke, but was it possible that she could do something to get them across the floods? She had sometimes wondered if she could assume the shapes of other animals, but had been afraid to try. She was even more afraid now; she had avoided her Elemental powers ever since the battle at Innail, and had been reluctant to use magery, even the simplest of glimmerspells. But maybe Cadvan had a point: if she could be a wolf, why not a bird?

  She thought for a while longer, remembering the different

  kinds of birds she had seen, and then, on impulse, she attempted a transformation. She was curious to see if she could do it, and in part she was impelled by mischief: she wanted to see the expression on Cadvan's face when he suddenly found himself sitting next to a hawk. Sinking into the inner space where all her selves fell away, seeking that point where transformation was possible, was easy for her now. This time, instead of seeking her wolf shape, she commanded herself: Be hawk!

  At first she thought she had succeeded: there was that moment of pure agony that always came with the transformation, before her new shape coalesced out of the protean self she had become. But this time the anguish did not stop; it was as if she were being consumed by a terrible flame. She screamed, but she had no mouth with which to scream; she was racked with anguish through her whole being, and couldn't even cry for help. She had no way of knowing how long this agony lasted, although it felt as if it went on forever, as if she would always be racked by this torment. Then a blessed coolness fell on her, like starlight, like bells tolling across a landscape of snow, and the fire dimmed; the coolness was her Name, Elednor, shaping her into her known self, and as she heard the Name, she had a mouth again, and eyes, and skin.

  Elednor, said Cadvan again, and this time it was not the voice of starlight, the inhuman voice of magery, but his own voice.

  Maerad opened her eyes and stared straight into his; he was pale, and the scar on his face stood out as it always did when he was anxious. The pain had gone without trace, as swiftly as it had overwhelmed her, but the aftershock of it remained, and it was a while before she could say anything.

  Cadvan studied Maerad in silence. Suddenly ashamed, Maerad turned her eyes away.

  "What happened?" Cadvan asked at last.

  "I tried to become a hawk," said Maerad. "It didn't work. I think I got—stuck."

  Cadvan's eyes turned black with anger. "You what?"

  "I tried to become a hawk," she whispered. "It didn't
work."

  There was a short, ominous silence as Cadvan brushed his hair distractedly out of his eyes. When he did speak, it was in the cold, even voice that in Cadvan signaled total fury. "Do you mean to tell me that, after weeks of refusing even to work a glimmerspell, Maerad of Pellinor suddenly decides on a whim, with no warning at all, to try a transformation she's never tried before? I thought you'd learned something over the past year."

  "It was foolish, I know—"

  "Foolish? That's the least of it. Perilous, reckless, stupid. By the Light, Maerad, I'd expect such a thing from a child, but you at least ought to know better than anyone else that magery of any kind is not to be used on a whim. Besides which, you didn't even bother to shield yourself. Any Hulls out enjoying the delightful pleasures of the Hollow Lands will know exactly where you are now."

  Maerad sat up, stung by Cadvan's anger.

  "I just thought I'd try," she said bitterly, meeting his eyes. "How else am I supposed to find out what I can do? Here I am, with this wonderful Gift that's supposed to save the world, and I haven't the first idea how to use it. I'm guessing all the time. It's not as if anyone can teach me. What do you suggest, Cadvan? Can you guide me through the magery of Elementals, so that I make no mistakes? Or if you can't do it, who do you think might show me what to do?"

  Cadvan said nothing, but she saw his anger subsiding. He sighed, and leaned forward and pushed some more wood onto the fire.

  "You have a point, I grant you," he said at last. "All the same, Maerad, you know as well as I do that that was a reckless act. And we cannot afford such acts. Not if we are to survive. Myself, I am quite fond of my own skin. And I am not overfond of seeing you in such a state as you were then."