Pellinor 04: The Singing

by Alison Croggon

  He glanced toward Maerad. While they had cooked and eaten their meal, Maerad had stood unmoving at the edge of the marsh, a tiny figure under the great bowl of the sky. The distress and pain that she had suffered as they traversed the Hutmoors seemed no longer to trouble her; if anything, her expression was serene. To Hem it seemed that her small figure held such power that she was vast: her shadow seemed to stream back from the westering sun like the brooding darkness of a mountain. For the first time, Hem felt a tremor of fear of her. Maerad was now beyond his understanding, beyond any homely call of kindred. He no longer knew who she was.

  He turned his gaze back to his three other companions. They all huddled close to the small fire, trying to catch its vagrant warmth before it was blown away. All of them were stained with travel, gaunt with exhaustion. Hekibel and Saliman sat very close together, and Hem saw that Saliman had taken

  Hekibel's small hands between both of his own and held them fast. Cadvan sat a little apart, his eyes fixed on Maerad, his face inscrutable. No one spoke much, and if they did, they spoke of unimportant things. There seemed, in truth, very little to say. They all knew that they stood before an abyss, and none of them knew whether they would see the following dawn.

  Together they watched the sun set through black bars of cloud. It cast a ruddy light over the moors, so that they seemed stained with blood, and Hem shuddered. The light slowly ebbed out of the sky, and the silence deepened around them. Maerad was a dim figure a few spans away, unmoving as a statue. Above them the sky was clearing, and the stars opened one by one until the dark field of the night was strewn with silver points of light. The world held its breath. Everything was absolutely still.

  Now their eyes were fixed on the horizon, where soon a pale glimmer presaged the rising of the moon over the distant peak of the eastern mountains.

  Cadvan looked over to Hem. "I think it is time," he said gently.

  Hem nodded. With trembling hands he took the chain from around his neck and held the tuning fork in his hand. Then he embraced his friends one by one, Saliman last of all. Saliman's warm, strong arms felt like a final bulwark, and to Hem it seemed that to let go was to fall into a darkness whose depth he could not guess. But at last he stood back and took a deep breath. The rim of the full moon had just broken over the edge of the world.

  "Right, then," he said.

  Hem walked over to Maerad with shaking legs. But although his body was trembling, something inside him was hard and certain. He was more frightened than he had ever been in his life, but he knew that his fear would not stop him from doing what had to be done. The time for fear or doubt was long past. As soon as he turned away from his friends, he forgot them; it was as if a curtain had fallen between them. He felt as if time itself had been waiting for him and Maerad since it had first hatched from the egg of the cosmos, that all pasts and all futures intersected in this one moment.

  When he reached Maerad, he put his hand on her shoulder. She turned to him and smiled, and for a moment that smile made Hem's vitals shrivel with fear: it was fey and wild, cold as the storms of winter, a smile to freeze the heart.

  "We have not long to wait, my brother," said Maerad. "See, the moon is impatient, she rises fast over the world."

  Hem watched as the moon lifted over the horizon. It was huge, huger than he had ever seen it. As it breasted the horizon, its light poured over the moors in a bright stream, catching the filaments of millions of tiny, dew-pearled cobwebs strung through the turf, so it seemed to Hem that a path of silver ripples opened before him, and that he could step lightly over it to the very door of the moon. And as the bright pathway ran up to his feet, he heard a high, beautiful melody that pierced his heart, and in that moment it seemed to him that he and Maerad were caught up out of time, and that the shimmering path was made of stars, like the Lukemoi where the Dead were said to walk on their way to the Gates.

  As he thought this, he saw that the road of light wasn't empty. Out of the silver disk of the moon, as if it were a door to another world, there came a great crowd of people, and they walked solemnly down the narrow road through the darkness toward Hem and Maerad. Hem gasped and found that he was trembling, although he trembled not with fear, but with awe and wonder.

  Before long the first of the people reached them, and they looked straight into Maerad's and Hem's eyes, and then they bowed their heads and walked behind them into the dark night and vanished. Their faces were expressionless, neither happy nor sad, but as they passed, Hem's heart grew heavier and heavier, as if he were weighed down by an immense sorrow. He saw people of all ages, ugly and beautiful, young and old, mothers with babies at their breasts, small children holding the hands of their elders, face after face after face, and in the brief moment when he beheld them, he saw the story of each life in each face, their fragile hopes and passionate desires and impossible dreams, and at the same time the ending of all these things. And it seemed to Hem that each face imprinted itself on his memory, that he would never forget any person he saw.

  Then he caught his breath in a sob. Zelika walked slowly toward him and as he recognized her, he cried out her name in pained surprise. She looked him full in the face with cool recognition, but said nothing. Then she bowed her head and passed behind him with all the rest. And Hem understood then that the endless stream of people were Sharma's dead, those whose lives had been untimely snuffed out because of his wars. He knew that Maerad recognized others: as if he were touching her, he felt her body thrumming with emotion like the string of a harp. He knew the names she spoke—Dernhil, Dharin—but then he heard one he didn't know. liar. Maerad reached out her arm and said something softly that Hem did not hear, and although he did not look, he knew she was weeping.

  And then he looked into the faces of two who stepped before him, a tall man and woman who gravely met his gaze, and he understood that this was the only sight he would ever have of his mother and father, and he felt as if something broke inside him. And still the dead came on, in this bubble of time that seemed to have no end, and Hem saw the face of each one of them.

  But at last the crowd thinned and then ceased, and the music sounded again, and he stood on the moors, the rocky ground beneath his feet, and the moon had lifted up from the black horizon and the silver path had vanished.

  Maerad turned to him, her face shining with a joy that he did not comprehend, although her eyelashes glittered with tears.

  "The dead ask for their accounting," she said. "And those I have killed forgive me. Oh Hem, I am forgiven."

  Hem nodded. He did not understand what Maerad said, and he didn't trust himself to speak.

  At that moment, Hem became aware that someone was watching them. The skin on the back of his neck prickled with a premonition of menace, as if an archer now trained his arrow on the center of Hem's back, and he felt as if the air thickened around him, choking him.

  "Don't take any notice," whispered Maerad. She lifted her lyre. "Now, Hem. Now!"

  Hem hastily bent and struck the tuning fork on a stone at his feet. At first it made no sound, but then the note rang, sweet and clear on the cold air. Just as it began to vibrate, something hit him with a force that knocked him over, and he almost dropped the fork.

  He heard Maerad's voice, sharp and impatient over the rising note that now began to fill the whole world. She sounded suddenly like his sister, not the strange, distant, tormented being he had seen over the past days.

  "For the Light's sake, Hem, don't drop it!" she said. "Hold on to it if you love your life."

  The blow came again, and then again. An instinct told Hem that this was only a muffled attack, that something shielded him from a force that would otherwise have destroyed him as easily as if he were one of the tiny spiders that spread their webs through the Hutmoors. Staggering to his feet, his ears popping, Hem clutched the fork in both of his hands, holding it high over his head. It was blazing with such intensity that he could see the bones inside his hands through the pink clothing of his flesh. Out of the c
orner of his eye he saw that Maerad's lyre was shining with the same light. She lifted it in her arm and raised her left hand, waiting for the right moment. It was a hand of light, a hand that was not maimed, and at the sight Hem's spirit lifted. It seemed to him that at that moment she had never been wounded, that she had never lost her fingers at all, that the terrible things that had happened to both of them had been only a dream from which they now would wake, forever whole.

  The note that filled the air was swelling and growing, and Hem realized with terror and joy that the tuning fork had roused the music that had surged through his body in Nal-Ak-Burat, the music that the Elidhu had breathed into him. But the music that had possessed him then was a mere shadow of the glorious torrent of sound that now lifted and transfigured him. He was a single shining note in an infinite melody that lifted and carried him beyond everything he had ever been or ever known. It seemed to Hem that he had become an instrument, that everything around him—every stone, each blade of grass, each stalk and leaf of every rush and sedge, the layers of rock that stretched beneath his feet to the molten heart of the world, the stars that blazed in the endless sky above him—was awakened into its own unique melody, and all these melodies wove together through his body into an immense, ever-changing harmony that was the living fabric of the world. His heart broke for its fragility, for the delicacies that wove themselves into the deepest intricacies of its being, and at the same time he thought its cruel and violent loveliness would kill him. He couldn't bear its beauty, but he never wanted it to end.

  Then Maerad brought down her hand and struck the strings of her lyre, and the world changed forever.

  When Hem bent down and struck the tuning fork, the sweet note pierced Maerad to her heart, and she gasped. She had felt Sharma gathering his power as the moon rose up from the horizon and, almost idly, she strengthened her shield against him as she readied to play her lyre. He could not touch her. Sharma, she said. You cannot prevail.

  His answer was a massive blow that shocked her with its power. It burst through her shield, although it lost most of its force, and struck Hem. He almost dropped the tuning fork, and a sudden fear bit Maerad's heart: Hem was vulnerable in a way that she was not. This was the single chance they had, and if the note died now, it would never sound again. She raised her shield at once, making it much stronger.

  Hem scrambled to his feet, shaking his head, but he did not drop the tuning fork, and the music swelled up around them, and Maerad heard for the first time the music of the Elidhu. But she could not let herself be carried away on its wild splendor. She stood firm against the overwhelming wave of the music as it rushed through her, listening for the correct moment. She would know it when it came. She raised her hand, feeling the lyre trembling with power against her breast, and the Song began to form in her mind, possessing her as if she were the Song itself. She bent her head and struck the chord that signaled the first of the runes, Ura, the Full Moon, the Apple Tree, and she opened her mouth to sing. And in that moment, her defenses were open to attack.

  Before she could sing the first word, Sharma brought the full force of his power against her. The words caught in her throat; she felt as if a giant hand were throttling her, and an unbearable pressure pushed her down, down, down to the ground. For a fleeting instant she thought of when the women had almost drowned her in the mud at Gilman's Cot; she heard the same roaring in her ears, the same defeated limpness in her limbs. She could still hear the music of the Elidhu, and she heard Hem shouting beside her, holding her up, but it all seemed to come from a great distance. She struggled toward the music, but she was powerless to move in the waves of blackness that now possessed her, that were strangling the life out of her.

  Then, inexplicably, the pressure lightened, and she gulped convulsively, leaning dizzily against Hem. The lyre was still in her hands, the Elidhu music still sounded around her, the Song still waited to be played; but she was weak, and her lyre felt as heavy as stone, so that she could barely hold it. She shook her head, trying to clear it, and listened desperately for the chords that should come to her, but she could not hear them; a gale of darkness raged about her ears and deafened her.

  And then she saw something that she did not understand. She blinked and looked again: a silvery light was sifting through the darkness, and as it did, the monstrous pressure lifted. It seemed as if the darkness were being touched by thousands of unseen hands that left briefly upon it a shimmering palm print, like the vaporous print of a hand upon cold glass. For a moment Maerad marveled at the strangeness of what she saw, and then she understood: it was the dead touching Sharma's shadow, and where they put their hands, he weakened and retreated. And she remembered that Sharma feared death above everything else. Now those whom he had killed had come to touch him with their deaths. She felt his horror and fear as thousands of the dead placed their spectral hands upon him, and her heart lifted with a sudden hope. The music came clearer now, and Hem stood straight beside her, holding up the tuning fork, and the chords came back into her mind, lovely and wild, as they should be played.

  She glanced up to the moon, which burned like a pool of molten silver low on the horizon. And the words of the stanza rushed into her mind, and she opened her mouth and sang the first line of the stanzas of the moon. Her voice shook and did not carry, but as she sang her voice strengthened, until it rang out over the empty wolds with a power greater than any mortal voice:

  I am the dew on every hill I am the leap in every womb lam the fruit of every bough I am the edge of every knife I am the hinge of every question

  As she sang the final line, she paused, waiting for the music to reveal the chords of the rest of the Song, but she ran her hands continuously over the lyre, so the melodies of the moon stanzas rippled over the Elidhu music. And it seemed to her then that the moon had been called down from the sky and stood before her on the thin turf. She blinked, dazzled, and Hem hid his face.

  It was Ardina, but Maerad had not seen Ardina in this guise. Her beauty shook Maerad's heart with terror. Her hair seemed to be alive, as if she were haloed with hissing snakes, and she blazed with a terrible anger. She wore a helm and armor of shining silver, and in both hands she held long blades that flashed so brightly that Maerad couldn't look on them. When she spoke, her voice was cold.

  "Sing for my kindred, Elednor," she said. "Do not fear. I will protect you."

  And then Maerad knew the chords, and she sang as Ardina bade her:

  I am the song of seven branches

  I am the gathering sea foam and the waters beneath it

  I am the wind and what is borne by the wind

  lam the falling tears of the sun

  I am the eagle rising to a cliff

  I am all directions over the face of the waters

  I am the flowering oak which transforms the earth

  I am the bright arrow of vengeance

  I am the speech of salmon in the icy pool

  I am the blood which swells the leafless branch

  I am the hunter's voice which roars through the valley

  I am the valor of the desperate roe

  I am the honey stored in the rotting hive

  I am the sad waves breaking endlessly

  The seed of woe sleeps in my darkness and the seed of gladness

  As she sang each stanza, she saw with wonder that hundreds of forms were materializing in the empty moors before her: the Elidhu of Edil-Amarandh were come to claim their Song. The stanzas of spring summoned creatures like waterfalls who tumbled endlessly in the air, and slender girls like saplings crowned with apple and cherry blossom, and a pregnant doe, and swallows whose wings were edged with sunlight; and the summer stanzas called forth an eagle with feathers of flame, a man who stood tall as a tree and whose hair was leaves, a golden bull, a cloud with eyes and a mouth, a wild pig with massive tusks. And there were many more, all of them so different from the others that she could scarcely comprehend them, but each of them with the same slitted yellow Elidhu eyes. And mor
e came and more, and they lifted their voices to sing with Maerad, so the chorus richened and deepened; but still Maerad's voice rose above them all.

  And then she struck the chords for the winter runes, and straight before her stood Arkan, his brow crowned with icy diamonds, and she lifted her head proudly and met his eyes as she sang; and he smiled as dazzlingly as winter sun on snow, and his eyes were only for her. And in that moment she was entirely regretless, and her heart trembled like a bird daring the highest reaches of the sky. The music soared inside her and the Elidhu voices gave her wings, and she knew that it was not Maerad who sang, but all the bright and savage beauty of the wild world singing through her. And it seemed to Maerad that she, too, was Elidhu, that she flew with them through their fluid and ever-changing world, and that she had never known such bliss as she knew in those moments.

  When she reached the last stanza, her lyre and the tuning fork blazed with a brilliance that was like the sun itself. She sang the last word, gladness, and a great light leaped toward the Elidhu and filled them with a blinding radiance, so that it burned Maerad's eyes merely to gaze on them. And as she watched, their forms became indistinct and began to ebb. There were now only a few chords before the Singing was over, and Maerad played them, sobbing for the loss of this fierce loveliness, begging the Elidhu not to leave her behind. But as her hands rippled over the closing chords of the Treesong, every Elidhu vanished before her eyes, and the music that had lifted her up so that she flew among the stars set her gently on the hard ground and abandoned her.

  Maerad saw without surprise that the runes that had been carved into the wood had disappeared, as if they had never been there, and that it was now just the simple harp it had always appeared to be. She stood forlorn in the great waste, the lyre forgotten in her hand, yearning toward the final notes of the Elidhus' music as it carried on past her, an echo of unbearable loveliness, and then faded into silence.