No excuses now. No room for them. I’m responsible for the people around me, and for the power I wield.309
Stories are powerful. Stories are arrows and swords. Written down, they become a copy of a mind. These words right now, on the pages under my hands—what am I doing with them? What power have I put into this? Is it safe? Is it right? How am I to know, when half of a Chant’s purpose is to embrace the possibility of new knowledge lying just over the horizon? How could I ever know if this is right, when I might be proven and disproven a thousand times?310
And the words I put into the world, the stories I told in the Rojkstraat and the salons—it’s too late for those. I was irresponsible.
I don’t know what to do.
I had all these thoughts when I was in Gradenheelt Square, wet and cold and trying to find the bridge, and I still haven’t found any answers hours later.
There’s one person I could talk to. There’s Orfeo. Orfeo knows about merchant things, and I’ve told him all about Chant things. Orfeo’s good. He’s so full of goodness—he found out that he was doing harm without meaning to, so he stopped, and he’s learning to do better. He’s making an effort; he’s trying to think more about other people; he’s caring and respectful. He tries so hard to be better than he is. And he loves me. He wants to keep me. He’s going to give me everything I want, and if all I want is my name, he’ll keep writing it back into my skin until it’s mine again. He’d give me his own name if he could.
(Oh . . . Except he could. He could: Ylfing Acampora. Fuck, my heart’s racing.)
(Later. Think of it later. Think of it, bask in it, ache for it later. It’s a thought that deserves more consideration than what I can give it when I’m this angry.)
To tell Orfeo what’s going on, I’d have to break my promise to Sterre.
. . .
Or would I?
* * *
306. That’s always a red flag. She might trust you, but you shouldn’t trust her.
307. Yes. People die and their bodies rot where they fall, sometimes, because there’s not enough others left alive to tend to them. If a plague strikes anywhere near you, just leave. Just get out. Because when people start dying, then everyone else is going to look for someone to blame. “Who brought the plague?” they’ll ask. “Someone had to bring it. Perhaps it was that stranger who just came to town.” That’s the best kind of scapegoat, you know. Someone they can murder with no guilt or consequences. It doesn’t even matter if the foreigner is barely older than a child. Plagues make people crazy; ask me how I know.
308. She deserved everything she got.
309. Yes. Yes! At last. Good!
310. Exactly. You can’t know. Once you write it down and let it out of your hands, you might as well be dead. You have no control over where it goes, or who reads it, or when, or how.
FORTY-THREE
The Story I Told to Orfeo Just Now, When I Sat Him Down and Said I Had a Hypothetical Question
A very long time ago and half the world away, there was a baker. He made the best bread in all the city, and everyone bought lots of it and ate it, and it was delicious and nourishing and good. He had all kinds of bread, but the most favorite kind was a rosemary-olive loaf. One day he found that the olive barrel in his pantry had spoiled several days previously. He knew that everyone who had bought his bread in the last few days would get sick, and he decided to keep it secret.
Was that bad of him?
FORTY-FOUR
Orfeo’s Answer
Well yes,” said Orfeo. “Was that the whole hypothetical question?”
“Think about it, though. It wasn’t his fault the olives went bad, right?”
“Probably not.”
“What if he’d left the lid off, and mice or maggots got in? So there was an element of carelessness involved?”
“Then it’s his fault, yes. A baker should take care with their ingredients. If a carpenter left his chisel out in the rain and it rusted, that would be his fault too.”
“But he made and sold the bread before he noticed that the olives had gone bad. Is that his fault?”
Orfeo tilted his head slowly back and forth, uncertain. “Yes,” he said at last, slowly. “Because he should have been paying attention. He should have been more careful.”
I relaxed all over and released the breath I’d been holding. “All right. Yes. Good.”
Orfeo left his head tilted to one side, smiling a little at me. “So what’s the ending? What happens to the careless baker?”
I fidgeted. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Orfeo gave me a strange look. “I thought you said Chants don’t make up stories.”
“We don’t. We only carry them and pass them along. They’re not ours to mess with.”
“So what’s this about?”
I took a breath. “There’s something I’m trying to figure out, and I promised someone I wouldn’t talk about it, but I needed to. I needed to say it aloud to understand it. And you . . . I trust your moral compass. You think about how to be good.”
He propped his chin on one hand and grinned. “That’s sweet. Thank you. Did I help?”
“I still don’t know what to do, but . . .” I looked away.
Orfeo caught my hands in his and kissed my knuckles. “Do you want to keep talking about it?”
“Maybe later.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to be very good company today.”
“You don’t have to be anything except you.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s rather the problem. I’m still figuring that out too. Still. I’m sorry, I know you thought I was all finished and fine.”
“You’re getting better, though.”
“Am I?”
“You’re in the middle of it all, so you can’t tell, but you’re getting close to the end. Then there will be something new on the other side.” He rubbed his thumb across my wrist.
“How can you tell?”
“Because you don’t have nightmares anymore,” he said simply.
I stared at him. I’d never mentioned the dreams to him, not once. Not once.
He squeezed my hands. “You’ve slept in my bed every night for weeks,” he said. “I notice these things. You used to wake up a couple times every night, flailing in the sheets like you were drowning.”
“You never said anything,” I said faintly.
He shrugged. “I was waiting for you to . . . reach for me, I suppose. Or to wake me and ask for comfort. I didn’t want you to think you’d troubled me, because you hadn’t. But you never asked; you never reached. You always just breathed for a few minutes and then curled up in a little ball all by yourself on the other side of the bed, so I thought you might not want to be touched, or that it might embarrass you. And then eventually, the nightmares seemed to stop, because you were sleeping through the night most of the time.”
Not . . . stopped. But changed. I’m still dreaming of the marsh every night, of sitting silently in the boat with the figure and the cormorant. None of us makes a sound; there’s not even a breeze to rustle the stars-in-the-marsh around us. But the sky above has pinpricks of stars now, and the cloudy spiral of the Eye of Shuggwa has grown much clearer.311
“And,” Orfeo added, “I know it’s not just that I got used to it, because I wake up if someone so much as whispers in the next room, always have. I wake up whenever you get out of bed in the middle of the night, and I wake up again a few minutes later when you start scribbling upstairs.”
“I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you.”
“It wasn’t a disturbance. I go back to sleep right away. The point is that you’re getting a little better, whether you’ve noticed it or not.”
“I still don’t know.”
He kissed my knuckles again, murmured “Ylfing” against my skin as he always did, and I closed my eyes and breathed and felt another tiny bit anchored into the world.
Acampora, my brain added. Ylfing Acampora. You could have all the n
ames you want, a name that’s you and a name to tie you to something real. All you have to do is tell him you want it, and it’s yours.
The old Ylfing would have dropped everything and followed him across the—no.
No, wait.
That’s not true, is it?
Because the old Ylfing didn’t do that. The old Ylfing was apprenticed to Chant, and followed Chant across the world because . . . that’s what he wanted. He wanted to be a Chant. He didn’t really want all those boys he loved the same way he wanted that.
Oh.
The old Ylfing loved them, loved them wholly, with his entire heart, loved them like the world was ending and the sky was falling, loved them like they were each the great and all-consuming love of his life. But then when it was time to leave, he left them. He left them, and he was sad, but not as sad as they were, because the thing he really wanted was somewhere in Chant’s head, or off on the horizon, something huge and beautiful and important, something infinitely rare and precious, something lost and forgotten. And then, whenever we stopped somewhere new, the old Ylfing went and loved the next boy just the same, just as wholly and sincerely. He loved, and loved, and loved. And then left, reaching out for something more important than that.
Oh.
I’ve been sitting here staring at those words I just wrote for the last few minutes. I don’t quite know how to go on from here. I’ve just discovered something about myself that I didn’t know before—a whole new perspective on myself, a perspective of how I must have looked from the outside. The story I’ve been telling myself about myself isn’t wrong, per se, but it is . . . skewed, a little. Offset by twenty degrees or so.
I wonder if this is how Orfeo felt when he realized how many people he had inadvertently been hurting. I made those boys sad—I hurt them—because I loved at them with all my heart and then whisked it away without much of an explanation. I wonder how many of them were confused; I wonder how many of them thought I meant it.
Beka—no, I didn’t love Beka.312 He liked me, and I blocked him off because I was too deep in my grief to give him my heart, too afraid of being hurt myself. Again.
Ivo, then—no, Ivo was a little like Orfeo used to be. Ivo wanted affection and attention, but he didn’t want to be adored with that intensity, and he began to push me away when it got too much for him.
All right, that’s two that I don’t have to feel bad about, at least. That’s two I didn’t lie to.
All Chants are liars, didn’t I say?
Before Ivo was . . . shit, what was his name? That boy in Enc—pretty brown eyes, had a little flock of goats, didn’t mind that I couldn’t wrap my tongue around the language without stammering . . . Mev, I think? Probably Mev. He barely counts either, because we only kissed for an afternoon, and then Chant and I continued down the road the next day—surely I wouldn’t have had time to give him any impressions beyond that massive love-mark I left on his neck.
Okay, no, I’m not going to go through the whole list of them—skip to one I know I hurt. Like Selim, then, the cabin boy on the Koşucu, when Chant and I were sailing from Map Sut to Kafia. I was a little older than fourteen; I’d only been traveling with Chant for not quite half a year. Nearly a month we had at sea, and both of us just boys who had never done anything with anyone beyond kissing until each other, and I told him he was the most beautiful person I’d ever known, and that was true. And he told me about his mother in Araşt, and how he’d take me to see her and she’d make me lentil soup—the best lentil soup in all the world, Selim said—and I said I’d go with him; I said I wanted to meet her. And then, a few days later, Chant told me about the alabaster temple at Mount Eikat, which we were heading to, and I was thrilled, and I told Selim I wasn’t going to come meet his mother after all.313
How many times did I do that, or something like that? And never in my life did I ever think about it as a pattern.
I think I’ll just have to sit with this for a while. I have to find a way to fit this big ugly thing into the rest of what I know about myself.
If you’d asked me five minutes ago whether I love Orfeo, I would have said yes. If you’d asked me whether I was in love with him, I wouldn’t have considered that a distinct question. I do love him; he’s so dear to me, and he deserves to be adored and cherished and—
Have I ever been in love with anyone? Really in love? Chant used to make fun of me, saying I’d fall in love twice a week given the opportunity. But it was always more genuine and sincere than infatuation,314 at least by what I understand infatuation to be. Perhaps I just fell in affection with everyone who caught my eye.
Have I ever cried over someone? Yes, many times. So many times. But that seems different, somehow. I suppose it’s that none of the boys I loved ever left me before—not in the abrupt way I left them, again and again. Some of them drifted away from me, a little at a time. I’ve been hurt before. I’ve fought with boys I was affectionate towards. I’ve been betrayed. But did they leave me? Did they steal away in the dead of night? Never. Maybe leaving is just what Chants do.
Even when I was an apprentice, when I was young and full of feelings so intense that sometimes I thought they’d tear me apart . . . even then, I never met anyone who I was prepared to leave my apprenticeship for. I chose the road and the horizon; I chose cold nights without a windbreak and blazing hot days without a speck of shade. I chose loneliness and hunger, broken occasionally by an unexpected friend and a feast. I chose the world laid out before my feet. I chose everything that’s in it.
Everything—that’s the only thing that would have been enough, before. The only thing that could have filled up my heart.
Chanting is the only thing I’ve ever been that devoted to.315 It’s the only thing I would sacrifice things for without expecting anything back, though I hope and hope and hope. I’ve been prepared to burn my entire self on that altar, and when I was told to do it, when Chant said All right, let’s get it over with, I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t think. I threw myself towards it with my arms outstretched, I gave away my heart entire, and it wasn’t until later that I had any regrets.
It’s not the love you find in real life. It’s love from stories, love like the tale of Hariq and Amina that ends with the two lovers throwing themselves from a cliff to their deaths. In real life, the best you get from love is two people who have been together for decades, who still care, who still want to be near each other, who still look to each other for comfort. And that’s not nothing. But it’s not the thing that burns at the heart of Chanting either, the thing that might fill up the empty space in my chest if only I could reach it.
Chanting says, “Come,” and I go to it blindly; I follow wherever it leads, waiting-hoping-longing-yearning for some promise to be fulfilled and yet never knowing that it will be. I walk across the world; I run until my feet are bloody; I climb up mountains; I row down rivers; I cross borders.
And when I come to the end of the world, when I reach the horizon and lay hands on what I find there, what Ylfing will I find there? Who the fuck will I be?
And on the other side of the argument, there’s Ylfing Acampora.
It’s a quiet thing, in comparison. Small, in comparison. Anything would be small next to the whole world. But also certain. Defined.
Ylfing Acampora is a name that says, Someone loves me. I belong somewhere. Ylfing Acampora is a space with edges—not loneliness and hunger and something huge and unreachable. It’s cold nights spent in a warm bed, and blazing hot days in the shade of a villa somewhere. It’s someone listening beside me, always. And there would still be enough of the world to sate me, to soothe my feet when they itch to chase the horizon—the Acamporas are merchants. They travel. There would still be knowledge enough to keep me occupied for years—the language, to begin with, perhaps later one of the universities if I wanted. Anything I want, Orfeo said. He’d find a way to give it to me.
Ylfing Acampora has a home and someone who loves him—maybe many someones. A family. Ylfing Acampora coul
d have nearly everything the-Chant-called-Ylfing would have, adapted and circumscribed and made civilized.
I know exactly who Ylfing Acampora is. The-Chant-called-Ylfing is . . . uncharted.
* * *
311. But how? Why? Why is this happening? Magic comes primarily from the earth and water, you know that—you’ve talked about the Hrefni runes that stop working when you go too far away from the land. And magic comes, rarely, from the heavens—which you might not know in your head, but you told the story of the Trout of Perfect Hindsight gaining his power from a chip of heaven-stone, and I daresay you have other stories with similar patterns. So what’s happening here? It doesn’t make any sense—what pieces of Shuggwa that came from Arthwend with the ancient Chants faded to a ghost of what he once was by the time they settled in Kaskinen, and never reached any farther. You could make a map of his reach, almost, if you had enough time and enough information. For every new tale of Shuggwa or Skukua, you could mark on a map a dot of ink or a pin for where you collected it, and they’d all be clustered in Kaskinen and the Issili Islands. And then, here, something new wildly far afield, an outlier. And it’s too consistent to be merely a dream, and you haven’t invented it from your own head, because there’s all the symbols that you apparently don’t know, or else you would have recognized them and identified him by now. So what is it? And how can it possibly be?
312. Who the hell is Beka? Have you ever mentioned—oh. The boy from those pages I threw in the fire, the one who took you to see the dragons hatching?
313. Wow, such a stunning betrayal of some kid you barely knew. What a horrible, unforgivable thing. You’re definitely the worst person in the world. It’s not like you’re ever allowed to change your mind or anything! (Is the sarcasm coming through here or should I go on?)
A Choir of Lies Page 29