Songmaster (3 page)

“Cull, you’re beyond this,” said Esste, with grief and sympathy and reproach. “You’re a good teacher, and that’s why we trusted you with the new ones.

“I know,” Cull said. “But, Esste—”

“You wept for minutes. Minutes before you regained Control. Cull, have you been ill?”

“Healthy.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“I wasn’t, not until after—after. I wasn’t weeping for grief, Mother Esste, I was weeping for—”

“For what?”

“Joy.”

Esste hummed exasperation and noncomprehension.

“The child, Esste, the child.”

“Ansset, yes? The blond one?”

“Yes. I sang him trust, and he sang it back to me.”

“He shows promise then, and you broke Control in front of him.”

“You are impatient.”

Esste bowed her head. “I am.” Her posture said shame. Her voice said she was still impatient and only a little ashamed after all. She could not lie to a teacher.

“Listen to me,” pleaded Cull.

I’m listening, said Esste’s reassuring sigh.

“Ansset sang my trust back to me note for note, perfectly. Nearly a minute, and it wasn’t easy. And he didn’t sing just the melody. He sang pitch. He sang nuance. He sang every emotion I had said to him, except that it was stronger. It was like singing into a long hall and having the sound come back at you louder than you sang it.”

Do you exaggerate? asked Esste’s hum.

“I was shocked. And yet delighted. Because I knew in that instant that here we had a true prodigy. Someone who might become a Songbird—”

Careful, careful, said the hiss from Esste’s mouth.

“I know it’s not my decision, but you didn’t hear his answer. It’s his first day, his first lesson—and anyway, that was nothing, nothing at all to what came after. Esste, he sang the love song to me. Rruk only sang it to him once yesterday. But he sang the whole thing—”

“Words?”

“He’s only three. He sang the melody and the love, and Esste, Mother Esste, no one has ever sung such love to me. Uncontrolled, utterly open, completely giving, and I couldn’t contain it. I couldn’t, Esste, and you know my Control has never faltered before.”

Esste heard Cull’s song, and the teacher wasn’t lying to protect himself. The child was remarkable. The child was powerful. Esste decided she would meet the child.

After she met him, in a brief encounter at the Galley at breakfast, she reassigned herself to be his teacher. As for Cull, the consequence of his loss of Control was much lighter than the usual, and as Esste taught Ansset day after day, she sent word for Cull to be advanced step by step until within a few weeks he was a teacher of new ones again, and Esste put the word around so that none would criticize Cull: “With this child, any teacher would have lost Control.”

And there was a dancing quality to her walk and a warmth to her voice that made every teacher and master and even the Songmaster in the High Room realize that Esste at last hoped, perhaps even let herself believe, that her life’s work might be within reach. “Mikal’s Songbird?” another Songmaster presumed to ask her one day, though his melody told her she need not answer if she didn’t want to.

She only hummed high in her head and leaned her head against the stone, and laid her hand on her cheek so that the Songmaster laughed. But he had his answer. She could clown and play to try to hide her hopes, but the very clowning and playing were message enough. Esste was happy. This was so unusual it even startled the children.

It was unheard of for a Songmaster to teach new ones. The new ones did not know it, of course, not at first, not until they had learned enough of the basics to advance, as a class, to become Groans. There were other Groans, some as old as five or six, and like all children they had their own society with its own rules, its own customs, its own legends. Ansset’s class of Groans soon learned that it was safe to be pugnacious and obstinate with a Belch, but never with a Breeze; that it meant nothing where you slept, but you sat at table with your friends; that if a fellow Groan sang you a melody, you must deliberately make a mistake in singing it back to him, or he’ll think you’re bragging.

Ansset learned all the rules quickly, because he was bright, and made everyone in his class think of him as a friend, because he was kind. No one but Esste noticed that he did not exchange secrets in the toilet, did not join any of the inner rings that constantly grew and waned among the children. Instead, Ansset worked harder at perfecting his voice. He hummed almost constantly. He cocked his head when masters and teachers talked without words, using only melody to communicate. His focus was not on the children, who had nothing to teach him, but on the adults.

While none of the children were conscious of his separation from them, unconsciously they allowed for it. Ansset was treated with deference. The hazing by the Belches (no, not in front of the teachers—in front of the teachers they’re
Bells
), which was usually at the level of urinating on a Groan so he had to shower again, or spilling his soup day after day so that he got in trouble with the cooks—the hazing somehow bypassed Ansset.

And he entered the mythology of the Groans very quickly. There were other legendary figures—Jaffa, who in anger at her teacher burst one day into a Chamber and sang a solo, and then, instead of being punished, was advanced to be a Breeze without ever having to be a Belch at all; Moom, who stayed a Groan until he was nine years old, and then suddenly got the hang of things and passed through Bells and Breezes in a week, entered Stalls and Chambers and was out as a singer before he turned ten; and Dway, who was gifted and ought to have become a Songbird, but who could not stop rebelling and finally escaped the Songhouse so often that she was thrust out and put with a normal boarding school and never sang another note. Ansset was not so colorful. But his name passed from class to class and from year to year so that after he had been a Groan for only a month, even singers in Stalls and Chambers knew of him, and admired him, and secretly resented him.

He will be a Songbird, said the growing myth. And this was not resented by the children his own age, because while all of them could hope to be a singer, Songbirds only came every few years, and some children passed from Common Rooms into Stalls and Chambers without ever having known someone who became a Songbird. Indeed, there was no Songbird at all in the Songhouse now—the most recent one, Wymmyss, had been placed out only a few weeks before Ansset came, so that none of his class had ever heard a Songbird sing.

Of course, there were former Songbirds among the teachers and masters, but that was no help, because their voices had changed. How do you become a Songbird? Groans would ask Belches, and Belches would ask Breezes, and none of them knew the answer, and few dared hope that they would achieve that status.

“How do you become a Songbird?” Ansset sang to Esste one day, and Esste could not hide her startlement completely, not because of the question, though it was rare for a child to ask such an open question, but because of the song, which also seemed to ask, Were you a Songbird, Esste?

“Yes, I was a Songbird,” she answered, and Ansset, who had not yet mastered Control, revealed to her that that
was
the question he had been asking. The boy was learning songtalk, and Esste would have to be careful to warn the teachers and masters not to use it in front of him unless they didn’t mind being understood.

“What did you do?” Ansset asked.

“I sang.”

“Singers sing. Why are Songbirds different?”

Esste looked at him narrowly. “Why do you want to be a Songbird?”

“Because they’re the perfect ones.”

“You’re only a Groan, Ansset. You have years ahead of you.” The statement was wasted, she knew. He could sing, he could hear song, but he was still almost an infant, and years were too long to grasp.

“Why do you love me?” Ansset asked her, this time in front of the class.

“I love all of you,” Esste sang, and all the children smiled at the love in her voice.

“Why do you sing to me more than to the others, then?” Ansset demanded, and Esste heard in his song another message: The others are not my friends because you set me apart.

“I don’t sing to anyone more than to anyone else,” Esste answered, and in songtalk she said, I will be more careful. Did he understand? At least he seemed satisfied with her answer, and did not ask again.

Ansset became one of the great legends, however, when he was promoted from Groan to Belch earlier than the rest of his class—and instead of Esste remaining with the class, she moved with Ansset. It was then that Ansset realized that not only was it unusual for a Songmaster to be doing a teacher’s job, but also Esste was teaching, not the class, but him. Ansset. Esste was teaching Ansset.

The other children noticed this at least as quickly as Ansset did, and he found that while all of them were nice to him, and all of them praised him, and all of them sought to be near him and eat with him and talk to him, none of them sang the love song to him. And none of them was his friend, for they were afraid.