Songmaster (38 page)

Esste stayed for a year, working quiet miracles.

“I never meant to involve myself directly in these things,” she said to Kyaren, when it was time for her to leave.

“I wish you wouldn’t go.”

“This isn’t my real work, Kya-Kya. My real work waits for me in the Songhouse. This is
your
work. You do it well.”

In the year that she was there, Esste healed the palace while holding the empire at bay. Humanity had been disorganized for more than twenty thousand years, knit together in an empire for less than a century. It could have come apart easily. But Esste’s deft voice was confident and forceful; when it was time to announce that Riktors was ill, she already had the trust or respect or fear of those she had to depend on. She made no decisions—that was for Kyaren and the Mayor, who knew what was going on. She only spoke and sang and soothed the million voices that cried to the capital for guidance, for help; that searched in the capital for weakness or sloth. There were no holes for the knives to go in. And by the end of the year, the regency was secure.

Esste, however, regarded as far more important the work she did with Ansset and with Riktors. It was her song that at last brought Riktors out of catalepsia. She was the antidote to Ansset’s rage. And while Riktors did not speak for seven months, he did become attentive, watched as people walked around the room, ate decently, and took care of his own toilet, much to the relief of his doctors. And after seven months, he finally answered when spoken to. His answer was obscene and the servant he spoke to was mortified, but Esste only laughed and came to Riktors and embraced him. “You old bitch,” he said, his eyes narrow. “You’ve taken my place.”

“Only held it for you, Riktors. Until you’re ready to fill it again.”

But it soon became clear that Riktors would never be ready to fill his place. He became cheerful enough, after a time, but he was often overcome by great melancholy. He was taken by whims, and then forgot them suddenly in the middle—once he left thirty hunters beating the forest and walked back to the palace, causing a terrible panic until he was found swimming naked in the river, trying to sneak up on the geese that landed in the eddies near the shore. He could not concentrate on matters of state. And when decisions were brought to him, he acted quickly and rashly, trying to get rid of problems immediately, uncaring whether they were solved right or not. He had lost no memory. He remembered clearly that he had once cared about these things very much.

“But it weighs on me now. It chafes me, like a badfitting uniform. I’m a terrible emperor, aren’t I?”

“You’re good enough,” answered Esste, “so long as you don’t interfere with those who
are
willing to bear the burdens.”

Riktors looked out the window to where the clouds were coming in over the forest.

“Already my shoes are full?”

“They aren’t your shoes, Riktors,” Esste said. “They’re Mikal’s. You filled them, and walked awhile in them. But now they don’t fit—as you said. You can still serve. By staying alive and putting in an appearance now and then, you can keep the empire unified. While the others make the decisions you don’t care to make anymore. Isn’t that fair enough?”

“Is it?”

“What use do you have for power now? You used it once, and nearly killed everything you loved.”

He looked at her in horror. “I thought we didn’t discuss that.”

“We don’t. Except when you need a reminder.”

And so Riktors lived in his rooms in the palace, and amused himself as he pleased, and put in public appearances so the citizens would know he was alive. But all the business was carried on by underlings. And gradually, as the year went on, Esste withdrew herself from the business, failed to attend the meetings, and the Mayor and Kyaren ruled together, neither of them strong enough yet to rule alone, both of them glad that ruling alone wasn’t necessary.

Healing Riktors as much as he could be healed was only part of Esste’s work. There was Efrim, in a way the easiest; in a way the hardest.

He was only a year old when his father was taken from him and killed, but that was young enough to feel the loss. He cried for his father, who had been tender and playful with him, and Kyaren could not comfort him. So it was Esste who took him, and sang to him until she found the songs that filled the boy’s need. “But I won’t be here forever,” said Esste, “and he must have someone to replace his father.”

The Mayor was not slow to catch on, and he turned to Kyaren. “He’s around the palace, and so am I. I’m convenient, don’t you think?” So that before Esste had been there six months, Efrim was calling the Mayor
Daddy
, and before Esste left the palace, Kyaren and the Mayor had signed a contract.

“I always call you Mayor,” Esste said one day. “Don’t you have a name?”

The Mayor laughed. “When I took on this duty, Riktors told me that I had no name. ‘You’ve lost your name,’ he said. ‘Your name is Mayor, and you are mine.’ Well, I’m not really his now, I suppose. But I’ve got used to having no other name.”

So Efrim was healed, and Kyaren with him, almost by accident. Oh, there was none of the passion she had known with Josif. But she had had enough of passion. There was something just as strong and just as comforting in shared work. There was not a part of her life that she didn’t share with the Mayor, and there was not a part of his life that he did not share with her. They periodically got quite irritated with each other, but they were never alone.

But all these healings, of Riktors, of Efrim, of Kyaren, of the empire—they were not Esste’s most important work.

Ansset refused lo sing.

As soon as the hysteria had ended, and he was rational again, she had iried to hear his voice. “Songs can be lost,” she said, “but songs can be regained.”

“I have no doubt of it,” he said. “But I have sung my lasl song.”

She did not Iry lo persuade him. Jusl hoped lhat, before she left, she could see a change in his view.

There were changes, certainly. He had always been kinder than Riktors, and so the suffering that purged him of all his hatred did not strip him of his personality. He laughed quite soon, and played happily with Efrim as if he were a younger brother, imitating Efrim’s baby speech perfectly. “I feel like I have two children,” Kyaren said one day, laughing.

“The one will grow up sooner than the other,” Esste predicted, and Ansset did. In only a few months he was interested in the matters of government. He was one of the few people in the palace who had been there under both Riktors and Mikal. He knew many people that the Mayor and Kyaren did not. More important, he was much better than Esste in understanding what people had to say, what they really meant, what they really wanted, and he was able to answer them the way they needed in order to leave satisfied. It was the remnant of his songs that had made him a good manager of Earth. Now, in the absence of the emperor and as Esste withdrew herself more and more from government, Ansset began to take the public role, meeting the people Riktors could not be trusted to meet, the dangerous ones that Kyaren and the Mayor were not sure they could handle.

And it worked well. While Kyaren and the Mayor remained virtually unknown to the rest of the empire, Ansset was already as famous as Riktors and Mikal themselves had been. And though no one ever again heard him sing in the palace as he had before, he was still called the Songbird, and the people loved him.

Yet he was not really happy, despite his cheerfulness and hard work. The day that Esste left, she took him aside, and they spoke.

“Mother Esste, let me go with you,” he said.

“No,” she answered.

“Mother Esste,” he repeated, “haven’t I stayed on Earth long enough? I’m nineteen. I should have gone home four years ago.”

“Four years ago you could have gone home, Ansset, but today you can’t.”

He pressed his face into her hand. “Mother, I found you only days before I left the Songhouse; this is the first year I’ve spent with you. Don’t leave me again.”

She sighed, and the sigh was a song of regret and love that Ansset heard and understood but did not forgive. “I don’t want regret. I want to go home.”

“And what would you
do
there, Ansset?”

It was a question he had not thought of, probably because he knew in secret that the answer would hurt, and he tried to avoid pain these days.

What would he do there? He could not sing, and so he could not teach. He had governed a world and helped to rule an empire—would he be content as a Blind, running the small business affairs of the Songhouse? He would be useless there, and the Songhouse would be a constant reminder to him of all that he had lost. For in the Songhouse there was no escaping the songs: the children sang in all the corridors, and the songs came from the windows into the courtyard, and whispered in the walls, and vibrated gently in the stone underfoot. Ansset would be worse off than even Kyaren had been, for she at least had never sung and did not know what it was she lacked. Better for the mute to live among other mutes, where no one would notice his silence and he would not miss his lost voice.

“I would do nothing there,” Ansset said. “Except love you.”

“I’ll remember that,” she said. “With all my heart.”

And she held him close and cried again because she was leaving—in front of Ansset she had no need of Control.

“Before I go, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

“Anything.”

“I want you,” she said, “to come with me to see Riktors.”

His face set hard, and he shook his head.

“Ansset, he isn’t the same man.”

“All the more reason not to go.”

“Ansset,” she said sternly, and he listened. “Ansset, there are places in you that I can’t heal, and there are places in Riktors that I can’t heal. His wounds were torn by your song; your injuries were made by his interference in your life. Don’t you think that what I can’t heal, you might be able to heal?”

Ansset did not answer.

“Ansset,” she said, meaning to be obeyed. “You know that you still love him.”

“No,” Ansset said.

“Ansset, your love was never slight. You gave without bar, and received without caution, and just because it brought pain doesn’t mean that it is gone.”

And so she led him slowly up to Riktors’s rooms. Riktors was standing at the window, looking out as he usually did, watching the birds settle on the lawns. He did not turn until they had been there for several minutes. At first he saw only Esste, and smiled. Then he saw Ansset, and grew sober.

They studied each other in silence, both waiting for the terrible emotions to come back. But they did not come. There was wistfulness, and sorrow, and a memory of friendship and pain, but there was no pain itself, and grief and guilt had faded. Ansset was surprised to discover how much hate he did not feel, and so he walked closer to Riktors even as Riktors walked closer to him.

I will not be your friend as I was, Ansset said silently to the man who was now his height, for Riktors bent a little and Ansset had grown. But I will be your friend as I can be.

And in the silence between them Riktors’s eyes seemed to say the same things.

“Hello,” Ansset said.

“Hello,” Riktors answered.

They said little else, for there was little enough to say. But when Esste left the room, they stood together at the window, looking out, watching the hawks hunting and shouting instructions at the birds desperately trying to survive.