Songmaster (42 page)

After a few days’ hiatus, the old man returned again to Rainbow Kitchen. The children were excited. They had been afraid this man of mystery would be gone forever. They watched carefully for some clue as to the reason for his disappearance. But he behaved as if nothing unusual had happened. And helped the cook afterward just as he had before.

Now, however, the old man did not disappear after meals. He began to appear in the corridors, in the Stalls, in the Common Room. He was doing jobs usually performed by young Deafs—sweeping, cleaning, changing bedding, washing clothing. He would appear silently, without knocking, as Deafs were allowed to do, but unlike Deafs he was not ignored. No one spoke to him, of course, but eyes followed him around the rooms, surreptitiously watching him, though he did nothing particularly unusual. It was himself that was unusual—for either the Songhouse had broken a thousand-year rule and let someone work inside the Songhouse who had never sung there as a child, or the old man had once been a singer, and there was a story behind his late appearance and his degradation.

There were speculations among the teachers, too, of course. They were not immune, and they soon learned that the Deafs and Blinds would not, under any amount of persuasion and wheedling, discuss the old man. Rruk quickly made it clear that she would not tolerate inquiry. And so they speculated. Of course, the name of Ansset came up with all the other names they knew of singers who had failed to return or who had not found a place within the Songhouse, but none of the names was agreed on as even probable, and Ansset’s was far from being the most common suggested. When a man had been emperor, they could not imagine him sweeping floors.

Only two people were sure, besides Rruk and the Deafs and Blinds.

One was a new Songmaster named Ller, who had been away as a seeker for many years and returned to find the old man wandering through the Songhouse, ubiquitous and silent as a ghost. He had recognized him instantly—years could not conceal from Ller the features of a face he had memorized in childhood. He toyed with the idea of finding Ansset alone sometime, approaching him, and greeting him with the love and honor he felt toward the man. But then he thought better of the idea. If Ansset was silent and unknown in the Songhouse, it was because of a good reason, and until Ller was given permission to violate that silence and anonymity, he would keep his peace. However, whenever he saw the old man he could not help feeling a rush of childhood sweeping over him, and a sadness to see the greatest of all the singers brought so low.

The other who recognized him had never heard him sing, had never seen his face before, and yet was as certain in her heart as Ller. Her name was Fiimma, and she had heard the legends of Ansset and fixed on them as her ideal. Not in a competitive sense—she had no thought of surpassing this long-gone Songbird. But she longed to be able to touch people’s hearts so irrevocably that she would be remembered as long and as happily as Ansset was remembered. She was very young to be longing for immortality, but she knew more of death than most children in the Songhouse. She had seen her parents killed when she was not yet two, and though she never spoke of it, the memory was clear to her. It did not give her nightmares; she handled the weight of memory with relative ease. But she did not forget, and often saw before her the moment of death and knew that it was only chance that had saved her from the thieves.

So she longed to live forever in legend as Ansset did, and took pains to remember everything she ever heard about him. She had asked teachers who had known him years before about his mannerisms, his expressions. They had been little help. So she had imagined the rest. What would a man feel like, act like, look like, having done what Ansset had done? Why hadn’t he returned to the Songhouse? What would he desire in his heart?

And gradually, seeing the old man in Rainbow kitchen and hearing all the speculation about him, she began to wonder if he might
be
Ansset. At first the idea was only appealingly mysterious—she did not believe it. But as days and weeks went by, she became more certain. Ansset, who had become emperor, might come home just this way, silently and unknown. Who knows what barriers there might be to his return? Then he disappeared for a few days and then returned as a Deaf, fully able to wander the corridors of the Songhouse. A decision had been reached, she realized, but it had not been an easy one, and the old man’s silence had not been lifted even though he had been allowed to stay. Would Ansset accept such silence as a condition for remaining?

Fiimma thought he would.

And finally she was so certain of him that at supper in Rainbow Kitchen she deliberately sat next to him. Usually he sat alone, but if he was surprised to see her beside him, he gave no sign, merely continued to break bread into his stew.

“I know you,” she whispered.

He did not respond, and he did not stop breaking bread.

“You are Ansset, aren’t you?”

Again, no sign that he had heard her.

“If you are Ansset,” she said, “then keep on breaking bread. If you are not Ansset, take a bite directly from the loaf.” She had thought she was so clever, but the old man merely responded by setting the rest of the bread into the stew all at once.

And he ate, ignoring her as if she did not exist. Several other children had noticed her there, were commenting among themselves. She was afraid that she was breaking some rule by being with the old man; certainly she had accomplished nothing by trying to get him to talk to her.

But she couldn’t let the moment pass so ineffectively. She pleaded with him. “Ansset, if it
is
you, I want you to teach me. I want to learn all your songs.”

Did he falter in the rhythm of his eating? Did he pause for a moment to think? She was not sure, but still felt hope.

“Ansset, I
will
learn your songs! You
must
teach me!”

And then, her daring entirely exhausted, she left him and sat with the other children, who begged her to tell them what she had said and if the old man had answered. She told them nothing. She sensed that the old man might be angry with her if she told anyone of her certainty that he was Ansset.
Was
he Ansset? She refused to let herself have any doubts.

The next day the old man did not come to Rainbow Kitchen, and never came there again as long as Fiimma ate there.

The silence became unbearable far sooner than Ansset had expected. Perhaps it was lingering memories of the silent days of imprisonment in Mikal’s rooms when he was fifteen. Perhaps it was just that like so many old men he had grown garrulous, and the confinement of his promise of silence weighed more heavily than it would have in his youth. Whatever the reason, he found himself longing to give voice, and so he quietly went to Rruk, got her consent, and traveled for the first of his liberties, as he called them in his mind.

The first few liberties, he did not leave the Songhouse lands. There was no need, since the Songhouse owned more than a third of the planet’s single continent. He spent weeks wandering the forests of the Valley of Songs, dodging the few expeditions bringing children from the Songhouse. He walked to the lake ringed by mountains, where Esste had first told him that she loved him, had first taught him the true power of Control.

And he was surprised to find the path was gone. Were none of the children taken to this spot anymore? He was sure they were—there were still flesket roads cut through the woods, and the grasses still grew low, a sure sign that visitors still came from time to time. But from the base of the waterfall there was no path coming easily to the top. He remembered as best as he could, and finally, very tired, he reached the top and looked out over the lake.

Time had not touched it. If the trees were older, he saw no sign of it. If the water had changed, he could not remember how it was before. The birds still came to the water to dive for fish; the wind still sifted through the leaves and needles with inexpressible music.

I am old, Ansset thought, lying beside the water. I remember the distant past far more easily than I remember yesterday. For if he closed his eyes, he could imagine Esste near him, could hear her voice. Relaxing all Control because he was alone, he let the tears of memory come; the hot sun warmed the tears as they seeped out of the corners of his eyes. But weeping, however gently it was done, could not soothe what was in him.

And so he sang.

After so long being silent, his voice was pathetic. The humblest Groan could do better. Age was playing tricks with pitch, and as for tone, there was none. Just the rough timbre of an old voice overused when young.

Once he had been able to sing with birds and improve on their work. Now the birds fell silent when he sang, and his voice was an interloper in this place.

He wept in earnest then, and vowed never to humiliate himself again.

But he had gone too long without songs in the palace and the Songhouse. There had been too many years when he did not sing because others would have heard his emptiness and his failure. Here, alone in the forest, there were no others, and if he sang badly no one heard but him. So the same day he made that vow, he broke it, and sang again. It was no better, but he did not feel so badly this time.

If this is all the voice I have, he thought, it is still a voice.

No other person would ever hear him sing, of that he was certain. But he would hear himself, and sing out what had been held inside for far, far too long. It was ugly, it was never quite what he wanted it to be, but it served its purpose. It emptied him when he was too full, and in his raucous songs he found some comfort.

On his first liberty he learned the Valley of Songs as few knew it, for no one came here for pleasure, without supervision. But too many memories came with it, and it was too solitary—solitude was good, but he could not bear it for too long.

His second liberty took him to one of the Songhouse’s three retreats.

He could not go to the one called Retreat, on the shores of the largest lake in the world, for that was where teachers and masters came from the Songhouse, when they needed ease from their labors. His vow of silence would still be in force there.

The other two were open to him, however.

Vigil, far in the south, was an island of sand and rock lapped by the water of a shallow sea. It was beautiful in a fierce way, and the stone city of Vigil that stood on its northernmost tip was a comforting place, an island of green in the wasteland. Once Vigil had been a fortress, in the days when the Songhouse had been a village and the world was wracked by war. Now it was where the failures went.

Hundreds of singers went out from the Songhouse every year, to do service until they were fifteen years old. Only a few in a decade were Songbirds, but singers were also highly prized, and all were welcomed home when they came.

Some singers became so well adapted to the world they served on that they did not want to come home. The seeker sent for them would try to persuade for several days, but if persuasion did not work, there was no force, and the Songhouse paid for their education until they were twenty-two, just as if they had been Deafs.

Some singers came home to the Songhouse and quickly found happiness in teaching, and were good at it, and remained in the Songhouse for the rest of their lives, except for the retreats to Retreat. They could become Songmasters, in time, and if they had the ability. And they ruled the Songhouse.

But there were other variations. Not all who came back to Tew were fit to be teachers, and a place had to be found for them. And not all the singers finished their time. There were some who could not bear the outside worlds, who needed the comfort of stone walls and seclusion and rigorous living and routine. There were those who went mad. “The price of the music,” the leaders of the Songhouse called it, and took tender care of those who had paid most dearly, gaining their voices but losing their minds.

These were the ones who came to Vigil, and Ansset could talk to them, for they would never come back to the Songhouse.

The sea between the Desert of Squint and the Island of Vigil was shallow, rarely more than two meters deep, with sandbars frequently shifting, so that the passage could almost be made on foot, if the sun were not so dangerously hot and the bottom so unpredictable. As it was, the passage was uncomfortable in a shallow-draft barge, though a canopy kept the voyage in the shade. Ansset was piloted by a young Deaf who spent three months a year here, running the ferry. The Deaf talked eagerly—visitors were few—and Ansset heard in his voice the peace of the place. For all that the land was dry and the water was not deep, there was life here. Fish moved lazily under the water. Birds dove for them and ate them on the wing. Large insects walked along the surface or lived just under it, sucking air from above.

“This is where all the life is,” the boy said. “The fish couldn’t live underwater without the insects that live on or just under the surface. The birds couldn’t live without diving through to get the fish. And the insects eat the surface plants. All the life exists because there’s just that thin layer of water that touches the air.” The boy had studied. He had no voice, but he had a mind and a heart, and had found a place for himself out here. If he couldn’t live in the water, he would live in the air.

He said as much. “You know, the Songhouse couldn’t live without sending singers to the outside world.”

And Ansset told him, “And the outside world, all the outside worlds, I wonder if they could really live without the Songhouse.”

The boy laughed. “Oh, I think the music’s just a luxury, that’s what I think. Lovely, but they don’t need it.”

Ansset kept his disagreement to himself. And wondered a little if maybe the boy was right.

There were only seven people living in Vigil, so there was no lack of room for Ansset. Three of them were Blinds, so that only four were mad.

One of the mads was a girl, not more than twenty, who walked every day from the cool of the towers to the sea, where she would lie naked, her body half in the water, half out. At the tides moved, so would she. And whenever a breeze would blow, she would sing, a plaintive, beautiful melody that was never twice the same, but that seemed never to vary, a song of loneliness and a mind as placid and seemingly empty as the sea. When the wind died, so did her song, so that most of the time she lay in silence. She talked to no one, and seemed not to notice that anyone existed, except that she ate what was placed before her and never disobeyed the few orders she was given.

Another mad was an old man, who had spent almost all his life in Vigil. He took long excursions from the town, and in fact seemed not to be insane at all. “I was cured long ago,” he said, “but I prefer it here.” He was brown from the sun, and collected shellfish from the edge of the water, which formed an important part of the menus at Vigil. The man told the same stories over and over, and, if he was left uninterrupted, he would repeat them one after another to the same person all day and far into the night. Ansset did it once, letting him have his audience. The old man finally fell asleep. He had never varied the stories once. Ansset asked one of the Blinds, “No,” the Blind answered. “None of his stories is true.”

And the other two were kept safely in rooms where their madness was seen only by the Blinds who cared for them. Sometimes Ansset could hear them singing, but the songs were always too distant for him to hear well.

Ansset visited Vigil only the once; it was more than he could bear. There were those, he realized, who had paid a higher price than he for their songs, and who had been given less. Alone in the rocky hills behind the towers, he sang, and learned new echoes and new emotions for his song.

And he sang with the girl who lay partly in the sea, and his voice did not silence hers. Once she even looked at him, and smiled, and he felt that his voice might not be so hateful, after all. He sang her the love song, and the next day he left Vigil.

The other retreat was Promontory, and it was by far the largest. Here was where most of the Blinds lived, singers who returned and discovered that they did not really enjoy teaching, that they weren’t really good at it. Promontory was a city of people who sang constantly, but spent their lives doing other things than music.

Promontory also coasted on a sea, the huge stone buildings (for the Songhouse children could never be long away from stone) towering over a choppy, frigid sea. There were no children there, by age, but the games played in the woods, in the fields, and in the cold water of the bay were all children’s games. As Rruk had explained to him before he came to Promontory, “They gave up most of their childhood singing for other people’s pleasure. Now they can be children all they like.”

It was not all play, however. There were huge libraries, with teachers who had learned what the universe had to teach them and were passing their knowledge on down to even younger Blinds until finally they died, usually happy. They never called themselves Blinds here, of course—here they were just people, as if everyone lived this way. Those who showed exceptional ability at government and administration were brought to the Songhouse to serve; the rest were content most of the time at Promontory.

Ansset wasn’t, however. The setting was beautiful and the people were kind, but it was too crowded, and while there was no restriction on his speaking to them, he found that they looked at him oddly because he never sang. Soon enough they knew who he was—his identity was no secret among the Blinds—and while they treated him with deference, there was no hope of friendship. His strange life was unintelligible to most of them, and they left him alone.

Inevitably, then, though he visited Promontory several times, he came back to the Songhouse after only a week or so. Speech to the Blinds and solitary songs in the forest or desert were not enough to attract him away from the songs of the children.

And, after a while, there was another reason for him to return. He had never meant to break his vow of silence; he was ashamed when he realized that Rruk could not trust him after all, that his Control was not enough to stop him. But some promises cannot be kept, he knew. And some should not be kept. And so, in one quiet room in the Songhouse, where Esste once had taught him to sing until he touched the edges of the walls, he sang.