Songmaster (44 page)

The word spread quickly through the Songhouse, carried by the Deafs. The children were to return to the Common Room and the Stalls, where the Blinds would watch them and take them to meals, if necessary. All the teachers and tutors and masters, all the high masters and Songmasters and every seeker who was at home—they were called to the great hall, for the Songmaster of the High Room had to speak to them.

Not sing. Speak.

So they came, worried, wondering silently and aloud what was going to happen.

Rruk stood before them, controlled again so that none would know that she had lost Control. Behind her on the stone stage sat Ansset, the old man. Ller alone of all the teachers recognized him, and wondered—surely he should have been quietly expelled, not brought before them all like this. And yet Ller felt a thrill of hope run through him. Perhaps Mikal’s Songbird would sing again. It was absurd—he had heard the terrible changes his songs had wrought in Fiimma’s voice. But still he hoped. Because he knew Ansset’s voice and, having heard it, could not help but long for it again.

Rruk spoke clearly, but it was speech. She was not trusting this to song.

“It was the way of things that made me Songmaster of the High Room,” she reminded them. “No one thought of me except Onn, who should have held the place. But chance shapes the Songhouse. Years ago the custom was established that in ruling the Songhouse we must trust to chance, to who was and was not fit when the Songmaster of the High Room died. And that chance has put me in this place, where it is my duty to safeguard the Songhouse.

“But I am not just meant to safeguard it. The Songhouse walls are not made of rock to make us soft within them. They are made of rock to teach us how to be strong. And sometimes things must change. Sometimes something must happen, even though it can be prevented. Sometimes we must have something new in the Songhouse.”

It was then that Ller noticed Fiimma, sitting in a far corner of the great hall, the only student there.

“Something new has happened,” Rruk said, and she beckoned to the girl who waited, looking terribly afraid, not because she showed fear, but because she showed nothing as she slowly got up and walked to the stage.

“Sing,” Rruk said.

And Fiimma sang.

And when the song was over, the teachers were overcome. They could not contain themselves. They sang back to her. For instead of a child’s song of innocence and simplicity, instead of mere virtuosity, Fiimma sang with depth beyond what most of them had ever felt. She tore from them feelings that they had not known they had. She sang to them as if she were as ancient as the Earth, as if all the pain of millennia of humanity had passed through her, leaving her scarred but whole, leaving her wise but hopeful.

And so they sang back to her what they could not keep within themselves; they sang their exultation, their admiration, their gratitude; most of all, they sang their own hope, rekindled by her song, though they had not known they needed hope; had not known that they had ever despaired.

Finally their own songs ended, and silence fell again. Rruk sent Fiimma back to sit in the corner. The girl stumbled once on her way—she was weak. Ller knew what the song had cost her. Fiimma had obviously figured out that Ansset’s fate was somehow in her hands, and she had sung better than she had thought she could, out of her own need for Ansset, out of her own love for the old, old man.

“Singers,” Rruk said, speaking again, her unsung voice sounding harsh in the silence. “It should be clear to you that something has happened to this child. She has experienced something that children in the Songhouse were never meant to experience. But I don’t know. If it has hurt her. Or if it has helped her. What was her song? And the thing that changed her, should it be given to us all, and to all the children?”

Ller did not speak. He knew the importance of a child finding his own voice. But Fiimma’s voice, as she sang, had still been her own. Not the child’s voice of a few months before. But not Ansset’s voice, either. Still her own; but richer, darker. Not black, however. For as the darkness of her voice had increased with Ansset’s teaching, the brightness had also grown brighter.

No one spoke. They were not prepared—either for Fiimma’s song or for the dilemma Rruk had given them. They did not know enough. The strangeness of Fiimma’s song had obviously come from suffering, but Rruk’s voice did not hint of any suffering she planned to cause them. It was plain enough, even though she spoke instead of singing, that she herself favored yet feared the course that she proposed. So they held their silence.

“You are not kind,” Rruk told them. “You are leaving the decision up to me. So that if I decide wrong, it will be entirely my own fault to bear.”

It was then that Ller stood and spoke, because he could not leave her alone.

“I am Fiimma’s teacher,” he explained, though everyone knew that already. “I should be envious that her song has been changed by someone else. I should be angry that my work with her has been undone. But I am not. Nor would any of you have been. If I came to you and told you that I had a way to double the range of all your children, would you not accept it? If I came to you and told you that I had a way to help your children sing twice as loudly and even softer than they do now, would you not seize the opportunity? You all know that the emotion behind the song is the most important thing. What happened to Fiimma was the increase of the range of her emotions, not just double, but a thousandfold. It changed her songs. I know better than any of you how much it changed them, and not all the changes are happy ones. But is there anything this child is not prepared to sing? Is there anything this child is not prepared to suffer, and endure? I’m aware of the dangers of what Rruk proposes, but those dangers are the price. And the price may bring us power that we have never had before.”

By the end of his speech, Ller was singing, and when his song was done there were many low murmurs of approval, though all of them were tinged with fear. It was enough, though. Rruk spread her arms and cried. “Thank you for sharing this with me!”

Then she sent them to get their children and bring them to the great hall.

Ansset sang to them.

At first they could not understand why they had been brought to hear this old man. They had not coveted the sound of his voice as Fiimma had. It was harsh to them. His pitch was untrue. His voice was not strong. His songs were crude and unpolished.

But after a while, after an hour, they began to understand. And, understanding, they began to feel. His crude melodies were just intentions—they began to glimpse the music he
meant
to sing them. They began to understand the stories his voice told them, and feel with him exactly what he felt.

He sang them his life. He sang them from the beginning, his kidnapping, his life in the Songhouse, his silence and the agony that finally was broken and healed by Esste in their ordeal in the High Room. He sang them of Mikal. He sang them songs of his captivity, of his killings, and of the grief at Mikal’s death. He sang to them of Riktors Ashen and he sang to them of his despair when the Songhouse would not take him back. He sang to them of Kyaren, who was his friend when he most needed one; he sang to them of governing the Earth. As he relived each event, his emotions were nearly those that he had felt at the time. And because he felt that strongly, his audience felt that strongly, for if Ansset had lost his voice, he had only gained in power, and he could touch hearts as no other singer could, despite his weaknesses.

And when he sang of his love for Josif and Josif’s death, when he sang of the terrible song that destroyed Riktors’s mind and killed Ferret, it was more than anyone could bear. Control broke all over the hall.

They had been worn down not just by his voice, but also by exhaustion. Ansset did not sing quickly, for some songs cannot be sung without time. It was on his fourth day of singing, with his voice often breaking from weariness and sometimes whispering because he could not make a tone at all, that he brought them to the edge of madness, where he himself had been.

For a frightening hour Ller and Rruk both feared that it had been a mistake, that what Ansset was doing could not be endured, that it would be a blow from which the Songhouse would never recover.

But he went on. He sang the healing of Esste’s songs; he sang the gentle love of Kyaren and the Mayor and their family; he sang of reconciliation with Riktors; he sang of years of serving the empire and loving, finally, everyone he met.

And he sang of coming home again.

At the end of the sixth day his voice fell silent, and his work was done.

It took time for the effects to be felt. At first all the songs in all the Common Rooms and Chambers were worse; all the children staggered under the weight of what had been given them. But after a few days some of the children began to incorporate Ansset’s life into their songs. After a few weeks, to one degree or another, all the children had. And the teachers, too, were colored by the experience, so that a whole new depth sang through the halls of the Songhouse.

And that year even the singers who left the Songhouse sounded like Songbirds to the people they went to serve. And the Songbirds were so strong, so beautiful, that people all over the empire said, “Something has happened to the Songhouse.” Those who had heard Ansset sing when he was still a child in the palace sometimes realized where they had heard such songs before. “They sing like Mikal’s Songbird,” they said. “I never thought to hear such things again, but they sing like Mikal’s Songbird.”

After Ansset sang his life to the children of the Songhouse, he felt a great weight leave him. He went with Rruk to the High Room, and tried to explain to her how it felt. “I didn’t know that was what I wanted to do. But that was why I came home.”

“I know,” Rruk said.

He did not bother with Control now. She had seen all of him, all of his life, as he revealed it to the deepest places in her from the stage in the great hall. There were no secrets now. And so he wept out his relief for an hour, and then sat in silence with her for another hour, and then:

“What do you want to do now?” Rruk asked. “There’s no reason for silence now. You’re free to live here as you choose. Do whatever you want to do.”

Ansset thought, but not long.

“No,” he said. “I did everything I came here to do.”

“Oh,” she answered. “But what else is there? Where will you go?”

“Nowhere,” he said. And then, “Have I done a Work?”

“Yes,” she answered, knowing as she did that she was giving him permission to die.

“Have I done a Work worthy of this room?” he asked.

And again, though no one had ever been granted such a thing before, she said, “Yes.”

“Now?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and as she left the room, he was opening all the shutters, letting the cold air of late autumn pour in. Only Songmasters of the High Room had been allowed to choose the time when their work ended, until now. But it would be absurd, Rruk thought, to deny the greatest Songbird of them all the death granted to others far less worthy of the honor.

As she walked out the door, he spoke to her. “Rruk,” he said.

She turned to face him.

“You were the first to love me,” he said, “and you’re the last.”

“They all love you,” she said, not bothering not to cry.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I thought I would die and disappear from the universe, Rruk. But thanks to you, they’re all my children now.” He smiled, and she managed to smile back; she ran back into the room, embraced him one more time as if they were still children instead of an old man and an old woman who had known each other too well, and yet hardly at all. Then she turned and left him, and closed the door after her, and three days later the cold and the hunger had done their job. He was so ready to go that he had never wavered, had never in the last extremity sought the comfort of the blankets. He died naked on the stone, and Rruk thought afterward that she had never seen anyone look as comfortable as he did, with rocks pressing into his back and the wind blowing mercilessly over his body.

They delayed the funeral until the emperor could come, with Efrim’s parents, Kyaren and the Mayor, the first to arrive. Kyaren did not weep, though she nearly broke when she confided to Rruk privately, “I knew he would die, but I never thought it would be so soon, or without my seeing him again.” And, breaking precedent again, though broken taboos were becoming quite common in the Songhouse, Efrim, Kyaren, and the Mayor attended the funeral and heard the songs; and they were not resented when they wept uncontrollably at Fiimma’s funeral song.

Only Rruk went to the burial, however, of all the people in the Songhouse, except for the Deafs who actually did the work. “It’s not a sight much conducive to song,” she told Kyaren as they stood together by the grave, “to watch death carry someone into the ground. The dirt closes over him so finally.”

And the two women who were the only ones left who had loved him in his childhood stood each with an arm around the other’s waist as the Deafs tossed dirt into the grave. “He’s not dead, you know,” said Kyaren. “He’ll never be forgotten. They’ll always remember him.”

But Rruk knew that memories, however long they are, grow dim, and eventually Ansset would just be a name lost in the books, to be studied by pedants. Perhaps his stories would survive as folk tales, but again his name would be linked to a life that was scarcely his anymore—already the stories of Mikal’s Songbird were far grander than the real events had been. Nobler, and so less painful.

Part of Ansset would live, however. Not that anyone would know it was Ansset. But as singers and Songbirds left Tew and went throughout the galaxy, they would take with them what they had learned from the voices of the singers in the Songhouse. And now a powerful undercurrent in those voices would be Ansset’s life, which he had given them irrevocably, forever theirs and forever powerful and forever full of beauty, pain, and hope.