The Singer of All Songs (12 page)

Xanni laughed. ‘I must go to the market and get us some supplies. And to my aunt’s house, to fetch you some clothes. Will you come with me?’

The rest of the day passed in a flurry of errands. Though Kalysons was a less sinister place in the light of day, Calwyn still did not enjoy pushing her way through the crowded streets, even with Xanni for company, and she was happy to return to the wide space and bright air of the harbour, laden with bags and parcels and dressed in some of her new garments: plain trousers in dark colours, blues and greens, and jackets with fine embroidery in bright scarlet and yellow at the collars and cuffs. It felt strange indeed to lay off her yellow robes, but the other clothes were so soft and beautiful that she didn’t mind as much as she’d expected. She stowed her new things in her little cabin, and sank down on her bunk. Tonno was frying up the evening meal, and a delicious smell was creeping under the door. She would just close her eyes for a moment and enjoy it. Just for a moment.

four
Black lands

C
ALWYN WOKE WITH
a start. Something had changed, though she was sure she’d been asleep only for the space of a breath; there was darkness outside, and she was aware of a quiet creaking and gentle movement as the boat dipped through the waves. She scrambled up out of the hatchway into a fresh wind that whipped her long plaits against her face, and a wide expanse of sea lit up by the three moons and a canopy of stars. They had begun their voyage.

All was calm on deck. Xanni stood at the tiller;Tonno had lit his pipe and was leaning against the roof of the cabin. Darrow had his hand to a rope and his eyes on the sails, and his lips were moving with a low rhythmic song of chantment. The only other sound was the rush of the waves as the boat ran forward through the water.

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ she cried.

‘We thought you needed your sleep,’ said Xanni kindly.

But Tonno said, ‘Easier to let you be than fret about landlubbers getting underfoot,’ and Darrow laughed.

This was infuriating. ‘How will I learn to be useful unless you teach me?’ she demanded.

Xanni laughed. ‘If you want to be useful now, you could brew up a mug of honey potion for the crew.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Tonno, and disappeared below. Plainly he believed no one else was capable of making the drink as well as he did, but Calwyn still found it maddening to think that he wouldn’t trust her even with such a trivial task.

She turned and saw the lights of Kalysons spread along the harbour, a winking glow against the horizon, receding behind them. She held on tightly to the railing and tried to get used to the pitching of the deck beneath her feet. It was very different from the gentle rocking at the jetty. Now
Fledgewing
was truly alive, the water singing beneath her prow and the wind driving her onward.

Darrow broke off his song. ‘Not seasick, I hope.’

‘No, no.’ Calwyn hoped not too. ‘Are you speeding the ship, or is it only the wind?’

‘I am helping her a little. The wind is not quite where we might wish it.’

‘I never thought of you using chantment to push
Fledgewing
through the sea. We will be in Mithates in no time!’

Darrow said, ‘I wish it were so simple. But it is harder to move something large than something small, and harder to move an object through water than through the air.’

‘Then move it through the air,’ said Xanni, with a wink at Calwyn. ‘Let us fly to Mithates, like a true
Fledgewing
.’

Darrow gave a mock grimace. He was more light-hearted in Xanni’s company than with anyone else, Calwyn had noticed with a slight pang. ‘That would take greater skill, and greater strength, than I possess. I can help us move a little faster than we might through the force of the wind alone. But only a little.’ And then the steady drone of his song began again, and Calwyn felt the ship surge beneath her feet as the chantment took hold.

Tonno brought up steaming mugs, two in each hand. Sipped out on the deck at sea, sailing swiftly through the night, the sweet spiced brew tasted even better than before.

Presently Darrow said to Xanni, ‘Let me take the tiller. You andTonno should get some rest. You too,’ he added to Calwyn.

‘I’m not tired,’ said Calwyn, and she was not. The blood seemed to sing through her veins just as
Fledgewing
sang through the foaming water.

After the brothers had gone below, Calwyn stood beside Darrow, leaning her elbows on the cabin roof. He said, ‘I am sorry we didn’t have more time to teach you boat-craft before this, or I would let you take a turn at steering. But not tonight, I think.’

Calwyn thought that it didn’t look too difficult. And how wonderful it would be to feel the boat leap and turn at the touch of your hand. She would learn boat-craft; she would become as skillful a sailor as any of them. ‘I wish the sisters had taught me ironcraft or windworking instead of ice-call, then I could help you move the ship.’

‘There will come a time when ice-call will be useful to us, I’m sure. But you must be patient, so that you can recognise that time when it appears.’

‘Now you sound like Marna.’ Calwyn knotted her plaits together, so that they didn’t whip across her face.

‘Poor Calwyn. To flee so far, and find the same lectures everywhere!’

Calwyn was silent. Since they’d boarded
Fledgewing
, she and Darrow had not had one moment’s conversation alone. After all their days’ journeying, she’d grown used to sharing her thoughts with him. And she’d believed that he was sharing his thoughts with her. She said, ‘Xanni told me that you and Samis were students together. He must have been a bad pupil. From what you’ve said, I can’t imagine him listening to anyone.’

‘On the contrary. He was always exceptionally gifted.’ Darrow’s voice was calm and even. After a pause he said, ‘I would have told you before long. But some things are not so easy to explain.’

‘It’s not important.’

‘He was not always as he is now. At least –’ Darrow hesitated, thinking as he spoke. ‘He was greedy always. But where once he was greedy for knowledge, now he is greedy for power. And he feels that he has been slighted, and overlooked. He burns for revenge.’

‘Were you friends for a long time?’

Darrow gave her a swift look. ‘Yes. A long time.’ He stared straight ahead across the water, as the wind blew his fair hair forward. After a moment he said, in quite a different tone, ‘Here, Calwyn, hold the tiller for a moment. The wind grows stronger, I must trim the sail.’

‘But if the wind is stronger, won’t we go faster? I thought we were trying to go as fast as we could.’

‘We must not try to go faster than the boat can stand, or we might be overturned. Balance, it is a question of balance, as everything is. That is one thing Samis has never learned.’

Calwyn took the tiller, and Darrow showed her which star to aim for. As he loosed the ropes and brought in the sail, she felt the lively power of the boat surging under her hands. She sang softly to
Fledgewing
as she would have sung to the bees, a song of soothing and quiet, and she felt the ship obey her, and she thought that she had never been so happy.

But when Darrow came back to take the tiller, he was curt with her, in no mood for conversation. At last Calwyn went down to bed with a confused aching in her heart, sorry that she’d ever mentioned Samis.

For ten days and nights they sailed without sighting land, heading northwest straight across the wide expanse of the Bay of Sardi. Few ships sailed between Kalysons and Mithates, and those that did took a longer route, hugging the coast all around the Bay, always within sight of land. Out in the open water, they saw no other vessels.

‘Not many sailors would dare to go this way,’ Xanni told her proudly. ‘But I’d wager
Fledgewing
against the Bay in any weather.’

‘Is it really so dangerous?’ Calwyn looked about at the calm ocean on every side, the wheeling gulls that had followed them all the way from Kalysons, and the sunlight dancing on the gentle waves.

‘It seems friendly enough now, I grant you, but the Sardi is deceptive as a Gellanese.’ Xanni sniffed the wind. ‘We may have a fog later, and then you’ll see.’

Darrow looked up sharply. ‘Do you smell fog?’

Xanni shrugged. ‘We may be lucky, and outrun it.’

Darrow gave a rueful smile. ‘Then I must work a little harder.’ His face was drawn and tired already from the work of pushing
Fledgewing
through the waves; Calwyn wished again with all her heart that she knew the chantments of iron, rather than ice, so that she could help him. He had explained to her that the craft of iron worked from the force of the earth, not from the water. ‘It is as if I had a long pole, and pushed against the bottom of the sea. The water gets in the way, it interferes with the chantment.’

‘Can’t you push against the water somehow, as if you had a pair of oars?’ asked Calwyn, glad to show off her new knowledge of boating.

But Darrow shook his head. ‘Ironcraft does not work in that way.’ Hour after hour, he sat at the stern of the boat, his eyes closed, his hands gripped so tightly that the knuckles showed white, his lips moving in a weary drone of chantment.

Calwyn asked Xanni, ‘What will happen if there is fog?’

Xanni shook his curly head. ‘No wind,’ he said simply, and went to take the tiller from Tonno.

Xanni was right. Later that afternoon, the air grew colder. Then the wind began to slacken; the sails, which had been taut, flapped loosely against the mast. With the mist thickening all around them, the world suddenly became silent. When Tonno called out to Xanni, his voice sounded oddly hushed, as though
Fledgewing
and all aboard her were inside a bubble of glass, and Darrow’s song was smothered by the fog as soon as it had left his throat.

Calwyn couldn’t see the sky; there was white mist everywhere. Even the top of the mast with its bright pennant had been swallowed by whiteness. Calwyn shivered as the fog’s icy fingers crept up her sleeves and down her neck. The boat was still moving, but much more slowly than before, bobbing uncertainly through the water. The sun had vanished, leaving only a certain brightness in the blanket of mist that enclosed them.

Calwyn said, ‘How will we know where to steer?’

‘That’s the danger of the fog,’ said Xanni, as grim as she had ever seen him. ‘We’re drifting blind now, until it lifts.’

More and more slowly they moved through the silent eerie whiteness, the touch of it cold and clammy on their skins, coating every surface of the boat with damp. Darrow had given up using his chantments to speed the boat; it was no use when they couldn’t be sure in which direction they were sailing. Calwyn tried to think of some way to help. She remembered what Marna had said about the Power of Ice, how it commanded everything that was cold and dark. The fog was certainly cold enough. She went to sit by herself on one side of the boat and quietly tried some small workings of her craft. With one song she could make the droplets of moisture gather together until they splashed onto the deck like rain, and with another she could change them into snowy flakes that fell softly into the water. But try as she might, she couldn’t lessen the thickness of the fog, nor clear a path through it.

All the rest of that day they drifted in the mists. They took turns to go below and sleep, so that after the fog lifted they could sail hard all night. They couldn’t tell when the sun went down, but gradually the whiteness all around grew more and more shadowy, until the only light was the glow of their own lanterns, and there was pitch blackness in every direction. No starlight or moonlight could penetrate the thick wall of fog; it was like moondark, but the blackness seemed to press down even more heavily that it did on those nights, for there was no friendly starlight flung across the sky. Calwyn felt as though someone had taken a thick blanket and held it down over her head; she leaned over the side and gulped breaths of cold air, trying to dispel her growing panic. If she kept her eyes closed, it was not so bad. To lift her spirits, she tried singing one of the hearth songs from home, but instead of the sisters’ cheerful warm chorus, she heard only her own wavering, lonely voice, a thin thread of sound swallowed by the mists. She kept up the song bravely till the end, but when it was finished she felt smaller and more helpless than before.

The fog started to lift in the night. A light wind rose, and soon the mists began to thin and drift, and first one, then another of the moons appeared, shining through the transparent veil of the fog. It was the time they called in Antaris theThree Smiles of the Goddess, when all three moons were in crescent, and the name had never seemed so apt to Calwyn. Tonno called Darrow up on deck again, and the three sailors scanned the stars, trying to work out in which direction they were facing, and whether they had drifted far off course.

The wind remained light, and Darrow stayed at his post in the stern all the next day, urging the boat forward, and would not go below even when Tonno threatened to kick him bodily through the hatchway. That made him smile, but it did not make him stir.