The Windsingers (15 page)

The light in the common room dimmed with the tailing fire; the candles were burning to stumps. Shadows were longer where they fell on the rough walls. The voices were stilled, and the harp's sound died away to almost nothing, whispering to itself. Vandien could hear the shushing of the waves outside. The harp fell silent. Then, with a crash of chords, it came back. The voices suddenly rose to roar out a defiant chorus. Three times that chorus was shouted out, each time angrier and more implacable. Then, with a final shout, voices and harp were still.

Vandien found himself trembling in the dark. No one moved; even Collie's hands, dimly limned by the red firelight, rested still on the strings. The silence was not peace; rather it was a tingling awareness, a remembering of a promise made, of a duty to be kept.

'The Windsingers!' The old grizzled man in the comer spoke with soft contempt. Someone spat loudly.

Vandien heard a step, and sudden light came back as Helti kindled a fresh candle from a guttering stump. Janie was passing another. Berni turned and began to reload the hearth. There was little talk as light and warmth came back to the room. The returning light showed Collie's head bowed over his harp. His fair hair was plastered to his forehead and neck with sweat.

'Best bring the harper a mug, Janie,' Vandien suggested softly.

'Whatever the teamster pleases,'Janie replied meekly, and went swiftly to this chore.

Talk was resuming, eddying in small pools throughout the room. There were no rowdy stories as Vandien had overheard earlier. The voices were serious. Vandien noted that the speakers were the older folk in the group, with the younger generations listening most respectfully.

Collie wiped his damp hands down his trousers and took the cold mug Janie offered. The muted conversation began to fill the gap left by the silenced harp. Janie stood at Collie's shoulder, waiting to take his empty mug from him. Berni continued to sketch aimlessly on the floor at Vandien's feet. He thought how Berni had looked in the firelight as she sang. Her wavy brown locks cascaded down her back. Her alto had sung each word clearly, enunciating them so that Vandien had found himself trying to bring meaning from those crystal syllables. The song had moved her. Even now, the flush of it showed in her brown cheeks.

'What did they mean?' he asked quietly.

Berni started as if roused from a dream. Her eyes were a soft brown, lighter than his own. They gentled her competent face. Now they were puzzled. 'What did who mean?'

'The words of the song. The Temple Bell Song. What did they mean?'

Berni was at a loss to explain. 'It was the story, you know. We have it every year, but it doesn't always sound like that. I've never heard it sound like that before. It tells how it started, and all.'

'I don't understand. How all what started?' Vandien slouched on the bench, resting an elbow on his knee. He smiled and said no more, knowing that silence would best prompt Berni.

'It tells how Temple Ebb Festival started. It's the song of how the village sank, and all.' Berni hesitated. 'I don't know if I can put it all into Common. I could give you the gist of the tale, I suppose.' She took a deep breath, glancing about as if seeking a starting place. 'Long ago, our village was a peaceful place, with a good deep harbor and a sturdy fleet. The Windsinger temple stood on a spit that ran out into the sea. And if they were not our favorite neighbors, neither did we seek their wrath. Mostly we ignored one another, the village and the temple. Their temple bell rang at the high and low tides of the day. We lived in peace, if not friendship. Until the Windsingers made the earth shake, and let the village slide beneath the sea.'

'How?' Vandien interjected softly.

Berni frowned. 'The song doesn't say, not clearly. I can't... I have no words to translate exactly what the song says. But the Windsingers sang our village into the sea. It was their fault. Their fault!' Berni's breath quickened. Vandien nodded, not wishing to delay the rest of her story. But why? The question tickled at the back of his mind. Why would the Windsingers sing, not only the village, but their own temple into the sea? And how? Their power was over the winds of the air, not the bones of the earth.

'Most of the village folk were out fishing when it happened. In the village were our old people, our babes, and those of us sick or injured that day. Alone and defenseless they were, when the earth trembled and the sea went dry. The folk out fishing rode out the great series of waves that came crashing from nowhere. We heard the wild tolling of the temple bell. We did not know, until we came back, that our beautiful harbor and our village were gone.' Berni was as caught in the telling as she had been in the singing. She was one with the 'we' in the tale, telling it as she saw it herself.

'The village was gone. The green hill above the village was gone, riven and sunk. The floor of our harbor had heaved and buckled, so that our large boats could not even come into anchorage anymore. And everywhere, floating on the sea, were bits of our lives. Limbs of trees and house timbers, with here and there a body.

'One little girl they found clinging to a beam. A fishing boat picked her out of the water. She was half-drowned, her robes draggled about her. At first we thought she was one of our own. She was only a little girl, probably stolen by the Windsingers, stolen away from her own folk who loved her. She wept, when she wasn't gagging up salt water. But finally she told it, as a child would tell such a story. She and a group of little ones like her had been down below when it happened. Down in a great chamber under the temple, that we village folk had never known was there. It was a schooling place, or a worshipping place; something like that. When the little ones felt the earth shake, and saw the water begin to squirt through the walls, they tried to save the precious Windsinger things. The little girl told how they had tried to carry up the heavy chests, five and six little ones to a box, trying to lug them up the stairs. She tried to help. But the whole temple was coming down on them. A falling stone broke her arm. She could hear the screams of those that were trapped and dying. The salt water was rising around her, and she was scared. So she did what any scared child would do. She tried to get away. She couldn't say how, but she got out, and somehow when the water swept her up, she managed to catch hold of a floating beam with her good arm. There she was, and fisherfolk picked her up, her little white gown all soaked and her arm bone gleaming white where it poked out of her flesh. She looked so like a Human child, with just a bit of scaling on her chin, and most of her ears still there and showing through her cowl. But her heart was already Windsingered. Though we dried her and wrapped her warm, we could not stop her weeping. All she could do was cry for the chest she had not saved. She sobbed that she was no longer worthy of her cowl, a disgrace to all Windsingers, and especially to her sisters who had died trying to save the thing she had abandoned. We thought she had cried herself to sleep. But when we touched her, she had wept herself to death. At that very moment, the temple bell rang, speaking in a drowned voice from beneath the sea.'

Berni paused. Then her brown eyes came up to Vandien's. The softness had burned out of them. And that is how we know that the Windsingers left things in the temple! Things they thought worth dying for! We were told by the dying voice of a little child once Human. We do not know what they left. But we shall find it. And when we do, we shall use it. They shall be made to grieve, those who brought our village down, those who stole the lives of Human children with their own!'

Her eyes locked with Vandien's. Sympathy stirred within him. He felt the fire of her vengeance kindle in his soul. But Berni broke that newly forged bond. She reached behind her to the hearth, to take up her mug and drink deep of it. When she set the mug down, she smiled up at him sheepishly. 'So goes the song. It's a moving tale, one that always catches me up in it. It was made by a minstrel who knew how to play folk as well as his harp. How I love the old tales! I wish I knew more of them. But if you would like to hear more of them, you must ask someone older than I. Srolan, perhaps, or Correy.'

'You tell a tale well,' Vandien complimented her. Looking about the tavern was like waking from a dream. The almost religious intensity of the Temple Bell Song was only a fading influence. Now folk were in little knots at tables, lifting mugs and warming themselves for tomorrow's festival. No boat would leave shore tomorrow. There would be baking of holiday treats, and the holiday banners would flutter. Folk would dress in their newest winter finery, and while away the day in the village streets. The puppeteer had said that some jugglers planned to come from Bitters, and perhaps a fortune teller as well.

There was talk, too, of past teamsters. Some they recalled with laughter, for their pitiful efforts, or in delighted remembrance of their showmanship. Srolan, who had come down the stairs to move among them, deftly turned the talk back to earlier days and earlier teamsters. Vandien found himself listening intently. He heard of mired teams that drowned when the tide came in, and of a teamster whose ribs were caved in by the fury of the Windsingers gale that flung him against the temple walls. There were many stories like that, but none gave him the specifics he sought.

In a quiet moment, he asked, 'What exactly does the chest look like?'

'What chest?' a dark young man asked snidely, and several others snickered. But the stabbing looks of their fellow villagers silenced their skepticism, if it did not dispel it.

'No one knows,' Berni dreamed aloud.

'No one's ever seen it,' Helti filled in.

'That's not true.' Janie's young voice was shyly defiant.

'My mother's father held it in his hands.'

'Then why didn't he bring it back to shore?' scoffed the same dark young man.

'Because he couldn't. Because it was too heavy, and Paul...' Janie's voice was losing its courage. Vandien could tell that she had been badgered about this story before.

'What about Paul?' the young man demanded.

'I won't say. You only make mock of me, and him.'

'He lived as drunk as he died. There were lots of things he couldn't explain,' chimed in another voice derisively.

'Shut up!' rasped Berni, but Janie was on her feet, ready to square off with them.

'Did you know him then, Dirk?' she asked sweetly, eyes flashing. 'How young you look, for a man of your years!'

'No more than did you, Janie!' Dirk snapped.

'No, but I knew my mother, and she told me as he told it to her.'

'Yes, a lot of folks knew your mother.'

Dirk's taunt seemed to have a private sting that was publicly known, for Janie whitened and then flushed to her hair line.

'Shut up!' Bernie roared again, but the damage had been done. Janie left the room, not fleeing, but defeated all the same. Collie rose, to drape his harp silently. His motions said what his bound tongue could not; that he would not play music only to have it defiled afterward by this kind of talk. His leaving seemed to break the gathering. Others shifted, rising and dragging outer smocks down over their heads, bidding good night to friends.

'Damn Dirk and his flapping mouth!' Srolan spat, sitting down beside Vandien. 'Every time Janie is moved to speech, he finds a way to silence her. And for no reason I can discover, except his own ill nature.'

'What was the rest of the story?' Vandien asked softly. Although the tavern was emptying out, it was still a less than private place to talk.

'No one knows. That's the bite of it. Janie had the story from her mother, who told it to no one else. Who's to say if there is any truth to it? Many's the time I've had Janie alone, and tried to get her to talk. But she's a tight-mouthed girl when the talk gets too close to her own. Janie will give you anything you want, except a glimpse of herself. When the talk gets too close to her family, she either clams her mouth, or says what the rest of the town says, and just as heartlessly: that her mother was a drunk, as her mother, and father, and grandfather were before her. And a drunk will tell any story to get another drink.'

'But Janie's mother did not tell that story to anyone but Janie?'

'Exactly. And that's why I think there may be a bit of truth to it. What did that poor woman have to give her child, other than borrowed fame? Your grandfather was the last man known to have held the Windsingers' chest. She gave her girl a tiny bit of family pride to cling to, and was at least woman enough to keep the story a private one, not one bandied about and laughed over. The story is as her grandfather first told it, pure and unaltered. Any fool in the village can tell you what his granny said that Janie's grandfather said. But it's all fifth hand and two generations old. Any useful bit of information is twisted to rumor. Only Janie knows the story as her grandfather told it.'

'Would she tell it to me, do you think, Srolan? She seemed anxious to please me earlier...'

Srolan was shaking her head. 'Try to speak to her now, and you'd find all her walls up. She was willing to bed you earlier; bedding takes no talk. She'd gladly give you what the village boys dare not ask for. They won't court her, for she seems ever angry to them, always sharp of tongue and derisive. And so she is, for she believes they won't court her because they despise her. She'd bed you, to show them that others want what the village boys turn their noses up at. Also that she'd rather bed a strange teamster than sleep with the likes of them.'

'I don't understand.' Vandien was confused.