Songmaster (43 page)

If Ller had not been Fiimma’s Songmaster, it might have gone undiscovered. And if Fiimma had been a worse singer, it might not have worried Ller enough to report it. But Fiimma was obviously going to be a Songbird. And the changes in her songs, which might have been mysterious to another Songmaster, were easily explained to Ller. For he knew that Ansset was in the Songhouse. And he recognized his music in Fiimma’s strange new songs.

At first he thought it was just a momentary lapse—that Fiimma had overheard Ansset somehow and incorporated what she heard into her music. But the themes became persistent. Fiimma sang songs that required experiences she had never had. She had always sung of death, but now she sang of killing; she sang of passion she could not possibly have felt; her melodies bespoke the pain of suffering she could not have gone through, not in her few years.

“Fiimma,” Ller said. “I know.”

She had Control. She showed nothing of the surprise, the fear she must have felt.

“Did he tell you he made an oath of silence?”

She nodded.

“Come with me.”

Ller took her to the High Room, where Rruk let them in. Rruk had often heard Fiimma sing before—the child had showed promise from the start. “I want you to hear Fiimma sing,” Ller told Rruk.

But Fiimma would not sing.

“Then I’ll have to tell you,” Ller said. “I know that Ansset is here. I thought I was the only singer who knew. But Fiimma has heard him sing. It has distorted her voice.”

“It has made my voice more beautiful,” Fiimma said.

“She sings things she shouldn’t know anything about.”

Rruk looked at the girl, but spoke to Ller. “Ller, my friend, Ansset used to sing things he didn’t know. He would take it from the voices of the people who spoke to him, as no singer has ever been able to do.”

“But Fiimma has never shown that ability. There isn’t any doubt, Rruk. He has not only been singing in the Songhouse, he has been teaching Fiimma. I don’t know what conditions you imposed on Ansset, but I thought you should know this. Her voice has been polluted.”

It was then that Fiimma sang to Rruk, removing all doubt of Ansset’s influence. She must have been holding back on the things she learned from Ansset when she sang for Ller before. For now her voice came out full, and it was not at all the voice that Fiimma had had only months ago.

The song was more powerful than it had a right to be. She had learned emotions she had no reason ever to have felt. And she knew tricks, subtle and distorted things she did with her voice that were irresistibly surprising, that could not easily be coped with, that Rruk and Ller could hardly bear without breaking Control. The song was beautiful, yet it was also terrible, something that should not be coming out of the mouth of a child.

“What has he done to you?” Rruk asked, when the song was through.

“He has taught me my most beautiful voice,” Fiimma said. “Didn’t you hear it? Wasn’t it beautiful?”

Rruk did not answer. She only summoned the head of housekeeping, and had him call for Ansset.

“I trusted you,” Rruk said to Ansset.

Ansset did not answer.

“You taught Fiimma. You sang to her. And you consciously taught her things she had no business learning.”

“I did,” he said softly.

“The damage is irreparable. Her own voice will never be restored to her, her purity is gone. She was our finest voice in years.”

“She still is.”

“She isn’t herself. Ansset, how could you? Why did you?”

He was silent for a moment, then made a decision. “She knew who I was,” he said.

“She couldn’t have.”

“No one told her. She just knew. When I realized it, I kept away from her as much as I could. For two years, whenever I saw her I would leave. Because she knew.”

“Why couldn’t you have kept it up?”

“She wouldn’t let me. She followed me. She wanted me to teach her. She had heard of me ever since she came here, and she wanted to know my voice. So one day she followed me into a room that no one uses, where I sometimes went because—because of memories. And she begged me.”

Rruk stood and walked away from him. “Tell me the coercion she used. Tell me why you didn’t just go out the door.”

“I wanted to. But Rruk, you don’t understand. She wanted to hear my voice. She wanted to hear me sing.”

“I thought you couldn’t sing.”

“I can’t. And so I told her that. I broke the vow and said to her, ‘I don’t have any songs. I lost them all years ago.’ ”

And as he said it, Rruk understood. For his speech was a song, and that it was enough to have broken all the barriers.

“She sang it back to me, you see,” Ansset said. “She took my words and my feelings and she sang them back. Her voice was beautiful. She took my wretched voice and turned it into a song. The song I would have sung, if I had been able. I couldn’t help myself then. I didn’t want to help myself.”

Rruk turned to face him. She was Controlled, but he knew, or thought he knew, what she was thinking. “Rruk, my friend,” Ansset said, “you hear a hundred children singing your songs every day. You’ve touched them all, you sing to them all in the great hall, you know that when these singers go out and come back, and in all the years to come, your voice will be preserved among their voices.

“But not mine! Never mine! Oh, perhaps my childish songs before I left. But I hadn’t lived then. I hadn’t learned. Rruk, there are things I know that should not be forgotten. But I can’t tell anyone, except by singing, and only someone who sings could understand my voice. Do you know what that means?

“I can’t have any children. I lived with a family that loved me in Susquehanna, but they were never my children. I couldn’t give them anything that was very deep within me, because they couldn’t hear the songs. And I come here, where I could speak to everyone and be understood, and I must be silent. That was fine, the silence was my price, I know about paying for happiness, and I was willing.

“But Fiimma. Fiimma is my child.”

Rruk shook her head and sang softly to him, that she regretted what she had to do, but he would have to leave. He had broken his word and damaged a child, and he would have to leave. What should be done with the child she would decide later.

For a moment it seemed he would accept it in silence. He got up and went to the door. But instead of leaving, he turned. And shouted at her. And the shout became a song. He told her of his joy at finding Fiimma, though he had never looked for her. He told her of the agony of knowing his songs were dead forever, that his voice, no matter how much it improved in his solitary singing in the forest and the desert, would be irrevocably lost, unable to express what was in him. “It comes out ugly and weak, but she hears, Rruk. She understands. She translates it through her own childishness and it comes out beautiful.”

“And ugly. There are ugly things in you, Ansset.”

“There are! And there are ugly things in this place, too. Some of them are living and breathing and trying pitifully to sing in Vigil. Some of them are playing like lost children at Promontory, pretending that there’s something important in the rest of their lives. But they know it’s a lie! They know their lives ended when they turned fifteen and they came home and could not be teachers. They live all their lives in fifteen years and the rest, the next hundred years, they’re nothing! That’s beautiful?”

“You did more than fifteen years,” Rruk answered.

“Yes. I have felt everything. And I survived. I found the ways to survive, Rruk. How long do you think someone as frail and gifted as Fiimma would have lasted out there? Do you think she could survive what I came through?”

“No.”

“Now she could. Because now she knows all my ways. She knows how to keep hope alive when everything else is dead. She knows because I taught her, and that’s what is coming out in her songs. It’s raw and it’s harsh but in
her
it will be beautiful. And do you think it will hurt her songs? They’ll be different, but the audiences out there—I know what they want. They want her. As she is now. Far more than they would ever have wanted her before.”

“You learned to make speeches in Susquehanna,” Rruk said.

He laughed and turned back toward the door. “Someone had to make them.”

“You’re good at it.”

“Rruk,” he said, his back still to her. “If it had been anyone but Fiimma. If she had not been such a perfect singer. If she hadn’t wanted my voice so much. I would never have broken my oath to you.”

Rruk came to him where he stood by the door. She touched his shoulder, and ran her fingers down his back. He turned, and she took his face in her hands, and drew close, and kissed him on the eyes and on the lips.

“All my life,” she said, “I have loved you.”

And she wept.