Songmaster (6 page)

Riktors Ashen was angry when he got to the High Room. “Listen, lady, do you know what this is?”

“No,” Esste answered, and her voice was calculated to soothe him.

“It’s a warrant of entry. From the emperor.”

“And you’ve entered. Why are you upset?”

“I’ve entered after four
days
! I’m the emperor’s personal envoy, on a very important errand—”

“Riktors Ashen,” Esste interrupted (but quietly, calmly), “you are on an important errand, but this is not it. This is just a stop along the way—”

“Damn right,” Riktors said, “and this petty errand has put me four days behind schedule.”

“Perhaps, Riktors Ashen, you ought to have
asked
to see me.

“I don’t have to ask. I have the emperor’s warrant of entry.”

“Even the emperor asks before he enters here.”

“I doubt that.”

“It’s history, my friend. I myself brought him to this room.”

Riktors was less agitated now. Was, in fact, embarrassed at his outburst. Not that he hadn’t the right—this was a man, Esste knew, who could use rage to good effect. He hadn’t risen to high rank in the fleet without reason. He was embarrassed because the rage had been real, and over a matter of pride. This was a young man who was learning. Esste liked him. Even though he was also a young man who would kill anyone to get what he wanted. Death waited in his calm hands, behind his boyish face.

“History is shit,” Riktors said mildly. “I’m here to find out about Mikal’s Songbird.”

“The emperor has no Songbird.”

“That,” said Riktors, not without amusement, “is precisely the problem. Do you realize how many years have passed since you promised him a Songbird? Mikal is a hundred eighteen years old this year. Naturally it’s polite to suppose the emperor will live forever, but Mikal himself told me to tell you that he is aware of his mortality, and he hopes he will not die without having heard his Songbird sing.”

“You understand that Songbirds are matched very carefully to their hosts. Usually we
have
the Songbird and work to place him or her properly. This was an unusual case, and until now we haven’t had the right Songbird.”

“Until now?”

“I believe we have the Songbird who will be Mikal’s.”

“I will see him now.”

Esste chose to smile. Riktors Ashen smiled back. “With your permission, of course,” he added.

“The child is only six years old,” Esste answered. “His training is far from complete.”

“I want to see him, to know that he exists.”

“I’ll take you to him.”

They wound their way down the stairs, through passages and corridors. “There are so many corridors,” Riktors said, “that I don’t see how you have any space left for rooms.” Esste said nothing until they reached the corridors of Stalls, where she paused for a moment and sang a long high note. Doors closed in the distance. Then she led the emperor’s personal envoy to Ansset’s door, and sang a few wordless notes outside.

The door opened, and Riktors Ashen gasped. Ansset was thin, but his light complexion and blond hair were given a feeling of translucence by the sun coming in his window. And the boy’s features were beautiful, not just regular; the kind of face that melted men’s hearts as readily as women’s. More readily.

“Was he chosen for his voice, or his face?” Riktors Ashen asked.

“When a child is three,” answered Esste, “his future face is still a mystery. His voice unfolds more easily. Ansset, I have brought this man to hear you sing.”

Ansset looked blankly at Esste, as if he did not understand but refused to ask for explanation. Esste knew immediately what Ansset planned. Riktors did not. “She means for you to sing for me,” he said helpfully.

“The child needs no repetition. He heard my request, and chooses not to sing.”

Ansset’s face showed nothing.

“Is he deaf?” asked Riktors.

“We will go now,” answered Esste. They went. But Riktors lingered until the last possible moment, looking at Ansset’s face.

“Beautiful,” Riktors said, again and again, as they walked through more passageways toward the gatehouse.

“He is to be the emperor’s Songbird, Riktors Ashen, not the emperor’s catamite.”

“Mikal has a large number of offspring. His tastes are not so eclectic as to include little boys. Why wouldn’t the boy sing?”

“Because he chose not to.”

“Is he always so stubborn?”

“Often.”

“Hypnotherapy would take care of that. A good practitioner could lay a mental block that would forbid resistance—”

Esste sang a melody that stopped Riktors cold. He looked at her, not understanding why suddenly he was afraid of this woman.

“Riktors Ashen, I do not tell you how to move your fleets of starships between planets.”

“Of course. Just a suggestion—”

“You live in a world where all you expect of people is compliance, and so your hypnotherapists and your mental blocks accomplish all your ends. But here in the Songhouse, we create beauty. You cannot force a child to find his voice.”

Riktors Ashen had regained his composure. “You’re good at that. I have to work a little harder to force people to listen to me.”

Esste opened the door to the gatehouse.

“Songmaster Esste,” Riktors said, “I will tell the emperor that I have seen his Songbird, and that the child is beautiful. But when can I tell him the child will be sent?”

“The child will be sent when I am ready,” Esste replied.

“Perhaps it would be better if the child were sent when
he
was ready.”

“When
I
am ready,” Esste said again, and her voice was all pleasure and grace.

“The emperor will have his Songbird before he dies.”

Esste hissed softly, which forced Riktors to come closer, to bring his face near enough that only he could hear what Esste said next:

“There is much for
both
of us to do before Mikal Imperator dies, isn’t there?”

Riktors Ashen left quickly then, to finish his business for the emperor.

“What song is that?” asked Ansset.

“Consider it a directory. It used to be taught to the children of Step, to make fun of the other great cities of Tew. Step is no longer a great city. But the ones they made fun of still are.”

“Where will we go?”

“You are eight years old, Ansset,” Esste answered. “Do you remember any life, any people outside the Songhouse?”

“No.”

“After this, you will.”

“What does the song mean?” asked Ansset. The flesket stopped then, at the changing place, where Songhouse vehicles always stopped and commercial transport took over. Esste led Ansset by the hand, ignoring his question for the moment. There was business at the ticket counter, and their luggage, slight as it was, had to be searched and itemized and fed into the computer, so that no false insurance claims could be made. Esste knew from her memories of her first venture outside the Songhouse lands that Ansset understood almost nothing of what was going on. She tried explaining a few things to him, and he seemed to pick it up well enough to get along. The money, and the idea of money, he took in stride. The clothing he found uncomfortable; he kept taking the shoes off until she insisted that they were essential. She did not look forward to his getting accustomed to the food. There would be diarrhea for days—at the Songhouse he had never acquired a taste or a tolerance for sugar.

She was not surprised at his quiet acceptance of everything. The trip meant that he was within a year of placement, yet he showed no excitement or even interest in his ultimate destination. Over the last two years he had finally begun to show a little human emotion in his face, but Esste, who knew him better than any other, was not fooled. The emotion was placed there in order to avoid exciting comment. None of it was real. It was nothing more or less than what was expected and proper at the moment. And Esste despaired. There were paths and hidden places that she herself had put in Ansset’s mind, but now she could not reach him at all. She could not get him to speak of himself; she could not get him to show even the slightest inadvertent emotion; and as for the closeness they had felt on the hill overlooking the lake, he never betrayed a memory of it but at the same time never allowed her to get even a few steps into the path she could follow to put him into a light trance, where she might have accomplished or at least discovered something.

When the business at the changing place was finished, they sat to wait for the bus, a flesket that anyone with the money could ride. It was then that Esste whiled away the time by answering Ansset’s question. If he was surprised or gratified that she had remembered it, he did not show any sign.

“Brew is one of the Cities of the Sea—Homefall, Chop, Brine, and Brew—all of which are famous for beer and ale. They also have a reputation for exporting very little of their product because they are such prodigious drinkers. Beer and ale contain alcohol. They are enemies of Control, and you cannot sing when you’ve been drinking them.”

“Bay takes your life?” Ansset prompted, having memorized the song, as usual.

“Bay used to have the unfortunate habit of holding public executions every Saturday whether anyone was sentenced to death or not. To avoid using up too many of their own citizens, they used strangers. The practice has, in recent years, been stopped. Wood had a sort of mandatory wifemarket. Very odd things. Tew is a very odd planet. Which is why the Songhouse was able to exist here. We were more normal than most cities, and so we were left alone.”

“Cities?”

“The Songhouse began as a city. It began as a town of people who loved to sing. That’s all. Things grew from there.”

“The rest of the cities?”

“Stivess is very far to the north. Water is just as far to the south. Overlook is a place whose only product is the beauty of its scenery, and it lives off the people of wealth who go there to end their days. Norumm has four million people. It used to have nine million. But they still feel crowded and refuse to let more than a few people visit them every year.”

“Are we going there?”

“We are not.”

“ ‘Bog takes your money.’ What does that mean?”

“You’ll find out for yourself. That’s where we’re going.”

The bus arrived, they boarded, and the bus left. For the first time in memory, Ansset saw people outside the milieu of the Songhouse. There were not very many people on the bus. Though this was the main highway from Seawatch to Bog, most people took the expresses, which didn’t stop at the Songhouse changing place—or even at Step, usually. This bus was not an express—it stopped everywhere.

Directly in front of them were a mother and father and their son, who must have been at least a year older than Ansset. The child had been riding far too long, and could not hold still.

“Mother, I need to go to the toilet.”

“You just went. Stay in your seat.”

But the child whirled around and knelt on the bench to stare at Esste and Ansset. Ansset looked at the boy, his gaze never wavering. The boy stared back, while wagging his backside impatiently. He reached out to bat at Ansset’s face. It might have been meant as a friendly gesture, but Ansset uttered a quick, harsh song that spun the boy around in his seat. When the mother took the boy to the bathroom at the back of the bus, the child looked at Ansset in terror and stayed as far from him as possible.

Esste was surprised at how frightened the child had become. True, the music had been a rebuke. But the child’s reaction was far out of proportion to Ansset’s song. In the Songhouse, anyone would have understood Ansset’s song, but here the child should have understood it only vaguely—that was the purpose of the trip, to learn to adapt to outsiders. Yet somehow Ansset had communicated with the boy, and done it better than he had with Esste.

Could Ansset actually
direct
his music to one particular person? Esste wondered. That went beyond songtalk. No, no. It must have been just that the boy had been paying closer attention to Ansset than she had, so that the song struck him with more force.

And instead of worrying, she made the incident give her more confidence. In his first encounter with an outsider, Ansset had done far better than he should have been able to. Ansset was the right choice for Mikal’s Songbird. If only.

Though the forest was not so lush as the deep woods in the Valley of Songs, where all Ansset’s excursions had taken him before, the trees were still tall enough to be impressive, and the lack of underbrush made for a different kind of beauty, a sort of austere temple with trunks extending into the infinite distance and the leaves making a dense ceiling. Ansset watched the trees more than the people. Esste speculated as to what was going on in his impenetrable mind. Was he deliberately avoiding looking at the others? Perhaps he needed to avoid their strangeness until he could absorb it. Or was he truly uninterested, more drawn to the forest than to other human beings?

Perhaps I was wrong, Esste thought. Perhaps my intuition was a mistake, and I should have let Ansset perform. For two years he has had no audience but me. If his preferred treatment before kept the other children from being close to him, his ban had made him a pariah. No one knew what his error had been, but after that triumphant song at Nniv’s funeral Ansset’s voice had gone unheard, and everyone concluded the disgrace must be punishment for something terrible. Some had even sung of it in chamber. One child, Ller, had even had the temerity to protest, to sing angrily that it was unjust to ban Ansset for so long, so unfairly. Yet even Ller avoided Ansset as if the future Songbird’s suffering were contagious.

If I was wrong, Esste concluded, the damage has been done. In a year Ansset will go to Mikal, ready or not. Ansset will go as the finest, most exquisite voice we have sent from the Songhouse in living memory. But he will go as an inhuman creature, unable to communicate the normal human feelings with others. A singing machine.

I have a year, Esste thought. I have one year to break down his walls without breaking his heart.

The forest gave way to wooded prairie, the desolate land where wild animals still roamed. Population pressure on Tew had never been great enough to drive many settlers to this plateau where winters were impossibly cold and summers unbearably hot. They were an hour reaching the Rim, a great cliff thousands of kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high. Here, however, the rift had split in two parts, and between them other cliffs took the descent more gradually. The city of Step had grown up at the front of the jumble of rock, where river traffic had to end and transfer to roads. Few of the farmers could afford fleskets. Even when Step ceased to be a major city, it remained important locally.

The bus followed the switchback road carved centuries ago in the rock. It was rough, but the bus never felt it, except when sudden dips forced it to drop a bit in altitude. Ansset still watched the scenery, and now even Esste gazed at the huge expanse of farmland at the base of the descent. What fell as snow on the plateau came as rain below the Rim, and the farmers here fed the world, as they liked to say.

Step itself was boring. All the buildings were old, and decay was the loudest message shouted by the shabby signs and the nearly empty streets. Nevertheless, lessons had to be learned. Esste took Ansset into a dismal restaurant and ordered and paid for a dinner. “Even the prices are depressed here,” she commented. Ansset ignored her.

The restaurant was no more crowded than the streets. Wherever all the people were, it wasn’t here. And the food came quickly. It was not bad, but the flavor had left it somewhere between the farm and the table. Ansset ate some, but not much. Esste ate less. Instead, she looked around at the people. At first she got the impression that they were all old, but because she didn’t trust impressions, she counted. Only six were gray-haired or balding—the other dozen were middle-aged or young. Some were silent, but most conversed. Yet the restaurant felt old, and the conversations sounded tired, and it all made Esste vaguely sad. The songs of the place were gone, if there had ever been songs. Now only moans were appropriate.

And, as soon as Esste thought that, she realized that Ansset was moaning. The sound was soft but penetrating, almost like the background noise of the kitchen machines that processed the food. Control allowed Esste to refrain from glancing at Ansset. Instead she listened to the song. It was a perfect echo of the mood of the place, a perfect understanding of the, not misery, but weariness of the people. But gradually Ansset built a rising tone into his melody, a strange, surprising element that made it interesting, or at least that made a person hearing it want to be interested in something. Esste knew immediately what Ansset was doing. He was breaking the ban. He was performing. And once again the song was not his own—it was what every person in the restaurant, including Esste, wished to hear, wished to be made to feel.

The lilting quality of his song became more pronounced. People who had not been conversing began to talk, conversations already in progress became more animated. People smiled. The ugly young woman at the counter began talking to the waiter. Even joking. No one seemed to notice Ansset’s song.

And Ansset faded, softened the song, let it die in mid-note so that it seemed to continue into the silence. Esste was not sure, in fact, when the song was over, even though she was the only person who had been carefully listening to it. Yet the effect of the song lingered. Deliberately Esste waited, watched to see how long the people would remain cheerful. They left the restaurant smiling.

“I congratulate you,” said Esste, “on your superb performance.”

Ansset’s face did not respond. His voice did. “They’re harder to change than Songhouse people.”

“Like trying to move through water, yes?” asked Esste.

“Or mud. But I can do it.”

Not even smugness. Just a recognition of fact. But I know you, boy, Esste thought. You are enjoying yourself immensely. You are having a hilarious time outsmarting me and at the same time proving that you can handle any situation. As long as it’s outside of you.

The bus took them through the night back up the Rim, but to the west this time, and it was still dark when they reached Bog. The sky was dark, that is. The lights of the city filled the land to the edge of the sea. It seemed in places that there were no breaks between the lights, as if the city were a carpet of pure light, a fragment of the sun. The clouds above the city glowed brightly. Even the sea seemed to shine.

The streets were so crowded, even in the last hours before dawn, that buses and fleskets and even skooters had to use overhead ramps that wound among the buildings. It was dazzling. It was exciting. The crush of humanity was frantic, desperate, exhilarating, even from the inside of a bus. Ansset slept through it, after waking for a moment when Esste tried to get him to look. “Lights,” he said, in a tone of voice that said, I’d rather sleep.

“Might as well go upstairs and sleep,” said the clerk at the hotel. “Nothing happens during the day here. Not even business. Can’t even get a decent meal except at one of those junky all-day diners.”

But after only a few hours of sleep, Ansset insisted that they go out.

“I want to see the city now.”

“It looks better by electric light,” Esste told him.

“So.” So that’s why I want to see it.

“So?” I’d rather rest.

“The beds here are too soft,” Ansset said, “and my back is sore. The food we ate in Step has sent me to the toilet four times, and it looked better than it did on the table. I want to see outside. I want to see it when it isn’t dressed up to fool people.”