The Singer of All Songs (28 page)

They like to keep me close by, in case they need my skills. If someone is
hurt, or ill, then they come to me, but in secret, after dark. But they will not
eat with me, nor let me teach the dances to the children. When I am gone, it
will all be lost.

‘It’s the same everywhere. Look at Trout. Even when he sees and hears chantment before his eyes, he still tries to find a way to disbelieve it. Perhaps magic is dying, all overTremaris. That will make it easy for Samis, if we can’t stop him.’ And how exactly would they ever stop him? she had wondered, not for the first time.

Halasaa had seemed to hear her thoughts, and had placed his warm brown hand reassuringly over hers.
Do not fear. This life
is a dance, and not a battle. We are all part of this world, not masters of it.
Tremaris dances hand to hand with the moons and the stars. The ocean
embraces the river, and the sky breathes in every song. The sorcerer should
know this, and we must remember it too.

Looking up at the leaves, Calwyn remembered his words and smiled. Though she had no idea what they might mean, she found them comforting. It was peaceful here, and pleasant to rest after so long at sea. Today they would sail for the Lost City. Tonno and Mica had gone with Halasaa to collect eggs from the water-birds that nested by the stream, and Trout had been taking apart the pulley that hoisted a basket up to the platform, to see if it was better than the ones he had constructed in Mithates. She didn’t know where Darrow was; he was so impatient to be off that she wouldn’t have been surprised to find him already waiting for them on
Fledgewing
, pacing the deck.

‘May I come up?’ Darrow’s voice broke into her thoughts.

Calwyn sat up, flushing at the unexpected sound of his voice. ‘Of course.’

He climbed the ladder as nimbly as a boy, and Calwyn laughed. ‘It’s good to see you so light on your feet!’

‘I had forgotten how good it feels to run.’ He brushed the hair back from his face and grinned at her. ‘But to sit quietly is a good thing, too.’

She smiled back at him, and they sat side by side in comfortable silence on the edge of the platform, their feet dangling among the leaves. Calwyn looked away, across the rustling sea of green that stretched as far as the horizon. To the north somewhere, invisible, was the shadowy line of the mountains where she had grown up, the place she had always considered her home, the place she might never see again. Supposing they did defeat Samis, what would happen then? Would they go back to Kalysons and help Tonno with his fishing? Or would she make the long journey home through the mountains, to Marna and Ursca and the others? Would Mica come with her? She smiled at the thought of quick-tempered Mica training in the quiet ways of a priestess of Taris. Tamen would find her even more difficult to handle than Calwyn herself had been. Half-regretfully, she put the idea out of her mind. Besides, she knew for certain now that the Wall of Antaris would never again be able to contain her own restless spirit. Perhaps they could all come back here and live in peace among the trees. But the Spiridrelleen would not welcome them.

She sighed, and looked at Darrow, at his hawk’s profile outlined against the leaves. He had spent so many years in companionship with Samis, then in rivalry, then pursuit. Once this chase was over, there would be a great emptiness in his life. How would he fill it? Wistfully she remembered the image that Samis himself had suggested to her in Trout’s workshop: she and Darrow, wandering the world together, seeing all kinds of marvels, side by side – She shook herself. This hunt was not ended yet; she couldn’t know how it would end. And if they weren’t strong enough, if they couldn’t manage to defeat Samis, all of them together, three chanters and Halasaa? Calwyn left the thought unfinished.

She turned to Darrow. ‘Will you leave your walking stick behind, now that you don’t need it any more?’

Darrow looked at her steadily. ‘A gift is not thrown away so lightly. Especially a gift from a friend. No, I will keep it, to remind me that not all friendships need to end in bitterness.’

Impulsively Calwyn laid a hand on his sleeve. ‘Sometimes friendships end in other ways. They can change – into something more . . .’ Her face grew warm. Would he understand her? She stammered, ‘As Halasaa says,
all is
change
. . .’

For a moment Darrow looked puzzled. Then his face cleared, he flushed, and he laid his warm hand on top of Calwyn’s. ‘There are things that you and I must say to one another, Calwyn,’ he said, and there was a tenderness in his voice that she had never heard before. ‘When this is finished –’

But before he could say anything more, Mica’s clear shout rang up from below, sending a handful of the red and green fruit-birds fluttering into the air. ‘Hey, you two, come down! We got enough eggs for a hundred omelettes! And Halasaa says it’s time to go.’

Darrow gave Calwyn a regretful, apologetic look before he scrambled to his feet. The quest still came first. But Calwyn sensed that he was not as eager to be under way as he had been before. Perhaps Darrow too had his doubts about what awaited them. All the calm certainty about their task now seemed to belong with Halasaa; it was as though he had been waiting for them all his life, and knew exactly what must be done. Looking over the edge of the platform, Calwyn could see him, still and straight as a sapling, his face turned upward, his eyes bright, a little bird on one shoulder and a woven basket of fruit slung over the other.

Come. It is time to leave.

Calwyn couldn’t help comparing the look of serene joy on Halasaa’s face with Darrow’s stern, set frown. Quickly she seized his hand and pressed it between her own.

‘When this is finished,’ she said.

He nodded and gripped her hand. Their eyes met, and held, and in that look there was a promise.

They spoke little in the next few days of swift sailing along the southern coast, as though the silence of the Tree People had seeped into their bones. They moved about the boat with quick deft actions when it was necessary, or stood motionless at the tiller or the prow, scanning the horizon. The shore slid by, the endless forest gliding past them; from time to time the noise of birds or the rustle of leaves would call out to them like whispers of encouragement. But not once did they catch sight of Samis’s ship, either before or behind them.

The arakin came sometimes to Halasaa, not in the great flock that had descended on the boat before, but one or two at a time. Trout still flinched at the sight of them swooping toward the boat, and took himself hastily below, but Mica stood bravely by Halasaa, willing herself not to move out of range of their sharp-toothed beaks. The arakin would speak to Halasaa in that language that only he could understand, and then flap away on their scaly wings. Every time the message was the same.

They say they cannot see the one you seek.

‘Perhaps he’s hiding himself with the Power of Seeming,’ said Calwyn.

‘Perhaps he’s sailing beside us
right now
,’ said Trout.

At once Mica snatched up an egg from the basket and hurled it at the place where Samis’s ship might be, but the tiny splash as it dropped into the empty waves did not wholly reassure her.

Darrow’s face wore the grim look all the time now, and once a whole day went by without his speaking a word to any of them.

They turned northward, and it was then that the rains began, softly at first, a silver curtain falling between
Fledgewing
and the shore, reminding Calwyn of the days in Antaris when the rains fell in a dull roar over the Dwellings. Then, the novices would sit by the hearth, weaving and spinning and listening as the priestesses told the long tales of Taris and the other gods, and the Ancient Ones and their adventures. There were no Tree People in those stories. There were no tales that told how they had been chased from their lands and driven deep into the wilderness, no stories of their hunger and cold, nor of their own silent dancing magic and the secrets of becoming. And what were the stories that the Spiridrelleen told of the Voiced Ones, the people who had driven them away? She did not like to think what horrors those tales would hold.

Day after day the rains fell, as the landscape of the shore changed before their eyes. The blanket of dark solid trees gradually gave way to a coverlet of more slender trees with pale trunks and silver-grey leaves. The land shimmered with delicate light, so that it was hard to see where the boundaries between the sea and the rain and the trees began and ended. During the day, the rain blurred the light of the sun, but this was also a time when all three moons were at their fullest, theThree Lanterns of the Goddess shining bright. Even at the depth of night, a silvery glow shone through the mists, and the lines between day and night were blurred too. The sound of the rain washing against the decks and sighing into the sea was like soft music, and droplets of water clung to the ropes and the sails like diamonds.

On they sailed through this indistinct world of blues and greens and silvers. Calwyn gave up all tasks on the ship, and stood unmoving at her place in the bow, barely eating or drinking, rarely sleeping, consumed by the faint steady call of the place that waited just beyond the horizon: the abandoned city of the Ancient Ones, the heart of all magic, the breath behind every song. Her serious dark eyes were always fixed at some place in the mists beyond the dipping of the prow, but it seemed to the others that she was listening, rather than watching.

At last, at a time that could have been early morning or silver dusk, she heard what she had been waiting for. She turned her head. ‘Mica, still the ship.’

Obediently, Mica broke off her song. The sails drooped; there was a sudden silence, but for the lapping of the sea and the ever-present murmur of the rain.

‘What is it?’ said Darrow.

Halasaa’s quiet words sounded in their minds.
This is the place.

Calwyn stood with her hands gripping the rail, and as the mists thinned, the others saw a wide cove spreading before them. And there was Samis’s ship, his Gellanese galley, the long rows of oars stilled and silent, the single square sail furled against the crossmast. Trout groaned; they all felt the same sickening despair. Tonno took up the looking-tube. ‘No one there that I can see,’ he said, in a voice more subdued than usual.

‘He’s not on the ship,’ said Calwyn, with certainty. Since she had met Halasaa, she had become aware of a flickering sense she hadn’t recognised before, a sense of the presence of life. It was neither seeing nor hearing, but some other ability that had lain long dormant inside her. It was like being able to close her eyes and still see the imprint of a candle flame, flickering against the dark. Now she could turn her mind toward Samis’s long ship and know in an instant that it was empty. She was even, very faintly, aware of someone, Samis himself, enclosed in the expanse of shimmering forest on the shore.

‘If he has gone ashore,’ said Darrow, ‘we should follow him.’

Tonno and Darrow took the oars of the dinghy, and the little boat slid through the mist. When the water became too shallow for rowing, Trout took the rope and waded the last few steps onto the pebbly beach. Calwyn was the last ashore, and stumbled as she left the boat. Mica steadied her.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes, but –’ Calwyn looked around at the slim trees that stood like a crowd of silent witnesses all around them. ‘There’s something about this place, a doomed feeling.’

There was a great slaughter between the Tree People and the Voiced Ones
here, all around the Lost City.
Halasaa’s face was taut with sadness.
The land remembers.

Calwyn closed her eyes, and for a moment it was as though she could hear the cries that had rung through the trees on that day so long ago, and the clash and whistle of weapons, and see the terrified faces of the fleeing people, and the stain of blood spreading slowly, slowly, a dark tide across the land, tinting the pale pebbles of the beach with scarlet, the blue-green sea soaked with red. So many bodies, so many, the land heaped with the dead and dying, and the stench of killing everywhere. She took a sharp, sobbing breath.

A firm hand gripped hers; Calwyn opened her eyes, expecting to see Mica, but it was Halasaa who stood there.

Come. This is the way.

The trees of this forest, unlike the trees of Spiridrell, were not tightly packed together. Light and rain filtered between them in a pale mist that subdued the sound of the crew’s footsteps and their hushed voices. Halasaa led the way, then Calwyn and Darrow. Mica andTonno followed, close together, withTonno’s big hand resting protectively on Mica’s shoulder, and reluctant Trout last of all, snatching off his misted lenses every few steps and rubbing them on his shirt. The earth was damp underfoot, covered in soft muffling moss that squelched where they trod.

After a time the trees thinned out further, and lumps of stone jutted from the ground. In a few places the stones made an island of paving, surrounded by moss.

‘This must have been a road once,’ muttered Trout to himself.

Now they followed the line where that ancient road had been. Once it had been a broad avenue; now the trees had reclaimed it, their slender trunks reaching up through the stones, as though they too were walking with slow determination toward the city.

Suddenly Mica clutched at Tonno’s arm. ‘What’s that?’

‘Just the wind, lass,’ murmured Tonno uneasily. But they could all hear it now: an uncanny cry that echoed through the forest, a howling that grew clearer at every moment, until it resolved itself into a human voice, into human speech.

‘What does it say? What does it say?’

They had all halted, listening. A chill ran down Calwyn’s neck as the unearthly sobbing rose and fell around them.

Darrow’s face was pale. ‘Heron,’ he said. ‘Heron, I summon thee to thy fate.’

The call died slowly away. Shivering, Mica wrapped her arms around herself; Tonno made a surreptitious sign to ward off evil. Trout said, ‘Heron? What does that mean? I haven’t seen any.’