Thunderer (4 page)

There was no one to speak most of the words with him, and he had to guess how the words were pronounced. Even Father Julah had no real idea. Arjun hunted out books of poetry, and tried to guess how the strange vowels were spoken from the rhymes and meters. Alone in his room, he practiced a dialogue of a dozen languages. The sound of things was very important to him. But he had stopped composing, and hardly ever sang anymore.

W
hen he was fifteen, he ran away, following a girl. Later, he wouldn’t remember why, exactly. Nor could he remember her face.

Tsuritsa was an outsider. Her family came up with the carts, to buy clockwork tricks to sell on the plains. They set up their wagon outside Gad, on a patch of ground too rocky to farm, and stayed for a week. At night, they kept up a fire.

Tsuritsa was at least a year or two older than Arjun. She wore a red dress; she was black-eyed and her skin was strikingly pale. Arjun came to watch her dancing around the fire with her brothers. Two other boys came with him. He sat cross-legged, hands folded, at the edge of the firelight. After a while, Tsuritsa stopped dancing, and took the fiddle from her brother, playing while the others danced. Arjun stayed put as the other boys slipped away.

When Tsuritsa was done, Arjun called out from the shadows. “You’re fouling the music’s structure. At the end, the feeling should build, but you let it die. I don’t know if you know any of the technical terms, but I can help you make it better.”

Her brother told him to get lost, but Arjun kept sitting patiently, until she said, “All right. Show me then, choirboy.”

Over the next few nights, she let him teach her a few tricks with the fiddle, standing behind her as she held the instrument, his hands over hers. She taught him a few words of her traveler’s patois, and she let him take off her ruched and dirty dress, out in the fields away from Gad and the caravan.

When her family left, he followed them on foot. He could never remember making the decision to set out after them; when he thought about it later, which he did rarely, he remembered a sensation of confinement, of drowning, of clawing up out of weeds, and a dreadful urge to run. He could not keep pace with the wagon, and he had not brought enough food or water. The Choristry’s servants found him a few days later lying under a farmer’s fence by the side of the road, half frozen.

They put him to bed, where he lay with a fever. It felt as though the clutching weeds were dragging him back under foul water. He could see green waving weeds in the candle’s shadows. His body was a dull weight. His breath fouled and revolted against him. His future was a dark river. He hated every aspect of himself and his body and his room and his world, and his graceless, honking voice, with an exhausted, passionless, but minutely detailed hate.

The herbalists kept the fever from killing him. A clear morning came when they told him he would soon be well again. And when he could walk, they said, he would be ready to mount the stairs in the central spire and to come within the presence of the Voice.

T
he Choir had no histories of its own founding. The Choirmen were skilled with their hands and voices, but incurious about their history. They thought of themselves as timeless.

The children made up stories, imagining a lonely goatherd looking for a missing animal, following an obscure path through the rocks up the mountain to find a silvery stream where he bent down to drink, and stopped, hand cupped, hearing a divine wordless song from the spring; or someone from the plains, like, say, a great leader, or a boy everyone laughed at, haunted by dreams of music, leading their people up to find the music’s source. Something like that might have been true.

The Voice had a number of other names; sometimes they called it the Great Music, or the Chord of Chords, or the Immaculate Chime or the Golden Drone or the First or the Final or the Seven-Fold or the Thousand-Fold or the Constant Echo. The names of the god were as multiplicitous as its nature was simple, but that was a deficiency in the men who’d named it, not in the god itself. Arjun always favored
Voice
. Why not? It
spoke
to him.

The Choir, the Mothers and Fathers said, was an echo of the Voice. They devoted their lives to that echo, bringing it out into Gad and down onto the plains. And in the Choir’s corridors, or out in Gad, you could sometimes hear a tiny pure fragment of the Voice itself, as if it was carried on the wind, or as if it unfolded itself out of silent space within you.

(Years later, as they lay in bed together in her flat in Ebon Fields, Arjun would try to describe it to Olympia: “Sometimes, you could be talking to someone right next to you, and they would hear it, though you couldn’t. They’d tilt their hands to one side and fall silent. Smiling. Or sometimes they cried, but with relief. Or both. We’d wait for it to pass: we knew what it was like. It was very important. I don’t think I can explain.” She didn’t quite understand; he didn’t mind.)

The Voice was present in this intermittent and reflected way everywhere in Gad, but there was only one place where it was perpetual and pure. The Voice was alone, high in the central spire, above the hall where the Choir sang at twilight. When a student was ready to be elevated, it would communicate an obscure signal to the Choirmen, and they would bring the student into its presence, to be sounded.

Arjun should have felt pride, but he was hollowed out by fever. When Mother Abayla and Father Julah came for him at dawn, two days later, he went with them quietly.

They led Arjun up the winding stair in the central spire. His legs were still unsteady. They climbed into the round hall where the Choir would meet that evening.

The stairs wound up around the outside of the hall into the rafters. Silver bells hung in the darkness beside them, ascending in a stately spiral. The heaviest and deepest tones, known as the Oxen, were the lowest-hanging; at the peak of the spiral the highest were delicate as little silver birds. Father Julah flicked dust from the highest bell with his sleeve and a shiver of sound ran down the spiral, plunging down the octaves into the shadows. Mother Abayla clucked at him and he hung his bearded head, shamefaced.

Mother Abayla unlocked a door under the shadow of the eaves and they walked through a dim attic. A wrought-iron staircase at the end of the attic spiraled up into the roof. At the top of the stair, Arjun opened a hatch and climbed up into the Chamber.

It occupied the pinnacle of the spire. It was impossible to see the Chamber from the ground; Arjun was surprised to learn that it was made of glass. The sheets of clear glass were supported by a frame of black iron girders and beams and struts of dark wood. The sky outside was the pale grey of dawn.

Arjun sat cross-legged and waited. He heard no music, only the quiet creaking of the glass and iron and wood of the frame around him. The wind whistled through the cracks. The room swayed slightly, barely perceptibly, there at the spire’s tip.

He sat in silence, listening to the wood’s tense creaking. At the edge of hearing, the glass panes produced a shrill, silvery, drawn-out screech as the frame stretched and squeezed and swayed in the wind. His mind was very clear and empty.

He focused on the creaking of the wood for a long time. The sound was senseless and shapeless. So he adjusted his attention and brought the sound of the wind within his grasp as well. The two sounds worked quietly against each other. There was the echo of a melody, and the beginnings of a rhythm, so slow and quiet that a less well-trained ear could never detect it.

He let his head hang down and expanded his attention again to encompass the sounds of the glass and the iron, then the silent sounds of the stone; then the sounds of the birds outside, the building, the quiet paths worn by the robed Choirmen; the sounds of the town and the river. He felt for a shape, a structure in the drifting susurrus.

At the edge of his focus, he found it. It was so quiet and slow and simple that it was barely there at all. Music came from the walls and from the sky, and from beyond and behind the sky. The edge of a vast presence was reaching gently into the Chamber. If he reached out, he could touch it. It worked a transfiguration on all the sounds it entered into; it played an impossibly beautiful music on the strings of the Chamber, and on the dome of the world. Arjun felt the clutching weeds retreat. He felt very clear and pure. He felt sad, but capable of great goodness and strength. The Voice whispered to him and held him.

He came down in the evening with tears dried on his face. Mother Abayla and Father Julah helped him down in respectful silence, holding his thin arms, locking the door behind them.

The next day, Arjun took the tonsure and put on the black robe. He moved into a journeyman’s office, on the second floor. He took on students in the evening, teaching them languages. Some of them were his age, or older. None of them shared his talent, but he tried to be patient and kind with them. For a long time, he felt reconciled to everything, and gladly so.

A
rjun was not the last person to hear the Voice, but he was nearly the last. In the months after he left its presence, it called for only two more students, two girls a little older than him. They were the last students to be elevated.

No one knew exactly when the Voice started to withdraw. That made it harder. Four months after Arjun heard it, Father Pulli returned from the Chamber confused and frightened, and confessed to Mother Abayla that he had listened for a whole day and heard nothing. The Mothers and Fathers assembled to discuss his problem. They were very concerned. Was he too impatient? Was he distracted, somehow? They let him know that they loved him and wanted to help him.

Later, they realized that Father Pulli was surely not the first to come back from the Chamber without hearing the Voice, but only the first to admit it. They remembered how many of their colleagues had seemed distant, irritable, and confused. How many had been lying, perhaps for weeks? Mother Kinnaka came back from the Chamber claiming to have heard the Voice when no one else could, but said that it was dwindling, losing its way, falling into mere noise. No one knew whether to believe her.

They could only conceal it from the students for so long. Their fear and confusion were too obvious to hide. And it was no longer possible to hear the Voice drifting on the air. The absence was hardly noticed at first—it had never happened very often, anyway—but it became more painful as the months went by.

The Choir was like a fading echo. Without the Voice reverberating through its walls, the Choristry was just a big ugly black building, cold and shadowy and cluttered. What was its point? There was no music in it. Quite literally there was no music in it: the walls and spires had been carved artfully with flutes and runnels and chines, molded and mouthed with reeds of steel and silver and glass so that, while the Voice was present, the whole structure whistled and murmured a soft constant chant that rose and fell with the wind; now the noise alternated shrill and flat, and arrhythmic and senseless like the whine of mosquito wings, and it kept everyone awake at night. During the day, their rituals seemed empty and pedantic. The children became like any other children who had been taken from their parents and set to work hard in dark rooms. They became nervous, angry, bitter. The Voice wasn’t there to comfort them. The Mothers and Fathers were hard teachers, unsympathetic masters.

(Years later, Arjun would try to tell the city how it felt; Olympia would be polite, while others, many others, laughed or rolled their eyes, but no one understood; Ararat was too rich in gods to understand poverty.)

Fewer and fewer students came to Arjun’s office to study. The words came much harder without the Voice. Most gave up.

Every evening, Arjun passed by the workshops on his way to dinner. They grew emptier as the Voice’s absence stretched out. The wires and springs twisted out of the students’ hands; they lost their patience and dashed their work against the wall.

Two years went by. Some of the older students realized that the Voice would never call on them now, and walked out into Gad, or onto the plains. Two of the apostates found work in the office of Gad’s Headman, where they raised bitter, pointed questions about the Choristry’s tax status. The Choirmen created a committee to handle negotiations with Gad. Then there was fighting in the market, between some students and the boys from the town. The debate over who should punish them was tense.

Three years after he last came back from the Chamber, Father Pulli hung himself in his office. It was days before they found him. Others followed, as if Pulli’s death had finally given them license.

They still went down onto the plains sometimes, and the plainsmen were still grateful for their medicines, but it was hard to find any song to sing them. And the plainsmen kept their children back, if they were elder sons or useful on the farm or in the business; they brought only surplus children to be tested. The Choirmen couldn’t bring themselves to take the sniveling, distrustful infants, even if they showed promise. They couldn’t see the point.

Gad was no longer willing to supply the Choristry, and the Choristry was no longer willing to share with Gad, so they started to trade. They put Arjun to work on the accounts, with Father Uttar’s group, for a couple of years. He believed the Headman’s office was cheating them. He made a report to the committee, and negotations went on over his head. The graft continued and his next report was ignored. He supposed they got something in exchange for turning a blind eye, but he never knew what it was. He couldn’t see the purpose of what he was doing.

The Voice kept him going. He held it close as long as he could, but it grew pale and thin and brittle, slipping away like any other childhood memory.

W
orking in the archives, digging through forgotten texts, Arjun conceived a plan. He went to Father Julah first. He sat on the edge of the sofa and thought about how to make his point.