Sword and Song

by Kate Story

  “Sure, sure,” people murmur.

  There’s maybe a hundred of them, packed together in a basement hall still damp from the great wave.

  “They say it was for that, but I know different. My brother, he’s active with the resistance. ‘New laws for new times,’ the Council’s always saying. Meaning, ‘in with us and to jail with the rest of them.’”

  “Half of them inside are there for so-called dissidence,” says a man so dark that the light on his skin gleams blue. “My son, for certain, and my wife.”

  “And they’re not convicted. Just accused,” adds the garrulous woman with the baby.

  “The Council,” someone says, and some let fly with a gob over their shoulder; most just mime spitting, but there’s no mistaking the disgust.

  The jail, the Council Farm—when Rowan hears about them he thinks of concentration camps, or Pol Pot, or his mother’s story of the vast state farms in Ethiopia where so many starving were sent in the eighties under the ruse of receiving aid. The images are terrible: people falling aside, curling like burning paper under the sun.

  “And I’ve heard that sometimes, they get sent down South.”

  “South?” The woman with the baby shudders. “I hope not.”

  South, where Ophelia’s Cinnamon Lake is, and her city—what had she called it?—almost like Kalmar. Calabar?

  “What’s wrong with the South?” It’s his first question. For most of the gathering, he’s just been sitting mute, next to the brothers.

  “They’ve all gone cracked down South.”

  “I hear they’ve gone to sacrifice. Animals, and . . . the halves, and humans.”

  “They’ve all gone nuts down there.” The woman clucks to the baby, who is beginning to fuss. “Haven’t they, my sweet? Right cracked they are, my love.”

  “What are the halves?” Rowan murmurs to Yishay.

  “Why, the half-humans. Centaurs and fauns and mermaids and so on.”

  Centaurs? Fauns? Mermaids?

  But more voices join in, and more. The South is insane, criminal, in a state of permanent hedonism under the influence of mass delusions. However much they despise and fear the Council, the South and its demented decadence is a topic they really warm to.

  “What can I do?” Rowan says this for Yishay and Yonah’s ears only, but the dark man overhears.

  “What can you do?”

  The crowd gradually falls silent.

  The dark man stands. “What can you do? You’re a political symbol. The Council is afraid of you. Don’t you understand? You’re the first thing they’ve been afraid of in . . . well, in years! Ask yourself, why haven’t they executed you or put you into the Council Farm? It’s not because you two—” and here he looks at the Whetung brothers “—managed to spirit him away so effectively. Don’t flatter yourselves. They know where he is. Some of these people—” and he looks out over the crowd “—are informers, mark my words. No, they’re afraid.”

  Murmurs of protest and agreement bubble up around the circle.

  The baby woman raises her voice. “They’re waiting for him to do something, to justify putting him away.”

  “The Council doesn’t know where he is,” Yonah says firmly, standing up.

  “He is safe, for now,” Yishay adds, standing next to his brother. They are massive as trees, and the rest of the group fall silent.

  “But it’s only a matter of time,” the dark man insists, his voice dropping into the silence like cold water. “And when the time comes . . .”

  “I’ll be a sitting duck,” Rowan mutters. His words skitter around the stone space like a bird on the wing. Everyone hears. With a flush, he notices the pretty red-haired girl looking straight at him, then down at her hands clasped in her lap.

  “So you must scare them,” the dark man says. “Scare them enough that you stay free.”

  Chapter Forty

  Everything Will Change

  The meeting disperses. The blue-black man, whose name is Bob, walks some way with Rowan. It has begun to rain, a misting drizzle. The Whetungs walk up ahead, talking together in low voices.

  “Bob?” Rowan has to ask. Everyone else he’s met here has a more exotic name than Bob.

  “Yes.” The man seems proud. “My family name is very common: Song Tao. So my parents gave me something extraordinary on my name day.”

  Bob is an agitator. He is fighting to get his son from the Council farm, and fighting to find out where the Council sent his wife, who disappeared almost a year ago.

  “How old is your son?”

  “Younger than you. Thirteen years.”

  “And he’s in the jail?”

  Bob looks at him strangely. “Age is no factor. They put people inside. All your family, so you can do nothing. Like me.”

  They walk in silence.

  “You could do something,” Bob says to Rowan.

  “Me?”

  “You are a symbol.”

  Rowan looks at Bob. In the light of the small fires, hissing in the fine rain, his eyes are hard, his mouth is set.

  “Bob, I’m not a symbol. I’m a . . . I’m a kid. I don’t know anything about this place!”

  “You carry the sword! You could visit the Council. Make a demand.”

  “Hasn’t someone already tried that? You?”

  “I am not allowed into the chamber. Only officials are allowed. Not like the old days, when it was public. Someone tried to assassinate the imposter Render; that was their excuse. They used to meet in the great meeting place, made for all to enter!” Bob flings his arms out like the chamber spans all the great outdoors, horizon to horizon.

  At that moment the ground trembles. The four of them stop, wait. It passes.

  “Soon.” Bob looks up into the night. “It’s coming. A split. The world splits, and it is the Year’s End!” Bob’s voice vibrates with excitement. He grips Rowan’s arm. “And everything will change!” He pauses. “Or the entire world will crack in two and fall into the ocean.”

  Rowan takes a deep breath. “Ari told me that last time, there was a . . . some kind of failure. That someone came from my world, and usually that would fix things somehow. But this time, it didn’t work.”

  Bob shakes his head. “That is arcane knowledge. I do not know about that. No one does. Maybe the real Render, if he exists. Maybe that Mender down south, she might know.”

  “Mender? There’s someone called Mender?”

  “So it is said.”

  “Along with mermaids and centaurs?” Rowan feels an exhausted, hysterical desire to start laughing and never stop. He steadies himself, and is proud when the next sentence comes out with barely a tremor in his voice. “Could the Render—the real Render—help me get Ari out of the Council farm-jail?”

  Bob laughs, a short, sharp bark. “No one’s seen him for years and years. Most people believe that the imposter is the Render, as he claims to be. The Render is gone, boy. That’s what I believe. You must do this on your own.”

  “The Whetungs say—”

  “The Whetungs,” hisses Bob, “mean only good. But if they have it their way, you will live in their cellar forever. Safe, and ineffective. Until the tremors get so bad that Antilia splits in two and we all drown. There’s no one to tell you what to do, boy. You must decide.”

  “Ari says the Render is alive and can tell me what I’m doing here. What I’m supposed to do . . .”

  Rowan trails off at the look on Bob’s face. There are tears in his eyes—yes, its tears and not rain—they spill down his cheeks. “Then we must liberate your friend.”

  “We?”

  “I will help you. Anything to get you to act. You are my only hope.” He grips Rowan’s hand. “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, Rowan thinks.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Play Something From Hell

  The next morning Rowan is awoken early by the scent of baking. He emerges from his basement lair to find Yishay covered in flour, and the t
able covered in little brown cakes.

  “For Great Night,” he says, rapping Rowan’s knuckles with a knife hilt when he reaches for one. “Do you not have this where you come from?”

  “Great Night? No. Please, I’m starving.”

  “It’s bad luck to eat one before sundown. Here,” he says, and he spears some dubious-looking meat on the end of the knife. Rowan accepts it gratefully.

  “What’s Great Night?” he asks, mouth full of something that is a bit like beef jerky but probably isn’t.

  “The whole city celebrates. It marks the year’s ending and the beginning of spring.”

  “So everyone wanders around eating cake?”

  “Everyone dresses in disguise and comes calling.”

  “Like Hallowe’en,” Rowan mutters.

  “Hallow—what?”

  “A sort of thing we do where I come from, but in the fall.” Rowan searches his memory. “It’s supposed to be a night that the dead walk.”

  “Ah! We, too, remember our dead from the past year on this night. With the Blot.”

  “Blot?”

  “Offering, I suppose. You put out food they would have liked. Remember them and hope for good things in the year to come.” Yishay hesitates. “Too many, these years. So many dead.”

  Yonah sticks his head out of the side room that serves as his bedroom, breaking into his half-brother’s despond. “There are many celebrations: stilt dancing, and grab-the-god-by-the-beard. And there’s the Hobby Horse, and the Bloated Calf.” He rubs his hands. “And Fang the Fiend. That’s Yishay’s favourite. You cover your face so no one knows who you are.”

  “Sounds terrifying.”

  “No, it is great fun. Great Night!”

  “But we will be staying here, my darling.”

  “Too dangerous,” Yishay agrees.

  Rowan paces around the little room. “Look, if everyone is in disguise, we could go out, couldn’t we? Put on some kind of appropriate mask or . . . well, whatever people wear?”

  “You’re too tall. You’ll be recognized.”

  “But if people are on stilts I won’t stand out, right? And if people wear masks . . . I can dance on stilts. I can!” Rowan wants so badly to get out of the house and explore the city. “Please?” He sounds like a little kid. “How can I help the people if I don’t even know who the people are?”

  —

  For some reason the brothers capitulate.

  They like danger too much, Rowan thinks, to pass on this calculated risk. “You will stay by our side,” they warn him.

  Rowan can hear the beat of drums and the clanging of bells, starting at sundown, and starting then, too, children come to the door for the cakes. “They will soon be home in bed, however,” Yonah says, visiting Rowan huddled in the basement. Hidden, safe, anxious, and bored. “Great Night is not for children.”

  The real celebrations begin at midnight. It’s called the Rush, they tell Rowan, and the Rush goes until the dawn. By the time midnight rolls around, they’ve let Rowan emerge from the basement and outfitted him in Yonah’s costume from last year, something they call Bush Man: green rags and bits of bush, fresh-cut, leaves attached. A scratchy beard made all of leafy twigs is tied around his chin, and he dons short, awkward stilts. “It’s the man gone to earth, man gone mad, lost his mind.”

  Something about donning the costume fills Rowan with dread, although he can’t say why.

  “The one who fights The Dragon.”

  “Like my sword?” The big knight stabbing the smaller one, the dragon.

  Yishay nods. “On Great Night we celebrate the ending of the year, chaos growing stronger, the borders between the worlds of the living and the dead coming thin. Yes, like your sword.”

  Rowan has no idea what he’s talking about, but at that moment his stilts get tangled and he crashes onto the remaining cakes, squashing them.

  Finally, it is midnight and they head out into the Rush. Yishay wears a red mask with horns, a top hat, and big boots, one with some animal’s hoof sewn over the toe. It’s so like the Devil that Rowan wonders if that’s indeed what it is.

  “Devil? What is that? No, no, Fang the Fiend,” Yishay corrects Rowan. The outfit gives Rowan the creeps.

  “He’s always Fang,” says Yonah, rolling his eyes. He, on the other hand, is nothing but funny, dressed as a woman with a large, swollen belly and a veil across his face. He gyrates. “Aren’t I a pretty one?”

  Yishay makes a show of averting his gaze. “If you want to turn me to stone, and not in a good way,” he says, “you’ll keep carrying on like that.”

  “Ah, my charms work their magic!” Yonah shakes his nonexistent breasts. Yishay makes ostentatious retching noises. “My brother,” says Yonah, “does not like the ladies so much.”

  “Even if I did,” Yishay retorts, “your costume would turn me queer. And as it is, you confirm me utterly in my convictions.”

  Yonah bursts out laughing.

  Yishay’s gay? Rowan hadn’t realized. Not that it matters.

  He takes a few practice steps up and down the street on the short stilts; he’s wobbly, but acceptable. He removes them, tucking them under his arm, and then they all head upwards to the centre of the city.

  A nearly full moon shines down, bathing everything in startlingly clear, bluish light. The small propitiatory fires still sparkle on many doorsteps.

  “The main gathering is in the city square,” Yonah explains. “There will be dancing there, and booths selling food, drink, gew-gaws. Music.”

  The music and clamour gets louder the higher up they go, until they turn a corner and the square spreads out below them. The sound, the Rush, crashes over them in a wave. Bells, drums, flutes, singing. Hands clapping, throats open and yelling. People swirl below in a chaos of dancing, talking, gesticulating. Yes, many people tower over others on stilts. Rowan sees also horses’ heads, dragon masks with undulating tails, tall bearded figures, people draped in ghostly white bearing small lights.

  Lit by many torches and lanterns, the city centre opens out beneath the sky. It is more or less a square, paved with cobblestones. Far off to one side rises the big building with the dome, semi-collapsed, dark and abandoned; he and Ari must have passed by it on the other side when they came up from the quay. Rowan can smell meat cooking, and smoke from wood fires. His mouth waters.

  “In summertime the city market is here,” Yishay’s voice comes muffled through his red, horned mask. “Although now the only food for sale comes from the Council. Better put those stilts on now, my lovely. You’re not the only tree-tall person in Kalmar, but we don’t want anyone noticing you in particular, now do we?”

  Rowan obediently sits on the street and buckles the stilts to his sneakers, his rags and twigs getting in the way.

  “What are the people in white? The ones with lights?”

  “The myling? Oh, they’re just spirits of dead children.”

  “Just the spirits of dead children?”

  “Yes. All the children who died this past year. Which, due to the Council, is a lot, a lot, a lot.”

  The list of costumes giving Rowan the creeps is growing.

  There are also many people dressed in robes, rather like a toga party. Rowan points one of them out, a man or woman—impossible to tell from afar—on the margins of the gathering, weaving back and forth, staggeringly drunk.

  “People dress in robes to mock the Council.”

  Rowan doubts any real Councilmen will be attending Great Night in the square.

  Stilts on, the brothers help him rise. “Ah, you tried to cop a feel!” shrieks Yonah, slapping his hand away.

  “As if.”

  “You wound my feelings, sir.” He gyrates.

  “Stop it!” his brother grunts. “I thought you were bad as Bush Man. And you, Bush Man. Rowan. You’re supposed to growl and strike around yourself like you’re trying to hurt people.”

  “Oh. I’d really rather not.”

  “Just pretend, lad.”

&n
bsp; “And by the way,” Yonah puts in, “in case you are talking to anyone, don’t let on about Yishay there.”

  “About . . . Yishay?”

  “The Council doesn’t look too kindly on queers. New laws for new times,” Yishay clarifies.

  “I understand.” This Council is looking more and more like a typical totalitarian regime—ultra-right or ultra-left, all the same in the end.

  The ungainly trio descends into the cacophony below.

  Rowan finds it curious that some of the costumes give him a shudder of horror, while others are merely amusing, or incomprehensible. He’s not the only Bush Man, he soon sees. The others do indeed strike out at everyone within reach, and some have extended their arms with sticks; he sees more than one connect full-on, knocking revellers over with a thwack. There are several creepy Devil-like creatures like Yishay, many with a single hoofed foot. And bellied women dancing among the crowd, some obviously men in drag like Yonah, many more convincingly female. Fine gentlemen and beautiful ladies, with cow tails trailing out from under their long skirts. Drunken fake Councilmen weaving between revellers. Dragons. Hobby horses rising between people’s legs like giant obscene phalluses, mouths opening and closing through a sort of string mechanism, with nails for teeth. And everywhere waft the white-clad ghosts of dead children, the myling.

  There are booths, hawkers selling jewelry and clothing, lanterns and knickknacks; braziers wafting the scent of roasting meat into the air, driving Rowan mad. But when he sees the booth with the bright awning, even thoughts of food are driven from his head.

  The girl from the meeting stands behind it, the redheaded girl.

  She is dressed as a very pretty Devil figure—what had the brothers called it?—Fang the Fiend, that’s it. Her mask is dangling around her neck, and her top hat sits askew on her curls. She is arguing with great animation, hands gesticulating, and a couple in front of the booth argue back.