Till Human Voices Wake Us

by Victoria Goddard

  Raphael sifted through various thoughts, wondering what he could ask that would be least dangerous. “High court?”

  “Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know, would you? I’m the king.”

  He asked, because with Kasian one couldn’t really be sure, “Of where?”

  “The Realm, of course. The Tanteyr Realm. Only kingdom I’m remotely entitled to! Though I’d be king of Ixsaa in a heartbeat.”

  “Ixsaa—”

  “I know, I know, they’re set on rule-by-committee. Democracy, if you’d rather. It’s not a particularly efficient system, I don’t think. No one who’d actually be any good at running a country ever seems to stand for election. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You’ve got the broad outlines for me. Fall of Astandalas—Kilturn—oh, yes, I went to the University of Riddles in Ixsaa for a bit,  before being suspended, whereupon I went exploring up the Whitefeather, found the Realm, and was offered the kingship. King I have been since my—our—eighteenth naming-day. There you are. What about you?”

  Raphael considered all the options available to him in response to that question and settled for, “I act.”

  “In what?”

  Everything, he thought, gazing balefully at a shoal of runners rounding the corner of Lambeth Bridge. “Plays, mostly.”

  “And you’ve done that since we were fourteen?”

  Perhaps being a king meant Kasian had learned to watch what he said, for he did not give voice to his incredulity. Raphael at fourteen had been brutally shy and stuttered. “Also a bit of magic.”

  Kasian threw out his hands in fierce mockery. “I do believe that was very nearly a complete sentence! Do you enjoy magic? You hadn’t any before the Fall. I daresay you’re not the only one to have had magic woken in them by what happend. Have you lived here, on Ysthar I mean, since then?”

  “Yes.”

  “From what I’ve heard, that’s been a lot longer than on Daun—centuries and centuries, not just a handful of years off, like Alinor. I suppose they say it’s been nearly a thousand years on Zunidh, too. It must have something to do with Zunidh and Ysthar being the old centre of the Empire … Has it really been that long, for you?”

  “Yes.”

  Vigils for the dead, phoenix years, a bare few years, sometimes even a decade or two, at any one apparent life, then starting over somewhere else as someone else. Moves of the Game, movements of magic, letters and friendships and enmities and slow crashes of civilizations. The Lord of Zunidh thought the warped time was due to—something he couldn’t actually remember at the moment. He shook his head at himself.

  Kasian caught the movement. “And what are you thinking, to shake your head so, O brother mine?”

  Raphael glowered at the gunmetal river, the flashing white gulls, the neon-bright runners. Beware looking back, Gabriel had said. No—Don’t look back. Don’t. The word rang in his mind like a warning bell. Don’t look back—Don’t look—Don’t—

  He found he did not want to tell Kasian that the end of the world was in three days. Two and a half days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. He did not want to say anything. He wanted simply to keep going, as he always had, smiling politely (he had found his store of polite smiles), running down the centre of his life like a canoeist down the narrows, avoiding such thrown boulders.

  No one was more surprised than he, therefore, to hear himself suddenly ask diffidently, with that finely-gauged disinterest he had worked so hard to make the natural tone of his voice, “Would you like to come to my house?”

  Kasian smiled as sardonically as if he had quoted Aurora. “Very much so.”

  Raphael touched the edge of his magic and stopped dead, the wind circling him like an anxious dog.

  The gulls settled down again in the wake of a boat navigating the bridge piers and the turning tide. The shoal of runners unravelled into jogging units, more than one slowing to gawk at the unexpected sight of film star James Inelu in the park. He tried to calm himself so as to fall back into obscurity, failing miserably. One woman actually stopped to retie her shoelaces just past them, struggling to undo a too-careful knot. Kasian caught Raphael’s distracted glance and gave her such a cheerfully knowing grin that she blushed and ran off with the laces still trailing. As soon as her back was turned Raphael shifted the magics so that he and Kasian were hidden, making a space in his enchantments for his brother. Then once again he found himself frozen in place. He could barely feel the wind nosing at the back of his trouser-legs.

  “Are we going in, Raphael, or shall we stand out here in the rain a while longer?”

  He hadn’t realized it was still raining. Kasian had never enjoyed getting wet unless deliberately in puddles. Raphael liked the rain, how it felt, how it looked, how it sounded. Once he had watched rain fill a new lake in the caldera of a volcano, in those years which were so full of magic he had been able to fly as easily as think.

  All of a heap, like a landslide, it came to him that it really was Kasian standing there outside the door to his house, that it really was Kasian who stood looking at him, that it really was Kasian whom he had just found in the park.

  The air trembled around him. His balance tottered as some great emotion caught the back of his throat. He prevented his immediate instinctive attempt to analyze it by saying, “Come in,” and turned his back on the runners and the gulls and the river and the rain.

  Even to his ears it seemed painfully choked, but Kasian merely smiled and followed him.

  As they walked across the garden in a spiral of confused mist and wind Ishaa flew around the hill like a splash of sunlight, as if to warn or welcome him; but Kasian did not seem to see her.

  ***

  Unsure of what else to do, Raphael made tea. He picked one at random from his collection: Chinese tea, from the mountains like standing waves, famous for their sages clambering up to seek peaches and immortality, as unreally magnificent as Venice. Pouring a second cup Raphael realized that for Kasian tea (which, like roses, grew only on Ysthar of the nine worlds) would seem as flashy an extravagance as black caviar and pink champagne, and in a stifled paroxysm of embarrassment managed to ask, “Are you hungry?”

  They were in the kitchen, Kasian on the stool and Raphael leaning against the stove. The half-wild magic of the house swarmed around them, come like a cat to investigate this intruder. Raphael wove and unwove his shields in quick succession, trying to settle his mind and his body both. His brother was a juddering knot in the room.

  “Yes, I am, as it happens.” Kasian spoke with a disarmingly apologetic smile. “If you don’t mind.”

  Mind was not really the right word. Any notion of hospitality cried for generous food for a stranger, let alone his close kinsman. Closest kinsman. Raphael moved to the cupboard where there was half a loaf of bread; which of course was stale. He put it back and found crackers instead. In the ice box there was cheese and salami and olives, and those were fine. Kasian said, “You don’t have any servants?”

  Raphael turned with a round of Stilton in hand, startled into speech. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  They’d grown up in a civilization that took servants for granted, though their own household—full of children and their parents’ ever-changing rescues, and their parents’ deathly secrets—did not have anyone but someone who occasionally helped with the small magical tasks that were also a usual part of life in Astandalas. In other houses, other lives, he’d had servants. More often been one. Not here, though.

  Kasian was smiling, obviously being polite and ordinarily curious. His expression was so open Raphael marvelled, so free it was from political indifference, so mobile and merry. He made sure his own voice was shaded towards warmth. “I like to do things for myself.”

  “Do you have someone come in to clean?”

  Raphael looked around his kitchen with stranger’s eyes, anxious for what he would see. But it was rigorously clean as a dairy, even the sculpture in the window free of dust so that it
s jewels and gold glowed in the diffuse grey light. “I prefer to do it myself,” he repeated. Forestalling any other questions, he added, “I’ll get another chair.”

  The matching stool was in the conservatory. The moist air embraced him as he passed through it, a steady torrent of growth, the room scented with lemon verbena and nutmeg geranium, loud with the rushing calm of green and growing things in a winter held at bay by glass and steam and subtle magic. There were ripe oranges, a gift from the trees in their tubs to him, from him to his brother. He held them balanced like juggling balls in his left hand, the chair in his right, magic reaching ahead to open the door—when it opened.

  His heart skipped a beat. Kasian grinned and reached to take the chair.

  The humidity beaded on Raphael’s upper lip and brow warned him of physical demands. By natural extension he thought of greater demands, hospitality first in present concern, his wider duty to Ysthar foremost in importance. Even though Kasian would hardly guess it from his behaviour so far, he was quite renowned for his hospitality in other houses. He forced himself to relax, smile thanks. He was the Lord of Ysthar, who was kind to strangers.

  It was easier, he reflected, with strangers.

  He brought plates and glasses and, doubtfully, wine. Kasian opened the bottle handily with a knife from his pocket stabbed into the cork and expertly flicked out, a facility that woke questions Raphael was unprepared to ask. He picked at his food distastefully, hardly able to keep his attention anchored in his body enough to use his hands, let alone care about the food. The salami was richly odorous and the mustard nauseatingly pungent. The untoward tension in the magic as the end of the Game approached had roiled his stomach more than he’d realized.

  Finally Kasian settled back with a contented sigh. Raphael braced himself. His brother began judiciously with compliments, nodding at the mobile in the window. “That’s a wonderful sculpture.”

  “It was a gift.”

  “It’s magnificent. One doesn’t often find gold-and-diamond sculptures in kitchens.”

  “It seemed a good place to put it,” he replied, more defensively than he meant. No one had ever commented on it; but then Kasian was the first person who had ever been inside his home, let alone inside the kitchen. He’d gone there automatically to make tea, not thinking of what it would be like to have someone looking curiously at his place, wanting to read him through this house that was not a set-piece for any role, just the accumulated bric-à-brac of his life.

  Kasian smiled reassuringly. “Just unusual. Though probably you get people telling you that frequently.”

  Raphael was taken aback by that evident desire to reassure, and answered with only slight mendaciousness. “I shouldn’t say frequently.”

  “No? Or do not many people get to eat lunch in your kitchen?”

  Kasian was a king, unused to kitchen hospitality, let alone kitchens untenanted by servants and cooks. Raphael stood. “We can go into the sitting room.”

  Going there was a mistake, he saw, as he saw the room through his brother’s judgmental eyes. The bottom of the original tower, it was a square room, moderately large and high-ceilinged, the walls plastered white over old rough stone. Between the windows three large paintings: trees by Monet, a Turner sea-and-cloudscape, a pointillist scene of his garden he’d done himself. A Chesterfield sofa in old leather that was missing half its buttons, a faded grey-blue wingback chair, two Louis XIV end tables with gilded lions-claw feet. Between all these a beautiful Persian carpet, showing a much-ramified tree in blue and gold and white. Floor of a dark wood nearly black. A fireplace with a sword on the mantelpiece above it.

  The untidiness: the leftover plates and socks from whenever he’d last sat here, the dirty windows he hadn’t cleaned in weeks, the messy pile of books by the fireplace. For the first time in many years Raphael’s glance also registered the bronze-bound wooden chest those books were piled on, an object so long in its position there he’d forgotten its presence. It too was grimy, unpolished, blackened with time. He hurriedly picked up the socks and sank down onto the grey chair. “I … wasn’t expecting anyone over.”

  Kasian took his seat on the couch and regarded the room. Raphael found his assurance discombobulating. His twin said, “I like your house.”

  Shargán’s laws of hospitality stated that one should welcome every unexpected guest as if a long-lost brother. She had given that edict while the Fhiannóriel Palace in Tae Rcatha was being built for her, after she had won the heart and hand of the Lord Phoenix over the course of hunting the White Stag, who grants wishes. That was the palace Kasian lived in. If he chose to call Raphael’s house by the diminutive hianü, which almost meant ‘cottage’, well, he didn’t know that Raphael had built his houselet stone by stone. Raphael spoke carefully. “Thank you.”

  “Aren’t you at all curious why I’m here?”

  He kept his emotions well back from the surface, instead coolly arching his right eyebrow. This only made Kasian laugh merrily. Raphael remembered slowly that they had spent several months when they were twelve learning to perform the gesture. Perhaps Kasian was remembering that, too—Raphael was suddenly mindful of his brother’s likely emotional state on seeing him for the first time in so long, if he’d thought him dead, and said quietly, “Do you want to tell me?”

  Kasian smiled mischievously. “I had a dream.”

  Raphael would have taken this for a joke except that before he did more than consider the possibility his brother amplified: “Do you remember when we tried that old saw about being granted prophetic dreams if you sleep with a phoenix feather under your pillow?”

  Raphael was puzzled, had to deliberately reach far back into memory. Back before the highways and byways of his memory cities, back before he had magic of his own, all the way back to their last year in Astandalas. Their grandmother, living with them for a bare few weeks after she brought Gabriel to stay with them and before she disappeared, had told them all sorts of old stories that their father hadn’t known. Amongst other marvels, the power of a phoenix feather under the pillow to show you the most important thing in your life.

  They were thirteen. They’d tried once, and only once, both of them shattered by the conviction of true reality. Kasian, always a bit more precocious, had dreamed of a woman. Raphael … Raphael had dreamed of a woodland at dawn, of what had turned out to be the day he became the Lord of Ysthar. The most perfectly beautiful day of his life, beautiful enough to carry him through the price he had paid for it in all the long years since.

  “You should smile like that more often,” his brother said matter-of-factly. “You look more real.”

  Raphael froze while the two parts of his mind cleaved together in a wrench of terror. Slowly, carefully, damnably, he reclaimed his features for his self-control. Everything hung on his ability to control himself, his mind, his body, his magic. He would destroy the world if he faltered in his control, and the dragons would tell tales of him as Fulgor did of Urm and Swallow, or Agrinalaine and Ghizhaur. Three days, he thought, three days.

  Kasian went on hurriedly. “A few months ago I was travelling down to Ixsaa when a stranger asked hospitality at my fire. It was a long story, he’d been a merchant ship’s captain, capsized on Colhélhé, had struggled to get home. He’d come by Ysthar, he said, and hoped his cargo of tea would redeem his venture. He told me this because Cael owns his ship, we’d met before. He said he’d met the Lord of  Ysthar, who had given him a gift, a feather of the phoenix of  Ysthar.”

  Cael was their second-oldest brother. Ulass, then Cael, then Tefenadar their older sister. Kasian and Raphael. Liassa, Sharien, the younger girls. What had happened to their other siblings—no, he told himself, no. He wouldn’t ask about them. He’d think about who the merchant ship’s captain could be, to whom he’d given a phoenix feather.

  Raphael drank some wine, hardly noticing that Kasian had refilled his glass. Some months ago on Daun … perhaps late-eighteenth century for him. There had been a man he’d met near A
rchangel in the winter, desperately in need of food, directions, help off the ice floe and onto the land. He’d spoken rough Shaian, and, yes, Raphael had given him a pound of tea and a phoenix feather and a dogsled with supplies to get him to the border with Daun. How remarkable the northern lights had been that winter.

  “He showed me the feather when I asked him. And I—Raphael, I recognized it as Ishaa’s, and I had to—all that time I’d thought you were dead. Yet there was her feather, and I thought, Ysthar has become so strange and isolated since the fall, perhaps you’d been lost there, perhaps you were still alive. So I tried—I slept that night with it below my head—and I dreamed how I travelled to that park, the tower with the clock and the river and the sculpture of the townsmen.”

  Raphael felt all his attention suddenly narrowed into realizing his jaw was clenched. He unclenched it carefully, ears popping. Kasian had come looking for him? Dared he believe that? What could he possibly say in response? Why would Kasian lie? But it was an awfully long way to go just in the hopes that an old fable told the truth.

  (Except that the feather dream had told the truth, that other time, to Raphael. He had found himself in that sunlit wood, where the beech trees stood like cathedral pillars and the winds called out to each other. And neither of them had ever doubted that those dreams were true.)

  He stared unemotionally at the floor for a long while. When he lifted his gaze the first thing he saw was that wooden chest he’d forgotten all about. It shouldn’t have been in that room, really, except that he’d not wanted to touch it, had thrown a cloth over it, then pretended so thoroughly it didn’t exist he was rather surprised his magic hadn’t done that work for him. It was the embodiment of Kasian’s twin Raphael, he thought: ignored, forgotten, hidden, locked away, but still there. Useless, unwanted, an appendix; but still there. Never moved, in case it jostled open. But still there.

  He lifted his gaze higher in faint desire, only to see the sword above the fireplace. His kindled hope faded again into soberer resignation.