Alison Croggon - [Pellinor 04]

by The Singing (lit)

  She paused, and then directed a sharp glance at Cadvan. "In a way, I don't know why the idea upsets you so much," she said. "Doesn't the Balance talk about the Dark and Light within you? Haven't you said often that you cannot perceive the Light without the Darkness? And surely that's what I want to do?"

  Cadvan looked taken aback. "Yes, you're right," he said. "And there is a Balance to be found. But there is a darkness in you, Maerad, that makes me wary; it is not of a kind that I have felt before. I have tried to speak of it to you." A shadow passed over his face as he recalled their worst quarrel, a breach that had almost ended in both their deaths. "I fear that in that dark­ness, there is no Balance. Or, perhaps, that there is not any kind of Balance as Bards understand it."

  "Perhaps the Knowing of the Bards doesn't cover every­thing there is to know," said Maerad.

  "Barding does not pretend to hold all knowledge," said Cadvan, his voice hard. Maerad looked away. "All the same, do not think to hold the Elementals as all-wise, Maerad, merely because they have Knowing that we do not."

  Maerad thought of the cold, arrogant face of Enkir. "Some Bards do believe that their Knowing is above any other kind," she said.

  "Aye," said Cadvan, catching her thought. "But those Bards do not observe the Balance, Maerad. Their minds are all too lit­eral, and brook no contradiction. But we could argue of the Balance all day, and still get no closer to the truth. I return to my earlier question: what do you plan to do?"

  Maerad drew her cloak around her and leaned closer to the fire, feeling its healing warmth on her wind-chapped cheeks. "I will try to see if I am bigger," she said. "I was thinking—when I change into wolfskin, I go inside, deeper and deeper and deeper, until I have no Name at all. And when I fought with the Landrost, I went out, further and further and further, until I was so far away I no longer knew who I was, or even what I was."

  She sat back on her heels and brushed her hair out of her eyes.

  "So I thought, what if I do neither of these things, but try to stay where I am, and see if I can become more? I mean, perhaps when I go in or out, I am like a spear, a narrow thing, so I can pierce through all those layers of being. But perhaps I need to be—well, something like a lake. Something broad as well as deep and high." She looked up, frowning with concentration, and when she met Cadvan's intent gaze, her brow cleared and she suddenly laughed. "I suppose I've just talked a mountain of nonsense!"

  Cadvan did not smile. "It might not be the most common of sense," he said. "But I do not think you speak nonsense, Maerad of Pellinor."

  Cadvan insisted that Maerad be prepared for her experi­ment, although he said that she would probably sense best what she should do. He had decided to cast a glimveil over their camp, in case the release of magery attracted unwelcome attention; although he thought privately that if Maerad did suc­ceed in unlocking her full powers, no charm he could make could possibly contain or conceal them.

  Maerad pondered for a short time, and then washed her face and hands in rainwater collected in a pool on the rocks nearby. As she did, she remembered vividly the preparation she had made for her meeting with Inka-Reb, the powerful Dhillarearen in the far north to whom she had journeyed with her cousin Dharin in search of the Treesong. She had not thought about Inka-Reb much since; her life had been full of so many things, and that meeting had been strange and disturb­ing. She saw his bulky, huge figure clearly in her mind's eye, naked, smeared with ash and fat, squatting by the fire in his cave, and she remembered the wolves who surrounded him— the same wolves who had later accepted her as one of their own. Inka-Reb had an inner power that awed her. Perhaps if anyone could teach her how to come fully into her Gift, he could; but even if she struggled all the way north again, she guessed that he would probably refuse. In this matter, she was on her own. She thought that perhaps Inka-Reb might not dis­approve of what she was trying to do. He was, after all, con­temptuous of both the Dark and the Light.

  When she returned from washing herself, she suggested that she and Cadvan bring out their lyres, which lay, untouched since Innail, in their packs. He looked at her in surprise, but brought out his lyre without further comment. Maerad held hers in the crook of her arm, gazing thoughtfully at the inscrutable runes that decorated its plain wood. She knew what they were now; they were the runes of the Treesong, its power captured and written down by the great Afinil Bard Nelsor, in the days of the Dhyllin. But she still didn't know how to make them sing, how to release them back to the Elidhu.

  "I thought," said Maerad, clearing her throat, "I thought that we could sing "The Song of Making.'"

  Cadvan looked pleased, but only said, "Your wish is my command."

  Maerad felt unaccountably nervous, as if she were perform­ing in front of a hall of critical Bards, instead of in the empty wilderness. She held her lyre in her hands, and let the magery rise within her until she was surrounded by a nimbus of light, and her left hand was whole again. She nodded to Cadvan, and struck the opening chords.

  They sang in close harmony, Cadvan's baritone and Maerad's pure, husky voice filling their shelter, and Maerad felt all her sorrow and anxieties lift and dissolve in the sheer beauty of the music.

  "First was dark, and the darkness Was all mass and all dimension, although without touch And the darkness was all colors and all forms, although without sight

  And the darkness was all music and all sound, although

  without hearing And it was all perfumes, and all tastes, sour and bitter and

  sweet But it knew not itself.

  And the darkness thought, and it thought without mind And the thought became mind and the thought quickened And the thought was Light, was the Light in darkness, And where Light fell, there was its shadow, And the shadow moved and a dark eye opened ..."

  It was the first song Maerad had chosen to sing in her day­long preparation to meet Inka-Reb. She had been taught this song when she was a child, and had heard it many times in the past year; and every time she heard it, it showed her new, more complex meanings. As she sang the opening stanzas, she realized how deeply it chimed with her recent thoughts. I need, she thought, my own dark eye to open ...

  As the final chords died on the air, she bowed her head and let the light of magery die out of her, and both she and Cadvan were silent for a long time. Finally Maerad lifted her head and looked Cadvan straight in the eye.

  "I will begin now," she said.

  Cadvan nodded. He did not seem in the least afraid, but he looked very sad, as if he were bidding Maerad farewell as she left on a long journey.

  Maerad took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

  She entered the darkness that was her inner self, the place from which she began all her magery. The desire to move on was strong within her; from this place, she would either plunge down through her deeper selves or quest outward with the heightened perceptions that the darkness generated. With an effort of will she remained just where she was, sus­pended on the threshold of possibility, waiting to see if any­thing might happen.

  Nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. Maerad found it hard to concentrate; in this place, she felt blurred, as if she were only half present. She tried to keep focused and alert, to feel the mysterious contours of this inner world, attempting to sense any thickening of shadow around her; but nothing seemed to happen. She began to think that she had been mistaken, that perhaps this was not the correct place to begin, when she noticed that there seemed to be a faint illu­mination, as subtle as starlight, growing around her, as if her inner eyes were adjusting.

  After a while she was sure that her awareness had grown inside the space, but it was happening so gradually that she almost hadn't noticed. Again she felt the desire to move on (was it onwards? she wondered briefly to herself: in this place there was no sense of dimension, no sense of time). But again she resisted the urge, and stayed where she was, concentrating on the thought of making herself bigger. Bigger? said the voice in her head again; all you are trying to fill up is you
rself, this makes no sense ... As soon as her doubts voiced themselves, she lost her focus, and the seeming illumination vanished. She almost with­drew in frustration; while it wasn't exactly unpleasant to be in this strange limbo, it wasn't pleasant either. But a stubbornness kicked inside her, a refusal to give up at the first hurdle. She tried again, this time without letting her doubt rise to the sur­face of her mind.

  Slowly she regained her focus, holding herself in a strangely agonizing pose of suspension. This time the dim illu­mination—if that was what it was—arrived a little more swiftly. She still couldn't sense anything about this inner space; it’s strange formlessness simply existed around her (or within her) without revealing any kind of contour. She wondered whether she should exercise some kind of will rather than the passivity she was having such difficulty maintaining, or whether to do so might obliterate what little she could already sense. At first she decided against it, but when nothing further happened, she began to feel impatient. She didn't want to go anywhere; but she did want to know more about where she was. She thought of her earlier idea, that she wanted to be like a lake, and imagined herself as a great body of water, as form­less as this faintly glimmering darkness, pushing outward in all directions, filling it up.

  At first it seemed to work; or at least, the lumination began to coalesce into tiny, blurred points of light. The dim lights looked like stars seen through a mist. She was at first astonished: surely it was, not just like starlight, but starlight itself? Was she full of secret constellations? And then another sense began to rise within her, a fluidly brilliant perception unlike any of her normal six senses, although this too seemed blurred, like a song that she knew intimately, but that evaded her recognition because it ran beneath her hearing. Or perhaps it was like a pic­ture that she couldn't quite see, a half-remembered image from her childhood, perhaps . . . only it was really like none of these things, but something else entirely that she had no words for. But neither of these things—the stars, if they were stars, or this other, new perception—became any clearer, although now she strained to perceive them.

  The feeling of suspension, of being neither here nor there nor even in between, of being unnaturally still rather than natu­rally in motion, was beginning to be unbearable, a kind of suf­focation of her mind. It grew until she thought she couldn't stand it, that she would have to move outward or inward, any­where but where she was, and she felt a helpless anger welling up through her. It was then that she remembered her reason for being there. Up until now, in the sheer strangeness of this limi-nal no-space, she had forgotten it, as completely as the most important details of a dream slip from the waking mind.

  Normally Maerad would have pressed this anger down, and attempted to keep her thoughts cool and rational. Anger only possessed her in extreme situations where it was powerful enough to outstrip her conscious control. This time, with an effort of will, she allowed it to grow. At first she disliked the feeling almost as much as the suffocation that had prompted it; she felt a quiver of fear as its red tide rose within her. Like the flood, it brought with it a strange detritus; random fragments of memory swirled through her, things she hadn't thought about for years. Old slights unanswered, injuries unrevenged, injustices suffered—all trivial events that she had at the time set aside, too proud to respond to—returned with their original force, their humiliating stings undiminished. On their heels came memories that were not so trivial: her mother, broken and defeated, dying in the squalid slaves' dormitory in Gilman's Cot; her father's murder during the sack of Pellinor; the point of Enkir's dagger at her childish throat as he blackmailed her mother into revealing where Hem was taken to be hidden. All her lost, blasted childhood. And all the deaths that had followed her: Dernhil, Dharin ...

  None of these things was fair, none of them was just, none was her fault. Each memory possessed her, filling her with bit­ter despair, and then a terrible hatred tore through her like raw flame. She cared about nothing except her own pain, her loss, her maimed life ... for a moment she wanted to howl, and she almost sank out of the protean darkness into her wolfskin; but some remnant of her purpose remained, and she stopped her­self, pulsing with an extreme, amorphous hatred. And within her, as if her hatred and anger had undammed a violent river, there rushed a brilliant, luminous sense of power, as deadly and implacable as a flood, as a wolf at the kill.

  A thrill went through her, and she forgot her hatred; now she basked in the pure pleasure of power. She had felt some­thing like this when she had first become a wolf, delighting in her physical strength; it had felt something like this when she had killed the Kulag, although she had dreaded that joy. But now she saw clearly the dark coils woven into the bright cur­rents that coursed through her being. She could do anything. She could kill; she could destroy; she could reach out her hand and shrivel the root of all living things; or lean forward to kiss the dead into life. And the thought did not shock her.

  She looked around her and saw the stars, bright and huge as she had never seen them, aligned in patterns that were made legible by the other sense that had so puzzled her earlier. It was a sense that could trace fields and vortices of energy; she felt how the stars moved each in its orbit, how the earth rolled beneath her, how the tides undulated to the moon; she heard the slow pulse of rock, the quick heartbeat of birds. She was suddenly aware of Cadvan's stubborn, intent presence, his thoughts bent solely on her, and she knew that he had been watching her for hours, and that the sun had long set. It was now deep night, under a clear and moonless sky thick with an infinity of stars.

  She widened her field of perception and her being filled with awareness. She heard voices echoing, many voices, cries and whispers and howls, and she could sense dim presences, outlined with a vagrant luminosity. She knew without thinking that these were the dead in the Hollow Lands, the faint murmur of their voices arcing across uncounted years, the warmth of their hands vibrating still in the stones they had raised, in the tombs they had dug beneath the stones. She cast wider still, curious and exhilarated by this new sense, and felt the dark presence of Hulls, not far away, not close, and she knew that their heads were raised, questing, and their nostrils flared as they caught the scent of the power that briefly touched their minds. For the first time she did not fear them; contempt curled in the depths of her being. They were nothing, no more than wisps of smoke on the wind.

  She hunted further still, learning as she went, refining and directing this new sense. She knew by the alignment of her inner stars that she was questing south, over the drenched low­lands. She heard the voices of those who had drowned, the grief of the homeless, the panicked lowing of cattle, the sharp fear of goats and sheep, the feathered terror of birds, the slow agony of trees. She paused, dizzied and confused by the chaotic babble of presences. She was no longer certain what the present meant;

  the voices came from the present, but she could hear also into the recent past, and behind that, fainter voices rose through the years, through decades and centuries, stretching back to a time that she could barely comprehend.

  In all this cacophony, she sought one particular light, one particular smell, one particular voice, one particular time: now. A word formed in her mind, a word of the Speech, and it hung before her like silver fire, one utterly clear thing in this world of shifting shadows and light, and all her desire flowed into it, and it intensified to an unbearable brilliance. Riik. Crow. The silver flame poured through her and became a voice, and she sought through the lowlands, through all the voices, all the dead, all the living, and found the one person whose Truename it was, the one person who would hear his Name coursing through his blood like fiery bells, like the voice of starlight. Riik, she said, Riik, my brother. Come to me.

  Leagues away, in a shepherd's hut on a dark hill, in the nameless depths of sleep, Hem started awake and scrambled to his feet, looking around him with wild eyes. "Maerad!" he said, and stumbled out of the hut's low door. "Maerad?" And then his earth sense rose inside him, a hunger that pulled
him with a force so powerful that he almost doubled over with the pain of it.

  Come to me, said Maerad.

  Hem realized, with a disappointment that hit him almost as painfully as his earth sense, that Maerad was not there. But the force of her summoning had been so strong that he could almost see the way toward her, like a shimmering pathway of silver through the darkness. It was as if Maerad were the moon rising over a calm sea, and the path toward her was a road of white ripples that swept northward from Hem's feet.

  I will come to you, he cried, but the summoning had released him, and he didn't know if she heard his answer. Maerad, I'm coming.

  XIV

  NEWS OF HULLS

  H

  EM sat down on the dew-damp grass, weak with the shock of what had just happened, and stared north­ward over the shadowy hills that humped darkly under the star-strewn sky, and which now seemed emptier than ever.

  Maerad. He had been so sure that she was just outside the hut, calling him; he could have sworn that he could smell her, a faint, sweet musk on the night air. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and ordered his distracted thoughts. The blazing path­way he had seen had now faded, but he felt its pull vividly; he knew, at last, exactly where to go. His first impulse was to go back into the hut and wake Saliman and leave at once, but he thought again and decided to wait until morning.