A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “What is your name?” Oyemo asked.

  “I’m thirsty,” the ghost pleaded. “Father, you promised, you promised. You left me.”

  “I have no children,” Oyemo said. “And I cannot help you.”

  “I’m so thirsty. Please. Please.”

  Again Oyemo denied it and denied it until it was enraged, and it came through the fence. Oyemo fought it back until sunrise, entangling it in the rope of grass and starlight, but it was so thin that it slipped out of all their knots. At sunrise, it vanished.

  The next month, when Mzuzi was again dark and Jida waxed gibbous, Oyemo had a silver basin that they had filled with water several nights before and left out at night to gather the light of the stars and moons. They sprinkled certain magic herbs across the water and waited for the ghost. It appeared by the fence as expected, and Oyemo said, “I have some water here.”

  “Please!” the ghost cried. “Please! Father! I’m so thirsty!”

  “Where were you left? Why do you thirst?”

  “The well,” the ghost whispered. “The water became poisoned. You left; you told me to stay with the goats. You promised to bring water. You promised you’d come back. Two days, you said.” The ghost’s voice had become angrier and angrier. “On the third day, I killed a goat to wet my tongue with its blood. And the fourth, and the fifth. The other goats started dying. Their blood was thick and dark and sluggish, as parched as mine. On the twelfth day, I laid down in the shade and died. Why didn’t you come back for me, Father?”

  Oyemo shook their head. “A broken promise is a terrible thing. Come through, lost one. Come and drink.” They had laid the grass-and-starlight rope in a snare-circle with the basin at its center, and when the ghost came through the fence and bent its head to the surface of the water, drinking deep in huge gulps until its belly bulged, Oyemo tightened the snare and caught it. The ghost sighed, long and low, and raised its face. Oyemo could see it now, the starlight in the water lighting it from the inside—the ghost was a young boy, fifteen or sixteen, and his eyes were clear now.

  “You’re needed above,” Oyemo said kindly. “There are lanterns to be lit and tended. You’re needed.”

  “Yes,” the ghost whispered, and turned his gaze to the sky. “Is my father there?”

  “Go find out.” They loosened the snare, and the ghost slipped out of its loops, becoming blurry and indistinct, and it rose in the air and wriggled like a minnow into the sky.

  Oyemo left before dawn, taking no payment from the villagers, and in the dark of the next moon, they sewed the ghost’s tale into their blanket with silver thread like starlight.

  * * *

  31. Goddammit. Is nothing sacred?

  TEN

  Before I write about Sterre,32 I have to explain something else. I thought for a long time about what tongue I wanted to write this in. It had to be something besides the Spraacht, to add a layer of protection should these pages be found or glimpsed accidentally, before I have a chance to burn them myself. So I weighed my options: The cold distance of Dveccan, to keep me disciplined and unbiased? The expressiveness of Echareese, like a pure scream of feeling on the page? The easy poetry of Avaren?

  But here I am writing in the soft flowing lines and curls of Xerecci.33 My handwriting isn’t too bad. The decision was really just . . . anything but Kaskeen. Anything but my master-Chant’s native tongue.

  Xerecci is comfortable. Cozy. Familiar. It’s flexible and adaptive, I don’t need a special pen, and the alphabet is designed for swift writing, like pouring a thought out of an inkwell. I don’t have to slow down much, writing in Xerecci. Hrefni, my mother tongue, doesn’t have a writing system of any kind of convenience (just runes, which are rudimentary, more for labeling things than writing at length), nor the complex vocabulary I imagine I’m going to need if I want to untangle the mess I’ve made of myself.

  The downside of Xerecci is that I’m working in translation,34 and there’s differences between the Heyrlandtsche and the Xerec ways of looking at the world. Xerecci, you see, has only three grammatical genders: he, she, it.

  I don’t feel confident in saying that I entirely understand the Heyrlandtsche gender system quite yet, and I’m hesitant about asking anyone for fear of causing offense. So I’ve just been keeping my ears and eyes open as much as possible, my mouth shut as much as possible, and, when I am obliged to speak, minding my grammar and my manners as scrupulously as I can.

  Here is what I can say with certainty: the Spraacht has six grammatical genders.

  I think that goes the same for social genders, but I haven’t quite pinned down what all of those are just yet. There’s mannen (addressed as Heer) and vrouwen (addressed as Mevrouw), which seem to be the two that you can find pretty much everywhere; and there’s nietsen (Mevriend), who are people without gender—also pretty straightforward. And then there’s vroleischen, tzelven, and loestijren (addressed as Mevrol, Andeer, and Hecht, respectively), which are the ones I’m still getting a handle on, and I don’t want to make any assumptions about them before I’ve kept my mouth shut and my ears open a little longer. I could compare each of them to other people I’ve known and the ways people do things in other places I’ve been, but that doesn’t feel right. Similarities don’t mean it’s the same. Each place has to be understood on its own terms. That’s what Chant taught me—people aren’t the same everywhere. They’re different everywhere, and that’s a good thing because it means I have a job.

  The point of all this was just to reason my way through a linguistic issue: Sterre de Waeyer is a vroleisch and uses the vroleisch grammar when she speaks and writes in the Spraacht—a grammatical nuance that Xerecci definitively lacks. Therefore, because I heard one of clerks in the de Waeyer offices speaking Vintish and refer to Sterre with “pas,” here I will use “she” since that is the closest translation. This whole detour has been far more complicated than necessary, but I think this is important and I wanted to make sure I had everything straight and clear in my own head.35

  Onwards.

  * * *

  32. Oh good, we’re getting even closer to the point. I don’t have much patience left, and I’m just bracing myself for another goddamn weepy tangent or another new bit of heresy.

  33. If I were you, I would have picked Echareese, especially if you were planning on being so whiny.

  34. Which was, again, your choice. I don’t know how you think you have a right to complain about something you chose.

  35. Again, Xerecci isn’t a great choice for this, if such precision mattered to you. Why didn’t you just write in the Spraacht? You could have just called Sterre by zse and had done with it without explanation. You didn’t have to do this work in translation.

  ELEVEN

  The next day, I went back to the de Waeyer offices. Sterre, I found out, is one of the richest people in the city and one of the most successful merchants. She’s stout, strong as an ox even though she must be pushing nearly sixty years old, and as full of fire as anyone half her age. She always wears such nice clothes, too, with froths of ruffled lace at her collar and cuffs, and bright buttons all down her front, and fine rings, different every day except for one—a silver ring with a flattish cabochon of honey-colored amber, etched with a cameo on its underside. And she’s a span and a half taller than I am, which has been catching me off-guard these couple weeks that I’ve been working for her so far—I’ve gotten used to being one of the taller people in the room the last year or so.

  She’s so busy that I probably would have been made to wait a long time if, when I arrived, she hadn’t overheard me telling one of her clerks about the letter of introduction Mevrouw van Meer had given me. She came charging out of the open door of her private office. “You!” she boomed at me. “Van Meer sent you?”

  “He has a letter from her,” her clerk said, and I held it out. Sterre came forward and snatched it out of my hand, ripped it open on the spot and read it, one hand on her hip. “Hm,” she said after a minute. “Hm! That bitch
usually knows what she’s about, I’ll own to that.” She looked me up and down. “Skinny thing, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Says here you’ve got a good dozen or so languages.”

  “I do.”

  “She wouldn’t say something that outlandish without verifying it.” I nearly replied to agree, but she was peering at the letter again, and I don’t think she would have cared about whatever I said. “Oh, and she thinks your manners are nice.” She looked up at me then, giving me a hard look.

  “I do my best, ma’am,” I said.

  “Good.” She folded up the letter and shoved it in a pocket of her skirt. “What’s your name? Van Meer didn’t seem to have verified that.”

  Ylfing, I wanted to say, I almost said.36 “I think she was too busy for formalities,” I said. “Call me Chant, please.”37

  And within the hour, I found myself installed at a clerk’s desk towards the back of her offices, near her private chambers, reading contracts and bills of sale in a dozen languages and translating as meticulously as I could into the Spraacht, the language of Heyrland.

  I’ve been working for Sterre for several weeks now, translating the things that she wants me to translate. It’s been good to get away from Chanting, from doing the things that I always thought I had to do, that I was trained to do. It’s been a relief to use my skills in silence, without an audience. Even when I’m translating aloud between her and a business contact or a customer, I am blissfully invisible. Merely a tool at Mevrol de Waeyer’s disposal. I don’t have to think, and I don’t have to make any decisions.

  I probably would have gone on in that way for a long time except Sterre found out a few days ago what a Chant is, and what they do.

  * * *

  36. I SWEAR TO ALL THE GODS.

  37. What’s wrong with you that that’s so hard to say? It’s been more than a year since the end of your apprenticeship.

  TWELVE

  It happened quite by accident. Last week a new shipment came in, and if I had thought the offices were busy before, that was nothing. There were more bills of sale to translate, and letters, more people to speak to, more mindless errands to run. Before, there hadn’t been much speaking to anyone, except for casual conversation as the few clerks and I passed through the offices together, but with the arrival of the shipment, there were sailors and captains and merchants from other places.

  One of the arrivals was a ship that Sterre had been awaiting for a long time; several months, in fact. It had come, at last, from the southwestern side of the Sea of Serpents, and it bore a cargo of the standard luxuries that you might expect—cloth and spices and unusual things from far-off places. But it held something else, something strange that I hadn’t expected to find somewhere like this.

  I walked in one day and saw Sterre and one of her captains bent over a filthy, twisted, ugly thing on her desk. It was thick with damp soil that crumbled onto the immaculate varnish.

  Sterre looked up when I came in all prepared to settle at my desk, and she gestured me over. “Chant,” she said. “Have a look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A flower.” I must have made some kind of expression, because she and her captain laughed. “We brought in a few crates of them last season and they did well,” Sterre said, touching the root fondly with one finger. “Very well. People like lovely new things, and we Heyrlandtsche love our horticulture particularly.”

  “What kind of a flower is it?” I asked.

  “We call them stars-in-the-marsh,” said the captain.

  There’s this feeling when you almost remember something, when it’s right on the edge of your brain and if you move too suddenly it might fall off and plunge back into the dark below, out of your grasp forever.

  “Lovely things,” Sterre said. “Really lovely. A little clump of long thin leaves at the ground, and one tall stalk, waist-height on your average person, about hip-height on me. And at the top of the stalk . . . ” Sterre made a blooming gesture with her hand. “A single flower, blue-white. And in the dark, it glows. Just a little, just a shimmer, like starlight.”

  “And they smell like rotting death,” the captain laughed. That feeling of familiarity tugged at me again. “Bugs love ’em, though. They fly right in, get stuck, and then the plant sucks them dry.”

  “The smell’s a small price to pay,” Sterre said with a grin. “Master Janssoen bought twenty of them last time. You can smell his garden from a street away, but I’ll be shipwrecked if it isn’t the prettiest one in the city. They grow in great wide fields in the wild, I’m told.”38

  “Where?” I asked. “Where did you get them from?”

  “Kaskinen,” she said, and that’s when my heart stopped.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Yes. I know these. I’ve heard of them.”

  She and the captain both blinked. “Have you indeed?” she said. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, a young world-traveler like you. Have you seen the fields yourself?”

  I hadn’t ever mentioned traveling to her, but she must have deduced it from my languages and manners. I shook my head. “My master-Chant told me about them once, that’s all.”

  “I beg your pardon? Your what?”

  “Oh. My—my master. The man I was apprenticed to.” Damn me. Damn it, Chant.

  My slip there led through a winding conversation of confusion and clarification, and eventually the captain wandered off to attend to his ship, and I was left with Sterre, who kept coming to my desk to ask me more questions—she wanted to know about my master-Chant, who he was, when he’d seen the fields of stars-in-the-marsh, whether we could write to him to ask about them. Or, better yet, if we could send for him to come here.

  These last two hit me right in the gut, and I couldn’t help but choke out, “No. No, we can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly. “Anyway, I wouldn’t know how to find him even if I wanted to. Chants don’t stay in one place for a very long time.”

  And then she gave me a puzzled look, and I remembered I was trying to avoid explaining to her what a Chant was. Too late, I thought, but then it turned out that perhaps it wasn’t too late: “Oh, you must mean your family,” she said with a sudden laugh. “Funny surname, Chant is, but I suppose it’s yours.” Another faintly puzzled look, laced with amusement. “This whole time, you’ve never told me your given name?”39

  Cold gripped my heart again. “Um. No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, what is it? I can’t go on calling you Chant now that I know the truth.”

  “You can,” I said quickly. “You definitely can.”

  “But I don’t call any of my other workers so coldly,” and she waved her hand at the rest of the offices—which is true, she really doesn’t do that. She is a very fair and kind employer; she calls all her workers by their given names, and they do the same to her. She inquires after their families—I even once saw her write out a note of condolence to the young daughter of Heer Quirijn (one of the clerks), whose puppy had died. “Do you dislike your name? I know something about that.” She laughed loudly. “My first one always chafed like ill-fitting boots. If you don’t like yours, you could always pick a new one.”

  “No,” I whispered. “I like my name very much. I just . . . can’t tell you.”40

  “I don’t follow, lad; you’ll have to be more clear.”

  “I’m not allowed to tell you my name,” I said. “I gave it up. I don’t have it anymore.”

  “Eh? What in the world are you talking about? Family tradition?”

  “Chant isn’t my surname,” I said, abruptly too exasperated to bother with the pretense and evasion any more. “It’s a title. It’s what I do. It’s what I am.”

  “A translator? An excellent translator under the employ of the best merchant in the city?” She put her hands on her hips and gazed down at me, half-smiling.

  And then I had to explain—only a translator by accident, really.
She’d been more accurate when she called me a world-traveler, and then I had to fill in the rest, all the things she wouldn’t have been able to guess—carrying stories from one place to another like her ships carried goods, learning the ways that people were in one place or another, going somewhere new and looking at it until I understood it.

  “I’m a storyteller,” I finished. “That’s the simple version. That’s what I do to keep myself fed.”

  “Until you decided to take up translation work.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a job.”

  She tapped her fingers on her arm. A contemplative expression had come over her face. “Tell me a story.”

  My heart sank. “I really ought to finish the—”

  “There’s time,” she said. “Go on, storyteller; tell me something.”

  I braced myself, and closed my eyes. “A very long time ago and half the world away, there was a man named Zaria who, being in the mood for fish stew, took his net and his fishing pole and went up the mountain to a certain pond he knew of—”

  “Stop.”

  I stopped, opened my eyes.

  “Why are you telling me that story?”

  “It was the first one that came into my head.” Mevrouw Basisi had served fish stew the night before and I’d thought of it, had mumbled it to myself as I ate.

  “You don’t seem like you care about it. Why tell me a story you dislike?”

  “I don’t dislike it. I just . . . don’t like telling them to people anymore. I needed a break; that’s why I went to look for translation work.”