Songs of the Earth (17 page)

Alderan nodded approvingly. ‘Neatly done. That’s called a glim. Ordinarily it would have been my next lesson, but you are not exactly an ordinary pupil, are you?’ A wry smile split the pepper-and-salt beard. ‘What else did you master?’

‘I can make fire, move air – mostly simple things, like you said. When I tried for anything more, it usually went wrong.’

‘You’re not the first person to call the Song and have it bite him. With time, you’ll learn how to avoid the teeth.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘How far do you want to go?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘Then I can’t say how long the journey will be. I’ve been a student of the Song since I was in swaddling; now I’m an old man with aching joints and a bladder that gets me up in the night, and I still don’t know everything it can do. I don’t even know if there
are any limits to it. Who knows – you might be the one to find them, if you apply yourself.’

Reaching out a finger, Gair touched the surface of his glim. Colours swirled around his fingertip and made his skin tingle and fizz like sherbet on his tongue. ‘You called it a gift,’ he said, feeling his way to the root of what he really wanted to know. ‘Is it a gift from the Goddess?’

‘I’d like to think so. Not everyone is born with it, but neither is everyone born with the ability to sing. If you believe the Goddess grants some of us a tin ear and blesses others with perfect pitch, I think you have your answer.’

‘It’s not a sin, then.’

Alderan didn’t respond immediately. ‘There are things that are right, and things that are wrong, fundamentally so, some of which the Church calls sins,’ he said at last. ‘We don’t always agree on the definitions.’

‘That’s not a straight answer.’

‘It’s not a straightforward question.’

Gair frowned. ‘It sounds like you’re saying it’s only a sin if I believe it to be.’

‘Maybe I am,’ said Alderan lightly. ‘Only you can decide what you believe, Gair.’

What
did
he believe? That was a question so huge he could hardly see the edges of it, and put it aside for now.

‘Where does the power come from? Inside me, or somewhere else?’

‘Both,’ said Alderan, and grinned at Gair’s surprised expression. ‘It is a part of us, our environment, even the earth and the air. Eventually, you’ll be able to hear its echo in whatever you touch. In some things, like a wild bird or an animal, it’s very strong. In others, made things usually, it’s barely there at all, just a remembrance, and the further removed from its origins, the fainter it grows. The truly gifted could take a handful of ash from a fireplace and hear the Song of the trees from which the wood was
cut, maybe even go back far enough to hear the germ of the Song in the acorns that sprouted them.’

Now Gair was astonished. He’d had no idea that the simple magics he could perform barely broke the surface of what the Song was, what it could achieve.
Start small
, the old man had said;
it’s a big world
. All of a sudden it was bigger than he had ever dreamed. The magnitude of what he had asked of Alderan staggered him.

‘It looks like there’s a lot for me to learn,’ he said. His glim bobbed in the draught.

Alderan stood up and his own glim vanished as softly as a dandelion clock. ‘More than you could imagine,’ he said, shouldering his scrip. He reached for the door handle to let himself out. ‘You have tremendous potential, Gair, but there is work to do to unlock it. Tomorrow, when you are rested, we can begin.’

‘There never were any mouse-traps in your saddlebags, were there?’ Gair asked.

Alderan showed his teeth. ‘A simple trigger-ward – tiny little thing, yet it stings like an adder-bite. I’ll show you how to make one sometime, if you like. You never know when it might come in handy.’

‘And on the barge? The flare? I meant to ask you about it, but everything happened so fast it slipped my mind. That was the Song too?’

‘No, that was Skeff’s distress flare. Most of the bargees carry them these days. Some of the river routes aren’t as safe as they used to be. I just didn’t have time to wait for the fuse to burn through.’ He opened the door. ‘Come up on deck. Fresh air will do you good.’

When Alderan had gone, Gair lay back down on his bunk. He was not sure if the conversation had answered any of his questions or just created a dozen more. There was so much he wanted to ask that he hardly knew where to start, and so much to learn that what little he had so far grasped did not feel like a beginning; it
simply highlighted the vastness of his ignorance, the way a candle-flame in the night did little more than reveal the depth of the dark.

His glim had drifted back to him, its surface shimmering in restless, perpetual motion with a thousand shades of blue. Glims had become so easy for him that he had grown careless – and that had been his undoing back in Leah. Then he had made the same mistake in Dremen. Not any more, though: in future he would be much more careful. But oh, the way the Song made him feel when he let it fill him! So vital, so charged with possibility that anything he could dream felt within his reach.

The glim hung above him, turning gently on its axis. He touched the Song and let the globe grow to the size of a honey-melon, then the size of his head. Inside him, a vast potential waited for him to bend his will to it. He felt none of the white-water wildness of which he had grown so fearful, though something told him it was still there, and would come if he called. Equally carefully, he shrank the glim until it was no larger than a marble, then let it go.

Up on deck, the
Kittiwake
resembled a cross between a laundry and a lumberyard. Sailors’ gear was hanging out to dry on the rigging, everything from hammocks to spare stockings, whilst the carpenter and his mates shaped a jury-mast from a spare mainyard. A pitch-boiler was set up on the fo’c’sle, where two men were tarring down new rigging. Sea and sky were midsummer blue, and a school of porpoises cavorted a few yards off the bow. Of the storm itself, there was no sign.

Alderan stood by the stern rail with Captain Dail. When he saw Gair, he beckoned him over.

‘I’m sorry about your boots,’ Gair said, embarrassed.

Dail laughed. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. After what you did for us last night, I don’t reckon a pair of boots amounts to much.’

Gair flushed. ‘It was mostly Alderan’s work.’

‘Not so.’ The old man laid a hand firmly on his shoulder. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you. It was too much for me on my own.’

A seaman ran up and knuckled his forehead to Dail. ‘Bosun’s compliments, sir. He’s about to sound the well.’

Dail nodded. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen, but I am needed below.’ With that, he strode towards the main hatch.

Apart from the steersman, Gair and Alderan had the stern deck to themselves. ‘Captain Dail knows what we are,’ Gair said quietly, a statement, not a question.

Alderan smiled. ‘He’s been running the trade routes from the Havens to Penglas since before you were born, and in that time he’s seen quite a few of us come and go. He knows the sort of things of which we are capable – so do a few of his men, but most of them do not. We don’t exactly keep it a secret, but we don’t shout about it either. There are people who are uncomfortable around our kind, and some of them can let their prejudices get the better of them. One accusation of witchcraft in your life is quite enough for any man.’

That was another thing; now was as good a time as any to ask. ‘Are there really such things as witches – aren’t they just people like us?’

The old man took a long breath. When he spoke, his voice was pitched low enough not to carry too far. ‘Some of them are. There are those named as such who are probably like you, gifted with power and fumbling their way to some sort of control over it. Most of them are simply cross-eyed old folk whose neighbours don’t care for them much – mutterers and wanderers and keepers of too many cats.’ A smile appeared, thin as an assassin’s blade, and just as quickly gone. ‘And some are true witches, with the power to rend the Veil between worlds.’

‘Can they summon demons, like the stories say?’

‘Demons, angels – there’s so little to choose between them it scarcely matters once they’re here. Anything from the Hidden
Kingdom upsets the balance of the daylight world, and that balance must be maintained.’ Alderan sighed. ‘But mostly it’s demons, yes. Order is white and cold and passionless, driven by logic. Chaos is passion unfettered, both creative and destructive energies pursued indiscriminately. Turbulence strains the Veil the most, and at those points of stress it is possible to pick a hole in the fabric.’

‘What would happen if it was torn completely?’

Alderan grimaced. ‘Some have had visions of that event. Most of them died screaming, like St Ioan—’

‘—who saw a vision of the Last Days and plucked out his own eyes rather than see it again.’

‘Exactly. The final chapter of the Book of Eador contains all that the Church dared to make public of Ioan’s prophecy. There is more of it in the Apocryphae, things that give strong men nightmares.’

Gair looked around him, at the bellying sails overhead, the leaping water, bright in the sunshine. It was hard to believe that the world he could see and touch could be picked open, like peeling paint on an old barn, to expose another world beneath. Surely he should be able to sense it, somehow? He’d read about the Hidden Kingdom; as a boy he’d been enthralled by stories of spirits and demons and creatures of the fey, but they had been exactly that, stories. He had never truly believed that the Hidden Kingdom was really there, beside him, as close as his skin.

‘How come I don’t know any of this? How can you know this other world exists if you can’t see it, or touch it, or …?’ He spread his hands helplessly. He could not organise his thoughts into coherent questions. There were simply too many, too much to take in.

‘As far as the people who raised you were concerned, it doesn’t exist.’ With rather a sad smile, Alderan added, ‘People don’t like to think too hard about the world in which they live, you know. They don’t care for change, and as long as each day continues pretty much like the one before, they’re happy. If you told them
that heaven was not above and hell was not below, but they were actually the same place and it exists alongside our world, a shadow’s depth away, they’d say you were touched by St Margret and send you to the sisters at the asylum-house.’

Gair felt his knees go weak; he needed to sit down. Everything in his life that he had always taken on trust had been tipped up and sent tumbling away from him, like apples from an overturned cart. Part of him wanted to chase after them, to catch them and pile them all up into some kind of order. The other part waited for them to stop bouncing. He needed more time to make sense of it all, for nothing was the same any more, nothing at all.

‘What about the storm?’ he asked at last. ‘Does Captain Dail know about it?’

‘He as good as said so last night, when he helped me put you to bed. It’s unusual for storms to come out of the northeast at this time of the year – they normally come from the south, off the deserts. Someone was playing games with the weather.’

‘Who?’

Alderan looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve no idea. There are a few who are strong enough for a weaving of that size, and that’s just of the ones I know. Storms aren’t what you could call local phenomena. Their causes spread over tens, even hundreds of miles – the temperature of the water or the land, the direction of the wind, all working together or against each other over vast distances to create the conditions in which a storm can occur. Controlling all those energies and manipulating them to focus on one specific area like that takes a great deal of skill, or a strong natural aptitude for weather-Song. It took the two of us to dissipate it, remember.’

That made sense, Gair thought. The web Alderan had woven across the face of the storm had stretched further than Gair’s eyes could see, though his awareness of it through his contact with the Song had reached far beyond that. If he had known more about what he was doing, he was certain he could have slid along the
cords of power to the furthest reaches of the net like a bead on a string.

Intuition tickled the corner of his mind. ‘What about Savin? Could he have sent the storm?’

‘It’s the kind of thing he’d think was amusing, that’s for sure,’ said Alderan. ‘I don’t think he was responsible, though. Savin is a liar, a gambler, and slippery as eels in oil, but I see no reason for him to try to harm us. What made you think of him?’