Till Human Voices Wake Us (29 page)

Once he sang before his God, who smiled at him and pronounced his playing good. How many people could say they had been granted such a benediction? Yet one day he closed his ears to that song, put down his instrument, and walked away without looking back.

He was a mage as well as a musician, though even in those days there were very few who knew him as both. When he knelt before his God in a golden wood he was given the duty of upholding the song of the world in return for the proper instrument on which to play it, the lirin on which it was said the nine worlds had been played into existence. Just then he disregarded the price of that lirin, the crown and the sword of
 
Ysthar; just as he disregarded what had happened to the first one who played it. After all, what had he to do with the Adversary?

For many years after that encounter in the woods he wandered, playing his lirin to those who would listen, working magic, solitary as his phoenix, happy. Even after the Great Game Aurieleteer began, he would have said he was content. Then one day he met Eurydice, and the world changed.

At first he paid slight attention to this one young woman out of all who came to hear him. He was sitting that day by a pool in a forest, as he had the day he met the god, though a different pool, among different trees. He was playing the song of the light dancing on the water, endlessly beautiful improvisations rippling from his fingers. Then he looked up, and met her eyes, and she smiled at him.

His fingers stilled a moment on his lirin, for even if there had been many before her who had smiled at him for his music, there had not been so many who had smiled at him for himself. His hands paused a moment, while his heart leapt and the white-and-gold fire of his magic filled him. Then he smiled at her, and began again to play.

Words never were his strong point. Yet when he dared lift his head he saw she was still there, still looking at him, still smiling.

He was shy when it came to anything but his music or his magic; without any words passing between them then she returned to her home and he to his wanderings. They took him through the mountains and across the seas, so he sent her songs on the wind. When he returned from the voyage of the
Argo
she had woven him a dowry-gift, a tapestry of the West Wind bearing Psyche in gentle hands.

He loved Eurydice for her unflinching heart, for her ready tongue and readier wit, for her eyes which he thought were the grey-green of cypresses in the evening, and which saw him so clearly. But most of all he loved her because he loved her, and could not have given any more reason than that. He wrote such songs for her that those who heard them remembered them to the ends of their days, and their children remembered the story of them, and their children’s children, until they passed into myth, those songs played by Orpheus in the long ago and far away.

For Eurydice also he made a new flower, the white rose of Ysthar. He made it for her one fine summer’s day when he must make something new and wonderful or burst forth as a new sun for joy in life and love in her. (And the music—the music—always singing in his mind—always the music.)

They sat among his roses, on that bank that had been scrubby and unimportant before, and spoke softly to one another as lovers do, kissing and smiling into each other’s eyes, and the world sang about them as he had heard it sing for the god in the wood. He brushed out her hair, deep brown like ripe chestnuts; she ran her fingers through his.
 

They made each other crowns of the white roses, which smelled of tea and allspice and glory, and lay in the grass beside each other telling stories. Lying there, drinking the wine of happiness, he felt as if his laughter and the love in his laughter were as newly created as his roses, and asked her to marry him, and she said
yes
.

The day they set for their wedding was the autumn equinox, when the grapes lay heavy on the vines and the wheat was as golden-headed as he. A fortnight before he went on an errand of his duty, a short visit to disenchant someone; nothing major.

***

As he returned to the island of Phos, his choice for his marriage-house out of all his world (much smaller then than it would become, in those days just from the Pillars of Hercules to the Abode of Snow, from the City of Elephants to Proxima Thule), he went singing out in full voice over the song of the world. That was the song that someone had heard and transported to another world and brought back so it could be recorded and played by Robin in twenty-first century London:
The Song of the Night Before
.

It was not until he came to the door of his house that he realized something was amiss: there was silence where there ought to have been the inner song of his Eurydice. To his ears she had the tenor of his lirin, as to his sight the life in her was green-and-gold as that beech wood in which he had first heard its song. Now that song was fallen silent: when they came to tell him she had died he was not surprised.

They told him she had been climbing the mountain that crowned the island, gathering flowers against his return. As she and her friends wandered the slopes she had disturbed an adder with her step. She stumbled back and fell, fell into one of the caverns that riddled the mountain. Some of them were level and could be explored; others dropped sheerly into the dark places of the earth. It was into one of these that Eurydice had fallen, so they had been unable to recover her body.

He left them and climbed the mountain himself. Phos was called the island of light for its beauty, for being the first land in that part of the world to receive the morning and the last to relinquish the evening. Iridathet was a tall mountain with snow on its peak, where it was said the rainbow lived. As he climbed the day drew into a glimmering night. He paid no attention to it, as he climbed silently to the cavern-mouth where Eurydice had fallen, as he stood there gazing down.

When it came to people she had perhaps been the clearer-sighted, but when it came to magic few could rival him. He looked down that hole in the mountainside, down and down to where it passed beneath the sea, down below that even to the roots of the mountain, which stood in the foundations of the world. Nowhere could he see the green-and-gold of her, nowhere hear the music of her existence. Out of all the things he saw there and all the things he heard, none of them were she; he disregarded the rest. He looked down until the sun rose, and when the first light touched him there on the peak of Iridathet he took up his lirin.

He played until he lost himself in the music.

He had never done that before: usually it was when he played that he was most himself. Then he knew luminosity and grace, then his mind was at the height of its brilliance, his heart and soul greatest, his whole being most complete. He felt it, and others saw it. Eurydice had told him that there were those who watched him play simply for the glory folded about him like the wings of the seraphim, who listened to the voice of the god informing his, who loved him for his ability to show beauty with a slow smile and a handful of notes.

But when he played that lament he lost himself and did not see how the clouds gathered and the shadows deepened around him. Autumn fled without her cornucopia; winter came early that year. The island of light, Phos that he loved, which had adorned itself so gladly for his wedding, became a grave. He would not have done it on purpose; but he lost himself, and did not know what he did.

The death of the year roused him. The sun that should have risen late and set early, on that shortest day, that year, that day, did not rise at all.
 

Phos was the island of light, first to receive the morning and last to relinquish the evening. When the sun did not rise, something cracked in the deeps of the mountain, and the island cried out in a voice to penetrate even his shadows. He woke from his grief to see what he had done: he had failed in his duty.

Once he ceased his playing he heard the song of the world, to which he had not been listening for a quarter of a year. He heard halt limping music that should have been swift and glorious. He set his mind to its reparation as soon as he had shaken it free of emotion, of course. Of course. He learned soon enough that he was too late.

A fissure had opened up below the roots of the world. Darkness came roiling up beneath his feet, darkness and silence that covered and uncovered in shifting shadows …
something
. And he—he with his magic, and his clear sight for such things, that had looked on the face of his god—he saw what few had ever had the misfortune to see in waking life.

He had never described the face of the Adversary to anyone. Nor had he slept a night through undrugged since. (In time he persuaded himself that his wakeful vigil for the dawn was in honour of the sun, which is what he would have said, had any asked him, why he was always awake for its rising. No one had ever asked him.)

Yet he stood upright before the Enemy, upright in the conviction that it was his duty to hold the Eater of
 
Worlds back from his Ysthar as long as he could, and he said, “Go back. You are not welcome here.”

He did not like to speak, for his voice when he spoke stuttered and hesitated like a broken-winged bird. When he spoke he knew no one but Eurydice could imagine how he could be the great musician and mage; he was not like the one before him, whose voice was beautiful even in ruin, as all liars’ are. Standing before the Adversary with his magic around him perhaps he looked the part of the Lord of
 
Ysthar, seventh in succession from the Lord of Light, who had cast the shadow into the Abyss; he did not sound it.

The Adversary laughed. “No? Small fool, you cannot even speak. You think to stand before me?” And he bent as if to sweep him aside with one negligent gesture.

“Yes.” If his voice hesitated, his will did not. The Lord of Ysthar—it was not Orpheus, then, in that moment, who looked up, nor Raphael who had denied his name—the Lord of
 
Ysthar met the Enemy’s gaze, and it was not he who looked away.

The Eater of
 
Worlds drew great wings of darkness around him, until he was entirely enclosed in darkness, where there was no magic but his own, and all the music he knew was silenced.

The Lord of
 
Ysthar lifted up his head. He thought of the light and the laughter and the love he had known, and the day he made the white rose, when he had first told Eurydice he loved her. The first rose of all was made by the Lord of Light in the days before the Adversary fell, and it had ever since been the emblem of
 
Ysthar. He held the image of that day in his mind, and he smiled at the darkness, and he said, “Go back. You are not welcome here.”

For a moment even the Adversary was taken aback. The Lord of
 
Ysthar moved his hands to the lirin he still held, but his fingers found the positions they had taken so long that year, and the note he played was of sorrow, not joy. The Eater of Worlds might have been cast out by joy—played on that instrument? Surely joy would have cast him out—but not by grief, which was something he knew well.

When the Lord of
 
Ysthar played a chord of longing without quite meaning to, he hesitated, and that thin shadow falling across the images of light and love and laughter in his mind was all the opening the Adversary needed.

Those who watched from neighbouring islands saw something like a single bright star in the darkness suddenly wink out, and they were afraid. (He heard the stories told of that day, later, when he came back unrecognizable from the wilderness, with no music in him, his bitter consolation the ability to speak clearly and walk without stumbling.) On Phos he fell to his knees, for in his mind suddenly there was nothing. For all his long life and power, in the end he was human, and the one before him was not.

The shadow moved slowly this time, rummaging through his now-opened mind, and the white fire of his magic ran before it like a sanderling before the sea.

The Adversary was so intrigued by this mortal who dared play the song that none but he had played—dared rival
him
, once best of creation—that he ignored his victim’s response. He did not care that the young man fallen before him had once had another walk through his mind, long ago when the magic first woke in him during the fall of Astandalas, except that it meant there were unhealed scars tender and inflamed by his presence.
 

Raphael, mind splayed open like an over-ripe pomegranate, sent all he could control to protect those his duty claimed, tracing a wall around the island, around the shadow, around himself.

On those other islands the watchers saw a golden circle drawn on the sea.

When his mind was empty of magic the Eater of Worlds laughed again at him. “Small fool, why do you fight?”

Raphael had nothing in his mind but the lesson of Persephone in hell. He wished he could remember that one day of perfection he had known, when he had met his God in a golden wood, and heard all creation singing as it had sung before the Adversary fell.
 

He wished he could remember his own name. He wished
she
were there.

The Adversary was a soft slow shadow in his mind, creeping along the musty corridors of his memory, musing with horrific ordinariness. “We are kin, you and I, and you are not so different from me. You have the lirin that was mine, and the music that was mine, and the world that should have been mine. And you have the power that was mine.”

Raphael looked him once more in the face and knew it to be true; this time it was he who looked away. When he turned his gaze there was nothing to see but the endless shadow, a thousand ages deep. He could not even see his lirin where it had fallen from his hand. The god had given him that lirin, that time in the woods, so he could play the song of songs, the gift beyond price. But there was a price: he was the lord of the world in payment for it.

“Cousin,” said the Adversary, his voice beautiful in that infinite silence, beautiful, gentle, kind. “Cousin. Why do you mourn?”