Till Human Voices Wake Us (34 page)

But the Rubicon wasn’t a brook to be crossed in one step.

He finished getting dressed, wrapped his lirin in a cashmere shawl someone had given him once under the mistaken impression that he had a wife to whom he might present it with compliments, and that in a waxed canvas bag from some long ago journey by sea, and hastened out to Robin’s house before he changed his mind again.

***

A gentle spring rain pattered down all around him as he stood before the door, a light and restful noise. The buds of the young oak tree in the tiny front garden gleamed brown with a rich sheen, the new leaves still tightly furled, but the patch of ground below it was riotous with crocus, yellow, orange, tawny, lavender, and absurdly rich royal purple intermingled with clumps of snowdrops and glory-of-the-snow. They were half-open in the shifting light as the rainshowers alternated with fast-moving clouds.

At a stray shaft of light coming between the clouds Raphael’s glance lifted to the detailed moulding around the door frame, its elegant acanthus swirls surprisingly appropriate. He sighed. He knew that Robin was awake—just awake, probably, from the taste of the magic spiralling languidly around the house. Still, after he rang the doorbell, he found himself shifting the bag containing his lirin from one hand to another.

While he waited for someone to come to the door he thought with some wonder and much trepidation of the new feelings that were slowly unfolding inside him. He had no name for them, not yet. But he didn’t need names; not with his lirin in his hand.

He was minded of the passage in the
Upanishads
where the faculties discussed their importance to the body. To solve the argument finally each decided to leave for a year and see which was missed most. Each went—sight, hearing, speech—one by one, and returned; but when the breath began to leave the body they all clamoured for its return, and it won the crown they argued for. That was what came into his mind now: in his dreams he had known only the immeasurable fields of rose-scented stars falling through his mind.

Zebulun opened the door. He was dressed in a strangely Scottish-inflected outfit, a kilt of the Campbell clan Raphael was fairly certain he had no connection to. He bowed deeply on seeing him, and said, “My lord of
 
Ysthar.”

No secrets from servants in a household such as Robin kept. Raphael nodded uncomfortably. “Is the prince at home?”

“If my lord will come in, I will inform his highness of your lordship’s arrival. Lady Scheherezade is already within.”

Raphael followed him in to the lower flat, saying as they went down the hall: “Zebulun, I would appreciate it if you were to keep knowledge of my rank within this household.”

“You have my absolute discretion,” the dwarf replied with another low bow as they paused at the door, then announced to the air, “The Lord Raphael. Lady Scheherezade.”

She turned around as the door opened, with an expression that moved from delight to concern and then—his heart sank—to fear. He stared uneasily at her, clutching the lirin. His usual icy composure was far away from him, stopped by the feel of the instrument in his hands. By his distaste for the masks, as if they were yesterday’s clothing. By sight of the back wall of Robin’s living room.

What had been a wall of high-tech entertainment machines looked as if he had made it malleable as putty. The plastic and metal writhed in twisted streaks of black and silver across the wall and part of the ceiling. The centre, which had been the stereo and television screen, was now a hole, as if he’d punched through to the next room. The velvet and silk curtains had been put back on their rails but the grey charcoal painting was half charcoal in truth.

My living room will never be the same
.

He felt sickened, battered by the aftertaste of his magic in the room. Sherry gazed at him soberly as he looked at it, then abruptly hastened across the room to him. Raphael stood numbly staring as she reached out for his left hand and wound herself into an embrace.

“I’m so sorry I drugged you.”

Tangled grief and aching hope for amends pushed out his own truth. “I’m sorry for not …” He couldn’t quite say it. The weight of the lirin was so familiar-unfamiliar he was shaken. “I didn’t want you to know.”

She let him go. He sank slowly onto the chair nearest him, a white velvet monster he suspected Robin of having Zebulun brush smooth after every visitor. Sherry was dressed in a rich garnet red dress, like something Circe would wear, and looked very well in it.

“What did you think we would do, to know you were the Lord of
 
Ysthar?”

“Curtsey politely and tell me social half-truths,” he said glumly, and to his surprise she laughed and perched herself on the arm of the chair beside him.

“Oh, Raphael, we have missed you so much these last years. Did you think you affected us so little? That we didn’t care what happened to you?”

He picked at a loose thread in the canvas sack, eyes on the grotesque ruin of the back wall. “I was frightened you would distract me from my duties.”

“Truly?”

He paused, thinking again that he was wading across a river, and halfway across was no good place to stop. “Perhaps that you would not like …” Despite his intentions he faltered.

“That we wouldn’t like the real you? Do you think you have hidden yourself so absolutely? Who are you, if not the sum of your actions? Are you not the man you appear?”

“No. I don’t think I am.”

“Do you know how you appear? Not in the faces that you make for the faces that you meet, but to us who are your friends, and have known you for many years?”

He shook his head dumbly, frightened at her intensity. He gripped the lirin through the slipping cloth. “I want a new story to begin. Scheherezade, please help me.”

She cocked her head askew at him. “You are asking for my help?”

“You are …” he thought suddenly of how much he hated (at the same time as he courted it) when people he thought of as friends treated him according to his position, not his person. And it was not the Lord of
 
Ysthar who needed help. He bit back “the Storyteller” and instead said, “You are my friend. Please.”

“To shape a new story? For the man who once told me not to despair, that some of my stories were true?”

He looked down at the woven canvas of the bag. “For someone who has forgotten how to take his own advice.”

From the doorway Robin said, “You really do take yourself remarkably seriously at times, Raphael.”

Raphael looked up from the lirin and saw again the twisted wreckage of the back wall. He wasn’t sure what to say, except that he had to wonder (with that far-too-distractible mind of his) what Robin had meant—“Why did you say that was only a—a loss of composure?”

“Oh, my house is still standing.”

“I’ve never …” he stopped, for of course there was Phos to stand against that denial. Or not to stand: the horror.

“‘No, never?’—‘Well, hardly ever …’” And Robin laughed. “Shall I ask you why you came here today? Please tell me it’s not just to be sad at us. I’m not sure if I can handle that after last night.”

The Prince came in with a merry smile for Scheherezade, taking the seat across from them. Will followed more slowly, with a thoughtful frown at the wall. When he saw Raphael was staring anxiously at him the poet said, “What Robin means is that we’re all hung over. After our, ah, conversation, Sherry and I got very, very drunk. It wasn’t as if we could go outside.”

Raphael felt as if he were missing something. “Why couldn’t you go outside?”

Sherry said gently, “The storm was … ah …”

“Apocalyptic,” Robin said cheerfully. “I think coffee is in order!” He clapped his hands; one of his fairy servants appeared and disappeared again, leaving a butler’s trolley behind her, in a soft puff of bronze magic. “Yes, apocalyptic.”

“You stood outside in it trying to raise my house.”

“And a fat lot of good that did. Except that I reckon your brother to be a very courageous man. I don’t know how many of my brothers would stand at, say, my mother’s house, and demand entry, let alone in a storm like that. I don’t think they would stand at
your
door for all the tea in China.”

“He said the same thing about you,” Raphael said. “Did you mean it, that you’d like me to teach you magic?”

Sherry burst out laughing, her hands shaking so she poured coffee half across the tray. “Of course he does! Have you never heard him moaning about the Lord of
 
Ysthar’s refusal to meet him? Sorry about your carpet, Robin.”

“Don’t fret, my living room already needs to be remodelled.”

Raphael dredged up a modicum of sense and said, “Angelica is trying to start an interior decorating company.”

Robin waggled his eyebrows at him. “You are usually less clumsy in changing the subject than that. Tell me about Angelica some other day. In answer to your actual question: I cannot believe you are asking me that again. The more I think about it the more astonished I am. I knew you had a secret life doing
something
, but I really and truly believed it was nothing more than hedge wizardry. At most.”

“I’m sorry.”

The words jarred strongly against the civilized atmosphere that was starting to develop over the coffee cups. Robin gazed at him mostly soberly; Scheherezade had covered her mouth with the coffee cup, and Will was frowning again. No one said anything for what felt like a brief eternity, and then Will said, “What are you carrying in that sack?”

Raphael was deeply tempted to say,
nothing of import
, and turn the conversation away from himself, but—

Sherry said, “Please, tell us. It must be important.”

If it had been Ishaa he was offering for their touch he could not have been shyer, he thought. This was his soul on display, what he never let through in his acting, what he kept hidden with his magic, locked in the chest.

O God, he thought, I will pay for this.

Before his courage failed him again he said: “I would like to play for you.”

He stopped talking abruptly, fumbled with the drawstring at the neck of the sack. As he carefully unwound the cashmere shawl from the instrument he saw them put down their coffee cups and arrange themselves to listen. Robin for once looked thunderstruck.

Raphael stood up jerkily, though with his attention on his friends his body seemed relatively painless. He had not thought through to the actual playing. He wished he had new music for them; but no bird sang.

O for a muse of fire
, he thought, looking at Will, thinking that if Will could find new poetry in modern England then surely he could find new music. One day. One day he would have new songs. For now … it came to him that it didn’t matter, that it was the playing that mattered; but of course it did matter, he wanted to play a
good
song for them.

He imagined opening that door in his mind again.

Fragments of songs surfaced along with ghostly memories. Not his memory palace, not for music. Just the dusty memories overlaying the untarnished beauty of his old songs. He sifted through them until he uncovered a piece of a song he’d written for Calaïs, when they had sailed together on the
Argo
, on that voyage where Neptune first wondered at ship’s shadow overhead.

He took a breath that rattled in his ribs, then laid bow to strings, and played a song of what friendship was to him.

At the end he was shaken: by the expression of emotion, which once given voice could never be retracted; by the flood of emotions within him, which he could not name or describe and could never have presented on his face; by the absolute certainty of how bad his playing was.

He was appalled at that last realization, and with his dismay suddenly blazing forth in purity, said: “I’m so sorry it’s so bad.”

There was a flabbergasted silence. With much trepidation he looked at their faces, apologies in his mouth, and saw—he was in the place he had forgotten, Raphael just himself, whose vision was not occluded by the masks he wore.

Sherry had her knuckles to her mouth, pressing against some cry or exhalation. Her hair twisted down her shoulders, catching light from the window. She was breathing hard, but silently, quivering, her cheeks flushed nearly the colour of her dress, her eyes brilliant. Raphael plucked a string so the soft sound resonated in the room, an answer to a question she was not asking, something like a
yes
.

Robin’s expression was inward-turned and nonplussed at the same time. He was the Prince of Fairyland: he claimed to have no heart (or was it a soul?): that he never cried but crocodile tears. Yet his magic was crowding the room like a forest of oak trees and fireflies, and Raphael saw in it an answer to a question
he
was asking.

He looked last on Will. The poet wasn’t weeping either, though his eyes were as brilliant as Sherry’s. He looked—Raphael, deliberately looking on him, saw in Will’s face some dawning—
what?
he asked himself, his fingers sliding on the strings to a question, a faint echo of music like the music he had once played, his voice and what he wished to say.

His fingers found notes, not a question but an echo resonating with Will’s expression, which now he was playing he could understand, could see that in the poet there was the sudden unfurling of a new creation.

His hands were playing the song he had played for Kasian, not the blackbird’s song but the light through beech trees, the white flowers like stars, the green grass and the water lit by the morning.

Faltering his music might be to what it had been, as his heart was to what it had been, as the world was to what it could be, but just as there was enough even in the dribbles of himself he had let through his masks to win him these friends, there was enough of the song of songs in these halting efforts that it woke an answering echo.

That was a gift.

“Thank you,” he said at last, his voice his own. Sherry dropped her hand and smiled, and something in him resounded in response.

He brushed his hands down the strings, not to silence them but to speak these emotions to himself, played again the melody of the song of friendship, a song of the sails of the
Argo
catching the wind while he and Calaïs bent their backs to one oar. Even now it was better, though still so far from what it was, what it could be.