Hem had been shocked when he saw Maerad"s hand, and at first he tried to avoid looking at it, as the sight pained him. Maerad herself was no longer self-conscious about her missing fingers and gestured as freely as she had before her hand was maimed; and gradually Hem became more used to her injury and didn"t feel a stab in his heart every time he glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye. They sat very close to each other, and joked and squabbled as if they were any brother and sister meeting again after a long parting. Except, thought Cadvan, for the magery that still flickered subtly under Maerad"s skin, surrounding her form with a faint, ever-changing nimbus of golden light. She remained pale and feverish, her eyes unnaturally bright, and Cadvan noticed with concern that she ate very little, and only when pressed. She gave most of her meal to Irc.
Everyone agreed they could not stay where they were, but no one knew where they ought to go. Innail, their nearest haven, was quite likely to be under attack again from the forces gathered in Desor, and traveling in that direction would very likely bring an unwelcome encounter with the army. The closest Schools were Desor and Ettinor, but none of them had any inclination to travel that way. Maerad remained silent, staring into the fire. Irc had crept onto her lap and was crooning as she idly stroked his neck, and Hem was beginning to nod with sleep.
"The main question," said Cadvan, "is the Treesong. If we understood what happened today, perhaps we could decide what we should do."
All eyes turned toward Maerad.
"I don"t understand it, either," she said slowly. "It"s difficult to explain, even to myself..."
"Can you guess what was wrong?" asked Saliman.
"Something was missing." Maerad paused, as if she were trying to listen to an inner voice, and then shook her head. "But I don"t know what it was ..."
"Hekibel, you knew that it wasn"t running true," said Saliman. Hekibel, who had been almost as silent as Maerad during this discussion, looked up. "I am wondering how you knew, and whether that same knowing might tell us something?"
"I know nothing of magery," said Hekibel, her voice low.
"Saliman and I are not considered beginners in the Arts," said Cadvan. "And yet we had no inkling of any trouble."
"Perhaps Hekibel felt it because she has no training, and we were hampered by what we expected, instead of looking at what was in front of our noses," said Saliman. "It is not Bardic magery, after all, and it moves in other ways. Simpler ways, perhaps."
"I suppose, for me, it was a bit like a scene in a play where somebody has forgotten the lines, or the scenery is wrong, or a player is missing, or something like that," said Hekibel. "But, well, worse. In a play, you"re just pretending that people die, but I thought that if it went on much longer, Hem and Maerad would really be killed."
Maerad looked up, startled. "Not killed," she said. "Worse, maybe . . ." There was a silence as the others waited for her to explain what she meant. She started to speak, and then stopped, biting her lip.
"It"s difficult to talk about," Maerad said at last. "I don"t have the right words; they don"t fit, somehow. I mean, as you know, it often happens in magery that if thea"if the circ.u.mstance is right, then the action follows. And so, when the lyre and the tuning fork were close together, it was as if the Treesong woke up anda"became something, almost as if there were another person there." She frowned with concentration. "And the Treesong was there, it wanted to be whole, and that wanting was all there was, and it just got more and more unbearable because whatever it wanted couldn"t happen. And there was nothing else in the whole world except that wanting. And if Hekibel hadn"t made the Treesong sleep again, Hem and I would have been trapped in that wanting, with no way out of it." She lifted her hands in frustration. "I can"t say it properly," she said.
"What does it want?" said Cadvan.
"To be whole. To be free. To be alive." She remembered, with a sudden stab of pain, the Winterking"s bitterness when he had told her the meanings of the runes on her lyre in his cold throne room in Arkan-da. "Arkan saida"he said the runes were dead, that Nelsor had trapped the power of the Treesong within them, like a flower in ice. He said they were a song, and I had to play them. And when I said I didn"t know the music, he said"a" she swallowed, recalling his icy rage, the strange mix of fear and desire that Arkan had invoked within hera""he said, Do you think anything can be alive, when it is cloven in half?"
Hem sat up, his eyes shining. "I"m the music," he said. "That"s what Nyanar meant." Maerad looked at him inquiringly, and he explained. "Nyanar was an Elidhu I spoke to, in the Suderain. He was ... I don"t know how to describe how he was." Hem paused, remembering. "He told me there were two foretold. One for the singing and one for the music." Hem slumped and looking broodingly at the ground. "Only the music didn"t happen. I know what the music sounds like. I mean, I know what it feels like. But it didn"t feel like that at all today..."
"Arkan also said that the Song could only be sung with love." The high flush on Maerad"s cheeks brightened, as if she were making a shameful confession. "And that love can"t be stolen or feigned, that it can only be given." She paused. "I don"t know what that means, either."
"These are deep riddles," Cadvan said, half smiling. "All the same, I think that whatever was missing today, it was not love."
"Perhaps we have to go back to the beginning? I mean, where all this began?" said Hekibel hesitantly.
Maerad stared at her. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I think so... but n.o.body knows when the Treesong was first sung. There"s that story Ankil told us, about the Split Song ..."
"Ah yes," said Cadvan. "So the Song came out of the nowhere into the now, and slipped into the veins of the Elidhu, as if it were a shoal of minnows slipping into a stream, and each Elidhu felt the Song within it like a shudder of life, and all the sounds of the world burst in on them: the fall of the rain, and the sough of the sea, and the endless sighing of the wind through the green trees. And they opened their mouths in wonder, and so it was the Song leaped out of their mouths, and at last became itself."
"That"s beautiful," said Hekibel, listening intently.
Saliman was staring at his hands, his mobile face thoughtful. "I think what might have been missing was the right place," he said. "It would only make sense. The Elidhu are creatures of place, after all. But then, where would that place be? The Winterking"s mountain? Or perhaps somewhere like Nal-Ak-Burat, where Hem saw Nyanar?"
Maerad shook her head, and Cadvan spoke. "That"s unlikely, I think," he said. "From what Maerad has told me, the Song doesn"t belong to any one Elidhu."
"Well, then, where it first appeared in Edil-Amarandh," said Saliman. "Wherever that might be."
"It"s not the Treesong we should be thinking about, but the runes," said Maerad softly. "And the runes were made in Afinil, by Nelsor himself, in the deep of time."
"If it is a matter of undoing what has been wrongly done, then the place of the doing is the proper place," said Cadvan. He sounded as if he were quoting something, and Saliman looked up and unexpectedly laughed.
"Menellin"s Rules," he said. "Learned by rote by every Minor Bard in Annar. How many times I wished, as I chanted them over and over again in the learning halls and watched the sun playing outside, that he hadn"t written so many! But yes, perhaps it will do to remember our first lessons."
Maerad was staring fixedly into the fire, her eyes shining.
"Afinil is the place," she said. As she spoke, it seemed to those who listened that echoes gathered around her words, as if many voices spoke behind hers. "We must journey to Afinil for the singing. Under the sign of Ura, by ash, alder, and willow, in the season of renewal..."
There was a blank silence.
"That is all very fine," said Cadvan at last. "But Afinil no longer exists. The Nameless One loathed that city above all others and scoured it from the face of the earth. Even its ruins were ground into dust and scattered on the sixteen winds. And no one living can tell where once it stood."
Chapter XIX.
THE DANCE OF THE DEAD.
THAT night, Maerad didn"t sleep. She lay on her back, her eyes open, staring at the blackness of the rough stone above her and listening to the gentle breathing of her companions. Hem stirred restlessly in his sleep and began to snore, and she smiled at the sound, thinking of the times when she had held him in her arms and stilled his nightmares. It seemed so long ago, in another lifetime. That was before she had even known that he was her brother. Though something inside her had known the first moment she saw him, cowering in the wrecked caravan in the middle of the Valverras.
Hem was much changed since then. It wasn"t only that he had grown at least two handspans and was now taller than Maerad by a head. He had always been thin, but his face had lost the softness of childhood, and his body had the ranginess of a young colt, at once awkward and graceful. It was possible now to see clearly the young man he would soon be.
To have found Hem at last was a deep happiness that lay, like a glowing coal, in the middle of her being, and she warmed herself against it like a shivering child. Beyond that one simple thing, all was uncertain. After her reunion with Hem, what she remembered most vividly when she thought about the previous day was the flash of fear in Saliman"s face when she had destroyed the Hulls. Cadvan had promised not to be afraid of her, and yet even he could not entirely conceal his own anxiety. But what were her powers? Even now, she felt she had little understanding of these forces that moved through her: she was a vessel, nothing more. The Treesong had its own imperative, and she was merely its instrument, for good or ill. The thought filled her with an aching emptiness.
It"s strange, she thought. The more powerful I become, the less choice I seem to have about anything. She felt as if she were fixed on the rim of a great wheel, which was turning slowly toward the singing of the Treesong. No force on earth could stop its inevitable revolution; and yet she didn"t know what would happen, what might begin or end with the undoing of Nelsor"s magery. Beyond the act of the singing, everything was blank.
I might die, she thought. Hem might die. Everything I love might be swept away. Cadvan and Saliman know that, yet still they stand by me. They do not think of turning back, although they do not know what they will meet at the end. They must be allowed their fear, if they are so brave in the face of it. Am I as brave as that? Why do I feel so lonely?
Maerad stared into the darkness. She had no right to feel such self-pity. She might be in the middle of the wilderness, in mortal danger, but with her were the people she loved most in the world. Somehow, that only made her feel worse. If she failed, their lives were forfeit. She thought of Cadvan"s choice to stand by her, his willingness to risk everything he believed in for his faith in her. Was she equal to such faith? She feared, deeply, that she would fail him, that she was weaker than he thought.
At last she gave up trying to sleep. She wrapped her blanket around her and wandered outside to sit with Cadvan, who was keeping the watch. He turned and smiled as she sat next to him, but said nothing. It was the coldest part of the night; the turf glittered with rime under the still moonlight, and Cadvan"s breath curled white on the air.
Maerad stared over the hills, and she thought that she could feel the landscape"s very bones. As she watched, it seemed to her that a dance of shadows began to unfold and dissolve before her, a dance of such intricacy and nuance that she could barely comprehend it. But she knew it was a dance of the same echoes and shadows that had haunted her dreams the past few nights.
It was a dance of the dead, but now she saw them with her waking senses. She heard their voices ringing dimly on the frosty air, and saw the soft nimbus of their numberless shifting forms. This time she was not afraid; she knew that these were not revenants, the undead who walked again, but rather their memory. Time seemed to her to move in veils that constantly shifted, one over the other, dissolving as swiftly as she perceived them, and through its layers she could follow the shimmering traces of those who had lived here. She saw not only the shadow marks of what they had made or broken with their hands, but the pa.s.sions that had lived within them: their hatreds and loves and griefs and desires and fears. Every moment when time had stopped under the intense impression of feelinga"the joy of a young child at the return of its father, the ardor of lovers, the moment of dyinga"sang faintly through the fabric of the earth, filling the Hollow Lands with an eerie, melancholy music.
Maerad caught her breath and turned to Cadvan, her heart beating fast, and she cried out. In that moment she clearly saw the skull beneath the skin and muscles of his face, and she knew she was seeing the future of his own death. The vision filled her with utter desolation: how could she bear a world without Cadvan in it?
Cadvan took her hand, urgently asking what troubled her. At once the vision vanished; but Maerad did not know how to tell him what she had seen, and held his hand tightly until her grief and horror began to subside.
She lifted her eyes from the earth and stared at the moon, which blazed high in the black, frosty night. She realized it would not be very longa"seven or eight days, perhapsa"before it waxed to the full.
"I have been thinking that the most likely place to look for Afinil is in the Hutmoors," said Cadvan, after a long silence. "Though it could have been near Rachida. Or even Rachida itself."
"Wherever it is, we have to find it quickly," said Maerad. "We have to get there before the moon is full. Or it will be too late. Not just for us, I mean, but for everyone: for Innail, for all of Annar ..."
"I don"t like our chances," Cadvan said. "But then, I never have. And yet we have come this far."
Maerad nodded. "How long would it take to ride to the Hutmoors?" she asked.
"It depends. We could get there in five days, riding hard. But where Afinil might be in that sorry, desolate place, I do not know."
"Ardina would know where it was. She went there when Nelsor was alive..."
"We need all the help we can get," said Cadvan.
Maerad thought a little longer, and then stood up and went back to the shelter. She returned with her pipes, and standing close by Cadvan, she began to play them. The tune she played was sad, and the notes echoed plaintively in the still night. But this time, Ardina did not come.
At last, Maerad gave up and sat down disconsolately, holding her pipes in her maimed hand. "Why will she not answer me?" she said.
"I don"t know," said Cadvan. "But both you and Hem have spoken of how the Elidhu fear and loathe the Treesong. It could be that, now the runes are close together, they emanate a great power, and she cannot come."
"But how are we to find Afinil without her help?"
Cadvan didn"t answer for a long time. Finally he said, "If we are meant to find it, we will. But you should sleep, Maerad, especially if we are to begin our journey tomorrow."
"I can"t sleep," said Maerad. "I don"t think I"ll ever sleep again."
Cadvan was about to tell her that she must sleep, that she could not contemplate traveling on no sleep at all, but something in her face, the traces of a deep and inarticulate pain, made him bite his tongue. Maerad stared out with burning eyes over the dim hills, and clutched her blanket more tightly around her body, although she was no longer conscious of the cold.
Hem dreamed of the Black Army that he had seen marching toward Desor. In his dream, the dead soldiers that lay strewn behind the army in the floodplains had risen and were marching on rotting feet, their blank eyes staring at nothing. When he awoke, he remembered that he had seen eyes with that same horrifying blankness in his waking life. They had stared out of the faces of the snouts, the child soldiers of the Dark, when they were bewitched in battle fever.
He rose quickly and walked to a nearby brook, where he splashed his face with cold water to wash away the memory. He tried not to think about his time with the snouts. Sometimes he thought it wasn"t possible, even in the many moments of darkness that scarred his life, that he had lived through anything so terrible. But it hadn"t been a dream.
And that reality, the world of Sjug"hakar Im, marched with the Black Army. It was that reality that had destroyed Baladh and Turbansk and perhaps had already smashed the walls of Til Amon. In Sjug"hakar Im, children were turned into brutalized killers, and beauty or gentleness or courage were mocked, tormented, and destroyed. Hem had seen children who were broken beyond the hope of repair, whose empty stares spoke of suffering so unspeakable there were no words that comprehended it; he had seen faces twisted and distorted by insanity and pain, faces blind with terror and anger, and dead faces, too many dead faces ...
He thought of his friend Zelika. He hadn"t seen her face after she died. Sometimes he didn"t know whether he was grateful to be spared that memory, or whether he had been denied his chance to make a proper farewell. Her lovely, savage features rose in his mind"s eye, as vividly as if she now stood before him; and his grief for her opened again inside him, raw and b.l.o.o.d.y, as if he knew it for the first time. Nothing would ever compensate that loss, nothing would ever heal that wound; even if the Nameless One were defeated and all his works should turn to dust and vanish utterly, Zelika would still be dead. In her death lay all the injustice, all the needless waste, of this terrible war.
Hem splashed water over his head again, gasping at the cold. He didn"t want these thoughts. The Dark had torn apart his whole life, but undoing the Treesong didn"t mean undoing the terrible things that had happened, and he would never be rid of his memories. He set his jaw, staring unseeingly over the purple dawn-lit hills, toward the mist-shrouded peaks of the distant mountains.
He returned to the others, and busied himself helping to strike the camp. No one argued with Cadvan"s suggestion that they should travel to the Hutmoors. Hem merely nodded; it seemed like the right direction to him. An earth sense was stirring in his body, like a melody he couldn"t quite hear, calling him north.
Everyone seemed to feel the same urgency, as if they knew that time was running out. They packed quickly, and left soon after first light, riding northwest along the borders of the Hollow Lands, Hem still riding behind Hekibel on Usha. They averted their faces from the rags and bones and piles of carrion that were the only remains of the Hulls and their mounts, and pushed the horses as swiftly as they could over the low hills. There was a hint of warmth in the sunlight that fell on their shoulders, and the horses were rested and eager, and the empty lands pa.s.sed by them swiftly. By twilight they had left the Hollow Lands and were approaching the Milhol River, two days" ride south of Milhol itself. A stone Bard Road ran alongside the water, following the river through the Broken Hills to Ettinor.
Maerad stared at the brown river, with its banks of black reeds poking through the surface of the sullen water, and remembered that her first sight of a Hull had been not very far from this place, farther down the road in the Broken Hills. The fears she had felt then seemed utterly unimaginable now. Perhaps, she thought sardonically, she had since encountered much worse terrors.
Despite her lack of sleep, she felt no tiredness at all, but her vision was troubling her. The shadow world she had first seen the night before had vanished with the morning sunlight, but as the day wore on, the veils began to return, so that sometimes she wasn"t sure which landscape she was riding througha"or more accurately, which time. And the hauntings were becoming clearer. Once she saw a long line of people hurrying through a mist, burdened by their belongings, and it seemed to her that they were fleeing in terror. They looked over their shoulders as if in fear of pursuit, and Maerad thought that she saw in their eyes the reflections of flames; but she shook her head and the vision vanished. Another time, near the last circle of standing stones that they pa.s.sed before they left the Hollow Lands, she saw an old man with a very long beard, tall and thin as a young birch, his arms up-reached to the sky in mysterious supplication. Toward evening, a child ran in front of her, laughing, and Maerad pulled Keru up sharply, fearing he would be trampled beneath her hooves, before she saw that the child was not there. There was something melancholy about all these visions, and Maerad did not speak of them to anyone.
When they reached the Milhol River, they halted briefly and scanned the countryside. It was deserted; the stone road shone white in the late afternoon light, and nothing moved as far as the eye could see. The only sign of life was a pair of hawks circling high overhead and some gray herons stalking in the reeds.
"No floods here," said Saliman, staring at the flat plains of Peredur that lay on the other side of the river. "Thank the Light. I"ve had enough of mud to last me a lifetime."
"Aye," said Cadvan. "Luck runs with us, so far. If we cross here, we can ride north of the Broken Hills and then cross the Usk Bridge to the Hutmoors, keeping well away from Ettinor. My only fear was that the Milhol might have flooded, and slowed us down. But I think we should go swiftly here; there is something I do not like in this silence, and I don"t want to stay on this side of the river."
At this point the river was wide but shallow, with broad, firm sandbanks on either side, so it was not difficult to cross. The light was failing fast as they forded, but although the horses were stumbling with weariness, they rode on until after dusk before they stopped.
Maerad offered to keep watch, since she felt no desire to sleep, but Cadvan, studying her with concern, forbade it and insisted that she rest. Although he did not say so, he was deeply worried about her. It was more than a day since she had used her power, but her skin still shone with the strange, golden magery; if anything, it seemed brighter than before. And he thought there was something fey in her eyes, a flickering like madness, as if she were seeing things that were not there. He remembered what she had told him about her dreams, and shrewdly guessed what she might be looking at. This night she had refused to eat at all, only drinking water and, at Hem"s insistence, some medhyl, and she barely spoke.
All day, Maerad had felt as if she were diminishing; the infinite power she had touched when she summoned Hem or when she had destroyed the Hulls now seemed out of reach, unimaginable, as if it had happened to another person. Her body seemed as fragile and light as a piece of spun gla.s.s and she felt her mortality more strongly than she ever had in her life. She sensed the Treesong glowing in her skin, and a faint murmur that she knew was a presage of its music seemed still to resonate in her bones. Yet instead of filling her with power, this half music left her desolate and empty, as if she were no more substantial than the shadows of the dead, an illusion glimpsed on a darkling plain that might vanish in the next instant.
A warm south wind rose, rushing over the gra.s.ses and thrashing the branches of the trees where they had sought shelter. A layer of clouds spread over the sky, and the moon rose blurred and dim, casting a pale light over the empty lands around them. Hem had the first watch, and sat cross-legged listening to the wind, Irc nestled fast asleep on his lap like a kitten. Hem was so tired that he didn"t think anything at all: he was just ears and eyes, his senses poured out pa.s.sively into the night, alert for any change in its rhythms that might signal danger.
The moon was climbing to its zenith when Maerad joined him. He didn"t need to turn to know exactly where Maerad was: her presence burned in his consciousness like a flaming torch, so that he was almost surprised when he looked at her and only saw the faint golden shimmer that rippled through her skin.
"Aren"t you sleeping?" he asked.
"No," said Maerad, almost petulantly. "It"s boring just lying there. I don"t want to stop, we should be riding still, we have so little time ..."
"We wouldn"t get anywhere if the horses collapsed with exhaustion," said Hem practically. "And even if you"re not, I"m pretty tired."
Maerad didn"t answer. She was staring over the plains, and Hem, sensitive to her thoughts, knew she was watching something that he couldn"t see. He stirred uneasily, and she turned, suddenly aware of him.
"Are you afraid of me?" she asked abruptly.
Hem met her eyes. In the darkness they burned with a cold, blue light, and she seemed to be looking both at him and through him.
"No," said Hem. "Are you?"
Maerad looked briefly taken aback, and then laughed. "No ... yes, I am, I think," she said. "I thinka"maybea"I ought to be afraid." She took Hem"s hand and held it, palm up, staring at it broodingly as if she could read her future there. "Everyone else is afraid of me. They sit a little distance away, and they are careful what they say."
Hem shrugged. "Irc"s not afraid of you," he said. "He thinks that you are like Nyanar."
"The Elidhu you met?" A smile quirked Maerad"s lips. "What does he mean?"
"I think he means kind ofa"wild and sad. You don"t feel like an Elidhu to me, though."
"What do I feel like, then?" Maerad looked at him challengingly.
"Like my sister." Hem glanced at Maerad, and then looked away. "I think I am afraid for you," he said, after a silence. "I mean, none of us knows what all this means. And sometimes I just think it means that soon we"ll all be dead, no matter what happens, and that seems so unfair." He paused. "And right now you look as if you have a terrible fever, and you ought to be in bed."
"But I don"t have a fever."
"I know you don"t. You just look as if you do. And it"s bad that you"re not eating and sleeping, and I think that it must be the Treesong inside you somehow, or something like that, that won"t let you go. I don"t feel it like you do, but I can kind of feel it in you. And I think it"s not something that a human body can bear for very long, and I wonder how long you can go on."
Maerad"s eyebrows lifted in surprise, and her gaze faltered.
"I"m a healer," Hem said, his voice low. "If I touch you, I can feel that your body is likea"like one of the strings on your lyre, and it"s humming with a note that I can"t hear, and it"s so awfully tight. But I know you can"t stop it happening. So, yes, of course I"m afraid for you. But I"m not afraid o/you."
"You"re a healer?" Maerad studied Hem with a new respect. He spoke with an authority she had not heard in his voice before. Her hand closed tightly on Hem"s. "It"s strange," she said. "Since wea"since the Treesong almost happened, I"ve been feeling so lonely. I didn"t know why . . . but I think that the Elidhu have gone away. I think that they used to be with me all the time, Ardina and Arkan; even when I didn"t know they were there, they knew where I was, and they werea" beside me somehow. I didn"t know until they went away. And now they"re gone, and it"s so empty."