Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  The soul was weighed against one of these feathers. One of the feathers of the Lord Phoenix, which he had woven into this phoenix cloak, which the legends said had cloaked Shargán when she sat on Kasian’s throne as first queen of the Tantey, and which after her death she had spread across the nine worlds, the veil of light, promise of morning. It looked the size of a human cloak, at the moment, as those trees in his garden looked like trees, the water of the fountain like water.

  Tanteyr legends weren’t very clear on what happened to people (the vast majority of people, after all) who did not have visible satallir; but Shargán of the Desert had had no satall of her own, and Raphael had to believe that the One Above had not made his creation to be damned. He had to believe that, despite everything that had happened in the long years of the Game, in his tenure of  Ysthar which was said to be under the rule of the Prince of Darkness. How he had flinched the first time he had heard that said aloud.

  “They say the rules of the Game are written into the fabric of things,” Robin said at last. “My father told me once that they were older than him, and he is almost as old as Arvath itself. You cannot just break them. Five simple rules, he said. Simpler than you would think for a complex game. But one of them is that the Game ends with death.”

  Raphael walked over to the fireplace and leaned his head on the mantel. He spoke without turning back. “One of them is that there is nothing to be held above the rules of the Game but those things necessary for the continuance of the universe. Nothing, do you understand?”

  The coals flared below him into fire, a hot and hungry flame like dragonfire, not the ordinary friendly wood blaze. Magic was crowding into the room again, suffocating in its intensity, in a desire he didn’t understand, couldn’t name to himself.

  “And yet you broke them.” Kasian’s voice was calm, judicial, his kingly voice, Raphael thought. A judge’s voice, awaiting the defense.

  “I don’t have a defense,” he said, “except she looked at the sun and smiled, and I thought: how can I? How can this be right? How could I look on you with that on my hands?” His voice trailed down unbidden by him. Without it on his hands, he wasn’t looking on them at all.

  Apropos of nothing Raphael could see, Robin asked, “Did you know Orpheus?” A pause, while Raphael tried to think how to answer that. His head was throbbing again, in waves. Every seventh one monstrous. Or was it every ninth? Robin went on, his voice curious, “Did you love him?”

  “I was him.”

  And there: he had said it. He kept his head bowed to the fire, letting it twine about his hands, kneading the flames until they turned colours, red to orange to yellow to green.

  Kasian said, “Raphael, rejecting your music because your beloved died is a good story but a terrible way to live. You must stop mourning her. It’s too easy to … wallow.”

  “Why do you keep saying it’s easier?” he asked, voice cracking. “Do you know what it’s like, to always have to turn away, to always have to choose duty over inclination, to always have more duties to do—always? Always.”

  He stopped, panting. Kasian said again, “The Game is over. You don’t have to keep playing it.”

  “I still have all my responsibilities.” The phoenix cloak weighed heavy in his mind, in the room. He would never balance that.

  “You are not a god! You don’t have to pretend to be one. You are the seventh Lord of Ysthar, not the first. You are a mage, powerful, but not divine. You don’t have to hold yourself to that standard.”

  “You don’t hold me to that standard,” Robin said, echoing Will. “Though you’re right, I do need to practise. You broke my wards as if they were spun sugar. Again I ask you, Lord: will you teach me?”

  Raphael scrubbed at his face and leaned forehead against hands against mantelpiece. Sword of the Lord Phoenix before him, cloak behind him, twin brother and best friend standing at his shoulders. He should feel protected, surrounded by care. Instead he felt totally inadequate. And still the shadow was waiting. Always.

  Kasian murmured something he didn’t catch. He did hear Robin’s response: “No, I doubt that would work. He’ll keep wriggling out of it. As Will said, he’s determined to see himself as living in a tragedy, not a history. Tragedies end in doom no matter how well intentioned you are.”

  Was that true? Was that how he lived?

  “Yes,” said Robin, “I’m afraid it is. Which, now that I come to think of it, means a great deal for my future. Am I doomed to a life of misery? I ask myself, contemplating the variousgreat magi I know. My father is a reasonably happy man, but would I be content doing nothing but wenching, drinking, and forest magic? No; I spent my youth in Fairyland. There is more to life than hunting.

  “But then again, there is more to life than honey. My mother, as I said, sends a tithe to hell, but even if she got power by giving over her name she certainly didn’t win happiness. Not exactly what I want out of life, either. I have always wondered about the Lord of  Ysthar; I thought he was far too devoted to his work for sanity even before I knew it was you. Now it’s clear that if you decide not to go the obvious power-and-glory route in favour of an honourable anonymity, you just get stuck with a depressing amount of work.”

  Raphael found his heart lifting a tiny bit from Robin’s tone. He was about to turn to answer when there came a sudden jarring intrusion in the form of a mobile phone ringing shrilly. He had to ride out the waves of pain as he jerked in reaction.

  Robin sighed melodramatically, shifted into English. “See, the rule holds good. A certain degree of anonymity, and people text you at midnight to complain—well, that the cast party has gotten rather out of hand, it appears. I don’t suppose you want to come to the theatre with me to tell them off?”

  Raphael shook his head, did turn, in time to see Robin’s wry grin. “I’ll leave you to your fraught silences and your brother’s ox-headed attempts to call you out of them, then. Oh! That reminds me, Scheherezade had a message for you: ‘For an extremely intelligent man, you can be unbelievably stupid at times.’—These are her words, you understand, not mine. She most vehemently added: ‘There is always another story when one finishes.’”

  He paused, then when Raphael said nothing, said, “Good night, my lord,” and bowed as befit the Crown Prince of Fairyland to the Lord of  Ysthar. Raphael hastily bowed back and nearly collapsed.

  Kasian caught him and pushed him down on the nearest seat, which meant he leaned back and found his head cradled by the phoenix cloak. It smelled intensely of roses and fire. “I shouldn’t be touching this,” he said, but didn’t move his head from the comforting burn. He could feel it, if little else but his body. Robin hesitated, then saw Kasian’s expression (which Raphael could not) and without further words walked out with a jaunty step belying the ruffled magic around him.

  When they heard the door close Kasian said, “Why not?”

  “It’s sacrilegious.”

  His brother squatted down to pour the wine into their glasses. The bottle was on the floor, not the end table. Raphael frowned at it as the pain receded to an ignorable level. “I don’t think so, sha óm. For anyone else, perhaps, but not you, not now.”

  He took the glass stupidly. “Now?”

  “Your injuries come from the end of the Great Game Aurieleteer.”

  “Not all of them,” he murmured.

  “Drink your wine. No, don’t sip it—quaff it.”

  He did so numbly, felt the strong wine radiate out into his body more quickly than the nirgal slaurigh. He rather wanted nirgal slaurigh just then, snowfall, quiet, silence, instead of this pounding hurt. Kasian refilled his glass, and when he sipped it this time merely smiled. Though the slaurigh hadn’t done anything but make him more aware of his bruises.

  “Thank you,” Raphael said finally. “I’m sorry I am not good company.”

  Kasian chuckled and eased himself up onto the chesterfield. “That depends on your definition of ‘good’. You’ve been infuriating company, certainly, but hard
ly dull, which I suspect is what you mean. Melodramatic, volatile, blowing hot and cold, full of enigmatic secrets and sudden flashes of power—but never boring. Not bad company, to be sure. And I must say I appreciate your taste in friends. I’m a little jealous.”

  He could only answer the last part with his dry heart. “Jealous?”

  “I haven’t any so dear to me they would stand up to a great mage in high temper. I’m not sure how many of them would stand for five hours of a stormy winter’s night trying to break into a friend’s house, either, on the say-so of a relative stranger. Especially not the Lord of  Ysthar’s house, and not by magic.”

  He spoke lightly, but Raphael could see that there was a painful truth behind his tone. Something stirred in him, and this time he was too tired not to let it unfurl into words. “You did miss me.”

  Kasian didn’t answer for a moment, turning his glass in his hand so the firelight caught it in a topaz glow. “Is it really so difficult to say what you feel? At first I thought it was because you no longer felt anything … five thousand years, I thought. What an impossibly long time to live through. It would harden anybody, seeing that much time go by. Having some power, but not enough. It’s never enough.”

  He was a king: he understood. Raphael could hear it in his voice. He sipped his own wine a little desperately, not sure what he was trying to block out, not sure where the ache he felt was coming from. There was a warm glow from the phoenix cloak in his senses. It was just too warm for comfort.

  “I thought at first that was the problem. Da can be like that … and you are very like him, you know.  You were crippled, and I wondered if it was—power has its price. We’ve been taught that our whole lives. Power always has its price.”

  Raphael’s gaze lifted up to the sword. Kasian followed his glance, said, “Yes … the sword of the Lord Phoenix, Adonai Adamai of the stories. Duty.” He chuckled dryly. “And there is always more to be done, isn’t there? Duty can cripple the soul, if you’re not careful.”

  He fell silent, poured more wine, leaned forward to fill Raphael’s cup. Raphael thought of Circe telling him to beware the strong wine, that it would go to his head. He shook his head, not wanting to think about her.

  “You shake your head, but it’s true. I thought you’d hardened yourself, until you realized about the nirgal slaurigh, and I saw your face for a moment, the despair. Oh, just for an instant, you caught yourself so quickly. It was terrible how quickly you hid it.—I saw that it wasn’t strength of emotion you were lacking. Then I saw your performance in the play. I didn’t understand all the words, but the range of expression you had was harrowing. There had to be something else at work, I thought.”

  Wednesday night’s performance was a complete blank to him except for that hazy moment where Will had helped him.

  “That was after the end of the Game, wasn’t it? I didn’t think—couldn’t think—you would go to the final duel without telling anyone … without telling me … or imagine you’d go to a play afterwards. You went to perform the night of the end of the Game. Duty again, I suppose. And out of it came that storm of art. It was beautiful. And terrible, when I thought of how cold you are the rest of the time. What were you hiding? What injuries done to yourself? How much had you lost without me?”

  Raphael realized he had come to the end of his wine. He thought that he should stop drinking before he became drunk (although as a rule it took a great deal to make him drunk), but he didn’t stop Kasian pouring him another glass. They sat companionably silent but for the soft movements of the liquid in their glasses, the fire nuzzling at the wood.

  Raphael leaned back into the fire-and-roses embrace of the phoenix cloak. A soft honey-coloured wind came in from the French doors, twining around him, bringing with it the sound of a blackbird in the garden. The bird kept stopping, starting again. Kasian dipped his finger in the candle nearest him and rubbed the wax thoughtfully with his thumb.

  In that moment, Raphael would have given absolutely anything to play.

  The desire cracked through him so sharply he caught his breath, as if he’d fallen and knocked the air out of himself. He held himself still, waiting for the impulse to pass. Fade it did. But before he moved he had the curious sensation that he was holding still in another place, an important one.

  He had held still for the wind booming across London in the night before Kasian came, and broken instinct against reasoned duty. He had held still for Circe in the sunlight, and broken the ancient grip of the rules of the Game against his thin tremulous hope that there was something more important than necessity.

  In this still silent place he realized that he was once again facing the question the shadow had posed him, that day on the island of Phos when the sun did not rise.

  ***

  He had been born able to hear the song of creation, played such that trees walked to hear him and the winds knew his name.

  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, an
d 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.