Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  “That’s what you gave up because of the Shadow King. Not just playing, but also hearing the … the …”

  “The music of the spheres. I couldn’t bear to p-play once I—once I closed my ears. I went into the wilderness and forced myself to speak without stuttering. At least,” he added in a lower voice, “when I’m not overwrought.”

  Kasian folded the handkerchief into small squares. “Was the trade worth it?”

  “I would rather I had my music than be able to speak. Words are not my strength. M-music always spoke for me.”

  “You’re not doing too badly right now.”

  “I’ve n-never told anyone this.”

  Kasian slewed around on the couch. Raphael inched back. Even in the candlelight, he saw the colour drain from his brother’s face.

  “You’re serious,” his twin breathed. “I didn’t realize … You mean it. You can hear the song of creation. Like the Unnamed One before he was unnamed—that’s what you mean, isn’t it? That music.”

  Raphael cupped the lirin in his hands. “That’s what I h-heard, yes. That m-music. I don’t remember when I first began to—I think always. As long as I can remember.”

  “No wonder you wanted to study music. And Da wouldn’t let you. You never tried to explain? Not even to me?”

  The question hung in the air. Raphael swallowed. “I thought it would be like explaining that since I could see I wanted to draw, or that since I was clumsy I didn’t want to fence. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized no one else heard what I d-did. By then I’d decided to keep it a secret. I was too different already; I didn’t want yet another thing singling me out.” He paused, then added self-consciously, “Besides, I l-liked having something I could d-do that you c-couldn’t.”

  His brother’s voice was soft. “There have always been many things, Raphael, that you could do and I couldn’t.”

  “But everything comes so easily for you. I spent thirty years—thirty—learning how to speak without stuttering. Once I had no occasion to talk to anyone for three or four years and I lost it and had to start again. It only took me twenty years that time. Fencing or dancing or anything physical is even worse. But music—oh, Kas, that came to me the way fencing comes to Da. Or you.”

  “I don’t think I’m quite in his league, though you flatter me by suggesting it. I don’t think anyone is in your league when it comes to music. Or magic.”

  He started to respond with his list of those he reckoned greater than he, but Kasian shook his head immediately. “No, not even Fitzroy Angursell could hide his magic the way you have. I envy your music teachers when they first heard you.”

  Raphael had to smile. “It wasn’t anything special. A tin pipe, rather shrill. It was the next lesson, after I’d had a fortnight to play around with it, that was something.”

  “How long did you study music?”

  “I studied from the summer we were eight until I was about twenty, so far as I could judge.” He was about to add more, as if he had opened a door with these words and now must let them out, but Kasian forestalled him.

  “Once a fortnight for five and a half years you had lessons, and you never let it on? How did you keep it a secret from me?”

  “You’re a heavy sleeper in the mornings.”

  “Bah!”

  “It’s true,” Raphael said, smiling at Kasian’s indignation. “It was only a fortnight between the first two times. Then it became weekly, then … ah, well, by the time we were ten it was almost every day.”

  He looked out into the garden, but couldn’t see the blackbird, though he knew from his magic it was in the pyracantha hiding the potting shed. “I am … I was very good at music, Kas.”

  “But when did you go? I always thought you went for long walks by yourself. You said you went for long walks by yourself.”

  “I did go for long walks by myself. To write music, usually. I used to go practice at Endya Music in the mornings, before school—and you were asleep then—and I’d have lessons in the afternoons, when Circe—Heloise had her magic lessons and you were fencing. And I worked, too, to begin with, in return for the tutoring.”

  “What could you do? That came out wrong. I mean, we were children, and you were so clumsy.”

  “I sorted books and manuscripts and scores, dusted and cleaned in the shop, helped in the yard a bit, that sort of thing. They were mostly humouring me, I think, at first. Later Sayo Alen taught me how to make instruments, so I helped with that. Then—”

  “Yes, and then?” Kasian snickered, a sudden unexpected noise. “You amaze me. I can hardly think what comes next.”

  Raphael blushed. Fire under his skin, as familiar-unfamiliar as the lirin in his hands. “I … When I started to write songs, decent ones I mean, they—they sold the music and lyrics, and took that as payment for the lessons. So after I was about twelve, I think it was, I just helped with the instrument-making—I liked that—and didn’t bother with the rest.”

  “You wrote enough popular—and popular enough—music to pay for daily lessons? What music did you write? How have I never heard of it?”

  “Kas—” He fought to get the words out, for no one but Alen and Zavya Forlonel had known he wrote the music he had. “Kas. I—I wrote a lot of music. ‘Tarazel’ and ‘The Golden Hind’ and ‘The Song of the Fire-Eaters’ and ‘The Ballad of Seven Buttons’ and—”

  Strange how easily the titles came to mind. He had not thought of these songs since the fall of Astandalas, because he had always reached onwards to the new prospects opening up in his soul; and, to be honest with himself, because those songs were the ones he had written before he had come to believe his entire family hated him, and most of them had been written for them.

  “‘The Ballad of Seven Buttons’ is one of my favourite songs,” Kasian said severely. “You wrote it? And never told me? And ‘Tarazel’? The Emperor named that as one of the three best songs of the year. I remember it. You laughed and laughed when I told you.”

  He stopped a moment. Raphael too remembered that Kasian had told him, somewhat condescendingly, about the Emperor’s choice of music for the New Year Feast; he had indeed laughed. Kasian coughed. “Because it was yours.”

  “I was going to tell you the next year, when the three best songs were ‘The Mistlethrush’ and ‘Ramna Torley’ and—”

  “‘The Garden of Light’. Don’t tell me those were yours, too? All those songs by the Anonymous Master of Astandalas … That was you. A boy.  You said you didn’t recall the song.”

  Raphael couldn’t bear to look at him. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t recall it.”

  Kasian said, in something like the tone with which he had asked Raphael if he had planned to explain about the end of the Game: “Were you ever going to tell us?”

  This time he had to answer. He gripped the lirin hard to help him cross the desert of his reticence. “Kasian, please believe me … I was. When all three of them were mine I was going to tell you, tell everyone, I mean, but … The announcement came the week before our birthday, and I thought of how we were going to have to choose our livelihood, so I waited. And then …”

  “Yes, and then indeed. Da disowned you, and the black wizards … found … you, and Astandalas fell, and you found yourself alone on Ysthar with a new talent for magic. And your music. I can’t even imagine what that was like.”

  “I studied magic as if it were music,” Raphael said, looking out into his garden. How strange that when he was thirteen he had written a song about the Garden of Light, a beautiful song (he could bring all the music perfectly to mind, still, though he’d so determinedly not heard it when Kasian and Robin sang) about the Lord of  Ysthar’s garden. How strange to sit here, half a lifetime on from then, and look out into that garden: his garden.

  “You see, I could … I heard the music of the spheres, but I still had to learn how to play, how to sing—”

  “You do—did sing? Even with a stutter?”

  “I don’t stutter when I sing.
”

  “No wonder you liked learning music.”

  The smile came more easily this time. “I heard music; then I saw magic. I taught myself its nature and limitations.”

  “And its glories? I know all magic has a price, and I’m not sure I would have paid yours, whatever the glories. Unless you had no choice?”

  “There is always a choice.”

  Kasian looked at him, frowning; the candlelight caught fine hairs and wrinkles. Raphael licked his lips, which were dry with so much talking, and gripped his lirin more tightly.

  “There is always a choice,” he repeated. “The alternative may be nothing better than a terrible and lingering death, but there is always a choice.”

  The blossom of silence grew until it enfolded them in its soft warmth. Raphael nudged open a space for his words. “I chose to give up music and concentrate on magic and my duties as the Lord of  Ysthar. I needn’t have; there was choice of an alternative. But I did not wish to exact the price.”

  Kasian spoke quietly. “Madness and death?”

  “That would have been what I gained for betraying my duty. Better to lose my mind, I thought, than to live having lost music. Better to lose my life, than to live having lost Eurydice. I don’t know what happens after we die: I might have found her.”

  Kasian said nothing, but turned on the couch so that his back was against the arm and his face turned to Raphael.

  “I would have followed her, Kas, if she had asked, beyond the end the world and beyond the ends of all the worlds and to the end of time and back. If she had asked. But she didn’t. And I don’t know what happens after, what dreams may come, what truths we may discover.”

  “If she died suddenly she couldn’t have asked.”

  “They said she stepped on an adder and fell down a crevasse. She had time to call me. I would have known if she had.”

  “What did you go through, if you gave up madness and death to do it?”

  Raphael looked out into the billowing night through the window. He could see only a few faint stars, blurred by the light cast off by the city, by the winds threaded through with magic. “I went through with the rest of the Game,” he said levelly. “I turned away from what had carried me through dark places, and I went through darker ones. I forced myself to become someone I contemn. I ignored my friends, and broke the laws of the universe, and betrayed myself. I have failed in my duty a thousand times: and I won the Great Game Aurieleteer whose rules were made by the Enemy.”

  Kasian said, “You just played for me what the blackbird was trying to sing.”

  Raphael leaned his forehead on his knees, his body aching. “I remember every piece of music I have ever heard. Every single piece.”

  How perfect an expression that was, he thought: every single piece. Each fragment of glory separated out from the whole, some complete and fitted in entire, others mere snippets chance-heard on the wind. But he remembered each one.

  “And now that the Game is done, was it worth it? Looking back at your life so far, are you happy to have made the choices that you made?”

  Happy, he thought, wondering at the choice of word. Kasian was a king: surely he understood.

  “Happiness does not much come into it,” he said. “In the same position I would choose the same—there was no one else. A season of madness taught me that. How could I turn my back on my duty?”

  “And your music? Would you still turn your back on that?”

  “Perhaps there was a way to keep it and not—not—not follow the path the Eater of Worlds took. But I can’t be sure—he heard that music, too, Kasian, and under the desire of power he fell—how could I stand strong where he fell?”

  “You are not he.”

  Raphael waited, but he was in the place of truth and consequences, and he had to say it. His voice was very low. “Sometimes I wonder if I might not be like him.”

  Kasian raised his hand as if to touch him, then let it sink down again. But he spoke: “What if you could go back in time to the crossroads, whenever it was for you, and refuse to take on the mantle of the lordship of  Ysthar? What if the choice had never come up?”

  Raphael’s fingertips were sore in unaccustomed places, his side hurt when he breathed, and his shoulder had started to throb. It was with great effort, hobbling other memories, that he cast his mind back to the beech wood, so long ago now, where the silence was framed with music and the magic with light.

  “When I woke after the fall of Astandalas, there was no one else around. Ishaa came—I don’t know how she found me—and there was just us. And the music, and the magic. I spent a long time learning about magic, and I used to sing for Ishaa. I went through every song I knew about Fitzroy Angursell and tried to do his magic. Otherwise it was mostly rocks, I remember, and I found water, the sea with a river running to it. Later there were trees. Mountains. Sunlight and moonlight and the stars, and sometimes lightning. Flowers—so many flowers—and the wind, and the clouds. But no people.”

  Kasian was quiet for a long while. “It must have been a long time.”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure how long. I … I remember watching rain filling a basin and making a lake, watching an oak tree grow from seed, watching beaches come into existence. Magic does strange things to people and their relationships to time, and I have a great deal of magic. Too much. Then, one day …”

  He stopped and let his mind run along the paths of that memory. Music splashed into his mind, and he smiled, for it felt as if suddenly his garden was indeed the Garden of Light, the Lord Phoenix’s garden, filled with divine radiance from the simple memory of music and light and one perfect afternoon long ago.

  But Kasian could not know what was in his mind, and so Raphael did his best to find words to describe it. “One day I was by a pool, a pond, in the middle of a beech wood. The trees had grey trunks: it was early morning, so the light slanted between them, and it was gold. There wasn’t much wind, just enough to make the shadows dance over the grass. In the grass there were white flowers, little ones. It was very still: but you have to remember there was music filling the air, like light in coloured glass. It was my phoenix dream come to me.”

  He savoured the memory. Then he shook his head a little to loosen himself from its grip, and knocked his cheek against the lirin. He raised his head, paused again at the sheer unaccustomed possibility that was opening before him.

  He struck a few notes with unsure fingers. “It was like this,” he said, and played for a while what it sounded like in his memory, the wind in the grass, and the beech leaves like green fans, and the white flowers like stars, and the water like silk to the touch.

  His hands slowed on the remembering, as his thoughts drew near the unfathomable glory in their centre, and he tugged words out from silence with the hands of his heart. “I was sitting there, bathing my feet, I think, when I saw … Someone … walking towards me out of the sunrise.”

  “Someone …”

  “The One.”

  Kasian’s amazement was a burst of golden light. Raphael looked out into the darkness, but he saw light: sunlight and magic, and before and behind and through it the radiance of the living intellect, the light that came before all darkness, the light that lets light be seen.

  “She came towards me. I was too awestruck to do more than stare, and worship. She walked the avenue from the morning to me, with the trunks of the beeches silver pillars and the roof above her blue and green and the grass lit with stars. I … I remember thinking … I had thought I heard the world singing, before. But it was nothing to the song that accompanied the One Above.”

  His hands wandered over the strings, playing pieces: the tree-trunks, a single flower in the grass, the light on the water, the wind blowing through his hair.

  “When I was somewhat recovered I saw she stood waiting … waiting for me to be able to pay attention, I suppose. She said, ‘Come,’ and I came, around the pool. I fell on my knees before her; I remember that.”

  Kasian breathed so d
eeply the candle flame flickered low. The light caught traces of tears on his face, as if someone had brushed gold leaf across his cheekbones.

  “She laid three things before me: a sword, and a crown, and a lirin. Then she asked me which I would choose, were I to choose one only.”

  “The sword of the Lord Phoenix,” Kasian said, looking at it. “The crown—the crown of  Ysthar. And the lirin?”

  Raphael gathered words together out of the insistent singing of his memories.

  “The lirin was—is—the lirin of the Morning Star, before he was unnamed, before he fell. I didn’t hesitate—why should I? I knew full well the sword was not for me, and the crown … I had never wanted power or its responsibilities. But the lirin …”

  He stroked the smooth wood of its curving belly. “I chose it. I didn’t know, not really, what it was. I didn’t think about the stories about the Morning Star, why he fell. I just wanted the music. She asked me why, and I replied that it was to play the song I heard then, the song of songs it was, the song of creation. That was all. Just to play it once would have been enough. I thought. It was almost enough. No. It has been enough. It has. I survived …”

  Kasian was politely silent, while the fire arched in the hearth like a cat.

  Raphael raised his eyes from the fire, found words. “She told me I should have the other two if I would have the lirin, and I accepted. Then I played for her …” He could not help but smile at this memory, of a perfect moment, though he dared not fumble with that music, with his fingers as unpractised as they were. “And she said my playing was good.”

  Kasian said nothing, though his face was illuminated with wonder.

  “Then she went away from that place. Or at least I couldn’t—I didn’t sense her any longer. Neither sight nor magic nor music.”

  He fell silent, thinking of the resounding praises that the world had sung after her departure, the hymns and hosannas and hallelujahs. Then, a while later, he added, “So that is why I, of all people, am the Lord of  Ysthar. In return for a musical instrument. Da would not be impressed.”

  “Is that truly the lirin of the Morning Star before he fell?”