Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  “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.

  Except his body chose that moment to seize in pain. His hand cramped separately from his body, from the unaccustomed movements, the counterattack of the physical on this opened box of his heart. The strings squawked protest. Will laughed, richly, joyously, jovial as Falstaff.

  And then emotion threw Raphael overboard the ship of his soul. He scrambled back to the door. “I don’t have anything else to say—just—thank you—and—and—”

  Their faces transmuted into a kind of exasperated fondness, to which he could only smile, until he realized there was more he could do—he added with a swift impulse of outflung magic, “And you may come to my house when you will—it’s by the river—Robin knows—good afternoon.”

  He didn’t wait for them to say anything, left them sitting there with coffee cups still balanced on their knees, threw himself into a kind of tumultuous joy of fast clouds and high sunlight and a wild fresh wind blowing from the east. The city was nearly too bright for him to look on.

  When he got home he barrelled into the living room to tell Kasian he had played for his friends and there, unexpectedly, he found God.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Theodicy of Sorts

  She was arrayed with the firmament and standing before the fireplace, and when Raphael jolted to a stop and fell to his knees she smiled at him. He had thought himself just barely able to contain looking with open eyes on the glories of the world; looking on the One choosing to manifest herself before him he was lost.

  He thought, not entirely irrelevantly, of Arjuna looking into the mouth of his charioteer and seeing there the entirety of things. Then his mind crashed into silence.

  “You were not so fri
ghtened when last we spoke,” she said.

  Frightened? There was a trembling in his limbs and a fire of sublime delight in his breast and a chasm of awe yawning ever greater in his mind. Perhaps this was fear, he thought, that he was unable to look upon his God. There was certainly something broken in him that this meeting was so dreadfully silent.

  “Are you here because of what I have done?” he asked. He meant, or at least he thought he meant, his deliberate flout of the rules of the Great Game Aurieleteer, when he let Circe go free from Stonehenge, compounding his earlier actions and his continuing inability to do what he had promised, to uphold the song of the world. Which, of course, he could no longer hear.

  “Yes,” she said simply, and there was pity in her voice.

  He was not surprised: some part of him had been expecting the judgment and the penalty, although he had not expected ever to be worthy of theophany; not he who had once known divinity in every moment, and spurned glory in high self-righteousness.

  “No pleas or excuses?”

  The enormity of his failings dropped onto his head and shoulders. He fell towards the floor under its weight. He had played for Kasian and his friends, knowing it might be the wrong step, and here he was.

  Excuses for it swirled around him like a school of minnows, that he had not known (but he had)—that he not intended (but he had)—that he had never dreamed (but that was the problem).

  But some gadfly of pride or folly or faith goaded him until he said, gasping with effort, stammering silently in huge heaving gulps, “No.”

  There was no hint of movement but suddenly there was a gentle pressure on the crown of his head, as of a hand resting lightly there. He did not, could not, dared not move. The touch was warm. It filled his senses for what seemed one moment, and all eternity.

  He had been a magus for the greater portion of his life, who worked directly with high and wild magic, magic he saw and tasted and felt on his skin and smelled as well as knew with his mind. Before that, for as long as he could remember—perhaps always—he had heard music erupting out of all things and their interconnexions to carol joyously in his ears and mind.

  Apart from one hour before the Eater of Worlds and one day under the nirgal slaurigh he had never known the ordinary uses of the five senses in isolation. When he came across what struck others, more normal in their perceptions, as the wholly and utterly other, he saw, however imperfectly, beneath and behind the physical surface of discontinuity to the underlying harmony. He had lived all his life attending to what lay between mind and brain, soul and body: that was his life.

  With the weight of the God’s hand or foot or presence on his head he was thrust onto the endless see-saw between sensation and thought which is the lot of human experience. Like a star twinkling because it fits into only one cell of the retina at a time and jumps from one to another with the minutest motion of the eye, the God flickered between his mind and his body, beyond being grasped by either.

  All of those parts of him that knew and understood and used that infinitely narrow space between sight and imagination were dark and silent. For a moment he felt only with his skin, saw only with his eyes, heard only with his ears.

  “I could leave you like this,” she said, “in return for what you have done and not done. Blind, deaf, all things that once spoke to you mute, all things you once could do impossible, living out the span of your life as an ordinary man; as ordinary a man as one who has such memories as you could be. That could be done.”

  Raphael had never before realized how much he cared for the more personal aspects of his magic. When he had despaired for the Game he had not wanted his magic for itself. He thought of Kasian asking him if it were worth it; he wondered if he knew the answer now.

  But he said, his head still bent to the floor, “I believe that you are good.”

  His voice was strange in his ears.

  Her voice was steady and unemotional and beautiful as the endless dazzle of the night sky. “And what if I were to tell you that I am neither just nor merciful?”

  His body was still held by her touch and his mind huddled miserably in his brain. He was left to tease an answer laboriously, out of his gut and marrow and muscles.

  From where it had lain hidden by his quicksilver magic, his grief for his music, his sorrow for Eurydice, and beneath his shames and prides and hopes and fears, beneath everything he thought he knew about himself, there he found the solid rock of his faith. He had broken the rules of the Game on the strength of it, still stood upon the world despite its long history of woe because he believed that one law to be higher than all the others.

  He had played for Kasian because he could not bear for it not to be true, had seen in the faces of his friends what their answer was when he showed them not the faces that he made but himself. He had played the music in silence as he had never done before, and found what law he obeyed. His despair did not go all the way down, as the cave on the island of Phos had gone down, to the Abyss. It was bitter as the water of the fountain on the hill; but still he believed that that water was the water of life.

  A totally unprovable axiom, he thought, but something that had to be assumed for all the rest to fall into place. One of the foundations of thought.

  Red, blue, and yellow are the primary colours. One and one is two. God is love.

  It was very hard to confess it, hard to say it aloud. It was hard to bare oneself to judgment, knowing one may very well be in the wrong; harder yet to know one did so in every moment. The laws of reason have complete jurisdiction.

  He had made his choice. And if the Rubicon took longer to cross than he had expected, nevertheless he had stepped into it.

  He could feel the wind around his house, careening as joyously as the wind on Sunday night had done, when he had not been able to see past Wednesday.

  She had given the lirin to him, long ago, price for all the things he had promised to do, and failed to do.

  He had to wet his lips before any sound came out. “Then,” he said raggedly, “I will deny your divinity to the God who is.”

  There was a pause, and he thought of the beauty of blossoms falling like stars, and a scent like roses and spring.

  “But I am your God,” she said in a low voice, soft as Ishaa’s feathers on his face, coloured with an indescribable emotion.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  The pressure on his crown lessened. His head rose at it lightened and he would have laughed at this light-headedness if he had been able to muster the strength. He floated upward to his knees and saw her once again before him.

  She smiled as she spoke. He had to cover his face, wondering why he was not destroyed by seeing that smile, the smile of one who had looked on creation and pronounced it good. (Who had once listened to him playing and pronounced it good.) “My Robin was right. You do take yourself far too seriously at times. Raphael.”

  She leaned forward and to his surprise (although he was almost beyond all emotions) kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  The world exploded into his mind again and by the time the dazzle cleared sufficiently to let him think she had gone.

  He heard a whisper of feathers, Ishaa drifting to his shoulder. She sang in his ear a song for nestlings and he put up his hand to the soft downy feathers at her throat where sound thrummed and the life-heat warmed his cold fingers. A fall of gold-white sparks spilled frothily over his wrist and across his chest. He shifted position to sit cross-legged and leaned against the chair. Just to be certain he could he reached into the hearth and called forth flame. Ishaa chortled her approval, and hopped from his shoulder to his knee.

  Raphael stroked her wonderingly, marvelling at the interplay of white and gold fire and feathers, and the rumbling velvety music at its heart. His thoughts were scattered like the current of a river around islands; his mind latched onto only one fact or image at a time.

  Most astonishing of all was what had just happened. Everything felt deeper and richer than it had before. He wept
at the beauty of Ishaa’s song, which played over him, living delight of cool waters. He hugged her closer, and Ishaa responded with another chortle. What a wonderful word, he thought delightedly, Lewis Carroll had done the English language a favour with its invention. He felt a chortle upwelling in himself and let it come without anxiety. Ishaa nuzzled him under the chin, her poniard beak gentle. The fire crackled merrily. He sighed with a pure and simple contentment.

  “You look very peaceful,” Kasian said from behind him.

  Raphael twisted around. To his amazement, nothing seemed to hurt. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Just a few minutes.” Kasian sat beside him with a quiet grunt. “I was half-asleep, reading in the library, when I heard you talking to someone. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but you were speaking in Tanteyr and the other person called you lhen and fhial rather interchangeably and I was curious to see who addressed you as a child and by the word for the Lord Phoenix.”

  “You must have heard, then, that I called her aufhial.” Which was the word for God.

  Kasian looked at him; his eyes were very bright. “Yes, I did.” He smiled suddenly and radiantly. “She, along with Robin, is quite right. You do—”

  “Take myself too seriously. I know.” Raphael sighed ruefully. Then he smiled at himself. “I am so tired.”

  “Revelations take it out of one, I understand.”

  Raphael leaned his forehead on Ishaa’s smooth beak and smiled at the way song quivered in his skin and in the bones of his face. “I feel quite pleased with things in general.”

  “I’m glad.”

  The fire crackled and warmth stole its way into his muscles. “Thank you for coming to find me, Kas. I don’t think I would have made it through this week if you hadn’t.”

  Kasian didn’t answer but he shifted his weight, laying his hand gently on Raphael’s wrist, where the sleeve had ruched up. It was the first time that they had touched bare skin together. The contact was reassuring and oddly—for Raphael’s head was still bent towards the phoenix—oddly enough the quality of the singing he heard suddenly seemed to involve the sound of horns.