Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  Astandalan horns, he thought doubtfully, trying to analyze the elements of the sound without ruining his enjoyment of the music. And Ishaa’s low alto voice, the silvery chimes of her feathers.

  His eyes flew open and he stared uncomprehendingly at the books piled beside the hearth.

  ***

  Raphael spent the rest of Saturday more awake than he had ever been before. He had asked the stars and the sky and the earth and the seas to waken, and waken they had, though he wasn’t sure what the result of that would be to any beside him; but the Empyrean had come to him of its own accord. Now he himself was properly awake and alive. Along with his ears half his mind had been closed.

  He and Kasian went out walking. It was a sharp clear day outside, sharp as the line of beauty, clear as a perfect consommé. Raphael chose not to press the metaphor: he was too busy looking and listening to do that. He didn’t talk, either; they simply walked through his favourite parts of London. The daffodils shone yellow and white and the cherries were starting to blossom, and all the world was singing to him.

  They came to the river at Tower Bridge. Sven the troll was there, looking like a jumble of rubble until he moved. He congratulated Raphael on the happy conclusion to the Great Game Aurieleteer.

  Raphael beamed. “Thank you,” he said simply. He was about to take his leave (Alp-horns and the low notes of the organ played very long: that was the troll in his mind) when the river stood up and came to him.

  He understood half a moment later, when he saw it was the river-god, the Thames himself, who had stood and leaned his arms on the escarpment. He was crowned with flags and rushes, and water sheeted over him with a sound like brass hammers.

  “Lord,” said the river, “I bid you good day.”

  “To you as well. How may I be of service?”

  “No service. Unless I can be of such to you—I believe this is yours?” And he held up Raphael’s bag.

  “It is, indeed. Thank you for returning it to me.”

  “There’s too much cluttering my bed to countenance anything extra,” the Thames growled. “See you keep better care of your belongings.”

  Raphael smiled. “I shall endeavour to do so.” He took his bag, introduced his brother—“Kasian, the river Thames and Sven of Umea; my brother Kasian Chrysaeór, the King of the Tantey,”—and, after compliments had been exchanged, swung off down the path again. Kasian followed behind him, laughing aloud to himself.

  Raphael looked around happily, gathering snippets of song together. Here a couple embracing on a bench, there an azalea flaming red with blossoms, the smooth arc a lawn-mower made with his tractor, the river like a symphony, the city a thousand songs and operas all fitting together.

  They walked westwards, back towards his house. The London Eye shook the world like a kaleidoscope when he looked through it. He stopped to stare in wonder at its coalescing colour and exuberant music. Kasian came up to lean against the railing beside him.

  “What is that?”

  “A Ferris wheel,” he replied after a moment, fishing words from deep inside. “The London Eye, it’s called. Would you like to go on it?”

  “Go on it? Er … yes, why not?”

  “Very well then.”

  They were not far from the Millennium Bridge, so he led the way south and along. The world must have been with him in truth, for there was hardly any queue when they got there: and it was a glorious Saturday afternoon, no less. Raphael paid for them, they clambered aboard, and slowly, majestically, began to rise.

  Raphael might have squared the circle in the space of time the Eye bore them upwards, had he been thinking of number in any form other than pure sound. There were two women in the carriage with them. One was a Londoner and pointed out the sights to Kasian as well as her friend. Raphael himself couldn’t tear his attention away from the music filling his mind.

  At the zenith Kasian flopped down on the bench beside him. “You doing all right there?” he asked. “You seem a touch, ah, distracted.”

  Raphael’s heart gave a huge leap of pure delight. “She gave me back my music.”

  Kasian looked at him. “Really?”

  He nodded breathlessly, words failing him. The music surged in their stead, horns and flutes and harps and drums and voices, in the wind and in the city and in the land and in the light and in everything around him. The Eye was a high soft thrumming noise like crystal rubbed with a damp finger.

  He looked around, inadvertently catching the attention of the two women. One of them, not the Londoner but her friend, smiled shyly. As they disembarked, she said, “You’re James Inelu, aren’t you? Would you give me your autograph?”

  Raphael blinked at her, but accepted the notebook she held out. He nearly signed ‘Raphael’ but caught himself in time. He handed it back to her, thinking happily that he would not be acting any longer, and that he would have to learn how to sign his name in modern penmanship. As he and Kasian wandered off, he heard the Londoner say, “Sandy, I can’t believe you did that! You’ve never asked anyone for their autograph before.”

  Since Kasian was laughing, all Raphael heard of the reply was, “He looked friendly.”

  Going home afterwards they encountered Gabriel at Westminster bridge. He was standing nearly where Circe had the day before, though now the bridge was swept clean and gleaming a ruddy gold in the late sunlight. Kasian greeted him enthusiastically and then said, “Did you have a message for one of us?”

  Gabriel smiled serenely, hands idly in his pockets. “No. I was just enjoying the evening air after the storm yesterday.”

  Raphael looked at his cousin. “I’m sorry,” he said, inadequately.

  “For the storm? It was quite magnificent, and, I think, quite cleansing.”

  “For … pretending I didn’t know you.”

  Gabriel gestured at the flood of gold in the river as the tide came in. A white swan rode the knotted waves unconcernedly. Despite the dinginess behind it the scene was so beautiful Raphael nearly wept. The deep well of pain was crowned with beauty, a mystery he did not know how to unravel, or if he even had to. There was grief so deep he had no idea to fix it; so much broken in the song; so much beauty.

  “When we met on the bank of the Euphrates the world was different. I brought a terrible message for a puissant lord magus, one that bound him into a game of daring and fear and despair, and I dreaded giving it. I was not expecting the Lord of  Ysthar to be you. I am sorry I let you think I didn’t want to know you because I was horrified at the message I was bringing.”

  Raphael wished he had his lirin to help him speak. “I didn’t expect you to apologize.” He fumbled to articulate his thoughts. “I have been mistaken in many fundamental presumptions, I think.”

  “And now?”

  “This is after.”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel: “after the passion comes the harrowing. And after the harrowing comes the new day.”

  They walked far into the evening, stopping for supper at a fish-and-chip shop near Kew Gardens. Gabriel and Kasian spoke companionably while Raphael walked behind them, listening to the music, listening to their friendship, listening. He would shape the songs later—there was a later—they did not need him to speak while his heart was too full for words.

  They turned back towards Westminster as the bells of the city churches started to chime, peal after peal ringing out into the night. Raphael thought it was in his mind until he saw how Kasian smiled up at the steeples as they passed them, and then they passed a procession bearing candles and incense that caught up the magic around him into a still higher register of joy, and he realized it was Easter.

  They walked home along the songlines, and when Raphael went to bed he fell asleep listening to the songs the three trees sang to the moon.

  Chapter Nineteen

  An Unexpected Thief

  Raphael woke up hungry and happy, a combination of sensations so foreign to him he jumped out of bed in amazement. The curtains and the windows both were open: the pale
eastern sky was freckled with stars. Winds called out one to another, singing songs he did not know. He stood listening, looking out his window eastwards to morning, until he heard a melody he did know, the tidings of an arctic tern almost home.

  Her voice was wordless but distinct, the poetry of flight, the journeying done for the journey’s sake. North in the spring and south in the autumn, from Arctic to Antarctic each and every year, from summer to summer through the tropics. Sterna paradisaea: the terns of paradise, the birds who know more day than night, who live in the summer countries of the world.

  She was early, probably the earliest of the migration, and she sang about the wonders of early spring as if she had never seen them before. Her voice rang down the wind to him, as he stood before his windows looking to the east and the morning star. They lived behind the North Wind, the arctic terns, ivumë in Tanteyr. Raphael’s friend Calaïs was Ivumel. He wondered if Calaïs would forgive him, if he asked.

  Perhaps he could write a song for him and set it loose on the tides of the worlds, and perhaps it would circle around at last to be heard by his friend, heard from some musician far away from Ysthar, where Calaïs might hear it and think—what? Perhaps that Raphael had come to his right mind, at last, and come home to himself.

  He listened to the tern until her voice was lost in the welter of sound that was the world waking up. He shivered with astonishment; he could not keep from smiling. Everything dazzled him, deafened him with music, startled him when he turned too suddenly. When he lifted his hand to comb his hair music rippled like water down his arm.

  He would have had a bath but he couldn’t bear to wait so long; his shower was hasty, the sound of water on his head mingled with the music unbearably intense. He accidentally grabbed a sarong rather than a towel from the linen closet, a tie-dyed item of clothing left from the seventies, from a curious eight months spent on a hippie commune in Tennessee, the result of a wrong turning and a great desire to do something different from his previous employment pretending to be a Russian spy for one of Circe’s challenges. He moved slowly out of deference to his poor overwhelmed mind, hair dripping wet down his bare back, with a rill of mirthful magic running beside him like a tumble of dogs.

  He hummed to himself as he went through the living room. Kasian was soundly asleep in a drift of blue magic and low soundings, his head squished into the arm of the sofa at an angle that would surely give him a crick in the neck. Raphael beamed fondly at him, straightened the blankets, tucked a pillow into the crook, and left him to wake on his own. For once there was nothing awaiting him: nothing but a sense of promise, the promise of a new day and a new story.

  He hesitated between going out to play immediately and making food, his desire for both almost equally emphatic. The music surging through his mind made it hard to decide, or indeed to think of anything beyond ever-increasing reaches of joy.

  He went eventually into the kitchen, assailed by the thought that he could make whatever he wanted and then go play while it was rising. It was still very early, after all, not quite dawn, and it was cool outside.

  He washed the crystal glasses and Will’s mugs first (and the glasses sang with the note Robin had made with his wet finger around them, nearly the sound of the London Eye with the city shattering into stained-glass colour through it, while Will’s mugs were like a Newfoundland drinking song), leaving them to dry while he fossicked in his cupboards.

  Thanks to Kasian’s enthusiastic shopping, there were eggs and flour and butter and sugar and chocolate and yeast, and for once there was time, and what more did he need than that?

  He made croissants and bread, and in the pauses brioches, and left them to rise. He squeezed fresh oranges from the conservatory, narrowly avoiding knocking over the tree in its tub while picking them; put champagne on to chill. There was a story of the monk who had first discovered that his wine had become champagne: he had said, with marvel in his voice on tasting it, that he had drunk sunlight.

  Raphael listened carefully to the bottle, and smiled: certainly it held the promise of light in its green depths. If Kasian had thought the port fine Raphael wondered what he would make of this. Trumpet-calls and sunshine and fizz like happiness. It had been a long time since he had been happy; he had forgotten how it illuminated the world.

  Then at last he washed his hands, collected his lirin, and went outside into the Garden of the Hesperides.

  The grass wet his bare feet as he climbed the hill to the fountain at the foot of the three Trees. At the crest of the hill each blade of grass was edged with fire, little spurtling crackles of grace-notes and arpeggios. He settled himself with his back against the Tree of the Golden Apples, right side to the rising sun, and listened.

  He heard everything.

  Eventually he stirred enough to raise the lirin to his chin. There were different ways of playing, so that the lirinist might play and sing at the same time, might caress the strings with the bow or pluck with his fingers; but he didn’t want to sing just yet. He had no words to express what he felt: words had never been his strength. But there had once been music.

  Now he smiled, shook out his arms, lifted lirin and bow, and touched the strings so gently the West Wind could not have carried Psyche more lightly. He meant to savour the sound of pure harmony for as long as he could, the sound of the absolute. But then perhaps he had not misunderstood himself when he had forsworn music in its entirety. He could handle no trickle, no frolicsome breeze: what came from his playing was the flood and the storm and the sunrise. He cracked open the nutshell of his soul and all the world came tumbling out.

  ***

  He played until the sun climbed into the branches. It fiddled with his hair, teased at the upper corners of his vision, dappled him with the shadows of leaves and white flowers. He improvised on the theme of sunlight and shadow for some time, the melody growing on the root of that old song he had written long ago for his beloved. When he stopped it was only because there was someone in his garden.

  A woman walked up the hill towards him. Green and gold magic the colour of the sunlight through early leaves swirled about her, embroidered with music like the notes of his lirin: she fit into his garden like the principal instrument into its concerto. The only jarring note was subtle: a scarf of magic covered her throat in Lincoln green, clashing with her aura. For a moment he thought she might be naked, but he wasn’t sure if he had seen that or only caught a glimpse of whiteness like a statue’s body. He was far more interested in her face.

  She stopped on the other side of the fountain from him. She looked at the water and she looked at the trees and he wanted to sing or shout or cry aloud until finally she looked at him. Her eyes were the colour of cypresses in the twilight: he caught his breath.

  She smiled awkwardly. He fought for equanimity but there was no hope for it. He couldn’t move. For the life of him he could think of nothing to say nor any music to play. It felt like whole ages of the world passed before he managed to smile, just as awkwardly, in return. Then he broke off and looked down and away. He was blushing furiously; he could see his face wavering pinkly in the pool. He was so confused, and he was wearing a ridiculous tie-dyed sarong and nothing else, and she was there.

  Then she knelt, her dark hair swinging over her shoulder and across her face. She brushed it aside with an impatient hand. He smiled at the gesture and she caught his eye. She held herself stiffly for a moment, then presented him with a quick abashed smile, much more real than her first. It thrust at him like lightning through a tree.

  Light gathered around her fingers as she cupped her hands into the water, but the liquid was too subtle and slipped through her grasp. She frowned, tried again to bring water to her lips, and again it slipped through her touch. Her face contracted with exasperation. Sunlight caught the edge of her expression and he realized it was closer to frustrated despair.

  He set down lirin and bow, stood carefully, but the sarong slipped and he had to hitch it up. He felt as if the moment or he might br
eak if he moved too hastily, and begrudged his embarrassment. He padded across the greensward without mishap to kneel before her. Her eyes widened and she met his gaze; perhaps anxiously, but with no fear, no pain, no flinching.

  He would have smiled, but found himself unable to. His heart was too full for expression. Instead he reached into the water. Soft bubbles rose into his palms from the source. The world sang in his mind and the water on his skin. He felt he had reached up and into the heart of the sun and held pure light in his fingers.

  He raised his hands to her lips. She stared at him in challenge or amazement or something for which he had no name, then bent her head and drank. It was awkward and his thumbs got in the way, despite his efforts, and his muscles shook holding his wrists at that angle; but she drank.

  Her hair fell across his forearm. He untangled his fingers, reaching to brush it away. She didn’t draw back, even when he touched her skin and traced the line of her throat. The Lincoln-green magic unwound from her neck, ran around his wrist, and slipped to the ground.

  She responded by reaching out and touching his face, her hand gentle and cool from the water. She touched his lips and then his cheek, sending light tingling through his body. The water on her hand was sweet.

  He ran his fingers along her hairline, from crown to temple. There was no magic there, nor physical wound even seven years of the phoenix healed, only the faintest glimmer of the light that is beyond the sun’s and lets the sunlight be seen. It was only because he could hear the echo of that divinity and knew its song—knew it from long ago in a golden beech wood where the green grass was starred with white flowers—that he was sure it was there. She closed her eyes but it was too late: he had seen the way she looked at him. He dropped his hand.