Songmaster (17 page)

Ansset walked in the garden by the river. In the Songhouse, the garden had been a patch of flowers in the courtyard, or the vegetables in the farmland behind the last chamber. Here, the garden was a vast stretch of grass and shrubs and tall trees that stretched along the two forks of the Susquehanna to where they joined. On the other side of both rivers was dense, lush forest, and the birds and animals often emerged from the trees to drink or eat from the river. The Chamberlain had pleaded with Ansset not to wander in the garden. The space was too large, kilometers in every direction, and the wilderness too dense to do any decent patrolling.

But in the two years he had lived in Mikal’s palace, Ansset had tested the limits of his life and found they were broader than the Chamberlain would have liked. There were things Ansset could not do, not because of rules and schedules but because it would displease Mikal, and displeasing Mikal was never something Ansset desired. He could not follow Mikal into meetings unless he was specifically invited. There were times when Mikal needed to be alone—Ansset never had to be told, he noticed the mood come over Mikal and left him.

There were other things, however, that Ansset had learned he
could
do. He could enter Mikal’s private room without asking permission. He discovered, by trial and error, that only a few doors in the palace would not open to his fingers. He had wandered the labyrinth of the palace and knew it better than anyone; it was a way he often amused himself, to stand near a messenger when he was being sent on an errand, and then plan a route that would get him to the destination long before the messengers. It unnerved them, of course, but soon they got into the spirit of the game and raced him, occasionally reaching the end before Ansset.

And Ansset could walk in the garden when he wanted to. The Chamberlain had argued over it with Mikal, but Mikal had looked Ansset in the eye and asked, “Does it matter to you, to walk in the garden?”

“It does, Father Mikal.”

“And you have to walk alone?”

“If I can.”

“Then, you will.” And that was the end of the argument. Of course, the Chamberlain had men watching from a distance, and occasionally a flit passed overhead, but usually Ansset had the feeling of being alone.

Except for the animals. It was something he hadn’t had that much experience with at the Songhouse. Occasional trips to the open country, to the lake, to the desert. But there had not been so many creatures, and there had not been so many songs. The chatter of squirrels, the cries of geese and jays and crows, the splash of leaping fish. How could men have borne to leave this world? Ansset could not fathom the impulse that would have forced his ancient ancestors into the cold ships and out to planets that, as often as not, killed them. In the peace of birdsong and rushing water it was impossible to imagine wanting to leave this place, if it was your home.

But it was not Ansset’s home. Though he loved Mikal as he had loved no one but Esste, and though he understood the reasons why he had been sent to be Mikal’s Songbird, he nevertheless turned his back on the river and looked at the palace with its dead false stone and longed to be home again.

And as he faced the palace, he heard a sound in the river behind him, and the sound chilled him like a cold wind, and he would have turned to face the danger except that the gas reached him first, and he fell, and remembered nothing of the kidnapping.

There were no recriminations. The Chamberlain didn’t dare say I told you so, and Mikal, though he hid his grief well, was too grieved and worried to bother with blaming anyone except himself.

“Find him,” he said. And that was all. Said it to the Captain of the guard, to the Chamberlain, and to the man he called Ferret. “Find him.”

And they searched. The news spread quickly, of course, that Mikal’s Songbird had been kidnapped, and the people who read and cared at all about the court worried also that the beautiful Songbird might have been a victim of the mutilator who still went uncaught in Philadelphia and Manam and Hisper. Yet the mutilator’s victims were found every day with their bodies torn to pieces, and never was one of the bodies Ansset’s.

All the ports were closed, and the fleet circled Earth with orders to take any ship that tried to leave the planet and stop any ship that tried to land. Travel between districts and precincts was forbidden on Earth, and thousands of flits and flecks and fleskets were stopped and searched. But there was no sign of Ansset. And while Mikal went about his business, there was no hiding the circles under his eyes and the way he bent a little as he walked and the fact that the spring was gone from his step. Some thought that Ansset had been stolen for profit, or had been kidnapped by the mutilator and the body simply had not been found. But those who saw what the kidnapping did to Mikal knew that if someone had wanted to weaken Mikal, hurt him as deeply as he could be hurt, there could have been no better way than to take the Songbird.

The doorknob turned. That would be dinner.

Ansset rolled over on the hard bed, his muscles aching. As always, he tried to ignore the burning feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach. As always, he tried to remember what had happened during the day, for the last heat of day always gave way to the chill of night soon after he awoke. And, as always, he could neither explain the guilt nor remember the day.

It was not Husk with food on a tray. This time it was the man called Master, though Ansset believed that was not his name. Master was always near anger and fearsomely strong, one of the few men Ansset had met in his life who could make him feel as helpless as the eleven-year-old child his body said he was.

“Get up, Songbird.”

Ansset slowly stood. They kept him naked in prison, and only his pride kept him from turning away from the harsh eyes that looked him up and down. Only his Control kept his cheeks from burning with shame.

“It’s a good-bye feast we’re having for you, Chirp, and ye’re going to twitter for us.”

Ansset shook his head.

“If ye can sing for the bastard Mikal, ye can sing for honest freemen.”

Ansset let his eyes blaze. His voice was on fire as he said, “Be careful how you speak of him, traitor!”

Master advanced a step, raising his hand angrily. “My orders was not to mark you, Chirp, but I can give you pain that doesn’t leave a scar if ye don’t mind how ye talk to a freeman. Now ye’ll sing.”

Ansset had never been struck a blow in his life. But it was more the fury in the man’s voice than the threat of violence that made Ansset nod. But he still hung back. “Can you please give me my clothing?”

“It an’t cold where we’re going,” Master said.

“I’ve never sung like this,” Ansset said. “I’ve never performed without clothing.”

Master leered. “What is it then that you
do
without clothing? Mikal’s catamite has no secrets we can’t see.”

Ansset didn’t understand the word, but he understood the leer, and he followed Master out the door and down a dark corridor with his heart even more darkly filled with shame. He wondered why they were having a “good-bye feast” for him. Was he to be set free? Had Mikal paid some unimaginable ransom for him? Or was he to be killed?

Ansset thought of Mikal, wondered what he was going through. It was not vanity but recognition of the truth when Ansset concluded for the hundredth time that Mikal would be frantic, yet bound by pride and the necessities of government to show nothing at all. Surely, though, surely Mikal would spare no effort hunting for him. Surely Mikal would come and take him back.

The floor rocked gently as they walked down the wooden corridor. Ansset had long since decided he was imprisoned on a ship, though he had never been on a boat larger than the canoe he had learned to row on the pond near the palace. The amount of real wood used in it would have seemed gaudy and pretentious in a rich man’s home. Here, however, it seemed only shabby. Peasant rights and nothing more.

Far above he could hear the distant cry of a bird, and a steady singing sound that he imagined to be wind whipping through ropes and cables. He had sung the melody to himself sometimes, and often harmonized to it.

And then Master opened the door and with a mocking bow indicated that Ansset should enter first. The boy stopped in the doorframe. Gathered around a long table were twenty or so men, some of whom he had seen before, all of them dressed in one of the strange national costumes of the past-worshipping people of Earth. Ansset couldn’t help remembering how Mikal mocked such people when they came to court to present demands or ask for favors. “All these ancient costumes,” Mikal would say as he lay with Ansset on the floor, staring into the fire. “All these ancient costumes mean nothing. Their ancestors weren’t peasants, most of them. Their ancestors were the wealthy and effete from boring worlds who came back to Earth hunting for some meaning. They stole the few peasant customs that remained, and did shoddy research to discover some more, and thought that they had found truth. As if shitting in the grass is somehow nobler than doing it into a converter.”

The great civilizations such people claimed to be heirs to were petty and insignificant to those who had come to think on a galactic scale. But here, where Ansset looked closely into their rough faces and unsmiling eyes, he realized that whatever these people’s ancestors might have been, they had acquired the strength of primitiveness, and they reminded him of the vigor of the Songhouse. Except that their muscles were massive with labor that would have astonished a singer. And Ansset stood before them soft and white and beautiful and vulnerable and, despite his Control, was afraid.

They looked at him with the same curious, knowing, lustful look that Master had given him. Ansset knew that if he allowed the slightest hint of cringing into his manner, they would be encouraged. So he stepped farther into the room, and nothing about his movement showed any sign of the embarrassment and fear that he felt. He seemed unconcerned, his face as blank as if he had never felt any emotion in his life.

“Up on the table!” roared Master behind him, and hands lifted him onto the wood smeared with spilled wine and rough with crumbs and fragments of food. “Now sing, ye little bastarrd.”

And so he closed his eyes and shaped the ribs around his lungs, and let a low tone pass through his throat. For two years he had not sung except at Mikal’s request. Now he sang for Mikal’s enemies, and perhaps should have torn at them with his voice, made them cringe before his hatred. But hatred had not been born in Ansset, nor had his life bred it into him, and so he sang something else entirely. Sang softly without words, holding back the tone so that it barely reached their ears.

“Louder,” someone said, but Ansset ignored him, and soon the jokes and laughter died down as the men strained to hear.

The melody was a wandering one, passing through tones and quartertones easily, gracefully, still low in pitch, but rising and falling rhythmically. Unconsciously Ansset moved his hands in the strange gestures that had accompanied all his songs since he had opened his heart to Esste in the High Room. He was never aware of the movements—in fact, he had been puzzled by a notice in a Philadelphia newspaper that he had read in the palace library: “To hear Mikal’s Songbird is heavenly, but to watch his hands dance as he sings is nirvana.” It was a prudent thing to write in the capital of Eastamerica, not two hundred kilometers from Mikal’s palace. But it was the vision of Mikal’s Songbird held by all those who thought of him at all, and Ansset did not understand, could not picture what they saw.

He only knew what he sang, and now he began to sing words. They were not words of recrimination, but rather the words of his captivity, and the melody became high, in the soft upper notes that opened his throat and tightened the muscles at the back of his head and tensed the muscles along the front of his thighs. The notes pierced, and as he slid up and down through haunting thirdtones, his words spoke of the dark, mysterious guilt he felt in the evenings in his dirty, shabby prison. His words spoke of his longing for Father Mikal (though he never spoke his name, not in front of these men), of dreams of the gardens along the Susquehanna River, and of lost, forgotten days that vanished from his memory before he awoke.

Most of all, though, he sang of his guilt.

At last he became tired, and the song drifted off into a whispered dorian scale that ended on the wrong note, on a dissonant note that faded into silence that sounded like part of the song.

Finally Ansset opened his eyes. Even when he sang for an audience he neither liked nor wanted to sing for, he could not help but give them what they wanted. All the men who were not weeping were watching him. None seemed willing to break the mood, until a youngish man down the table said in a thick accent, “Ah but thet were better than hame and mitherma.” His comment was greeted by sighs and chuckles of agreement, and the looks that met Ansset’s eyes were no longer leering and lustful, but rather soft and kind. Ansset had never thought to see such looks in those coarse faces.

“Will ye have some wine, boy?” asked Master’s voice behind him, and Husk poured. Ansset sipped the wine, and dipped a finger in it to cast a drop into the air in the graceful gesture he had learned in the palace. “Thank you,” he said, handing back the metal cup with the same grace he would have used with a goblet at court. He lowered his head, though it hurt him to use that gesture of respect to such men, and asked, “May I leave now?”

“Do you have to? Can’t you sing again?” It was as if the men around the table had forgotten that Ansset was their prisoner. And he, in turn, refused them as if he were free to choose. “I can’t do it twice. I can never do it twice.” Nor for them, anyway. And for Mikal, all songs were different, and every one was new.

They lifted him off the table then, and Master’s strong arms carried him back to his room. Ansset lay on the bed after the door locked shut, his Control easing, letting his body tremble. The last song he had sung before this had been for Mikal. A light and happy song, and Mikal had smiled the soft, melancholy smile that only touched his face when he was alone with his Songbird. And Ansset had touched Mikal’s hand, and Mikal had touched Ansset’s face, and then Ansset had left to walk along the river.

Ansset drifted off to sleep thinking of the songs in Mikal’s gray eyes, humming of the firm hands that ruled an empire and yet could still stroke the forehead of a beautiful child and weep at a sorrowful song. Ah, sang Ansset in his mind, ah, the weeping of Mikal’s sorrowful hands.