Songmaster (30 page)

For the first time in his life, Ansset lost songs.

Up to now, everything that had happened to him had added to his music. Even Mikal’s death had taught him new songs, and deepened all the old ones.

He spent only one month as a prisoner, but he spent it songless. Not that he meant to keep his silence. Occasionally, at first, he tried to sing. Even something simple, something he had learned as a child. The sounds came out of his throat well enough, but there was no music in it. The song always sounded empty to him, and he could not bring himself to go on.

Ansset speculated on death, perhaps because of the constant reminder of the urn that had held Mikal’s ashes, perhaps because he felt entombed in the dusty room with its constant reminders of a long-gone past. Or perhaps because the drugs that delayed the Songbird’s puberty were now wearing off, and the changes came on more awkwardly because of the artificial delay. Ansset awoke often in the night, troubled by strange and unfulfilling dreams. Small for his age, he began to feel restless, an urge to grapple violently with someone or something, a passion for movement that, in the confines of Mikal’s rooms, he could not fulfill.

This is what the dead feel, Ansset thought. This is what they go through, shut up in their tombs or caught, embarrassingly, in public without their bodies. Ghosts may long to simply
touch
something, but bodiless they cannot; they may wish for heat, for cold, for even the deliciousness of pain, but it is all denied them.

He counted days. With the poker from the fire he notched each morning in the ashes in the hearth, in spite of the fact that the ashes were of Mikal’s body—or perhaps because of it. And, at last, the day came when his contract was expired and he could finally go home.

How could Riktors have misinterpreted him so? In all his years with Mikal, Ansset had never had to lie to him; and in his time with Riktors, there had also been a kind of honesty, though silences fell between them on certain matters. They had not been like father and son, as he and Mikal had been. They were more like brothers, though there was some confusion as to which of them was the elder brother, which the rambunctious younger one who had to be comforted, checked, counseled, and consoled. And now, simply by being honest, Ansset had touched a place in Riktors that no one could have guessed was there—the man could be vindictive without calculation, cruel even to the helpless.

Ansset had thought he knew Riktors—as he thought he knew practically everyone. As other people trusted their sight, Ansset trusted his hearing. No one could lie to him or hide from him, not if they were speaking. But Riktors Ashen had hidden from him, at least in part, and Ansset was now as unsure as a sighted man who suddenly discovered that the wolves were all invisible, and walked beside him ravening in the night.

On the day Ansset turned fifteen, he waited expectantly for the door to open, for the Mayor or, better yet, someone from the Songhouse to come in, to take his hand and bring him out.

The Mayor did indeed come in. Near evening he came and wordlessly handed a paper to Ansset. It was in Riktors’s handwriting.

If Ansset’s long silence in Mikal’s rooms had ended with a return to the Songhouse, it might have helped him grow, as the silence and the suffering in the High Room with Esste helped him grow. But as he read the letter, the songs drained out of him.

Not that he believed the letter at first. At first he thought it was a terrible, terrible joke, a last vindictive act by Riktors to make Ansset regret wanting to leave Earth and return to the Songhouse. But as the hours passed, he began to wonder. He had heard nothing from the Songhouse in his years on Earth. That was normal, he knew—but it was also distancing him from his memories there. The stone walls had faded into the background, and the gardens of Susquehanna were more real to him. Riktors was more real to him than Esste, though his feelings for Esste were more tender. But with that distance he began to think: perhaps Esste had merely beem manipulating him. Perhaps their ordeal in the High Room had been a strategem and nothing more—her complete victory over him, and not a shared experience at all. Perhaps he had been sent to Earth as a sacrifice; perhaps the skeptics were right, and the Songhouse had given in to Mikal’s pressure and sent him a Songbird knowing he was unworthy, knowing that it would destroy the Songbird they sent and they could never bring him home.

Maybe that was why, when Mikal died, the Songhouse did the unthinkable and let him stay with Riktors Ashen.

It fit, and the more Ansset thought about it, the better it fit, until by the time he was able to sleep he had almost despaired. He still harbored a hope that tomorrow the Songhouse people would come in and tell him it was a cruel joke by Riktors, and they had come to claim him; but the hope was slimmer, and he realized that now, instead of being one of the few people on Earth who could regard himself as independent of the emperor, almost his equal, he was utterly dependent on Riktors, and not at all sure that Riktors would feel any obligation to be kind.

That night his Control failed him, and he awoke from a dream weeping out loud. He tried to contain himself, but could not. He had no way of knowing that it was the onset of puberty that was weakening, temporarily, his knowledge of himself. He thought that it was proof that the Songhouse was right—he was polluted, weakened. Unworthy to return and live among the singers.

If he had been restless before, now he was frantic. The rooms were smaller than they had ever been before, and the softness of the floor was unbearable. He wanted to strike it and find it hard; instead it yielded to him. The dust, which his constant walking had pushed to the edges and corners of the room, began to irritate him, and he sneezed frequently. He constantly caught himself on the edge of tears, told himself it was the dust, but knew it was the terror of abandonment. Almost all his life that he could remember he had been surrounded by security, at first the security of the Songhouse, and later the security of an emperor’s love. Now, suddenly, both of them were gone, and a long-forgotten abandonment began to intrude into his dreams again. Someone was stealing him away. Someone was taking him from his family. Someone was vanishing his family in the distance and he would never see them again and he woke up in darkness full of terror, afraid to move in his bed, because if he so much as lifted an arm they would cease to forbear; they would take him and he would never be found again, would live perpetually in a small cell in a rocking boat, would always be surrounded by the leering faces of men who saw only his nakedness and never his soul.

And then, after a week of this, his long silence ended. The Mayor came for him.

“Riktors wants to see you,” the Mayor said, and because he was not delivering a memorized message his voice was his own, and it was sympathetic and warm, and Ansset trembled as he walked to him and took his offered hand and let himself be led from Mikal’s rooms to Riktors’s magnificent apartments.

The emperor waited for him standing at a window, looking out over the forest where the leaves were starting to go red and yellow. There was a wind blowing outside, but of course it did not touch them. The Mayor brought Ansset inside and left him alone with Riktors, who showed no sign of knowing the boy had come.

Boy? Ansset was, for the first time, aware that he was growing, that he had grown. Riktors did not tower over him as he had when he took him away from the Songhouse. Ansset still did not come to his shoulder, but he knew that someday he would, and felt a growing equality with Riktors—not an equality of independence, for that feeling was gone, but an equality of manhood. My hands are large, Ansset thought.

My hands could tear his heart out.

He pushed the thought into the back of his mind. He did not understand his lust for violent action; he had had his fill of it, he thought, when he was a child.

Riktors turned to face him, and Ansset saw that his eyes were red from weeping.

“I’m sorry,” Riktors said. And he wept again.

The grief was sincere, unbearably sincere. By habit Ansset went to the man. But habit had weakened—where before he would have embraced Riktors and sung to him, he only came near, did not touch him, and certainly did not sing. He had no song for Riktors now.

“If I could undo it, I would,” Riktors said. “But you pushed me harder than I can endure it. No one but you could have made me so angry, could have hurt me so deeply.”

Truth rang in Riktor’s voice, and with a sinking of his heart Ansset realized that Riktors had not defrauded him. He was telling no lies.

“Won’t you sing to me?” Riktors pleaded.

Ansset wanted to say yes. But he could not. He hunted inside himself for a song, but he couldn’t find one. Instead of songs, tears pressed forward in his mind; his face twisted, and he shook his head, making no sound.

Riktors looked at him bitterly, then turned away. “I thought not. I knew you could never forgive me.”

Ansset shook his head and tried to make a sound, tried to say, I forgive you. But he found no sound inside himself right now. Found nothing but fear and the agony of being forsaken.

Riktors waited for Ansset to speak, to deny, to forgive; when it became clear the silence would last forever if it were up to Ansset to break it, Riktors walked. Around the room, touching windows and walls. Finally he came to rest on his bed, which, when it was clear he was not going to lie down, cooperated by flowing up and around his back a little, providing support.

“Well, then, I won’t punish you further by keeping you with me here in the palace. You aren’t going back to Tew. I can’t just pension you off; I owe you better treatment than that. So I’ve decided to give you work.”

Ansset was incurious.

“Don’t you care? Well, I do,” Riktors said to Ansset’s silence. “The manager of Earth is due for a promotion. I’ll give you his job. You’ll report directly to the imperial capital, no prefects between us. The Mayor wanted to give you something smaller, some office where you wouldn’t have so much responsibility.” Riktors laughed. “But you aren’t trained for any lesser office, are you? At least you know protocol. And the staff is very good. They’ll carry you until you learn your way. If you need help, I’ll see to it you get it.”

Riktors studied Ansset’s face for any sign of emotion, though he knew better. Ansset wanted to show him something, show him what he was looking for. But it took all Ansset’s concentration to maintain Control, to keep from breaking the glass and leaping from the palace to get outside, to keep from weeping until he cried his throat out. So Ansset said and showed nothing.

“But I don’t want to see you,” Riktors said.

Ansset knew it was a lie.

“No, that’s a lie. I must see you, I can’t live without seeing you. I found that out clearly enough, Ansset. You showed me how much I need you. But I don’t want to need you, not you, not now. And so I can’t want to see you, and so I won’t see you. Not until you’re ready to forgive me. Not until you can come back and sing to me again.”

I can’t sing to anyone, Ansset wanted to say.

“So I’ll have them give you some sort of training—there isn’t any school for planet managers, you know. The best they can do, meetings with the current manager. And then they’ll take you to Babylon. It’s a beautiful place, they tell me. I’ve never seen it. Once you get to Babylon, we’ll never meet again.” His voice was painful, and it tore at Ansset’s heart. For a moment he wanted to embrace this man who had, after all, been his brother and his friend. He had known Riktors, he thought, and Ansset did not know how not to love someone he so completely understood. But I did not really understand him, Ansset realized. Riktors was hidden from me, and I do not know him.

It was a wall, and Ansset did not breach it.

Instead, Riktors tried to. He got up from the bed and came to where Ansset stood, knelt in front of him, embraced him around the waist, and wept into his hip, clinging desperately. “Ansset, please. Take it back! Say you love me, say that this is your home, sing to me, Ansset!”

But Ansset held his silence, and the man slid down his body until he lay crumpled at Ansset’s feet, and finally the weeping stopped and, without lifting his head, Riktors said, “Go. Get out of here. You’ll never see me again. Rule the Earth, but you won’t rule me any longer. You can leave.”

Ansset pulled away from Riktors’s slack arm and walked to the door. He touched it; it opened for him. But he had not left when Riktors cried out in agony, “Won’t you say anything to me?”

Ansset turned around, hunting for something to break the silence with. Finally he thought of it.

“Thank you,” he said.

He meant thank you for caring for me, for still wanting me, for giving me something to do now that I can’t sing anymore, now that my home is closed to me.

But Riktors heard it another way. He heard Ansset saying thank you for letting me leave you, thank you for not requiring me to be near you, thank you for letting me live and work in Babylon where I won’t be required to sing for you anymore.

And so, to Ansset’s surprise, when his voice croaked out the two words, utterly devoid of music, Riktors did not take them kindly. He only looked at Ansset with a look that the boy could only interpret as cold hatred. The look held for a few minutes, an unbearably long time, before Ansset finally could not stand to see Riktors’s hatred any longer. He turned away and passed through the door. It closed behind him. When the door closed, Ansset realized that at last he was no longer a Songbird. The work he had now would require no songs.