The Crow (4 page)

"So you're not going to send me away?" Despite himself, Hem's voice wavered.

Saliman looked surprised. "Send you away? Whether you stay here or not is your decision, Hem, not mine. No, I would not send you away."

Hem gave an involuntary sigh of relief. He was not afraid of being whipped, although no one had beaten him since he had met Maerad, and perhaps he had lost some of his old toughness. But now Saliman was standing with his back to him, looking out of the window. He was silent for a long time, and Hem began to feel ashamed of himself.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, when the silence had stretched out too long.

"But are you, Hem?" asked Saliman, turning around. "Are you really sorry? It is not enough to say so, and then to do the same thing again."

Now Saliman's face was very serious, and a fluttering started in the boy's stomach. When Saliman was happy with him, Hem felt exultant, but his displeasure hurt more than any whipping. Saliman was one of the few human beings he wholeheartedly respected, and there was an unsettling power in Saliman's dark gaze, which seemed to see without prejudice or fear through any dissembling.

"Well?" Saliman's voice was gentle, but within it was a strength like steel.

"I am
sorry," said Hem, a little more clearly. "I don't mean to cause trouble."

Saliman sighed again, and sat back down on the bed, patting the cushions beside him. "Sit down, Hem. Tell me, are you very unhappy?"

Hem blinked at the unexpectedness of the question. He had not spoken to Saliman about his feelings. He opened his mouth to answer, and then shut it again.

"Urbika tells me you are not making friends," said Saliman. "And she says you are struggling with the Suderain language, which can't help."

Despite himself, Hem blushed. He didn't like the thought that people were observing him like that. He struggled with himself. He had longed for the chance to pour out his heart to Saliman, to tell him all his troubles. Saliman would understand his constant nightmares, his fears, the difficulties he had talking to people, how he hated the other minor Bards. He knew that Saliman would not judge him. But now that the chance had come, it was as if his jaws were sewn together with wire.

"I miss Maerad," he said at last.

"That, alas, is a wound I cannot heal," said Saliman gently. "Although I can perhaps help with other things." There was another long silence.

"Well," said Saliman, when it was clear that Hem would not volunteer anything further. "Perhaps we should look at this bird of yours."

Hem brightened up at the change of subject, and opened the chest. The bird cowered in the corner, staring at them unblinkingly. Saliman picked it up carefully, whispering to it in the Speech, and it relaxed into his hand.

"Do you think it will be all right?" asked Hem, watching Saliman anxiously.

"I think it has sustained no great hurt," said Saliman. He examined the bird closely, murmuring in the Speech. As he did, he began to glow faintly with a strange inner light. Hem, who had now seen a few Bards using their Gift, knew he was making a healing charm, and relaxed. He felt a strange affinity with this tattered, abused bird, and he was relieved that it was getting the proper treatment. He could do healing, but he wasn't confident about his ability.

After a short time Saliman finished, and he coaxed the bird onto Hem's wrist, where it perched, perfectly tame, as if it were a falcon. Its feet felt cold against his skin, and its claws dug in with a surprising strength. Hem chirped at it, and then said, in the Speech,
Are you all right, little one?

Better,
said the bird.
Hungry!
And it made an interrogative noise very close to the wheezing gasp of a baby bird asking for food.

"It's scarce more than a nestling," Saliman said, smiling. "But what is it?"

"I thought you might know," said Hem eagerly. "It looks like a kind of crow..."

"Yes, but it's white." Saliman regarded it with his head cocked to one side. "How did you find it?"

"Well, I was sitting in the mango tree when..." Hem stopped.

Saliman glanced at him ironically. "I had assumed that you were raiding Alimbar's fruit trees," he said. "Very expensive fruit it is, too. And then?"

Hem blushed for his slip, and told the full story of how he had found the bird. Saliman listened attentively, and then stroked the bird's head. "An outcast, eh?" he said. "Perhaps it will not want to go back to its kin, where it will be persecuted. I think it is a crow that was so poorly used because it is unlike the others. Crows will do that. You may have found a companion, Hem." He stood up. "I'll leave you to decide whether you want to look after a crow. I have many things to do, and I am now grievously late."

He walked to the door, and turned around. "I haven't forgotten your trespass," he said. "We'll say no more for today. But I will do some thinking, and I judge that you ought to, as well." Then he left.

Hem nodded absentmindedly; his attention was all turned to the bird. It now looked very perky, but it was, he thought, rather scruffy. It would look better when all its adult feathers had grown and it didn't have grayish fluff poking through them, which gave it a kind of ragamuffin look.

So,
he said.
Do you want to stay with me? I can look after you.

Feed me?
said the bird.

Yes, I'll feed you. And keep those others away. You'll be safer.
The bird ruffled its feathers, stuck out its tail, and soiled the floor.

But you'll have to do that outside,
Hem added, thinking with dismay of Saliman's rather stern housemaster.
Because people will get cross with me.

The bird turned its head, fixing Hem with one of its eyes.

I stay,
it said.

So what is your name?
asked Hem.
Name?

What do they call you?

I was not given a name,
said the crow.
The flock would not name me, when my wing feathers came, because I am wrong-colored. I have no name.

You have to have a name,
said Hem. He thought for a moment, and remembered the word for
bird
that had been used by the Pilanel people he had briefly known.
How about "lrc"?

Ire?
The bird bobbed up and down comically on his wrist.
Ire! I have a name! Ire!
It soiled the floor again.

I told you,
said Hem.
You'll have to do that outside.

Feed me? Hungry!

All right, Ire,
Hem said, sighing, but only with pretended impatience.
I'll feed you.

II

W
OUNDS

It wasn't very surprising that Hem had not learned much of the Suderain language. He had only recently arrived in Turbansk, after a two-week journey south with Saliman all the way from Norloch, the chief citadel of Annar. They had fled the city as it trembled on the brink of civil war, and Maerad and Cadvan had stayed behind, planning to escape that night and head north on a quest for the Treesong. Nobody really knew what the Treesong was, but Hem had perfect faith that Maerad would return triumphant, having not only discovered its identity, but having saved the world from the Dark as well. For wasn't that what the old prophecies had said she would do?

As he and Saliman had galloped through the moonlit meads of the Carmallachen in the Vale of Norloch on the night they left, Hem had looked back over his shoulder and seen the towers of the ancient citadel in flames, with a great smoke spiraling upward and obscuring the stars. When at last they had stopped, Hem had passed the night in despair, sure that Maerad and Cadvan must be dead. Saliman had consoled him, saying that they were sure to have escaped, that there were secret passages that even Enkir did not know. Hem just swallowed and hoped. Beneath his boundless faith in Maerad's abilities was a dreadful fear that he would never see her again.

He didn't fully understand what had happened in Norloch, but Saliman explained that Enkir, the First Bard, and therefore the most important Bard in Annar, had revealed himself as a traitor against the Light. Moreover, Enkir had destroyed Hem's family: it was Enkir who had overseen the sack of Pellinor ten years before, when Hem's father had been murdered and his mother and Maerad sold into slavery. Hem himself had been kidnapped by the Black Bards, the Hulls, under Enkir's orders, and put into an orphanage in Edinur: a miserable prison where he had lived most of his short life with the other unwanted children.

Many of Hem's nightmares were about the orphanage; he would dream that he was still there, in a dank, pitch-black room crammed with children of all ages lying three or four to each stinking pallet, freezing cold in winter and sweltering in summer. It was never quiet: children whimpered and muttered and screamed all night, even in their sleep. Babies were put in with the rest of the children, and very few of them survived, although the older children tried to care for them. Hem had many memories of small blue corpses being taken out in the mornings. Sometimes what the children did to each other was worse than the neglect and careless brutality of the adults who ran the place: there was a vicious hierarchy among the orphans, reinforced by beatings and taunts, and any weakness was quickly identified and exploited. There was never enough food, and the children often sickened and died from the illnesses that raged rapidly through the crowded buildings. Only the tough survived; and luckily Hem was tough.

He had been taken out of the orphanage by a Hull, who brought him to a fine house where, for the first time he could remember, Hem slept in clean sheets and had enough to eat. But he was still afraid: the people in the house were sinister and cold, and he found out later they were all Hulls. They had tried to make him become a Hull like them, tempting him with their immortality. They showed him that Hulls did not die: even if stabbed through the heart, a Hull would stand up again, smiling, the wound instantly closed over. But an instinct in Hem rebelled against their persuasions, which although softly spoken, with fair and reasonable words, caused icy chills to run down his spine.

Finally, at the dark of the moon, the Hulls tried to make Hem a Black Bard by force. Although he did his best to forget it, he remembered that night with a horrible clarity and it, too, figured in his nightmares. The Hulls had ordered him to kill a boy called Mark, whom he knew from the orphanage. When he had refused, despite their worst threats, they killed the child themselves, forcing Hem to watch, and burned his body in an ensorcelled fire. Hem was then locked in his room without food and left alone, too frightened even to sob in the darkness.

The next day the Hulls had been out on some foul errand, and by chance Hem was rescued by two Pilanel men who were robbing the house. The Pilanel had been kind to him, taking him as one of their own because of his olive skin and Pilanel features; but the Hulls had tracked them down in the wilderness and mercilessly slaughtered the family who had cared for him. Hem, hidden in the Pilanel caravan, had heard everything.