The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III (24 page)

That surprised a laugh out of T’fyrr. “Perhaps,” he agreed, and cocked his head to one side. He decided to try a joke. “If I were to present you as such, my people would be much distressed that you had feather-plucked yourself to such a dreadful extent.”

Father Ruthvere laughed heartily. “That is a better joke than you know, Sire T’fyrr. I have a pet bird that unfortunately has that very bad habit—and my colleagues have been unkind enough to suggest that there is some resemblance between us!”

Tanager smiled; she was clearly quite pleased that T’fyrr and the Priest had hit it off so well. For that matter, so was T’fyrr.

They exchanged a few more pleasantries before T’fyrr and Tanager took their leave; the Priest hurried off to some unspecified duty, while they left the way they had arrived.

“Surprised?” Tanager asked when they reached the street again. “I was, the first time I heard him. And he’s telling the truth; he’s not the only Priest preaching the brotherhood of all beings. He’s just the one with the Chapel nearest Freehold. It is a movement that
seems
to be gaining followers.”

“I am trying to think of some ulterior motive for him, and I cannot,” T’fyrr admitted. “Perhaps attendance falling off, perhaps a gain in prestige if he somehow converted nonhumans to your religion.”

“Neither, and there’re more problems associated with attracting nonhumans than there are rewards,” Tanager told him. “As I told you, I was just as surprised, and I tried to think of some way that this could be a trick. I couldn’t—and information I have assures me that Father Ruthvere truly, deeply and sincerely believes in what he was preaching.”

T’fyrr picked his way carefully among the cobblestones and thought about the way that the Priest had met his own direct gaze. It was very difficult for humans to meet the eyes of a Haspur, for very long. Just as the gaze of a hawk, direct and penetrating, often seemed to startle people, the gaze of a Haspur with all of the intelligence of a Haspur behind it, seemed to intimidate them. Father Ruthvere had no such troubles.

“No, I believe you,” he said finally. “And I find him as disconcerting as you humans find me.”

“He is one of my sources of information,” she said as they turned into a street lined with vendors of various foods and drink. “We share what we’ve learned; he tells me what’s going on inside the Church, and I tell him the rumors I’ve learned in Freehold and in the Palace kitchen.”

T’fyrr nodded; she had already told him about her clever ploy that got her into the Lower Servants’ Kitchen every day. “Well, I can add to that what I learn,” he said, “though I am afraid it will be stale news to him.”

She shrugged. “Maybe; maybe not. Oh—look down that street. That might be a good place for you to go if you’re caught afoot and need to get into the air—”

She pointed down a dead-end street that culminated in a bulb-shaped courtyard. Unlike the rest of the street, there were no overhanging second stories there. He nodded and made a mental note of the place.

She continued to guide him through the narrow, twisting streets, pointing out flat roofs and protruding brickwork where he could land, then climb down to the street—finding places where he could get enough of a running start that he could take off again. And all the while she was showing him these things, she was also questioning him . . .

She was so subtle and so good at it that he didn’t really notice what she was doing until he found himself clamping his beak down on a confession of what had happened to him in Gradford. It was only the fact that he made a habit of reticence that saved him. The words tried to escape from him, he put a curb on his tongue, and still his heart wanted to unburden all of his troubles to her.

So he distracted both her and himself with a description of what the High King had done that day. Or, more accurately, what the High King had
not
done, and how troubled he was by it all.

“There is something fundamentally wrong with the way Theovere is acting,” he said finally. “My people have no equivalent to his office, but—if you allow yourself to take advantage of great privilege and great power, should you not feel guilty if you do not also accept what obligations come with it? Should that not be
required,
in order to enjoy the privilege?”

Tanager sighed. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she replied. “I know that I would feel that way.”

“The King’s Advisors do not,” he told her. “They continue to tell him that the most important thing that a King must learn is how to delegate responsibility. They praise him for shirking his most important tasks, for ignoring the pleas of those who have nowhere else to take their grievances and concerns. I do not understand.”

Tanager looked very thoughtful at that—and more like Nightingale than she had since they had begun their tour of the streets. “I think that perhaps I do,” she finally said. “Let’s go back to Freehold. I want to talk about this somewhere I know is safe from extra ears.”

###

That place—
somewhere safe from extra ears
—turned out to be her own room in Freehold, supplied as part of her wages. T’fyrr examined it while she took a change of outfit into the bathroom and turned from Tanager to Lyrebird.

There probably had not been much supplied with the room other than the furniture—and it was, unmistakably, the Deliambren notion of “spare.” But Nightingale had put her own touches on the place: the bench and bed were covered with dozens of delicately embroidered and fringed shawls, and there were extra cushions on both. The walls had been draped with more shawls, and she had hung a small collection of jewelry on hooks fastened there, as well. Her harps sat in one corner, out of the way, and a hand-drum hung on the wall above them.

“I’d begun to wonder about something lately,” Nightingale told him, her voice muffled a little by the closed door. “And what you just told me confirmed it.”

She emerged, gowned in the dark green dress she had taken in with her, and settled herself on the chest, leaving the bed to him. “Humans are odd creatures,” she said finally. “We often go out of our way to justify things that we
want
to do, and do it so successfully that we come to believe the justifications ourselves.”

He nodded, waiting to hear more.

“Take King Theovere,” she said after a pause. “He was working hard,
very
hard. He was certainly one of the best High Kings that Alanda has seen for a while. And he solved four of the most terrible problems the Twenty Kingdoms have seen, all in a very short period of time.” She held up a finger. “The Bayden-Anders border dispute.” A second finger. “The Grain Smut and the resulting famine.” A third finger. “The Kindgode incursion.” And the fourth and final finger. “The Black Baron’s Revolt. All four of those took place within a single decade. Any one of them would have been enough for a single High King to fail at or solve.”

T’fyrr nodded, although he hadn’t heard anything about three out of the four problems she mentioned—but then again, he had just begun to scrape the top of the Palace archives, and he didn’t imagine there was much about a grain smut that would make a good ballad. “Your point?” he asked.

“Theovere would have every reason to be tired,
bone
tired, by the end of that time. And when his Advisors began to tell him that he had done enough, that he should rest, that he
deserved
to take a rest, he listened to them.” She tilted her head to one side and stared up into his eyes, waiting for him to think about what she had said.

“But he did deserve to take a rest—” T’fyrr pointed out. “At least, he deserved
some
rest, if those problems were as weighty to solve as you say.”

“Of course he did!” she exclaimed. “I’m
not
saying that he didn’t—but the point wasn’t that he didn’t deserve to rest, the point is that he
couldn’t
rest.” She licked her lips, clearly searching for an explanation. “He is the High King; he
could
and probably
should
have reorganized his duties so that he had some time to recuperate, but he
could not
abandon his duties! Do you see what I’m saying?”

“I think so—” T’fyrr said hesitantly. “There really isn’t anyone who can do what he can, who can be
the
ultimate authority. So when his Advisors started telling him to rest, to delegate important business to someone else—”

“They were telling him what he wanted to hear, but not the truth,” she finished for him, when he groped for words. “He
could
arrange to take more time in solving those problems that won’t get worse with time. He
can
ask for help from any of the Twenty Kings. He
can
look to his allies for some help. He
cannot
tell someone else to solve them for him.”

T’fyrr shook his head. “It is easy to feel sorry for him,” he said, thinking back to Theovere and realizing that he had seen signs of strain that he had not noticed at the time. Perhaps even those temper tantrums were a sign of that strain. “It seems like too much of a burden for one man. No one should be expected to bear that much.”

Nightingale spread her hands in a gesture of bafflement. “There’s no good answer,” she admitted. “There is a reason why the High King has the privileges that he has; why he lives in a place that is second only to the Fortress-City in luxury, why virtually anything he wants is given to him. Since his duties can’t be made easier, his life is made easier. But do you see what our answer might be?”

T’fyrr thought it all through before he answered. “Theovere was tired; his Advisors told him what he wanted to hear—that he needed to stop working so hard, he needed to rest, he needed to give over some of his responsibility to others. So he followed their advice and found that he liked the new life—and his Advisors only reinforced his feelings when they told him that he was doing the right thing. It probably began with very little things, but by now—by now it has built up to the point that Theovere is actually doing very little in the way of his duty, and the Advisors are still telling him what a wonderful leader he is.”

Nightingale nodded emphatically as she put her hair up into a complicated twist. “Furthermore, since they are not letting anyone in to speak to him who is likely to tell him something that contradicts what they are saying, he believes that everything is exactly as it was when he was in his prime. He
wants
to believe that, and the sycophants are only too happy to tell him so.”

T’fyrr fanned his wings a little in the breath of moving air from the ventilator grille. “It will be difficult to turn that trend around,” he offered diffidently. “I have been trying—I have been inserting songs with a particular theme, that great power demands the acceptance of responsibility, into the performances that the King has asked me to give. But as I told you, I have not
seen
any evidence that he has paid any more attention to them than to the story ballads or the love songs.”

Nightingale’s hands stopped moving for a moment. Her eyes took on the expression of someone who is looking deep into her own spirit, and T’fyrr wondered what she was thinking.

Then, with an abrupt motion, as if she had suddenly made up her mind about something, she put the last twist into her hair and folded her hands on her lap. “T’fyrr, who told you that some of the Free Bards have—magic?” she asked.

“Harperus,” he replied promptly. “Harperus told me that
you
have it, in fact. Well, not
magic,
as such—he told me that many of you have some sort of power that he and his people could not weigh or measure, but that observation would prove existed. He said that you could influence peoples’ minds, among other things. He suspected that you could, well, see into the future. He said that some Deliambrens believe that you can influence events as well as minds, provided that the influence need only be very small. He has real evidence that you can heal people in ways that have nothing to do with medicine as he knows it.”

She bit her lower lip and looked away from him for the first time. “I am not really supposed to admit to this,” she said finally. “Especially not to someone connected with the Deliambrens.” She looked back at him with a wan smile. “Harperus and his kind are driven mad by things they cannot measure, and if they knew we really
did
have abilities such as you describe, they would be plaguing us constantly to find out what it is we do and how we do it.”

T’fyrr nodded but said nothing, only waited quietly for her to continue.

“There is—there is a power in music properly performed,” she said after another long moment of silence, broken only by the sound of the air in the ventilators and the distant murmur of all the sounds of Freehold below them. “You might call it ‘magic.’ Certainly the Gypsies and the Elves do, and so does the Church, although the Churchmen have no idea how great or little that power really is. I’ll put it to you briefly: some Bards are mages, and—among other things—we can influence the thoughts of others through our music. Some of us can do the other things you described as well, but it is that one particular power that pertains to our situation now.
Sometimes,
not often, we are powerful enough to make others act against their will. Most of us confine ourselves to very minor acts of—well, it
is
manipulation, and as such, it could be considered improper. Most of the time, all we do is to enhance our audiences’ ability to appreciate the music.”

“But you can do more,” T’fyrr stated. He had no doubt that she, personally, could do much more.

She nodded reluctantly. “This might be a case where doing more is justified. Would you care to add me, and my magic, to your performances for the King? All you need do is bring me in as your accompanist, and I can do the rest. Between the two of us, we may be able to reawaken his sleeping conscience and rouse his slumbering sense of duty. But I won’t lie to you; this is interference in someone’s mind, his thoughts. Before you take me up on this, you need to think about that—and if you would appreciate having something like this done to you, if your situation and his were reversed.”

Now that she had put it baldly and
offered
her services, and now that she had admitted that this “magic” was as much a form of manipulation as the overt form that Theovere’s Advisors were doing, the idea wasn’t as attractive as it had been. In point of fact, the notion made him feel rather—shaken up inside.