Chapter Twenty-one
Sira and Theo rode together down into Ogre Pass under a clearing sky, and made their next camp on the broad floor of the Pass between steep slopes. They faced northeast, toward where Lamdon lay, now at a distance of five days’ ride. During the day they had experimented, with Theo sending to Sira, and she listening and reporting to him what she heard. Frequently, Theo laughed aloud at the result, Sira smiling in return. The hruss’s long ears flicked back and forth between them, listening to their voices.
Sitting by the fire in the evening, Theo asked Sira to bring out her food supplies so they could measure what they had together. “It looks a meager pile,” Sira said doubtfully.
There were two little cloth sacks of grain, and just a few packets of dried meat. “It’s enough,” Theo said. “If we don’t take side trips, we should be able to eat three times a day until Lamdon.” He kept the softwood, and stowed all the food supplies in Sira’s saddlepack. “Take care of that,” he admonished, grinning. “Empty bellies make cold company.”
He did not try to persuade her to go back to Conservatory. He told her of Magister Mkel’s concern and Isbel’s fears. She nodded acknowledgment, but did not answer, and he let the matter rest. He had been hired to find her, not force her to return. If Magister Mkel felt otherwise, he would return the bits of metal Conservatory had paid him.
They went to sleep early, snug in their bedfurs. Theo watched Sira peacefully close her eyes, though she had told him how uneasy the sounds of the wilderness made her when she was alone. The night was windless and clear, and the smoke from the embers of their fire drifted in a narrow spiral high into the empty purple sky above the Pass. Theo had to admit that he, too, felt peaceful. It was nice to have company. Especially this company.
Theo woke with the sun bright in his eyes. The morning was quiet, but the hruss held their heads high, ears turned forward, staring at something beyond the sun-faded quiru.
Theo rolled over, and sat up. Squinting up into the light, he found a semicircle of men, conspicuously armed with bows and knives. They sat their hruss around the campsite, luminous ghosts in the glitter of sun on snow. His belly clenched in the sure recognition of trouble.
Sira lay in her bedroll, her face turned toward him, her eyes closed. Without stopping to think, he sent to her. Wake up now, but move very slowly. Sira! Wake up now. Slowly.
Sira opened her eyes at once and looked directly at him. She said nothing, and no reaction showed on her face. Deliberately, with no sudden movements, she pushed back her furs and sat up to face the riders ranged around their camp.
The scene held a moment in complete silence, until a hruss outside the quiru stamped impatiently, and one of those inside the envelope of light whickered.
“Sorry to disturb you, Singer,” came a raspy voice. His accent was thick and guttural. “You will break camp now. One of us will give you a hand.”
Theo slid barefoot out of his bedfurs and reached for his boots while Sira watched in a tense silence. He felt for his long knife where he had left it in one boot. He and Sira were only two against six, but he put his hand on the knife just the same, and measured the distance between himself and the leader.
“Chad will take the knife,” the man rasped, pointing to one of the riders.
Theo straightened with the knife in his hand. The man closest to Sira drew his own knife and pointed it, almost casually, at her throat.
Theo sighed. He reversed the knife and held it out to the man called Chad, hilt first. Chad tucked it inside his own boot. Sira’s knife, Theo remembered with regret, was in her saddlepack with the cooking things. Her filla, though, like his own, was safe inside her tunic.
She sent to Theo, Who are they?
He responded, Watchers. Even in the stress of the moment, he took pleasure in his growing ability to hear and send. He pulled his boots on one by one.
What next?
Careful, he sent back. He couldn’t tell if she understood him, but surely she could guess. He was standing now, fully dressed and grim-faced.
“What do you want with us?” he asked the newcomers.
The raspy-voiced one nodded at Chad. “Saddle the hruss,” he said, then to Theo, “We need you at Observatory, Singer. Your traveler can stay or come, as she wishes.”
Chad dismounted and busied himself with hruss and tack. Sira set about dressing herself to ride, looking to Theo for guidance. He nodded to her, then turned back to the leader. Through a tight jaw, he said, “By what right do you abduct us?”
The Watcher was unmoved by Theo’s ire. “By right of need,” he said. He barked instructions to some of the others.
“We don’t enjoy this, Singer. We have no choice.” This was Chad, who was handing the reins to one of his own group, and rolling up Sira’s and Theo’s bedfurs to tie onto their hruss.
“You would leave me alone here, without hruss?” called Sira to the leader. Her deep voice rang across the campsite. Theo caught his breath. The Watchers had no idea what they had found. They assumed he was the Singer and Sira the traveler. He hoped Sira understood.
The leader took a closer look at her. He was short and squat of build, with hard, intelligent eyes. “We need hruss almost as much as we need Singers,” he said. “But we need people at Observatory, too. Come with us. You would likely die out here in any case.”
“Mount up, traveler,” said Chad. “You too, Singer. We don’t waste sunlight.”
Theo moved toward his hruss. He caught Sira’s eye and tried to send to her, Do not. She raised her scarred eyebrow in question, but kept silent as she walked to her own beast. They mounted, and settled into their saddles, but two of the strangers kept their reins. Chad picked up all the remaining equipment from the campsite, cooking pots, a packet of dried meat, a sack of grain, and stowed all of it on his own saddle.
Once again Theo tried, Cantrix. Not tell.
Sira’s face was a frozen mask. Do not tell them I am a Cantrix?
Yes. Yes! he responded. A nod from her told him she had received the message.
I will not. She leaned back on the cantle of her saddle and folded her arms across her chest. She looked more angry than afraid. “I can guide my own hruss,” she snapped at the man holding her reins.
“Soon enough,” said the raspy-voiced one. “When we are out of the Pass.” He clucked to his own animal, and led the party away from the campsite.
What will they do with us? Sira sent.
He did his best to answer. They want me to work. To sing, but he was fairly certain she could not get much of that. The group around them rode in heavy silence. As they rode south through the Pass, away from Lamdon, Theo inspected them as closely as he dared. Their furs were bulky and well-worn. Their hruss looked underfed. That they were a determined, even a desperate, group was clear. Theo held little hope for an escape.
The group traveled southeast across the Pass. Ahead, it seemed their direction would lead them straight into a mountainside. After two hours of riding, with Watchers still keeping Sira’s and Theo’s reins, they left the Pass through a litter of snow-capped boulders, climbing into a narrow snowy canyon. Their path had been invisible from the Pass itself. For another hour they traversed twisting, treacherous slopes where the firn, growing deeper every day, seemed almost to hang above their heads. The way was so steep that Sira had to hold on to her saddle horn at times to keep from sliding off. Theo watched their route, but could not see how he would ever remember it. It was nearly featureless, an unmarked way through a tangled landscape.
“Now you can have your reins,” said the leader, whose name they had learned was Pol. “You could never find your way back alone from here.” He fixed Theo with a stony stare. “Believe me, Singer. Too many men have died trying.”
Theo mustered a cheerful grin. “Must be some House if men die trying to get away.”
Unexpectedly, Pol gave a short bark of laughter. Sira glanced at him, then away.
When the party rode out onto a cramped, terrifying path that circled an immense cliff, Theo looked back over his shoulder to gaze in wonder at the vista below. The broad reaches of the Pass they had left hours before swept from the southwest to the northeast, seemingly almost beneath the hruss’s feet. Beyond the Pass the Mariks rose in majestic, forbidding splendor. He understood how their abductors had found them. The smoke from their fire and the light of the quiru must have been beacons of invitation.
But hard as Theo tried, he was unable even now to trace how they had climbed to this spot. Their route was lost in a jumble of rocky cliffs and canyons.
He took the reins that Chad handed back to him and glanced ahead, where the hruss were strung out along the cliff path. He would have sworn the path ended in a cul-de-sac, but even as he watched, the lead rider turned right, as if straight into the bare rock of the cliff, and disappeared. Theo’s heart sank. Pol, it seemed, was right.
When he arrived at the turning, he and his hruss had to squeeze through a narrow opening. The rock walls scraped his legs as he passed. Ahead was another steep path, winding further and further into a wilderness of rock and snow. They rode on for some time before the leader turned downhill into a broader and easier road across a mountain valley.
Theo found his shoulders tingling from the tension of the climb. He rubbed them to restore circulation as his hruss found easy footing on the descent.
It was almost dark when they approached the House. Pol raised one thick arm and pointed. “Observatory. Home.”
Theo was astonished. The Watchers had made the trip out and back in one day. They had to have started very early, risking the pre-dawn darkness, riding without a Singer. Had anything gone wrong, their whole party would have been lost to the cold.
The House clung stubbornly to the southeastern slope of a narrow peak that towered over those around it. Observatory looked smaller than most of the Houses Theo knew, with an odd, circular addition high on its roof, like a knob or a bowl dropped upside down. Its quiru was pale around it, touching its roof and walls with faint illumination.
We will not sing, Sira sent to Theo. He heard her quite clearly. His only response was a shrug. These men had shown their willingness to let them both die.
I will not, in any case, she sent further. They cannot force me. He looked at her face, its narrow mouth set firm, and he hid a smile. She would not be an easy one to subdue, he thought with rueful pride. Cantrix Sira would surprise these Watchers.
They rode up to the House in purple twilight. No welcoming party greeted them. Sira looked down at the rough, slanting steps leading to the door, realizing they had once been straight, but had shifted and broken as the ground moved below them, and had not been repaired.
The House was cold, with dank, moldy corners and icy floors. Without ceremony, Sira and Theo were led to narrow, dark rooms furnished with only the simplest of cots and chairs. They were not treated roughly, but matter-of-factly, saddlepacks and bedfurs dropped on the floor, empty of all valuables. Sira’s knife was gone, and all their food. Fortunately, no one had offered to search her. They could not suspect, she supposed, what she carried inside her tunic.
In Nevyan fashion, they were taken to bathe next, as if they were guests. Sira found the water in the ubanyix dark and tepid. Three other women were bathing. They looked at her in silent curiosity, and she turned her face away. She hid her filla in a fold of her tunic when she undressed, and endured a cold and unpleasant bath rather than reveal herself by warming it. She wondered how long it had been since the water had been changed. She took a perverse satisfaction in knowing that the other women must also be cold, but she shivered in angry misery as she dressed again in the same clothes she had been wearing.
Her dismal cubicle was at the end of a dark corridor, with empty rooms around it. She was grateful for that. In her own room, at least, she thought, she would have light and warmth. She brought out her filla and used it, softly, to brighten the air around her. The room grew warmer, but hardly more cheerful, as the increased light revealed creeping fungus in the corners of the ceiling, and beads of condensing moisture here and there on the walls. Sira sighed as she tucked her filla away.
They had apparently missed the evening meal, and no one offered them food or tea. There was nothing to do but go to bed. Sira piled her bedfurs over the ragged blanket on her cot and slid under the mound. The chill from the wall made the cot frigid, and she could not sleep until her body’s warmth had heated it. She curled herself against the cold, waiting for warmth.
What this House needed, of course, was a strong, healthy quiru. A warm House quiru, established by a full Cantor or Cantrix, and maintained for some weeks with a daily quirunha. That would put an end to the molds and fungus and damp.
But I will not do it, Sira insisted into the darkness. Not for them.
Sira found her own way to the great room the next morning. She and Theo sat in silence with the rest of the community of Observatory, who were almost as silent as they were. The indifferent food, consisting almost entirely of meat, was eaten quickly and without ceremony.
They look ill, Sira sent to Theo.
His answer was jumbled, but she understood Cold. Damp.
She nodded, then caught Pol’s eyes on her. Careful. Pol watches us.
He is not stupid, Theo responded, with surprising clarity.
Sira admired the quickness with which Theo’s listening and sending were improving. What a talent, she thought, to have been wasted by not properly training it. She remembered young Zakri sending a ball spinning away from him, and she felt a sharp pang of sympathy. She looked around the gloomy room, seeing the reddened cheeks and noses of the House members here, and she grew angry again.
I would like to teach you more, she sent to Theo. But they will find me out. And we must not sing for them or we will never get away.
A hard cough from a child at one of the tables distracted her. She turned toward it, and found Pol’s short, powerful figure in her line of vision as he came toward them. “If you have finished your meal, Singer,” he said, standing before Theo with his arms folded.
Sira rose with Theo. Curious eyes followed them as they left the great room to follow Pol down a corridor, where he opened a heavy door.
“Our Cantoris,” he said in his grating voice. He waved a hand into its shadows. Sira could just make out the dais in its center. “Here you will sing.”
Theo put his head to one side and gazed down at Pol, an amused smile on his lips. “You must think you’ve captured a ferrel, Pol, when all you’ve got is a poor little wezel in your trap.”
Pol’s eyes narrowed in his heavy face as he looked up at his two captives. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“I’m just an old mountain Singer,” Theo went on in a bland tone. “I can’t warm a whole House. You need to send to Conservatory for a real Cantor.”
“I think perhaps Conservatory has sent us one,” Pol rasped. He fixed his gaze on Sira.
Her neck prickled, and she felt her face warm. There was a long moment of tension, and Pol began to smile. She wondered how he had guessed. Perhaps he had understood that she and Theo were communicating without words. Or perhaps her voice had given her away. Indeed, thought Sira, he is not stupid. Only cruel.
She lifted her chin and looked down at him. “You will have nothing from me.”
“Oh, I think we will,” Pol said with offhand triumph. “By the Ship, I think we will! We’ll have it sooner, or we’ll have it later. But we’ll have it.” He closed the door of the Cantoris with a solid thud.
In the great room the next morning, Sira and Theo met Jon v’Arren, an itinerant Singer who had been struggling to keep Observatory warm by himself, with only his filla and his small travelers’ quiru. Even indoors he was muffled in furs, a middle-aged, exhausted-looking man.
“Will you not try to help?” he asked Theo. “I’ve been here two weeks, and I can’t get the place warm. I’m no Cantor, unfortunately.”
“I’ll try,” said Theo, ignoring the look Sira gave him. “But where is their Cantor?”
“Their last one died. He had no Gifted one to train, apparently, so they got me.”
“How did they find you?” Sira asked.
“I was with a party in Ogre Pass, and they attacked us. They may have killed someone. The man who hired me was a hunter, looking for tkir. He shot at them, and they shot back.”
Sira saw Pol in a corner of the great room, and no one else close enough to overhear their conversation. “What about your travelers? Did they just leave them to die?”
“We were only three hours out from Bariken,” Jon said. “They should have made it back. I hope.” He shook his head. “These people are crazy. Do you know what they do here?”
Theo and Sira shook their heads.
“They watch the sky,” Jon said.
“They truly do that? Still?” Theo asked.
“Every night. Two of them go to the top of the House and look though a limeglass roof.”
“A pair,” Sira said. “Like Cantors.”
“Well, maybe. And even if I were able to establish a real House quiru, it would have to fade enough by dark so they could see the stars.”
Sira, like all Nevyans, had heard the old fables of Observatory and the apocryphal stories of the Ship. They were children’s tales. It was preposterous to think these people really waited here to be saved. “This is not sane,” she murmured.
Jon gestured carelessly around the room. “I don’t understand any of them. They don’t even complain about the cold. Half of them are sick, and their babies die.”
“Is there even a filhata in the House?” Sira asked. “A House quiru takes more than a filla to establish.”
Jon looked at her with dawning hope. “Can you play a filhata? I’ve never even had one in my hands.” He turned to Theo. “You? Are you a Cantor?”
Theo gave his lopsided grin. “I’m only an itinerant like yourself, my friend. I wouldn’t know which end of a filhata to blow into.”
Sira smiled, but Jon gazed at her intently. “You, then? Are you a Cantrix?”
Sira grew somber. “I was once,” she admitted. “No more.”
“Can you stop being a Cantrix once you have become one?”
“I did. And I will not sing.”
“But you’ll never get away, you know. You’re stuck here, as I am. We may as well be comfortable, don’t you think?”
“I am sorry,” Sira said firmly. “I will not sing for them. And I will not stay. Pol has guessed what I am, but it makes no difference.”
Jon heaved a gloomy sigh. “We’re going to be cold, then. And you can’t get away. They’ll never let us go.”
Sira was silent. I will not be used again, she thought. They cannot control me. There is no reason for me to sing here.
At midday, swallowing keftet that was short on grain, Sira looked around the great room for Jon.
“He’s in the Cantoris,” Theo murmured.
She nodded.
“He sings several times each day,” Theo added. “And he’s nearly worn out.”
Are you going to sing?
Yes. Theo’s eyes met hers. They are cold.
Sira did not object, nor did he try to persuade her to sing. Each of us has to deal with these Watchers in our own way, she thought.
She felt someone’s eyes on her and glanced up to see Pol, at the center table, regarding her. The child with the cough hacked and hacked from one side of the room. Sira closed her mind to the sound, looking steadily back at Pol until at last he turned his eyes away. It was a small and bitter victory. Sira finished her tea and rose from her seat.
She heard the faint sound of Jon’s and Theo’s filla from the Cantoris. The House was slightly warmer and brighter as she walked back to her room. She was surprised, when she reached it, to find a carefully wrapped object, an unmistakable shape, lying on her cot. She folded back the stiff and moldy wrapping to disclose an old filhata, cracked and discolored.
It must belong to the House, she thought, and now there is no one left to play it. Its carvings were scratched and dented, and what remained of its strings hung untuned and out of condition from the pegs. She took it up. The instrument felt tragic, abandoned, as if it had a life of its own she could sense through her fingers. She wondered about those who had played it in times past, and whether anyone would ever play it again. At least, she thought, she could polish the body and restring it, without giving in to Pol. She could hardly resist it. Its cracked wood called to her. Its silent voice was more persuasive than any human’s.
Theo found her tracing the carvings on the old filhata over and over again with her long fingers. When she saw him, she held it out.
“Someone left this on my cot.”
He took it from her. “It’s in terrible shape.”
“I can repair it, if you will find some cloth and oil for polishing, and caeru gut for new strings.” She paused. But they will know I am working on it.
He nodded.
Do you understand why I will not sing?
Theo smiled gently. I do. He added something else that she didn’t catch. She looked at him, waiting, until he tried again. Your own decision, he finally managed. “They are ill, though,” he added aloud. I have to do what I can.”
Sira took the old filhata back into her lap. “That is their choice,” she said. “They could rejoin the rest of the Houses, and have Cantors and Cantrixes. They could be healthy. I will not sing for fanatics.”
Theo’s crooked grin reassured her. “I’m not trying to persuade you, Cantrix.”
“You must not call me that.” She indicated the battered filhata on her knees. “But I could teach you on this,” she offered.
Theo reached out to touch the instrument. “This was a long way to travel to find a teacher,” he said, “but you have a willing student! I’ll try to dig up what you need.”
He left Sira’s room and she sat on, holding the ancient filhata. She searched for its past with her fingers, like trying to recall a forgotten tune. How sad a place this was, this lonely and isolated House, cut off from the whole of its people by some wild and hopeless idea. The greatest tragedy of all was that the traditions of its Singers should have been allowed to die out.
She remembered the child coughing and coughing in the great room, but she hardened her resolve. If they wanted to be well, there were things they could do. They had no right to disrupt other people’s lives, to imprison and use them. If she sang for them, she would only be supporting their delusion. She would not do it.
Never, she promised herself. I will never sing for these foolish people.