The Crow Page 27

  "We'll just have a quick look," said Hem, pulling his gaze from the tree man with an effort. Zelika nodded, and they hurriedly turned to inspect the walls, as they had in the other smaller chambers. They immediately found they didn't want to stand with their backs to the figure in the mural. They tacitly agreed that Hem would keep watch, while Zelika inspected the walls. Ire had not wanted to come with Hem, but did not want to be left outside on his own, either, and clung to Hem's shoul­der, with his eyes hidden in Hem's hair. They kept as far away as they could from the stone table; it was made of white, veined marble, and it was stained by a blackish red patch that looked like ancient blood. It seemed sinister.

  In her desire to get out of the room, Zelika was giving the walls very little more than a perfunctory examination. Hem had to turn occasionally, to move the magelight for her. The third time, when he turned back to look at the tree man, he jumped. Surely its arms were higher than when he had last looked at it, moments before? No, it must be his nerves. He set himself to watching it again, studying its position, trying to still a panicky voice that was urging him to leave the chamber. The next time he took his eyes off the painting, he was quite sure it had moved. Now its arms were almost level with its shoulders.

  "Zelika..." he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the mural.

  "Yes?"

  "Let's get away from here."

  "In a moment – there's something there, don't you think, high up? Can you put the light up there? Maybe that's what Hared wanted us to find – it looks like a tunnel."

  To Hem, it sounded as if Zelika were speaking underwater; her voice was muffled, and his ears filled with a roaring sound. Now he was staring at the tree man as if he were a rabbit trans­fixed by a snake; he was no longer conscious of the rest of room. Every moment the figure seemed more and more real, and less and less like a painting.

  The tree man blinked, lowered his arms to his sides, and stepped out of the wall.

  Hem felt a scream gathering in his throat but, as if he were in one of his nightmares, he found that he couldn't move or speak. The figure walked silently toward him, its eyes fixed on his. Hem had never been so wholly terrified as he was in that moment, but it wasn't really a fear that he would be hurt or killed. It was more akin to awe: the kind of feeling one might have at the edge of a huge precipice, on the brink of falling over it. The tree man was more than twice Hem's height, and his eyes were yellow like an owl's, with no white around the iris, and cleft with a vertical pupil. Branches, heavy with dark, nar­row leaves, grew from his head like antlers and smaller leafy branches pushed out of the tendons of his arms and from his shoulders. The face was white-skinned, as white as the petals of a magnolia, and as blank of expression.

  When he reached the stone table, which stood between them, the tree man halted. Then, to Hem's amazement, he spoke to him; he used some variant of the Speech, which Hem could only just understand. He wasn't sure if the tree man spoke aloud; his voice resonated inside Hem's skull, low and rich and melodious.

  Songboy, he said. At last, out of the foretimes, you come. I have waited for thee long.

  It was the last thing Hem had expected, and his mouth fell open with astonishment. After a few moments he realized he was standing like a gawping fool, and shut it with a snap. The tree man stood utterly still, as if he were waiting for Hem to answer. Hem struggled to gather his thoughts, which were whirling inside his head like panicked birds.

  Me? he said. I... I think there's some mistake –

  The tree man's expression did not change, but it seemed to Hem that a cold laughter lit his yellow eyes.

  There is no gainsaying the Speech of the earth, Songboy. There is no mistake. Thou art but a spring leaf in the ages of the world, and there are many wisdoms that those such as thou – who pass like a ripple on a lake, like a ray of sunlight on a hill – will never under­stand. The knowing is sure. Thou art foretold.

  Hem blinked. You mean my sister, I think, he said at last. Not me. I'm not important. My sister's the Fated One. She's the one you mean. There have been mistakes before, when I was a baby... He sud­denly became conscious that he was babbling, and fell silent.

  Yes, a sister and a brother. Out of the foretimes.

  Hem didn't know what to say to that, and licked his lips. His mouth was so dry he could barely swallow.

  Out of the foretimes, said the tree man softly. To unchain the song.

  The Treesong? said Hem uncertainly. But that's what Maerad is looking for –

  One for the singing and one for the music. Listen well, Songboy. Listen with the sinews of your heart, with the marrow of your bones, with the sap of your mind. The tree man leaned forward: to Hem's perception it seemed that his upper body stretched impossibly over the stone table across the entire distance of the chamber, so that now the tree man spoke into his ear. Listen and remember.

  The tree man breathed into Hem's ear; and the world changed.

  Afterward, trying to make sense of what had happened, Hem thought it was as if he had suddenly been tossed into an ocean of music, and he was a fish made of light, swaying in cur­rents of pure sound. Or it was as if he were suddenly no longer flesh, as if his muscles and bones and organs were woven of melody, a harmony that contained all dissonance, trembling on the edge of silence. It was unbearable, a beauty so extreme that comprehending it was beyond his human capacity, but he wanted it never to end; and he felt it never would end, that the single moment of the tree man's breath caught him into eternity, that his body pulsed in time with the slow music of the stars, and beyond the stars, a pure, infinite darkness, the source and end of all beauty and all life.

  The next thing he was aware of was a piercing pain in his left ear, and someone shaking his shoulder, saying his name. He tried to brush away whatever was hurting his ear, and his hand touched feathers: Ire. For some reason, he was lying on the ground. It was completely dark, so he lit a magelight and sat up.

  Zelika was seated next to him, her face tense in the pale light. "Are you all right?" she said. "I thought..." She shook her head, as if she were trying to clear it. "Did you faint or something? You just fell over, and then the magelight went out and it was so dark."

  "Didn't you see the tree man?" said Hem, looking at her curiously.

  "What? The one on the wall?"

  "He spoke to me."

  "Spoke to you?"

  Hem realized that Zelika thought he was delirious. And in any case, he wasn't sure that he felt like talking about what had just happened.

  "It doesn't matter. Something happened, that's all. Maybe I imagined it." He looked around the room; the sense of a watchful presence had vanished completely. Now it was just an empty room. "Did you find anything?"

  "No."

  At that moment, they heard Hared outside, calling them. Zelika met Hem's eyes.

  "He's back," she said. "That weasel. Well, I suppose we can't throttle him or complain, or we'll fail the test."

  Hem laughed and stood up. His knees were wobbly, but otherwise he felt no ill effects. He could almost believe that he had suffered some kind of hallucination; he remembered how fevered children in the orphanage saw all sorts of terrible visions. But somehow, it didn't seem like that to him. They walked out into the courtyard, where Hared waited for them, holding a leather bottle of water.

  After that day, Hem and Zelika didn't need to be told to come prepared for anything. They always brought a water flask each and, at the very least, a hunk of flatbread and some dried fruit. Hem also asked if Ire could train as well, since, he argued, Ire would be an invaluable help; to his surprise, after at first demurring, Hared agreed. Ire was unusually well behaved when he accompanied the children, which was a sure measure of Hared's authority.

  They finished each day exhausted, not necessarily because they were doing physically punishing work, but because Hared demanded nothing less than their complete attention, all the time. They never knew what to expect, nor what would be expected of them. Several times they spent the entire day
on memory games. Hared would place a number of objects on a table, let them study them for a short time, and then cover them with a cloth. The children were then expected to list all the objects they had seen, in the order in which they had been placed on the table, running from left to right. Hared would not allow them to go until their recall was completely accurate more than three times in a row; and naturally, the more tired they became, the worse their results. But their teacher was pitiless.

  Another day he took them into a room deep in the palace, shut the door, and extinguished the lamp, so they all stood in complete darkness. This was another, more sinister game, which Hared called "shadow hunting." The aim was to creep up behind one of the others without being sensed. Hem was not permitted to use his Bard hearing: the point was to be as silent as possible, while opening one's physical senses to their maxi­mum sensitivity. If one of them managed to place his or her hands around another's neck, they won.

  Hem found that shadow hunting was surprisingly nerve-racking. He would stand in the dark, rigid with alertness, hearing perhaps the smallest breath here, sensing a shift of air there, catching maybe the whiff of Hared's sweat or Zelika's musky smell. He had not realized that he knew their scents until he played this game. He learned how to stand absolutely still, how to control his breathing to make it soundless, how to step slowly and surely in the dark, using all the muscles in his feet to feel out the floor, how to minimize the air's movement around him. He would creep in the dark for what seemed like ages, sure that he had pinpointed a body a step or so away, only to find that somehow he had imagined its presence. And when­ever, as happened most often, Hared slipped his cold hands around his neck, Hem leaped out of his skin with fright.

  The first time he managed to catch Hared, he could see the Bard was grimly pleased. After that, he began to find it easier; he became aware that he had an intuitive feeling for bodily presence, which he could hone into a sense almost as good as sight. He was much better than Zelika at this game, and once, after Hem caught her three times in a row, she accused him of cheating. Hem was outraged, and only Hared's sharp repri­mand stopped them from coming to blows.

  There were also lessons that Hem had alone, which he found himself enjoying most of all, not least because he was free of Zelika's relentless competitiveness. In these sessions, Hared taught him the major charms of concealment and disguise: the glimveil that glances aside a watching eye; the art of shadowmazing that confuses tracks and makes them difficult to follow; various kinds of mageshields, to hide the telltale glow of Bardic magery from Hulls; and the skill of semblance making, the creation of likenesses that can be used to fool an enemy. Hem was quick and adept at these spells, and actually sur­prised Hared when he demonstrated the difficult disguising spell that Saliman had taught him, long ago, in Turbansk; it was the one time Hem saw Hared genuinely impressed.

  But what Hem was really waiting for was the chance to go above ground. He had begun to hunger for sunlight and wind with a passion; at night before he went to sleep, he tried to remember what it was like to walk beneath an open sky. It felt like years since he had seen stars. But Hared continued to train them in the underground city, with no word of leaving. They worked long, boring, monotonous hours, repeating the same exercises over and over again until they began to feel entirely meaningless. Remembering Saliman's stricture that if Hared's report was less than excellent they would not work for him, they bit back any complaints. Ire was even more bored than the children, but he continued his unusually good behavior, although this required a lot of bribery on Hem's part. All of them had had their fill of darkness.

  Hem didn't speak to anyone about the tree man for some days. Partly it was because their training took up most of their time: Hared was devoting all his attention to the children. He clearly thought the work they were doing was important, as important as his many other duties – for Hared was busy, and Bards from Nal-Ak-Burat were always leaving and reappearing. Also, as the days passed and the memory of his encounter with the tree man receded behind his daily activities, Hem became less sure that he hadn't had some kind of fit and, overcome by the strange atmosphere in the cavern, imagined the whole incident. In any case, he wasn't sure how to put the experience into words. So much of it, especially when the tree man had breathed in his ear, escaped his language. Sometimes he woke in an anguish of loss from dreams in which he was again in the breath of that music, tossed in that infinite, intolerably beautiful harmony; but he had no words for that, either.

  He didn't attempt to speak of it to Zelika, who simply assumed that Hem had fainted and had been raving when he came to. He was too afraid that she would laugh. The only per­son he could trust enough to talk to was Saliman, and it was difficult to find time alone with him without Zelika becoming curious. But he found himself constantly dwelling on the tree man; there were, he noticed now, paintings of him all over Nal-Ak-Burat. When he had the chance, he examined them curiously. Who was he? What was his name? Was he some kind of Elemental, an Elidhu? Had the people of Nal-Ak-Burat per­haps worshipped him, as Zelika had said some people in the south worshipped the Light?

  Maerad had told Hem that they had Elemental blood; she said she had even spoken to Ardina, a wood Elidhu, although Maerad's description of that Elidhu did not sound anything like the creature Hem had seen. Nelac had seemed to think that the Treesong, which Maerad had gone north with Cadvan to find, was something to do with the Elidhu. It was difficult not to think that the Treesong might have something to do with the tree man. And, after all, Saliman had said that Hem had some part in Maerad's quest; that was why he had kept him in Turbansk for the siege, instead of sending him away with the other students. Perhaps this was what Saliman had meant? One for the singing and one for the music. But then Hem would wonder again if he had imagined the whole thing; it seemed too like a dream.

  Hem's chance came when Hared gave the children a rare day off. Nimikera asked Zelika for some help with the children, as she had sickened again from her wound. Zelika disappeared to the children's room, and Hem helped Saliman prepare the herbs to treat Nimikera's fever. Nimikera gave Hem a surprised glance when he entered her bed chamber with Saliman, but she did not object to his presence. She drew back her robe from her breast, and Hem and Saliman (accompanied by interested peeps from Ire) gravely examined her wound; it was a red slash running down from her throat almost to her stomach. But although it looked nasty, Hem saw straight away that it was a flesh wound, which miraculously had not pierced any vital organs. Another scar ran across her stomach, a white line, long healed, and Hem wondered about Nimikera's history.

  "It looks as though the blade was poisoned," he said to her. "We had many such at Turbansk. The edges of the wound fes­ter, and there is fever. But this must be a slow poison, I think; otherwise you would already be dead."

  "It comes and goes," said Nimikera. "I curse it; each time I think I am recovering, I find myself abed again. This was done to me nigh on three months ago, and still it will not heal."

  "You have no ill effects from that previous wound?" asked Hem. He had fallen easily into the role of healer again; here he felt at home, sure of where to place his hands, of how to speak, of what his instincts told him. Nimikera again gave him a curious glance – Hem was still a boy, and to the long-lived Bards he was considered very young indeed. Yet he was speak­ing like one of the wise, an equal to Saliman.

  "I was left for dead after the sack of Terr-Niken," she said. "Which might be counted as an ill effect – both the sack and the sword."

  "I meant, now," Hem said gently, meeting her eyes. Jerr-Niken? he thought, remembering that, like Pellinor, that School had been razed to the ground and its Bards massacred by the Dark some years before. That no doubt explained Nimikera's grimness. "Sometimes wounds like this one can inflame old injuries." There was a short pause.

  "No. No ill effects."

  "You have a living sickness in your blood, I think." He turned to Saliman inquiringly. "What do you think, Saliman? If it comes and goes
, it is not a simple poison."

  "Aye, it seems so to me. To cleanse it thoroughly will take some magery. Hem, I can deal with this one; you look tired."

  Hem nodded; he was tired. He left the tiny bed chamber and went back to the meal room, which was empty. While he waited for Saliman, he prepared some mint tea and sipped it morosely, thinking of Oslar. This was the first time Hem had been called on to do any healing since he had left Turbansk; it made him reflect on the training he was doing with Hared. It was difficult to imagine anyone more different from Oslar than Hared. Where Oslar emanated the kind of gentleness that comes from great strength, Hared had not a trace of gentleness. All the same, Hem thought, Hared was not weak; the past days of training had made him respect Hared's sternness, which he applied as unsparingly to himself as to others. But perhaps it was a kind of blindness. For the first time since he had decided to work for Hared, he wondered if he was really doing the right thing.

  Saliman entered, interrupting Hem's musings. His face was gray with exhaustion.

  "I'll have some of that," he said, pointing to the mint tea. Hem poured some into a little tin cup and handed it to him as Saliman sat down, sighing.

  "She sleeps," he said. "But that was a hard one. You were right, Hem, it was not an ordinary poison. That's why the heal­ings hadn't worked on her earlier. They don't have any real healers here; it is the one thing they lack."

  "Irisanu isn't bad," said Hem.

  "Aye. But she is a healer in the way that most Bards are; it is not her especial gift. There are some things she cannot do."

  They sat in companionable silence for a time, pursuing their own thoughts. Then Hem roused himself.

  "Saliman, something happened, that first day of training," he said.

  "Hmm?" Saliman looked up. "I've been meaning to ask how you're finding Hared's tuition. He seems quite pleased with your progress, even though he won't say so."