The Crow Read online

  "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

  WOUNDS

  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 b
ecause 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.

  That was something else he had nightmares about.

  After he had lain for hours in his cramped hiding place, too terrified to venture out, Maerad and Cadvan had found him. He had then discovered that not all Bards were Hulls, as he had thought. Finding that he had a sister – someone who belonged to him, someone who without question wrapped her warm arms around him when he cried out and trembled in his black dreams – was the most important thing that had happened to him in his whole life. When he had been forced to leave her behind, he had felt as if his heart had been cut in two. It was a loss he tried not to think about, because it hurt him too much.

  Meeting Saliman was the second most important thing that had happened to him. Despite his anxieties about Maerad, the ride to Turbansk with Saliman had been his first taste of real freedom. The weather had stayed fine for most of the way, and although they feared pursuit from Norloch, he and Saliman had encountered no dangers. After Hem's body had made the first painful adjustments to horseback – for riding made his legs so stiff that he thought he would walk with bowed legs for the rest of his life – the journey had been an unalloyed pleasure.

  Hem often wished he could ride again with Saliman through the mountains of Osidh Am, his favorite part of the whole journey. They had camped at night by still pools in the fragrant forests of larch and fir, and Hem would lie by the fire looking up at the bright stars through the branches high above him. During the day they often surprised small herds of deer, which would leap up almost under the horses' feet to crash away through the bracken, and sometimes they brushed past bushes full of butterflies, which would start up in a cloud of bright colors about their heads.

  There were no other people for leagues, and a great peace began to rise in Hem's heart. It was the happiest he had ever been. On the other hand, his first sight of Turbansk, which was, Saliman told him, the most ancient city in Edil-Amarandh, had been bewildering and overwhelming.

  They had arrived at first light on a summer's day, just before the dawn bell. The Great Bell of Turbansk, three times the height of a man, hung in a high belfry under a gilt cupola above the West Gate – one tower in that city of many towers, which glowed like an opulent mirage on the shores of the Lamarsan Sea. It was struck every day at the exact moment that the sun's disc appeared over the horizon.

  As it rang over the city, it had seemed to Hem as if the sound itself was made of light. Sunlight and bell note spilled simultaneously over market and tower, house and hall and hovel, picking out the glittering domes of the School and the palace and the Red Tower, flushing the stone walls pale pink or warm yellow. The sun flooded the city's broad squares and trickled into the narrow alleys of the poor quarters, where the walls were painted in fading greens or blues or reds, and fresh washing was strung over the street from house to house like colorful flags; and on the great inland sea of Lamarsan a path of dazzling gold flared across the water.

  In the markets, which teemed with people hours before dawn, the flaming torches faded in the sudden increase of light and the world flooded with color. The dew sparkled on the roses and jasmine and saffron in the flower stalls, and rainbows quivered over the scales of trout and salmon, and on the iridescent feathers of freshly killed ducks and pheasants as they lay on the marble benches.

  From the food and flower markets spread a labyrinth of alleys lined with stalls and tiny shops, which sold everything from plain brass lamps to curious enameled fortune-telling boxes that were used to predict the positions of the stars, from robes of diaphanous silk to thick linen tunics, from rings and brooches to knives and cooking pots. The narrow streets were packed with people: bakers walking with trays of fresh loaves balanced on their heads; donkeys and pack mules loaded down with huge panniers or sacks; farmers from the Fesse, the land surrounding the city, carrying baskets of dates or live ducks, their heads poking from the top; women in bright, embroidered robes, their fingers sparkling with rings; children squabbling and playing; and hawkers marching up and down, calling the virtues of their wares.

  There was a whole street of spice sellers, who sat behind their counters with bowls of precious ground spices before them, saffron and cardamom and whole nutmegs and cinnamon sticks; then you would turn the corner and find a street of shops full of songbirds and finches, fluttering in cages of copper wire. The next street was full of stalls with copper braziers that sold little tin cups of black coffee and sweet honey-filled cakes and hot bean pastries. Jugglers and minstrels plied their trades for the gossiping customers.

  Hem stared, amazed at the ordered chaos of Turbansk, his nostrils flaring. The streets were aromatic with spices from the hawkers' stalls and everyone, men and women, wore musky perfumes. As the heat of the day increased, the perfumes merged with other, earthier smells – rotting vegetables and sweat and waste – so that Hem felt faint, as if he were drugged in some sweet stupor, moving through a constantly changing hallucination.

  The people of Turbansk took great pleasure in personal adornment; at first Hem thought everyone in Turbansk must be fabulously wealthy, for he saw no one who did not wear golden earrings or bracelets or some intricately fashioned brooch. Later he knew that those who were poor wore trinkets of brass, with glass jewels; but to Hem they seemed no less beautiful than emeralds and gold. Nothing had prepared him for the rich colors and ceaseless movement, the countless men and women and children who moved with unerring grace through the teeming streets. To his astonishment, he saw no beggars: they had been everywhere in Edinur. He turned and asked Saliman if they had been banished from the city, and Saliman laughed.

  "Nay, Hem, here the Light does its work. No one goes hungry in Turbansk," he said.

  Hem mulled this over in silence. "Then won't people get lazy?" he said at last.

  Saliman gave him a sharp look. "What do you mean?"

  "If they don't have to work for food, I mean."

  Saliman stared ahead for a moment, as if revolving thoughts in his head. "If a person doesn't want to work, that is their loss," he said at last. "To make things, to care for what one loves, to earn one's place in the city, that is one of life's great pleasures. It is not a Bard's business to tell people what to do: if they are hungry and ask for food, we give them something good to eat. We have plenty, after all. Then they are able to think what they might do best. If their best is sitting in the gardens watching the carp in the pools, then so be it."

  Hem blinked in surprise. It seemed wrong to him, simply to give food away for nothing.

  The city of Hem's daydreams so far surpassed them that his expectations had wavered like smoke and collapsed utterly. He scarcely remembered his first week there. It passed in a blur of unfamiliar voices and words and colors and smells: the fresh touch of linen sheets against his skin; the silken caress of his new robes; the tastes of the food, which flamed along his tongue, making him choke and gasp; the hundreds of faces he saw in the streets every day, each one a stranger. Although Hem wasn't afraid, this sudden profusion of sensation induced something very like panic. In the midst of his confusion the only still point was Saliman, who – perceiving the chaos of Hem's mind – for that first week took him everywhere. Hem haunted Saliman's footsteps like a little dog, never less than three paces behind him, as if he were the one rock in a turbulent and threatening world.

  But in seven days the world stopped whirling and settled down, and Hem began to find his bearings. He was instated into the School of Turbansk as a minor Bard and now wore on his breast a brooch in the shape of a golden sun, the token of a Bard of Turbansk. Saliman told him to keep the medallion of Pellinor – the precious token from his babyhood, which was the only thing he possessed of his family's heritage – in a cloth bag that he hung around his neck.

  The Turbansk brooch, a gift from Saliman, pleased Hem much more than his lessons, which, apa
rt from swordcraft and unarmed combat, he found much more difficult than he had expected. Study bored him, even his studies in magery, and he was at best a mediocre student.

  This puzzled Saliman, who believed Hem had a facility with magery. He had taught Hem a few techniques on their journey to Turbansk and, when he had time, showed him mageries that caught the boy's fancy. Hem was particularly adept with the charms to do with concealment, shadowmazing, and glimveils, and he had even mastered a disguising spell that was a speciality of Cadvan's, and which was particularly difficult. Saliman suspected this ability might have to do with his life in the orphanage, when he had been forced to keep his Barding powers hidden, as anyone suspected of witchspeak – which was what the ignorant termed the Speech – might be stoned to death. Yet in classes he acted the dullard, refusing to concentrate or focus his powers.

  To Hem's dismay, Saliman had left the city for a few days shortly after their arrival in Turbansk. This was when Hem began to feel truly isolated. Saliman would not tell him where he was going or when he would be back, and despite Hem's pleadings would not take him with him. Hem felt it as a betrayal; a small betrayal, perhaps, but a betrayal nevertheless. Saliman came back for a day and then vanished again, and Hem began to feel lonelier than ever.

  During Saliman's absences the Turbansk Bards were kind to him, but Hem found this almost as bewildering as Turbansk itself. He simply wasn't used to being treated with courtesy. The first time a Bard gave him the bow of greeting he had flushed red with anger, believing that he was being mocked; but fortunately Saliman was present and took him aside, explaining that it was the custom, and that he was simply expected to bow back.

  Most often his confusion erupted without warning into explosions of rage. Perhaps Hem's greatest difficulty was that he didn't speak Suderain, but that might have been overcome if he had not also suffered from a deep mistrust of almost everybody who attempted to speak to him. Within days his fellow students had dismissed him as surly and aggressive, and before long some were taunting him, provocations to which he always responded violently. By the time Hem rescued Ire, he had punched three minor Bards hard enough to warrant visits to the School healer for both parties, and once had even used magery against a student, a practice so strictly forbidden in the School that Urbika had told him sternly that he would be thrown out altogether if he ever did such a thing again.