Sheri Tepper - Wizard’s Eleven

I, too, had found the song disquieting, though I could not have said why. All the evening’s entertainment had done nothing but leave me irritated and cross. When Silkhands came to my room in the Guest House later, this irritation remained and I made her a free gift of it, not realizing what I was doing. I was speaking about the girl who had come to our table, about what I presumed to call her “dishonesty.” Silkhands disagreed with me.

“Ah, Peter, truly you expect too much. Who was it came to your table? Lunette of Pouws? I thought so. Her brother wishes to establish an alliance with the Black Basilisks at Breem. So he seeks to interest Burmor of Breem in Lunette. She is his full sister, and she is no fool. She seems like to manifest a Talent which will fit her well enough among the Basilisks; however, Burmor wants no competitor in Beguilement at the Basilisk Demesne. Thus she plays witless before those he sends to look her over. What would you have her do? Stand upon her dignity and Talent, as yet unproven, and so cause her full brother annoyance and grief? If she goes to Burmor, she will be of value there as symbol of the alliance. She will be protected, and there will be time for her Talent to emerge.”

This argument did not sit well with me, and I said so with much reference to the “consecrated monsters” I had seen in the place of the magicians. “They, too, were taught to be passive, or were so changed in the hideous laboratories that they could be nothing else. They, too, existed for nothing except to breed sons…”

“You may recall,” she said, “that Windlow once told us of the rules of the Game? How those rules had been made originally to protect; how those rules came to be more important than what they protected; how those rules came to be the Game itself! Well, those rules were made by men, Peter. Lunette chooses to make her own safety and her own justice within the Game. It is her choice.”

She was so annoyed with me that I thought it wise to change the subject. “Who was that minstrel who won the prize? Did I mistake him, or did he sing to you and me alone of all that crowd?”

“Ah, one of my students, Jinian, thought the same. He has sung this wind song before. It seems to follow me wherever I go, into the orchards, the gardens. His name is Rupert of Theel, and he is well known among the musicians. Yesterday in my bath I heard ‘Wild-wind weeps and illwind moans. Has the wind an eye? A hand? Has the wind sinews or bones? Healer, Healer, understand.’ It so infuriated me I leaned naked from the window and told him to cease singing `Healer’ or `wind’ in my hearing.”

“Well, last night he sang `Healer,’ but he also sang ‘Gamesman,’” I commented. “He sang to me as well as you if he sang to either.” We wondered at it a bit. What was there in it, after all? A song. There was this much in it: it linked the two of us together as did Windlow’s prophecy. Musing on this I reached out to take her into my arms. She sighed upon my shoulder and we sat there for a long time in the candle shine and starlight, lost in our own thoughts. When she drew away at last, I began to tell her what had brought me to Xammer.

Thus Silkhands learned about the blues, and about Windlow’s blue, the only person besides myself who knew of it, the first person beside myself to know the sorrow of it.

“I take the blue into my hand,” I whispered. “Windlow comes into my mind, a gentle visitor, gentle but insistent. Silkhands, he struggles there. I feel his struggle. He inhabits my mind as a man might inhabit a strange house — no, a strange workshop where nothing is in its accustomed place. I feel him search for words he cannot find, seek explanations for things which are not there — connections and implications which might have been obvious to Windlow in the flesh but which he cannot find in me. He struggles, and it is like watching him drown, unable to save him.”

“Not your fault,” she soothed me. “Not your doing.”

“No,” I agreed. And yet it was my doing. “If I do not take him up, then he lies imprisoned in the blue, a living intelligence imprisoned as intelligence is imprisoned in these students of yours who must hide it to protect themselves. Oh, Silkhands, worst of all is when he wants me to read to him.”

“Read? As a Demon Reads?”

“No, no. Books. A book. He wants me to read the little book, the one he called the Onomasticon, over and over. As though there were something in it he needs to know and cannot find. Oh, he is gentle, kind, but I can feel the sorrow like a whip.”

At that she came into my arms again to comfort me, and we lay there upon the wide windowseat staring at the stars until we fell asleep. When I woke, stiff and sore, it was morning and she had gone. I went out to the necessary house behind the Guest House. (A silly place to have it. We had toilets near our rooms at the Bright Demesne.) The singer was there, Rupert, and I thought to find out about the wind song, perhaps find why it disturbed me so.

“I am interested in the song you sang,” I said politely. “The one about the wind?”

“Better you than I, Gamesman,” he said, making a face. “Would I could forget the thing.”

I evinced surprise, and he laughed a short bark without amusement. “I heard it first at the Minchery in Learner. They make shift there to train artists up from childhood, and there is a summer songfest at which many of us assemble to lend encouragement and judge the contests. There are always new songs, some written by students, some brought in from the Northern Lands. Many are of a caliginous nature, dark and mysterious, for the students love such. Well, this wind song was one of them. I heard it, and since have been unable to get it out of my head. I find me singing it when I eat, when I bathe, when I …” he gestured at the necessary house behind him.

“The places mentioned in the song? Waeneye? The Wastes of Bleer? Where are those?”

“Oh.” He seemed puzzled. “I do not know that they exist, Gamesman. I took them for more mysteries. They may exist, certainly, but I know nothing of them.” He smiled and bowed. I smiled and bowed. We took leave of one another. I believed he had told me all he knew. Considering how the song ran in my own head, I could believe it had haunted him.

When I saw Silkhands, later in the morning, I asked, “Have you a cartographer at the School?”

“Gamesmistress Armiger Joumerie,” she said. “A good Gamesmistress. A difficult person.”

“Difficult or not, I would like to see her.”

And I did see her that afternoon in my room at the Guest House, for no male may enter the School House. As the girls there were much valued for their ephemera they were much protected against its premature bestowal.

I asked the Gamesmistress whether she knew of a place called Bleer, or one called Waeneye. Also did she know of Learner, or of any place where creatures called krylobos or gnarlibars might live. I had heard, I said, that gnarlibars lived in the north, but that might have been only talk.

“Bleer, Bleer,” she mumbled to herself, stroking her upper lip with its considerable moustache as an aid to concentration. She was a big woman, larger than many men, and her face had a hard, no-nonsense look about it. “Yes. That jostles a memory.”

“Possibly a mountainous place,” I offered. The song had mentioned mountains and stone, an abyss, fells.

“No help, Gamesman,” she said tartly. “If one excepts the purlieus around the Gathered Waters and Lake Yost, virtually all the lands and demesnes are mountainous. You are not untraveled! Surely this has struck you. How much flatland have you seen?”

I had to admit having seen little. The valley of the Banner was fairly flat, as were the valley bottoms leading into Long Valley in the southwest. Other than that I could think only of that vast, tilted upland which lay above the River Haws and south of the firehills and Schlaizy Noithn. I would not speak of that to the Gamesmistress, but the thought had reminded me of something. “Shadowpeople!” I said. “Where are shadowpeople said to dwell?”