ANIMAL THROATS COULD not talk, but ears could listen, and human minds could understand. Ash kept his counsel about the songs he needed until he could talk with his father in daylight, man to man, but he could at least start Flax on the road he needed to walk. He moved back from his father and pulled Flax forward.
“This is Flax, whose father Gorham was raised by his mother and never brought to the Deep. Will you teach him what he needs to know?” He hesitated, but it had to be said, or Flax would not be accepted. “He is a singer.”
The men nodded. Two of them, a deer with wide antlers and a squirrel, whose head looked odd on his large body, came forward and started to strip Flax’s clothes off. He exclaimed and looked for help to Ash. Ash grinned at him. He had already started to undress.
“In the Deep, we show our true shapes.” That was true in a way that Flax wasn’t ready for yet. But he would be, one day soon.
The badger, his father Rowan in his true guise, put a hand on Ash’s arm and led him forward to the cave — or rather, to the caves. The fire cave was only the first in a long series. It was open to all whose blood calmed the waters. Year after year, the boys were taken further in, further down, into the Deep. Ash had been told that before Acton came, each year would add a new scar to the boy’s body until he was marked formally as a man. But not now.
“Travelers must travel unnoticed. Scars show, sooner or later, and lead to questions. There must be no questions about the Deep,” he had been told.
In the old days, men wore the masks of their animal in the ceremonies, once it had been revealed to them by the water. But since Acton came, the River had granted them their true shapes, to be and then wear inside, afterward.
“This is the River’s gift. This is how Traveler men stay men,” his grandfather had told him, in the first year. “The fair-haired ones look at us with scornful eyes, and a man might come, in time, to believe that he is worthy of scorn. But we know that what they see is not what we truly are. The man who knows what he truly is, and accepts it, cannot be diminished by another’s gaze. This is the River’s gift: when they look at you with hate and disdain, you will think, ‘You do not know me; you know nothing.’ Then, though you look at the ground, pretending humility to prevent a beating, you will not feel humbled in your heart, because you know who you are.”
Ash had always felt that it was a great gift, even though, when he went to Turvite, he had forced himself to banish even a stray thought about the Deep. It had been pure superstition; he was afraid then, that he would never return, that he had been cast out of the society of Travelers, forced to Settle, because there was no place for him on the Road. He was afraid that the River would reject him if he had tried to come here without his father.
He was still afraid of that, but there were more important things than his fear. He watched his father who had joined in the testing of the new boy. The demon forms prowled around Flax, growling softly, reaching out hands curled like claws to touch his face, to poke his side, to scratch.
“If you hold still and show no fear, you won’t be harmed,” Ash said quietly. It was what he had been told by his grandfather, who had met him and his father here the year before the old man died — the first year that Ash came and had been tested as Flax was being tested now. He believed it was true, but the demons chuckled to themselves disquietingly. Ash wondered what happened to the boys who broke and tried to run.
This was only the first test, but it lasted until dawn, until Flax was swaying with tiredness and fear had passed out of him because he was too exhausted to feel it. As the dawn broke somewhere outside the canyon, the sky lit with rose and orange glory and the demons lifted their heads and howled, a long ululation, then turned as one and jogged inside the big cave.
Ash came over to Flax and supported him to a seat on a flat rock. He brought water in a curved shell from a tiny stream flowing between two boulders, and held it so Flax could drink.
“W-why…?” Flax stuttered.
“That was the first test,” Ash said. “There’ll be others.”
“Demons. One of them was your father?”
Ash nodded. “You’ll meet him soon.”
“That’s why he’ll know the right songs? Because he’s a demon?”
“Ah, no, not exactly.”
“You could have warned me!” With his legs no longer wobbling and his thirst slaked, Flax had found enough energy to be angry.
“No, I couldn’t,” Ash said. “I’d sworn secrecy. I did warn you it was dangerous.”
“Yes, but… real demons.”
Ash laughed. “Oh, they’re not so bad when you get to know them!”
It hadn’t occurred to him that Flax would think he was demon-spawned, that he wouldn’t immediately understand who the badger-headed figure really was. He couldn’t resist letting him continue to think it. The misunderstanding wouldn’t be for long, anyway. He collected his and Flax’s clothes and they dressed, glad to escape the chill.
Flax rummaged in their bags for something to eat, but Ash moved away, waiting for the sun to come up over the lip of the canyon wall. He knelt by the stream, trailing one hand in the cold water, and wondered what was happening up north, with Bramble and the others. He missed Martine. Oakmere was a long way north of where his ancestors had lived — there were no Traveler songs about it, and right now he was glad. He was sick of songs. Heartsick.
He had held them inside all his life, although again and again they had almost burst his chest with the pressure to sing. But he had never sung, because of the look on his parents’ faces whenever he tried. Now he knew that he had sung with the voice of the dead, and his parents’ reaction was understandable. But then, when he had been three and four and five years old, all he had known was that his voice was so horrible that even his father could not bear to listen. Yet his father had taught him the songs. Taught the music, on the flute and drum. Taught the lyrics, and heard Ash recite them all until he was word perfect.
All. That was the point — that had been the point — that he had learned all that his father had to teach. That his father had entrusted the songs to him, so that someday he could teach someone else… his own son, his own daughter… and the songs would continue, as they had continued for more than a thousand years. All of them. If his father had not given him all the songs, then none of them was worth anything.
None.
He wished he could wipe his memory clean of every song he had ever known.
The breeze carried the sounds of the Deep with it; birds, beetles, small animals in the carpet of leaves, and the Hidden River rushing through its banks. He found the Deep disturbing, always, but the sounds of life lifted his spirits. Perhaps — perhaps his father did not know the songs Safred was talking about. A small sound came from behind him, a foot on pebble, and he swung around, drawing his knife as he turned.
The men were coming out of the cave, still naked but with their own faces returned to them. Ash stowed his knife hurriedly. His father came first, smiling broadly, and embraced him.
“Ash! You made it!”
Ash knew he should have left his clothes where they were, but embracing his father while they were both naked always felt bizarre, and he’d rather have to strip off again later than experience that oddity.
Flax was looking from one face to another, one body to another, and coming to a conclusion.
“They’re not demons?” he asked Ash, outraged.
“Only at night.” Rowan laughed. “When the River gives us our true faces.”
Flax opened his mouth to complain, but Ash forestalled him. “We have more important things to talk about.” He looked around the circle of faces he knew so well. Friends, an uncle of his mother’s, his father… They looked at him with welcoming eyes, but would they still look like that after he had demanded to be taught the secret songs? Or would he be cast out, never to return? Would he lose his place in the world all over again? His heart beat faster, but he had to speak.
“There are things happening in the world outside which you must know about,” he said. “And there is a thing I must ask from you.”