Vandien awoke to warmth and darkness. For long moments he lay still, savoring that time of peace that hovers between waking and sleeping. He tried to drift back into sleep, but found he could not. His body felt rested and healed, his mind cleared to alertness. He found he had ideas he had not had when he dropped in sleep, and a drive to begin his task. The will to work possessed him.
Rolling from bed, he lifted the window shutter for a look. Late afternoon greeted him. He looked down on his team, still huddled peacefully. He resolved to check their lines before nightfall, to be sure they would withstand any nocturnal tugging. Letting his eyes wander farther, he looked over the low dwellings of False Harbor. Holiday banners fluttered from cottage windows. A puppeteer had set up a booth in the street. Children too young to fish were standing about it. Shouts of laughter rose at regular intervals. Vandien smiled at the sound.
The tide was going out. He stood holding the shutter open, watching the slow retreat of the waves. It was so deceptive, the rise and fall. Each nibbling wave seemed to fall on the shore and lap up to the same height as the preceding one, but already the high tide line was clearly visible, a tracery of small flotsam, shells and seaweed stranded across the sands in a wavery line. Later tonight, he knew, most of the old village would stand exposed. The broken house walls would rise from the sea like the decayed teeth of some monstrous beast. The tide’s full retreat would be under moonlight, and would expose almost all of the old settlement. But not the temple. The temple had been closest to the sea, standing between the ocean and the village. When the land sank, the temple had gone deepest and taken all its secrets with it. Had any Windsingers drowned along with that mysterious chest? No one had ever mentioned that to Vandien.
There were boats in sight, some beaching, some heading out to sea. There were flat-bottomed scows prowling in the shallows, and double-ended dories that would venture into deeper water and fish the true sea. Close in, Vandien saw youngsters in makeshift vessels or on rafts. Armed with sharpened sticks of driftwood, they lazed silently along, waiting for some sea creature on the bottom to betray itself with a ripple of fin or a twitch of claws. Then the sharp spear would plunge down, and sometimes return with skewered bounty. The wind was chill on Vandien’s face, and he could imagine the iciness of the water. Yet the youngsters were barefoot and shirtless, or nearly so. ‘Oh, for the youthful ability to ignore the weather,’ Vandien sighed to himself.
He used a towel to wedge the shutter ajar. It gave a dim light to the room as he fumbled his way into the unfamiliar garments. He must remember to ask for candles. The brown smock was loose on him, sewn for a man wider of shoulder and taller than he. He belted it at the waist with his own belt. The extra bulk of unneeded cloth was annoying, but the clean soft smock felt good against his skin. The trousers tied at the waist with a drawstring. They were also too long, but Vandien found their unaccustomed looseness pleasant. He had no doubt that he struck a comic figure. Well, let them laugh. The rest of the village might as well get their money’s worth, if not Srolan. He looked about for his boots, but they were not where he had dropped them. He found them by the door, their mud scraped away and the wrinkled leather freshly oiled. Srolan or Janie? he wondered, and shook his head over his own unwariness. What other visits had he slept through? Luckily he had nothing worth stealing. He pushed his feet into his boots, tucking excess trousers into them.
The common room below was a noisier, busier place than it had been in the morning. Vandien paused a moment on the stairs. The fisherfolk below were taking their ease in most energetic ways. The sound boomed like surf, the voices rising and falling in waves crested with laughter. Most of them were garbed to match Vandien, but in brighter colors. One woman big with child was robed for comfort, but the rest dressed like their men, in smocks and trousers. Their hand motions were extravagant as they talked, big hands thrown back, mouths wide with laughter. They were large folk for the most part, making Vandien feel like a youth. Smells of drink and hot chowder rose to him. The big fireplace roared now. Benches had been pulled up before it, and folk sprawled on them, their boots smoking in front of the blazing logs.
Vandien’s quick spirit soared with their good humor and easy laughter. The fellowship below was as appetizing as the food, and more heartening. His earlier melancholy evaporated before the warmth of it.
‘Vandien!’ Helti roared it out, and the din stilled for an instant. ‘Here’s our teamster, and looking more that part now. Come on down, man! Make him a place at the fire, there! Janie! Fetch a bowl of the kettle’s best, and a mug of the coldest!’
Vandien’s boots rang on the stairs as he descended. The talk picked up, not quite as loud as before, but it was a comfortable sound. Fisherfolk moved aside to let him through, with affable nods. For every eye that clung to his scar, Vandien saw a hand or a leg or a face as marred as his own. His scar might be a little more prominent than most, but a missing finger or a hook-torn arm was little to these people. He felt acceptance, and, if anything marked him as an outsider in this crowd, it was his slighter stature and girth. He eased down on the bench like a boat moving into its berth. Janie put the hot bowl into his hands almost before he was settled, and set the mug on the bench beside him. He took the chance to send a smile and a look into her eyes. To his surprise, a blush rosed her cheeks and she scowled at him. She fled back to the kitchen.
He nodded to introductions too multitudinous to note. Vandien was at his best in dealing with folk; he was as skilled as a stray cat in moving into a warm place by the fire and making himself agreeable. He could remember too many times when his hopes of a meal and a bed had hinged upon how affable folk found him. He felt no cynicism about this; among his folk it was the oldest and most basic idea of hospitality. In his own land, the man with a tale to tell, a smiling face, and a listening ear was never turned away empty.
And that was the trick of it, as Vandien had long known. A tale or two of a stranger’s travels were welcome new meat in a village where the doings of one’s neighbors were not all that different from one’s own. But even more welcomed by folk in isolated villages was the chance to tell their own tales to new ears. Vandien listened, his eyes bright, his lips curving in appreciation of the story. Before the chowder was gone, he had heard of their catch for the day, and the week before. He had commiserated with Red, who had inadvertently netted a creature too large for his boat, and lost not only nets but part of his rigging. He knew that Sara’s baby was expected before the next moon, and that the child’s future luck as a fisherman would be foretold by what catch the afterbirth lured into the nets. Berni was crouched on the floor before him, sketching on the boards with a bit of charcoal taken from the fire as she argued with Helti about exactly where Dea and her crew had gone down in the big storm just before festival, five years ago.
A young man with a cloth-wrapped harp came pushing up to the fire. Collie, Vandien guessed. His face and hands were still red with chill from his fishing. He had a large square face, and square hands to match it, with thick stumpy fingers that gave no hint of the music in them. But when he took the cover from the harp and began to test the strings, Berni and Helti stopped their arguing and all the common room drew closer to the hearth.
Collie wet his chapped lips and looked around with a smile at the silence he had caused. He looked to Vandien, and Vandien conceded all attention to him. Smiling, he plucked a few notes on the harp and looked about him questioningly.
‘Not that one!’ Helti decided. ‘Too sad for the night before Temple Ebb. Give us something with a merrier tune.’
Collie’s sandy brows danced with mischief as he plucked out another set of notes. ‘Collie! There’s children still up and about!’ Red was scandalized. ‘Save a tune like that for later in the night, when the small ones are off to sleep!’
‘He speaks with his harp,’ said a soft voice by Vandien’s ear. He looked round to find Janie had wrangled a place at his shoulder. ‘All the village laughed when his father traded half a season’s catch for that harp, and gave it to a simpleton. But once the boy mastered it, no man in the village had a sweeter voice.’
Vandien nodded silently, hearing both stories in the tone of her voice. Janie was not only telling him how Collie had gained a voice, but in all innocence had told also where her heart longed to be welcomed.
Collie looked askance to the room. With a shrug of his shoulder and an upturned hand he asked what they would hear.
‘Give us the net menders’ song!’ called a voice Vandien knew. He glanced up to where Srolan sat on the stairs. She was above the level of the flickering candles. Her face and form were a maid’s in the semi-darkness. Vandien wondered how long she had sat there, looking down on them, watching the interplay of the village without being seen. Collie’s fingers were already drawing out the notes of the melody. The surging voices of the fisherfolk followed his fingers. The chorus was a simple one. Before the song was done, Vandien was shouting it out with the rest. Stamping boots kept the time.
‘That’s one we haven’t sung in a good long while,’ Helti observed into the silence after the song.
‘And it puts me in mind of another one!’ called a grizzled old man in the corner. ‘Can’t remember its proper name, but Collie should know the tune. It’s the one that begins, “Moon follows my wake and silvers my nets …”
‘The Candlefish Moon!’ Srolan’s voice came dropping from the upper dimness.
‘That’s it!’ the old man exclaimed, and Collie put his fingers to his harp strings. This song most of the younger folk listened to, joining in as soon as they knew the refrain. The words were in Common, but in archaic forms to fit the rhyme. An old song, Vandien guessed, and so seldom sung that the younger folk did not know the words. It was a courting song, too, that had many of the oldsters looking at one another with youthful eyes, while Janie’s voice came from behind Vandien to sing the refrain with heartfelt sweetness. He stole a look in her direction, but she never noticed. Her eyes were on young Collie.
Collie did not let that song die completely, but used its ending notes to lead into another. The old man in the corner grinned delightedly as he recognized it, and he led the others into the words. Again the turnings of the words betrayed the age of the song. It was a stirring ballad of an earlier time, when the Humans of this village had disputed their fishing ground with T’cherians from across the bay, and won. Vandien sensed about him a quickening of spirit. The old folk were caught up in singing of this past glory. The younger folk listened or hummed along in wonder. Vandien glanced up the staircase. Srolan was all but invisible. After the battle song, there was another, this one sad, a lament of the folk who returned from fishing to find their village sunken, their kin gone. A bonding was taking place here; Vandien felt it on an instinctive level. Was the old man in league with Srolan? Were they working together to turn the villagers’ minds back to the past? Some eyes were moist at the end of that song, and Collie let the last notes die to silence.
Helti himself was quiet as he moved through the throng with a tray of cold mugs for the newcomers, while Janie dispensed cold bitter ale from an immense pitcher. There was little talk, most of it muted. Kinship. That was what thrummed throughout the room. It was more than friends and a warm fire on a cold night. Vandien could almost touch the unity of the village. Berni suddenly looked up from her idle sketchings on the floor to say, ‘Collie. Play the Temple Bell Song.’
A hushed expectancy settled in the room. Collie sat still for a moment, his lax fingers numbing his harp strings. Vandien did not look up at the darkened staircase. He did not need to see Srolan to know her triumph. She had primed them, and perhaps the old man had helped. But now village feeling was running high and free, on its own, as unstoppable as a river in flood.
Collie’s fingers swept into the music. No one sang. Vandien heard the deep plucked notes like temple bells ringing slow and mournful behind an intricate weaving of somber melody that grieved too deep for words to flow. The candles seemed to burn more slowly as he played, and the mourning seemed to ebb and flow as endlessly as the tides. Then first one voice and then another began to rise. And Vandien could not understand the words at all, but both old and young sang them well and with feeling. He knew he was listening to a tongue so old it was no longer spoken, the vestige of whatever language had been spoken here when the village sank. Common was a good enough tongue for everyday dealings, but like many another folk, they had turned back to their native tongue to sing of a sorrow too deep for words, too personal for outsiders to share.
It was a long piece of music, not the usual tavern ballad of eight or ten verses, nor a courting song with three or four verses and a sweet refrain. This song was a tapestry, composed of sections where the harp grieved alone, and then was joined by Human voices, that tapered away and left the harp sobbing alone again. The singers were intent as they sang, rapt when they listened. Vandien marked that no mug was raised to slake a dry throat, no one tossed more wood into the blaze, even though it had begun to wane. He found himself drawn into it almost as strongly as the villagers. He did not feel restive as he listened, despite his ignorance of the words. There was a power to this song, an emotion that was almost racial. The song tapped their ancestry, swirled them all back to a time when grief was fresh as a bleeding slash. It was all so hopeless, so very hopeless.
The light in the common room dimmed with the falling fire; the candles were burning to stumps. Shadows were longer where they fell on the rough walls. The voices were stilled, and the harp’s sound died away to almost nothing, whispering to itself. Vandien could hear the shushing of the waves outside. The harp fell silent. Then, with a crash of chords, it came back. The voices suddenly rose to roar out a defiant chorus. Three times that chorus was shouted out, each time angrier and more implacable. Then, with a final shout, voices and harp were still.
Vandien found himself trembling in the dark. No one moved; even Collie’s hands, dimly limned by the red firelight, rested still on the strings. The silence was not peace; rather it was a tingling awareness, a remembering of a promise made, of a duty to be kept.
‘The Windsingers!’ The old grizzled man in the corner spoke with soft contempt. Someone spat loudly.
Vandien heard a step, and sudden light came back as Helti kindled a fresh candle from a guttering stump. Janie was passing another. Berni turned and began to reload the hearth. There was little talk as light and warmth came back to the room. The returning light showed Collie’s head bowed over his harp. His fair hair was plastered to his forehead and neck with sweat.
‘Best bring the harper a mug, Janie,’ Vandien suggested softly.
‘Whatever the teamster pleases,’ Janie replied meekly, and went swiftly to this chore.
Talk was resuming, eddying in small pools throughout the room. There were no rowdy stories as Vandien had overheard earlier. The voices were serious. Vandien noted that the speakers were the older folk in the group, with the younger generations listening most respectfully.
Collie wiped his damp hands down his trousers and took the cold mug Janie offered. The muted conversation began to fill the gap left by the silenced harp. Janie stood at Collie’s shoulder, waiting to take his empty mug from him. Berni continued to sketch aimlessly on the floor at Vandien’s feet. He thought how Berni had looked in the firelight as she sang. Her wavy brown locks cascaded down her back. Her alto had sung each word clearly, enunciating them so that Vandien had found himself trying to bring meaning from those crystal syllables. The song had moved her. Even now, the flush of it showed in her brown cheeks.
‘What did they mean?’ he asked quietly.
Berni started as if roused from a dream. Her eyes were a soft brown, lighter than his own. They gentled her competent face. Now they were puzzled. ‘What did who mean?’
‘The words of the song. The Temple Bell Song. What did they mean?’
Berni was at a loss to explain. ‘It was the story, you know. We have it every year, but it doesn’t always sound like that. I’ve never heard it sound like that before. It tells how it started, and all.’
‘I don’t understand. How all what started?’ Vandien slouched on the bench, resting an elbow on his knee. He smiled and said no more, knowing that silence would best prompt Berni.
‘It tells how Temple Ebb Festival started. It’s the song of how the village sank, and all.’ Berni hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I can put it all into Common. I could give you the gist of the tale, I suppose.’ She took a deep breath, glancing about as if seeking a starting place. ‘Long ago, our village was a peaceful place, with a good deep harbor and a sturdy fleet. The Windsinger temple stood on a spit that ran out into the sea. And if they were not our favorite neighbors, neither did we seek their wrath. Mostly we ignored one another, the village and the temple. Their temple bell rang at the high and low tides of the day. We lived in peace, if not friendship. Until the Windsingers made the earth shake, and let the village slide beneath the sea.’
‘How?’ Vandien interjected softly.
Berni frowned. ‘The song doesn’t say, not clearly. I can’t … I have no words to translate exactly what the song says. But the Windsingers sang our village into the sea. It was their fault. Their fault!’ Berni’s breath quickened. Vandien nodded, not wishing to delay the rest of her story. But why? The question tickled at the back of his mind. Why would the Windsingers sing, not only the village, but their own temple into the sea? And how? Their power was over the winds of the air, not the bones of the earth.
‘Most of the village folk were out fishing when it happened. In the village were our old people, our babes, and those of us sick or injured that day. Alone and defenseless they were, when the earth trembled and the sea went dry. The folk out fishing rode out the great series of waves that came crashing from nowhere. We heard the wild tolling of the temple bell. We did not know, until we came back, that our beautiful harbor and our village were gone.’ Berni was as caught in the telling as she had been in the singing. She was one with the ‘we’ in the tale, telling it as she saw it herself.
‘The village was gone. The green hill above the village was gone, riven and sunk. The floor of our harbor had heaved and buckled, so that our large boats could not even come into anchorage anymore. And everywhere, floating on the sea, were bits of our lives. Limbs of trees and house timbers, with here and there a body.
‘One little girl they found clinging to a beam. A fishing boat picked her out of the water. She was half-drowned, her robes draggled about her. At first we thought she was one of our own. She was only a little girl, probably stolen by the Windsingers, stolen away from her own folk who loved her. She wept, when she wasn’t gagging up salt water. But finally she told it, as a child would tell such a story. She and a group of little ones like her had been down below when it happened. Down in a great chamber under the temple, that we village folk had never known was there. It was a schooling place, or a worshipping place; something like that. When the little ones felt the earth shake, and saw the water begin to squirt through the walls, they tried to save the precious Windsinger things. The little girl told how they had tried to carry up the heavy chests, five and six little ones to a box, trying to lug them up the stairs. She tried to help. But the whole temple was coming down on them. A falling stone broke her arm. She could hear the screams of those that were trapped and dying. The salt water was rising around her, and she was scared. So she did what any scared child would do. She tried to get away. She couldn’t say how, but she got out, and somehow when the water swept her up, she managed to catch hold of a floating beam with her good arm. There she was, and fisherfolk picked her up, her little white gown all soaked and her arm bone gleaming white where it poked out of her flesh. She looked so like a Human child, with just a bit of scaling on her chin, and most of her ears still there and showing through her cowl. But her heart was already Windsingered. Though we dried her and wrapped her warm, we could not stop her weeping. All she could do was cry for the chest she had not saved. She sobbed that she was no longer worthy of her cowl, a disgrace to all Windsingers, and especially to her sisters who had died trying to save the thing she had abandoned. We thought she had cried herself to sleep. But when we touched her, she had wept herself to death. At that very moment, the temple bell rang, speaking in a drowned voice from beneath the sea.’
Berni paused. Then her brown eyes came up to Vandien’s. The softness had burned out of them. ‘And that is how we know that the Windsingers left things in the temple! Things they thought worth dying for! We were told by the dying voice of a little child once Human. We do not know what they left. But we shall find it. And when we do, we shall use it. They shall be made to grieve, those who brought our village down, those who stole the lives of Human children with their own!’
Her eyes locked with Vandien’s. Sympathy stirred within him. He felt the fire of her vengeance kindle in his soul. But Berni broke that newly forged bond. She reached behind her to the hearth, to take up her mug and drink deep of it. When she set the mug down, she smiled up at him sheepishly. ‘So goes the song. It’s a moving tale, one that always catches me up in it. It was made by a minstrel who knew how to play folk as well as his harp. How I love the old tales! I wish I knew more of them. But if you would like to hear more of them, you must ask someone older than I. Srolan, perhaps, or Correy.’
‘You tell a tale well,’ Vandien complimented her. Looking about the tavern was like waking from a dream. The almost religious intensity of the Temple Bell Song was only a fading influence. Now folk were in little knots at tables, lifting mugs and warming themselves for tomorrow’s festival. No boat would leave shore tomorrow. There would be baking of holiday treats, and the holiday banners would flutter. Folk would dress in their newest winter finery, and while away the day in the village streets. The puppeteer had said that some jugglers planned to come from Bitters, and perhaps a fortune teller as well.
There was talk, too, of past teamsters. Some they recalled with laughter, for their pitiful efforts, or in delighted remembrance of their showmanship. Srolan, who had come down the stairs to move among them, deftly turned the talk back to earlier days and earlier teamsters. Vandien found himself listening intently. He heard of mired teams that drowned when the tide came in, and of a teamster whose ribs were caved in by the fury of the Windsinger’s gale that flung him against the temple walls. There were many stories like that, but none gave him the specifics he sought.
In a quiet moment, he asked, ‘What exactly does the chest look like?’
‘What chest?’ a dark young man asked snidely, and several others snickered. But the stabbing looks of their fellow villagers silenced their skepticism, if it did not dispel it.
‘No one knows,’ Berni dreamed aloud.
‘No one’s ever seen it,’ Helti filled in.
‘That’s not true.’ Janie’s young voice was shyly defiant. ‘My mother’s father held it in his hands.’
‘Then why didn’t he bring it back to shore?’ scoffed the same dark young man.
‘Because he couldn’t. Because it was too heavy, and Paul …’ Janie’s voice was losing its courage. Vandien could tell that she had been badgered about this story before.
‘What about Paul?’ the young man demanded.
‘I won’t say. You only make mock of me, and him.’
‘He lived as drunk as he died. There were lots of things he couldn’t explain,’ chimed in another voice derisively.
‘Shut up!’ rasped Berni, but Janie was on her feet, ready to square off with them.
‘Did you know him then, Dirk?’ she asked sweetly, eyes flashing. ‘How young you look, for a man of your years!’
‘No more than did you, Janie!’ Dirk snapped.
‘No, but I knew my mother, and she told me as he told it to her.’
‘Yes, a lot of folks knew your mother.’
Dirk’s taunt seemed to have a private sting that was publicly known, for Janie whitened and then flushed to her hair line.
‘Shut up!’ Bernie roared again, but the damage had been done. Janie left the room, not fleeing, but defeated all the same. Collie rose, to drape his harp silently. His motions said what his bound tongue could not; that he would not play music only to have it defiled afterward by this kind of talk. His leaving seemed to break the gathering. Others shifted, rising and dragging outer smocks down over their heads, bidding good night to friends.
‘Damn Dirk and his flapping mouth!’ Srolan spat, sitting down beside Vandien. ‘Every time Janie is moved to speech, he finds a way to silence her. And for no reason I can discover, except his own ill nature.’
‘What was the rest of the story?’ Vandien asked softly. Although the tavern was emptying out, it was still a less than private place to talk.
‘No one knows. That’s the bite of it. Janie had the story from her mother, who told it to no one else. Who’s to say if there is any truth to it? Many’s the time I’ve had Janie alone, and tried to get her to talk. But she’s a tight-mouthed girl when the talk gets too close to her own. Janie will give you anything you want, except a glimpse of herself. When the talk gets too close to her family, she either clams her mouth, or says what the rest of the town says, and just as heartlessly: that her mother was a drunk, as her mother, and father, and grandfather were before her. And a drunk will tell any story to get another drink.’
‘But Janie’s mother did not tell that story to anyone but Janie?’
‘Exactly. And that’s why I think there may be a bit of truth to it. What did that poor woman have to give her child, other than borrowed fame? “Your grandfather was the last man known to have held the Windsingers’ chest.” She gave her girl a tiny bit of family pride to cling to, and was at least woman enough to keep the story a private one, not one bandied about and laughed over. The story is as her grandfather first told it, pure and unaltered. Any fool in the village can tell you what his granny said that Janie’s grandfather said. But it’s all fifth hand and two generations old. Any useful bit of information is twisted to rumor. Only Janie knows the story as her grandfather told it.’
‘Would she tell it to me, do you think, Srolan? She seemed anxious to please me earlier …’
Srolan was shaking her head. ‘Try to speak to her now, and you’d find all her walls up. She was willing to bed you earlier; bedding takes no talk. She’d gladly give you what the village boys dare not ask for. They won’t court her, for she seems ever angry to them, always sharp of tongue and derisive. And so she is, for she believes they won’t court her because they despise her. She’d bed you, to show them that others want what the village boys turn their noses up at. Also that she’d rather bed a strange teamster than sleep with the likes of them.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Vandien was confused.
‘Neither does she, poor pet. So she goes about paying for her mother’s reputation, and makes herself lonely in the process. But you won’t get a word out of her tonight. You’ve refused her once. She won’t offer again, and take the chance of your disdain. Nor will she ever admit, by word or sign, that she made you such an offer. She’s so careful, she even fools herself.’
‘What am I to do?’
‘What the teamster does every year. Go out, and waste more than half the tide looking for the chest in every wrong place. Go out there, with no idea what it looks like, or how large it is, or where it is. Splash around a lot.’ A gusty sigh drained her smaller on the bench beside him. ‘I’m an old woman, Vandien. Each Temple Ebb year I hope it will be the last, that this year the chest will be found. But it isn’t. Likely it won’t be this year, for all that you’ll do your best. Go up to bed, man. Get some sleep, and be ready for tomorrow. The low tide will not be until tomorrow evening, so sleep in a bit. Good night.’
She rose, and went away, walking old. Vandien looked around to find the common room empty of customers. He was alone by the failing fire. Janie sullenly gathered mugs onto a tray at the other end of the room. Vandien rose and stretched and sent her a smile. She stared through him. He went to check his team, and then to bed.