39
The Place of Voices
“I know this stretch of water,” said Tanahaya. “We have almost reached the first gate.” It was the first time she had spoken to Morgan in hours.
He had been silent too. He was still full of shame about the night before, and every time he opened his mouth to say something, the memory of his foolishness leaped up to mock him. “Gate?” he said after a few moments. “On a river?”
“In a sense.” She seemed determined to act as though his mistake had not happened, but that only made Morgan feel worse, as though he were a child or some animal that did not know better. “In truth, the gates are bridges over T’si Suhyasei—roads once rang along both its banks—but those who came to Da’ai Chikiza on boats called them gates. The first one we will see will be the Gate of Cranes.”
Morgan watched the trees slip by on either bank. As the sun neared noon the light plunged between the trunks all the way to the forest floor: they seemed to be traveling through a vast, columned church without walls. Other than the vigorous splashing of the river, Morgan could hear only birdsong and scolding squirrels, and that was good. He could think of nothing to say that seemed worth saying, and nothing that Tanahaya might say that would make him feel any less of a fool.
From the position of the sun, Morgan guessed it was an hour or so after midday when they finally reached a slender, curved bridge of translucent stone netted in ivy and the branches of thicker plants, its carvings almost obliterated by time and weather. A large stone bird stared down blindly at them from the span’s highest point above the river. The Sitha might have called it the Gate of Cranes, but the bird’s long beak and the spreading wings had long since worn away; Morgan thought it looked more like a lump of clay waiting to be shaped by a potter’s hands into something finer.
They passed beneath several more of these stone bridges, not one exactly the same as another. Tanahaya recited their names in turn—Tortoise, Rooster, Wolf, Raven, and Stag, though the Gate of Stags was now only a tumble of ruined stones on either bank, and the Gate of Wolves had lost enough stones that it looked as though it would soon follow the Stags into the river.
Morgan had lost count of how many gates they had seen when they reached a bridge whose tan, blue-seamed stones must have been harder than those of the others. The details had not been worn away by water and wind: the sharp little beak of the carved bird atop the bridge was open in song, its edges well defined, even the round eye clearly visible.
He turned to Tanahaya to ask her if this one was newer than the rest, but was stopped by her expression: her angular face and half-lidded eyes made her look like someone asleep and dreaming. Suddenly she began to sing, an odd, almost haunting melody with words he could not understand and a tune that went in circles, wandering back across itself with only slight differences, over and over.
Then, as suddenly as she had begun she fell silent and steered their little boat toward a cracked stone pier that jutted out at a bend in the river.
“We will leave the boat here,” she said. “Be cautious. The landing is old, as old as the bridges. Test it carefully before you put your full weight on it.”
“That song you were singing,” he asked as he carefully climbed out onto the stone platform and from there to the overgrown bank, thick with bracken and wild strawberry. “What was it?”
“It was a song about Jenjiyana of the Nightingales—the gate brought it to my mind. Queen Utuk’ku’s son Drukhi was killed by mortals. His wife was Nenais’u, Jenjiyana’s daughter, and Jenjiyana mourned the loss of her child no less fiercely than Utuk’ku mourned hers, but without anger. Jenjiyana lived long at Tumet’ai in the north, until the ice and snow came and devoured that city and the Zida’ya left it behind. But always afterward she dressed in the heavy gown she had worn in that cold place, as if time for her had stopped when her daughter died. The song says:
Dressed in billows,
Mournful white cloud
Soft without rain
But still it weeps
Mournful white cloud
Carried by the wind
Carried by grief
Where will you wander?
She made a gesture, the fingers of both hands spread with her thumbs touching. “It is only a small part of a longer whole. I cannot make it sing in your tongue. That is my fault, not yours. Follow me now. You will see something worth seeing.”
She led him around the bend. Although the riverbank seemed a little flatter in places, as though there might once have been a path, most was so overgrown with knot-rooted trees and thick underbrush that he hardly paid any attention to where he was being led until Tanahaya stopped him with a hand on his arm and said, “Look! You have come to the Tree of the Singing Wind. Very few mortals can say that.”
Ahead of him the river bent away to the right, its banks thick with buckram and bluebell and gently waving ferns, then vanished down a tunnel of close-leaning alders. But on the side of the river where they stood the forest did not grow so close to the bank, and the trees and plants took on strange, angular shapes. He stared for long moments before he realized he was looking not just at crowding trees and thickly twining ivy, but at a crumbling city that the wood had all but swallowed.
Shapes now became visible all along the bank as his eye separated them from the engulfing forest—sections of roofless buildings, solitary doorways stitched with vines, and more ruined walls than he could hope to count. Here and there on the ground glints of pale stone peeked through dense mats of moss and fern. The city stretched far back into the forest, where he could make out the crumbling remains of slender towers. In places the spires still seemed to stand tall, though so enmeshed in ivy and snapdragons and vines that the underlying stone might have disappeared long ago, leaving only the leafy ghosts of the towers behind.
“This . . . this . . . ?”
“Is what remains of Da’ai Chikiza. One of our old cities—one of the Nine Cities of lore. After Tumet’ai vanished beneath the ice, this was considered the most beautiful dwelling of our people—lovely beyond even Enki e-Shao’saye in the eastern forest.”
“What happened to it?” He felt a weight on his chest, as though the age of the place was squeezing out his breath, forcing his heart to race simply to keep him standing. “Where did they go? Why did your people leave?”
Tanahaya shook her head. “It happened before I was born, but our chronicles say that something happened to T’si Suhyasei—to the river.” She gestured to the wide waterway. “It was the city’s life—that is why this place was named “Her Cool Blood,” after the river and the forest. But something happened near the time my people fled Asu’a, when the Storm King murdered his father and then died fighting the mortal Northmen. Many Zida’ya had retreated here, but the river suddenly ceased to flow. Then one day the river suddenly returned, swollen and raging, and flooded the city. Many of my people died, many more lost everything they had brought out of Asu’a or had saved from Tumet’ai. Most fled farther into the forest, vowing not to build anything again that they could not take down and carry with them. But as I said, all that was before my time.”
“How old are you?”
She looked at him carefully. To his immense gratitude, she did not smile. “Not so old by the standards of my people, although none of us live so long now that the witchwood is lost.”
“That’s another question you didn’t quite answer.”
She was silent for a moment. “I am a child of our Second Exile. I was born after my folk left Asu’a and the rest of our cities behind. But I was alive when your grandfather’s many-times-great grandfather Eahlstan Fiskerne first came with his river-wife to the castle in which you were born. Do you need to know more?”
For the moment, Morgan was overwhelmed. The ancient, ruined city was daunting enough, but the idea that this young, womanly creature beside him was centuries old was even harder to compass.
As they walked across the uneven ground toward the overgrown walls and empty doorways, Morgan caught his foot and fell into a patch of ferns. By the time he clambered upright again his fingers were sticky.
“You must be cautious here,” said Tanahaya. “If you look where the undergrowth is not so thick, you can see remnants of what was here.” She pointed down to a place where he could see dull colors through the moss. She pulled loose a handful of vegetation and brushed away dirt to reveal broken tiles caught in a net of roots. Morgan could see bits of color, but could make out nothing of the faded figures or designs.
“This was the Place of Sharing Out,” Tanahaya said. “The people of Da’ai Chikiza would gather here where the boats came in off the river, or sometimes to make festival. At Year-Dancing time the whole of this place would be lit with lamps of many colors, and boats on the river carried lanterns too. My master Himano told me once that it seemed to him what it might feel like to stand high in the sky among the stars themselves.”
Her voice had changed as she spoke, growing more distant, as though she spoke more to herself than to Morgan. When she looked at him again she smiled, but it seemed an expression more of weariness and self-deprecation than of pleasure. “It will soon be Year-Dancing again, but I wonder if the Zida’ya will come together this time. Jao é-Tinukai’i, our last gathering place for the whole of the House of Year-Dancing, is gone now. The witchwood is gone too. And our people are fewer now, and more scattered than ever.”
Tanahaya led him deeper into the forested ruins, until the afternoon light was almost entirely filtered by greenery and the noise of the river faded to a distant murmur. Since so much of the city was in ruins, it was hard to tell whether the streets of Da’ai Chikiza had been broad, or simply that so many of the buildings had been pulled to pieces by time and storms and the marching forest. Morgan could make little sense of it as a city—nothing seemed to be set at a right-angle to anything else, and very large ruins stood next to some structures no bigger than a crofter’s hut.
As they moved deeper, what seemed at first a clearing in the forest revealed itself to Morgan as an open space with ruined buildings on three sides, like the square in front of St. Sutrin’s cathedral in Erchester. In places tree roots had pushed up the ground, revealing fragments of broken tiles under the dirt and plants.
“This was another gathering place,” she said. “It was called the Place of Voices, because the people would—”
If she finished what she was saying, Morgan never heard it: at that moment, something struck him on the head—not a killing blow or even a vicious one, but hard enough to disorient him for a moment, so that he lost his balance and fell to his knees. As he was shaking his head and wondering what had happened, he realized that he and Tanahaya were both covered in a thick net of woven vines.
“What . . . ?” He barely finished the word before he saw white shapes running at them from all directions, bursting out of the forest and from behind ruined walls, moving with the terrifying, silent speed of phantoms. He began to struggle, but the vines were thick and heavy.
“Morgan, do not fight!” Tanahaya said sharply. There was a tone of uncertainty in her voice as well as something he hadn’t heard before, and it scared him badly. “We cannot escape. Do not tempt them to kill us.”
Vaqana was off hunting, and Sisqi’s ram was cropping sedge at the edge of the clearing. Binabik had taken off his jacket and thin shirt to enjoy the warm night, and now patted his bulging stomach fondly. “We have had many hardships on this journey,” he said, “but at least you must admit that the birds of this part of the forest are toothsome in the extreme. That grouse—wonderful!”
Sisqi would not smile. “They seem a little dry to me—none of the lovely oil of a ptarmigan. Perhaps because you have spent more time in these southern lands you have developed a fondness for them.”
He laughed. “You are a terrible liar, my beloved. I know how much you look forward each year to Blue Mud Lake and the birds and other delicacies there. ‘Lovely oil’, indeed. Do I not remember you saying that ptarmigan tasted like an old snowshoe?”
She poked at the fire. “Perhaps. Once, long ago. But do not think you will so easily cheer me out of my worry for our daughter.”
His face grew more serious. “That was not my intent. I fear for them too. But our Qina is the cleverest young person I know, and even Snenneq—though he has a few awkward qualities—is a resourceful young man. They are on their nuptial walk, after all—it is only fitting that they do some of it on their own.”
“Nowhere in the words of the ancestors is it said that a nuptial walk should be taken in a place where enemies will try to murder you.” She poked the fire harder, so that the flames sprang up and for a moment bathed the ceiling of trees with yellow light.
“I did not mean that,” he said. “And there are few places any of the Yiqanuc can go, in our own mountains or here in these lands, where someone or something will not try to harm us.”
“I know, husband.”
“It is so warm,” he said after a while. “Why do you not take off your jacket so that you can be more comfortable? Summer is gone. Soon the cold will come again, and you have been complaining of the heat since we left Rimmersgard.”
“I do not like the warmth of these southern lands,” she admitted. “And I do not like sweltering in these heavy clothes. But I like the bites of midges even less. They are worse here than at Blue Mud Lake, I swear! Why do you think I keep poking the fire? The smoke helps to keep them away. At least a little bit.”
Binabik nodded. “Then perhaps a distraction is in order. Come, lie with me and we will rub faces. After that, we can see what happens.”
Sisqi gave him a look. “With me full of worry about my only child, and these bloodthirsty creatures hovering all around us? No, my husband, we will not be shaking the tent tonight.”
“May I point out that we have no tent?” He patted the blanket. “Only the trees and sky for a roof. Our children are not here. We are alone.”
“You know what I meant,” she said. “I am not in the mood for lovemaking, in any case. Perhaps later, if we find a place where the swarms of midges are not thicker than the smoke of our fire.”
Binabik swatted at something on his chest, lifted it on his finger to examine it, and seemed about to comment on its size and fierceness before reconsidering. “Ah, well,” he said instead. “If you are certain, my dear one. I have had to travel without you enough that I have learned to live with loneliness.”
She gave him another look, this one even more sour than the first. “Such foolishness did not work on me even when I was young, Binbinaqegabenik of Mintahoq.”
“It must have worked a little,” he said. “Because we married and made a child.”
She almost smiled. “Here is something to consider,” she said after a moment. “Instead of sitting on our blanket, let us roll ourselves in it as protection from these biting things. Then, when we are forced into such close proximity—well, perhaps we will see what happens, as you said.”
“An excellent idea,” he said, grinning. “Poke that fire again. Fill the woods with smoke until the midges all flee. Then we will begin this plan of yours.”
“You do love to talk, my husband,” she said as she rose and shook out the bearskin blanket. “Most of it is foolish, but at least you make me laugh.”
Morning found them climbing a series of hills. Binabik was not riding Vaqana because he was looking closely for signs of other travelers, but he kept the wolf close by. Twice since they had left the younger Qanuc and turned southward they had almost stumbled into Norn soldiers. Only Vaqana’s sense of smell had warned them early enough for them to hide.
“It concerns me,” Binabik said now, breaking a long silence. “It makes no sense to me. Why would the Norns come so far from their home—and for what? Do they seek to destroy the Sithi? But after such a terrible defeat in the Storm King’s War, how could they be strong enough?”
“Perhaps as you said before, they are on their way somewhere else.” Sisqi guided her ram Ooki around a cluster of low-hanging branches. Her mount was almost tireless, but did not always pay attention to the rider’s well-being.
“That was when I thought there were but a few of them,” he said. Vaqana paused, shaggy white head erect, and Binabik stopped too. Sisqi pulled back on her ram’s harness and together they waited silently until Vaqana trotted forward once more. “Now I wonder,” Binabik said, but more quietly than before, “whether something else is not underway, some grand design of the Norn Queen’s—especially this Witchwood Crown, which we still do not understand. Is it a thing, a weapon, a treasure? Is it a plan?”
They were nearing the crest of the hill. “I smell water,” Sisqi said.
“Yes, I do too. That means we are close to Geloë’s lake now.”
Sisqi made an unhappy face. “Lakes mean midges. And flies. And only the ancestors know what other kind of biting thing.”
“As long as there are no Norns, I will be content, my beloved. Besides, if her hut still stands perhaps we can shelter in it tonight. That will be an answer to those midges.”
Once upon the hilltop they made their way through a crowning stand of birches and emerged at last where they could finally see for a distance in front of them. They stood atop one of a ring of tree-blanketed hills that surrounded a dark green bowl of a valley with a mirror-flat lake at its bottom. A bittern lifted its honking call, then the valley fell silent once more.
“Geloë’s house was there,” Binabik said, pointing. “There along the water’s edge.”
“I don’t see any house.”
“We cannot see it from here. It is behind those trees. But we will reach it long before the sun sets.” He stood, listening. “Quiet—this was always a quiet place. But the Norns are a very quiet race, especially when they make war, so let us stay vigilant.”
Sisqi nodded. “No fear that I will be anything else. I have never much trusted these lands, and the White Foxes terrify me.”
They followed a dry streambed down the hill, then Binabik led them crosswise along the slope into a thick grove of alders. When the trees finally fell away it was because they had stepped out onto the edge of a muddy shore. The trunks of other trees, long dead, loomed from the water like crippled beggars washing their limbs in a holy fountain.
“I fear I have made a mistake,” said Binabik, looking around. “I would have wagered my best knucklebones that this was the spot where Geloë’s hut stood, but look! Not a board, not a stick. I do not understand. Wait for me.” Despite Sisqi’s protests, he took off his boots and waded out into the lake until it almost reached his waist, then moved along the shore until he had disappeared from her view behind a drooping line of silvery willows. A little while later he emerged again and sloshed his way back to shore.
“It can be nowhere else. This was the spot, but everything is gone. How could that be? Even after all this time there would be some sign, surely, but look—nothing.”
“I am sorry we will have no door to shut against the insects,” said Sisqi, “but I do not know why you were so anxious to find it, anyway. Geloë herself has been dead for a very long time. What could be so interesting about her empty hut?”
“Likely nothing after all the years it would have been deserted. But she was uncommonly wise, and I had hoped—only a little, it is true—that there might be some of her books left, anything that might help to explain the Witchwood Crown, or at least shed some light on what the queen of the Norns might be planning.” He frowned and poked at the ground with his walking stick. Somewhere nearby Vaqana was crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of some small, unhappy animal.
“A long throw, it seems to me,” she said. “Did you really think there would be anything of use left after all this time?”
“I should have come years ago,” Binabik conceded. “Geloë was never like anyone else. Part Tinukeda’ya, some claimed. I do not know if that is true, but she had rare gifts and I hoped for a stroke of fortune.” He sighed. “I suppose we should make camp. I do not like to make a fire so close to the edge of the lake, where anyone on the other side could see us—”
“What is that?” asked Sisqi. “Out there in the middle of the lake?”
Binabik squinted. “I do not have such sharp eyes as you, my beloved. What is it?”
“There, look—do you really not see it? I thought at first it was a log, but it has a more regular shape, like the roof of a cabin or hut—just the angled top, sticking up above the surface of the lake. Could that be Geloë’s hut, all the way out there? Could it have fallen into the lake and drifted out there?”
Binabik looked out across the dark waters for no little time. “I think I see it. You may be right.”
“But I have never heard of such a thing,” Sisqi said. “How could her hut have ended in the middle of the lake? What could have swept it there without destroying it?”
“It is another puzzle.” It seemed for a moment like he might say more, and Sisqi watched him closely. “Much that has to do with Valada Geloë we will likely never know,” he told her at last. “But I confess it makes me uneasy, although I could not easily say why. Let us find a more sheltered place to make our fire, then tomorrow we will leave this place and its mysteries behind. After all, our destination is still far, far away and the days rush on toward winter.”
In the first moment, as the net fell on them, Tanahaya thought they had been caught by the Hikeda’ya and a cold fear seized her. But as she struggled without success to loose herself, she recognized the weave of the vines and a different kind of fear took its place.
Who could have guessed so many of the Pure are still here, she thought. “Brothers and sisters,” she cried. “What are you doing? I am one of your kin!”
But the white-clad figures did not respond. The net was pulled around her and the mortal prince and more coils of rope were looped over it and then yanked tight. Something struck at her legs, not hard enough to cripple her, but hard enough to sting, until she understood what was wanted and struggled back to her feet.
“Get up, Morgan,” she said in Westerling. “Do not resist them. Let me do what I must.”
“Who are they? What’s going on?”
Something struck him. She could not see, but she heard the blow and then heard him groan.
“Leave him be,” she said loudly in her native tongue. “He is no enemy. Punish me if you must—I brought him here.” Her captors still did not respond; when the boy had clambered awkwardly to his feet they were both forced to march across the Place of Voices. Each stumble by Morgan was rewarded with a retaliatory strike from one of the long, flexible rods the Pure carried, rune-scribed branches of hardened willow. Tanahaya protested each time they struck him, but many of their captors also carried swords, so she did not fight back.
The prisoners were goaded down a long, crumbling flight of stairs into darkness, their captors poking and prodding so that even Tanahaya found it hard to keep her balance. She kept one hand tightly clutching Morgan’s shirt, helping him stay on his feet. She was stunned by the savagery she was being shown by her own people.
At last she and Morgan, still wrapped in the net, were led out into a wider space, polished stone beneath their feet and lights sparkling here and there, dim as the last stars at dawn. They were forced to the ground, then in a matter of a few heartbeats the ropes were loosened and the net roughly pulled away.
What had been the open peak of the circular room’s wide ceiling was covered with a densely woven mat of sticks and branches so that very little light could enter, but she knew the place now, and the empty plinth at the center left her with no doubt. They were in Da’ai Chikiza’s Dawnstone Chamber, surrounded by armed, white-clad figures. Most wore horizontal stripes of gray paint or ash across their faces, but their golden skin and eyes proved they were all Zida’ya like herself. Beside the plinth stood a tall female Sitha with the ageless, weathered features of someone who had lived a very long time.
“Mistress Vinyedu,” she said to the imposing figure. “I am Tanahaya of Shisae’ron.”
“I know who you are.” Vinyedu stared at her with obvious distaste. “You are Himano’s acolyte and thus at least as much of a fool as he is. What I do not know is what you are doing here, or what madness has seized you that you should bring a mortal to Da’ai Chikiza, of all places.”
“The mortal is innocent. I brought him—”
“No mortals are innocent,” said Vinyedu with cold certainty. “Mortals killed Nenais’u, the Nightingale’s daughter. Mortals killed Amerasu Ship-Born. Saying that you brought this one here does not excuse the mortal—it only makes you his accomplice.”