One Plus One Equals Both

HE HAD HAD EVERY INTENTION TO DIE, and music had forbidden it. He’d been netted by melody not so much beguiling as nagging. That’s what he thought, when he could think about it. Though it was another few hours or days (he couldn’t count either) before even this much came clear to him.

What he remembered from before his fall from the sky was imprecise at best, and its emotional character muted. Panic over the sight of a girl being slung from a burning bridge…disgust at realizing what Shell had been up to in those cells at Southstairs. Consolation at seeing a stag at the far side of a field in early autumn. Panic, disgust, consolation-cheap souvenirs from a holiday. Emotions were portable and obvious: small savories of a life, suitable for kicking his mood upswing or down as the moment required. False, somehow.

But he and his memories alike had awakened into a new capacity of pain and grief. He had awakened to find himself alive again, damn it. Couldn’t he even fall from a great height and expect the comfort of a quick death? Need Feckless Liir march on yet again?

Though marching was hardly what he was doing, in literal terms, as he tossed, and kicked the sour blankets in this abandoned mill building or industrial outpost, wherever it was she had taken him.

The girl was named Candle, she said. She spoke to him colloquially in Qua’ati.

She brought him water from a well outside. He could hear the squeak of the pulley as the bucket went down, came back. She brought him nuts and moss apples, which gave him a stentorian diarrhea at first, but cleaned him out and started him up again, and before long he was able to sit up. Then get up and piss in a pail. Then walk to the window and rub a shaky hand against the dirt on the glass, and circle a clean space with his palm, and look out.

His resting room was off the kitchen of a small compound: a few stone domestic buildings connected to dependences built at right angles to one another. In the yard he saw the laundry cart to which Candle and that ferociously old maunt had dragged him. Now the donkey was unhitched and was grazing nearby in an overgrown orchard, braying opinions about nothing in particular. Within a couple of days, out on her scouting adventures, Candle had come up with a hen, too, and once the hen grew familiar with her new home, there were eggs in the morning.

“Is it a farmhold?” he asked her.

“It was once,” she said in her half-a-voice. “Old apple trees in the woods, and dozens of barrels in a shed. I think it had been a cidery. But it seems to have been fitted out for industry of some sort since. I’ve found a…a heap of machinery standing in the high main barn. It’s been hacked with sledgehammers and I can’t guess what job it was meant to perform. When you can get around better, you can tell me what you think.”

Beyond the orchards and a few overgrown pastures, as far as he could tell, they were surrounded by a forest. By day it was the color of a hundred fawns, every afternoon brighter as more leaves fell and the light sank nearer to the ground. By night, owls hooted, and in the ceaseless wind the branches made sounds like coughing.

He dozed much of the day and lay awake next to her much of the night, when she fell into a sound sleep. She showed no sign of restlessness. But then, he couldn’t play an instrument to trouble her dreams. The domingon, if that’s what it was called, hung on the wall like an icon.

“Why did you rescue me?” he asked her. She couldn’t answer the question; she seemed not to understand the concept of rescue, though the word in Qua’ati could mean nothing else. “Who are you?” he tried, another way of posing the earlier question. The reply, “Candle,” nothing else, gave him something close to comfort, but it was not comfort, quite.

Another time he asked, “Why did we flee that place?”

“The old maunt told us to go. She said they would hunt for you sooner or later.”

“They? Who?”

“Perhaps I misunderstood. Anyway, she said you were in danger. She had heard tell of this abandoned place and gambled that the donkey would find the way. Indeed, it did.”

“I am still in danger? Then I’d have been safer if you’d let me die.”

“I didn’t cause you to live or die,” she said. “Don’t give me credit for skills beyond me. I played music; you remembered. Music will do that. What you remembered-that was within you, and nothing to do with me.”

But he wondered, as he grew stronger. So many of his memories included an offstage trickle of melody, like marginalia embroidering a page of manuscript. He hardly recognized himself in the glass of the window, when at night he took a candle to the black pane to see who he was now. Gaunt, and stubbled, almost palsied with the weakness of the infirm. Had her playing helped him to remember his life as it had been lived, or had she enchanted him with music and given him a false past?

He could be anyone, this could be anywhere. He might be mad, and not even know it. There might be no Emperor, no dragons, no broom-no castle of Kiamo Ko before that, no Nor abducted from it a half a lifetime ago. No occupying force in the provincial capital of Qhoyre. No parents slinging their daughter clear of the burning bridge. Candle might have riveted his comatose mind with a battery of pretend memories so as to distract him from something more important.

Though she spoke Qua’ati, and so did he. She wasn’t likely to be that skilled a player that she could have taught him a whole new language in his coma.

THE FIRST NIGHT HE COULD MANAGE IT, they pulled two chairs into the open doorway to watch the stars come out. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

She lit a candle, charmingly. Even more wonderfully, she pulled a bottle of wine from out of nowhere. “Mother Yackle gave it me, along with a few other things filched from the mauntery’s pantry,” she admitted. It took some ingenuity to remove the cork, but when they’d succeeded, they sat with their legs entwined, and sipped from old clay mugs with broken handles.

She told of her past. He tried to listen. After a while he realized that he was waiting for clues to prove that he had been comatose for several years, not merely weeks. He wanted her to be the Quadling girl tossed from the bridge at Bengda, grown up and magically restored not just to life but intohis life. How he wanted to provide for her-to begin the impossible task of reparation.

It was hard to shake off this hope, but in order to hear of Candle’s real life, he had to try to still his own rackety guilt.

Candle was raised in Ovvels, in all of Oz the southernmost town of any size. Well, hardly a town, as she described it: a network of cabanas built in the rubbery limbs of suppletrees above the salty damp of flooded groves. As a child she hunted charfish with her spear. Like most of Quadling Country, her settlement had become economically blighted in the decades of the Wizard’s ascendancy. She thought prosperity must once have been possible here: great tiers of granite blocks, eighteen feet at their highest, were set together in long broad curves. One could have driven a horse along the top for nearly a mile. Nobody alive could imagine what such massive structures had been used for, nor how they had been erected; there was no granite anywhere nearby. The locals used the place for fixing their marsh nets and for drying fish.

Beyond that, Candle had little else to say. Her father had lit out long ago, her mother being rather wiftier than was useful in a wife. Food had grown scarce, and some of her relatives had set out to try their luck as itinerants. She’d learned to play the domingon while traveling with her uncle.

“But how did you come to stay in a mauntery?” asked Liir. “The Quadlings aren’t unionists.”

“In general, Quadlings are inexpressive about holy matters,” said Candle, “which means they’re not easily offended by other traditions. However, you’re wrong about southern Quadlings. A whole passel of Quadlings from Ovvels converted to a kind of unionism several generations ago when a missionary and his entourage came through. I heard my great-grandmother speak of it once. A sickly group of do-gooders, prone to being afflicted with mold in our climate. Frankly, it’s a wonder they had any effect. But they did. I was raised on a cushiony variety of unionist thought, so I don’t mind the chapel and the devotions that the maunts engaged in. Nor the custom of caring for the sick, either. It seems a decent way to spend one’s hours.”

“You played for me on that-domingon. Where is it from?”

“It was a gift of my uncle,” said Candle tersely, and would answer no further questions on the subject of the instrument or her uncle, either.

“You cared beautifully for me.” Liir noted the rue in his voice. “I remember what it was like to fall through the air and see the ground rush up with a speed you can’t imagine. It was all a brown blur of wind and earth.”

“I couldn’t have saved you if you had fallen very far,” said Candle. “Likely you imagine it worse than it was.”

“But my bones are healed. I can move,” he said. “I didn’t bleed to death.”

“The maunts who tended you first were more capable than they let on. In any case, I am still not clear on why you came to be airborne,” said Candle.

He ripped the skin off a wild winter orange she had found in the woods somewhere. The pungency stung his nose with eclipsing sweetness. “With all I seemed to relive in my dead sleep, there’s a lot I can’t remember,” he said at last.

“Do you remember what happened to your broom?”

“I suspect it fell to the ground. I’m not sure. Or maybe the dragons took it, though why they’d bother I can’t imagine.”

She didn’t press him further. It was Liir who did the asking. “Why did you take me away from there? Why did that one you called Mother Yackle lock us in the tower together, and release us when she did? What did she say to you about it?”

“Mother Yackle is well known to be wandering in her mind. In the short time since I arrived at the mauntery, I never knew her to cause trouble nor even, often, to speak. Somehow your arrival engaged her, though whether it was into a further madness or a mysterious clarity, I can’t say. Perhaps we were locked in so…”

“Finish your thought.”

She couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She merely smiled at Liir. “It’s nice to speak Qua’ati again. They thought I was simple at the mauntery. I didn’t mind that, really; I suppose I am simple. And my small voice doesn’t lend itself to public utterance. But I find it is nice to speak with words again, as well as with music.”

“How did you learn your skill with music?”

“We all have skills,” she said. “I mean the Quadlings from Ovvels do. They emerge in different ways. We can-see things-is that how to put it?”

“Can you see the future?” said Liir. He gripped her hand. “What is our future?”

She blushed a little; he hadn’t known a Quadling who could blush. “It isn’t like that,” she answered. “I can tell you-I suppose-a little bit about the present. It’s not the future.”

“Tell me about the present,” he said.

“I did already.” She pouted, a jest only. “I sat by your side for days and days and played the domingon to you. It gave you your present.”

“You gave me memory. That’s the past.”

She corrected him. “Memory is part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our heart pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work, too: it keeps us who we are. It is the influence that keeps us from flying off into separate pieces like”-she looked around-“like this peel of orange, and that clutch of pips.”

“Play for me again.”

“I’m tired of playing,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

Before they went back inside, they explored the high-ceilinged barn. “I’ll look again in better light tomorrow,” said Liir after poking around a bit. “But I think this was a printing press.”

“Out here in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?” said Candle.

“Maybe it printed seditious tracts,” said Liir. “Someone didn’t like what it was being used for, and expressed that opinion with an ax and a hammer.”

“From pressing cider to publishing broadsides.”

“Both are presses. This is Apple Press Farm. I’m naming it.”

They retired. Candle fell asleep quickly. Liir rolled up against her for warmth. I am not a soldier any longer, he said to himself; this is not my Qua’ati girlfriend. He stiffened, as a man will, but took pains to govern the appetite. She was his rescuer and not his concubine. He might be infected with something contagious, and he wouldn’t endanger her that way.

When it seemed that the sweet lettucey smell of her breathing, the roll of her breast in the moonlight was too much to bear-that he would sink his mouth upon it-he turned onto his side. A minute or two of envisioning the burning bridge at Qhoyre was all it took to restore him to the sadder state in which he’d spent most of his life.

IN NOON LIGHT, the mess in the main barn proved more severe. Dozens of trays of letters used by compositors in a back room-once a milking stall maybe-were overturned on the floor. The wheels and weights and great drum of the press proper, cabineted in well-oiled oak and well-blackened brackets and footings of iron, had been gashed, and fairly recently, by swords or axes. The metal cuts gleamed with as yet untarnished brilliance.

They saw no sign of blood. Perhaps the obscure printers had gotten wind of an assault and cleared out in time.

Liir poked about in the charred rubble of the barn hearth. He managed to dislodge a few scraps of a broadsheet. He pointed to the words, but Candle said that she couldn’t read the script.

“‘Pieties of the Apostle,’” Liir told her. “That’s the heading. Here, beneath, it says ‘The Virtue of the UGLY.’”

“I didn’t know the ugly had special virtue,” said Candle, “just a sort of misfortune.”

The print was small and Liir had to carry it to the open door in order to make it out. “It seems a blameless sort of religious tract, near as I can tell.”

“Perhaps the press was used for more incendiary publications, too.”

“Maybe.” He rubbed away char and declaimed from the parchment: “‘The Apostle boasts no special skill. For his humility the Unnamed God has blessed him with the reward of untroubled conviction.’”

“I told you,” said Candle, “we’re already converted. I don’t need a further catechism.”

She left to gather firewood, and when she returned a few hours later leading a goat, Liir said, “You are systematically raiding some nearby farm, aren’t you? Is that why you have been carrying your domingon with you?”

“There are a few holdings in these hills, farther up,” she admitted. “Mostly they’re abandoned at that time of the morning, but it’s true: the instrument helps lull any resident grandfather into his morning nap.”

“I hope you’re not beggaring them.”

“Should I bring it back?”

Milk. Cheese, in time? “No.”

But what were they doing here? Resting up-for what?

“I’ve been scrutinizing such flecks of pages as I could salvage,” he told her. “I’ve come to think this circular was not a missionary tract. I think it’s oppositional. You just don’t see it at first-you read some ways down and begin to find resistance to the notions of the Apostle. It’s a clever rhetorical device, in its way; it may have fooled some readers, or convinced others to join a resistance to-this Apostle, whoever he is. It’s seditious, this paper, that’s what it is. And whoever didn’t like it traced its origins here, and made their sentiments known.”

“I hope they don’t come back.”

“What’re they going to come back for? The goat?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you know anything about milking goats?”

“I learned to fly on a broom,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “I can learn to milk a goat, I bet.” Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

CANDLE SAID EVENTUALLY, “The weather is steadily chilling. If we’re going to be here all winter we’re going to need to get in some firewood. Are you feeling well enough to begin to collect some?”

He was, and he did. In finding his way around the browning dales and hollows, he realized that the press had been set up in a farm that most likely had been abandoned a generation ago. Rangy teenager trees were colonizing some of the pastures, and deeper in the woods, the crisscrossing of stone walls suggested that these had been working meadows not all that long ago.

At suppertime he told Candle what he’d seen. “I don’t know much about how land is used anywhere but Ovvels,” she admitted. “I have seen those walls among the trees, and I thought perhaps they grew there like lichen.”

“The influence of pebbles! To grow stone walls. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plant a farm that way! Drop the seeds of a barn here, drip a tincture of millpond in an eyedropper over there. Plant an egg and get a whole henhouse, complete with cockcrow and breakfast omelet.”

“What would make a sheepfold?”

“All you need is a lamb’s tail.”

“How horrible!”

“Not really. To avoid fly strike, shepherds often dock the tails of lambs.”

She didn’t like this line of play. She got her domingon-Liir guessed as much to change the subject as anything else. He needled her anyway. “To grow a mauntery you’d have to plant a…a what?”

She struck up a tonic depressive and then played it backward. “Plant a prayer,” she said, despite herself. “To grow an army…?”

“Touché. Well, the story of the Seven Spears says you plant dragons’ teeth.” He’d heard the folk story eventually, the one that had given the company of the Seventh Spear its name. A bit close for comfort, that. “To grow a melody?”

“You can’t grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.” This seemed a musical reference, and it went over his head. “To grow a memory. Tell me that one, mister magic farmer.”

“To grow a memory. To grow a memory, one must plant…I’m not sure. Who wants to grow memories, anyway?”

“I’ll make it easier. To grow a good memory. A happy memory.”

He shrugged, indicating, Go on.

“It doesn’t matter what you plant,” she concluded, “but you must plant it with love.”

Then she whipped up a scale and finished with some splay-handed chord clusters. The sounds hung in the air like prisms suspended from the trees on invisible strings. The donkey brayed in an altogether more accomplished voice than usual, looking astonished at himself. The goat cocked her head.

Candle added a few grace notes in a complementary modality.

The hen stepped closer as if surprised, at her age and station, to receive an invitation to dance. She let out a squawk that turned into a nightingale’s sonnet, line after line after line, though Liir couldn’t imagine what it meant.

Candle added a hedge of bass notes, tense as the girders of a bridge. The goat opened her mouth and provided an alto obbligato line-rather huskier than would work for a paying audience, but entirely serviceable in a barnyard.

Then the Quadling girl sang something in Qua’ati-some rural advice; Liir had to struggle both to hear her and to translate. He guessed she was singing, “No one can sing unless they can remember.” The trio of animals attempted a big harmonic finish, but it was beyond them, and the moment passed.

“You can make the animals sing,” he said. “You are a wonder.”

“I can play a wonderful instrument,” she corrected him. “To grow a song, you must plant a note.”

THE NEXT DAYhe went for more kindling. His strength returning little by little, he scaled another rise, a higher one than before. He saw in the distance a blurred line of tree heads a different shade of brown. The oakhair forest, in that direction, and, when he turned to see, the suggestion of the Kells in the other.

He collected what he could comfortably carry, not yet having regained full strength, and put off what needed to be said another day or two. Before he could bring the matter up, though, Candle got there first.

She said, “It’s a month now since we left the mauntery, and you dropped out of the sky perhaps two weeks before that. I’ve been nursing you as best I could, and I’ve assumed we’d winter here together. But is that a false premise? You ought to let me know. I must decide if I want to try to stay here alone through the winter, or return to the mauntery.”

“Why would I leave?” he asked, looking for a reason.

She tried to lighten the mood. “To grow a man, you must not only plant a child, but harvest it,” she said. “You’re not done yet. Are you?” When he didn’t answer her, she added, “You ask why you would leave. But I ask, why would you stay?”

“I owe you that much.”

“You owe me nothing.” She looked as if she meant it, seeming neither combative nor proprietary. “I did the job that was set me by the Superior Maunt, that’s all. Though maybe in evacuating you from that keep and bringing you here I exceeded my charge, and endangered you the further.”

“I can’t be in danger here. Look, what? Are the very elm leaves going to wreathe up by magic and smother me?”

“Something attacked you six weeks ago, and for a reason,” she reminded him.

“I had a flying broom. Of all things. No reason more than that.”

“You had the power to fly on it, too.”

“Any ant has the power to wander aboard an eagle.”

She demurred, but didn’t want to argue. “You were going somewhere. Surely you remember by now?”

“A Conference. A Conference of Birds in the eastern entrance to Kumbricia’s Pass. Though I have no way of knowing exactly when it was formally opening, nor how long it would last. It could be over already.”

She sat down. “If I understood what I picked up in the mauntery, we aren’t that far from the eastern edge of the Kells.”

“No. A few hours by broomstick, I guess. A few days, maybe, on foot.”

“There’s the donkey.”

“Two weeks on the singing donkey. He seems very lazy.”

“You’re still weak. You ought to ride.”

“You’re pushing me out of the nest?” He was relieved, in a way: someone was making a decision for him. Or perhaps she wanted to hear from his lips that he wouldn’t abandon her, he wouldn’t consider it.

Her thinking was further along than that. “I don’t know if you want to stay with me for a day, or for longer, or at all,” she admitted. “But you should choose what you want and not just fall into it. I abducted you, after a fashion. I will not keep you.”

“I’ll give myself permission to stay here.”

“You’ll settle your curiosity first,” she told him. “You don’t know why you were attacked, really. You don’t know what the Conference was for, nor what it might mean to the Birds that you didn’t arrive. You should find out that before you make any other decisions.”

“I’m not that selfless anymore. Anytime I try, I fail. I learned failure early, and mastered it.”

“Be selfish then. Ask those Birds if they have seen your friend. That Nor.”

He could hardly believe her generosity. He loved Candle already but didn’t have the perspective to know if it was as a savior, a woman, a friend, an alternative to loneliness. Or all of those together. Or if any of those were the right reason to love someone. Well, what personal experience of love had he ever had? And what testimony of love had ever been paraded before him? Precious little.

He knew in many ways Candle was right and that, also, she was giving him a way out.

“I need firewood. If you help me with firewood,” she said, “I’ll stay here the winter and not leave till spring. Between the fruits and mushrooms I’ve been drying, the potatoes growing wild in the sunny patch yonder, and what the goat and the hen can provide, I won’t starve. If I’m turned out by some landlord, or if trouble chases me away, I’ll return to the mauntery. I can be found there, by my uncle if he comes to claim me, or by you. Or there I’ll stay, maybe; it’s as good a life as most, and they’re kind women.”

He helped with the firewood, redoubling his efforts to build up the stockpile, and in so doing restoring mass to his muscles and strength to his step. By the time the first hard frost came, and the chimney was issuing its thin braid of smoke all hours of the day and night, he was ready to leave.

He wouldn’t take the donkey. She might need it.

“For what?” she asked.

“He’s better company than the goat,” said Liir at last. He took Candle in his arms on the final morning, and kissed her fondly for the first time. “I do not need to hear about goodness from any Apostle,” he told her. “You have given me more to admire than almost anyone I have ever met.”

“It’s very clear you haven’t traveled the world,” she chided him, almost lovingly. “Be safe, as safe as you can, dear Liir: and be brave.”

“Are we a couple?” he asked, bravely enough.

“We are one and one,” she said. “In Quadling thinking, one plus one doesn’t equal a single unit of two. One plus one equals both.”

For a long time, turning back, he could see the soft curl of smoke hovering over where Apple Press Farm must stand in its encroaching forest. The fire’s breath hung like a question mark above the place that she had planted herself, already, to wait for his return.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 820