The Crow (5 page)

That was something else he had nightmares about.

After he had lain for hours in his cramped hiding place, too terrified to venture out, Maerad and Cadvan had found him. He had then discovered that not all Bards were Hulls, as he had thought. Finding that he had a sister – someone who belonged to him, someone who without question wrapped her warm arms around him when he cried out and trembled in his black dreams – was the most important thing that had happened to him in his whole life. When he had been forced to leave her behind, he had felt as if his heart had been cut in two. It was a loss he tried not to think about, because it hurt him too much.

Meeting Saliman was the second most important thing that had happened to him. Despite his anxieties about Maerad, the ride to Turbansk with Saliman had been his first taste of real freedom. The weather had stayed fine for most of the way, and although they feared pursuit from Norloch, he and Saliman had encountered no dangers. After Hem's body had made the first painful adjustments to horseback – for riding made his legs so stiff that he thought he would walk with bowed legs for the rest of his life – the journey had been an unalloyed pleasure.

Hem often wished he could ride again with Saliman through the mountains of Osidh Am, his favorite part of the whole journey. They had camped at night by still pools in the fragrant forests of larch and fir, and Hem would lie by the fire looking up at the bright stars through the branches high above him. During the day they often surprised small herds of deer, which would leap up almost under the horses' feet to crash away through the bracken, and sometimes they brushed past bushes full of butterflies, which would start up in a cloud of bright colors about their heads.

There were no other people for leagues, and a great peace began to rise in Hem's heart. It was the happiest he had ever been. On the other hand, his first sight of Turbansk, which was, Saliman told him, the most ancient city in Edil-Amarandh, had been bewildering and overwhelming.

They had arrived at first light on a summer's day, just before the dawn bell. The Great Bell of Turbansk, three times the height of a man, hung in a high belfry under a gilt cupola above the West Gate – one tower in that city of many towers, which glowed like an opulent mirage on the shores of the Lamarsan Sea. It was struck every day at the exact moment that the sun's disc appeared over the horizon.

As it rang over the city, it had seemed to Hem as if the sound itself was made of light. Sunlight and bell note spilled simultaneously over market and tower, house and hall and hovel, picking out the glittering domes of the School and the palace and the Red Tower, flushing the stone walls pale pink or warm yellow. The sun flooded the city's broad squares and trickled into the narrow alleys of the poor quarters, where the walls were painted in fading greens or blues or reds, and fresh washing was strung over the street from house to house like colorful flags; and on the great inland sea of Lamarsan a path of dazzling gold flared across the water.

In the markets, which teemed with people hours before dawn, the flaming torches faded in the sudden increase of light and the world flooded with color. The dew sparkled on the roses and jasmine and saffron in the flower stalls, and rainbows quivered over the scales of trout and salmon, and on the iridescent feathers of freshly killed ducks and pheasants as they lay on the marble benches.

From the food and flower markets spread a labyrinth of alleys lined with stalls and tiny shops, which sold everything from plain brass lamps to curious enameled fortune-telling boxes that were used to predict the positions of the stars, from robes of diaphanous silk to thick linen tunics, from rings and brooches to knives and cooking pots. The narrow streets were packed with people: bakers walking with trays of fresh loaves balanced on their heads; donkeys and pack mules loaded down with huge panniers or sacks; farmers from the Fesse, the land surrounding the city, carrying baskets of dates or live ducks, their heads poking from the top; women in bright, embroidered robes, their fingers sparkling with rings; children squabbling and playing; and hawkers marching up and down, calling the virtues of their wares.

There was a whole street of spice sellers, who sat behind their counters with bowls of precious ground spices before them, saffron and cardamom and whole nutmegs and cinnamon sticks; then you would turn the corner and find a street of shops full of songbirds and finches, fluttering in cages of copper wire. The next street was full of stalls with copper braziers that sold little tin cups of black coffee and sweet honey-filled cakes and hot bean pastries. Jugglers and minstrels plied their trades for the gossiping customers.

Hem stared, amazed at the ordered chaos of Turbansk, his nostrils flaring. The streets were aromatic with spices from the hawkers' stalls and everyone, men and women, wore musky perfumes. As the heat of the day increased, the perfumes merged with other, earthier smells – rotting vegetables and sweat and waste – so that Hem felt faint, as if he were drugged in some sweet stupor, moving through a constantly changing hallucination.

The people of Turbansk took great pleasure in personal adornment; at first Hem thought everyone in Turbansk must be fabulously wealthy, for he saw no one who did not wear golden earrings or bracelets or some intricately fashioned brooch. Later he knew that those who were poor wore trinkets of brass, with glass jewels; but to Hem they seemed no less beautiful than emeralds and gold. Nothing had prepared him for the rich colors and ceaseless movement, the countless men and women and children who moved with unerring grace through the teeming streets. To his astonishment, he saw no beggars: they had been everywhere in Edinur. He turned and asked Saliman if they had been banished from the city, and Saliman laughed.

"Nay, Hem, here the Light does its work. No one goes hungry in Turbansk," he said.

Hem mulled this over in silence. "Then won't people get lazy?" he said at last.

Saliman gave him a sharp look. "What do you mean?"

"If they don't have to work for food, I mean."

Saliman stared ahead for a moment, as if revolving thoughts in his head. "If a person doesn't want to work, that is their loss," he said at last. "To make things, to care for what one loves, to earn one's place in the city, that is one of life's great pleasures. It is not a Bard's business to tell people what to do: if they are hungry and ask for food, we give them something good to eat. We have plenty, after all. Then they are able to think what they might do best. If their best is sitting in the gardens watching the carp in the pools, then so be it."

Hem blinked in surprise. It seemed wrong to him, simply to give food away for nothing.

The city of Hem's daydreams so far surpassed them that his expectations had wavered like smoke and collapsed utterly. He scarcely remembered his first week there. It passed in a blur of unfamiliar voices and words and colors and smells: the fresh touch of linen sheets against his skin; the silken caress of his new robes; the tastes of the food, which flamed along his tongue, making him choke and gasp; the hundreds of faces he saw in the streets every day, each one a stranger. Although Hem wasn't afraid, this sudden profusion of sensation induced something very like panic. In the midst of his confusion the only still point was Saliman, who – perceiving the chaos of Hem's mind – for that first week took him everywhere. Hem haunted Saliman's footsteps like a little dog, never less than three paces behind him, as if he were the one rock in a turbulent and threatening world.

But in seven days the world stopped whirling and settled down, and Hem began to find his bearings. He was instated into the School of Turbansk as a minor Bard and now wore on his breast a brooch in the shape of a golden sun, the token of a Bard of Turbansk. Saliman told him to keep the medallion of Pellinor – the precious token from his babyhood, which was the only thing he possessed of his family's heritage – in a cloth bag that he hung around his neck.

The Turbansk brooch, a gift from Saliman, pleased Hem much more than his lessons, which, apart from swordcraft and unarmed combat, he found much more difficult than he had expected. Study bored him, even his studies in magery, and he was at best a mediocre student.

This puzzled Saliman, who believed Hem had a facility with magery. He had taught Hem a few techniques on their journey to Turbansk and, when he had time, showed him mageries that caught the boy's fancy. Hem was particularly adept with the charms to do with concealment, shadowmazing, and glimveils, and he had even mastered a disguising spell that was a speciality of Cadvan's, and which was particularly difficult. Saliman suspected this ability might have to do with his life in the orphanage, when he had been forced to keep his Barding powers hidden, as anyone suspected of witchspeak – which was what the ignorant termed the Speech – might be stoned to death. Yet in classes he acted the dullard, refusing to concentrate or focus his powers.

To Hem's dismay, Saliman had left the city for a few days shortly after their arrival in Turbansk. This was when Hem began to feel truly isolated. Saliman would not tell him where he was going or when he would be back, and despite Hem's pleadings would not take him with him. Hem felt it as a betrayal; a small betrayal, perhaps, but a betrayal nevertheless. Saliman came back for a day and then vanished again, and Hem began to feel lonelier than ever.

During Saliman's absences the Turbansk Bards were kind to him, but Hem found this almost as bewildering as Turbansk itself. He simply wasn't used to being treated with courtesy. The first time a Bard gave him the bow of greeting he had flushed red with anger, believing that he was being mocked; but fortunately Saliman was present and took him aside, explaining that it was the custom, and that he was simply expected to bow back.

Most often his confusion erupted without warning into explosions of rage. Perhaps Hem's greatest difficulty was that he didn't speak Suderain, but that might have been overcome if he had not also suffered from a deep mistrust of almost everybody who attempted to speak to him. Within days his fellow students had dismissed him as surly and aggressive, and before long some were taunting him, provocations to which he always responded violently. By the time Hem rescued Ire, he had punched three minor Bards hard enough to warrant visits to the School healer for both parties, and once had even used magery against a student, a practice so strictly forbidden in the School that Urbika had told him sternly that he would be thrown out altogether if he ever did such a thing again.

All this was in Saliman's mind as he contemplated his charge over the evening meal, a couple of weeks after Hem's escapade in Alimbar's garden. Hem was proving a more testing responsibility than he had expected, although he did not regret his decision to bring him to Turbansk. Beneath his exasperation, Saliman had grown to love this difficult, troubled boy, and he had a Truthteller's intuitive understanding of the contradictory emotions that were tearing Hem apart. What he didn't know, Saliman thought, was what to do about them.

Hem was on his best behavior, and so was acting as if he were made of wood; in his nervousness he had already knocked over a full goblet of wine.

I am a healer,
Saliman thought to himself,
and counted great in that art in this city; but these wounds are beyond me. Perhaps only Maerad could heal them...
He thought of Hem's pale-skinned sister, in her own way almost as damaged and lonely as Hem was, and sighed.

Saliman had arranged to eat alone with Hem that night, and Hem, conscious of his sins, was unusually tense and silent in the Bard's company. Only that morning he had endured yet another difficult interview with Urbika, who had patiently asked him why he felt obliged to use his single talent – that for unarmed combat – against his fellow students.

Hem had stood before her, silent and scowling. He could not tell her that it was because Chyafa – the minor Bard whom he had, shortly before, left with a black eye – had called him a dirty white
hlaf.
Chyafa was Hem's principal enemy in Turbansk: a strongly built, handsome boy with an air of superiority who dropped his taunts with a carelessness that only intensified their sting. To report the insult was to compound Hem's humiliation: Hem understood enough Suderain to know what
hlaf
meant. It was the word for carrion crow, which as an insult meant an ignorant barbarian, and it particularly hurt because it referred to Ire as well. A number of other children had laughed at Chyafa's witticism and Hem knew then, with a sense of furious helplessness, that it had become their nickname for him.

So he had said nothing, dumbly awaiting his punishment, and Urbika had pressed her lips tight with suppressed frustration. She was having a trying morning. Hem had been assigned the dawn duties for a week as a punishment, which meant waking before the first bell, shivering out of his bed in the dark hours before daylight to sweep out the Singing Hall and lay out bowls and spoons for the other Bards, and then working in the kitchen, stirring great cauldrons of dohl, the dried beans that were boiled with fermented milk and sweetened with honey for breakfast.

It was a mild punishment: privately Hem didn't mind these duties, since he liked Soron, who oversaw the kitchens. He was a fair-haired, heavily built Bard from Til Amon, and he had a trick of wordless, unpatronizing kindness. He kept Hem supplied with meat for Ire, without Hem having to ask more than once, and gave him any sweetmeats left over from the previous evening, and never asked him questions about himself; which paradoxically meant that Hem was more chatty with Soron than with anyone except Saliman.

Hem knew that Saliman was very busy; he had only that morning returned from one of his mysterious trips. This probably meant that tonight's meal had been arranged because he wanted to say something in particular. Hem feared, again, that he was to be sent away, that this latest outrage had torn even Saliman's patience with him. He was so nervous that his appetite had disappeared, and he merely picked at the fresh fruits piled on the table, although among them were some of his favorites: mangoes (sent as a courtesy, Saliman told him ironically, from Alimbar's private garden), star fruit, pomegranates, figs, green melons, and grapes.