“The towns around the Gathered Waters need food,” he said. “The Talents leave the farmers pretty much alone.” Which was more or less true. Gamesmen would be fools to meddle with the farms. Though Queynt had yet to see the limit of their foolishness. Some of the things the new race of Gamesmen did were not only unbelievable but childishly silly and cruel. “There’s lots of good land west of the Lake, and plenty of it left. The farmstock market in Laketown sells on credit, too. I’d recommend you go there and give it a try.”
There. He’d given them his best advice. He finished the beer and left, hearing them coming after him before he was halfway down the short street.
“Sir! Sir!” Her voice like a whetstone, he thought, wondering how the man and child could bear it. Maybe they were deaf. “We’d be mighty grateful for the loan you offered.”
“You’ll go south?” He kept his face neutral, still. No loan would help them if they were determined to return to the northlands.
“South,” the man agreed in a toneless mumble. “We won’t need so much, actually. We do have one good milk zeller left.”
He gave them money. “When you have prospered,” he said, “you are to make this amount available to someone else in need. It is a trust, you understand?”
The woman turned away, eyes wary as a flitchhawk’s, but the man gave him a straight look. “I take it as such, sir. Don’t mind her. We left two children buried there, north.” He put his arm protectively around the woman and they went down the street, the child silent as a shadow at their heels. Queynt stared after them, not the first he had met, not the first he had sent south with enough to buy food and little more. And still he did not know the truth of what was happening there, in the Shadowmarches. He would not know, until he went himself.
He went afoot, trusting no horse—new stock or old—carrying only a few odds and ends and what he needed to eat to supplement stuff taken from the wild.
At one time, he thought sardonically, he would have distrusted anything resembling a hunch, but he was in the grip of a hunch when he walked alone up into the Marches. It was the woman’s plaint about music in the hills that had set him off, and he thought much about that remark during his travels. When he had come past the farthest reach of the attempted settlements, he found a tall rocky hill and camped himself on it in a half cave with its back to the wind.
It was a high, lonely moor he sat upon, the stones at his back raising themselves like the heads of questing beasts toward the lowering sky. Low, woody plants carpeted the hills, amber and wine, bronze and green. At the bottom of the hill, the forests began, twisted and low in a furry mat like the pelt of some great beast, wide swamps of darkness lying beneath the trees. And over all a shrill, keening wind, coming and going like a visitant ghost.
Queynt smiled, well pleased. He took the bait he had brought out of its careful zellerskin wrappings, an ancient instrument, one brought from the former world, a thin column of old wood with double reeds to blow through and a plaintive, importunate voice, unlike any in this world. The thing made a sorrowful, interlocutary cry, which would, he felt, summon any creature with a grain of curiosity in its bones—or whatever passed for bones with northern creatures.
Waiting for a caesura in the wind, he played. While no great shakes upon the instrument, still he had a feel for it when he stuck to easy things, and the simple melodies winged out from the height like native birds seeking nests. A few quiet elegies and nocturnes were what he knew best. When he had finished, the hills around sank into waiting silence.
It was the third day he was there—playing each day a bit at dawn, noon, and dusk, sitting in the meantime quietly over a steaming pot of grain and broth, mostly native stuff — that he heard a phrase from one of the elegies come fluttering at him out of the shadows along the hill. It was almost the sound of his double reed, but not quite, and the phrase was followed by a tiny spitting sound which could not be other than an expression of artistic annoyance.
In a moment the unknown singer tried again, closer this time, but still not exactly. Queynt set the reeds between his lips, gave a faintly expository warble, then played the melody into the waiting air once more.
A small creature, virtually invisible in the dusk, came out upon the hillside before him and sang. It had wide ears, huge eyes. From either side of its face soft, flowing whiskers swept back to join its shadowy mane, and needle teeth glimmered in the half-light. It had the flattish star shape of all the tailless, backboneless creatures of this world, yet with legs, arms, and head that parodied humankind. It stood there and sang.
By the time full dark had come they had progressed to the point that Queynt dared assay a contrapuntal arrangement. The shadow voice dropped into silence.
Queynt played the first part again, encouragingly, taking up the counterpoint when the singer began again. After several false starts the singer got the idea and they proceeded through the composition, harmonically intertwined. During this concert, Queynt was conscious of a soft gabble, interrupted by fragments of song, as though the audience were explaining to one another the intricacies of this new—obviously new—kind of music.
So, he thought with satisfaction, they are musical but did not know harmony. What an interesting
