‘His elder brother was very different. Where the young man loved to join people together by the telling of some tale, or bring reconciliation through the citation of some ancient precedent, where he loved to conserve the old rites and joyed to teach children by fables how to be just, generous, fair and modest, his brother instead seemed to love only himself. He inherited their family’s petty kingdom; within a few years, he had purchased a better one, trading blood – his own, and those of his soldiers – for gold, land and crowns. Abroad, on foot, haunting markets and shady groves, the young man gathered stories; at home, in the saddle, thundering in the plains and on the mountains, his brother collected kingdoms. His conquests staggered his treasurers, who were forced to construct new vaults to house his gold, while the storyteller gladly and freely surrendered every dream of his heart or eye to any peasant who would share his crust of bread. In all of this he considered his rich brother the poorer for his insatiable greed, and himself the richer for what he considered his endless – boundless – generosity.
‘The two brothers could not have been more different, my children –’
Just at that moment, they were all startled to hear, from the darkness beyond the Ossarium, back down the tunnel through which they had walked, the sound of singing. The voice was high and strained, and the pitching of the song erratic, unstable, as if sliding in drunkenness across the notes and words – in drunkenness, or madness.
It was the Riddler.
The tunnel, much lower than the slope on which they now sat, had flooded. All of them – save for the Professor, whose back was square to the Ossarium’s entrance – turned towards the sound and peered into the deep shadow hanging over the porch of bones through which they had, themselves, earlier come. The song was nearing, always nearing, lapping on the water. Fitz wasn’t sure at which moment he first became aware that the Riddler was swimming, bellowing out verses between wide, extended strokes. All the while the Professor continued his story, his back to the porch of the Ossarium, as if he were completely oblivious to the splash of the Riddler’s arms, to the echo of his song in the tunnel.
‘But the two brothers were not so different, after all,’ said Farzan. ‘In those days the younger son gave up his house, and his name, and travelled into the north to join an ancient society of those who, like him, had no need for the things of this world, but lived only for the love of stories. You cannot, I think, imagine the peace and tranquillity in which that society lived. In the feasts of their great temple, together they told tales that broke upon the ear and eye like a dawn upon the mountains, glancing with light and colour, full with the promise of life and power. In their communal life they enriched one another’s art, refining their practice through the study of language and music, voice and gesture, passing stories between them in great rounds and cycles that could stretch not just for days, but for weeks, months, even years. Their art seemed to promise health and order, civility and peace. It was the expression of all that was best in human virtue, love, order and achievement, the flower of mind and heart. Its highest form and the vehicle of its performance was a great instrument on which their music was played – not by one of them alone, but by them all at once and together, an instrument which threaded and wove together the voices of a thousand singers, speaking in unison. Just so, many runnels, flowing together, may make a river; just so, many currents, combining, grow to a wave or swell.’
‘He reverences the bones!’ sang the Riddler – very near now, so near that Fitz thought he could discern in the darkness behind Farzan the flash of motley upon the water. ‘The bones, the bones – he reverences the bones!’
‘This instrument,’ Farzan said – and his forehead where he leaned over the lantern was a study in concentration, furrowed and etched with deep lines – ‘this instrument was known as the Great Loom. In the high assemblies of the society, one of their number, the first among them, sat before the Loom, and as they spoke and sang, a thousand voices blending in a feast of hymn and harmony, this Weaver wove their song together into a single piece or work, at once both tale and picture, story and image. The means by which he worked, as he sat before the Great Loom, partook of the human, but also of the divine, for it was said – and believed – that the Loom had been a gift of the gods and not the manufacture of human hands at all; that to sit before it was at once to fulfil the greatest promise of humanity, and to commune with something beyond our world. The secret of the Loom’s design
