Esste opened the door to the gatehouse.
Songmaster Esste, Riktors said, I will tell the emperor that I have seen his Songbird, and that the child is beautiful. But when can I tell him the child will be sent?
The child will be sent when I am ready, Esste replied.
Perhaps it would be better if the child were sent when he was ready.
When I am ready, Esste said again, and her voice was all pleasure and grace.
The emperor will have his Songbird before he dies.
Esste hissed softly, which forced Riktors to come closer, to bring his face near enough that only he could hear what Esste said next:
There is much for both of us to do before Mikal Imperator dies, isn't there?
Riktors Ashen left quickly then, to finish his business for the emperor.
11
Brew takes your mind,
Bay takes your life,
Bog takes your money,
Wood takes your wife.
Stivess is cold,
Water is hot,
Overlook wants you,
Norumm does not.
What song is that? asked Ansset.
Consider it a directory. It used to be taught to the children of Step, to make fun of the other great cities of Tew. Step is no longer a great city. But the ones they made fun of still are.
Where will we go?
You are eight years old, Ansset, Esste answered. Do you remember any life, any people outside the Song-house?
No.
After this, you will.
What does the song mean? asked Ansset. The flesket stopped then, at the changing place, where Songhouse vehicles always stopped and commercial transport took over. Esste led Ansset by the hand, ignoring his question for the moment. There was business at the ticket counter, and their luggage, slight as it was, had to be searched and itemized and fed into the computer, so that no false insurance claims could be made. Esste knew from her memories of her first venture outside the Songhouse lands that Ansset understood almost nothing of what was going on. She tried explaining a few things to him, and he seemed to pick it up well enough to get along. The money, and the idea of money, he took in stride. The clothing he found uncomfortable; he kept taking the shoes off until she insisted that they were essential. She did not look forward to his getting accustomed to the food. There would be diarrhea for days-at the Songhouse he had never acquired a taste or a tolerance for sugar.
She was not surprised at his quiet acceptance of everything. The trip meant that he was within a year of placement, yet he showed no excitement or even interest in his ultimate destination. Over the last two years he had finally begun to show a little human emotion in his face, but Esste, who knew him better than any other, was not fooled. The emotion was placed there in order to avoid exciting comment. None of it was real It was nothing more or less than what was expected and proper at the moment. And Esste despaired. There were paths and hidden places that she herself had put in Ansset's mind, but now she could not reach him at all. She could not get him to speak of himself; she could not get him to show even the slightest inadvertent emotion; and as for the closeness they had felt on the hill overlooking the lake, he never betrayed a memory of it but at the same time never allowed her to get even a few steps into the path she could follow to put him into a light trance, where she might have accomplished or at least discovered something.
When the business at the changing place was finished, they sat to wait for the bus, a flesket that anyone with the money could ride. It was then that Esste whiled away the time by answering Ansset's question. If he was surprised or gratified that she had remembered it, he did not show any sign.
Brew is one of the Cities of the Sea-Homefall, Chop, Brine, and Brew-all of which are famous for beer and ale. They also have a reputation for exporting very little of their product because they are such prodigious drinkers. Beer and ale contain alcohol. They are enemies of Control, and you cannot sing when you've been-drinking them.
Bay takes your life? Ansset prompted, having memorized the song, as usual.
Bay used to have the unfortunate habit of holding public executions every Saturday whether anyone was sentenced to death or not. To avoid using op too many of their own citizens, they used strangers. The practice has, in recent years, been stopped. Wood had a sort of mandatory wife-market. Very odd things. Tew is a very odd planet. Which is why the Songhouse was able to exist here. We were more normal than most dries, and so we were left alone.
Cities?
The Songhouse began as a city. It began as a town of people who loved to sing. That's all. Things grew from there.
The rest of the cities?
Stivess is very far to the north. Water Is just as far to the south. Overlook is a place whose only product is the beauty of its scenery, and it lives off the people of wealth who go there to end their days. Norumm has four million people. It used to have nine million. But they still feel crowded and refuse to let more than a few people visit them every year.
Are we going there?
We are not.
Bog takes your money.' What does that mean?
You'll find out for yourself. That's where we're going.
The bus arrived, they boarded, and the bus left. For the first time in memory, Ansset saw people outside the milieu of the Songhouse. There were not very many people on the bus. Though this was the main highway from Seawatch to Bog, most people took the expresses, which didn't stop at the Songhouse changing place-or even at Step, usually. This bus was not an express-it stopped everywhere.
Directly in front of them were a mother and father and their son, who must have been at least a year older than Ansset. The child had been riding far too long, and could not hold still.
Mother, I need to go to the toilet.
You just went. Stay in your seat.
But the child whirled around and knelt on the bench to stare at Esste and Ansset, Ansset looked at the boy, his gaze never wavering. The boy stared back, while wagging his backside impatiently. He reached out to bat at Ansset's face. It might have been meant as a friendly gesture, but Ansset uttered a quick, harsh song that spun the boy around in his seat. When the mother took the boy to the bathroom at the back of the bus, the child looked at Ansset in terror and stayed as far from him as possible.
Esste was surprised at how frightened the child had become. True, the music had been a rebuke. But the child's reaction was far out of proportion to Ansset's song. In the Songhouse, anyone would have understood Ansset's song, but here the child should have understood it only vaguely -that was the purpose of the trip, to learn to adapt to outsiders. Yet somehow Ansset had communicated with the boy, and done it better than he had with Esste.
Could Ansset actually direct his music to one particular person? Esste wondered. That went beyond songtalk. No, no. It must have been just that the boy had been paying closer attention to Ansset than she had, so that the song struck him with more force.
And instead of worrying, she made the incident give her more confidence. In his first encounter with an outsider, Ansset had done far better than he should have been able to. Ansset was the right choice for Mikal's Songbird. If only.
Though the forest was not so lush as the deep woods in the Valley of Songs, where all Ansset's excursions had taken him before, the trees were still tall enough to be impressive, and the lack of underbrush made for a different kind of beauty, a sort of austere temple with trunks extending into the infinite distance and the leaves making a dense ceiling. Ansset watched the trees more than the people. Esste speculated as to what was going on in his impenetrable mind. Was he deliberately avoiding looking at the others? Perhaps he needed to avoid their strangeness until he could absorb it. Or was he truly disinterested, more drawn to the forest than to other human beings?