The broad face of the mertzer turned towards him, the eyes widened a fraction. “Your mother’s taught you the Capitol tongue as well, then?” He smiled for a second and then the eyes shifted away, following some path of his thoughts. “That’s a good thing, to know a language just for its songs.”
“She’s not just my mother,” said Daenek. “She’s a lady—the Lady Marche, and—”
The mertzer turned quickly and studied the boy’s face. “She’s who?” Without waiting for an answer, his blunt finger tapped the boy’s chest. “And if that’s her name, then who are you?”
Daenek shook his head and tried to stand up, but the mertzer’s hand gripped his shoulder and pressed him back down onto the blankets.
“The Lady Marche,” said mertzer, marvelling, “and she didn’t even tell me. Though what was I supposed to think when those wretched stone-cutters told me a woman lived up here who spoke the Capitol’s tongue, and might have some hospitality for one who was also born in that city. The Lady Marche . . .” He turned Daenek around to see him better. The mertzer’s face was transfigured, his mouth slightly open. “Then you must be,” he said, “of course, you’re—”
“My name’s Daenek.” He looked warily at the mertzer, wondering what change would strike him next.
“Yes.” The mertzer nodded, his face grown solemn. “The thane’s son.”
“So what of it?” said Daenek sullenly. He twisted free of the mertzer’s hand and stood up.
Sad eyes followed him as he backed away. “Ah, child,” murmured the other. “What have they told you here, about your father? What lies rotted that part of him that’s inside you?”
“Nothing,” said Daenek truthfully. “They never told me anything.” Suddenly, like a hollow space opening in his body, he felt a sense of shame. Shame at the way he had felt before.
“That’s how it’s done.” The mertzer’s gaze didn’t move away from him. “Slandered well, when the details are left for each to fill in with his own little fears and hates. Until a thane’s memory is painted over with a traitor’s.” He closed his eyes and slumped against the wall.
Daenek retraced his steps until he was standing just before the mertzer again. “He wasn’t a traitor?” he asked the silent figure. “My father?”
The mertzer opened his eyes and looked at Daenek for several seconds. “No,” he said. “Traitors they who call your father a traitor.”
“Did you know him?”
A small, bitter laugh. “I was only one of his followers. I even signed aboard the caravans, became a mertzer, so I could tell people in every village I came to about your father’s plans. You see,” he leaned forward and looked up at Daenek, “even back then it could be seen how things were going. Things breaking down and not being repaired, people running out of—whatever it is that you hold onto your life with. Will, perhaps it’s called. But I thought the thane, your father, would change all that.”
“How could he do that?” Daenek squatted down in front of the mertzer. All this sudden knowledge was making him feel dizzy—like suddenly finding yourself at the edge of a precipice you hadn’t seen.
Another laugh. “I never even really knew,” said the mertzer. “Or what little I did know isn’t worth telling now. Just a few fragments of a memory, with enough edge left on it to draw blood.” He fell silent, his eyes seeing nothing but some inner scene, filled with regret and pain.
A storm of questions surged up inside Daenek, each seeming to strain at the confines of his chest and throat. He wanted to ask more about the thane—what his father had looked like, what words of his could be remembered—but didn’t, as he studied the mertzer’s lowered head. Instead, he bent down to intercept the mertzer’s line of vision, and asked: “What did that song mean? What do the words say?”
“What?” The mertzer looked up. “Song? Oh . . . that one. It’s about leaving. Being in strange places by yourself— Why do you ask? You know the words to it.”
“But not what they mean.”
The mertzer looked at Daenek in puzzlement, that finally broke into comprehension. “You are your father’s son,” he said. “Nobody’s ever taught you anything but this whining stone-cutter’s tongue, yet . . .” He pulled Daenek closer to him. “How many times have you heard that song before? Once?”
Daenek nodded.
“Listen.” The mertzer sang a line of the song, in a high, sad-tinged voice, then dropped to his usual bass. “That means, Not a friend in the whole wide world.” Another line in the same tone as the first. “Now, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” But Daenek sensed a small, microscopic event in his head, like the cracking of a seed’s hull. “Something . . . something that also isn’t.”
“And nobody knows my name,” translated the mertzer.
Daenek listened as he sang the entire song, pausing after every line to give the words’ meanings. Every word that Daenek had held for so long intact within himself now swelled with radiance.
He would never forget the song.
“Now,” said the mertzer, “what does this say?” He recited another line, slower, one that Daenek had never heard before.
Gaps . . . there weren’t enough words yet. But still, some of the words the mertzer had explained from the song—they sounded, no, felt like these. “Oceans,” said Daenek. “An ocean that isn’t there?” He shook his head in confusion. What could that possibly mean?”
“The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” The mertzer reached over to his pack and took up one of the tattered books.
The yellowed pages fluttered under his thumb until he stopped midway through the volume. He began to read, the other language’s words exact and powerful sounding.
For Daenek it was like seeing some vast, mysterious object through a dense fog that at times thinned or vanished entirely.
The mertzer would turn the pages back and forth in his hands, then stop and read another section aloud. Sometimes his eyes closed for several seconds, but the deep voice continued.
Silence in the little room at last, and the mertzer handed the book to Daenek. “Take it,” he said. “Learn to read it.”
“It’s so big.” Daenek weighed it in his hands. “It’ll take me forever to know all these words.”
“No.” The mertzer lightly touched the boy’s forehead with his finger. “A day, perhaps. You have a thane’s gift for languages.”
He paused for a moment, searching for an explanation. “You see, there’s a language underneath all languages, and when we’re infants a part of us knows that language and can suck out the meanings and ways of any human tongue as though it were air. But the part dies a few years after our births, except for thanes. Like you. It stays strong in you, becomes stronger, a tool instead of a gift. So that, like your father, you could someday rule a world where every piddling village has its own language. There are some people who can pick up a solid thing, and tell you the face of every person who’s ever handled it. You,” the finger tapped the boy’s chest again, “can hold words and draw out whatever their speakers were saying with them.”
Daenek studied the faded gilt lettering on the cover of the book. The other language used the same alphabet as the stone-cutters’ language. He held the tip of his ringer under the first word of the book’s title and turned it towards the mertzer.
“Does that mean thane?”
“Close.” The mertzer nodded. “The book is called Master Poems of the English Language. ‘English’ is what they speak in the Capitol and, so I’ve heard, on some of the other worlds way beyond this, and even Earth itself.” He suddenly noticed the empty glass tube and the metal packet. His hand reached down and pushed them out of sight.