More, she now understood much better his confusion about tenses: for in the Whisperer’s mind, the world wasfinished,a made thing, a completed thing … though one that was constantly changing. It was a harrowing point of view for a Person to try to assimilate, or for any mortal being who lived in linear time and generally thought that one thing happened after another, and that the future was still indeterminate. It was not, toHer.The Whisperer, in Her mastery, saw it all laid out. The only place where Her uncertainties lay was in whatyouwould do to change the future … in which case everything you did also became part of the ongoing completion, a law of the universe, as if it had been laid down so from the very beginning. The two visions of the future did not exclude one another, from Her point of view: they actually complemented one another, and made sense. To Rhiow, that was the most frightening concept of all.
She breathed out, wondering how she would apologize to Arhu for so completely misunderstanding what he had been dealing with, while Arhu got back his breath and his composure, and headed on down Water Lane again. Just across from Traitor’s Gate was an opening into the central part of the Tower complex, through a building called the Bloody Tower. He went under this archway as well, and turned immediately left.
Built into the wall here was a house with many long peaked roofs, the Queen’s House: and in front of it were arches with iron bars set in them. Behind those arches were some low, wizened trees and shrubs … and in the trees, and under at least one of the shrubs, sat the ravens.
Arhu had known they would be large, but he hadn’t thought they would be as large as a Person. Most of them were, though, and at least one of them which perched on that stone wall, above the bars, was as big as Huff: as big as a smallhouff.They were all resplendently glossy black, and they looked down at him and, to Arhu’s astonishment, saw him perfectly well, even though he was sidled.
“Look,” one of them said. “A kitty.”
“Oh, shut up, Cedric,” said another of them. “You had breakfast.”
Arhu licked his nose and sat down, trying to preserve some dignity in the face of so many small, black, intelligent, completely unafraid eyes staring at him.“I, uh, I’m on errantry. Hi,” Arhu said.
“And we greet you too, young wizard,” said one of the ravens. There was a muffled noise of cawing from the far side of Tower Green: Arhu looked over his shoulder.
“How many of you are there here?” he said. “Should I go over and say hi to them too?”
“No, they’re minding their territories at the moment,” said the raven. “After all, the place is full of tourists. Later in the day, when the warders chuck them all out and lock the place up, we can all get together in the quiet and the dark and have a chat. Meanwhile, anything you say to me, they’ll know. They can see it, after all.”
“I’m sorry,” Arhu said, “but I don’t know what to call you. There areehhifnames on the sign over there, but—”
“No, it’s all right: we use their names,” said the biggest of the ravens. “It’s a courtesy to them, and from them: they’ve made us officers in their army, after all.” She chuckled. “Even if we’re only noncoms. So I’m ‘Hugin’, and that’s ‘Hardy’.” She pointed with herbeak at the raven sitting below her. “We have other names that we tell to no one, that come down from the Old Ones … but we can’t give you those. Sorry.”
“Uh, it’s OK. But look, is it right what the sign says, over there? That theehhifthink this place would‘fall’ without you? Fall down?”
“Cease to exist,” said Hugin.
“Of course the place would fall without us,” said another of the ravens. “We’ve always been here. It doesn’t know how to be herewithoutus.”
“How long is always?” Arhu said.
“How long does it have to be?” Hardy said. He was a little thinner than the others, a little smaller, which might have been deceptive: but the eye, that black, wise eye, seemed to say that this was the eldest of them. “Since there were buildings. And before that: since there were humans, whatyou callehhif.We saw your People come, too: we saw them go, when the city first was burned … We stayed, and the dead … no others.”
Arhu controlled his desire to shudder. With their great ax-like beaks, there was no mistaking these birds for anything but what they were—meat-eaters—and there was no mistaking what they would have eaten, from time to time, in this city where there had so often been large numbers of deadehhif. Or People, for that matter …Arhu thought.
“It’s all right,” another of the ravens said. “By the time we eat somebody, they don’t mind any more. And these days we mostly don’t, anyway. The Wingless Raven gives us chicken breast.” The raven clattered its beak with pleasure. “Very nice …”
“If you’ve been here that long,” Arhu said, “you must have seen a lot …”
“Even ifwehadn’t been,” Hugin said, “we would still be seeing it now. William the Conqueror: I see him walk by a puddle, right over there, and a cart goes through it and gets his hose wet, and he swears at the man driving the cart and pulls him out of his seat … throws him down into the water, too. The Romans: I see them walking their city wall, looking at the cloud of dust as Boudicca and her chariots come riding. Over there.” She gestured with her beak at the remains of the wall, like a bumpy sidewalk, that stretched from past the Wardrobe Tower to the Lanthorn Tower, along the green that had once been the site of the Great Hall. “And poor Ann Boleyn. There she goes, over to the block. Over there.” She turned and pointed with her beak in the other direction, over toward Tower Green. “Very dignified, she was. That used to be a great concern for them. And there he goes running by, one of them who didn’t care about dignity so much.” She pointed over to the little corner building which was presently the Tower gift shop, but which once was the home of the Keeper of the Jewels. “Colonel Blood, with the Crown stomped flat and hidden under his wig, and the Rod with the Dove down one boot. He almost gets away with that, too …”
“And it was you saw thatthen?”Arhu said.“You must be pretty old.” He let the skepticism show in his voice a little.
“Oh, notus,”said Hardy.“Our ancestors. Though we see what they see: that’s our job. And eventually the humans noticed that we were always here, and for once they came to the right conclusion, that the place needed us. They started trying to protect us … very self-enlightened, that. Though there have been times when the population has dropped very low.” He glanced up at the sky. “During the war—the last big one here—almost all of us died except old Grip. The humans got very worried. And well they might have, with the V2s and the buzz-bombs coming down all around them. But we knew it would be all right. We saw it then, as we see it now …”
“That’s why I’ve come,” Arhu said. “It maynotbe all right, soon, in a very large-scale sort of way. We need help to find out how to stop what we thing is happening from happening.” He looked around him. “All this could be gone …”
“No,” said Hardy, “of course it won’t.Thiswill still be here.” He squinted up at the pale stones of the Tower. “It will bedead,of course. No people … and eventually, even no ravens. No nothing, just the dark and the cold, and the thin black cloud high up that the Sun can’t come through. The wind crying out for loneliness … and nothing else.”
“You mean it’s going to happen,” Arhu whispered, shocked.
“I mean it alreadyhashappened,” said Hardy. “Now it’s just a matter of seeing how it happens otherwise. You know that: for you have the Eye too, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’m not very good at it yet,” Arhu said, suddenly feeling a little humble in the face of what was plainly another kind of mastery than his own.