Evening the Seventh — The Drowned Choir and the Green Hands of the Ape

Draw close. The fire's down to its embers and the wine here is more vinegar than grape, but sit — you paid, and Hjalti One-Eye pays back in the only coin he mints. You there, at the end, with your cloak still steaming from the rain: you missed the nights when I sang of the woman who kept fire in her belly, and of the crowned thing that sat white and patient beneath the ice, and of the irons the Cimmerian struck off men who had forgotten their own names. Ask the pot-boy. He'll tell you cheap.

Tonight is not those nights. Tonight the tale goes down, and then it goes green, and I'll not pretend I liked either half of it.

Hear now.

There is a country in the south and east where the sun comes off the rock like a hand laid flat on your face, and in that country a man may walk a ridge and find a woman waiting who was never a woman. Stone. Carved into a queen — the shoulders bare, the mouth cut with the little downward pull of somebody who has stopped asking. Twice he found her. Twice the same face, in two places a hard day apart, and that is the part that put a crawl in my gut when he told it: not that she stood there, but that she stood there again. Some hand set that face in the wilderness the way a farmer sets scarecrows, and whatever it meant to frighten off was not birds.

Strabo Nagi walked up to the first one and looked at it the way you'd look at a dog that hadn't decided yet. Cimmerian, that one — grey-eyed, black-haired, big through the back, and marked across the chest with the cross of the rope and the tree, the brand of a man who was hung out to die and had the bad manners to refuse. He does not pray. Crom gives a man strength at his first breath and nothing after, and Strabo has never once asked for the nothing.

He gave her his shoulder. Stone cracks. The face came off in three pieces and the queen was a pile in the dust, and he walked on with white grit in the creases of his knuckles, and when he found the second one he did not even slow his stride. Some men argue with an omen. That one just breaks it and keeps the road.

There was a great grey ape on that road too — you have not seen one, and I hope you don't. Taller than a tall man when it stands, and it does stand, that's the horror of it: the shoulders of a smith, the arms hanging past the knee, a hide like wet ash and a jaw that opens further than a jaw has business opening. It came at him downhill with its knuckles hammering the ground, whump, whump, and the sound went up through his boot-soles before it ever reached his ear. He met it. That's all he ever says. He met it, and it stopped being a thing that walks.

And a river-lizard, later, in the shallows — the long armoured kind, all mud and patience, that lies like a rotted log until the log has your leg. Strabo went into the water to his knees to take it, because the fool will not fight a thing on the ground the thing chose. He came out with a bite through the calf and the tail-meat over his shoulder and ate it that night with the fat popping in the fire, and if you think that's a small thing, friend, you have never eaten the thing that meant to eat you. It sits differently in the belly. It sits like a debt paid.

Now the ground opens, and I want another cup before I go down there.

(drinks)

West. Middle of the world's spine, where the rock is old. There is a stair that goes into the dark and the stones of it are worn smooth in the middle, worn by feet, worn by many feet over long years — and that's your first warning, because worn stairs mean traffic, and nothing up there was walking.

The air came up at him wet. Not cave-wet. Tide-wet. Salt and rot and old fish, a hundred leagues from any sea, and he told me the smell had a weight to it, that it went into the cloth of him and would not come out for three days.

And in the dark below, singing.

You laugh. I did not laugh when he said it. Not words — no throat down there is shaped for words — but a rising and falling together, many of them, keeping time. A choir. Drowned and keeping time.

They came up the passage at him: men, near enough. Two arms, two legs, and a head that had lost the argument. The eyes were on the sides and did not blink, being made without lids, and they were the flat gold of a coin at the bottom of a well. The mouth had no lip to close on, so it hung, and the teeth went back in rows further than teeth should go. Grey-green, the skin, and wet — always wet, down there where nothing dripped. Some came with rusted blades. Some came with spears they threw, and threw well, from the dark where he could not see the arm that cast. One of those went through the meat of his shoulder and he broke the shaft off with his teeth and kept walking. Bodies before minds, in that place. A man who stops to think in the dark drowns in it.

He fought them at a narrows where only two could come abreast, because he has worn a rope and learned what a man learns about ground when he has been on the wrong end of it. And when the last of the singers went down and the choir went ragged and then went quiet, one thing was left, and it did not sing.

It was bigger. That's the honest start of it. It came up out of the black water at the chamber's end and the water came up with it, sheeting off shoulders that had gone past man and past fish into something that had only ever been itself, and it stood in the shallows steaming and looked at him with those flat gold coins, and it knew what he was. That's the part I keep. It knew him. Not a beast's knowing. It had a thought behind the eyes and the thought was old and it was patient and it had counted men before.

Strabo went into the water again. Of course he did.

I'll not give you the blow-by-blow; he doesn't, and I don't invent what a better man bled for. He came out of that hall with his hair full of salt and a wound down his ribs he stitched himself with a fish-bone needle, and the singing did not start again. He climbed the worn stair. He stood in the sun a long while at the top of it, he said, just standing, letting the heat get into his hands.

He never told me what it was. Neither did it. And down there under the world the water is still black and still waiting, and I do not know how deep it goes.

The next day was green, and green is its own country.

Jungle now — hot as a shut oven, a canopy so thick that noon comes down in coins. He went in because the road went in. He found a bird there, small and brilliant, the green of a new leaf with the sun behind it, and it sat on a branch a spear's length off and looked at him and did not fly. He said that was the strangest thing of the whole day. Everything down that hole had wanted him dead, and this small green nothing simply did not care.

Then it was gorillas, and the jungle showed him its manners.

They came in a family, black as a wet stone, and they were not the grey ape of the hills — no, these had faces, faces that watched, and they mourned their dead where the grey thing had not. And behind them came the old male with the saddle of silver down his back, hair going white the way it goes white on a man, and he did not charge first. He stood up, and he beat his chest, and the sound of it was not a drum — a drum is hollow and honest — it was flatter and worse, the sound of meat that has decided. He was giving Strabo a chance to go.

Strabo did not go, and I'll not tell you he was right. The old one hit him and put him on his back in the leaf-rot with his ribs singing, and he came up under the jaw with the blade going where blades go, and it was over quicker than the warning had been. He sat afterwards with his hand on the silver back a while. He told me that, and then he told me to leave it out of the song. I'm telling you anyway. Hjalti pays back in the only coin he mints, and half a man is not the coin.

There was a panther that same day, that took him from a branch he'd walked under twice — one hundredweight of black quiet with the claws already in his shoulder before the branch had finished moving. There was a salamander in a wet place, its hide slick and mottled and cold as a well-stone, and cold is not what you expect from a thing that lives near fire-rock. And there was a lizard as long as two men laid end to end, a shambling thing with a hide like a dropped shield and a tongue that came out to taste him from ten paces off, testing the air for what he was made of. It found him bad eating. Not soon enough, though — it opened his forearm first, and that wound stayed hot and angry for a fortnight after, which tells you the mouth was worse than the teeth.

He came out the far side of that green at dusk. Bitten, torn, salt still in his hair from a place a day behind and a world below.

So there he stands, this night I sing him: a big grey-eyed man with the cross on his chest, gone down under the world and come back up, gone into the green and come back out, with a rope-scar he did not choose and a road he did.

He does not sing of himself. His people don't. Crom keeps no hall for songs and grants no favour, and that's a cold creed but it's an honest one — a man stands or he goes down, and the sky says nothing either way.

But I will tell you the thing that's been sitting in my one good eye since he walked out of here.

He broke that stone queen twice and never asked who carved her. He killed the choir and never learned the tune. Somewhere south and east, her face is standing in the dust waiting for him a third time.

Come back when the moon's thin. I'll know by then whether he found her — or whether she found him.

Cup's empty, lads. That's the whole song.