Singer of the 'Stones

Marbhean’s earliest and only coherent memory of his family is of his mother’s silence, deep and full as a river, and the dark, intent glitter of her eyes as the Wardens dragged him out of their home. He did not fight them. He remembers feeling weak and limp, more from confusion than from fear.

He also remembers feeling insubstantial, and not yet having the words to describe the feeling, had he been capable of speech in those moments. His arms, small and wiry, were no feat at all for the Wardens’ hands to encircle.

It would be a long time, as children measure it, before he found his voice again. Not knowing this then, his pale, thin lips still shaped questions that were the beginnings not of fear, but of misery.

Mama? They shaped, and: why? What?

Do good, her lips shaped back as one mute. The Warden carefully restraining his father was saying something obviously threatening, gesturing at Marbhean’s older brother—a tall, thin, serious young man whose name Marbhean will never again say or remember—then at his mother.

Everyone was speaking aloud, he suddenly realized, it was just that he could not hear the words—didn’t know if he, too, was making sounds. A child that may have been friend or foe during seasons past was now just a wide-eyed memory, peering from around his own door-post as Marbhean was led away from all he’d ever known.

Then they were gone. Or Marbhean was—he’d never been too sure about that part, because that’s when a piece of him—his true childhood—quietly died.

Life and memory now began with the warm sweat-soap smell as one of the Wardens—not the one who’d threatened Marbhean’s family—picked him up and held him gently as the dim, close, muggy interior of a carriage closed around them. The discreet click of the door shutting heralded the return of sound. A surprisingly soothing voice, not unlike his father’s, said things he didn’t understand, while the carriage—something he’d never ridden in before—jounced busily down the avenue, its steam engine near-silently working away in puffs of vapor and smoke.

For an unknowable span, this was Marbhean’s new world, one that he was too numb and confused to understand. A world of damp, hot air that smelt of the Wardens’ sweat and the sweat of children past.

Then, all of a sudden . . . light. He hadn’t realized that the carriage had stopped, so rattled and discombobulated was he by the eternal ride. He had not noticed the kind Warden carry him out of the carriage and into a courtyard that was paved with Godstone much more refined than the kind his mother shaped. He itched and tingled to touch it, to feel it sing under his hands and bare feet, and squirmed around in the Warden’s arms till he was put down with a laugh.

The Godstone did sing under his feet, then his hands when he dropped to all fours, next warming them and softening under them. It sang, this entire courtyard of three yard-sqaure Godstones. Even parts of the large, squat building it presented and the tall, graceful tower jutting up proudly to seemingly scrape the cyan sky like a spike of silver-white.

They sang. All of them.

Finally, after letting Marbhean goggle and roll around on the singing Godstone, the kind Warden picked him up and put him down on his feet, murmuring that they had to be moving on. He gestured toward the building and took Marbhean’s hand, gently, but firmly pulling him onward. Halfway to the building, when Marbhean glanced behind him, he saw that with every step he’d left behind a footprint. It made him smile, and when the Warden glanced back to see what his charge was smiling at, he gasped and gaped at Marbhean. Then he picked Marbhean up again, murmuring nonsense that was meant to be comforting . . . but more to himself, than to Marbhean.

The Warden carried him past the sturdy brick manse, to the tower that butted against its north side, and into the structure through doors of glass and bleached wood.

It was in this tower, in the Warden’s office that Marbehan was told that he was a—powerful—stone-singer. That he was to be trained at the expense of the State, to divine, purify, and shape Godstone like the ones that paved the front courtyard.

He was also to be taught the more common subjects children his age and younger had already begun to learn, such as reading and writing. Unfortunately, Marbhean was significantly behind, having been hidden away at home instead of starting school when the other children had, the Warden told Marbhean, as the boy looked curiously around the office. At the shelves of books and knick-knacks—all of which sang to him, especially the ones made of bits of Godstone—and the huge, messy desk that sat at the center of it all. Behind it sat the kind Warden. Across from him, Marbhean squirmed in the stiff-backed chair and swung feet that did not touch the floor.

“Do you understand?” the Warden finally asked, when he’d fallen silent and the still, pale-eyed child had not moved to fill that silence with questions.

Marbhean thought over all he’d been told—namely the part about not being able to see his family again until he was sixteen . . . an impossibly old age, and higher than Marbhean could count—and briefly remembered dark, serene eyes and a gentle, tender voice wishing him a good night. . . .

Do good, had been the last thing that voice had ever said to him, and promising it that he would, that he would do the best he could, Marbhean nodded to the Warden, even though he’d understood little of what the man had said.

The Warden frowned. “Can you not speak, child? I know you can—I heard you call out for your mother when we left your former home, and murmuring your brother’s name in the carriage. Will you not speak, now?”

Marbhean shrugged uneasily, tamping down and pushing away the memories of the dark-eyed woman, and all the memories that attended her. He pushed away all of it, but for the mouthed words: Do good.

It was imperative, he knew, to hold on to that, if nothing else.

But of this he did not speak, nor did he speak of anything else. He had nothing to say.

*

The days and weeks and months after the Wardens took him were like flashes of consciousness in the midst of a long slumber. And in those days and weeks and months, Marbhean lost nearly everything. He taught himself to forget these things: the house he was born in; his father’s garden; his mother’s small sculptures on the windowsill, which had seemed to glow mellowly in the daylight—golden beams winking off the cream-peach-tan swirls of unrefined Godstone; and his brother’s soft, low voice as he sang while doing chores.

The cool feel of clean cobblestones or smooth, hard wood under his bare feet had, in the blink of an eye, become the cold, unforgiving evenness of marble and tile felt through uncomfortable shoes, interspersed with the soft, creamy warmth of the Godstone which paved the front courtyard.

The small, cluttered bedroom he’d shared with his brother had become a large, pin-neat dormitory he shared with twenty-five other boys of varying ages, beds lined up against high walls with tall, barred windows.

Marbhean’s mornings and afternoons of riotous playing became days of unrelieved learning of reading and writing, sciences and sums. He had quite forgotten what it was to play with other children—which was of no moment to him because he had no friends, despite the tens of dozens of children kept at the New Place—which, he was to learn, was the renowned and somewhat feared State Primary and Secondary Institute for Advanced Youngsters—with him.

He was left alone in his little free time, an unnaturally quiet boy who never spoke a word except in his sleep, when he would dream of a woman with dark eyes holding out her arms to him. He would wake from these dreams crying and burbling: “Mama,” but since that was a common occurrence in the dormitory—even among some of the hardened, jaded older boys of nine or ten—no one paid his cries any particular mind, nor sought to comfort him.

Befriended and pitied by none—except for the kind Warden who’d carried him into the Institute and who was, it turns out, the senior Warden over the whole school—Marbhean often walked around the locked front courtyard (which the Wardens had politely asked him not to disturb further), that still bore his footprints and would, ever after, and listened to the Godstone sing. It sang of numbers and order—of things he was learning in his advanced maths classes (in which he was doing exceptionally well, already outstripping his peers despite his late start). It sang of harmony, and of the perfection it experienced being one-from-many, united by a common purpose.

Marbhean grew to envy it, or supposed he did.

*

It wasn’t until he’d been at the Institute for more months than he could clearly remember that someone, besides the kind Warden or another authority figure, spoke directly to him.

He was sitting alone in the front courtyard, as usual—laying on it, actually, in the sun, eyes closed, listening to the Godstone sing beneath him and letting its contentment fill his body like helium filled an empty balloon. He could feel the sound from the tips of his fingers to the toes of his shoeless feet.

He heard but did not really hear the courtyard gate swing open, as it only rarely did—for just the Wardens ever went out by the front gate, and only ever on Institute business, such as the bringing in of a new student . . . who would not leave the premises again until they turned sixteen and were ready to go to the Tertiary Institute—then swing shut, followed by the sound of a steamer carriage, trundling its busy, near-silent way across the unfazed Godstone.

It was headed in his direction but, in Marbhean’s extended experience, it would simply go around him, as it was programmed to do. And it had, indeed, done so, when the whoosh-hiss of its engine and workings began to grow closer again.

Now, he began to listen with both ears, tuning out the Godstone for a few moments, until the carriage drew even with him, once more.

Marbhean opened his eyes and turned his head.

The carriage door opened and out sprang a tall, spindly, ochre-colored man, swaddled in yards of unrelieved charcoal and navy. He was quickly followed by the head Warden, who looked annoyed and aggrieved.

The spindly man—who, Marbhean would later find out, was the renowned stone-singer Danand Dalwat—approached him and smiled. And said:

“So. This is the child the Godstone obeys.”

He was still smiling, and his eyes were curious, intelligent and dark. He had a very strange way of speaking that wasn’t quite an accent. That smile widened, sharpening rubbery, indistinct features into caricature as he glanced briefly at MacCoinneach, the Warden who’d once removed Marbhean from all he’d ever loved.

The man who still found time, every once in a while, to speak kindly to a blank, strange boy who never spoke a word in reply.

“You may go, now,” Dalwat told MacCoinneach, and having spoken, turned back to Marbhean. This was a man unused to being disobeyed, and in his mind, Warden MacCoinneach had already ceased to exist. Those dark eyes twinkled with acquisitive satisfaction: here, was a magpie that had found discarded gilly-shine in an empty field.

“Marbann,” Dalwat said, the first person to ever to pronounce it that way, instead of Mair-VAWN, the way Marbhean’s kith and kin had . . . the way MacCoinneach still did. He wouldn’t be the last. “I am told that you can sing the Godstone. Is this so?”

Marbhean gave the question serious thought before shrugging. The stone sang to him, not the other way around. Dalwat frowned and squatted in front of him, looking him in the eye.

“Are you the one who left those prints—” Dalwat pointed at the trail of footprints that led halfway to the front doors of the Institute. “—in the stone?”

At this, Marbhean glanced at MacCoinneach, who nodded once, reassuringly. Returning his eyes to Dalwat’s intense, steady ones, Marbhean nodded also. Dalwat’s smile stretched practically from ear to ear.

“Wonderful. And can you do the same with other kinds of stone?”

Marbhean shrugged again. He’d never tried.

Dalwat hmmed and dug in the folds of his voluminous robes, seconds later pulling out a small, jagged lump of black metal. He reached out and took Marbhean’s hand. His own was warm and dry.

“Take this,” he said, placing the metallic lump in Marbhean’s hand and closing his fingers around it. Dalwat’s eyes were as dark as the metal and they glittered. “I would like for you to make this piece of onyxium into a perfect sphere . . . you know what a sphere is, yes?”

Marbehan’s nod was wary and hesitant.

“Excellent. Please make that into a perfect, unmarred sphere.” Dalwat sat back on his heels patiently, long hands hanging between his knees.

Nonplussed, Marbhean looked at the lump then he looked at Dalwat. Then he looked at MacCoinneach—who seemed worried and tense—then back at the lump.

His mother had showed him how she manipulated Godstone when he was a still just a toddler—how she’d convince it to change its song until it was in the shape she wanted. Marbhean had never done it for himself, preferring to listen to his mother hum to the Godstone, her voice low and lovely and perfectly swaying as she first echoed the ‘stone’s song, then began to subtly change it.

If the lump had been one of the small pieces his mother had let him play with before she shaped it—if, that is, Marbhean had even remembered her with his waking mind and heart—he might have been able to do it.

As it stood, he merely stared at the lump of onyxium, and let the hot sun beat down on him. Like the Godstone, the onyxium had a song—fiery and fast, unlike the Godstone—that he could hear and feel in his bones . . . not quite all the way to his core. He reached out to it, to learn it, and felt his mind swept away in fire and heat.

Unlike the Godstone, this lump of rare earth was not eager to be unified, and become one-from-many. In fact, it was quite the reverse, each of its particles wanting to be off in a different direction doing something different than its neighbor. It did not want to be a perfect sphere. It wanted to be, in each of its quadrillions of discreet atoms, an autonomous entity.

But Marbhean, sweating now, from the heat and from concentration, began to do something he’d never tried to do before: he began to hum one of the songs of the Godstone—and there were many, but they were all about the same thing . . . unity and harmony—back at the onyxium, and. . . .

For the briefest of moments, the song of the onyxium stopped as the stone listened.

When it started up again, almost instantaneously, it was, however, changed. It was ever so slightly slower and a touch uncertain.

Marbhean was unaware he’d started to smile.

Slowly, he continued humming of unity and harmony. Of one thing from many, and all towards the same purpose. He sang of the perfection of this unity, and of spheres (a hasty improvisation). And he waited. Hummed . . . and waited. . . .

Until finally, the song of the onyxium began to sound more like that of the refined and shaped Godstone of the courtyard, its fiery, fast voice becoming slow and crackling, like the banked embers of a fire-pit.

Letting out a breath, Marbhean opened his eyes to a world that was too bright and spinning too fast, and he sagged forward: a sweaty, limp, heap that Dalwat caught in his arms. He didn’t even realize the rock had rolled out of his nerveless fingers until Dalwat, still holding Marbhean against him with one arm, snatched something up off the Godstone courtyard with his free hand.

He held it up between them, and Marbhean could only push dripping, russet-brown hair out of his face and blink stinging sweat out of his eyes.

It was a piece of perfectly spherical black stone.

“My boy, you are to come with me, and be my apprentice,” Dalwat said, taking Marbhean’s clammy hand and standing up. The onyxium sphere rested between their palms like a covenant and when Dalwat started walking toward the Institute, his long-legged stride devouring courtyard, Marbhean, still weak about the knees, dizzy, and sweating freely, hurried to keep up. The clack of MacCoinneach’s heels could be heard to follow them. “When I am done with you, you will reshape this world, and it will tremble wheresoever you step, Marbann.”

Marbhean—MAR-bann blinked again.

He was suddenly, after so many dim, forgettable, run-together months, wide awake. He inhaled sharply, and examined one of his earliest memories—a dark-eyed woman whispering to him to: do good—even as it was once more submerged under the memories of his life at the Institute. Even as the courtyard stones under his bare feet rippled and shook. As they warped and twisted, shying from his step, yet clamoring toward it, too.

As they trembled.

Marbann exhaled, a croaking, unlovely whisper flowing out on an indrawn breath that had been held for two years.

“It already does.”

END