The Singer and the Sea by Michael Scott Rohan

Author:Michael Scott Rohan [ROHAN, MICHAEL SCOTT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575092266
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-30T23:00:00+00:00

He chose it because its rhythm made it a fine rowing chant as well, and their way perceptibly increased as the night grew cooler. His voice began to fail all too soon, but the tune was simple and repetitive, easy to strum against the rhythmic creak and rattle of the rowlocks and the sluggish splash of the sea. After a while he seemed to sink into it, and lose his conscious thought in the pace of the music, breathing in and out like immense lungs. It was Nils’s ripe oath that jolted him out of his trance.

‘By the Sea-Daughters’ short an’ curlies! Look at the sail!’

For a moment Gille thought it was some effect of the air as they pulled. But the canvas was filling and billowing on its own, beginning to strain at the sheets and give them some way.

‘No, don’t stop playing, skipper,’ grated the sailing master. ‘Whatever you do! Sing some more, even.’

‘I’m too dry,’ croaked Gille.

‘Whistle, then!’ snarled Nils, and took up the tune a moment in his own toneless whistle. ‘Wind for wind, that’s old sea-lore.’

‘It makes sense,’ admitted Gille, and licked his lips to try and catch the tune. He felt foolish, but as others joined in, the tone of the kantel seemed to pick it up and grow stronger, and he could feel the breeze on his cheeks, hot as a girl’s breath. As Utte’s, anyhow; the Other’s had been cooler, perhaps. What was Utte doing now? What was she thinking about?

A vision came to him with startling clarity – Utte, on the high leads of the old farmhouse, gazing far out to the distant sea. The sight of her, with her brown hair whipping about her eyes in the sea breeze, wrung his heart and pricked his conscience, and he struggled to blot it out. The other girl – what of her?

Nothing came save darkness. Infinite darkness, though it was tinged with a coolness and peace he found achingly welcome. But it was overwhelmingly strange, and there was a sense of motion in it also, of great masses churning in the blackness, mighty and slow; and he fought clear of that also. If these were truly visions shown him by the strange music under his hands, what could that one mean?

Far better let the old tune carry him back to where he had first heard it. His first bewildered day as prentice in the smithy of his new master, Kunrad the Armourer, learning to pull the bellows, to make the hearthflame leap beneath the crucibles dangling from their chains, ready to tip out their molten brews. Learning that song, then, from the thickset fellow-apprentice with the red-brown skin who was the enormous span of eleven months senior to himself, and who would become, after a fashion, his best friend. Could the music tell where he was now?

Gille found himself afraid to wonder. But it would be good to know Olvar still lived. He looked towards the horizon, past the skeletal shadows of the mizzenmast and loading boom to the still stiffening mainsail, tinged with starlight.

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