A Choir of Lies Read online

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  To Macey and Freya:

  I genuinely couldn’t have done it without you.

  All right . . . I suppose things like this usually start with an apology of some sort.

  ONE

  My former master-Chant thought we shouldn’t write down the things we know. I don’t know if he was right. I don’t know if I agree. Rather, I don’t agree entirely, but I don’t disagree entirely either. I’m still exploring all my options. But one option must be to write a little down, because here I am, writing, even though I’m not really supposed to. The argument he gave was that mere ink and paper can be lost or destroyed or taken from you.

  These won’t get taken from me. These are mine, and I’ll burn them up once I’m done with them. And anyway, if he cared so much about what I do, he shouldn’t have—

  I won’t write it. I can’t. (“Can’t” here meaning both “I don’t want to. I refuse to. I won’t face it” and “If I were to face it, there would still be no language in the world with strong enough words to make myself understood. Whatever I wrote would be a work in translation, and it’s just not linguistically possible.”)

  There’s a kind of magic in writing down the things you know. It makes mere ink and paper into weapons. It makes them a mind, in a way: A paper copy of a mind with some of the mental abilities that its writer possessed—persuasion, or charm, or insidious destruction.

  But paper can’t think and ink can’t adapt—they are an arrow shot into a foggy night by a blind man. At least this way, I know that there’s no one in front of me, no one to be struck and killed by a stray bolt carelessly shot, and no witnesses. And even though there’s no one to hear my words, no one to see what I’m doing, no one to care at all . . . Sometimes, I’m going to lie, even here, when I’m all alone: I’m a Chant now myself, after all, and Chants are liars.1

  But first, something true.

  * * *

  1. You little shit. I’d argue with you, but you’ve already proven your own point, haven’t you? And not just a liar, but an oathbreaker (and in regards to that: Fuck you very much, thanks). Why am I even bothering with this? Why even waste the ink to call you a shit and an oathbreaker? You’ve already run off—at least you know how to abscond in the night like a proper Chant. It’s not like you’ll ever read anything I write here. It’s not like you’d particularly care about it even if I did catch you. But . . . Dammit, I’ll have the last word, even if you aren’t around to witness me getting it. The last word and the satisfaction of yelling at you the way I want to, and what does it matter that you won’t ever hear me? You never heard me before, so it’s really no different.

  TWO

  A truth: I wonder if it was right for me to become a Chant.

  Another: I think it changed me. I think I’m different than I used to be.

  Another: When I was becoming a Chant, finishing my apprenticeship officially, my master-Chant led me through the rites to sink my homeland beneath the waves and unname myself.2 But I’m afraid, now, that I must not have meant it hard enough,3 because I still feel like I have my name. I whisper it into the dark sometimes, and it feels like I’m breaking a tenet, though the tenets of the Chants are few and vague and abstract.4

  Chants are—

  They—

  This is difficult.

  Chants are storytellers, right? That’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be a collector and a curator.5 The things humans make up are delicate when they’re out in the wild. Stories and languages and secrets, they have a lifespan. If no one passes them on, then they die with the last living person to remember them. A Chant tries to—

  They go around—

  They learn stories, and they tell them to other people. And when an apprentice becomes a master-Chant in their own right, they give up their name and their homeland. They have to. There’s no other option; they have to do it.6 I think this is because . . .

  Why, why is this so hard?

  It’s because you need to put yourself aside, if you’re going to be a Chant. You have to be humble. You can’t put too much of yourself into the stories you’re telling; that’s what my master told me. Because they’re not your stories. You’re just an empty vessel. So you have to keep yourself separate. I think that’s why we unname ourselves.7

  But people call me Chant now and I still think they’re talking to him. My master-Chant. Chant isn’t me.

  This is a mess, isn’t it? Everything in my head is a big tangled knot. I’m not doing a good job of this so far.

  I always do this. It’s my weakness—that’s what my master-Chant used to say. I talk too much about things that aren’t important, I babble, and I get sidetracked.

  There’s no translation for what I’m thinking and feeling. Why can’t I stop talking about him? Why do I have to keep carrying him around with me? Why can’t I just forget? I don’t want any of this anymore, I—why aren’t there words? Why can’t I just excise it like a surgeon cutting out a tumor? Or exorcise it, more accurately—naming the evil thing to gain power over it and casting it into salt water to burn it away. Why can’t I name it? Why isn’t there a word that means the same thing as . . . I don’t even have a metaphor to lay hands on.

  “My heart scrubbed raw with sandpaper.” There, that will do. “Drowning on dry land, feeling like the water is about to close over my head at any moment, frantic and panicked and scared.” Or even, “Lying down in the middle of a deserted road and crying and screaming until my throat bleeds.” Or, “So much anger and hurt and anger and fear (and anger, and anger, and anger) that it chokes me, that it paralyzes me, that I fall down crying again because I just—can’t—do anything with it, and there’s nowhere to put it down, so I have to hold it in my heart, and there’s no one to turn it against except myself—so settle in, self, and hang on.”

  But all right. I have to get it out somehow, excised or exorcised. I have to put it somewhere besides my own heart, or it really will choke me. Sooner or later it’s going to start getting literal. I can put it here on paper, and later maybe I’ll throw the paper in the sea—good clean salt water to unmake my hurts from the world.

  Let’s see if I can pick all these knots apart and weave them into something shaped like a story. And I’m going to lie, because Chants are liars. I won’t be able to help it. I’m going to lie on purpose, and I’m going to lie by accident, and it’s going to feel better than the truth, sometimes, and I’m so, so tired of not feeling better.

  I’m going to write down my real name here,8 because it strains to burst from my lips and the tip of my pen like a flooding river of snowmelt in spring, and I want more than anything to
take it back, to take me back, to go back to the way things were when I was . . . him. And I can’t. It’s done. It’s over. It’s lost to me, just like the ancient Chants lost their homeland and couldn’t ever reclaim it. My name, too, has been erased from the world. That’s the whole point of the rites, isn’t it? It’s to remember what they lost. It’s supposed to feel like this.

  Whenever I introduce myself now, I say, “Call me Chant.”

  But my name used to be Ylfing.9

  * * *

  2. I don’t even want to think about what that man told you were “the rites.” It was horrific enough the first time I heard it. Can you really even use the word “led”?

  3. Gods and fishes, every time you mention that man and what he did to you, I want to tear something apart. Of course you didn’t mean it! How could you have meant it in those circumstances? You were coerced.

  4. I rest my case. He didn’t teach you anything. I did keep telling you.

  5. NO!

  6. Your bias is showing.

  7. Sort of? But not really. Why are you bothering to chatter about this? If this is your idea of explaining yourself, my patience is already wearing thin.

  8. I beg your fucking pardon?

  9. How dare you. What the hell are you doing? I won’t stand for this. There—I’ve scratched it out. One little thing I can do to save you from your folly.

  THREE10

  * * *

  10. I threw section three into the fire, just so you know. Took me a couple tries, because it kept splatting to the floor, and then it turned out it was too soggy with tears to burn. So your master, asshole that he was, tricked you and lied to you and used you as a pawn, and you got to watch him sell out a country and all its citizens to save his scrawny neck. And even now, years later, you’re beset with guilt? You know what sort of a person he is—why bother with all this melodrama? Accept it, learn from it, and let it go.

  FOUR

  A Happy Memory11

  * * *

  11. This section was also completely irrelevant, so I took that out too (also, the title of this story is mediocre at best). Did you reread anything you’d written before you shoved this mountain of damp paper into my hands and ran out the door? Why did you think I’d care about some boy named Beka in Xereccio? Why did you think I’d care that he was cute and he liked you and that for the first time in your life you didn’t care? So maudlin! I already want to slowly peel the skin off my face, and I’m not even a tenth of the way through this. (I’m forced to admit that the part describing the dragon-hatching was interesting from a professional perspective, but it really could have done without all the self-pity.)

  FIVE

  A Good Story12

  A very long time ago and half the world away, a little boy named Ylfing13 went fishing with his friend Finne. Finne had the most beautiful eyes of anyone in the village, Ylfing14 thought, and lips as pink as flower petals, and hair as buttery yellow as the topaz in the ring Ylfing’s mother wore.

  The fish were slow to bite that morning, so Finne said, “There is an old man come to the village out of the hills. Have you met him?”

  “No,” Ylfing said. “I didn’t know about him. A trader?”

  “A strange trader, if he’s that.”

  “Does he buy or sell?”

  “Both, but all he’s interested in are stories. He said that for a place at a fireside, he’ll weave you tales of faraway lands and heroes you’ve never heard of. Fill his belly and he’ll fill your ears all evening.” They were quiet for a time, and they caught several fish each before either of them spoke again.

  “Is he good?” Ylfing15 asked, because the Hrefni have an eye for skill.

  Finne nodded seriously, looking at the water, and said, “I think he may be the best that anyone has ever seen.”

  And he was. By all the heroes, he was.

  He was a master-Chant, and he didn’t seem to have any other name. Ylfing heard him telling stories, and he took to following Chant through the village whenever he had a chance. He barely spoke to Chant at first, just watched, rapt, and listened to Chant talking to the others, asking for stories and trading his own in return.

  And on one glorious shining night of summer, a few weeks later, when the sky got no darker than twilight, Chant turned to Ylfing and said, “I’ll be leaving soon.”

  He said, “You listen well.”

  He said, “I heard that you told a few of my stories to your friends.”

  He said, “You’re special.”

  He said, “Would you like to come along with me as my apprentice and see all the wonders of the world?”16

  And Ylfing found that he would like that very much.

  “It isn’t easy,” Chant told him. “And it’s not like your life is here—we’ll be each other’s only family,17 and we’ll move from place to place.”

  So he went to his friend Finne, and Ylfing told him, “The Chant wants me to be his apprentice. I’m going away.”

  “Goodness,” said Finne, his eyes shining. He didn’t understand how far away Ylfing was going, but neither did Ylfing. “An apprenticeship to him! You’ll learn all his stories?”

  “I will,” said Ylfing.

  “Good,” said Finne. “When you come back, you’ll be the best anyone has ever seen. You’ll probably be taken to every Jarlsmoot, and you’ll be named the chief skald every time.”

  “But first I must learn,” Ylfing said.

  So he left.

  He was young, he was stupid, he was kind and affectionate, and he thought everyone else in the world must be the same way he was, more or less. He thought Chant was the same way.18

  * * *

  12. For my own reference—the title recalls the last line of the previous section: “My Chant said many times that it doesn’t matter whether something happened that way in real life, as long as it’s truer than truth, as long as the story is good. See, that’s my problem. I tried to tell you a happy story instead of a good story. Let me try again.” I’ll bet five guilders that this isn’t a good story either.

  13. Must you?

  14. STOP.

  15. I swear to all the gods, every time . . . You know what this is like? It’s like someone flashing their naked body at me for cheap titillation. That’s what this feels like. I’ve gone back and scratched every instance of that name, like I’m throwing my cloak over the naked person so nobody else has to be embarrassed. You should be ashamed of yourself.

  16. Wait, this isn’t clear—how was all that handled? Did your master talk to your parents at all? I have a haunting suspicion that he just stole you away in the night, and I really hope I’m wrong about that. That would be appalling, and . . . ultimately, unsurprising. Though it does cast an entirely new light on the way things ended between you.

  17. Deeply unsettling.

  18. Deeply, deeply unsettling.

  SIX19

  * * *

  19. This section was also summarily thrown into the fire—you wouldn’t mind that, though, would you? You were going to burn them yourself. It needed to be burnt, anyway; it was too depressing for words. That passage about how you woke up, a lone Chant for the first time, and began walking until you came to the first crossroads, whereupon you sat down and sobbed for an hour because you couldn’t decide which way to go? Unbearable. I couldn’t bear it. Might as well have slapped a title like “Nobody Loves Me” on it, you pathetic wretch. And by the pillars of the world, boy, it was like you didn’t even notice that cart driver that passed was trying to help you—you could have hitched a ride and had company. But no, you take the other path to avoid the one person you met on the road and you mutter stories to the wind to make yourself feel better, as if writing them down wasn’t bad enough. What other heresies are you going to confess to?

  SEVEN

  Enough!

  I’m starting over! I’m sick of myself! Here’s the only part that matters: I wandered for about a year and a half after I parted with Chant, and I kept to myself as much as I coul
d on the road and hated every time I had to tell a story to someone else. I wanted something that belonged to me, and the stories were all I had. But I have to eat, and I don’t carry coin.

  Enough of wallowing20 in the past. I’m in Heyrland now.21 I arrived three months ago. Heyrland is a city-state on a tiny, swampy peninsula off one corner of Vinte, across the channel from Avaris. They’ve built dikes all around, to keep out the sea when the new moons bring the king-tides every solstice and equinox, and they dug channels and canals all through the city to drain the water out of the swamp and make the ground dry enough to build on. I expected it to be smelly, but it’s not nearly as bad as I imagined—it just smells of water and salt and, faintly, dead fish. No worse than the seaside is, and much better than most other cities, where the filth just gets thrown into the street. The streets themselves are clean—people wash them every day, and they’re all neatly paved with bricks or cobblestones, even in the poorer parts of the city. I see servants scrubbing the front steps of the houses, polishing even the hinges on the doors, and the dikes and canals are just as meticulously maintained—they take care of their city.

  The houses are all crammed so close together that there’s not even alleys between them. Only the very wealthy folk have gardens. But there are plants and flowers everywhere—even the poorest houses have window boxes of herbs for the kitchen, and others have ones with flowers dense and bright. There are clay pots on every balcony with hanging vines, and there are trees by some of the canals.

  I’m tired of wandering. I’m footsore in my heart. Every time I come to a new place, I feel like I’m grasping for something that I can’t quite reach. When I arrived here, I was too exhausted to keep going, so I decided to rest, and here I have been since then, the last few months. I do what I’ve always done, what I learned from Chant: I help with little chores in exchange for a roof over my head and a corner by the hearth where I can sleep, and when I have to, I tell stories to fill my belly.22 It’s simple, I guess. At least, it’s familiar. Safe. It’s what I know how to do.