Chapter 43: The Humming Stone

Damar brought it up out of the harbor himself.

Nobody asked him to. He came through the Westmere gate at noon, the day after the ships left, in his dusty boots, with his great arms folded and his beard full of grit, and stood on the end of the north pier for a long time with his eyes shut, listening. Then he said, "Ah," in a voice that made the pilings hum, and walked down the steps at the end of the pier, and kept walking.

Into the water. Down. The way you'd walk down a staircase into a cellar. The gray harbor closed over his head without a ripple, and half of Westmere stood along the wall with their mouths open, and Tamar said a word I won't write down.

"Safe passage beneath the ground," said Eleanor, beside me, pushing her spectacles up her nose. "It's one of his. The bottom of a harbor is ground. Just wet."

He came back up a quarter of an hour later, at the same steps, dripping, with mud to his knees and weed in his beard. He had the stone in his arms, held against his chest, the way you'd carry a sleeping child.

"It didn't want to come," he said. "It liked it down there. Quiet. Lots to listen to." He looked down at it. "I asked it. It said all right."

* * *

They set it up in the lower court of Westmere Hold, on a trestle of oak, under the arch where the gate comes out.

It was exactly as I'd felt it through the piling. Black. Smooth as river glass. Round as an egg and about the size of a man's head, with no mark on it anywhere, no seam, no chip, no letter. When you put your hand near it, you could feel it hum. Not loud. Under the edge of hearing, the way you feel a cat purring through a blanket. Low and steady and patient.

And the Hold was silent.

That was the thing everyone in Westmere kept noticing. For as long as anyone could remember, the Hold had hummed in the stones under the town, warm and low, and now it didn't. It wasn't hurt. Damar put his hand flat on the floor of the lower court and listened for a long time and said it wasn't hurt. It was just quiet. The way a person goes quiet when someone else in the room starts talking, and they want to hear what's said.

"It's listening to the stone," said Damar. "Same as the stone's listening to us."

Davren came through the gate an hour after that, with two leather cases of instruments and a look of tremendous excitement badly disguised as professional concern. Cassia came behind him, carrying a third case and a basket of lunch, and looking as though she had come entirely to make sure he ate it.

For the rest of the afternoon, he and Eleanor took that stone apart without touching it.

I'd never watched the two of them work together before. Eleanor is an architect. She thinks in walls, and doors, and wards, and the shapes of the things that hold a building up. Davren is an engineer. He thinks in gears, and wheels, and the shapes of the things that make other things move. Between the two of them, there wasn't much left of the stone by suppertime that they didn't understand.

They held a tuning fork beside it, and the stone's hum changed to match it. They spoke beside it, softly, and then louder, and Davren put a brass horn to the surface and listened through it, and said the hum moved when they talked. Not with the words. With the shape of them. Like water moving around a stone in a stream.

"It's an ear," said Davren. He sat back on his heels with the brass horn in his lap and looked at the stone with the expression of a man who has just met a machine better than any he has ever built. "That's all it is. It's an ear. A very, very good one."

"Whose?" said Tamar.

Nobody answered him.

* * *

Then Eleanor floated it.

It was Cassia's idea, actually. She'd been sitting on the step of the lower court all afternoon with her lunch basket, not looking impressed, and when Davren and Eleanor had been arguing about which direction it was pulling for half an hour, she'd said, without looking up, "Put it in a tub and see which way it turns. Like a lodestone. That's what sailors do."

Davren looked at her.

"That's brilliant," he said.

"It's obvious," said Cassia.

So they got a washtub from Tamar's kitchen, the biggest one, and filled it with harbor water, and set a round wooden platter floating in the middle of it, and Damar set the stone on the platter, very gently, with both hands.

It turned.

Slowly. Steadily. The way a lodestone turns on a string. Around and around, a little past and a little back, settling, until the platter was quite still in the water, and the smooth black egg sat on it pointing, as clearly as if someone had painted an arrow on it, out through the open arch of the lower court, across the harbor, past the end of the mole, toward the open sea.

West. And a little south.

Davren had his brass instruments out before it had stopped moving. A compass. A sighting-rod. A set of folding brass arms with numbers cut into them. He took the bearing three times, and then a fourth, and then sat back on his heels and looked at Eleanor.

She'd been doing the same thing in her head. I could see it.

"Severin's silk map," she said quietly. "In the map room. If you lay that bearing on the floor from Westmere..."

"The golden city," said Davren. "On the great western bay."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

"So it's listening to us," said Tamar slowly. "And telling them."

"I don't think so," said Damar.

Everyone turned to look at him. He was standing beside the washtub with his great arms folded, looking down at the stone on its floating platter, and he had a strange expression on his face. Not worried. Puzzled. The face of a god who can hear stone, listening to a stone that isn't saying what he expected.

"It isn't sending," he said. "It's only listening. It doesn't carry anything back. There's nothing going west out of it. Nothing at all." He frowned. "It's pointing at something. Not talking to it."

"Then what's it pointing at?" said Eleanor.

"I don't know." Damar shook his head slowly. "It's far. Very far. Past where I can hear. But it isn't the city." He paused. "It's smaller than the city. And it's lonely. The stone's lonely for it, the way a dog's lonely for a person who's gone away." He looked up. "Whatever it was made to listen for, it hasn't heard it in a long time."

I thought of Hobb, sitting in his mother's kitchen with his soup. We've left something in the harbor. For listening. I thought of the Lockwarden, who'd been so lonely he'd kept a dockworker for twenty-four nights just to have someone to say evening to.

"He left it for us," I said.

They all looked at me.

"The Lockwarden," I said. "He told Hobb to tell the steward. For listening. Not for spying. For listening." I looked at the stone, turning very slightly on its platter, always coming back to point at the same place past the end of the mole. "He was lonely. He knew what it was to want something to listen for. I think he left us something that does."

Eleanor looked at me for a long time over the top of her spectacles.

"Then the question," she said, "is what it's listening for."

* * *

Aurelia came at dusk.

She'd heard about the stone from Tamar's courier and come through the gate to see it, barefoot, in her plain white dress, with the light coming off her very softly in the gray of the evening. She stood beside the washtub for a long time with her hands folded, looking at the smooth black egg on its floating platter, turning and turning and always settling back to point past the mole.

"Oh," she said quietly. "Oh, you poor thing."

"You know what it is?" said Eleanor.

"No." Aurelia shook her head. "But I know what it feels like. It feels like a candle in a window for someone who hasn't come home." She looked at Damar. "You're right. It's lonely."

We were standing like that, all of us, around the washtub in the lower court in the last of the light, when the singing started.

It came from the harbor. Faint at first, over the slap of the water and the cry of the gulls going home. A man's voice. Not a very good one. Rough, and cheerful, and a little off-key, the way a voice is when it's been used for a great deal of singing out of doors in a great deal of weather and has never once been trained. Coming in across the water from somewhere out past the end of the north pier.

I didn't know the words. It was an old song. A marching song, maybe, or a song for a long road. It went up at the end of every line, and came down again, and went on.

But Aurelia knew it.

I saw her know it. I've never seen anything go through anyone the way that song went through her. She'd been standing beside the washtub with her hands folded and the light soft around her, and the first line came in over the water, and she went absolutely still. Every bit of her. The light stopped moving. Her hands came apart. Her face went white, and then not white, and then something I can't describe at all.

"No," she said.

Then she was gone.

Not by lightning, the way Father goes. Not by a fold. She just ran. Out of the lower court and under the arch and down the water stair and out along the top of the harbor wall, barefoot, in her white dress, with her hair coming loose and the light streaming off her like a torch in the dusk, faster than I'd ever seen anyone run. And we all stood in the lower court for one stupid stunned heartbeat, and then we ran after her.

* * *

There was a little coaster coming in past the end of the mole. A two-masted trading boat from Orselle, with blue-glass lanterns at her bow and her sails half down and a deck stacked with crates. The kind that runs up and down the coast all year with lamp oil and glass and salt and anything else that'll pay. Tamar knew her. He said her name as we ran. The Gannet. Out of Orselle. Every second week.

And standing on the very point of her bow, with one hand on the forestay and the other cupped to his mouth, singing that rough cheerful off-key song at the top of his lungs across the harbor at the town, was a man.

He wasn't tall. He wasn't broad. He was brown as a walnut from sun and wind, with gray in his short dark beard and lines around his eyes from squinting at horizons, in a sailor's coat gone white at the seams with salt and a pair of very old, very good boots. He looked about forty. He looked like a man who had spent a long time going exactly wherever he liked.

He had my father's face.

Not exactly. Not the eyes, or the jaw. But something underneath them. The way he stood. The way he tipped his head back to sing. The thing in my father's face that you can't name, that makes people who've just met him think they've known him all their lives.

The coaster swung in toward the north pier. The man on the bow stopped singing, mid-line, and looked along the harbor wall at the white figure running toward him in the dusk with light pouring off her like a lantern.

And I saw his face change.

He let go of the forestay. He didn't wait for the boat to come alongside. He didn't wait for anything. When the bow of The Gannet was still six feet off the end of the pier, he stepped up onto the rail and jumped, and landed on the tarred boards running, and kept running, down the long pier toward the harbor wall.

They met at the foot of the pier.

I've thought a lot about how to write what happened next. I don't think I can. I'll just say that Aurelia, my great-great-grandmother, the goddess of forgiveness and compassion and healing, to whom every doctor and nurse and midwife in the kingdoms prays, who has never once raised her voice in Council and never once wept in front of anyone until Teo, stopped running a pace in front of that sun-browned man in his salt-white coat, and put both her hands on either side of his face. And looked at him. And didn't say anything. And then put her forehead against his chest, and held on, and the light that came off her went up into the dusk over Westmere harbor so bright and so gold that every gull on the wall went up at once, and the fishermen on the quay put their hands over their eyes, and somewhere up on the hill behind us, I heard a bell start to ring in the chapel all on its own.

And the man held her, and put his weathered cheek against her hair, and said, quite quietly, in a voice that was rough from singing:

"Hello, Mother."

* * *

His name is Benjamin.

I'd always known that, the way you know the names in the old stories. My little brother Elenos carries it in the middle of his name, Elenos Benjamin Grey, because Mother wanted to give it back to the family. But I'd never met him. Not properly. I'd been three, at the very end of the war, when Aurelia found him on an island at the edge of the world behind a door he'd held shut for two hundred and twenty-two years. I remembered a thin, white, frightened man who couldn't walk without help, sitting in the window seat of the east wing with a blanket over his knees, singing very softly to himself. Then I remembered him gone.

Aurelia's son. My father's grandfather. My great-grandfather.

He was nineteen when Greykeep fell, and he held a door so that his wife and children could get through a passage to safety, and then he held another one, alone, on an island, for two hundred and twenty-two years, because a cold voice told him that if he let go, they'd be followed. He carved a line in the wall beside the window for every winter. He sang the soldiers' song every night, so that somewhere, someone might hear it and know which way to walk home.

And then the war ended, and he came home. And he got well. Slowly. Aurelia healed what she could, and the rest he healed himself, the way you heal from anything: one day at a time, in the sun.

And then, one spring morning when I was about five, he packed a bag and left.

"I couldn't stay," he said that evening, in Tamar's kitchen, with Aurelia beside him on the bench holding his hand as though she would never, ever let go of it again, and the whole of the kitchen crowded around the table listening. "Not in a castle. Not behind walls. Not anywhere with a door." He turned his cup in his weathered hands. "I'd spent two hundred and twenty-two years in a stone house on a rock, looking at one window. I'd never seen Orselle. I'd never seen the sea, except through that window. I'd never seen the southern kingdoms or the eastern mountains or the salt marshes or the great forests in the north. I'd never been anywhere I didn't have to stay." He looked at his mother. "I wanted to see every corner of the continent. Every one. I wanted to walk until I'd walked off the edge of everything I'd ever been afraid of."

"You wrote," said Aurelia. Her voice was not steady.

"I wrote every month. Every one. From everywhere." He smiled at her. It was my father's smile. "Did you get them?"

"Every one," said Aurelia. "I kept every one. In a box. Under my bed." She closed her eyes. "Benjamin, I didn't know where you were. I'd get a letter from Orselle, and then nothing for a month, and then one from a salt-marsh town in the far south that nobody's ever heard of, and then one from a mountain."

"I know." He squeezed her hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where I was either, most of the time. That was rather the point." He looked around the crowded kitchen, at Tamar and Edric and Eleanor and Davren and Cassia and Damar and me. "But I was in Orselle a week ago, and a sailor came in off a grain ship from the north, and told a story in a tavern about sixty black ships off Westmere that sang at sunset." His face changed. "And I thought, that's my grandson's harbor. And I came."

He turned and looked at me across the table. His eyes were very bright in his sun-browned face.

"You're Garrick," he said. "The twin. The one who folds." He smiled. "You were five when I left. You used to fold my spoons into the soup."

"I don't remember," I said.

"I do." He grinned. "I remember everything. Two hundred and twenty-two years of nothing to do but remember, and it turns out you get very good at it." He looked at Eleanor. "Now. Somebody tell me about this stone. The tavern in Orselle was very short on detail."

* * *

We took him down to the lower court by lantern light.

He stood beside the washtub for a long time, the way Aurelia had, with his weathered hands in the pockets of his salt-white coat, looking down at the smooth black egg turning slowly on its platter. Pointing past the mole. West, and a little south. Always.

"It's an ear," said Davren. "That's all we know. It listens. It doesn't speak. It points at something a long way off, and Damar says it's lonely."

"It is," said Benjamin.

He said it so simply that everyone turned to look at him.

"I know that feeling," he said. He didn't look up from the stone. "Something that's been made to listen for one voice. Only one. Every night. Through a door. For years." He was quiet for a moment. "You get so you can hear it even when it isn't there. You listen so hard you forget how to do anything else." He crouched down beside the tub, so that his face was level with the floating stone. "That's what this is. It's not a spy. It's a door with an ear pressed to it. Waiting for someone on the other side to say something."

"Who?" said Tamar.

"I don't know," said Benjamin. "But I know how you find out."

He looked up at Aurelia.

"When I was on the island," he said, "I didn't know if anyone could hear me. I didn't know if anyone was on the other side of anything at all. I just knew that if there was, and they were listening, they'd need something to listen to." He smiled a little. "So I sang."

Aurelia's hand went to her mouth.

Benjamin leaned forward over the washtub, with his rough sailor's hands on the rim, until his mouth was a few inches from the smooth black stone. And he sang.

Very softly. Not the way he'd sung on the bow of The Gannet, loud and cheerful across the harbor. Quietly. The way you'd sing to a child who can't sleep. The soldiers' song. The one he'd sung every night for two hundred and twenty-two years on an island at the edge of the world, so that somewhere, someone might hear it and know which way to walk home.

It went up at the end of every line. And came down again. And went on.

The stone stopped humming.

Everybody in the lower court felt it. The faint purr under the edge of hearing simply stopped, the way a cat stops purring when it hears a sound it knows. The platter went perfectly still in the water. The whole of Westmere Hold, under our feet, went still with it.

Benjamin sang the second verse. Then the third.

And at the end of the third verse, very faint, so faint that afterward half of us weren't sure we'd heard it at all, something came back.

Not from the stone. Through it. The way you hear a voice through a wall. A woman's voice. Far, far away. Thin as a thread. Humming. The same tune. The soldiers' song. Going up at the end of the line, and coming down again.

Damar made a sound like a rockfall.

Benjamin stopped singing. He didn't move. He stayed crouched beside the washtub with his hands on the rim, very still, with the lantern light on his weathered face.

"Hello," he said. Quietly. To the stone. "My name is Benjamin. I'm standing in a harbor called Westmere. It's dark, and there are a great many people here who would very much like to know who you are." He paused. "You don't have to tell us. You can say no."

For a long time, nothing.

Then the voice again. Fainter. As if it were very tired, or very far, or both. Not humming now. Words. In Kethran, with long vowels and soft consonants, and then, haltingly, in our tongue, as if it were remembering how.

"...Westmere?"

"Westmere," said Benjamin.

"I know that song," said the voice. "I heard it, a long time ago. Every night, for years. From the north, across the water, very faint. I never knew who was singing."

Benjamin closed his eyes.

A long pause. Then something that might have been a laugh, or might have been someone crying.

"I used to light a lamp on your pier," said the voice. "Once. For a little while. To tell you something."

Aurelia had gone to her knees beside the washtub. Her face was wet in the lantern light.

"Selvane," she whispered.

The voice was silent for a long moment.

"...Yes," it said. "Who's there? Who's asking?"

Aurelia put both her hands on the rim of the tub, beside her son's.

"Aurelia," she said. "It's Aurelia, Selvane. We've been looking for you. We lit a candle for you, in the chapel. We said, wherever you are. Whoever's holding you."

Silence. The stone sat perfectly still on its platter, pointing west.

"Nobody's holding me," said Selvane at last. Very faint. Very tired. And, under the tiredness, something else. Something I'd heard in Iselle's voice on the harbor wall that morning, when she said he took off his gloves.

Something that sounded very much like hope.

"Nobody's holding me anymore," she said. "I'm hiding. I've been hiding for a very long time." A breath. "Someone gave me back a little of my harbor. Just a little. A gray man with a key, who said he was tired of locking things." Another breath. "He said if I sang, someone might answer."

Benjamin bowed his head over the washtub.

"Someone did," he said.