Seeklight

Daenek retraced his steps until he was standing just before the mertzer again. “He wasn’t a traitor?” he asked the silent figure. “My father?”

The mertzer opened his eyes and looked at Daenek for several seconds. “No,” he said. “Traitors they who call your father a traitor.”

“Did you know him?”

A small, bitter laugh. “I was only one of his followers. I even signed aboard the caravans, became a mertzer, so I could tell people in every village I came to about your father’s plans. You see,” he leaned forward and looked up at Daenek, “even back then it could be seen how things were going. Things breaking down and not being repaired, people running out of—whatever it is that you hold onto your life with. Will, perhaps it’s called. But I thought the thane, your father, would change all that.”

“How could he do that?” Daenek squatted down in front of the mertzer. All this sudden knowledge was making him feel dizzy—like suddenly finding yourself at the edge of a precipice you hadn’t seen.

Another laugh. “I never even really knew,” said the mertzer.

“Or what little I did know isn’t worth telling now. Just a few fragments of a memory, with enough edge left on it to draw blood.” He fell silent, his eyes seeing nothing but some inner scene, filled with regret and pain.

A storm of questions surged up inside Daenek, each seeming to strain at the confines of his chest and throat. He wanted to ask more about the thane—what his father had looked like, what words of his could be remembered—but didn’t, as he studied the mertzer’s lowered head. Instead, he bent down to intercept the mertzer’s line of vision, and asked: “What did that song mean?

What do the words say?”

“What?” The mertzer looked up. “Song? Oh… that one. It’s about leaving. Being in strange places by yourself—Why do you ask? You know the words to it.”

“But not what they mean.”

The mertzer looked at Daenek in puzzlement, that finally broke into comprehension. “You are your father’s son,” he said.

“Nobody’s ever taught you anything but this whining stone-cutter’s tongue, yet…” He pulled Daenek closer to him.

“How many times have you heard that song before? Once?”

Daenek nodded.

“Listen.” The mertzer sang a line of the song, in a high, sad-tinged voice, then dropped to his usual bass. “That means, Not a friend in the whole wide world.” Another line in the same tone as the first. “Now, what does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” But Daenek sensed a small, microscopic event in his head, like the cracking of a seed’s hull. “Something… something that also isn’t.”

“And nobody knows my name,” translated the mertzer.

Daenek listened as he sang the entire song, pausing after every line to give the words’ meanings. Every word that Daenek had held for so long intact within himself now swelled with radiance.

He would never forget the song.

“Now,” said the mertzer, “what does this say?” He recited another line, slower, one that Daenek had never heard before.

Gaps… there weren’t enough words yet. But still, some of the words the mertzer had explained from the song—they sounded, no, felt like these. “Oceans,” said Daenek. “An ocean that isn’t there?” He shook his head in confusion. What could that possibly mean?”

“The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” The mertzer reached over to his pack and took up one of the tattered books.

The yellowed pages fluttered under his thumb until he stopped midway through the volume. He began to read, the other language’s words exact and powerful sounding.

For Daenek it was like seeing some vast, mysterious object through a dense fog that at times thinned or vanished entirely.

The mertzer would turn the pages back and forth in his hands, then stop and read another section aloud. Sometimes his eyes closed for several seconds, but the deep voice continued.

Silence in the little room at last, and the mertzer handed the book to Daenek. “Take it,” he said. “Learn to read it.”

“It’s so big.” Daenek weighed it in his hands. “It’ll take me forever to know all these words.”

“No.” The mertzer lightly touched the boy’s forehead with his finger. “A day, perhaps. You have a thane’s gift for languages.”

He paused for a moment, searching for an explanation. “You see, there’s a language underneath all languages, and when we’re infants a part of us knows that language and can suck out the meanings and ways of any human tongue as though it were air.

But the part dies a few years after our births, except for thanes.