Excerpt: The Singer of Ice

The ceremony began just before sunset. The courtyard thronged with restless bodies and restless energy. People packed themselves into the space, stumbling over each other, pressed against walls, flooding the walkways, spreading even out through the front gates of the palace and down the road to the first plateau. Those who were not too proud to do so carried their younger ones on their shoulders to give them a better view. The only pools of space were around the palace guards, stationed throughout to prevent chaos or to curb those who might think to use the distraction of the ceremony to perform mischief; such an immense congregation so near the palace and its gardens was a rare occurrence indeed.

Ahmin had found an excellent vantage point in the window of a third-floor guest chamber. The view directly overlooked the courtyard, and the window was large enough to sit in, with a wide flat sill and comfortably rounded edges. Although he was not as close as the nobles at the lip of the crowd, Ahmin did not envy those caught in the mighty press of bodies below. From here he could see easily without being jostled or worse: recognized.

The vantage of the window was too high from the ground for Ahmin’s facial features to be seen clearly — but at any rate such precaution was unnecessary. Every eye in the throng was focused on the mouth of a small cave just to one side of the palace, a dark hole in one of the craggy mountain arms that sheltered the courtyard.

The cave mouth was set above the ground level, and so an approach had been carved into the mountain stone to reach up to it. The approach was oddly split. On the left were carved white stairs, gently ascending, curving off from the side and culminating in a dais at the cave entrance. On the right side of the approach was a canal, a chute cut of the same ubiquitous white stone sliding down into the ground, disappearing under the laid sandstone that adorned the courtyard. At the moment the canal held only the faintest trickle of water, a thin stream that fed all the canals running down the length of the city, joining with underground streams and rivers inside the mountain to fill all the wells from here to the mountain’s base.

The dais in front of the cave was currently occupied. The Teacher, head of the Gehmek Temple, stood entirely motionless, dressed in simple ceremonial white robes and the ridiculously ornate ceremonial hat that had always amused Ahmin. He was facing the interior of the cave. The stillness of him was eerie; with his pale robes he seemed carved out of the very rock of the mountainside, like the dais on which he stood. Ahmin shivered to look at him. The man was the religious leader of the city as well as the keeper of its history, but to Ahmin he had always seemed cold and unwelcoming, rather than the sort of gentle paternal figure his position implied. He was a quiet man, forever turned inwards in prayer and meditation as though it burdened him to notice the world. Whenever the Teacher did lift his gaze to the face of reality, it never seemed to measure up to whatever serene and pious world he found within his own silent contemplation.

The light reflecting in from the desert was orange, swiftly turning pink. The courtyard held its collective breath, the hushed silence complete and frightening from so many at once. Anticipation shivered through the air. Ahmin’s fingers tightened on the edge of the windowsill. As one, hundreds of ears strained to listen, waiting for the sound.

It began as the faintest of threads, barely audible: a strange and wordless music. It could almost be called a melody, except that it was accompanied by discordant and eerie echoes as the sound bounced off the interior of the cave, reflecting back and back and back again from its walls, fracturing into strange chords. One voice — the Singer — in a song that was never the same from year to year, a song that came from inside her and no one else.

The song grew louder as she approached the mouth of the cave. Already Ahmin could see the trickle of water in the canal beginning to expand, widening first into a stream, then from a stream to a river.

The song filled the courtyard, the pure notes and the strange echoes both, as the crowd stood in silent awe. The river became a torrent, water gushing from the cave entrance and raging down the canal in a froth. The Teacher finally interrupted his stillness to reach forward into the cave, offering his assistance.

And there, finally, she was. A murmuring sigh rose like a wind from the courtyard as everyone’s tense breaths were released into the air, but not Ahmin. Ahmin’s breath caught instead, at the beauty of Yesenia.

She was dressed in the same colors Ahmin had worn the previous day, watery blues and foamy light greens. But whereas the dress Ahmin had worn was simple, Yesenia’s outfit was riotous and spectacular. Layer upon layer of fabric crashed and swirled around her like the raging river at her feet, until she appeared borne on the crest of a wave. White flowers dotted her hair like flecks of foam, shining in the quickly-dimming light, held in place by small braids that punctuated the length of her long, flowing dark hair. A small silver coronet, delicate as mist, sat on top of her head, the crown of the Singer. She was nymph-like, an ethereal creature that had stepped from the waves of another world out into this one, mouth open and resounding with song.

One of her hands gripped the Teacher’s tightly as he helped her climb from the mouth of the cave, but this did not stop her singing. As she entered the open courtyard the eerie and discordant echoes fell away from her voice, leaving her notes pure and unadorned. The sound was unnaturally, inhumanly loud, rising to the sky, melodic but immediately slipping from the memory, tones that did not come from a human voice — too crystalline and bell-like to be made by any ordinary living creature.

As the Teacher and Singer emerged fully onto the dais, the Ice began to emerge from the cavern behind them, following like a shadow. Yesenia had told Ahmin once, about the Ice. She said the interior of the cavern was coated with it; sparkling, glittering crystals that covered every wall, ceiling, every surface but the small path on the floor next to the canal. As she sang the crystals of ice would grow larger and larger, pushing into each other like gnashing teeth, growing together until they filled the cave, pushing into the space and closing it up behind her until finally she emerged into the open air, and the Ice emerged with her.

It climbed the stone surface of the mountain like a living thing, like a tide of insects skittering and crawling over the rock. It swept over the mountain with the swiftness of a sandstorm, rising and swarming over the stone, sweeping up the side. Flat planes of glassy Ice coated every surface, encasing the rock, periodically blooming into strange crystalline shapes like sharp flowers that erupted skyward. The crowd gasped and murmured, even those who’d seen the spectacle before, as the Ice enveloped the mountain.

It took barely a minute for the entire peak to be covered, the strange, living Ice overtaking the rock until it had nowhere left to grow. The very last purple-pinks of the setting sun reflected in the Ice, transforming the mountain into a mirror, trapping the sun’s fire inside it and holding the glow, splitting and sharing it, sharding it back out to the viewers.

The song ceased, finally, and the mountain stood cold and silent, full with awe and majesty. In a few moments the stars would come out and the mountain would capture them in its glass, holding a million reflected points of light like a coating of diamonds, glowing blue-white in the light of the moon, breathtaking in its beauty. The whole mountain would be lit from within with a pale glow that glimmered and shone along its surface.

The silence in the courtyard held for a moment longer, then shattered into applause as Gehmek thanked its Singer. The performance was over, although the spectacle of the Ice would last the rest of the night. Many people stayed up all night to witness it, to watch the subtle shifts in its brilliance as the stars wheeled overhead, and to watch it capture the fire of the sun in the morning sunrise before it slowly lost itself in the battle with the new day’s heat.

The Ice coating the mountain was fleeting, a swiftly-melting crystal that would shine for one night and then disappear. But the ice in the cavern would stay, would melt slowly over the course of the year, quenching the thirst of the mountain as it did so.In the morning the guards would roll a heavy stone in front of the cave entrance, sealing off all entry and exit but for the canal. From that opening the water from the cave would spill down into the courtyard, into the gardens, and far down into the city. No one but the Singers knew how deep the cavern went, how large it was and how full the Ice, how many other underground streams left from it to wend down the inside of the mountain. But the desert city of Gehmek had never wanted for water in the year after a Singing. Hopefully it never would.