Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [79]
“We could ride out to the countryside?”
“I don’t dare leave the dun, either. Of course, if a thunderstorm or suchlike should come up, we could make all the noise we wanted up here without anyone being the wiser.”
Rhodry looked up at the clear and sunny sky.
“Not likely, is it?” he said.
Jill merely smiled.
Some little while before sunset the storm hit. Rhodry was walking across the ward when he felt the wind, whistling up cool and sharp from the west. He trotted over to the outer wall, scrambled up to a catwalk, and watched the sky from this perch with a view free of the encircling dun. Far off to the west the sun was sinking in a huge billow of black cloud, rising above hill and forest and sweeping toward Cengarn. Often out on the grasslands he’d seen storms like this, charging unobstructed over the plains, but never in hill country. The clouds headed for the town so purposefully that for a moment he feared some vast and unnatural fire; then he remembered Jill, and her smile.
Just as the sky was darkening over, and the wind was turning damp, Jill hailed him from the ward below. It was time, he supposed, for his lesson. When he climbed down, she remarked as much.
“If there’s lightning with this storm,” he said, “we’d best not go up on the tower roof again.”
“Oh, we’ll be safe enough.”
Up on the high tower the wind hissed and whistled round them. Off to the west Rhodry could see the occasional flash, and tardy thunder rolled their way. Down below servants and warriors rushed back and forth, getting horses into the stables, dragging firewood under overhangs, dashing at last for shelter themselves as the first fat drops of rain hit. Rhodry felt one splash on his cheek, then nothing, even when it began to rain steadily all round. When Jill laughed at his surprise, he realized something that his memories of her and their love affair had kept him from seeing until this moment, that she had changed far beyond the woman he once had loved, so far that whether she was a beauty or a crone, or even whether she was male or female, simply no longer mattered. She stood beyond such things, a consciousness that used flesh for her own purposes rather than being bound by flesh, and one that held power over far more than her own flesh.
In a wash of blue glare lightning struck close; thunder boomed and rolled round the dun; she laughed with a toss of her head. Rain poured down like a silver curtain, sheltering them from casual sight, leaving the spot where they stood bone-dry. All at once he was frightened of her. Against the hiss of rain she raised her voice to be heard.
“Remember what I was telling you earlier?’
He nodded yes.
“Listen to me, then. This sound means naught, by the way. It’s just a sound, not a dweomer call.”
He was glad that she’d told him. She breathed out a long “ah” sound, such as a bard will use to cover a word he’s forgotten, but the sound was neither spoken nor sung, more like a hum, perhaps, but strong and deep, resounding from her very soul, as she had said, quivering like a live thing, if indeed a sound can be said to live, vibrating like a harpful of strings. It took a long time to die away, even on the wet, heavy air.
“Try it.”
“Oh, here, I could never do that.”
“I think you can, Rhodry. For reasons I can’t tell you, mind, but I think you can. There’s more music in your soul than you might know.”
At first he felt embarrassed, as if he’d become some sort of half-wit, standing on a roof and bellowing. Yet for her sake he tried, over and over, making all sorts of yells and hisses and a couple of truly foul remarks as well until all of a sudden something came clear without his truly knowing how it did, just as when a child learns to whip a top, flailing away too lightly, then too forcefully, until suddenly the thing spins. He felt the sound well up deep, seemingly of its own accord, and flood through and out of him, shaking his entire body. Once learned, he knew he would never forget— again, just like that child.
“Splendid!” Jill said, grinning. “You’ve got it. Now