‘And scare them away from getting involved with the resistance?’ Zoe said.
‘Perhaps,’ said Leonard. ‘That’s why the Council’s telling their version. I like to think my version might do something different – perhaps help people to realise why the resistance is so necessary. All I can do is tell the story. What they do with it is up to them.’
‘If we gave you another story to tell,’ I said, ‘you know it could be dangerous for you.’
‘That’s for us to decide,’ Eva said.
Piper and Zoe didn’t say anything, but Zoe stepped forward to stand beside Piper. Piper took a deep breath, and began to talk.
The bards put down their instruments while they listened. Leonard’s guitar lay on its back across his knees, and as we talked I imagined that it was a box we were filling with our words. We didn’t tell them about my link with Zach, but we told them everything else. We told them about the tanks, each one a glass case filled with terror. The missing children, and the tiny skulls in the grotto beneath the tank room at Wyndham. And the expanding refuges, and the machines that we’d destroyed with The Confessor.
When we’d finished, there was a long silence.
‘There’s good news in there too,’ Leonard said quietly. ‘About The Confessor. We passed near the Sunken Shore last week. She was from round there, they say, so there was a lot of talk about the rumour that she’d been killed. But I hadn’t dared to believe it.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, looking away from him. I didn’t want to see Leonard’s answering smile. He didn’t know the price Kip had paid for this good news. The price I was still paying.
‘And the rest of it – about the tanks. Is it really true?’ said Eva.
Leonard answered her before we could.
‘It’s all true. Hell on earth, it’s too far-fetched to make up.’ He rubbed at his absent eyes. ‘It explains everything. Why the Council’s been driving up the tithes and the land restrictions, these last few years. They’re pushing us toward the refuges.’
‘And do you think you could put it in a song?’ I said.
He reached down to place a hand on the neck of the guitar. ‘There’s a song in your story, that’s for sure, though it won’t be a pretty one,’ he said. He hoisted up the guitar, stroking along the top with his thumb, as if waking it gently.
‘Like Cass said: it’ll be dangerous, spreading the word,’ said Piper.
Leonard nodded. ‘True enough. But it’s dangerous for all of us, if word of the tanks and the refuges doesn’t spread.’
‘It’s a lot to ask of you,’ I said.
‘You’re not asking it of me,’ Leonard said. There was no music left in his voice as he spoke – his words were grave and quiet. ‘But you told me what you know. And now that I’ve heard it, I have an obligation.’
*
For hours, while I took my shift at the lookout post, I could hear Leonard and Eva working on the song. First they built the tune itself. The occasional word reached me: No, try this. Hold off on the chord change until the chorus. How about this? But mainly they didn’t talk. It was a conversation that took place in music. He’d pluck out a tune, and Eva would echo it, then play with it: varying the melody, adding harmonies. For hours they sat together, passing the tune back and forth between them.
Even when Eva had settled down to rest, Leonard kept working, adding the words now. He sang slowly, trying out different versions of the words. He was stringing them onto the growing melody like beads on a string, sometimes unthreading and rearranging. When Piper relieved me at the lookout post, I fell asleep listening to Leonard’s singing, the gravelled edge of his deep voice.
When I woke later, the moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Leonard was still playing. I walked down to the spring. The music followed me all the way to the water, which might be why Zoe didn’t hear me coming. I saw her standing close to where the stream burst from the rock, about twenty feet ahead of me. She was leaning against a tree, one arm wrapped loosely around it, her head resting on the trunk as she tilted her face upwards. She swayed slightly to the music that filtered through the trees. Her eyes were closed.
I’d seen Zoe naked, when we washed at rivers. I’d seen her asleep. I’d even shared her dreams, her sleeping mind a window onto the sea. But I’d never seen her as unguarded as at that moment. I turned away, as if I’d seen something shameful, and began to retreat. She opened her eyes.
‘Are you spying on me?’
‘Just fetching water,’ I said, lifting the empty water flask like a flag of surrender.
She turned back to the spring. When she spoke, she didn’t look at me. ‘There used to be a bard who came through our parents’ village, a few times a year. She played the violin like nobody you’ve ever seen. Piper and I were only tiny, then – we used to sneak out after bedtime to listen.’
She said nothing more. I hesitated before speaking – I was remembering her blade at my stomach, after she’d learned that I’d seen her dreams.
‘If you want to talk –’ I said, eventually.
‘You’re meant to be the expert on the future,’ she interrupted, striding towards me and grabbing the flask. ‘Concentrate on that. That’s what we need you for. Keep your nose out of my past.’ She knelt at the spring and wrenched the stopper out before filling the flask.
We stood facing each other. I watched the water drip from her wet hand, and I tried to come up with words that she couldn’t throw back at me.
Before I could speak, the music stopped suddenly. From up the hill, Piper was calling to us. Zoe strode past me and didn’t look back.
‘The song’s not finished yet,’ Leonard warned us, when we were gathered around him and Eva. A fog had descended with the darkness, and Piper had rekindled the fire. ‘It’ll change, too,’ he added, ‘as we travel, and as other bards take it up. If a song’s alive enough, it changes.’ I remembered the different versions of songs that I’d heard. The song about the blast, which changed from bard to bard, or from season to season.
Leonard began quietly, his fingers strumming a series of almost cheerful chords on the guitar. There was none of the intricate fingerpicking that had impressed me when he’d performed for us earlier. ‘I’ve kept it simple,’ he said, as if he could see me staring at his fingers. ‘If you want it to catch on, it has to be something that any bard could play, without fifteen fingers.’
As the tune went on, melancholy notes were slipped in like contraband, so that by the time they reached the chorus, the tune had soured. Eva’s melody parted from Leonard’s, her voice climbing to new and mournful highs, as his stayed steady and low. Their voices counterbalanced and resonated, until the space in between the notes was thick with longing.
There’s no refuge in the refuge,
No peace behind those gates.
No freedom once you turn to them
Just living death, where the tanks await.
They throw you in a cage of glass
Not living, and not dying.
Trapped inside a floating hell
Where none can hear you crying.
Oh, you’ll never be hungry, you’ll never be thirsty
And the Council’s tanks will have no mercy.