Once upon a time there was a boy named Eridanis. He lived with an old woman in a house by the Singing River. That was what everyone called it because late at night, if you lay very quiet in your bed, you could hear voices singing from the water. They would sing Eridanis to sleep every night.
The old woman would tell him stories all the time. "The end of the river is where all your dreams go, and that's where the Magic is!" she told him.
The end of the river....
The Singing River? he wondered...?
Boats made of bark and leaves he would send down the river. One of them would reach the end, he told himself wistfully as he watched the leaf sails flutter in the stiff breezes.
One night while he lay in bed listening to the voices from the river, Eridanis imagined that he could hear them calling to him; and so he crept out of bed. It was pitch dark, and all the candles and coals had long since gone out. He didn't want to wake up the old woman anyway. The moon was bright enough for him to see by and so he pushed back his blankets and opened the door and stepped outside.
The moon was so bright that it was like a night-time sun. He stood there for a moment, entranced. There were no shadows, only light...and darker light. The moon made a silver path for him, and the voices from the Singing River called; so he answered. He started down towards the riverbank. It was not far from the house, and when he stood at the edge, he imagined it to be a silver highway. Moonlight glinted off the surface of the water and danced to the music of the Singing River. He wanted to join them suddenly. Without thinking, Eridanis stepped out to the water, not caring that it was winter and he wore very little. Something about the moon and the water beckoned him and he could not resist.
He stepped out. Instead of making little splashes and feeling the numbing cold of the river race up his legs, he instead found himself standing upon the surface of the water.
The river laughed. "Silly boy!" it sang to him, but not derisively. Gentle, just like the voices that whispered to him at night and led him to the dreamlands. He giggled and stepped out farther, then threw his laughter out across the silver surface that was as smooth as glass, as lively as a full ballroom. The sound of his voice rang out across the water, but went no further than that.
He was not frightened, because it just felt...right. "Who are you?" he asked the voices of the Singing River, and more laughter answered his question.
"Who? Silly boy!" came the answer again. "You should know." The light from the moon danced in a million sparks across the surface of the water and dazzled his eyes
And he blinked...and found the sunlight streaming into the one little room in the house he lived in with the old woman. He sat up from the bed, uncertain. "Do you plan to lie there all day?" Ratha scolded him as she bustled in with the morning fresh in her every move and an exuberance unusual for her age.
Eridanis blinked again and rose from the bed, and the day continued much like any other day. For a time, he forgot about the strange magic of the previous night when he had gone out to answer the river. But when night fell once more and sleep had almost overtaken him, the call of the Singing River beckoned to him again, and he could not resist. Once again he left the warmth of his bed and wandered out into the early winter chill. Even this far south, winter was not powerless in this land.
Days passed. Every night when Ratha was sound asleep, when the crickets began their accompaniment to the music of the night, when the river began to hum, Eridanis would answer the call of his river. His river. That was how he came to think of it, for no one else answered its call like he did. He knew because...the river had told him that it was lonely. Not in so many words. But that was what the songs of the Singing River had told him. "They take my dreams, and they live each night, cradled in the worlds I give them.... And then they wake and forget it all...." the river had told him sadly. "But I don't forget. They're mine forever. They're my stories. Will you listen to them?" And so the river told him hundreds of stories of dreams that other people had once dreamed, and once forgotten.
He promised himself he would never forget.
"Do you know of the Undreamers? They are the ones that the Music does not touch. They are the ones the Magic does not touch. I pity them. Why would anyone not want this Music?" the river would ask him, singing her riddles and whispering her lies that were truths.
And he promised himself that he would never shut out the Music.
Each night, he walked farther out into the river before the dazzle of firefly lights would blind him and he would find himself back in his bed. At first he doubted that his nighttime excursions were real. But after several more times, all doubt vanished.
The river whispered to him, "Never doubt, sweet boy."
Weeks passed. Each night, he went out to the river.
A year.
A year and a day.
The next night, the river did not sing.
Disbelief flashed through him, but strain though he might, there was no music to be heard. The Singing River was silent. Such a desolation filled him that he could not breath for a moment. He had not realized how much that Music meant to him until now. The moon was full when he ran out, and the fact that no tingle raced down his spine where those silver rays touched him was enough to send a million more frantic fears racing through his soul.
Eridanis stepped out onto the surface of the water, but even before he had done so, he knew what would happen. The water splashed up all around him, wetting him to the waist, for in his urgency, he had dashed far into the river. He stood there a moment, listening, but there was no sound other than the normal burble of a running river. The water parted around him, and it was just Water. He cried salt tears into the fresh water, and though he did not notice it, each tear turned to a drop of gold as it touched the surface of the river and sank below. He cried for something lost, something that he could not even name.
The river was silent. At last his disbelief gave way to practicality. He shivered, for the water was chill, it was late at night, and the even the moon had vanished beneath a thick blanket of clouds. He crawled out of the water, numb to the waist and with hardly any feeling in his fingers and toes, and an empty place somewhere inside. Some of the water on his sleeves froze as he made his way back to the little cabin, and by the time he was safely within the heat-soaking walls of the cabin, his whole body shivered violently.
The noise he made woke Ratha. In an instant, she was on her feet. With clucking noises, she berated Eridanis. "Heavens!!! What were you doing boy?! Wet, in the middle of the night? You look like you took it into your fool head to dive into the Singing River!" He did not answer her, and not only because he did not want to. His teeth chattered to much for him to say anything intelligible at the moment. Ratha bustled about him, taking several towels and rubbing them briskly across his blue skin, and he did what he could as well when she went to coax the lingering embers in the hearth up to a decent flame. "You'll catch your death doing idiot stunts like that, Eri dear. What were you thinking of? Crazy youth..." she muttered to herself.
What indeed? "I...was going to the river. It stopped singing..." he said at last, not sure how to phrase it, for he had never mentioned to her the magic and silver-filled nights. But the old woman had lived along the banks of the Singing River all her life. She knew some of that which he spoke.
"Ah," she said. And that was all.
Things continued as they always had, for the world does not stop for the lost voice of a river. When at last Eridanis came to accept that the singing of the river was gone, at first he felt strangely empty. It was as if that small hole he had felt at first had grown to become a gaping maw in his heart.
It was when he realized that Ratha had given up trying to console him for a loss she did not understand nor even know of (he still did not tell her all), given up scolding him for moping, and instead had begun to look upon him with pity and disgust.... That was when he finally gave himself a mental kick and saw himself from without. He was pitiful. It was that more than anything else that he saw in Ratha's eyes when she watched him, and it was that which jolted him back to the rhythm he had left since that first night when the Singing River had sang a million dreams to him.
One night, he climbed out of bed after he was certain Ratha was sound asleep. He tugged the blanket around his shoulders and slipped outside again. If the river would not sing to him, he would sing to it. And so he sat on the banks and threw his childish voice out across the water. After a while, he went back inside, but he felt a strange release and a lightness.
He pushed himself to smile once again as he went about his daily chores and helped Ratha gather herbs and plants for her to mix each day in preparation for when the villagers came to her in need of medicines. Once again he began to trot with a lively stride as he went to Clover Vale to trade small things to the villagers in exchange for eggs and cheese and other necessities.
And he began to hum to himself sometimes as he went about these things. At first it was unconscious. His mind wove the memories of the strange melodies of the Singing River -- the songs that were not songs -- into his everyday routines. It was not real music, in any way that most people would call music, for it was strange and sometimes discordant, and jarring at times; but it was the music the river had shown him. A little girl heard him one day as he waited for Mistress Zeah to come back with a wheel of bread. She was not much younger than him -- perhaps two years. "Sing it again," she pleaded, and when he looked startled, she laughed.
The laughter was so wonderful and innocent that he could not help but accede to her request. He sang, whispers of her laughter and his own intertwined and an eldritch melody that was beautiful in its simplicity and strange assonance.
When he finished, he found Mistress Zeah behind him, an odd expression on her plump features. She did not move for a moment, like she was frozen in a spell, but at last she felt Eridanis's eyes upon her, and the little girl's, and she snapped from her reverie, smiled, and handed him the bread, "There you go, Eri. Tell Ratha my husband sends his thanks for the salve she gave him for those aches." She watched with a thoughtful look as Eridanis tucked the bread inside a basket and trotted homeward with little Aerian trotting after.
Thereafter, Aerian always tagged onto Eridanis each time he came to the village. At whim, she would ask him to sing for her, and more often than not, he found himself acquiescing. The other villagers would hear his voice wend among them, and many would pause in their labors to listen for a moment. There was something about the youthful voice that tore at their souls. "Ah, Eri has come again," they would say when the first piping notes echoed across the village each day, and smile as they went about their business.
Sometimes, he would catch the gaze of one of the villagers as he sang, and something would glint in their eyes, and he would sing to that spark, draw the Music from it. It was no longer the remembered Music of the river that he sang. Somewhere along the way, while singing to those dozens of sparks and drawing them to himself, he had made a Music of his own.
He sang to the river on occasion.
One time, as he sat on the banks of the Singing River, he opened his eyes after his voice had died away, and he found a small audience from the village. They were spellbound, and he blushed to find them watching him.
He did not deny that he loved the attention, but there was something else as well that kept him singing and that kept the people coming back to him always. After all, they had all heard numerous traveling minstrels and such, for the musicians and troupes loved to travel through this land that never knew the true chill of winter. Clover Vale had heard professionals, renown singers, but never had any so captured them as Eridanis did. For those who heard him, the voice was oddly ethereal and wholly...them.
He was happier than he had ever been, and so was the village, and Ratha smiled to see him so filled with energy each morn. The informal audience he captured when he sang to the river occasionally contained one or more strangers who had somehow heard of Eridanis.
He never noticed, but many of them left very speculative, or filled with a purpose they did not understand, or caught in the web of their memories. But however they felt, all of them left wondering how this boy who had never seen or known them could reach within their souls and draw out -- make them remember the dreams that they themselves had forgotten.
Years passed, and Eridanis wondered one day, when had Aerian become so beautiful?! And Aerian wondered as she watched Eridanis from the corner of her eyes, when had the foolish boy vanished? The villagers laughed and gossiped about the dance Eridanis and Aerian played with one another and laid bets on when something would happen.
He asked her as she helped him gather bloodroot and willow bark for Ratha to make a medicine for Mistress Thierry's son's colds. She blinked in confusion at first, not sure if she had heard him correctly. Eridanis had already started to blush crimson. He stuttered. "I thought maybe if I--"
"Oh, of course I'll marry you, Eri!" she laughed.
"You will?" he asked like an idiot. The relief flooded him, and the laughter reminded him again of how it had been she that first brought out his Music. He laughed with her, picked her up and spun around, too happy to say anything else.
The week they were to wed, the village was filled with activity as everyone labored with preparation. There was laughter and excited chatter everywhere, for a coupling was a time for fun. But Aerian fell ill, and during the three days that she lay in bed, coughing and pale, a dozen others became sick. By the time Aerian died and many others were close to death, it was too late for anyone to escape the dread hand of the sickness. All over the land, the plague raced through, decimating the population. Wails of pain and mourning echoed everywhere. Motherless children were left untended in cribs, lovers wailed as they were bereft of the loved, children died feverish and pale, as did their parents, and all semblance of order had vanished.
And when the fevers had run their course, the survivors picked themselves up to find that half their loved ones had passed over to the other side.
The bodies were burned, the ashes scattered to the four winds. Eridanis helped the other survivors, and he was not ashamed of the tears that ran freely down his cheeks. For Aerian, for Ratha, for Mistress Delina, Master Rhuo the blacksmith, little Weyvi who had been an eternal annoyance to nearly everyone but his mother.... As he flung the ashes outwards, he thought that the Music had died in him. Just one more death to add to the others, he told himself. In his mind, he flung the ashes of that invisible death out with the souls of the others. It was a small gift he could give them.
He lay in bed that night, alone. For once, there was no rustle of cloth from Ratha in her corner -- only a deathly silence in which he could hear his own heartbeat and the rasp of his breath, still feeble from long sickness. He railed bitterly at Fate then, hatred in his soul. After several minutes of restlessness, he sat up. The silence ate at him.
He tried singing, even though the Music was missing.
He regretted the attempt. The Music was not gone. He had not sent it off as a beautiful gift to those whose souls flew the winds, like he had thought. Because the Music was still in him, and it was ugly with pain, hate and self-recrimination because Why am I left alive? What have I done to deserve life that so many others have lost? and after a minute, even he could not stand it. He fell silent, pulled his legs back over the edge of the bed, and tried to fall asleep.
"Sing for us, please Eri," the villagers pleaded with him in the following months. They needed something to remind them of the things they had forgotten.
But he would not sing. He could not even though his voice ached to be heard. That knowledge pained him more than the hurt in the eyes of the other villagers -- and that hurt burned a hole through his breast.
When the River's voice rung through his mind again, he did not believe it at first. He thought it might be the hallucinations of the fever come back to him. But the voices persisted. They beckoned, they pulled, they insisted. At last, with more hope than he let himself feel, he stumbled to his feet and went outside.
The silver highway of the moon tumbled into the waters of the Singing River, and the river danced as it had that first night. The magic overtook him again, and he could not help but make his way down to the riverbank. "Eridanis!" called the silver tops of the waves. He stopped there; did not step out onto the surface. "Eridanis!" cried the river. The longing he had felt when he had first lost the voice came back to him as the most beautiful thrill he had ever felt. The voice of the Singing River was not lost forever....
"Who are you?" he asked again, just as he had that first time.
"Who, who? And who are you? You should know! Who are you?" the river laughed.
He stepped out then. The surface became smooth as glass where he placed his feet, and everywhere else, the silver-coated waters leaped higher in welcome as they danced around him and sang a million songs drawn from a million hearts. He nearly cried when he listened and heard the Music that others still seemed to possess despite his own lack. It was so beautiful.
The river beckoned him farther and farther out, until he stood in the very center of the great Singing River. Death was on his mind, heavy in his heart as it had been since that day of death.... "No no, silly boy. You still have a last song," the voices of the river laughed and teased.
And then the glass-like surface vanished from beneath his feet, and he felt himself plunged into water that was unnaturally chill. It was the middle of the summer! And yet he could feel the numbness creep into his fingers and toes almost instantly. The inadvertent gasp of startlement gave him a mouthful of water and made him lose precious air.
Rationality came back when the first shock of the freezing water wore off, and he began to slice through the water in the direction of the surface. The moon gleamed like a lamp to light the way. He was a strong swimmer. What child born on the banks of the Singing River was not taught to swim? But he was fast losing all sensation in the extremities, and the surface seemed so very far! But at last he knew he was close, and he gave one last powerful push to bring him above the water --
And found himself blocked by a layer of ice. Ice, in the middle of summer. Fear took precarious root. He banged at the ice, hoping to shatter it, but the rough undersurface only cut his fists so that thin ribbons of blood streamed out in the water.
Something bumped his leg, and he looked down to see a blue corpse, reaching for him with a ghastly semblance of life. But it was dead, and cold, and frozen. He pushed it away from him with his feet.
"Your last song," the river whispered to him, and he could not tell if it was with laughter or sadness that the millions of voices whispered to him. Anger flared inside him. Anger, betrayal, pain, and the Music.
My last song?Then hear my last song! Even as the Music began to gather in him, he could feel Death's breath as the collector of mortal souls waited for him to give in.
He let loose a song such as he had never sung with his voice, a song that ripped and tore and burned with hatred and the unfairness of everything and loss that burned and burned and ate at the soul and mind and the Music, and the river laughed!!! This time there was no mistaking the sound. "You want to die, do you not?" asked the river. The taunting goad, the knowledge that Death reached out a hand for him, the chill water that ate at his flesh so that he knew he was as blue as the floating corpse...all of it burned into the Music so that the voice of his mind sang more furiously, weaving a tale, a million tales that he would never tell, would never know, but would know, and he would not die if he could help it because he wanted to live more than ever, and there was Music of Aerian's laughter, and the Music he had discovered himself, and his own imaginary dream of reaching the end of the river where all the Magic went as Ratha used to tell him, and damn it if Death was going to stop him before he achieved that! With a silent voice he sang a music that was not music. If it had ever been heard by mortal ears, it would have brought a man to his knees, tore a woman's heart out, and left a child...
...left a child as the River had left a child named Eridanis when it sung to him one night and beckoned him out and showed him a Music that few mortals can Make.
His lungs burned. Nothing else but that and the Music mattered, and when he finished his last song, he felt eminent death -- felt the phantom specter touch his shoulder. He closed his eyes and breathed, feeling the water flood his lungs.
A shower of golden tears fell from his closed eyes and sank to the bottom of the river. Death vanished back into the time-mists with empty hands. The river's laughter became gentle, the chill water a warm cradle.
Eridanis felt startlement when the ice water did not shatter his body. The liquid flowed as easily as air, and the tenseness evaporated from him. He uncurled himself and floated suspended in the arms of the River with his own arms extended, palms open and eyes closed, and the River whispered meaningless songs to him that meant everything. "I'm sorry," said the River, and he forgave.
* * * * * *
The villagers noticed a change the next day, and when he sang to them, tentatively at first as he helped them in the fields. Smiles came to faces that had almost forgotten how to smile as they heard the familiar voice reach within them once again. We have little enough left to give, they thought, but somehow, Eridanis found that little, brought it out, and gave it back to them magnified a hundredfold. They remembered, just as he did.
Each day, he would give to them his voice, his Music, and slowly, Clover Vale moved back to its old rhythm before the plague had crushed so many hopes and loves and dreams. It was not the same as before. There were still empty chairs and homes and roles, but death no longer hung in a miasma above the village. The villagers once more whistled as they went about their chores, hummed with Eridanis, laughed and shouted to each other. And enshrined in all their hearts were their memories of the dead and the knowledge that Ratha and Aerian and all the others flew upon the wings of the wind now.
The Singing River once more sung at night to those who listened for it on the brink of sleep and dreams.
A year had passed before Eridanis finally decided that he would leave. He needed to go beyond Clover Vale now that the villagers no longer needed him and there was no one to hold him there. So he took up a cloth scrip, some extra clothes, a wheel of Mistress Zeah's bread, some cheese, a skin of water, and his Music, and he left the village he had lived in for so long. Several people came to bid him good-bye and luck. He left them with high-spirits and laughter on their lips.
At first he traveled only near to the Singing River, for he feared to lose its voice again. "We'll always be here," the River assured him as he journeyed down its length. He stopped in whatever towns and villages would offer him shelter and food in exchange for his voice. His reputation traveled faster than he, and so it was usually not hard.
He sang for Lord Etharn in the small manor in the hills, for the Lord had heard from those in his city of the man with the voice that sung the Truths of a person's heart. There were tears on the Lord Etharn's cheeks when Eridanis left, shaking his head to the offer of a sack of silver the man offered him.
So he went for several years, up and down the Singing River. He came to be expected. The people welcomed him with open arms, and he came and sang them the millions of stories the River told him and that he saw in the spark in the eyes of listeners, and he found a million more stories each time.
The third time he went to Lord Etharn, the Lord handed Eridanis a sealed missive, his own hands shaking with anticipation and a delight that Eridanis was puzzled at. "Open it!" the man exclaimed. And so Eridanis did, breaking the bright seal of a lion with a rose and a sword in its jaws.
A letter from the King, requesting that he come and sing for his Majesty.
He wavered uncertainly for several days, for the Palace of the King was many miles from the Singing River. But the River tossed aside his doubts. "Never doubt, sweet boy, remember?" He remembered. "We'll always be here." And so the next day he set out for the Palace.
It took two weeks to reach the Palace, but at last he stood before the gates of the greatest city of the world. The guards let him in with a salute when they saw the seal on the letter he carried, and one even broke away to lead him to the King.
The King was an old man. He had seen many more days and years than he had ever thought he would; more days than his wife and three sons.... A terrible thing to have to outlive your children, he thought. When the man named Eridanis was brought before him, the very sight brought some faint hope fluttering back to the King's feeble chest. Not hope for a miracle such as his resurrected sons or such, for he knew what was impossible and what were the wild imaginings of a too-old man. But perhaps there was...something else this Eridanis could give him that no others had been able to. He smiled, gestured the guards away, motioned for silence to come to the court. Within the space of a few heartbeats, the audience hall of the King was absolutely silent. "You are the Singer?" the King asked.
"I am, your Majesty," Eridanis murmured. A whisper rustled through the crowd, and several court minstrels and troubadours moved forward to see this man who was said to sing with a voice that could touch any heart. He knelt before the old monarch.
"Sing for me. Please."
And so he sang. He gazed long and hard at the King, reached in with his Music, and saw the pain that the King held -- a pain that he had known well himself. He saw a fear of Death clinging to the man, even as he cursed the dread specter for stealing his wife and children, and he showed the King the cradling water as the River had once held Eridanis after Death had touched him. There is more, he promised. The peace and warmth the River had granted him after that trial, a taste of Aerian's never-forgotten laughter, and of the sweetest mornings he had ever known -- echoes of which glinted in the King's eyes as well. He coaxed those visions back to the light of day. He gave the King the love that Eridanis knew burned in people he had been among -- love and loyalty and trust. He tore through the soul of a monarch with the soul of River Music and his own Music and with lost dreams and true ones. He gave the King a peace such as the man had never known.
When he finished, there was silence. "Are you God?" the King asked at last.
Eridanis chuckled. "No, milord." And with the silent accolade accorded him by the rest of the court, he bowed and left the Palace.
He traveled back and forth across the lands thereafter, but always he went back to the River. "He knows," people would say of Eridanis after they had heard him. "He is a man who just...knows...." Eridanis laughed to hear that and did and said nothing to contradict or agree with them.
He grew old, and there came a day when he was too old to continue his wanderings over all the lands. He came back to the River. "It is time for my last song," he said softly to the waters that lapped at his ankles.
But not yet.
He made one last journey, and it took him four times longer than it had in the days when he had first left Clover Vale. He journeyed to the end of the river. All the way, Ratha's old words whispered in his head. "The end of the river...the end of the river."
When he finally stood upon the cliffs where the river poured into the ocean, when he stared out across the wide expanse of blue from the promontory that he had been to many dozens of times, he whispered to the river, "Thank you."
The moonlight had once again made its silver highway for him. "For what?" the River asked back.
"For the Music."
"Ah, but you've given us much more."
"Have I?" he asked, amused.
"They all remember us again."
He chuckled as images came back to him of those nights when he had sent his laughter echoing out across the river with only the moon and the wavelets as witness, when Aerian had shared her laughter with him and how he had woven it into His Music that was like and was so different from the River's Music. "I have only an old man's laughter now to give to you," he chuckled, "But you are welcome," and with that, he ran out and dove into the Singing River. He let the water fill him, gentle as he had remembered.
You gave me immortal love and showed me immortal death, he thought to the river.
"But the mortal love and mortal death you give is much stronger. I can never sacrifice anything for you, not when it is eternal."
Just like the Music.
He sang in his mind one last song to the River. And then he died. And his soul wandered free to join the voices of the River.