Penguin Books
DARKFALL
Isobelle Carmody began the first of her highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles while she was still at high school, and worked on it while completing a Bachelor of Arts and then a journalism cadetship. The series, and her short stories, have established her at the forefront of fantasy writing in Australia. She now divides her time between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and her travels abroad.
She has also written many award-winning short stories and books for young people. The Gathering was a joint winner of the 1993 CBC Book of the Year Award and the 1994 Children’s Literature Peace Prize. Her book for younger readers, Billy Thunder and the Night Gate, was shortlisted for the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature in the 2001 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. The Legend of Little Fur, is Isobelle’s first series for younger readers. The third book in the series, A Mystery of Wolves is now available.
ALSO BY ISOBELLE CARMODY
Legendsong:
Darksong
The Obernewtyn Chronicles:
Obernewtyn
The Farseekers
Ashling
The Keeping Place
The Gateway Trilogy:
Billy Thunder and the Nightgate
The Winter Door
Scatterlings
The Gathering
Green Monkey Dreams
Greylands
This Way Out (with Steve Taylor)
Alyzon Whitestarr
The Legend of Little Fur
Little Fur
A Fox called Sorrow
A Mystery of Wolves
DARKFALL
BOOK ONE OF THE LEGENDSONG
ISOBELLE CARMODY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books Australia, 1997
Published in Penguin, 1998
Copyright © Isobelle Carmody, 1997
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74-228388-3
for Brenda
dear myrmidon
who taught me strength
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book is never called from the Void by one voice and it needed a veritable chorus to bring this one from Chaos to harmony.
I would like to thank the Pirovano family in Holland, for their generosity of spirit, snow and fireworks. I owe a debt of gratitude to Bernard and his myrmidons, Mary, Regina, Doreen, Teresa, Ingrid and Anne at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. In Australia, I want to thank Jacqui Carmody, who typed the book from the rough; Wendy Lohse, Virginia Lowe and my mother, Marjory, who read it in various barely comprehensible incarnations; my editor, Kay Ronai, for enduring the long haul, Alex, for very fine tuning and Erica, for sundry hand-holding; and especially Shane, who minded my life and me while I segued in the Void.
My grateful thanks finally, and yet again, to the Australia Council, who have never faltered in their support of me as a writer.
KELTOR
Prelude
A small seal negotiated a jigsaw puzzle of cracked ice just before the commencement of the long polar day.
It was very young and, born in the darkness of the six-month night, it had never seen the sun. It might have sensed instinctively that something momentous was approaching, but it was preoccupied. During the night it had become entangled in a white plastic supermarket bag that had been carried on sea currents from Land’s End on the English coast.
The seal had twisted for almost an hour before managing to free itself and now it was dangerously tired.
It swam towards sheer ghostly cliffs, unaware and uncaring that a comet approached the earth, or that it and the coming of the comet were being observed and wondered at by a watcher in the still secret centre of Chaos.
1
In the Beginning was the Void,
filled with the madness of the Unmade and the spirit of Chaos.
But all things struggle towards Harmony and Form
and so there came from the Void, a song,
and this was the Song of Making.
LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN
The sky was white with cloud and the ocean still and reflective. Between them, the horizon was indistinct, pale sea merging with paler sky to create a milky twilight.
Ember was gazing at the Aegean, her good eye resting on those caiques still at their moorings. She stared at everything in that intense way, as if committing the world to memory. Before her on the table was a barely touched plate of tzatziki and calamari. Absently, she fished her pill case out of her pocket, flipped one of the tiny yellow tablets onto her palm and dry-swallowed.
Watching, Glynn winced, thinking her too like the listless water; pallid and showing nothing of what lay below the surface. You could never tell how Ember felt because she gave back only a reflection of the world around her. The single hint that there might be more to her than met the eye was that vivid red hair, flowing over her shoulders like a tongue of flame.
It was the hair, more than anything, that made it hard to believe she was dying. You couldn’t imagine that hair being extinguished. Sometimes Glynn thought it would fly away from Ember, when the life had gone out of her, like a phoenix from the ashes.
She shook her head minutely. She had been determined not to think of death or illness while they were on holiday; what must surely be the last they dared take so far from home and hospital. It was her first serious lapse, but this was the last day of the month in the Greek Islands and it was the pill that had done it; reminding her that tomorrow they would begin the journey home.
Back to real life.
Except Glynn was not sure she knew what real life was. Back home or travelling, it always felt as if she was waiting for real life to happen; for something to tell her what she was for. Though physically strong as she was, Glynn felt smoke inside – all colourless drift and edgeless grey.
Even Ember had more sense of purpose than she did. Morbid though it was, Ember was completely absorbed in her dying, and she had managed to make her music part of it. The two of them lived very comfortably because Ember’s funereal musical compositions were in great demand. She didn’t care about money, or what happened to her music. She was i
nterested in nothing beyond its creation as an articulation of her state. Glynn did all of the negotiating with the help of a musical agent and an accountant. There were no troubling questions or moments of doubt about what life meant for Ember, because every moment was rigidly circumscribed within the parameters of her illness. From the minute they returned, it would begin; there would be tests to see if the new pills had reduced the tumour rather than simply arresting its growth. The doctors had not wanted her to take this trip. The new pills were experimental. There would be side-effects. Hallucinations, perhaps. But they had come anyway. ‘What does it matter about side-effects,’ Ember had murmured with that glassy calmness of hers. Unspoken beneath the frozen surface, the dark current of awareness: I’m still going to die.
‘You would have dessert, perhaps, kyria?’
The waiter let his eyes rest appreciatively on the smaller of the two girls. So exquisite, but white like a statue or a wax doll except for the amazing brightness of the hair. He had discussed them with the other waiter, Dimitri, when it was understood they were staying on the island. Young to be without escort, they were perhaps only seventeen. They came in the tourist season, yet they were not like other tourists, spending a day on the beach, flirting and talking loudly and then rushing back at night to the expensive hotels with discos on the other side of the island. Nor were they the other kind of traveller who came here for long periods, sometimes even to stay but never to belong.
The two young women had made no effort to make friends with other tourists. They stayed in a cheap hotel and did not buy souvenirs or visit the sun-bleached ruins. They did not drink or dance or dive or sunbake or take pictures.
Dimitri thought they had come to mourn a death, but Nikos was less certain. There was an air of expectancy about them – as if they were waiting for something or someone. It nagged at him that he had not been able to find out what it was.
He had heard they were twins, but that was one of the idiot rumours that blew across the islands like a hot summer wind, for they were not alike at all. The one called Ember was small and fragile: a pocket Venus, his uncle had called her. The other, whose name he could never remember, was taller than most men and had a lean, muscular body. Each morning she would run around the whole island in the searing heat. She had wonderful legs but she moved like a man, that one; striding along with swinging confident arms. Though when you spoke to her she would either fail to respond or startle like a wild deer. Perhaps she was slightly deaf. Her hair was long, too, but white-blonde and coarse as the mane of a mule.
The only thing the two girls shared was identical, pale, honey-coloured eyes which could be marked to family likeness.
The little red-haired Ember was much to his taste. She did not run or swim, but only sat on her balcony in the shade strumming her guitar with her thin fingers, and scribbling notes on a pad beside her. Sometimes she sang. She had a sweet, haunting voice, but it was too soft. One could hardly hear her. She was truly like her name, an ember, ready to be snuffed out by the slightest wind.
‘No, thanks. Just tea,’ the blonde sister answered for them both. She mopped up the last of the yoghurt dip with bread.
Nikos went back to the kitchen wondering why neither of them flirted with him. He was very good-looking. He knew this because many female tourists had told him so, and begged him to stand with them while a picture was taken. Perhaps at home they told their friends he had been their lover. This did not displease him.
‘They want tea,’ he said absently to the cook, Sofia.
‘You asked about dessert?’ Dimitri said.
Nikos gave him a look.
‘Tea,’ Sofia said with a disparaging shrug. ‘I heard they leave tomorrow.’ She filled the kettle from a pump. ‘They go by ferry to the mainland.’
Dimitri and Nikos exchanged a glance of disdain. How else would tourists get to the mainland but by boat, their eyes agreed scornfully.
The kitchen door opened and a wiry old man came in, offering his toothless grin.
‘Ari,’ Sofia welcomed her brother. ‘You will play for us?’
‘You have rich American tourists?’
Dimitri snorted. ‘No, uncle. Two Australian girls. They came with only a single backpack and bought no souvenirs.’
‘Australian,’ repeated Ari with obscure bitterness.
‘Play,’ Sofia insisted. ‘Then the word will be passed around that music can be heard here and other tourists will come.’
‘Tourists go where food is bad and expensive and there is loud music to hurt the ears,’ Ari avowed, but he went through the batwings into the restaurant and set himself up near the door. He liked to hear the waves when he sang. It settled a peace in his soul and for a while he forgot the endless nagging of his son to go to Athens. He strummed his battered guitar and thought the sea seemed louder than usual, almost insistent. In his mind, he dedicated his first song to it, as his distant ancestors had done.
When night falls
and the dark song calls,
will you hear?
Will you tread the moon paths?
Will you sing the lost soul home?
He shaped the words in English in his thick sweet voice, dimly wondering why that particular song had come into his mind. It was long and very old and told the story of a horse drowned while searching for its beloved mistress. The horse had called for her forever after in ghostly longing, without ever knowing she was dead too. It was a ballad his own grandfather had sung only rarely because of its complicated harmonics. The old man had claimed it originated in the time of the legends and that it had been given in trust to their ancestor by a god. He had made Ari learn it, rapping his knuckles when he made a mistake. Ari had hated the old man and the guitar and the song, but he had learned about discipline and the beauty of hard-won things. More than he had managed to impart to his lout of a son, whose fingers itched to pick pockets rather than guitar strings; his only son, who had no music in his soul.
Ari’s fingers were thicker than they had been, and he felt sweat bead on his forehead as he played. The music was demanding. He was too old and stiff, he realised, and it came to him suddenly that it might be the last time he would ever play his grandfather’s precious song. He poured all of his mediocre skill and weak heart into the ancient music, in regret for all the dreams of his youth that had faded and died, and in apology to a song that would henceforth be heard no more in the world. He felt like weeping but, instead, a true musician, he let his sorrow infuse the music.
The verse, sung in heavily accented English, rippled out into the gathering darkness, the muted crash of the waves on the shore seeming to offer a primitive counter-beat, transforming the ballad into something less solemn than its singer intended. Something more wild.
Well, music was like that, he thought. It took you where it willed.
Ember’s head was cocked sideways in a familiar listening attitude, her face pale and oddly rigid. Glynn judged from this that the music was exceptionally good, or really dreadful. She had no idea, being tone deaf. All music came to her as random sound. A three-year-old banging on a saucepan was all of a piece with Beethoven. People found this minor disability so queer that Glynn had developed the trick of tuning in on the vibrations of a song, to stop anyone knowing. She could tap her fingers and even dance to music in this way. She quite liked the primal beat of African music; the pound of heavy metal seemed to get into her chest and rattle her ribs, but she rarely played it in the house because it seemed to cause Ember physical pain.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, leaning over the table towards her sister.
‘That song. I’ve heard it somewhere …’ Ember’s voice trailed away.
The tea, when it came, was lukewarm and vaguely soapy. Ember drank without expression, but Glynn pushed her cup aside after one sip, signalling for the bill. Surely one could only make tea that badly on purpose. She had not thought much about the people who lived on the island, but now she wondered if they disliked tourists. She had heard
stories of spitting in cups and worse and was suddenly glad they were leaving. She thought the old man hunched over his guitar gave her a sinister look as they left.
Outside, dusk had fallen into night, and the air was very clear. As they walked the full moon rose into the sky, shedding sequins of light on the water in a glittering path from horizon to shore.
‘It’s so beautiful here. I can’t believe this is our last night. I wonder if they will see the comet from here. You’d need a telescope to see the tail properly, I suppose. Look,’ Glynn cried, pointing to a single bright spark of light to the left of the moon. ‘The first star. Make a wish.’
Ember only pushed her fists deeper into her pockets and Glynn wished wearily that Ember would just for a while forget that she was dying. Then she felt a stab of guilt at her selfishness.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ she announced. She would pretend this was the river Lethe, and that it would bestow forgetfulness on her.
Stripped down to her faded black swimsuit, she ran into the water, striking straight out toward the horizon. Relishing her strength she concentrated on pushing her toned muscles to their limit to keep her thoughts at bay. Tendons she had not known were knotted, relaxed at last in pleasant weariness, and she turned over and swam a lazy aimless backstroke.
Moonlight shone on her skin, silvering it – making her into a statue of platinum. No. Something less stiff – mercury maybe. A drowsy sense of timelessness stole over her, and she stopped swimming and let the sea take hold of her in its cool wet embrace. She floated, staring up into the night sky from under heavy half-closed eyelids. If only life were as easy as swimming or running. As simple and clean and uncomplicated as using your body well and to its full capacity.
A cloud crossed the moon. Momentarily suspended in blackness, she thought this was how it must have felt to be in the womb; or dead.
The mythical river Lethe had been a tributary of Acheron, the river of woe that was supposed to have flowed through the underworld. She frowned, trying to remember the names of the other rivers. There had been Cocytus, the river of grief or of tears, she could not remember which, but the two other names escaped her. Wind had told her about the rivers. He had always been fascinated by myths and believed they were spawned by an unconscious level of the mind that somehow linked up with all other minds. That was why two entirely separate cultures could come up with the same myth.