He strummed his instrument nervously. “If you don't want a song for your deathbed,” he said, “then why did you send to Stormtown for a singer?”
“I want to sing to you,” she said. “It won't hurt too much, although I can't play or carry a tune. Mostly I'll recite.”
The singer set aside his instrument and folded his arms to listen. “A strange request,” he said, “but I was a listener long before I was a singer. My name is Daren, by the way.”
“Good,” she said. “I am pleased to know you, Daren. I wish you could have known me when I was a bit more vigorous. Now listen carefully. I want you to learn these words, and sing this song after I'm gone, if you think it's good enough. You will.”
“I know a great many songs already,” he said.
“Not this one,” she replied.
“Did you make it up yourself?”
“No,” she said, “no. It was sort of a gift to me, a farewell gift. My brother sang it to me as he lay dying, and forced me to learn all the words. He was in a great deal of pain at the time, and death was a kindness for him, but he would not go until he was satisfied that I had all the words committed to memory. So I learned them quickly, crying all the while, and he died. It was in a town on Little Shotan, not quite ten years ago. So you can see that the song means a great deal to me. Now, if you would, please listen.”
She began to sing.
Her voice was old and worn, painfully thin, and her attempt to sing strained it to its uttermost, so that sometimes she coughed and wheezed. She had no sense of key, she knew, and she could not carry a tune any more in her old age than in her youth. But she knew the words, she did know the words. Sad words set to simple, soft, melancholy music.
It was a song about the death of a very famous flyer. When she grew old, the song said, and the days of her life grew short, she found and took a pair of wings, as she had done once in her legendary youth. And she strapped them on, and ran, and all of her friends came running after, shouting for her to stop, to turn back, for she was very old and very weak, and she had not flown for years, and her mind was so addled that she had not even remembered to unfold her wings. But she would not listen. She reached the cliff before they could catch her, and plunged over the edge, falling. Her friends cried out and covered their eyes, not wanting to see her dashed against the sea. But, at the last moment, suddenly her wings unfolded, springing out taut and silver from her shoulders. And the wind caught her, lifted her, and from where they stood her friends heard her laughter. She circled high above them, her hair blowing in the wind, her wings bright as hope, and they saw that she was young again. She waved farewell to them, dipped her wing in salute, and flew off toward the west, to vanish against the setting sun. She was never seen again.
There was silence in the room when the old woman had finished singing her song. The singer sat tilted back in his chair, staring at the flickering of an oil lamp, his eyes gone far away and thoughtful.
Finally the old woman coughed irritably. “Well?” she said.
“Oh.” He smiled and sat up. “I'm sorry. It's a nice song. I was just thinking how it would sound with some music behind it.”
“And with a voice singing it, no doubt—one that didn't wheeze and strain quite so much.” She nodded. “Well, it would sound very good, that's how it would sound. Did you get all the words?”
“Of course,” he said. “Do you want me to sing it back to you?”
“Yes,” said the old woman. “How else would I know if you got it right?”
The singer grinned and took up his instrument. “I knew you'd come around,” he said pleasantly. He touched his strings, his fingers moving with deceptive slowness, and the little room filled with melancholy. Then he sang her song back to her, in his high, sweet, vibrant voice.
He was smiling when he had done. “Well?”
“Don't look smug,” she said. “You got all the words right.”
“And my singing?”
“Good,” she admitted. “Good. And you'll get better, too.”
He was satisfied with that. “I see you did not exaggerate—you do recognize good singing.” They grinned at each other. “It's odd that I'd never heard that song before. I've done all the others about her, of course, but never that one. I never even knew that Maris died that way.” His green eyes were fixed on her, and the light reflected in them gave his face a pensive, thoughtful cast.
“Don't be sly,” she said. “You know perfectly well that I'm she, and I haven't died that way or any way. Not yet, that is. But soon, soon.”
“Will you really steal wings again, and leap from a cliff?”
She sighed. “That would waste a pair of wings. I don't expect I could really pull off Raven's Fall, not at my age. Though I've always wanted to. I saw it done a bare half-dozen times in my life, and the last time it was tried the girl had a strut break on her, and she died. I never did it myself. But I dreamed about it, Daren, yes I did. It was the one thing I wanted to do that I never managed. Not a bad thing to say of a life as long as mine.”
“Not bad at all,” he said.
“As for my death,” she said, “well, I expect I'll die here, in this bed, in the not too distant future. Maybe I'll make them carry me up outside, so I can see a last sunset. Or maybe not. My eyes are so bad that I wouldn't see the sunset very well anyway.” She made a tsking sound. “In either case, after I'm dead some flyer will sling my body into a harness, and struggle to get aloft with my dead weight added to his own, and I'll be flown out to sea and given what is widely known as a flyer burial. Why, I don't know. The corpse certainly doesn't fly. When it's cut loose it drops like a stone, and sinks or gets eaten by scyllas. It makes no sense, but that's the tradition.” She sighed. “Val One-Wing had the right idea. He's buried right here on Seatooth, in a huge stone tomb with his statue on top. He designed it himself. I never could quite disregard tradition the way Val could, however.”
He nodded. “So you would rather have them remember this song than the way you'll really die?”
She looked at him scornfully. “I thought you were a singer,” she said. She looked the other way. “A singer should understand. The song—that is the way I really die. Coll knew that, when he made the song for me.”
The young singer hesitated. “But—”
The door to the room opened again, and Odera the healer was back in the doorway, with a taper in one hand and a glass in the other. “Enough singing,” she said. “You'll wear yourself out. It's time for your sleeping draught.”
The old woman nodded. “Yes,” she said. “My head is getting worse. Don't ever fall onto rocks from a thousand feet up, Daren. Or if you do, don't land on your head.” She took the tesis from Odera's hand, and drained it straightaway. “Terrible,” she said. “You could at least flavor it.”
Odera began to pull Daren toward the door. He stopped before he was quite there. “The song,” he said, “I'll sing it. Others will sing it too. But I won't sing it until—you know—until I hear.”
She nodded, drowsiness already stealing into her limbs, the small slow paralysis of tesis. “That would be appropriate,” she said.
“What is it called?” he said. “The song?”
“‘The Last Flight,' ” she told him, smiling. Her last flight, of course, and Coll's last song. That seemed appropriate too.
“‘The Last Flight,' ” he repeated. “Maris, I understand, I think. The song is true, isn't it?”
“True,” she agreed. But she was not sure he heard her. Her voice was weak, and Odera had dragged him outside and was shutting the door between them. Some time later the healer returned to snuff the oil lamps, and she was left alone in a small dark room that smelled of sickness, beneath the ancient bloodsoaked stone of Woodwings Academy.
Despite the tesis, she found she could not sleep. A kind of excitement was on her, a dizzy, giddy feeling she had not known in a long time.
Somewhere far above her head, she thought she could hear the storm beginning, and the
sound of rain drumming against weathered rock. The fortress was strong, strong, and she knew it would not collapse. Still, somehow she felt that tonight might be the night when, finally, after all these years, she would go to see her father.
About the Authors
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN is the award-winning author of five novels, including Fevre Dream and The Armageddon Rag. For the last ten years, he has been a screenwriter for feature films and television and was the producer of the TV series Beauty and the Beast as well as a story editor for The Twilight Zone. After a ten-year hiatus, he has now returned to writing novels full-time and is presently at work on A Dance with Dragons, the fourth book of his A Song of Fire and Ice series.
LISA TUTTLE won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer in 1974 and has since gone on to author numerous short stories and novels, including Lost Futures, which was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and The Pillow Friend. More recently, she has written several books for children.
Texas-born, she now lives with her husband and daughter in a remote area on the west coast of Scotland where the scenery and weather are very similar to the seascapes of Windhaven.
Also by George R. R. Martin
A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE:
A GAME OF THRONES
A CLASH OF KINGS
A STORM OF SWORDS
DYING OF THE LIGHT
FEVRE DREAM
THE ARMAGEDDON RAG
DEAD MAN'S HAND
(with John J. Miller)
Short Story Collections
A SONG FOR LYA AND OTHER STORIES
SONGS OF STARS AND SHADOWS
SANDKINGS
SONGS THE DEAD MEN SING
NIGHTFLYERS
TUF VOYAGING
PORTRAITS OF HIS CHILDREN
Also by Lisa Tuttle
THE PILLOW FRIEND
LOST FUTURES
GABRIEL
FAMILIAR SPIRIT
Short Story Collections
A SPACESHIP BUILT OF STONE
A NEST OF NIGHTMARES
MEMORIES OF THE BODY
Praise for Windhaven
“Windhaven is a powerful flight of the imagination, a tale well told . . . an entirely enjoyable reading experience wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.” —Roger Zelazny
“Told with a true storyteller's voice: clear, singing, persuasive, and wonderfully moving. They have made a mythic land and peopled it with unforgettable characters. It is a book for adults and children who have dreamed of flying with their own wings, and for story listeners of all ages for whom dreams are as potent as realities. A truly wonderful book.” —Jane Yolen
“It's a romance. It's science fantasy. It's beautiful.” —A. E. van Vogt
“I didn't mean to stay up all night to finish Windhaven, but I had to!” —Anne McCaffrey
“A beautiful and moving book. It carries the reader through a fascinating society and through the life of a courageous, memorable woman. . . . I'm sure this will be a big awards contender; it certainly deserves to be.” —Joan D. Vinge
“The pace never slackens, shifting easily from moments of almost unbearable tension to others of sheer poetry and exhilaration. Martin and Tuttle make wonderful professional music together.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Twenty years after the first publication of this novel, it still stands the test of time.” —Talebones
WINDHAVEN
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Simon and Schuster edition published 1981
Bantam Spectra hardcover edition published June 2001
Bantam Spectra mass market edition / May 2003
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1981 by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle
Maps by James Sinclair
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80-28177
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
Visit our Website at www.bantamdell.com.
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The section entitled “Storms” was originally published in slightly different form in Analog in May 1975 under the title The Storms of Windhaven copyright © 1975 by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
The section entitled “One-Wing” was originally published in slightly different form in Analog in January and February 1980 copyright © 1980 by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-89719-7
v3.0
George R. R. Martin, Windhaven
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