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It’s weird, Noise, but almost wordless, cresting the hill in front of us and rolling down, single-minded but talking in legions, like a thousand voices singing the same thing.
Yeah.
Singing.
“What is it?” Viola asks, spooked as I am. “It’s not the army, is it? How could they be in front of us?”
“Todd!” Manchee barks from the top of the small hill. “Cows, Todd! Giant cows!”
Viola’s mouth twists. “Giant cows?”
“No idea,” I say and I’m already heading up the little hill.
Cuz the sound–
How can I describe it?
Like how stars might sound. Or moons. But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It’s a sound like one planet singing to another, high and stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that’s sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word.
One word.
We reach the top of the hill and another plain unrolls below us, the river tumbling down to meet it and then ru
Creachers I never seen the like of in my life.
Massive, they are, four metres tall if they’re an inch, covered in a shaggy, silvery fur with a thick, fluffed tail at one end and a pair of curved white horns at the other reaching right outta their brows and long necks that stretch down from wide shoulders to the grass of the plain below and these wide lips that mow it up as they trudge on dry ground and drink water as they cross the river and there’s thousands of ’em, thousands stretching from the horizon on our right to the horizon on our left and the Noise of them all is singing one word, at different times in different notes, but one word binding ’em all together, knitting ’em as a group as they cross the plain.
“Here,” Viola says from somewhere off to my side. “They’re singing here.”
They’re singing Here. Calling it from one to another in their Noise.
Here I am.
Here we are.
Here we go.
Here is all that matters.
Here.
It’s–
Can I say?
It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.
It’s–
Wow.
I look at Viola and she has her hand over her mouth and her eyes are wet but I can see a smile thru her fingers and I open my mouth to speak.
“Ya won’t get ver far on foot,” says a completely other voice to our left.
We spin round to look, my hand going right to my knife. A man driving an empty cart pulled by a pair of oxes regards us from a little side path, his mouth left hanging open like he forgot to close it.
There’s a shotgun on the seat next to him, like he just put it there.
From a distance, Manchee barks “Cow!”
“They’s all go round carts,” says the man, “but not safe on foot, no. They’s squish ya right up.”
And again leaves his mouth open. His Noise, buried under all the Heres from the herd, seems to pretty much be saying exactly what his mouth is. I’m trying so hard not to think of certain words I’m already getting a headache.
“Ah kin give y’all a ride thrus,” he says. “If ya want.”
He raises an arm and points down the road, which disappears under the feet of the herd crossing it. I hadn’t even thought about how the creachers’d be blocking our way but you can see how you wouldn’t wa
I turn and I start to say something, anything, that’ll be the fastest way to get away.
But instead the most amazing thing happens.
Viola looks at the man and says, “Ah’m Hildy.” She points at me. “At’s Ben.”
“What?” I say, barking it almost like Manchee.
“Wilf,” says the man to Viola and it takes a second to realize he’s saying his name.
“Hiya, Wilf,” Viola says and her voice ain’t her own, ain’t her own at all, there’s a whole new voice coming outta her mouth, stretching and shortening itself, twisting and unravelling and the more she talks the more different she sounds.
The more she sounds like Wilf.
“We’re all fra Farbranch. Where yoo from?”
Wilf hangs his thumb back over his shoulder. “Bar Vista,” he says. “I’m gone Brockley Falls, pick up s’plies.”
“Well, at’s lucky,” Viola says. “We’re gone Brockley Falls, too.”
This is making my headache worse. I put my hands up to my temples, like I’m trying to keep my Noise inside, trying to keep all the wrong things from spilling out into the world. Luckily, the song of Here has made it like we’re already swimming in sound.
“Hop on,” Wilf says with a shrug.
“C’mon, Ben,” Viola says, walking to the back of the cart and hoisting her bag on top. “Wilf’s gone give us a ride.”
She jumps on the cart and Wilf snaps the reins on his oxes. They take off slowly and Wilf don’t even look at me as he passes. I’m still standing there in amazement when Viola goes by, waving her hand frantically to me to get on beside her. I don’t got no choice, do I? I catch up and pull myself up with my arms.
I sit down next to her and stare at her with my jaw down around my ankles. “What are you doing?” I finally hiss in what’s sposed to be a whisper.
“Shh!” she shushes, looking back over her shoulder at Wilf, but he could’ve already forgotten he picked us up for all that’s going on in his Noise. “I don’t know,” she whispers by my ear, “just play along.”
“Play along with what?”
“If we can get to the other side of the herd, then it’s between us and the army, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t thought about that. “But what are you doing? What do Ben and Hildy gotta do with it?”
“He has a gun,” she whispers, checking on Wilf again. “And you said yourself how people might react about you being from a certain place. So, it just sort of popped out.”
“But you were talking in his voice.”
“Not very well.”
“Good enough!” I say, my voice going a little loud with amazement.
“Shh,” she says a second time but with the combo of the herd of creachers getting closer by the second and Wilf’s obvious not-too-brightness, we might as well be having a normal conversayshun.
“How do you do it?” I say, still pouring surprise out all over her.
“It’s just lying, Todd,” she says, trying to shush me again with her hands. “Don’t you have lying here?”
Well of course we have lying here. New World and the town where I’m from (avoiding saying the name, avoiding thinking the name) seem to be nothing but lies. But that’s different. I said it before, men lie all the time, to theirselves, to other men, to the world at large, but who can tell when it’s a strand in all the other lies and truths floating round outta yer head? Everyone knows yer lying but everyone else is lying, too, so how can it matter? What does it change? It’s just part of the river of a man, part of his Noise, and sometimes you can pick it out, sometimes you can’t.
But he never stops being himself when he does it.
Cuz all I know about Viola is what she says. The only truth I got is what comes outta her mouth and so for a second back there, when she said she was Hildy and I was Ben and we were from Farbranch and she spoke just like Wilf (even tho he ain’t from Farbranch) it was like all those things became true, just for an instant the world changed, just for a second it became made of Viola’s voice and it wasn’t describing a thing, it was making a thing, it was making us different just by saying it.