Sword and Song Read online

  His dad says that’s medieval Portuguese for “island on the other side.” Island on the other side of what? It’s imaginary, of course. A lost Atlantis, or one of the Caribbean islands, hopelessly misplaced due to a faster-than-expected passage across the sea. It doesn’t exist. Rowan has made it his own.

  He softly climbs the stairs so his father won’t hear him.

  His room is the attic. He doesn’t bother to turn on the light. The white, slanted walls reflect the streetlight below; plenty of light to see his guitar, lying half-under the bed. A new song’s been troubling him lately, but he can’t find the words to it.

  It’s sad. Everything he writes lately is, but there’s something there, though, he has to find it. It’s about Antilia, and a war there. . . . They’re never good enough, his lyrics, and his playing . . . his voice . . .

  He remembers Ophelia asking him if he was in the school choir. The strange look on her face when he said no. As if he’d ever, ever sing in public. Besides, that choir’s hard to get into; you have to audition and they’re sort of famous. That’s why it was such an upset when the Catholic girls’ school beat the hell out of them at the competition. Some new on-fire music teacher there, apparently, plus—Rowan would never say this to his friends, but he saw it—those girls have something to sing for. None of them come from well-off families, none of them have the music lessons that his parents, for example, have coughed up the dough for, for years. To very little effect.

  Sure, Rowan’s sung in public. Once. A Kiwanis music festival. He was about nine, and choked on the words halfway through. He’ll never forget the mocking glint in his music-loving mother’s eyes, the sad, disappointed expression on his father’s face.

  But Ophelia, head back, murdering that Dylan song! He feels a bubble of gladness in his chest.

  He strums, eyes wandering across his shadowed room: posters of bands, his bookshelf full of His Dark Materials and Lord of the Rings, Earthsea Trilogy, Njal’s Saga, King Arthur, Celtic and Norse legends, fantasy.

  He closes his eyes and lets the strings ring, lets the day drain away from him. The soft hum of the city outside his open window, the heat of the unseasonably warm spring night stirring sluggishly, it all intensifies for a moment, then starts to fade. He lets it go, lets it go. Gently. The air is changing—ah, there it is.

  The sea, a rocky shore. A flat place the waves lick against. Seals bob around a small black leather boat, and there, out there, a deep whooshing noise—yes, it’s the slow slide of a great whale, tail flukes waving and disappearing with barely a splash. The spume and scent of the blowout coming to shore—fish and warm body and salt water and dirty whale breath. If he turns his head he can see the red roofs and towers of the great city, the warm grey stone weathered with centuries, nestled in the throat of a great fjord, cliffs rising steeply up and up from the blueness of ocean. It’s daytime, here. A shield is on his arm, a sword in his hand. The ground is shaking.

  Ari is running at him, yelling.

  Rowan dodges. “Christ!”

  Ari’s sword whistles by his ear.

  “Do we have to do this?”

  “Defend yourself!”

  Ari is shorter than Rowan and muscled, with brown skin, a hooked nose, long black hair in braids with leather and feathers wound through them, and a serious glint in his black eyes. Rowan sighs and raises his shield.

  It hasn’t always been like this. They used to just go sailing, or walking along deserted stony beaches. As kids they’d played a lot: hide and seek, capture the castle.

  But lately it’s been this—like some corny pastiche of martial arts movies, where the initiate gets trained in fighting techniques. And when he gets hit, sometimes, it hurts. Even leaves bruises, like it’s real.

  Problem is, Antilia isn’t real. It’s imaginary. Ari is his pretend friend and this is a pretend land. . . .

  “Ari, what are you? Cato?”

  “I do not know that name. Shield up. Keep it close, don’t wave it around like that.”

  Rowan keeps his shield down. “Why can’t we all just get along?”

  Ari looks around. “We all? It’s just the two of us.”

  “It’s a joke. . . .”

  “Shield up! You have to get better at this. Soon, you will be fighting in earnest.”

  What does that mean?

  Rowan opens his mouth to argue, but the shaking of the ground gets worse, enough that even Ari’s concentration is broken. He looks up at the vast mountain with the telltale scoop in the top, the old volcano. Rowan’s eyes follow his. “That’s not going to blow, is it?”

  “We are not ready.”

  “How can you ever be ready for that?”

  The ground heaves, and Rowan feels like he’s falling. And then he is, and it’s falling away from him—Ari and the ocean and the city and the mountain—and then he’s back on his bed.

  It’s always like that. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t make himself stay, and the leaving seems random. He lands, on his back, in his bed.

  From outside his window he hears a squeal of car brakes. Honking.

  Rowan stands, looks out his window. Sees his mother’s car stock-still in the street, engine running, lights illuminating nothing.

  After a moment, the car turns into the drive.

  Rowan hides his guitar under his bed, and goes downstairs to the kitchen.

  Chapter Seven

  Into The Shadows

  Outside, a young man stands in the deep shadows by the side of the road. He’s muscular, and dressed in a leather jerkin, with feathers in his long black hair.

  He looks surprised, and also as if this is an unfamiliar expression for his keen face to wear.

  On his forearms, patterns—visible in the darkness—emit a faint phosphorescent glow. They move, ever-changing, like shadowy fish in a stream. He looks up at the attic window of Rowan’s house, then watches as a tall, pale woman gets out of a car in the driveway and slams the door shut.

  Some papers fly out of her satchel and she curses, chases them through the air.

  A smile quirks the young man’s mouth.

  He backs further into the shadows, disappears into the night with a puff of air and a flash of soft light, soft as a will-o-the-wisp in a haunted marshland.

  The lights in the house above go dark.

  Chapter Eight

  Under His Bed

  What were you up to today? Where’s your father? What are you eating?”

  She always does this. It’s usually best to answer the last question. “A cheese-and-Dorito sandwich.”

  Rowan and his mother sit in the kitchen, a candle between them. The electricity’s surged back on again after a brief outage. Second of the day.

  “Ugh. Why does your father keep buying those unhealthy snacks?”

  Rowan shrugs.

  “Where is he?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Wonder of wonders, the great poet’s pretending to work, is he? I almost hit a man in the street,” she continues, swinging her coat off her shoulders. “Probably some crack addict. This neighbourhood is getting worse.”

  Rowan’s father sticks his head out of the study door and, seeing them both in the kitchen, comes down the hall. “Hello. Did you notice the lights going out? When did you get home?” he says in his English accent. He’s brown to Mom’s blonde, hair and eyes and shirt and corduroys all like a sparrow. He leans in to kiss his wife but she brushes him away. He shrugs. “How was work?”

  “Good. Finished that story on the assassination of the Saudi prince.”

  “It was the CIA,” Rowan says through a bite of food.

  “Brilliant. Where did you get that, Facebook? Don’t talk with your mouth full. Yes, of course it was engineered.”

  “Where were you this evening?” asks his father.

  Rowan keeps chewing, taking long enough about it that he knows his parents will lose interest in his answer. He doesn’t want to tell them that he was at the protest. He’s not sure why
. Something about Ophelia. He feels like even thinking about Ophelia around them will take the beauty and happiness and twist it, make it tarnished and small and worthless.

  “It’s official, by the way,” his mother says, just as Rowan swallows. Tactic successful.

  “What, my dear?” asks his father. He opens the fridge, staring inside and tapping the side of his nose with one finger.

  Sometimes Rowan wonders if he’s thinking anything at all; it’s hard to tell when he just stands there staring into space. Sometimes Rowan feels an urge to be like his mother, poke at his father and slash him and belittle him. It frightens him, feeling this way. His father is a fragile man, a man who hasn’t had a job for as long as Rowan can remember. Living off his successful journalist wife while working on his poetry, which is theoretically okay but practically kind of embarrassing.

  “They refuse to revisit the military service policy. Despite the fact that most of this war will be fought by corporate mercenaries like that Darkwater outfit. Will you close the refrigerator door?”

  “Sorry, love,” Dad mumbles. He closes the door and pats Rowan on the shoulder. “Thank goodness we don’t have to worry about that,” he says. “You’ll be at university.”

  Rowan won’t be at university. He never filled out the forms. They’re under his bed, with his guitar.

  He can’t even say why; he just never did it. Some combination of laziness, inchoate rebellion, and that chronic lack of motivation that his mother is always hounding him about.

  And the cohort that they have announced will be called up first, by lottery—young men between sixteen and twenty-four with birthdays falling January to March—Rowan belongs to that cohort.

  “Well, gotta go.” Rowan grabs the half-empty bag of Doritos and takes the stairs to the attic two at a time.

  The irritation and hurt fill the house, there’s no room for anything else. Why did they get married if they hate each other so much? Did they ever love each other? A flash of a wedding photograph comes into his head: his father so young-looking and happy, his mother willowy and tall with a shy, sweet smile and flowers in her hair. He remembers his mother telling him that they’d met on a commune in the Shetland islands. A political community, his mother calls it. Rowan called them commie hippies for a while, but his mother made it clear that the joke was stale the first time he told it.

  He’s almost at the door of his room when he hears his father, calling after him.

  “My boy?”

  It’s been so long since his father has called him this that Rowan stops charging up the stairs.

  “Yeah?” He takes a cautious half-flight back down so he can see his father on the staircase, next to the map.

  “My boy, are you still writing songs?”

  “Songs?” Rowan is immediately wary.

  “Lyrics. You used to, I know. With your guitar?”

  “Um, yeah, I guess so. . . .” Why the hell is his father asking him this? Rowan hears his mother switch the TV on in the living room. A news announcer’s voice clangs: another orange alert for the city—they’re expecting a terrorist attack.

  “Well, I . . .” His father coughs. “I’d take a look sometime. If you’d like that.”

  Rowan stares. “Well, yeah. Okay.” He thinks for a moment. “Maybe you could give me some tips. . . .”

  His father nods once, decisively, and walks away.

  —

  Rowan closes his eyes, lying back on his bed. So much stuff hidden under there; it feels like a malevolent force. He drifts into uneasy sleep, the acoustic guitar and empty university applications burning a hole through his back.

  Chapter Nine

  She Has Her Father’s NamE

  Ophelia me love, do the dishes, there’s a girl.”

  Ophelia drops her bag on the floor, looks at the haphazard pile of pots, plates, and glasses on the counter. The apartment still reeks of Mom’s fish and brewis from the night before.

  “Why can’t the twins do them?”

  “Because,” says Mary, pale hands braced on the arms of the easy chair as she lowers herself to sit, “the twins are doing their homework. Aren’t you?” she yells up the stairs.

  In stereo from the bedroom: “Yes, Mom!”

  “Come on, sweetheart, don’t argue.” She fishes under her ass for the TV remote. “My feet are killing me.” She hauls out the remote like she literally found it up her butt, and on goes the TV. “Now.”

  Ophelia stomps through the living area to the kitchen sink.

  “For such a slender little thing you sounds like a herd of elephants.”

  “Sound.”

  “What?”

  “I sound like a herd. Not sounds.”

  “Ooh, listen to you, Little Miss Princess Dictionary. How was the protest? Any trouble?”

  “Fine.” Ophelia turns on the water.

  “I had a hell of a night. Darryl had a meltdown and wouldn’t go to bed.”

  Ophelia grunts. Her mother treats Darryl, the only boy, like a baby and he’s almost two. Siobhan and Shakira, the twins, are ten now. They’re beginning to have to do more chores, but never as many as Ophelia had to do at their age.

  The suds mound up in the sink, gauzy hills. Ophelia starts with the glasses, water hot on her hands. Her mother’s watching the news; she can hear the tense excitement in the reporter’s voice, on location in Tel Aviv and talking about the war.

  “This is going to make Afghanistan look like a stroll around the pond,” comments her mother. She’s incapable of watching TV without a running commentary.

  Ophelia says nothing.

  Her mother sighs.

  Ophelia starts on the plates.

  “What a day.” Ophelia knows she’s supposed to ask about the day. Another sigh. “That Smith lady? Well, today she actually left blood on her toilet seat for me. What a streel.”

  “Ew, Mom, that’s disgusting.”

  “You can say that again. Well, her son leaves his used condoms under the bed, so it runs in the family.” Her mother shakes with laughter, pink face wrinkling with mirth.

  Ophelia claps wet hands over her ears. “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.”

  “Wonder if she knows what he’s up to with that girlfriend of his.” Her mother points the remote at Ophelia. “Don’t you go having sex in this house now.”

  Ophelia shudders. “Well, Mom, I share a room with the twins. That could get kind of awkward.”

  Her mother looks at her for a moment, then her body starts shaking and she lets out a huge laugh. “Yes, girl, it might.” Then she gets all serious. “You knows to be careful, right? We’ve talked about—”

  “Yes, yes.” She’s not going to try and have the sex talk with her, is she?

  “You’re a wonderful girl. I’m lucky to have you. Don’t know what I did to deserve you. Smart and gorgeous—”

  It’s awful when her mother tells her she’s gorgeous. “Mom—”

  “I just wants you to be careful.”

  “It’s not like I have a boyfriend anyway,” Ophelia mutters at the soap suds.

  But then, of course, Rowan flashes into her mind.

  Tomorrow night, maybe, she’ll see him. I will be there, he’d said. Would he?

  Just then the twins come clattering down the stairs. “Darryl’s awake.”

  There’s a wail like an air-raid siren.

  Ophelia’s mother sighs and heaves herself out of the chair. “You finished your homework?”

  “Yes,” Siobhan says.

  “Yes,” says Shakira.

  They climb into the vacated easy chair and flip through channels while their mother sighs and waddles her way toward the siren that is Darryl. “Will this day never end?”

  Ophelia’s onto the silverware now. “Hey, you guys could dry.”

  The twins ignore her, heads together, giggling. They got their straight black hair bobbed recently—a real little-doll look. It’s cute.

  Upstairs, the siren stops and soon their mother reappears
with a flushed and teary Darryl on her shoulder. They look so much alike—it strikes Ophelia sometimes—with their pinkish skin and red, wavy hair. And the twins have each other. Ophelia is the oddity in the family—one of these things is not like the others . . . She even has a different last name. The rest go by Quinn, her mother’s family name. She has her father’s name: Miller.

  He signed his name on the flyleaf of the dictionary—and the atlas—in beautiful, careful, cursive writing. Marcus Miller. Ophelia looks at it sometimes, tracing the letters with her fingertip.

  The twins are her half-siblings, products of an uncharacteristic one-night stand on her mother’s part. Ophelia never met the guy; her mother offensively refers to him as the tallest Chinaman I ever met. Little Darryl’s a product of a two-year relationship with a white guy named Douglass (he always insisted on that extra s). Ophelia never liked him and it was a relief when he took off.

  Not for her mother, though. She’d cried until her pink face swelled up, and she ate and ate—she probably gained thirty pounds after he left. I’ll never do that, Ophelia promises herself. I’ll never let some lousy freeloading guy make me that sad.

  Ophelia’s dad left when she was about four. Her mother kicked him out. Ophelia’s never been told why. Her mother has only good things to say about him: Handsome! A gentleman! That man, he could make me laugh and laugh! Ophelia herself has a handful of memories: warmth, a deep singing voice, a comforting scent. Nice memories.

  So why did her mother throw him out of the house? He must have done something shitty, but her mother won’t talk about it. Marcus Miller turned out to be a douche. And now Ophelia will never know him.

  She’s almost finished the dishes when it happens.

  Her mother says, “Ophelia me love,”—she says it like it’s all one word—“Opheliamelove, listen, I’m going to need you to babysit tomorrow night.”