It was not ceremonious. I simply found the front of the line and started to sing.
I sang the song of them. And almost without thinking, I blended the absolute value of the Sellari with a passage of Suffering—Vengeance.
Before my training at Descant, my experience with the word, even the idea of vengeance, came mostly from pageant wagon plays. Now I realized they’d treated the notion rather too simplistically. And I thought I understood why. Either the players didn’t themselves really know. Or, if they knew, they believed most folks would be better off remaining ignorant on the topic. For that, I wouldn’t blame them.
Then later, under the tutelage of the Maesteri, as I learned Suffering, my understanding of vengeance grew by half. But it was still a clean thing, theoretical. It remained a nearer cousin to the pageants, where vengeance sounded like melodrama, performed by a player wielding a wooden blade, wearing a silly mask, and moving in exaggerated motions. If it had a sound, it was that of a recalcitrant child screaming, “I’ll get you back.”
My Sellari song of vengeance was nothing like this. It was blind and messy. It pulsed with hatred. It knew nothing of justice or balance or making something even. And if my other recent songs had been rough-throat, this sounded as though I’d just gargled with crushed stone. I half expected my throat to start bleeding.
So I walked into their midst, unhurried, letting the song out. It was like playing a great chord, strumming a thousand strings. Ten thousand. Some men simply fell. Others began losing blood from every orifice. The flesh of many sloughed from the bone. Wails of anguish filled the air. There came the sound of countless bodies thumping onto cold ground. Some made a few retreating steps before the song got inside them.
Bright red blood spilled across the vast field.
It was a terrible song. And it was also mine. Since at his core it was resonance.
The property of resonance in sounding systems serves as a metaphor for love. One system can be set in motion by the vibrations of another. Two things, people or strings, trembling alike for one another.
That was one of the first Predicates of Resonance. The awful, practical knowledge I added to it was this: there were many resonances that could cause a man to tremble; love was but one of them.
With each note, my song grew stronger, feeding off itself, swelling as a wave traveling a broad ocean. I had no idea which of my enemies actually heard me sing, but it didn’t really matter. Even if it wasn’t heard, this song was felt.
When I finally stopped, I had no idea how long I’d been singing. It might have been a few long moments. It might have been hours. An eerie silence fell across the vast field. Not a single Sellari stood between my countrymen and the far tree line.
But there came no feeling of relief or triumph. The desire for vengeance still surged inside me. That’s when I learned the hardest truth about vengeance: it had no logical end, served no real purpose, except perhaps to delay grief. Vengeance was just an inversion of loss; or maybe its cowardly cousin.
But it did have consequences.
Though I’d survived its singing, the song had done something to me. I knew it when the first Mor congratulated me. I didn’t feel happy that this fellow would return to his family. Instead, I wondered and worried whether I’d saved a Mor who would bugger his son or beat his wife or ignore a daughter who only sought his approval. The cynicism ran deep, painful. It sickened me. And I instinctively knew that the only relief I’d find for this new pessimism was to continue singing the song.
Dear absent gods, give me someone to hate.
That prayer seemed to find an answer. Two hundred strides away, at the long tree line of poplar, hundreds of fresh Sellari emerged, striding purposefully toward us. In their midst, four Anglan draft horses pulled a broad flatbed wagon bearing a spherical object two strides in diameter.
I felt an eager smile creep onto my face, and I began to close the distance between myself and this new crop. To their credit, the second-wave Sellari came on bravely, as though they hadn’t seen how I’d sung down those whose bodies I now trod on in my haste. I wanted to be closer this time. I wanted to watch them suffer as they went down.