when they sent me away. That’s all I know of her: those marks on paper, that I can’t even see.’
I thought again of Zach. What did I have of him, now? I had been thirteen when I was branded and sent away. Not long enough for me, and too long for him. During my years in the Keeping Rooms, he’d come to see me, but only rarely. When I’d last seen him, in the silo after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths, he’d seemed fevered, frantic. He had been hissing, cut loose, like the electric wires that Kip and I had slashed.
When the next song started, my mind was still lingering in the silo with Zach, hearing again the tremor of terror in his voice when he’d told me to run. Eva had swapped her drum for a flute, so it was only Leonard’s voice tracing the words. It was mid-morning, the sun through the trees casting stripes on the clearing. It took me a moment to realise what Leonard was singing about.
They came in dark ships
They came at night
They laid The Confessor’s kiss
On each islander’s throat with a knife.
Piper stood up. To my left, Zoe dropped quietly from the lookout tree to the ground. She moved closer to where we sat in a circle around the ashes.
‘I heard they didn’t kill them all,’ Piper said.
Leonard stopped singing, but his fingers on the guitar never hesitated, the tune continuing to unfurl from his hands.
‘Is that what you heard?’ he said. The music played on. ‘Well, songs always exaggerate.’
He went back to the song.
They said there was no island
They said it wasn’t true
But they came for the island in their dark ships
And they’re coming next for you.
‘You’d want to be careful who’s listening, when you sing that song,’ said Zoe. ‘You could bring down trouble.’
Leonard smiled. ‘And you haven’t got trouble already, the three of you?’
‘Who told you about the island?’ said Piper.
‘The Council themselves are putting the word out,’ Leonard said. ‘Spreading the news that they found the island, crushed the resistance.’
‘That song you’re singing is hardly the Council’s version, though,’ said Piper. ‘What do you know of what happened there?’
‘People talk to bards,’ he said. ‘They tell us things.’ He strummed a few more chords. ‘But I’m guessing you didn’t need to be told about the island. I’m guessing you know more than I do about what happened there.’
Piper was silent. I knew that he was remembering. I’d seen it too. Not only seen it, but heard the shouts and whimpers. Smelled the butcher’s block scent of the streets.
‘No song can describe it,’ said Piper. ‘Let alone change it.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Leonard. ‘But a song can at least tell people about it. Tell them what the Council did to those people. Warn them what the Council’s capable of.’
‘And scare them away from getting involved with the resistance?’ Zoe said.
‘Perhaps,’ said Leonard. ‘That’s why the Council’s telling their version. I like to think my version might do something different – perhaps help people to realise why the resistance is so necessary. All I can do is tell the story. What they do with it is up to them.’
‘If we gave you another story to tell,’ I said, ‘you know it could be dangerous for you.’
‘That’s for us to decide,’ Eva said.
Piper and Zoe didn’t say anything, but Zoe stepped forward to stand beside Piper. Piper took a deep breath, and began to talk.
The bards put down their instruments while they listened. Leonard’s guitar lay on its back across his knees, and as we talked I imagined that it was a box we were filling with our words. We didn’t tell them about my link with Zach, but we told them everything else. We told them about the tanks, each one a glass case filled with terror. The missing children, and the tiny skulls in the grotto beneath the tank room at Wyndham. And the expanding refuges, and the machines that we’d destroyed with The Confessor.
When we’d finished, there was a long silence.
‘There’s good news in there too,’ Leonard said quietly. ‘About The Confessor. We passed near the Sunken Shore last week. She was from round there, they say, so there was a lot of talk about the rumour that she’d been killed. But I hadn’t dared to believe it.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, looking away from him. I didn’t want to see Leonard’s answering smile. He didn’t know the price Kip had paid for this good news. The price I was still paying.
‘And the rest of it – about the tanks. Is it really true?’ said Eva.
Leonard answered her before we could.
‘It’s all true. Hell on earth, it’s too far-fetched to make up.’ He rubbed at his absent eyes. ‘It explains everything. Why the Council’s been driving up the tithes and the land restrictions, these last few years. They’re pushing us toward the refuges.’
‘And do you think you could put it in a song?’ I said.
He reached down to place a hand on the neck of the guitar. ‘There’s a song in your story, that’s for sure, though it won’t be a pretty one,’ he said. He hoisted up the guitar, stroking along the top with his thumb, as if waking it gently.
‘Like Cass said: it’ll be dangerous, spreading the word,’ said Piper.
Leonard nodded. ‘True enough. But it’s dangerous for all of us, if word of the tanks and the refuges doesn’t spread.’
‘It’s a lot to ask of you,’ I said.
‘You’re not asking it of me,’ Leonard said. There was no music left in his voice as he spoke – his words were grave and quiet. ‘But you told me what you know. And now that I’ve heard it, I have an obligation.’
*
For hours, while I took my shift at the lookout post, I could hear Leonard and Eva working on the song. First they built the tune itself. The occasional word reached me: No, try this. Hold off on the chord change until the chorus. How about this? But mainly they didn’t talk. It was a conversation that took place in music. He’d pluck out a tune, and Eva would echo it, then play with it: varying the melody, adding harmonies. For hours they sat together, passing the tune back and forth between them.
Even when Eva had settled down to rest, Leonard kept working, adding the words now. He sang slowly, trying out different versions of the words. He was stringing them onto the growing melody like beads on a string, sometimes unthreading
