There are no tale tellers from my country. Not as you knew them, as they once were.
I come, now, from a land of unspoken words. Of wide eyes and tight mouths that swallow down the truth of what we’ve lived through. We have lost our singers, the storytellers renowned across the world, whose skills transported audiences, won praise from heads of state and purses from captains of industry, brought back wealth and glory for our nation.
Though it was only a generation ago and the suffering that loss engendered has flowed through so many lives, no one speaks of it. Silence has grown over silence, until I had to flee far from my home, flee far from our capital, to give voice to these words.
What is that truth, then? That story, unspeakable until now? It might be easier to start by showing you—see this? Yes, of course it looks familiar; it’s the medallion of office, making me a graduate of the Academy of Stories. Any teller who traveled from my land would have had such a thing; even now, years after tellers have ceased to come, people recognize the badge of distinction. But look closer—the curving crest on its heavy chain is not only decorative. Watch! Yes, it opens on secret hinges. That inner socket, now blasted and darkened, it once held my nation’s greatest resource: pure inspiration, hewn from the veins that ran through the earth deep beneath our feet.
This scorched remnant, a thin film of caked ash, is all that’s left of my last portion of inspiration—but I remember what it felt like, when a new cut filled my medallion, hanging heavy over my heart. I could feel its warmth through the metal, through my flesh and into my blood, quickening it and loosening my tongue, setting my mind on fire. You think I am an entrancing teller, now? This is nothing; insipid blathering of circuitous words. You should have heard me when I could draw on true inspiration. You should have heard my teachers, trained to mastery when the Ministry of Mines provided abundant, high-quality ore.
By the time I graduated the Academy, though, tellers’ portions were rationed. As a junior fellow, still honing my art in the salons and small theaters of the capital, I learned how quickly inspiration faded, how the stories we told over and over, even the most popular, would grow dull in our mouths as the genius ebbed from our blood.
I didn’t really begin to understand the shape of things to come, though, until a chance meeting in the marble-floored halls of the Ministry’s central building.
I had felt the warmth of my current dose beginning to wane—my words stumbling, the small sun that rested over my heart growing cooler. It was a week short of my appointment for a new cut, but there was some flexibility built into teller rationing, and so I had come, with only a little trepidation, to the Ministry’s broad-stepped entrance.
It faced the familiar walls and towers of the Academy of Stories, across our capital’s central square—that beautiful park, lush in summer, frosted like a sugar confection in winter. As a trainee, I had looked across it every day, stared up at the grey slab of the Ministry building. I knew the uniforms of the guards who stood before its doors. And still a weight descended on me every time I climbed those steps. The faces above those uniform collars were not the same as those who patrolled the Academy’s walls, and these eyes looked at me with cold, well-trained suspicion. Even I, an initiated bearer of inspiration and teller of tales, felt a pall as I entered that place.
It made me walk lightly through the Ministry’s gleaming halls and corridors—so lightly that I heard the strained voices of those who approached well before they came into my line of sight.
“—may simply be your time, Singer Adair. No teller can stay responsive to inspiration forever.”
“No! I am still in my prime, with years of transported audiences ahead of me. I’ve felt no deadening of my senses. It is the ore. You know that the veins have been meager for years. This poor excuse for a cut that they’ve given me, it fizzled like a spark. My last concert appearance, I was midway through the Saga of Serpetra, and I felt them shifting and yawning! At me!”
The speakers rounded the corner, and I saw Solon Adair. I had recognized his voice immediately. Adair was the greatest teller alive, internationally renowned and practically worshiped by all the young trainees and fellows, including me. The second Minister for mining accompanied Adair, the sleeves of his robes fluttering behind him.
Adair’s mouth was open and full of angry words, and he matched the minister stride for stride. “I will not let my career languish simply because the stonebreakers you claim to direct shortchange us with—” The minister noticed me, hesitating a few paces away, and put his hand on the teller’s arm, but Adair shook it off and kept going, “with this dull and impotent ore.”
“Singer Adair,” The minister’s face was like his building’s, grey and carefully guarded. “The Ministry of Mines appreciates your concern. I will relay your words to the director of the northern mines—but imagine his resistance to your claims. What should I say to him?”
I ducked my head as they passed me, and kept my gaze trained on the dull stone tiles at my feet, but pretending myself invisible did nothing to prevent Adair’s words from ringing in my ears.
“What shall I say to my audiences, here and abroad? How can I show them the glory of our country, if my tales turn to ash on my tongue for want of true inspiration?”
I worried, then, that Adair would regret his indiscreet words, spoken beyond the protection of closed doors—but I think now that he meant to be heard, and by more people than merely a junior Fellow, who clutched his own locket and worried about the quality of the inspiration he would be dealt as he hurried on.
It was shortly thereafter that we all began to hear such things.
“My last three cuts faded after a handful of performances,” Cybella, one of my agemates, complained to me. We’d repaired to a teahouse near the Academy after a session practicing the song cycle of Ygrete the Ruined.
“Audiences losing interest,” warned one grizzled teller. Too old and inured to inspiration’s influence to perform anymore, he’d held court here as long as I’d been coming, and tried to make up for his lost abilities by continually repeating the most ominous gossip. He spoke loudly now. “I’ve heard people say they’re tired of the old tales.”
The room, which was full of Academy students, murmured with denials. It was unthinkable. The old tales were what the Academy of Stories perfected. Amid the denials, though, I folded my lips, unsure what to think. I remembered Adair’s words, a worry rose within me to hear them echoed by my friend—but I was also, guiltily, sympathetic to the frustration with the endlessly repeated array of Academy-sanctioned tales. Maybe, I thought, this was an opportunity for something new.
My private hope faded, became clouded with the general worry as teller after teller began complaining of the same thing: inspiration was growing weak. The ore was poor, cut with chalk and stony impurities. It did not last as long. Adair was not the only one of the great tellers who hesitated to travel abroad, wary of their inspiration giving out when they were far from home, far from easy resupply.
The Deans of the Academy wore new footpaths across the park to the Ministry of Mines, and the ministers themselves sent more and more people north on urgent business: inspectors and supervisory experts, men who wore thick coats and carried thicker sheaves of production reports. The trainloads and caravans from the mining towns arrived more frequently. Their drivers would fill the bars of the capitol with the dust from their boots.
They spoke of the urgency of their work, the need to delve farther, deeper, seeking newer, more brilliant veins of inspiration; grumbled about the risk of the accidents and attrition. The young tellers who frequented those bars quieted the noise of their laughter and impromptu competitions, and nodded to the visiting miners, taking in the sight of those big-shouldered men, creased and wiry from their years of effort, of digging up inspiration from the dark beneath the earth. The miners would toast them back, solemnly, and ask for the oldest tales, the best loved ones. We always obliged.
I told many stories in those bars, and listened to many more offered up by friends and friendly competitors. The smoky rooms would fill with transportive words as teller and miner alike savored their drinks and contemplated the fruits of their labors. I never thanked those miners enough. I shouldn’t have thanked them at all—I should have told them their labor wasn’t worth all they would lose.
The last year of inspiration had a long, mild fall. The days grew shorter, but the skies stayed clear and warm. The news out of the northern mining towns was of a great push for excavation, forests razed and hillsides cratered in the push for better ore. One team of miners had discovered a new vein in the mountain foothills, so deep and rich that the inspiration it yielded was almost blinding. Solon Adair sampled the first shipment, and pronounced it worthy of another world tour, and the Ministry directed miners from three separate digs to join in the new excavation. Inspiration was pouring into the city, quickening the singers’ tongues with greater potency than ever before.
I was buoyed up like as all the rest and, what was more, I had at last received my first permission to tour—nothing international yet, but I was still suffused with excitement as I set out from the capitol on my own for the first time, medallion of my station heavy on my breast, my one valise held tight on my lap as I peered from the window of the rocking train.
Young singers most often travelled south, where they were likely to catch the attention of the few foreigners whose visas allowed them to vacation in of our coastal cities, places where new talents might nurture spreading reputations. I was full of patriotism and gratitude for the work of my mining countrymen, though, and I chose to go north, hoping to touch the lives of those laborers.
That well-intentioned vanity was the only reason that I witnessed the beginning of the end.
The town closest to the new excavation was a bloated, bustling creature, with a thousand feet and voices driven by the excitement of the mining operation’s success. Ministry officials hurried through the streets, children too young to dig played on doorsteps, and laundry hung from the windows of buildings whose walls were not yet weathered.
Despite its sudden size, the place was more an overgrown village than anything else, and there was nowhere for a teller to perform besides the open square bordered by the Ministry outpost and the public house. I shared a drink of sharp licorice spirit there with the local under-minister before my performance. He had given me only a begrudging welcome when I arrived, but the liquor made his creased, red face softer and redder, and he toasted me with his second glass before knocking it back.
“In you tale spinners,” he told me, “our nation’s spirit lives on. The great heroes will never be forgotten.”
I nodded and took a polite sip, savoring its bite. I had learned the hard way that inspiration’s influence was deadened by reckless drinking.
“These men of mine,” the minister gestured vaguely out towards the square, where a few families and off-duty miners had gathered. It was a smaller crowd than I had imagined would receive the fruits of my gratitude. “I thought at first, ‘what foolishness, to tell stories for them; how backward, to squander the product of their efforts at the source!’ I think now,” and here he cocked an eye at me, over the rim of a glass that was once again full, “you are wise in your foolishness, tale teller. One must always go back to the source. Tell the old stories, the best stories. That is what the people will ask for.” He drained his glass again, then flipped it down upon the table with a clink. “The old stories are what make us great.”
I shifted, uncomfortable. Another, unvoiced desire had spurred my visit to the provinces, the same secret hope that I might be able, for once, to tell something spun from my own fancy. I certainly could not depart from the canon of tales while on a foreign tour. But maybe here…? I had a little notebook in my pocket, full stories I had woven and rewoven over the days of travel.
When I stepped before the small crowd, though, they proved the minister right. Their welcoming noise was full of calls for tales of Serpeta Omni, the Siege of the Third Eye, and the Origin of Stories. I confess my heart sank, mourning for the sake of my own, unspoken words, but it lifted again as I began, and the faces of my listeners turned up towards me.
The inspiration warmed my heart and strengthened my voice. The evening lengthened and darkened, although the square stayed half-lit by flickering lamplight—no electric light in these provinces, even now—and the miners and their families drew close around me, traveled with me down the familiar roads of stories that they must have heard a thousand times, still powerful and binding.
I finished my last tale well after midnight, in a silence so deep and still that it echoed in my ears. Everything that I miss about tale-telling, everything that I mourn, existed in that moment: the feeling of belonging, of story that tied together speaker and listener, telling them who they were, where they came from. That was the glory of inspiration. That moment of silence, before the miners’ applause rained down on me.
Many of those same miners, who pressed up to me afterwards and shook my hand, thanked me, they were on the team that went down into the new mine the next day, after I had left on the back of a dusty cart trundling on to the next stop on my progress. They took the pulley-weighted car down to where the new vein extended deep and deeper into the earth, to where the Ministry of Mines and the Academy of Stories had told them to push further, to dig for ever-more-powerful inspiration—and they broke through to what lay beneath.
The Ministry has expunged these records: you cannot find them now, even if you submit an application to their archive and by some miracle get it approved. But I had begged a ride in the cab of a hauling transport that pulled one of the caravans of ore, on my way from the last engagement to the rail lines’ northern depot.
“The new vein,” the driver said, “there’s nothing coming from them today?”
The factor was a young woman who had not yet learned to school her expressions, and she bit her lip. “No. There’s been a…sickness there. We won’t stop in the town before we reach the station.”
I confess my first, selfish thought was gratitude that I could avoid another drink with the florid under-minister. “What happened?” I asked, and then guilt at my unvoiced thought made me add, “I hope it’s nothing dire.”
The factor frowned. “A new discovery. Some contaminating ore lying entwined with the richest of the miners’ payload. They say it seems at first to stir the mind and blood more strongly than any inspiration, but then it weakens you. Those who hold it lose the strength to stand, to speak…” She trailed off.
“It poisons tellers?” Horror shifted in my guts. “Who has tried to use this thing?” I imagined my friends and classmates in the capital, somehow transported to the mine outpost, wasting away.
“No, this was before any teller even laid hands on it.” She looked at me, and I could tell she hardly understood or believed her own story. “I read a report from their foreman. It was the miners who cut it from the earth, who carried it up to the surface. If they had held the ore too long, they grew quiet. Then lethargic. They sat down and would not get up again.”
The driver grimaced, but stayed silent, his attention on the road. I didn’t know what to say either. I had never heard of such a thing.
When we arrived at the station, there was a cluster of carts already at its gates, crowded around with people on foot, all shouting and pressing forward against a handful of guards. Recognizing the Ministry’s crest on the sides of the caravan, some of those figures changed the direction of their efforts, and ran up to where the driver had halted.
“Please, sirs! Allies! Singer!!” They called out, recognizing me. I recognized some faces from the village as well, although now they were drawn with uncertainty and fear. Two men supported a third between them. His head lolled and his feet stumbled and dragged over the ground. Others pointed back to their carts, where, I now realized, other forms were laid out as if sleeping or dead.
Many people were shouting.
“—poison from the mine. Spreading, even to those who haven’t touched it—”
“—why? There’s something about it—”
“—the old stories. Best he’d ever heard, he said—”
The factor half-stood, leaning out of the hauler’s cab and yelled questions, yelled for silence, and the tumult abated. A single voice rose, different from the rest.
“I hear it now. Just like they told the story when I was a child.” The tone was wondering, words breathy and slow. “Serpeta Omni drew his sword and strode down into the valley of shadow, where the fire-tongued lizards waited…”
It was the man held up by his two companions. He looked, unseeing, into the distance, and took another gasping breath. “I see it. I remember…. It was beautiful.” His head tipped sideways, and his legs crumpled. His supporters staggered beneath his dead weight.
Silence echoed for a moment, and then the guards had crossed the distance to us and, with their batons and raised guns, pushed the gathered miners to one side or another. They forced a space large enough for the caravan to move on and attain the station.
My thoughts ran mazes of confusion as the train carried me south to the capitol. The factor’s words had laid a shadow over me, and I kept hearing again and again the miner’s wavering voice. I had recognized his words easily—they were from the denouement of the Saga of Serpeta Omni. I had heard that scene told a thousand times, told it a hundred, easily, myself, but I felt as if I had never really heard it before, or as if I had, but the memory has been lost, and something in the way that man had spoken aroused a painful, sadness-tinged desire to recapture that long-gone time. I wanted to jump off at the nearest station, retrace my steps in search of that ailing miner and his evocative telling, but I was also discomfited and full of malaise at the memory of his ashen face and faltering limbs.
I didn’t realize how narrowly I had escaped. I was ignorant, still, of the true nature of the pestilence—the reality whose influence grew behind me.
Later, much later, after the mine had been condemned and the earth and stone piled up over it in an attempt to stop the spread, after townships and villages had been emptied and the survivors scattered to capitol and southern provinces, only then did the poison’s name reach my ears. Refugees stumbled into tellers’ bars, whispered warnings of nostalgia, the ore mined from the deepest inspiration pits.
“I held his hands,” one miner’s widow told me, “I talked and talked, trying to drown out his words as he told me, over and over, the best stories he remembered. I told him I loved him, that we had a future brighter than any of the old tales. I tried to shake him out of his dreams, even as the longing bore him down, even as he stopped moving, stopped talking, stopped breathing.” She gasped, suppressing a sob, as if her own breath was cut short. “And now, as much as I mourn him, as much as I hate the thing that took him from me, I miss the story more. I want that memory myself…”
Nostalgia’s influence spread like a miasma, its power diluted only gradually by distance. Even worse, it struck most swiftly anyone who had a favorite tale or had recently listened to a teller’s performance. I remember my own sick despair when I heard this last detail, and I thought of those firelit faces focused on my tales.
The reports remained whispers. Officially, nothing adverse had befallen either the Ministry of Mines or the Academy of Stories, but scandal grew, nonetheless. You could read it in the murmur of crowds that gathered in the central square as winter tightened its grip on the city. You could suspect it from the hurried paces of the deans and ministers who flocked to closed-door meetings on both sides of the square. Fear of nostalgia and its effects closed the throats of many tellers, even before the decision came down from the highest echelon: all telling would cease. Those singers still in possession of live inspiration could use up their allotment, but no more would be forthcoming. The Ministry would seek other resources to export.
The night they shuttered the Academy, I sat with a few fellows in an empty and quiet bar. The weight of nostalgia seemed to drag on our bones, for all we had never come under its true influence. I remember catching Cybella’s gaze, and seeing in it the same mixture of horror and confusion.
“Is this our fault?” Her words fell like stones into the silence, with only the faint echoes of muttered denials around the table.
We weren’t the only ones who saw guilt by association. Many tellers had become the targets of cold glances and insults in the streets. To many, tellers were the face of that ambition to delve for greater inspiration, and the cause of what came after. Some, like Solon Adair, defied that revulsion, and kept performing, telling tales to smaller and smaller audiences until his last dregs of inspiration wore away in a blaze of glory, and then he leapt from the roof of the defunct Academy into the snow-covered square below.
Most of us, though, did our best to let go the memory of performance, of the stories that we’d learned to spread, and found other ways to fill the days and years of our lives. I kept carrying the book of my own fancies, though, the dreams and stories that had lived only in my mind. In time, that book in my pocket came to hold as much weight and warmth as the old inspiration once had.
I wanted to tell these stories, the ones that were mine, new and vital. The old stories, those weighed down so heavily with the cobwebs of the past that they required more and more inspiration to make them live again, those were what had led us into nostalgia’s grasp. There must be a way to escape that legacy.
I could not break the silence that has fallen in my country, the paralyzing reaction to loss. I had to travel here, to speak to you in this distant land. I hope that my story will prosper in the telling, and be repeated. Maybe, one day, it will even be heard in my homeland, in the square between the Academy of Stories and the Ministry of Mines—or better yet, there will be some other teller, with some other iconoclastic tale, without precedent, without tradition, who will speak words there. That new story will ring without inspiration, yet still feel inspired.
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Chloe Smith teaches English and history to 14-year-olds, which is never boring. Besides teaching, she works as a proofreader for Fantasy Magazine, and writes science fiction and fantasy stories whenever she can make the time. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she lived in Texas and Washington states, New York City, and rural France before coming back to California. Her short fiction has appeared in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, Bourbon Penn, and elsewhere. Her debut novella, Virgin Land, came out from Luna Press Publishing in 2023. |