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from the farms. There was no other traffic. Gad had only one market, and it had no particular name.
    Gad had no neighbors in the mountains. A single road led down onto the warmth and noise of the plains. Winter’s snow made it impassible, but in the summer, Gad did a little trade with the towns of the plains, sending down its small surplus on ox-drawn carts.
    Sometimes, a Choirman went down onto the plains with the carts. The dusty, drunken cow towns of the plains could be rough places, but Choirmen traveled unmolested: any idiot who laid hands on a Choirman’s black robes would soon face justice—or what passed for justice in the heat and noise of the world down there. And the towns were eager to house the Choirmen, for their medicine, or their skills with animals, or their patience in resolving disputes; but above all, the plainspeople—whose daily lives were dry, tough, and practical—wanted the Choirmen for their song, and for the intimations the song could bring them of Gad’s sacred Voice.
    In dusty bowls out back of the town, or in clearings in the scrabbly woods, the Choirman, or more often woman, would sing until night fell over the plains, then slip away. At dawn, she would wait where she sang the night before, cross-legged on the ground, black robes pooling around her feet, waiting for the town’s children to come to her. She would test them all day, helping the shy children to improvise a clumsy descant upon her plainsong. She listened closely to their voices as nervous parents waited at home. Most often, she would pack up and leave town alone. Only a few children had the gift of song, and those she brought with her.
             
    A rjun was very young when Mother Abayla tested him and brought him up into Gad. He soon forgot his previous life, except for a few scattered images. He remembered horses; cows; a piano banging away over a warm drone and shimmer of sitars and the drunken beat of hand-drums, in a room full of towering, twirling legs in dusty brown leather and bright lace and silk; the smell of dust and cows and cheap rum. Nothing much else. The Choirmen disdained piano and sitar and drums, but still, when he composed, he imagined that cheap piano and the peasant drums and drone, and the memory gave his music a thumping liveliness entirely unlike the other students’ exercises. Otherwise, he never thought much about what his life might have been like before Gad.
    They let him keep his birth-name. They added
Dvanda
to it—a word that referred, in their scheme of thinking, to an augmentation of chords through doubling and repetition, but that they chose for its sound, not its meaning: so that he was
Arjun Dvanda
at the chanting of the roll. It fitted the meter better.
    The Choristry’s floors were made of cool grey stone. The Choirmen’s feet brushed it gently. The first thing he learned was to walk quietly, and listen closely.
             
    A rjun’s voice broke early, and fatally. It was not terrible, only pedestrian and a little flat. Good enough to belt out a sing-along at some peasant feast day down on the plains; better, in fact, than anything one could hear anywhere else in the world; but not good enough for the Choir. The Choir existed to echo the Voice. Only the purest singers were fit for that task. Those boys whose promise went sour were sent back sadly onto the plains.
    Arjun was allowed to stay only because of an exceptional gift for composition. That was his earliest real memory: sitting in Mother Abelia’s lacquer-paneled office while she and Mother Jessica and Father Julah explained this to him. They gave him a choice: he could stay, or he could leave the Choristry and go into Gad, where he would be taken in. He was very small on the hard wooden chair. The Mothers and Fathers were not cruel, unless it was perhaps cruel to offer a child that choice, but they were very honest.
    Arjun chose to stay. When the Choir practiced at noon, he was permitted to take tiny parts,