Charlie saw all of them.
It's one thing, he thought, singing for your life, in a room filled with diners, on the spur of the moment, with a gun barrel in the ribs of the girl you-
That you-
Oh.
Well, thought Charlie, I can worry about that later.
Right now he badly wanted either to breathe into a brown paper bag or to vanish.
"There must be hundreds of them," said Spider, and there was awe in his voice.
There was a flurry in the air, on a nearby rock, which resolved itself into the Bird Woman. She folded her arms and stared at them.
"Whatever it is you're going to do," Spider said, "you better do it soon. They aren't going to wait around forever."
Charlie's mouth was dry. "Right."
Spider said, "So. Um. What exactly do we do now?"
"We sing to them," said Charlie, simply.
"What?"
"It's how we fix things. I figured it out. We just sing it all, you and I."
"I don't understand. Sing what?"
Charlie said, "The song. You sing the song, you fix things." Now he sounded desperate. "The song."
Spider's eyes were like puddles after the rain, and Charlie saw things in them he had not seen before: affection, perhaps, and confusion and, mostly, apology. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Lion watched them from the side of a boulder. Monkey looked at them from the top of a tree. And Tiger-
Charlie saw Tiger. It was walking gingerly on four feet. Its face was swollen and bruised, but there was a glint in its eyes, and it looked as if it would be more than happy to even the score.
Charlie opened his mouth. A small croaking noise came out, as if Charlie had recently swallowed a particularly nervous frog. "It's no use," he whispered to Spider. "This was a stupid idea, wasn't it?"
"Yup."
"Do you think we can just go away again?" Charlie's nervous glance swept the mountainside and the caves, took in each of the hundreds of totem creatures from before the dawn of time. There was one he had not seen the last time he had looked: a small man, with lemon yellow gloves and a pencil-thin moustache and no fedora hat to cover his thinning hair.
The old man winked when he caught Charlie's gaze.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
Charlie filled his lungs, and he began to sing. "I am Charlie," he sang. "I am Anansi's son. Listen as I sing my song. Listen to my life."
He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, and he sang of his mother.
He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.
He sang the world.
It was a good song, and it was his song. Sometimes it had words, and sometimes it didn't have any words at all.
As he sang, all the creatures listening began to clap and to stamp and to hum along; Charlie felt like he was the conduit for a great song that took in all of them. He sang of birds, of the magic of looking up and seeing them in flight, of the sheen of the sun on a wing feather in the morning.
The totem creatures were dancing now, the dances of their kind. The Bird Woman danced the wheeling dance of birds, fanning her tail feathers, tossing back her beak.
There was only one creature on the mountainside who did not dance.
Tiger lashed his tail. He was not clapping or singing or dancing. His face was bruised purple, and his body was covered in welts and in bite marks. He had padded down the rocks, a step at a time, until he was close to Charlie. "The songs aren't yours," he growled.
Charlie looked at him, and sang about Tiger, and about Grahame Coats, and those who would prey upon the innocent. He turned: Spider was looking up at him with admiration. Tiger roared in anger, and Charlie took the roar and wound his song around it. Then he did the roar himself, just like Tiger had done it. Well, the roar began just as Tiger's roar had, but then Charlie changed it, so it became a really goofy sort of roar, and all the creatures watching from the rocks started to laugh. They couldn't help it. Charlie did the goofy roar again. Like any impersonation, like any perfect caricature, it had the effect of making what it made fun of intrinsically ridiculous. No one would ever hear Tiger roar again without hearing Charlie's roar underneath it. "Goofy sort of a roar," they'd say.
Tiger turned his back on Charlie. He loped through the crowd, roaring as he ran, which only made the crowd laugh the harder. Tiger angrily retreated back into his cave.
Spider gestured with his hands, a curt movement.
There was a rumble, and the mouth of Tiger's cave collapsed in a small rock slide. Spider looked satisfied. Charlie kept singing.
He sang the song of Rosie Noah and the song of Rosie's mother: he sang a long life for Mrs. Noah and all the happiness that she deserved.
He sang of his life, all of their lives, and in his song he saw the pattern of their lives as a web that a fly had blundered into, and with his song he wrapped the fly, made certain it would not escape, and he repaired the web with new strands.
And now the song was coming to its natural end.
Charlie realized, with no little surprise, that he enjoyed singing to other people, and he knew, at that moment, that this was what he would spend the rest of his life doing. He would sing: not big, magical songs that made worlds or recreated existence. Just small songs that would make people happy for a breath, make them move, make them for a little while, forget their problems. And he knew that there would always be the fear before performing, the stage fright, that would never go away, but he also understood that it would be like jumping into a swimming pool - only uncomfortably chill for a few seconds - and then the discomfort would pass and it would be good-.
Never this good. Never this good again. But good enough.
And then he was done. Charlie hung his head. The creatures on the cliff top let the last notes die away, stopped stamping, stopped clapping, stopped dancing. Charlie took off his father's green fedora and fanned his face with it.
Under his breath, Spider said, "That was amazing."
"You could have done it too," said Charlie.
"I don't think so. What was happening at the end? I felt you doing something, but I couldn't really tell what it was."
"I fixed things," said Charlie. "For us. I think. I'm not really sure-." And he wasn't. Now the song was over, the content of the song was unraveling like a dream in the morning.
He pointed to the cave mouth that was blocked by rocks. "Did you do that?"