"I don't mean it was too soon for the Saint," she replied. "Too soon for us. I was not ready. Neither were you. I wish I could have spared you that pain."
The concession felt like a dismissal. Vance could not bear his own mute incomprehension. He walked away.
#
A newly Resurrected Dessit, flanked by Sila Kreiner on one side and Strake Adell on the other, took his place unsteadily at the head of the long table, served by tradition for the absent Saint. He was hairless of course, tall where he'd been short, and much less overweight, though still thick around the torso and thighs. His eyes were blue now and his skin a light tan. He appeared to be in his late twenties.
The feast-goers offered congratulations to Dessit-reborn, to his companions and to the Saint. When it became known that the kitchens were untouched by the flames, cups of mulled wine were raised in toast. Even Goodhosts Bunstable and Yousta, their regard for their daughter split between suspicion and jubilation, held their cups aloft and thanked Mitus.
Vance held himself apart from the celebrations. He no longer knew how to behave in this company. The Eight was broken. He would not Resurrect. There was no place for him in the Order of Rejuvenationists now. No other pilgrimage would take on a member of a failed Eight. He could not imagine becoming a lay fellow, devoting himself with simple faith and no hope of a greater calling. Saint Mitus might have great plans for his fellowship, but they no longer included Vance Adell.
He became aware that Strake and Sila were watching him, conferring in whispers. He turned, uncomfortable, looking down the road to the town at the steady stream of well-wishers and patrons of the Feast of Horns. One of them would surely agree to accommodate him for the night. He no longer wished to return the way he came in the company of his former companions. Best to make a clean break of it.
"The Feast hasn't begun yet. Are you already looking to tidy up?"
He had become lost in his reverie. He hadn't noticed Strake approach. Too late to run, but what could he say?
He decided on simplicity. "I'm leaving."
Strake nodded thoughtfully. "A broken Eight doesn't need a treasurer," he observed.
"I wish you well on your engagement, brother. You've made a formidable match. The Saint would approve."
"No doubt," said Strake, with an air of sheepish pleasure. They watched the milling crowd in silence. The forced cheer of the tragedy narrowly averted was giving way to relief and a mood of celebratory thanks. Eventually Strake said, "Did you know Saint Mitus never travelled with seven other people?"
"What?" Vance had never heard anything like that before, let alone from his doctrinally-precise brother.
Strake's guarded expression would better have fit Strake-of-old. "On his original pilgrimage he met many people along the way. He led armies, fought battles and saw the wonders of the world, but he never came up with the idea of the Eight until he sat down at the end of his life to write his memoirs."
"Why eight then?"
"I think it was just his lucky number."
"Are you trying to tell me something?"
Strake spread his hands and shrugged. "Not a thing," he said. He looked across at Sila Kreiner, who was leading an impromptu ritual of greeting for Dessit. She looked relaxed. There was even a small smile playing across her face as she led the prayer.
"Things change, big brother. Saint Mitus has big plans, but maybe he's not as fussy as we all think about how they get delivered. Walking the world in a big circle, seeing the same sights he saw a hundred years ago and telling his stories over and again, until we burst into flame. Even a drunken old warhorse like Mitus can think of more efficient ways of getting things done, don't you think?"
Vance considered the life he would go back to, counting the coins for some grasping lord, perhaps managing an estate in his later years. He looked back to Sila. She was a new woman. She could never return to her ice sheets and her gutting knives. She had given up her Eight. Without it she had nothing. He had never seen such a look of contentment, not on this face nor her last.
"I won't Resurrect," he observed. His relief was a surprise; he'd expected to give voice to overwhelming shame.
Strake wrapped a reassuring arm around his shoulder. "I never thought you would, big brother. The Resurrected are forged to become blades in Saint Mitus' arsenal. Dessit will return to his nets and boats to become a great man of the port cities. Gerrolt's been building great monuments in his head for months. As for Polna, she'll lead great war parties whether she burns or not."
"What about Sulsan and Hiram?"
Strake chuckled. "Every general needs soldiers with good muscle. Mitus made them mighty. We can't expect him to work miracles on their wits."
"You know, you blaspheme a lot more often since you were reborn." Vance caught himself smiling, warming to his brother's good humour. Saint Mitus, it was said, was an amiable companion.
"Well, there you are then. I'm the chaos and disorder that fans the flames."
"Don't let the Goodhosts hear that." The smoke odour hanging to their damp clothes made him blink away tears. What other cause could there be? "Are you really so keen to overthrow tradition?"
"I'm just here to tear down some walls and clear a path. Kreiner's the one who will make new traditions. No more Order of Rejuvenationists, no more marching songs, no grand sightseeing expeditions. Even the Nineteen Venerated tourist spots may find new significance."
"I wish her well," said Vance. He meant it. It still hurt to say it. Better to go now, before the grief became real. He turned his back to the revelry.
A thin horn sounded a low, groaning note that echoed across the massive face of Luxichre. The Feast of Horns began with low cheers fading into a song of mourning and renewal. "Goodbye, Strake."
Instead of overpowering him with one of his bear hugs, Strake asked, "Do you know why I knew you would never take the fires, Vance?"
He paused. "Did you have a vision?"
"I used my eyes, brother." Now Strake lay his hands on Vance's head and turned it gently. In his eyes shone the blessing of the Saint and, perhaps, permission to change his mind. "You're already what she needs you to be. You always were."
Vance saw Sila Kreiner, seated with the faithful, singing and smiling before the House of Saint Mitus' Eyes. Her eyes were alight, green and wet, shining with love and purpose. The seat beside her was empty, a senseless void left in hope of a centre.
Vance looked past her to the House of Saint Mitus' Eye, smoke vapour wisping about it in the freezing mountain air. He thought of its hearth and the morning's fire kindled from the evening's coals. He thought of spring, distant but closing. He thought of warmth shared against the cold.
A fire grew in his belly as he returned to the Feast of Horns.
'The Feast of Horns' came out of a 24-hour writing challenge for the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. Coordinator Ian McHugh gave each of us several prompts one Saturday afternoon, and we were to meet the following afternoon at a café with a finished story. The only prompt I still remember is that I drew a Jack of Clubs playing card, corresponding to a "troublemaker" or "disruptive element" or something like that. Strake emerged fully formed.
The idea of the pilgrimage and the (literally) transformative experience came from other prompts. The idea of a noble and spiritual adventure being undermined by miscommunication, unforeseen problems and petty exploitation was, sadly, all me.
Incidental
Everything changed for Benji when he hit puberty and lost his incidental music.
Growing up, he was no different to any other kid. He played the same games, ate the same food and he was followed everywhere by the same simplistic, cheerful party pop. Sure, there were times when he ran through some minor keys, like when his parakeet got out of its cage and eaten by the neighbour's cat, or when his mum caught his dad harmonising with the neighbour's suggestive bossa-nova ambiance. But even after Mum started her new life as a soloist, Benji mostly bopped along with an untroubled heart and a C-D-F refrain
in the air.
One week after his thirteenth birthday, his music went away. His friends Cally and Winston noticed it before Benji did.
"How come your music's stopped?" asked Cally. She was taking a break from their soccer practise to peel open an orange. A warbling trombone wafted up from the mix of her usual upbeat swing number. "Are you feeling okay?"
Winston thundered the ball past Benji into the goal net. "He's so dumb he thinks it's the intermission!" A cymbal clash broke Winston's soaring, horn-heavy fanfare. They all chuckled along.
Benji hadn't even noticed the silence. Now it followed him everywhere.
His mother was even more worried. With a frantic oboe chorus buzzing in her wake, she raced Benji to the paediatric musicologist.
The doctor, his furrowed brow echoing with elegiac mountain pipe music, took blood samples and ran some basic scales tests. Benji's music didn't respond. The doctor referred him to a psychoacoustics specialist.
The specialist steered Benji into an acoustics chamber that could detect a pin drop or a dying man's last chord. Nothing. In a baffled studio that damped every noise but Benji's breathing, he took x-rays and brain scans and a few more blood samples.
Benji waited for hours, the only sounds his scared breathing and his mother's muted, mournful chorus that sometimes swelled to a rousing reassurance of lively drums and brass.
Finally the specialist returned with images of Benji's head. In time to a stern, staccato waltz, he tapped a ruler at a blue patch in the cross-section of Benji's brain and recommended exploratory surgery.
Benji couldn't tell whether the specialist's jarring pitch changes meant that he was excited or confused.
Cally's outrage expressed as atonal ascending scales, strident and brassy. "They're going to cut your head open?"
Benji shrugged. "Nobody knows what's wrong. I think they're scared." He tried to sound brave but not so much as an adventurous viola sounded forth. "They try not to be but my Mum says she can hear it in their trebles."
Winston said, "They should just leave you alone. You don't have to have music if you don't want it." But then he ran away, trailing a clatter of cowbells and plucked ukulele notes.
Benji thought it over. Winston was wrong. He wanted his music back.
Nurses wordlessly flitted around his hospital bed making efficient, business-like movements. They swept in and out of sight like ants disassembling a picnic to brisk, professional woodwinds.
As Benji breathed through the anaesthetist's mask, their music wandered away from melody into tuneless contralto waves.
But Benji was aware of their timpani rumbles of submerged fear and the first dissonant strains of a bassoon as the surgeon arrived. Keys diverged and time signatures fell out of harmony as his eyes closed.
#
Benji knew before his eyelids began to unglue that the operation had failed. Nothing surrounded him but the soft hiss of a ventilator, the hum of indifferent machinery and the hushed buzz of human speech beyond too-thin walls.
He tried to squeeze his eyes shut but the darkness made the silence worse, a void that drained hope and fed despair. With a lump rising in his throat, he let the light in and looked around at the blue wall of vinyl curtains hanging around his bed. The curtain's perimeter diverted around the back of an unoccupied chair. He felt its emptiness deep inside his stomach; he felt no hunger for the bowl of pale, spotted fruit in the bowl alongside his pillow.
Benji knew one thing. All the doctors and nurses hadn't been able to figure out what happened to him. His music was gone. They didn't know where it was and they didn't know how to bring it back.
He thought about the last time he had cried. One afternoon a year ago, his father had said goodbye in a haze of endless regret, unstoppable tears and slow-strummed minor chords.
Without low, slurring strings rising with the lump in his throat, Benji didn't remember how to cry.
The talkers came closer and now he could hear strains of concern, confusion and even some anger. He could hear violins darting in and out of their upper registers. His mother was nervous and upset. Benji steeled himself for the crashing peals of percussion and trills of flutes as she tried to hide her fear and disappointment.
Voices and shadows fell across the curtains and they parted for his mother and the surgeon. Benji met her eye. He tried to think of a way to tell her he was sorry.
Then all at once Benji's mother's music softened and transformed. A counter-melody cut through her distraught fugue, a chorus of violas laying down a bridge for a crisply-strummed guitar to appear.
Benji's mother looked around in surprise, even a little alarm – she'd never made a sound like it. Next to her, the doctor's face made the same expression. His music was falling into rhythm with hers. Guitars and a snappy drum fill, the kind that made Benji want to stamp his feet and wave his arms. Fun, happy music spilled out of them and filled his ears.
Benji smiled at his mother. He laughed at the doctor, and the nurses who ran in and the orderly who reached for him with big, trembling hands.
They were playing his song.
'Music as magic' is, depending on how you look at it, either one of my favourite motifs or a crutch I lean on far too often. If there's a clinically safe dosage, I am probably a certifiable motif abuser.
In this case, I wanted to turn the idea "what if people could hear their own incidental music?" into a comical short film script. The idea bounced around my head for a couple of years, until it attached itself to the character of an innocent child, with creepy results.
'Incidental' was the first piece of flash fiction I ever submitted for publication. It appeared in EGM Shorts (Evil Girlfriend Media, February 2016), edited by Jennifer Brozek.
Lost Dogs
Eric unspooled a length of tape with a sound like ribs splitting. Morning mist crept around his ankles. The steady bleed of fresh traffic emptying the suburbs had yet to begin.
He pinched off the tape with his teeth and pressed it across the top of the poster, fixing it to a pole of weathered green timber, burying signs of various vintages.
LOST DOG, exclaimed the text above the photo. HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Hayley’s eyes stared out in happy expectation. Even the faded impression left by a toner-starved printer couldn’t rob them of their simple, goofy joy. Eric’s son, Matthew, had taken the picture at dinner time, when Hayley’s natural affection was at its bubbly peak.
They still had no idea how she got out. How did an overfed, congenitally lazy golden retriever clear a six-foot brick wall, or a latched front gate?
Admiring his handiwork, he realised suddenly he’d forgotten to add his phone number alongside the house line and Craig’s office number. Craig would be pissed if someone called him at work. But Eric hadn’t brought a pen.
The chill creeping into his fingers reminded him he still had four blocks and eighteen poles to cover. He stuffed the tape back into his jacket pocket and stumped off toward the next corner. In case Hayley had strayed into a neighbour’s yard, he peered over each fence.
A few joggers nodded as they huffed past. Down the street some bird watcher wandered about with a camera held up like a permanent facial attachment. Eric waved a poster at a woman walking a shaggy little Pekinese with a silver collar. "Excuse me. My son’s dog has gone missing. Have you seen her?"
The woman’s legs were clad in black leggings, thick as sealskin, while her upper half disappeared into a bulky sweatshirt. The little dog retreated behind her pristine running shoes. She said, "A dog? It’s not that dirty great brown thing, is it?" She sounded like she’d eaten something disagreeable but her eyes ran up and down over Eric with familiar appreciation. He was used to it. He kept in shape.
"I – no, Hayley’s a golden retriever." He pointed to the picture. "What brown thing are you talking about?"
The dog flattened onto its belly and growled. Its buzzsaw whine struggled to penetrate the frozen air. "Stop that, Chelsea." The woman jerked on its lead. It raised a shaggy black ey
e toward her but its protest persisted. "Oh, I nearly ran over some big dog wandering along the road yesterday afternoon. Size of a bull and covered in curls. I’ve only just had the front end retouched from hitting a roo last year. When I hit the horn it just stared me down."
The cold killed his interest in lingering over a dead end. "Not my Hayley then. She’d have fainted at the noise."
The Pekinese burst into yapping at the distant ornithology enthusiast, straining at his lead to give chase. "Shut up, Chelsea. I didn’t let it eat you, did I?" The woman frowned. "I’d better get her home. You live on Parvenir Street, don’t you? I’ll drop in if I see your Hayley."
"Thanks so much."
Eric’s gaze strayed away. For the first time he noticed posters slathering every power pole on the street. Each bore a photo of a different dog.
#
Craig backed his Audi backed down the driveway in a cloud of exhaust vapour. Eric danced out of the vehicle’s way and rapped frozen knuckles against the frosted driver’s side window. The car slowed without stopping. The window opened a narrow crack.
Craig said, "I’m late for work. You took too long." He made no effort to be audible above the Arcade Fire album playing on the stereo. Eric’s hearing had become sharper since he’d moved into Craig’s house.
"You said you would drop Mattie off at school this morning." Eric complained. "You know he’s upset."
"Well, he was apparently too upset to be ready in time, so you’ll have to handle it." Craig checked his mirrors and turned the wheel hard, forcing Eric to jump back. "Call me if you get a job today. I’ll be back at half-six unless something comes up."
Eric’s fingernails dug into his palms as he watched the Audi roar away. Not a word of concern for the dog, let alone for their twelve year old son.
No, he corrected himself. Never ‘our’ son. Just mine.
Mnemo's Memory Page 18
