McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk

by Song For The Basilisk(Lit)

  Pleased, he caught her hand and kissed it, nearly blinding himself with her bow. "That's wonderful. You will appreciate my work in ways that Berone Sidero never did. He refused to let me choose singers for my own songs. His taste was never quite disastrous, but—" Attuned as he was to every tremolo of mood around him, he stopped. His hand tightened on hers; he searched her eyes. "But why you? Where is Berone Sidero? He fusses over this festival like a goose with a string of goslings. He is jealous of every flea. Did he drop dead or something?"

  "He became ill," Giulia said temperately. "Hexel. About the singers—"

  "Illness was not in his schedule a week ago. He was hounding me for music." He loosed her to fling up his hands. "How can I write music? I have no—but listen to this." He took the picochet impulsively, found a note, and played a simple, haunting melody. The picochet whined fretfully in his hands; Giulia, lifting the lavandre, repeated it in dulcet tones and smiled.

  "It's lovely."

  "It's a song to an absent lover." He put the picochet down and tried to pace around it. "Or perhaps a lost love, one mysteriously vanished. I can't decide. How can I? I have done everything already; there is nothing left to hold my interest. Everything bores me. Lovers, lovers parting, lovers reconciled. That is the only plot in the world and I have exhausted it."

  "But it becomes new with every pair of lovers who have never loved like this before—"

  "And never will again. I know. The Prince of Berylon wants a bauble for his birthday. An airy pastry stuffed with pastel cream. I am starving on all this sweetness. This year, I am going to kill someone."

  "Not on his birthday!"

  "Why not? He did."

  She rapped his shoulder sharply with her bow. "He did not. Which is the reason for the autumn festival."

  "That he stopped killing people."

  "That Berylon was at peace again. Which is saying the same thing," she added as he opened his mouth. "I know. But in language he would wish to hear. And which will not get the music school closed. You may rant at me about the Prince of Berylon, but you will write a confection for him."

  He sighed, leaning over her, his hands on the arms of her chair, his head bowed. "Then help me."

  She thought, silent. He straightened, picked up her lavandre, and blew softly, playing his love melody. She set the bow to the picochet, whispered a duet.

  She saw the stranger's face again, an odd echo of the past, as if a dusty painting had come to life. Hexel, watching, lowered the lavandre. "What are you thinking?"

  "Nothing. I mean something out of the ordinary. But not extraordinary. Just—"

  "What?"

  "Just a man who came into the Griffin's Egg and played my picochet and left. That's all."

  He leaned back against the door, still watching her beneath half-lowered lids. "That's not all."

  "He played like my grandfather."

  "Did he look like your grandfather?"

  "No."

  "What did he look like?"

  "No one I have ever met, but somehow familiar… He barely spoke. He interrupted my ballad, finished it for me, and was gone. That's all. Yet I've never heard anyone play like that except my grandfather."

  "And you."

  "And me."

  Hexel made a soft sound; his eyes grew opaque. "The stranger who is not a stranger, returning…"

  "Returning from where? He looked as if he had been born in the provinces and had just walked down from them. He played like it."

  "Perhaps," he said softly. "But you like him mysterious."

  "Well, so he seemed…" She paused, and decided not to invite the Basilisk's guards into Hexel's imagination. "He wouldn't tell me his name. His eyes were—"

  "His eyes?"

  "He looked—" She stopped, inarticulate again, and met Hexel's curious gaze. "His eyes didn't look," she said finally, "as if he had spent his days watching corn grow. But he probably did."

  "I," Hexel said, "prefer him mysterious." She lifted a brow; he did not see. He had focused on the shining coils of the lavandre. "I see him returning from somewhere, some ordeal… Returning perhaps to Berylon, where he was born. And where once he loved."

  She raised the bow, pressed it meditively to her lips. "And he wonders now—"

  "If she still loves him. If she is still free. If she will recognize him."

  "Why wouldn't she recognize him? He can't be that old."

  "We must have some dramatic tension."

  "She pretends not to recognize him," Giulia suggested, inspired. "She dares not."

  "She's married."

  "No," she said hastily, remembering Damiet. "She must be virginal for the prince's opera. You may not raise moral issues."

  "She's engaged, then." He sat straight suddenly. "No. I know. She doesn't know him. They have never met. Upon meeting, by chance, love flares between them, their hearts are lost to one another. But they must love in secret because their families are bitter enemies. Which is why he was forced to leave the city."

  She stirred, hearing overtones of history in his plot. "Hexel, you are treading too closely to truth. Love must have been thwarted like that during the Basilisk's War, and in the lives and memory of some who will be watch ing this. They'll find only bitterness in your happy ending."

  "And, returning, he is still in danger…"

  "You're not listening to me."

  "Yes, I am. How can you say that?" He caught her shoulders, kissed her exuberantly. "I hang on your every word. You are my muse."

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  Chapter Three

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  Caladrius found lodgings, a tiny room above a tavern across from the one place he knew that held no sorrow. Some inner compass had led him there, through vast currents of strangers moving ceaselessly between stone and light that could, he learned, be merciless. Its fierce warmth had hatched basilisks in that city, griffins; the phoenix of Marcasia House shriveled in it like paper and was reborn; the chimera of Iridia House could be glimpsed in the hot, shrunken shadows and the shimmering glare of noon. In the cool pale marble of the music school he finally saw beyond the fiery light, to the child who had walked fearlessly through the city and knew his name.

  From his room, he could look down at the griffins still intact on their egg-shaped shields on either side of the front doors. The Basilisk had destroyed the House, but had let the stones survive. A gesture for history, Caladrius guessed. A token to the dead. Watching the students, the black-robed magisters coming and going, their arms cradling instruments, music, books, he remembered his teacher's face, her luminous, powerful eyes. She had played an instrument for him that he had not heard again until he walked into a village in the hinterlands.

  Perhaps, he mused, she had other strange instruments. She was of Iridia House; she would have no love for the Prince of Berylon. He could ask at the music school; they would tell him where to find her. If she had survived.

  He descended to the tavern, noisy with students and laborers, and already stifling at midday. He ate roast beef and brown bread, drank bitter ale, his head lowered, taciturn as the farmer he seemed. He longed with sudden intensity for Hollis's company, and put the longing aside ruthlessly to think. The young man who had called himself Griffin Tormalyne had had a secret; perhaps it was that secret which had tried, so ineptly, to bring arms into the city. The name had not been forgotten; it had become dangerous. To whom? he wondered. Perhaps she would know, his old magister, with her seeing eyes. He was startled out of his musings by the young man sitting down opposite him at the broad, scarred plank.

  "You're Giulia's picochet player!" he exclaimed. Caladrius gazed blankly at the good-humored, blue-eyed face under a tangle of pale gold. "Do you remember?" he persisted. "You played with us in the Griffin's Egg. Giulia wondered who you were."

  "Giulia." He took a bite, chewed silently, and found, beneath the terrors and chaos of the bridge, calm hazel eyes within a limp, sweat-streaked fa
ll of dark hair. "Is that her name."

  "Giulia Dulcet." He added mysteriously, "We lost her to Pellior House. To the Basilisk's birthday party. My name is Justin Tabor. I play the bass pipe."

  "Yes." He stretched a hand across the table, noticing then that the blue eyes were reddened with late hours, smoke, beer; the wild hair looked permanently tangled. He felt his own face ease slightly. "I remember the hair."

  "Can you play with us again?" the young man asked impulsively. "We've gotten accustomed to the picochet; it's the only thing louder than the tavern. We're at the Griffin's Egg nearly every night. We can pay, if you're looking for work."

  "I am," Caladrius said, after another bite. "But I left my instrument behind me. In the north. I'm a stranger here. I don't understand. Why you lost Giulia."

  The rakish gentleness on Justin's face slipped like a mask; someone older, harder, inhabited that face. "She went to play music for the Basilisk. Arioso Pellior. Every year on his birthday, he gives us all a present. A feast. Music. The streets are dressed in ribbons and banners; Berylon turns into a festival. He bribes us to forget, and shows us at the same time that we have no power in remembering."

  "You're too young to remember," Caladrius commented, and the untroubled musician reappeared, hiding his private face.

  "The House remembers," he said briefly, and bit into the meat pie cooling in his hand.

  "Perhaps when I'm settled," Caladrius said, intrigued by the hints of bitterness, of secrecy. "When I find another instrument."

  "What kind of work are you looking for?"

  "Almost anything. I've done many things."

  "Can you read music?"

  "Why?" Caladrius asked, arrested mid-bite.

  "They're looking for a music librarian at Pellior Palace. To catalog the music collection from Tormalyne Palace that strangely refused to burn. My cousin Nicol was trying to persuade me." He brooded a moment at his pie, then looked up to catch the expression that had glanced through Caladrius's eyes. "I don't blame you, I don't want it either. Most likely," he added with his mouth full, "for entirely different reasons. You must be used to mortaring stones together. Tossing seeds around. Watching things grow."

  "Or not."

  "Well, they must have grown once, the way you play. Isn't that what they say? It brings up the crops? Giulia told me that. If you do get work and your instrument back, come and find us again. You can find Giulia across the street at the music school. You left before she could talk to you. You're the only other picochet player she's heard in Berylon."

  Caladrius, making a sudden decision, replied absently, "It's not an instrument for the city."

  "No. She grew up in the provinces on her grandfather's farm."

  "Did she? So did I. Grow up north."

  "Maybe you knew each other."

  "No." He dropped a coin on the table and rose, looking down at Justin. "Which way is it?"

  "What?"

  "Pellior Palace."

  Justin swallowed too quickly. "That way," he said when he could. "Four streets over and then down Tigore Way. Half a mile or so past Tormalyne Palace. You'll recognize that. It's been dead for thirty-seven years."

  "Thank you. You've been kind. I'll find you again. When I have a picochet."

  He was nearly out the door when Justin got to his feet and shouted, "Wait! I don't know your name."

  The familiar midday din in the tavern fell to a sudden hush. Caladrius, turning, faced inquisitive eyes all over the room, attention focused on him for no reason at all except that a young man, crying out a question, held them suspended in his curiosity.

  He said to the city of Berylon, "My name is Caladrius."

  The tavern resumed its noisy flow, burying his name beneath words like a stone beneath water. Only Justin, caught in Caladrius's glance as the door swung shut, hesitating before he sat, seemed puzzled as by a song he had once heard that had just haunted him again.

  Tormalyne Palace lay in the bright, drenching light like the immense, blinded, sun-bleached corpse of some fabled animal. Caladrius tried to pass without looking at it, afraid he might stop in the middle of the jostling crowds and howl like a dog, tear cobbles from the street to wring sorrow out of stone. It loomed beyond his lowered eyes, insisting, until he finally looked, and was stopped. Memories swarmed through him; he could not see beyond the ghosts haunting him. Something struck him lightly: a passing lute angled across the back of a magister's black robe. The red-haired lute player, lost in his own furious thoughts, did not notice the man he had brought back from the dead. Caladrius lowered his head, took one step, and then another, and felt the fingers of fire and bone slowly loosen their hold around his heart.

  He did not remember Pellior Palace. It was likely that he had never seen it: the rulers of Pellior House had paid court, for four centuries, to Tormalyne House. It rose white as bone above its placid gardens, banners spilling out of its windows, its turrets painted gold. Basilisks prowled the front gate. They demanded his business brusquely, laughed at his worn boots, his unkempt hair. Then, with nothing better to do than swelter in the sun, one walked through the cool trees into the palace.

  Sometime later he returned, and opened the gate.

  Veris Legere, he was told, would see him.

  Veris Legere saw him in a small room of green-and-cream marble. He was a slight, aging man, unperturbed, it seemed by his complete lack of expression, at the sight of a farmer in Arioso Pellior's palace. He did, for a moment, search for appropriate words.

  Caladrius said, while he looked, "Forgive my appearance. I just walked down. From the north. I'm looking for work. I studied awhile with the bards. On Luly."

  Veris Legere found his voice, a hint of expression. "The bards of Luly," he said slowly. "I forget, sometimes, that they are more than a legend."

  "They may be, by now," Caladrius said steadily. "No more than a legend. It was many years ago. But they teach in ways to make you remember."

  "Yes. So I've heard." If he heard more than that, of fire on the rock, nothing in his cool eyes suggested it. "What did they teach you?"

  "Various instruments. Poetry and songs. To read and write words and notes."

  "Did you compose?"

  "A few things."

  "Who told you that the House needed a librarian?"

  "A young man in a tavern." Veris Legere raised a questioning brow. "A musician. I mentioned that I need work. He remembered this. He did not expect me to be interested."

  "The musicians of the Tormalyne School would rather play it than catalog it. The collection to be cataloged is quite large and very old. It was taken from Tormalyne Palace after the fall of the House."

  "The palace burned." He found reason then to be grateful for the provincial abruptness. "The music did not?"

  "I believe it must have been moved. To the dungeons, perhaps. It was moved here with equal haste, that I can tell from the disorder. Whoever brought it here forgot it, or was unable to tell anyone who thought it important. The prince's daughter Luna discovered it in various old chests and cupboards. Much of the music was written by members of Tormalyne House. Their names told us where the collection had come from. Some of the music is so old it flakes under the brush of air. It must be put in order, as far as possible, by composer and date. You would need to learn something of the history of the House."

  "May I see it?" The passion he could not hide in his voice, Veris took for a music lover's; a faint smile surfaced in his eyes.

  "Some of it has been moved into the music room. It is usually empty, at this time of day. Come."

  "I'm not—I can't—" He gestured at his dust.

  "You made it this far, Master Caladrius, in those clothes. Arioso Pellior does not question my judgment in matters of music."

  The music room, as he had predicted, was empty. It was a vast cave of filigreed marble, all shades of white but for the solemn black strip that ran along the base of the walls. Cases of wood and glass stood back-to-back in ranks along one side of the room; they hel
d instruments and music. Veris led him to the line of cases along the wall, opened one. Scrolls and flat manuscripts filled it in a disorderly pile. Veris lifted a brown scroll gently and handed it to Caladrius.

  "Tell me what you see."

  "It's old." He unrolled it carefully, his hands trembling slightly. "Song," it was titled simply at the top. At the bottom it was signed "Aurelia Tormalyne."

  "Someone of the House wrote it. There is no date. I would have to know when she lived. It is written for a single instrument in the middle ranges. Possibly to be sung. Perhaps there are words, somewhere." The scroll was shaking badly; he felt Veris's eyes move from it to his face. He let the scroll roll itself. "I'm sorry," he told the cold marble floor. "It's a thing that happens. When I want something very badly."