McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk

by Song For The Basilisk(Lit)

  "He stopped there, on his way into the city, when they crossed at the Pellior Bridge. So I heard. I never saw him go there again."

  "Very strange… And the matter of the arms?"

  But his mistrust of everything living except her father overcame him. He said only, "About the matter of the arms on the Tormalyne Bridge, I have spoken to the prince."

  She turned back to the night. "Thank you, Brio." She felt him leave, a spill of shadowy air down the tower steps, the faint rustle of dead leaves. She rested her chin on her hand, gazing at the moon again, as if it mirrored her, or she mirrored it, and they both took pleasure in their reflections.

  After a while, Taur came up, looking vague, as if he did not know what had brought him up there, but found it as good a place as any at the moment. Luna had let him feel her desire to see him; her silent wish compelled him, in restless and aimless fashion, to search the house until he found peace on top of a tower he barely knew existed.

  He said absently, "You come up here, too."

  "Sometimes." He had been drinking, she saw. His shirt was loose; there was a wine stain on his sleeve. He was carrying something: a wooden puppet on strings. She added, "You've been with your children."

  He looked blankly down at the toy. "It's safe, with them," he said. He wove his fingers through the strings, set the puppet dancing on the parapet. She watched him.

  "Safe?"

  "Our father has been furious with me ever since I came back."

  "He doesn't seem angry."

  "I can hear it in his voice, see it in his smile. He did lose his temper when he heard how I had the trapper killed on the Tormalyne Bridge before he could be questioned. He asked me how he could possibly have sired an heir with a coddled egg for a brain."

  "You were tired," Luna said temperately. "You were hurrying to get home. He exiled you for six weeks among sheep—"

  "Don't remind me."

  "You're with your children more now. You used to be out all night. Did you have a lover?"

  "Well." He let the puppet collapse on the stones. "It was a madness that passed."

  "Who was she?"

  "No one you knew."

  "Was she angry, when you stopped?"

  He shrugged a little, jerking the puppet limbs again; he would not let her see his eyes. "How would I know? I gave her no choice."

  "Will you see her again?"

  He met her eyes then, his tired eyes holding no bitterness, only a stunned wonder, a secret. She drew a long breath; the scent of oranges mingled with the distant, moonlit water. "I don't know," he said abruptly. "It seems like a dream. There was another man on the Tormalyne Bridge that night. He set the wagon on fire and ran, after the trapper was killed. Maybe if they find him, my father will stop being so angry with me."

  "Was he a trapper?"

  "He said he had walked down. From the north. You know how they talk. Or maybe you don't. He must have known something, though, the way he ran."

  "What did he look like?"

  "I don't know," Taur said impatiently. "Like a farmer."

  Luna turned her head, questioned the moon with wide eyes. "A farmer," she said. "From the north. Why would he know anything?"

  "Why did he run? He behaved suspiciously."

  She picked up the puppet lying forgotten on the stones, tossed it lightly over the edge of the tower. "That's why."

  "Luna! I made that!"

  "That's why he ran."

  Taur breathed heavily for a moment. "I still say he was—" He stopped, began again. "I wouldn't have thrown him over the bridge."

  "It's too pleasant to argue."

  "I'm not arguing. I'm trying to be reasonable, and you throw my children's toys into the trees."

  She smiled at him. "Make another. It's only a toy."

  "You are getting as impossible as our father. He should find you a husband. Or doesn't he want you to leave him? Or can't you leave him? Are you really something he conjured up in secret?"

  "You should know."

  "I wasn't paying attention when you were born. I was busy growing my first beard. I don't remember noticing you for years. For all I know, he might have made you."

  She leaned over the parapet, listening to the night bird. "Maybe he did," she said equably. "So then?"

  "Then it doesn't matter. You'll die when he dies. And my children will never have to fear yours."

  "And if I don't die?" She looked at him, her eyes still smiling, full of moonlight, cold and white as bone. His breath caught. Then he laughed a little, searching the moon-frosted leaves below for his puppet.

  "Then I'll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble. You can throw your own children's toys off the towers."

  She laughed, too, softly, and slid her fingers into the crook of his arm. "Let's go down. I promised our father I would play his new compositions with him. Come and listen?"

  "No, thank you. I would rather stay out of his way. Music makes me tired. That interminable opera on his birthday. It sounds like people being tortured. Maybe that's why he likes it."

  They wound down the tower steps together, and parted company, Taur to his family's chambers, and she to a small alcove beside the music room. There, on a marble table, beneath a bust of Duke Drago Pellior, who watched her with her father's cold lizard's eyes, she played with an odd assortment of mirrors, lenses and prisms, copper rods and weights. She balanced a lens and a small mirror on rods set across from one another, and at a level with one of her ancestor's eyes. The eye within the lens, enlarged, gazed at itself within the mirror. A prism, dangling from a higher rod, neatly caught the reflected eye and trapped it in its facets. Footsteps passed her now and then, growing fainter with discretion, as if those who made them tried to walk on air behind her. She left such playthings here and there within the palace. No one dared touch them except her father, who toyed with them curiously, and found them pretty but inexplicable. She recognized his step and lowered the mirror. She turned, smiling, and felt the alteration of his inner world, its dark solitary businesses suspended in a sweet, momentary calm. He had been with his mistress; he wore her perfume and the expression she had given him.

  He sensed something too, as he stopped to flick the prism and watch candlelight glitter in it. He said, "You have been with Taur."

  "How can you tell?"

  "He scatters his frustrations around him like an odor. Has he spoken of that woman again?"

  "A word or two. No more. He is afraid you are angry with him."

  "I am," the prince said mildly. "He should be afraid. He left a pile of arms on the Tormalyne Bridge and me with nothing to question except some solitary traveller who panicked and ran, who probably knows nothing at all. Brio is looking for him."

  "Brio will find him. Brio finds everyone."

  "Except that woman. He found a mystery instead. A rheumy hag whom everyone addressed by his lover's name. What did you send her?"

  "I thought," she said ruefully, "what I was told. A glass rose, with a poisoned thorn. Maybe Brio gave it to the wrong woman."

  "Brio does not make mistakes."

  "Then I do. I am sorry, father. Anyway, she is gone and Taur spends his evenings with his children."

  "A novel experience for them all. I must be content with that," he said. But she heard his leashed discontent. Someone of Tormalyne House had troubled him and, somehow, eluded him. Or perhaps not; he could not tell; Brio could not tell him. She felt his hidden exasperation turn to wonder as they approached the music room: Strange noises were coming out of it. A page bowed too elaborately, before opening the door too slowly. On the far side of the room, doors closed behind a rustle of smoke-blue skirts. The prince glanced around, bemused, found Veris Legere beside a trio of gilt chairs, bowing to him. He asked incredulously,

  "Damiet?"

  "Yes, my lord."

  "In the music room?"

  "Yes, my lord."

  "That noise. Like a cat on fire—"

  "It is a surprise for your birthday," Veris exp
lained.

  "But what was she doing?"

  "Singing, my lord."

  "Singing!" Arioso stared at him. "Damiet has no interest in music. She can't wear it."

  "I believe Magister Dulcet found a way to persuade her that she can." He opened a cupboard, took out the prince's flute and some manuscripts. Then he drew his own instrument, an antique viol, from its case. Luna moved to the harpsichord, loosened her fingers with some broken chords.

  "You must pretend to be surprised," she told her father.

  "Surprised! I'm stupefied."

  "You must be kind."

  "Impossible."

  She smiled, taking the composition pages that Veris handed her. "She wants to please you. Is that difficult to understand?"

  "She never wanted to before. I would sooner have expected Taur in here singing arias."

  "She's growing up. Maybe she's becoming more complex." Her father's chair creaked noisily under him like a comment. She played a few chords of his accompaniment, pressed a note for Veris to tune his viol. Poised, they consulted the prince with their eyes. The air sang tenderly to Veris's viol, and, somewhat more hesitantly, to the prince's flute.

  They stopped and started, stopped again, as Arioso lowered his instrument impatiently. "It's wrong. I don't like it. It's a dance—it sounds leaden."

  "Perhaps the harpsichord should be more fluid, my lord," Veris suggested gently.

  They began to play again. The door opened softly, closed behind them. Luna, playing chords laid together like bricks, neat but dense, listened to the quiet steps, the slide and catch of glass doors, scrolls unrolled and rolled again. The door opened; she glimpsed a stranger in unadorned black, faultless as to hair and boots, discreet in his movements as he stepped through the door and closed it quietly behind him. The farmer has vanished, she thought curiously. He no longer exists. She remembered his eyes, catching hers across the room: the darkness in them, as if he had seen far more than crops die. Perhaps he had, so he had turned his back on everything he had loved, and come south.

  Arioso, looking at her, lifted his flute abruptly from his lips. "Who was that?" he asked her. "Who is that in your eyes?"

  "No one," she answered indifferently. "The librarian."

  He waited for more, hearing overtones in her voice. "You remember him, my lord," Veris said, mistaking his silence for perplexity. "Master Caladrius. The farmer. He has been staying late to finish moving the music manuscripts."

  "Farmers don't read music."

  "This one studied at Luly."

  "Did he." Luna saw the basilisk's face suddenly, beneath his smile.

  "Many years ago. He remembers enough to be very helpful, though he knows nothing of history, and almost nothing of Berylon."

  "Does he play music?"

  "Very little, beyond the picochet. And that, not well enough, apparently, to save his crops."

  The shadow of hollowed bone and darkness was easing behind the prince's face. "The peasant's instrument," he said, enlightened. "Giulia Dulcet mentioned that she once appalled the magisters with it. He does not play it here."

  "No, my lord." Veris hesitated. "Not yet, at least. Lady Damiet expressed an interest in it."

  "Damiet would not know a picochet from a pitchfork."

  "You should encourage her," Luna said lightly, "if she is beginning to think."

  "Children who think are dangerous. Not that Damiet would recognize a thought if she had one. But perhaps she is not so hopelessly like her mother. If she continues to express an interest, then teach her the picochet."

  "My lord, I can't play it myself."

  "Then have the librarian teach her.."

  "My lord—"

  A flurry of notes checked him. "Enough of librarians and picochets. Do you want me to finish this without you?"

  Veris raised his bow; Luna found her chords. Flute, viol, and harpsichord danced in the room, uninterrupted by the librarian, who returned, that evening, only to the memory of the Basilisk's daughter.

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  Chapter Seven

  « ^ »

  Caladrius stood in the gardens of Tormalyne Palace.

  He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again. He wore the librarian's black; not even the moon, drawing stars like sheep across the meadows to the west, could see him there.

  On a chain around his neck, beneath his shirt, he wore the fire-bone pipe he had taken from Reve Iridia.

  In the hinterlands he had dreamed the pipe; in Berylon he had found it, an answer to his need, as if a monstrous head of mist and cold had loomed out of the hinterlands to lay that carved bone under his eyes. He remembered the warning: the words of the ancient tale all students were taught that had woven themselves into his dream. Fire burned within the pipe; it would strike where he willed it. And then it would strike him, find its way into his own heart and twist him into its deadly song of fire and ice. So the tale said.

  He thought: There is no other song.

  But he could not risk learning the truth of the tale at the moment he played the pipe for the Basilisk. He had been taught early on Luly that each tale had its grain of truth; the pearl that formed around it was layered by time and the bright, shifting words of the teller. A shy, unusual beast might have grown monstrous over many tellings through the centuries. The power in the bone might once have been no more than an enraged bard's wish.

  Or every word might say exactly what it said, a clear and unambiguous warning to those who travelled past the boundaries of the human world to look for such a monster, such music.

  The birds in the Tormalyne Gardens led him along a hidden path to the tiny barred window behind a weedy sprawl of juniper. The bars had been forced apart. He thanked the birds and, blind now, dropped down into darkness.

  Stone caught him, a clumsy pile of steps that led down into a puddle. He stood a moment, felt the cool air, smelling of moss and standing water, flow into the shape of something vast and hollow around him. He moved away from the window, found a stone wall to follow with his hands, that became, within a few steps, a massive slab of wood and iron. He pulled at an iron ring; the rotting wood had begun to sag on its hinges, crumble against the stone floor. He heaved the door level, opened and shut it as gently as he could.

  Dark and stone closed around him, formed a small, windowless room. Listening, he heard the sounds within the register of its silence: the forgotten screams of pain and despair that had seeped into the stones through centuries of Tormalyne history. As a child, he had never known such a place existed beneath his feet. Now, he would have assumed it, if he had thought. The fire-bone pipe, it seemed, hearing its own music, had led him unerringly there. He felt his skin constrict, his blood quicken, as if he had trapped himself there, in that place where names and past meant nothing, and time stopped.

  He drew the pipe out of his shirt. It was warm, porous like bone; in the dark, its carved holes glowed. Studying it, alone with the broken ghosts that Tormalyne House had made, he heard his own heartbeat again. The truth of the tale, he sensed, was in the tale.

  He raised the pipe to his lips and heard a step outside the door.

  He lowered the pipe again, with infinite care, as if the sound of thread shifting against thread might travel through the stones. Then he waited, motionless, breathless. The steps passed the door. Others followed quickly, a patter of rain on the stones, many of them, trying to be quiet, all passing the door closely, as if they too followed the wall in the dark with their hands. They trespassed, he thought, breathing again, shallowly. The night watch would have brought torches; they would have found no need for silence.

/>   He stood still for a very long time; nothing else, no voices, no other steps, broke the silence. Finally he slipped the pipe back under his shirt, and pulled the door open, one grain of wood at a time. He heard the faintest of sounds, a moth beating against glass, a distant word. He followed it.

  He found them all finally, in a huge chamber with groined arches of wood and stone, dimly lit by a couple of oil lamps. He recognized racks for bottles and kegs, though they were empty. Pellior House must have appropriated the wine cellar along with the music. They sat among spider webs on kegs and barrels, fifty of them maybe, all of them young, many of them younger than Hollis. He recognized the cob-haired piper from the tavern, who was arguing with a lean, red-haired young man with a thin, inflexible mouth.