Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He cried out. A string snapped, curled with a wail like wood in fire. Bard Trefon, staring at him, reached out, catching the harp before Rook flung it into the water. “No,” he said quickly. “Rook.”

  Rook stared at him, his heart still burning. “It was on fire.”

  “I know,” the bard breathed. “I heard. Rook. Try again. But this time—”

  His fingers curled into fists. “I will never play it again.”

  “But you have a gift for it. And there are other songs.”

  “No.” He added, as the bard watched him, brows crooked and questioning, “There is a fish on your line.”

  “Rook.”

  He turned away, tugged at the dancing, thumping line until Bard Trefon finally put the harp away and helped him.

  The more the bards taught him, the farther back he drove the fire and what lay within it. He built walls of words against it; he charmed it away with music. There was nothing, it seemed, he could not learn in order to escape. He changed the meanings of words without realizing it. Becoming a bard meant becoming someone who knew no past but poetry, he thought. A bard changed the past to song, set it to music, and made it safe. So he learned the tales of the hinterlands, the provinces; he played their instruments even in his dreams, until he woke with strange cadences and ancient languages he almost understood fading in his head. He was taught, in cursory fashion, of the city south of the provinces, which had a sheathed, dangerous paw on the world around him. But its music made him uneasy. Like the harp, it led him back, toward the past; it smelled of fire. Its bright, sweet, complex language was not rooted in wind and stone; it was too new. It held no word for bard. So he reached back, finding past and eluding it, as far as he could, to the first words, the first tales, the first sounds fashioned out of the language of birds and insects, the whine of wind and wolf, the sough of the sea, the silence of death, all the sounds the first bard had woven into his song. After eight years on Luly, he could spin poetry from his dreams, and play anything his hands touched. After three more years the bards of Luly said that he was ready to choose his future.

  He had grown tall and muscular, his long, fair hair usually a rook’s nest of wind and brine, his rook’s eyes, beneath level brows, so dark they seemed without pupils. His rare smile softened their grimness. When he played, his face lost its usual calm. Someone else, the boy in the boat perhaps, staring unflinchingly at fire, looked out of his eyes; they reflected what he did not remember seeing.

  “You should call yourself Caladrius,” he was told sometimes. “It’s a name more suitable for a bard.”

  He would shrug. “Rook suits me.” And when he played, they saw the raven in his eyes.

  He sat on a grassy slope outside the school one sunny day, imitating birds on the clay pipes, when the bards summoned him to make his choice. The summons came in the form of Sirina, a land baron’s daughter from northern provinces. She had been at the school for three years; she had a restless nature and a spellbinding way with a harp. “You’re wanted,” she said, and sat down on the grass beside him. He looked at her, still playing, and realized in that moment how she had changed, from the slight, freckled girl he had first met. Her harper’s hands were pale as sea spume; her long hair gleamed like pearl. She knew things, he thought suddenly. She held secrets, now, in the long, slender lines of her body she held some music he had never heard before. “Rook,” she prodded while his pipes spoke back to a passing gull. He lowered them finally, still gazing at her.

  “Who wants me?”

  “Bard Trefon, Bard Galea, Bard Horum. They want you to make a decision. About your future.” She had a northerner’s way of chopping sentences into neat portions, as if they were carrots.

  “There’s no decision to make,” he answered simply. “I’m staying here.”

  “It’s more complicated. They said. What you must choose.”

  “Staying or going is one or the other. It’s not complicated.” He added as she sighed, “I’ll stay here and teach. It’s what I want.”

  “How can you not want to be a bard? How can you want this rock?” she asked incredulously. “You could have the world. If you would only learn to harp. It’s what the world wants.”

  “I don’t want the world.” The spare, taut lines of his face softened at her bewilderment. “Sirina.” The color of her eyes distracted him suddenly; he forgot what he was going to say.

  “You can play anything else. You can tell any tale. Sing any song. Why do you balk over a harp? Anyone can play it. You don’t have to play it with your heart. Not to please the land barons. Just with your fingers.”

  “I prefer the picochet.”

  “Peasant.”

  He smiled. “Very likely.” Her eyes had changed at his smile, become shadowy, mysterious. Their color kept eluding him. “Mussels,” he decided, and her gaze became skewed.

  “What about them?”

  “It’s a riddle,” he said, following an ancient formula. “Answer: I am the color of mussel shells.”

  Her eyes narrowed faintly, holding his. “Is that so,” she said softly. “Answer: I am the color of a starless night.”

  “Is that so.” His hand dropped to the ground, very close to hers. Neither of them blinked. “Answer: I am a son without a father, a bird without a song. Who am I?”

  He watched her lips gather around the first letter of his name. He bent his head, gently took the rest of it from her. She opened her eyes as he drew back; they had grown very dark. He heard her swallow.

  “Rook.” Her fingers shifted in the grass, touched his. “They’re waiting.”

  “Will you?” he asked as he stood. He had an impression, as her hair roiled away from her into the wind, of someone rising out of foam. “Will you wait?”

  Her eyes answered.

  He felt something leap in him like a salmon, flicking drops of water into light on its run toward home. I’m never leaving, he thought, striding toward the ancient, drafty pile of stone in which he could still hear, late at night, between the wind and the wild burst of the tide, the final cry of the bard imprisoning all the magic in the hinterlands. Never.

  “You have three choices,” Bard Galea told him. Her hair was more silver now than gold, but she still had the mermaid’s enchanting smile. “You may choose to stay here and teach. Which is what I think you want.”

  “Or you may choose to master the harp and be called bard,” Bard Trefon said. “Which is what I think you should do. Then you will leave Luly and find your future with some house or court or school in need of a bard. If you choose that, remember that the farther you go from Luly, the more the word ‘bard’ changes, until, if you go far enough south, you will hardly recognize yourself.” He waited, dark brows lifted, still questioning, after so many years, still hoping. Rook turned to Bard Horum, a tall, very old man who looked, with his pure white coloring and ancient, oval eyes, as if he might once have been a unicorn.

  “Or,” the third bard said, “you may take the path across the sea to the hinterlands, and let what comes to you there decide your fate. If you choose that, remember that you may not find your way back to Luly.”

  Rook started to answer. The unicorn’s eyes held him, powerful and still. Did you? Rook wanted to ask. What did you find there? “I choose,” he said to Bard Horum, and caught himself, startled and breathless, as if he had nearly walked over a cliff. He blinked away from the ancient gaze, and it dropped, hid itself. He turned back to Bard Galea’s smile. “I choose to stay.”

  That night he dreamed of fire.

  He woke not knowing his own name, consumed, as with a sudden fever, by the knowledge that he had a past hidden by fire, another name. Somewhere on the mainland, the blackened, crumbling walls of a farmhouse held his name. He could not find his future without his past. He could not play a true note, even on the picochet, or sing a word that meant itself, without his past. He lay awake in the dark, staring at it, listening to the rill of the tide filling hollows beneath the school. When night finally relinqui
shed its grip of him, he still felt blind, memory-less, as if he had only dreamed his life, and had wakened to find himself among ashes, without words and understanding nothing.

  “I can’t make a choice yet,” he told the bards in the morning, trembling with weariness, rubbing at the rasp behind his reddened eyes. “I’m going to the provinces.” This time the seal’s eyes watched him, curious, approving. The unicorn’s eyes were still hidden.

  He left three days later at dawn. Sirina rowed him to shore. They did not speak until the boat scraped bottom and he jumped into the waves to run it out again on the outgoing tide. She said, softly, her face quiet and pale in the new light, “I’ll give you a thread. To find your way back.”

  “Or for you to find me,” he breathed, and she nodded. She leaned forward abruptly, kissed him before tide pulled the boat out of his hands. He watched her row halfway to Luly while he stood knee-deep in surf, pack and picochet dangling from his shoulders, still tasting her sea-salt kiss.

  Finally he turned, found a beach littered with driftwood and mussel shells, without a footprint, human or otherwise, anywhere in the sand. Beyond it lay the wild land north of the provinces, the forests and hills flowing to the end of the world. He felt its pull, its mystery, as strong as the tide carrying his heart back to Luly, as strong as the name waiting to be found in the provinces. He waded out of the water, shook the sea out of his boots, and began to walk south toward the villages and farmlands, the great houses of the provincial barons. Ravens cried at him from the ancient forest, raucous, persistent. He did not know their language, he explained silently to them; he did not understand. Later, when they dropped a black trail of feathers to guide him into the unknown, he refused to see.

  He played the picochet in farmhouses, in inns, the flute and the lute in barons’ courts all over the provinces. Sometimes he stayed a night, sometimes a month or two, playing whatever he was handed, singing whatever he was asked. He was given lodgings, coins, new boots, new songs, a strange instrument that had found its way out of the hinterlands, a haircut, an embroidered case for his picochet, many local tales, and offers of positions ranging from tavern musician to court bard. But he could stay nowhere. His rook’s eyes searched for fire everywhere. He was shown charred, ruined farmhouses, or the place where they had been before they were rebuilt, or the cornfield where the farm had stood before it burned and its ashes were plowed under. Solk, their name was, or Peerson, or Gamon. They had lost a baby, or a cat, or all their horses, or everything but each other. A terrible fire with only one child, a son, left alive? That sounded like the Leafers, but no, only the grandmother had been left alive in that one. She had wandered out of the house in her nightgown in the middle of the night, thinking she heard her baby son crying. She woke to hear him crying to wake his own children inside the burning house. The Sarters in the next valley had lost their cows when the barn burned, but…The Tares’ girl had lost her parents, but there were those who said she had started the fire herself.

  He couldn’t say who had taken him to Luly?

  He couldn’t say why Luly?

  He couldn’t say why the name Caladrius and no other?

  He couldn’t say.

  “But you must belong here,” he was told many times. “The way you play the picochet. You must have heard it in the womb.”

  He was certain he could not stay? Not even if—

  He was certain.

  He returned at night, nearly two years later, alone, on foot. He lit a fire on the beach and sat there, listening to the dead silence in the forest behind him, waiting while a star moved across the water in answer to his fire. Before the boat entered the tide, something spoke in the dead silence of his heart. He got to his feet without realizing it. When the tide caught the boat, and the lamp careened wildly on the prow, he left pack and picochet on the sand and ran into the water.

  Sirina caught him as he caught the boat. Tide poured between them; the boat tilted, spilled her into his arms. An oar went its own way; the star was doused.

  “You’re here,” he kept saying, stunned. “You’re still here.”

  “You came back.” A wave broke over them; laughed, wiping her face with her wet sleeve, then his face. “You took long enough.”

  “You waited for me.”

  “We waited. Yes.”

  “You.” He stopped, heard the boat thump hollowly as a wave flung it upside down on the sand. Beneath that, he heard silence again, as if the trees were listening. He said, “We.”

  “I called him Hollis. After my grandfather.”

  His knees turned to nothing; he sank suddenly under! a wave. She tugged him out, laughing again. “Don’t be afraid. You’ll like him. He has my eyes.”

  He tried to speak; words turned to salt. She pounded on his back as he coughed. Brine ran down his face like tears. “Hollis,” he said finally. Then he heard the strange, deep song of the whale weltering up all around him from sea to sky, and he shouted, loud enough to crumble rock, to overwhelm the magic of the hinterlands, send it fleeing from his heart.

  He picked her up, carried her out of the sea.

  And so the years passed.

  The child in the ashes waited.

  Two

  In the hall of mirrors at Pellior Palace, within the walled city of Berylon, Giulia Dulcet lifted the instrument in her hands many times in many different mirrors and began to play. The hall was soundless but for the music; the hundred richly dressed people in it might have been their own reflections. Arioso Pellior, Duke of Pellior House and Prince of Berylon, stood with his three children across the room from the musicians. Giulia caught brief glimpses of them now and then as she lowered the sweet, melancholy lavandre to pass the prince’s melody to Hexel on the harpsichord. The prince’s compositions seemed predictable but never were: he scattered accidentals in music, Hexel commented acidly, as in life. Above Arioso’s head, the basilisk of Pellior House, in red marble and gold, reared on its sinuous coils and stared back at itself in the massive frame of the mirror behind the musicians. All around the room the basilisks roused and glared, frozen in one another’s gazes, while mortals, beneath the range of their stony regard, stood transfixed within the prince’s vision.

  The composition ended without mishap. Playing the prince’s music kept Giulia concentrated and on edge: a note misplaced in his ear would be enough, she felt, to get them tossed, by the irate composer, out of the Tormalyne School of Music into the gutters of Berylon. But the muted tap of fans against gloved fingers reassured them. Arioso Pellior acknowledged compliments with a gracious inclination of his head. The hall quieted for his next composition. Giulia exchanged the lavandre for a flute. She and Hexel played a duet. Then Hexel sang a love song, a stylized piece with vocal frills that he tossed out as lightly as largesse. Giulia sat listening, a slender figure in her black magister’s robe, her straight, sooty hair neatly bound in a net of gold thread, her tawny, wide-set eyes discreetly lowered as she listened. Only the lavandre moved to her breathing, its spirals of rosewood and silver throwing sparks of light at its reflection.

  The song ended. The prince’s younger daughter, the Lady Damiet, lifted a folded fan to her lips and swallowed a yawn. Her broad, creamy face revealed nothing of her thoughts; she was reputed to have few. On the other side of the prince stood his son Taur, twenty years older than Damiet, offspring of Arioso’s first marriage. Taur, looking slightly disheveled in his finery, brooded visibly while the music played, applauded a trifle late when he noticed it had stopped. Taur’s wife, a thin lipped woman with restless eyes the color of prunes seemed to search perpetually for the cause of her annoyance in the mirrored faces. Taur’s younger sister Luna Pellior stood behind Arioso’s shoulder, nearly as tall as he, with her hair the rich gold of a dragon’s hoard, and her eyes, like her father’s, lizard green. She had his face, Damiet her mother’s. The prince’s wives had both died, having done their duty to the Basilisk, and being, so it was widely believed, no longer required.

  The hall quieted ag
ain. Giulia turned a page and raised the lavandre. Its liquid voice imitated hunting cadences, announcing the beginning of the pursuit. Hexel, she noted, had forgotten his loathing for the composer and was galloping over the keys. A strand of her hair slid free and drifted above the lavandre’s mouth, fluttering with every note she played. She ignored it, though the prince’s daughter Damiet, her eyes opening slightly at Giulia, seemed to have found something at last to interest her.

  The hunt reached its climax; something was slain by an unexpected chord. The harpsichord paced itself to a peaceful walk, while the lavandre sang a pretty lament for the dead. Midway through it, Giulia saw the prince’s eyes, beneath slow, heavy lids, fix on her face, as if she played jewels instead of notes, and every one belonged to him.

  He came up to her afterward, while the musicians were putting their instruments away, and the guests picked daintily at what looked like butterfly wings and hummingbird hearts. Giulia, who saw the Prince of Berylon rarely and at a distance, swept her magister’s robe into a deep curtsy, wondering if she had mortally offended him with a turn of phrase.

  Rising, she looked into his eyes. The skin around them was lightly crumpled with age, but they were still powerful, at once searching and opaque, like a light too bright to be looked at, but which illumined everything. This year would mark his sixty-fifth birthday, the thirty-seventh year of his ascent to power over Berylon. His fine face, gilded by sun and symmetrical as a mask, seemed not so much aging as drying. It was as if, Giulia thought, his skin were a husk within which blood and bone were busily transforming themselves into something else entirely.