Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She said, “Auber Tormalyne spent some years in the hinterlands; he brought back a collection of very strange instruments, which he gave to the school. Like the picochet, they were viewed as curiosities, generally offensive to the ear, and relegated, at his death, to a storage room, where, after a hundred years, they grew cracked, dusty, and even more difficult to listen to.”

  “But you listened to them.”

  “Demi and I found them, once when we were looking for a place where no one would be likely to disturb us. I could not keep my hands off them. Demi grew impatient with me, and left me there, screeching, whistling, drumming—they were like neglected children to me, all crying out for human touch, human breath, crying out silently to be heard. I became all their voices…” He drew breath, soundlessly, he thought, but she heard even that; he felt her regard like a touch. “I taught myself to play them, alone in a musty storage room, stumbling my way through their hearts. They began to speak slowly; I was clumsy with them, I hardly knew what I was doing…There was no one in the school to tell me about them. What I learned, I taught. Not to all of my students, surely. But to a few, a very few. Most of them did not survive the war between the Houses.”

  “I did.”

  “Yes…And what did you learn in the north, besides the picochet?”

  He picked up a wooden flute, cracked with age, very plain, without a carving or a stain of color on it. “I learned that this flute is played only among women, and only at childbirth or to the dead. Its outward simplicity suggests the humility which the player brings to the playing. The seam of gold hidden within it honors the beauty of its voice.”

  “Will you play it?”

  He shook his head. “I may touch it, but if I play it, I will be haunted by all the dead women who heard it played for them.”

  She was silent; he could not see the expression on her face. “I didn’t know,” she said at last, “that it is a woman’s instrument. That explains why I have glimpsed only women’s faces.”

  “When?”

  “Sometimes when I play it in a dim quiet place, like this. What else?”

  He touched the glazed clay drum painted with flowers and with eyes out of his nightmares. “That the spirits of the dead become trapped within this drum. To free them, you must play it until it shatters.”

  She stood very still, so still that he would not have known she was there but for her voice. “Have you played it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never knew what to drum with. Wood and metal sounded wrong, glass is too fragile, my hands made no sound—”

  “It is played with bone.”

  “Have I confused the dead with my playing?”

  “Very likely.”

  She moved then, made her frail but unerring way through instruments and ghosts, to find something lying behind the closed curtains on a window seat. In the sudden flick of light, he glimpsed one she did not pick up: a small pipe whose finger holes glowed sullenly in the shadows, from the fires within the bone. He made no sound, he knew, but still she glanced toward him, before she let the curtain fall, as if she heard his thoughts within his silence.

  “Can you play these?” She handed him a small set of pipes bound together, the smallest no bigger than his finger and stained red, the others gold. He lifted them to his lips; sounds bloomed out of them, fell gently, like tossed flowers. “No,” she said patiently, as if he were still her student. “Not like that.”

  He gazed at her, wondering at what she had discovered in that forgotten storage room. “Yes,” he said finally. “I can play them not like that.”

  “I played them once for Demi, in the storage room. I stumbled then into their true voice. It was like being very drunk, he said, on music. We dreamed awake, and had the same dreams. The city disappeared around us, the wood swallowed it, the moon rose in the storage room. We swam naked in a river flowing through the floorboards. Strange people or talking animals joined us…We found ourselves back in the storage room at dawn; we were still naked and our heads were wet. We could not find our clothes. We stole magisters’ robes out of a closet; Demi ran home barefoot through the waking streets…That was the last time I played them for anyone. Our spirits were trapped in it by war, and he and I did not survive.”

  “It is ancient. Its voices change with every player, and it is very susceptible to suggestion.”

  “And if you played it like that?” she asked. “Now?”

  He laid it down, very gently, on the spinet; he did not answer. Instead he asked her, “Do you always play these in the dark?”

  “Is it?” she asked surprisedly. “I scarcely notice shadows. I can’t bear too much light. I see more with my hands and my ears and my memory, these days, than my eyes. I hear the power and the ambiguities in your voice. I saw your face very clearly, when you sat in that chair. In here, in the dark, I can see it even better. I can see it best in your voice.”

  “Then should I ask you for the instrument I want,” he said steadily, “or should I just take it so that you will not know?”

  She found his eyes, held them so long he thought she saw through dark and blood and bone into his future. She turned to the spinet, stood with her back to him, pressing one key down softly, again and again, while he walked to the window where what he wanted lay among some yellowing scrolls. He slipped it carefully into his shirt. He could feel it against his heartbeat: a small, warm, deadly secret.

  She said then, her head still bowed over the spinet, “That will be the one I could never play. I heard the scrolls shift as you lifted it. Why could I never get one note out of it?”

  “Because it only plays one song,” he answered. “And in your graceful and courageous life, you have never heard it.” She turned then; he caught her fragile hand, lifted it to his lips. “Thank you, Reve Iridia.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “I hope so. If I play this right.”

  “Or not at all,” she whispered, her hand pushing down across the keys, again and again, as he left. Their jangled protest followed him out, reached him, still warning him as he passed beneath the window, as if her spirit, caught within the notes, would struggle there until he freed them both.

  Six

  Luna Pellior stood on a high tower in Pellior Palace, watching the moon rise over Berylon. It drenched the ancient city with a pearly light; it gazed, with an austere and bone-white eye, down the stone streets, into windows open to catch the faintest brush of night air. In the gardens below, a bird sang to the moon among the orange trees. She waited for Brio Hood. He came silently, but she heard him before he wanted her to. His shadow, she might have told him, brushed too carelessly across stone. Still, she did not move before he spoke. Then she turned, smiling at him, the brittle collection of bone and cold shriveled thought that no one ever noticed, even after it was too late.

  He bowed, then raised his head, his eyes steady as a hunting animal’s on her face. He seemed not quite human; she wondered, now and then, if her father had made him in his secret chamber. But there were those who wondered that about her: her father’s golden other, the self he had fashioned to take his place when he tired of his own body. His apprentice, his mistress of mysterious arts, his muse.

  “She is nowhere,” Brio said.

  “Then my rose killed her.”

  “No one dead came in or out of the tavern. No weeping, no black ribbons at the door. Nothing. She is gone. There is some wizened creature who hardly speaks, to serve there in her place.”

  “How strange. Maybe I accidently turned her into something else. I need to know, Brio, if I did as my father told me. Or if I made mistakes. He won’t be pleased with me if she is still alive. And Taur won’t say. He holds yes and no in his mouth like jewels; he won’t swallow one or spit out the other.”

  “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. L
ike a cat on fire—”

  “It is a surprise for your birthday,” Veris explained.

  “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.