Strange Sweet Song

by Rule, Adi

  At last the cub managed to scale a small boulder under the lip of the ledge where the Felix sat watching. He swatted some glistening grass blades poking up through a crack in the stone, tangling a clump in his paws and rolling onto his back with it. One of the wolves at the base of the cliff called to him, Too high. But the cub’s nose quivered in the air. He had caught the Felix’s scent and didn’t know what it was. Eyes bright, he began pawing the loose rock of the cliff, searching for a way up. Too high, came the call from below. Too far. Come back.

  The Felix did not know delight, so she couldn’t delight in the prospect of so easy a kill. She didn’t know fear or uncertainty, so she felt no relief that her next meal was presenting itself in her own lair. But she disliked padding around the forest when it was wet and gray, and she understood convenience. Her ears twitched and her muscles tensed in anticipation of the cub’s final leap onto the ledge.

  The wolf cub continued to claw at the cliff face, dislodging stones and rubble. One of the adults began to clamber up the large boulder. The rain intensified, sending the occasional cascade of muddy water down the cliff. The cub pawed and scraped, scrabbling at last onto a high vantage point just below the ledge. With a final push from his short back legs, he propelled himself over the side and tumbled into a furry ball before the jaws of the Felix.

  The ground shuddered.

  This bought the cub a few more seconds of life as the Felix, puzzled, closed her mouth before her jaws could finish their deadly snap. The shuddering intensified, and she and the cub and the lip of the ledge slid down the face of the cliff in muddy confusion. The slippery, tumbling rocks knocked more of their brothers free; smaller stones easily influenced by shifting mud came loose from their perches, leaving larger stones unsupported and teetering. The Felix heard the cub’s frantic yelps as he fell.

  They came to rest in a jumble of stone and dead plants and mud at the bottom of the cliff. Instinctively, the Felix leapt to higher ground, settling on the bank overlooking the depression. Here and there a tuft of gray fur poked from between rocks, or a long body splattered with mud and blood lay still.

  Then, to her surprise, she saw the cub pulling himself out of the muck. She hesitated, wondering if such a small meal was worth all that filthy fur. With the mud and debris, the depression was now almost level with the ground above it, and the cub began running across it and back again, edge to edge. He stopped at each patch of gray fur and nosed it, twice, three times. But all the wolves were dead.

  Finally the cub stopped running and sat down in the middle of the clearing. He raised his nose and started to howl.

  The Felix hopped down and loped over to him. A bigger wolf would have been better. But the cub didn’t even try to run. He just stopped howling and looked at her.

  And in his eyes, she saw whole galaxies, just as she saw in the soul of every creature. But the eyes of this wolf cub were different. My fault, the eyes of this tiny creature said. And the rest of that vast inner universe was wordless, soul-rending grief. An entire cosmos of despair looked back at her.

  The Cat part of her shrank at this. It shouldn’t have been given this insight. It didn’t know how to react. But at that moment, the part of the Felix that still clung to a memory of the sky expanded within her earth-body as though she were breathing in lungfuls of it. That part of her felt this cub’s despair as acutely as it felt her own. That part of her understood.

  Before it curled up and was silent again, the part of her that was Sky wept a single tear for this wolf cub. And the sky noticed. The tear hung suspended in the air, solid and shining, until the wolf cub caught it on his tongue like a snowflake.

  That evening, the Felix watched the wolf pack move on, long legs picking their ways over the rocky terrain, gray coats still shedding sparks of sky-magic. The cub stayed close to the adults.

  And so the first tear the Felix shed was for the wolf cub.

  The last would be for Sing da Navelli.

  Sixteen

  SING IS MUTE IN HER DREAMS. She breathes, opens her mouth, pushes air through, and nothing happens.

  Dreams of Lori Pinkerton and Marta singing Baroque duets on the other side of a chasm have put dark circles under her eyes this morning. She follows Marta and Jenny outside, past the tall casement windows of the dining hall. Crows caw unattractively from the tall trees surrounding the campus. The statue of Durand gleams.

  “First rehearsal tonight!” Marta chirps.

  Sing grunts.

  “I’ve been looking over my aria,” Marta says. “Do you know—”

  “So do you believe in this deal with the devil stuff?” Sing cuts in. Any topic of conversation other than rehearsal.

  “Huh? What deal with the devil?” Marta’s eyes widen.

  “You know,” Sing says, gesturing. “François Durand. That’s what they say, anyway. He did some black magic or something, after all those people died.”

  “Too bad it’s old news,” Jenny says. “That would be a good headline: ‘Civil War Massacre Shrouded in Mystery!’”

  Sing’s mental clockwork whirs. “Yeah, I’ve heard it was the northernmost battle. But it’s a bit unclear who was fighting who, or why everyone in the village died. And as far as I know, no one was shot.”

  “Creepy,” Jenny says. “Necromancy. Or aliens. Or plague.”

  “Oh.” Marta snorts. “People mix up their mythology sometimes. Durand didn’t make a deal with the devil. His wish was granted by the Felix.”

  Sing is dubious. “The cat-beast from Angelique?”

  “Uh-huh.” Marta’s tone is matter-of-fact. “I read about it in Monsters of the World.”

  “I see,” Sing says.

  “You don’t have to believe,” Marta says. “They’ve found journals in France indicating that Durand’s entire body of work was destroyed in a fire in 1860, which is why he got so depressed he left to die abroad. That’s a fact. Then—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jenny says. “Then, miraculously, his entire canon reappears, he founds the conservatory in this wilderness and attracts bright students and produces Angelique two years later. Hooray.”

  “It was the Felix,” Marta says. “She came down from the heavens and granted his wish. How else would you explain it?”

  Well, I wouldn’t automatically jump to “magical space cat,” Sing thinks.

  Jenny leaves them as they pass the building named for Durand, two stories of musty, antiquated classrooms. The handbook says Mr. Bernard’s acting class is in the greenhouse at the edge of campus.

  Sing and Marta find seats on the stone floor among pots of flowering plants. The greenhouse is old-fashioned, iron and glass. The sound of a forest stream floats through open windows.

  Instead of staff robes, Mr. Bernard wears burgundy windpants and a white T-shirt that hugs his jiggly middle.

  “Welcome!” he says to the twenty or so students. “I am officially Mr. Bernard, but you may call me Lou. I’d appreciate it if you did so. Just don’t let the president hear you!”

  Sing sighs. Some teacher always tries to be the cool one, the one to confide in, the one who inspires. She traces the cracks between the floor stones with her fingers.

  “Now, you are all singers here,” Mr. Bernard goes on. “Tell me, what’s the difference between singing and playing an instrument?”

  A few hands go up. “Yes?” He points to a boy with glasses.

  “Singing has words?”

  “Singing has words, most of the time. What do words imply?”

  No hands.

  “Come on, guys,” Mr. Bernard says. “Tell me about words!”

  Marta says, “They tell a story?” Sing notes her chipper tone. She got the Queen of the Tree Maidens. She has nothing to worry about.

  Mr. Bernard nods. “Sometimes they tell a story. Sometimes they just tell an emotion. But who produces words? Okay, how about you?”

  Silence … until Sing realizes he’s pointing at her. She shrugs. “People?”

  “Bingo!” Mr. Bernar
d claps. “People!”

  Sing rolls her eyes behind closed lids.

  “Sometimes animals, if it’s an animal character,” says the boy with glasses.

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” Mr. Bernard says. “You said the magic word: character. When we sing, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘you,’ because I sing like cats in a bathtub, we are becoming a character. Now, that’s not to say that other instruments can’t represent characters or tell stories, but it isn’t the instrument itself that’s doing it, it’s the sound. When we sing, we become someone else. We express ourselves with sound, and with our faces and our bodies. That’s acting!” Some of the students smile or nod, some look skeptical.

  Sing has taken acting classes before. Her father insisted. She’s never been good at it. Mr. Bernard talks about emotions, asking the students first to feel anger—“It’s the easiest,” he says—then sadness, and finally joy. “These things live inside you. You need to recognize them for what they are before you can hope to inhabit someone else’s body. You need to separate them.”

  A few minutes go by. The other students concentrate. Some breathe heavily, some smile. One or two have tears running down their cheeks. Sing watches with interest. She tries to call up anger, then sadness. But nothing comes. Inside, she is as hard and smooth and dark as obsidian.

  Marta’s eyes are closed, her face twisting with rage, then sorrow, then happiness. Good actress, Sing adds to her list of Marta’s strengths.

  Mr. Bernard goes on after a while. “Hundreds of emotions live inside you—they are what make you yourself. Fear, envy, pity, resentment, love, lust.” That elicits a few giggles. “What are you feeling today? Can you name it?”

  Sing glares at Mr. Bernard as if daring him to expose her. Go ahead, she thinks, tell me I’m a jealous little witch.

  He hands out index cards. “I want you to write ‘I am’ on your index card. Follow it with whatever you like. Okay? Go!”

  Sing stares at her index card. Some of the other students are staring, too.

  This is stupid, she thinks. How good an actor does an understudy have to be? It’s not like she’s ever going to be an opera superstar. It’s not like she’s her mother.

  Sing picks up her pencil and writes “I am not my mother” on the index card.

  Seventeen

  THE FELIX WAS BORN A THING of beauty, and despair, as is its nature, only made her more beautiful. She resembled a great cat, yes, but in the way the sky resembles its reflection in a still lake. Even after her fall, she kept the color of the sunset, her favorite time—the beginning of a starry night—and the stars themselves she kept dotted throughout her sleek fur. Her eyes were nearly black nebulae; creatures unlucky enough to be mesmerized by their violet tinge would live to see nothing else ever again. But her teeth and claws, once pale and lustrous as the moon, became a crimson-edged yellow under the dark, bristling trees.

  Nevertheless, something continued to shine out of her, a soft, white star-light, now laced with blood, but still bright. Animals ran from the strange shadows it cast.

  One century, it caught the massive, rolling eye of the spirit of the Forest himself. He was so taken with this lovely, sad light that he left his sleeping bear caves and diligent worms and shivering nests and, for a time, thought of himself as a great cat instead.

  Eighteen

  SING STEPS THROUGH THE ORANGE door with the chipped paint into a cold, damp classroom filled with old chair-desk hybrids.

  This is a mistake.

  She should have listened to her father when he suggested she take The Artist’s Life as her arts elective. It is common knowledge that Anybody Who is Anybody takes The Artist’s Life. But she couldn’t stand a semester learning the elusive rules of making it in the professional world. She’s already had seventeen years of that.

  So she chose The Nature of Music. An easy A, right?

  But she is shocked to find strange, ten-lined staves covered with spiky, shaky notes on the whiteboard. The walls are hung with scientific-looking diagrams of what appear to be upside-down larynxes and tracheas and lungs. Has she stumbled into a science-fiction movie?

  The teacher looks like someone’s cookie-distributing grandma. Her white hair puffs as she takes papers and books from her tote bag and arranges them on the desk at the front of the classroom. The lenses in her silver glasses look like bubbles.

  Sing, not fooled by the teacher’s benign appearance, scowls at the strange staves—this class is going to be weird and technical, not philosophical. Something else for her to fail at.

  She finds a seat by herself, which isn’t difficult; there are only four other students in the room. She sits two chair-desks behind a small boy with curly brown hair and three chair-desks over from a pair of older girls—one large and dark, one small and fair—who seem to be best friends. The only other student is an athletic-looking guy with a goatee. As Sing grudgingly gets out her notebook, he is joined by another athletic guy with unappealing sideburns.

  “All here, I think?” the teacher says. “Great! Welcome to The Nature of Music. I’m Mrs. Bigelow.” Sing flips open her notebook and starts to doodle.

  Mrs. Bigelow begins with, “What is music?” and Sing begins to drift. She knows the discussion will turn to alternative instruments, unfettered dissonance, string quartets in helicopters—all the crazy stuff students are supposed to be impressed by. She’s never been able to get her head around most of it. It feels like pretend.

  But a few minutes into the lecture, Mrs. Bigelow hefts an ancient tape player onto her desk and presses “play.” Sing hears the rustle of a breeze through leaves, then a birdcall. It starts as a little growl, then shoots up high and back down. Grrrrrlll, grrEEEEEEooo. Grrrllll, grrEEEEEEooo.

  Mrs. Bigelow lets the call play five or six times. “I’ll be impressed if any of you can identify that bird.”

  The large girl says, “Sparrow?”

  “Nope.”

  The curly-haired boy says, “Grosbeak?”

  Mrs. Bigelow smiles. “Nope. It’s a little bird from Southeast Asia called the silver-eared laughingthrush. Here’s a picture.” She holds up a large book, open to a page with a color photograph of a grayish bird. The bird has dull yellow patches on its wings and a funny red pattern on its head that looks like a hat. Sing’s gaze lingers on the picture for a moment before she goes back to doodling.

  “Did you catch the song?” Mrs. Bigelow asks. “It’s a fairly simple one. Can anyone sing it back to me? Sing?”

  Sing looks up. Why are all the teachers calling on her today? She keeps her expression neutral: not hostile enough to be considered insolent, but definitely not engaged.

  “No?” Mrs. Bigelow says. “Laura?”

  The pale girl looks around nervously, then tries, “Um, grrrrll, cheeEEE!”

  The other students laugh, not unkindly, and the girl looks at her best friend and giggles. Mrs. Bigelow says, “That was pretty good. Tom? How about you? Want to try?”

  Sideburns exchanges a look with Goatee and says, “Bck, bck, bck-AWW!”

  The teacher laughs with the students. “While that wasn’t quite a silver-eared laughingthrush, it was brave of you to try. You are definitely not a chicken.” The other students chuckle. They’re warming up to Mrs. Bigelow, even as Sing’s heart grows colder.

  “So imagine you are a juvenile silver-eared laughingthrush, instead of a juvenile human being.” Mrs. Bigelow shoots Sideburns a lighthearted glance. “You need to communicate with others of your species. You need to be able to say things like ‘I’m in danger!’ or ‘I’m looking for a mate!’ or just ‘I’m here!’ How do you learn to do it?”

  The pale girl raises her hand. “Instinct?”

  “Not as much as you may think,” Mrs. Bigelow says. “Anyone else?”

  “Listen to your parents?” Goatee says.

  “Exactly! Most songbirds learn their songs from their parents, the way you and I learn language—and, for many of us here, music.”

  Was that a glan
ce in Sing’s direction? It better not have been.

  Mrs. Bigelow presses “play” again, and more birdsong hisses through. It is the same song … almost, Sing thinks. Something’s not right.

  She realizes what the strange, many-lined staves are just before Mrs. Bigelow says, “Here are sonograms of the two different songs I just played you. Left to right represents time, and low to high is frequency. The smudgy lines that look like notes are the sounds the birds are making. As you can see, the second song—which is the juvenile—is just slightly different from the first. He hasn’t quite learned it yet.”

  Pencils scribble things in notebooks. Sing wonders what everyone’s writing. She looks at her doodle. A shepherdess in a flouncy dress.

  “We don’t have any silver-eared laughingthrushes here,” the teacher says. “But I brought a couple of field guides to help you. You’re each going to choose a common local bird—nothing too hard to find, please, since you’ll have to study it—and learn its songs. Birdsongs can be quite lovely and inspiring; several famous composers, like Olivier Messiaen, have even tried to imitate them in their works. I’ll give you until the end of class to choose your species.”

  Mrs. Bigelow hands a book to the best friends and another to the athletes. The curly-haired boy moves over to the best friends, but Sing stays put, adding a crook and bow to her shepherdess. Mrs. Bigelow doesn’t say anything.

  What am I doing? Sing thinks. Do I think my life will be better if I get bad grades? If I get kicked out of the conservatory? She imagines telling her father she’s coming home, going back to her old school. That she couldn’t cut it here. She can see his placid face, hear his disappointment.

  Yet she continues to doodle. She draws the Felix now, Durand’s “great beast.” A big cat with oversize teeth and small, mean eyes. She has never understood why the beast is always portrayed as a cat—doesn’t felix mean “happy,” not “cat”? She has a feeling Marta would know.