Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  It can’t be very long, then, I thought.

  Elise adjusted the position of the framed parchment on the music stand; there was no other score in front of her, although each of the Sisters of Shalimar had one. Then the child picked up her bow, and drew it across the strings of her instrument, as if to check the tuning of the strings.

  Immediately, as if it were a signal, there was a stir among the Sisters of Shalimar, as if they too were tuning up.

  But they weren’t.

  And neither was Elise, for she drew the bow back far more forcefully, playing a chord that was impossibly loud and impossibly resonant—as if it did not come from the viol at all, but from somewhere outside the room, outside space, and outside time: a chord that did not stop when the bow reach the limit of its thrust.

  In fact, although she did not show any sign of astonishment or alarm, it was immediately obvious that Elise was not playing the chord at all, even though it was her hand that had drawn the bow and triggered its release. Perhaps it was something in the haunted instrument that had been waiting for the right trigger for a long time, but it seemed more likely to me that it had been something lurking far deeper, which had only been waiting to use the instrument, or its strings, as a fissure through which to flood.

  The parchment was supposed contain the language of sighs, and perhaps it did—but only if the language of sighs is also the language of screams.

  The marine trumpets did not strike the same chord. In fact, they did not strike any chord at all. The marine trumpets fell away, as each of the Sisters of Shalimar removed something that had been hidden inside her instrument: a dagger.

  They could have hidden revolvers, or even rifles; but this was no mere matter of brute aggression; there was a symbolism to it as well as an insanity. And as everything within that terrible scream became movement, hectic and rapid but still somehow more balletic than chaotic, I realized that the one thing that I had considered so utterly implausible as to be literally unimaginable—that the Dionysians would invade the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar in order to sow mayhem there, to carry forward their vendetta and exact their revenge for Dellacrusca’s symbolic reclamation of the most precious relic of his cult—had actually happened.

  The Sisters of Shalimar were not Sisters of Shalimar at all; their places had been taken by maenads. And the maenads had one simple purpose in being there: to assassinate Dellacrusca, and sever the head of the Cult of Orpheus.

  The maenads were probably screaming, as maenads are supposed to do, but nobody would have known, because the whole Underworld was screaming through the mouth of the viola da gamba, and that scream drowned out everything else… far more than mere sound.

  I felt a thrill of burning electricity shoot through me, but it did not petrify me any more than it petrified anyone else—for everyone was in movement, in panic or alarm… and although the Orpheans had been taken completely by surprise, they too were drawing weapons, with somewhat less concern for tradition and symbolism than their enemies.

  I whipped my head around to face Myrica, and simply said: “Run!” I formed the word precisely with my lips, because I knew she would not hear it, and trusted to her to realize that she ought to drag Mariette with her if Mariette did not have sufficient presence of mind to run too, or wanted to follow Charles instead.

  Charles had no choice about where to go, because I was dragging him away, hurling him toward Elise. There was no point in shouting at him, because he could not see my lips—and because he had to know, in any case, why I was thrusting him forward toward the helpless, bewildered child.

  I have to confess that I didn’t do that because I thought that the glory of saving Elise, if she could be saved, ought to fall to her adoptive father. I did it because my own first thought was not for the child but for Hecate, who, was an adult, and might well have been able to look after herself, and probably didn’t need my help at all—but it was yet another of those moments when passion and the unconscious carry one away.

  I grabbed Hecate as Charles grabbed Elise. I didn’t waste a second before turning to haul my prize away, because, even though I knew that no one was actually intent on stabbing her or Elise, the crossfire might easily be deadly. Even so, I am convinced that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the first dagger plunge into Dellacrusca’s breast. I truly believe that it was not my imagination: that I actually saw the fatal blow.

  Then I saw nothing more, because I was diving for the door with Hecate in my arms, who felt like an enormous burden, even though she was slightly built, and it was one of those situations when a surge of adrenalin is supposed to give a man the strength of ten.

  Shots must have been ringing out behind me, but they were inaudible in the scream. Blood was certainly flowing: spurting and jetting volcanically. And the room was full of presences both visible and invisible, real and virtual maenads, crazed with Bacchic fury. I was not at all sure, as I plunged through the door, hot on Charles Parenot’s heels—his burden was lighter, and perhaps he really had acquired the strength of ten men and the speed to match—that anyone behind me would get out of that mayhem alive.

  Jean-Jacques had already leapt up into his seat. It was so crowded inside the carriage that I ought perhaps to have climbed up beside him, but I didn’t think of it, and simply squeezed myself in, trying to slam the door of the sociable behind me as the whip cracked—probably unnecessarily, as the horses were already moving away of their own accord. Even outside, the scream was still audible—or at least its echo. The viol was silent now, but the scream still filled the Marquis of Mesmay’s ballroom, sowing its panic and its terror.

  The atmosphere outside was icy, and the wind cutting—but not, thank God, like a dagger.

  Gradually, we sorted ourselves out. Mariette, Myrica, Hecate and Elise were seated on the cushions, Charles and I on the floor. Elise was still clutching her viol and her bow, but she only had two hands. The parchment had been left behind, on the music stand. I wasn’t sorry, and I really didn’t care who ended up with it, when all the killing was done, even if it was a powerful instrument of magic.

  “It wasn’t me,” said Elise, finally.

  “No one thinks it was,” said Charles, “but I wish you’d dropped that infernal instrument.”

  “It was my mother’s,” she said.

  In her place, I supposed, I wouldn’t have let go of it either.

  “I hope Vashti’s all right,” said Hecate. “You left her behind.”

  “With forty or fifty others,” I said. “She was on the edge, with us. If she didn’t get out, she’ll have had sense enough to keep her head down.”

  “But Fion and the rest of the council were in the middle—and Niklaus was on Vashti’s inside.”

  “At last half the Island Council are members of Dellacrusca’s cult,” I said, although it was a guess. “Even if they didn’t draw knives and guns, they were fair game. The maenads didn’t stand a chance, though: it was a suicide mission. They had to be completely crazy.”

  “Isn’t that rather the point?” said Charles. He was a mythological painter. He understood such things. Sane maenads would be a contradiction in terms.

  “Do you think they got him?” Mariette asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Charles. “I didn’t see.”

  “I did,” said Elise, saving me the trouble. “The boys tried to protect him, but it was too late. They were taken by surprise.”

  “He was off guard,” I said. “For once, he was off guard. He was too arrogant. He really didn’t think that the Dionysians would try anything, once he had the parchment in his possession, even if they knew. He thought he’d won.”

  “And what happens now?” asked Myrica.

  “You’ve probably just lost the two largest commissions of your career,” I told her. “Maybe three, if Mesmay went down in the battle. We’re all a good deal poorer than we seemed to be an hour ago.”

  “What I meant,” said Myrica frostily, “is what do we do now?”

  �
��We have a very stiff drink,” I said. “Except for Elise, of course.”

  “We do not,” said Hecate, sternly. “The rest of you will sit quietly, while Elise and I put on the performance we intended. I’m damned if I’m going to let all that work and rehearsal go to waste. It won’t be the same without the marine trumpets, but we’ll just have to do without.”

  “What do you suppose they did with the real Sisters of Shalimar?” Myrica asked. “They won’t have killed everyone in the convent, will they?”

  “No,” I said, trying to sound confident. “They weren’t maenads until the time came for them to be. When they infiltrated the convent they were just women. At the worst, they’ll have locked the Sisters up. They won’t have wanted to hurt any of them, and the Sisters won’t have put up any resistance.”

  “The innocents in the hall won’t have been so lucky,” Mariette put in.

  “Maybe not,” I conceded. “Let’s hope the innocents had enough sense to play dead, and let the rest get on with the stupid games. What idiots they all are! Still feuding, after three thousand years! Still shedding blood, even now, in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Maenads, in today’s world—and here of all places, on Mnemosyne! I was wrong, I admit it. That black snow really was an evil omen; I just refused to see it.”

  “Are we really going to play?” Elise asked Hecate, looking uneasily at her instrument now, wondering what other diabolical devices it might still have in store.

  “We are,” said Hecate. “We have to. It isn’t finished until we do.”

  “You understand Eurydice’s lament now, then?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “and so should you. You would, if Dellacrusca hadn’t bent your mind out of shape playing cat and mouse with you…although, in a way, that ought to have helped you. You’ll understand when you hear the piece. And thank you, by the way.”

  “It was a reflex action,” I said. “I know you could have got out in your own.”

  “I was thanking the reflex action,” she said. “Your thoughts get tangled up in your genius, but your unconscious is always trustworthy.”

  “I, alas, needed to be shoved,” said Charles Parenot, mournfully.

  “No you didn’t,” I said. “That was a reflex action too. When I panic, I just can’t bear leaving other people to do the right thing by themselves. I simply have to grab the credit. I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me, Master Rathenius,” said Mariette, “have you ever painted a self-portrait?”

  “Of course,” I replied. “Several.”

  “As yourself?”

  I saw what she was getting at. “Vision doesn’t work like that,” I told her. “I can see more in other people than they realize they’re giving away, but when I look at myself in a mirror, I only see the appearance. I can only paint my image. I’ll still be able to do justice to you, though—with your husband’s permission, of course.”

  “But what will happen now?” Elise asked. “To me, I mean? Now that my grandfather is dead.”

  It wasn’t over, I realized. Not unless Tommaso and Lorenzo had gone down in the conflict too. She still had a family, linked to her by blood; they would still have a legal right to claim her; they didn’t even need to be above the law, in the sense that her father had been.

  “I think you’ll get to choose,” I said. “Tommaso and Lorenzo don’t have the reputation of being good or reasonable people, but they’re not as bad as they paint themselves, let alone as others paint them. They won’t do you any harm.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “It’s good to be able to choose.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced, although it was the truth. She had never really thought before about having a choice in major matters, but had simply gone with the course of events, as children do, only exercising choice in trivial things, exerting her will just for practice. For now on, it would be different. From now on, she would have to decide what it was she wanted, not just from moment to moment and day to day, but with a whole future life in view.

  “Shall we stop at our house or go on to yours?” Charles asked, as Jean-Jacques turned on to the promontory.

  “We’ll go on to Axel’s,” said Hecate. “Finished or not, his triptych will make a backcloth for our performance. It won’t be the same as the marine trumpets, but the middle panel will help to put the language of sighs in context. As long as there’s a good fire in the studio—now that it’s getting dark, it’s turning positively Arctic.”

  Luzon had, in fact, kept the fire stoked up in anticipation of my returning with guests. She had even prepared a meal, which was more necessary that anyone had anticipated. Danger of death stimulates the appetite, presumably because of all the extra energy released by the rush of adrenalin.

  So we ate first, and calmed down, until we were in an appropriate state of readiness to hear Hecate and Elise perform, after which we arranged the triptych as a backdrop, even though two of the panels were still incomplete.

  As the child picked up her bow, though, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of apprehension, thinking that the instrument was still essentially diabolical, and the language of sighs still the language of screams.

  XVII. The Truth About Orpheus

  This time, when the bow stroked the strings, there was no scream. There was nothing discordant in the sounds that Elise drew from the accursed instrument, which seemed, at last for a while, to switch into angelic mode. The music that poured forth was unadulterated sweetness: genuine charm, although not without a hint of compulsion. It was pure temptation, but so pure, so unadulterated, that it was utterly confident in its own irresistibility.

  When that girl wants to be seductive, I thought, in the full sense of the term, no one is going to be able to resist her.

  But for the moment, at least, she didn’t want to be seductive, in any erotic fashion. The purity of the music persisted; it drew the mind in but without the mind knowing exactly where it was going. I had no doubt that Elise was improvising, and not only because there was no music-stand in front of her carrying a score. The piece was not being invented momentarily, however; she had played it before, exploring it with Hecate’s company, under Hecate’s guidance. It was a collaborative endeavor. I knew that even before Hecate’s voice joined in with the strange melody—if “joined in” is the correct term for a combination that was more opposition than fusion, more contest than collaboration.

  Hecate was not singing, or even reciting in the manner that I had heard her recite her work a hundred times before. When she had said that she was working with the language of sighs, she meant it literally. What was doing with her voice was wordless, but it was not meaningless. I understood immediately what she had borrowed from the eerie voices that had echoed so strangely in Vashti’s séance, unconsciously channeled—or so it seemed—by Mariette. Those really had been the voices of the dead, in some sense, even if they had originated and Mariette’s throat and Mariette’s unconscious, but this was Hecate’s voice, and Hecate’s voice alone, consciously produced, as a work of art. It was remarkable, to be sure, but it was a performance, pure and simple. It was a poem of sorts, improvised but rehearsed, practiced and supported by Elise’s music, to which it was a kind of counterpoint.

  What, I wondered, would the marine trumpets have contributed?

  It wasn’t hard to guess. The marine trumpets would have been the other shades, in the crowd scene represented in the middle panel of the triptych. They would have been the background hum of the Underworld, incidentally subdued by the music that Orpheus was addressing primarily to one of them, or perhaps to two: to Eurydice and to Hades, the latter envisaged symbolically as the death that had her in his grip.

  As the piece was being played now, though, there was just the music of the substitute lyre, and the presence of Eurydice, as a shade, in the clutches of death. The remainder of the Underworld and its population had been reduced to mere paint and charcoal, not even finished.

  The sweetness of Elise’s music was devoid of any erotic quality becaus
e it was charming death, not love; it was pure, because it was dealing with life itself, not the pleasure of life, it was weaving existence, not ecstasy.

  And Eurydice’ reaction—her reaction, not her reply—was a litany of sighs.

  And suddenly, it became obvious to me what I had been missing, even though it was right under my nose, even though it had been voiced in my presence, and I had voiced almost all of it myself, under Dellacrusca’s needling, and had almost made it manifest at the tip of my brush: the truth about Orpheus.

  It was something that I was composing, of course, with the aid of Elise’s chords and Hecate’s sight; it was a work of art, not a literal representation of something that had actually happened three or ten thousand years ago, but that didn’t make it any less true: quite the contrary, in fact.

  Orpheus had been romanticized. The idea of him charming the beasts, causing even the trees and the rocks to follow him, had been envisaged by his admirers as a pleasant and amicable endeavor, a benevolent induction of affection, a bountiful taming of savagery, a generous contribution of life to dull inertia. It had been seen as marvelous, enviable magic, which made Orpheus a beautiful and virtuous person.

  But in reality, as I had suggested to Dellacrusca, it was all about control, command, and possession. It was all about making the animals, and the birds, and the trees, and the very rocks do what he ordered them to do. Orpheus wasn’t a beautiful and virtuous person at all. Orpheus was a Dellacrusca.

  Even his supposedly heroic deeds, such as shielding the Argonauts from the Sirens, were a matter of asserting control, a matter of competition and mastery, of demonstrating the power of compulsion.

  And as for the excursion to the Underworld: what heights of arrogance! He had gone to subject death itself to his command, to compel Hades, the personification of death, to release Eurydice, to give her back to him.