Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She lowered her eyes, wondering suddenly if he had read her thoughts. He said only, “You play my music very well.”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  “As I would play it, if I were that proficient. As if you like it.”

  “Then I must,” she answered in her low, clear voice. Years in Berylon had smoothed the provincial quirks out of her speech. “I don’t play well what I don’t like.”

  “Did you think the lament a trifle long?”

  Surprised, she lifted her eyes again, to glimpse the tentative composer behind the ruler. “No, my lord. You made me see a stately animal, maybe with mythical qualities, that had been slain. Something to touch the heart. Not just something to be viewed as supper. A stag?”

  “Or a griffin,” he suggested, with his tight, still charming smile. “I have heard you play here before. You teach at the school.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Five years as a student, my lord, and five as a teacher.”

  “You are a northerner.” She hesitated, surprised again; his smile deepened. “I hear it in your voice. You came to the school young, then. And were given assistance? You are not a land baron’s daughter.”

  “Yes—no, my lord. My grandfather still farms or the northern slopes. He sent me here at fourteen, thinking that I would astound the magisters of the Tormalyne School with my music.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes, my lord. They had never heard such noise in their lives.”

  For a moment his smile reached his eyes. “What were you playing for them?”

  “My picochet. They locked it in a closet, and forbade me to touch it for five years. They taught me to play more civilized instruments.”

  “I am not familiar with the picochet.”

  “It is a peasant’s instrument, my lord.”

  “And one you still play?”

  For a breath he caught her wordless. She felt the blood gather in her face, under his bright, unblinking gaze. She said finally, “Yes, my lord.”

  “I know many uncivilized instruments…But not that. You live at the school?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good. Then I will know where to find you.”

  “My lord?”

  “When I need you.”

  She blinked. He turned away; she curtsied hastily, lost sight of him when she straightened. She put the lavandre into its case, her straight dark brows puckered slightly.

  Hexel came to her side; she said with relief, “I can’t believe we got through that with no bigger disaster than my hair falling down. He was pleased.”

  “What exactly was he pleased with?” Hexel asked suspiciously. “What did he say to you?”

  “Pleasantries…” Still frowning, she snapped a case latch with more force than necessary, and saw blood head along the quick of her thumbnail. “He has such strange eyes. They seem to see everything, even what I’m thinking. Or don’t know I’m thinking. He said that he would know where to find me when he needed me.”

  “And what did he mean by that?” Hexel’s blue eyes were narrowed, his long, black hair looked suddenly windblown, though the candles behind him burned still. As a dramatist and composer, he had an exhausting passion for dramatics. He was lean, moody, intense; students at the music school constantly pushed notes under his door, or set his discarded scribbles to music, or dropped roses or themselves across his work. “What kinds of pleasantries did he have in mind?”

  “Oh, Hexel.” She wiped blood on her robe and began to put her music in order. “He meant music. That’s all we talked about.”

  “Then why are you frowning?”

  She tapped the manuscripts straight slowly. “Because,” she said finally, “of who he is. Whatever it is he needs of anyone, how do you say no to the Basilisk? I never had to think of it before. He never looked at me before, with those eyes.” Something dragged at her attention from across the room; she added nervously, “The way he’s looking now. As if he hears us.”

  “He is an aging tyrant who gets his music played free,” Hexel said without compunction, “since he had the foresight not to destroy the Tormalyne School. You are my muse, not his. He can find someone else. I need your inspiration. Tonight.”

  “For what?”

  “For the prince’s opera, what else?”

  “Oh. Hexel, I can’t. I’m playing the picochet in the tavern tonight.”

  He gazed at her, exasperated. “Not again.”

  “It’s this day every week.”

  “But I need you!”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You are merciless.”

  “So you are always telling me. Why can’t you find someone else to be your muse instead? All I do is inspire you with horror, headaches, frustration, and despair.”

  “That’s why I need you,” Hexel said briskly. “Without proper proportions of despair, how can I tell if I’m doing anything right?”

  “Come with me. We’ll talk on the way. You might like what I play.”

  “I would rather have hobnails driven into my ears. You are only doing this to prove some obscure point, because no one could possibly want to listen to you.”

  “Northerners do,” she answered simply. “They miss it.”

  Hexel snorted so audibly that faces across the room turned, exhibiting exquisitely raised brows. “It’s a foolish and dangerous thing you are doing, Giulia Dulcet, and if anything happens to you it will devastate my work—” He sensed a distraction hovering at his elbow, and found a page there, bowing to the music stand. “What?”

  “Master Veris Legere will make a formal presentation of the prince’s music to the school, if you will please…”

  They followed him across the room. The prince, formally presented with Hexel, looked at Giulia over Hexel’s bowed head, the faint, sharp splinter of a smile in his eyes. She thought in horror: He heard…Veris Legere, the silver-haired Master of Music for Pellior House, who knew Giulia, greeted her more pleasantly. He presented the musicians with scrolls tied with gold ribbon, about which they all, even Hexel, made proper noises. Hexel ate a hummingbird heart; Giulia drank, in two swallows, most of a glass of wine while she responded to Veris Legere’s polite interest in her work at the school. The mirrors around them began to lose movement, color. The musicians in their scholarly black detached themselves from satins and pastels to gather their instruments and music. Small clusters of courtiers, like elegant bouquets, drifted in the wake of the prince’s departure. Finally the mirrors emptied even of servants, who left them to reflect themselves, while the onyx-eyed basilisks turned one another into stone.

  Later that evening, Giulia made her way alone through the streets of Berylon. She still wore her magister’s black, beneath a flowing hooded cloak. The stone streets, broad and lamplit in front of the music school, grew narrow and twisted as she neared the north wall of the city. Tiers of closed doors and bright windows rose above shops and taverns, smithies, tanneries, market stalls covered for the night. Each street had its own particular odor: she could have smelled her way by now to the tavern at the gate of the Tormalyne Bridge.

  Four bridges led across water into Berylon, each named after one of the ancient ruling Houses. To the west, the Iridia Bridge crossed slow moat water in which the frogs would be singing. The plain beyond that was treeless, grassy, the long, dust-white road curving through it flowed visible from the horizon. To the south, the Marcasia Bridge spanned broad deep water to the docks, where fishers moored their boats and cleaned their catch, and the trade ships, sails colored according to House or province, took their wares downriver. East, the Pellior Bridge rose over slower, shallower water, where goods and passengers were carried by flat bottomed barges. The Tormalyne Bridge crossed the river at the beginning of its long curl around the city, where the rushing, silvery water had sliced a path through shelves of rock, torn earth away and swallowed it, scoured the sides of the ravine into cliffs as sheer as a knife blade. T
here were no docks on this side of the city, no river traffic. Travelers crossing the bridge passed into a forest that stretched between Berylon and the northern provinces. The smells that roamed into the tavern beside the bridge were redolent of raw pelts and tanneries.

  She was stopped once by the night watch. The long instrument she carried had made a suspicious silhouette in their torchlight. Bloodred basilisks on black tunics cast baleful stares at her; neither they nor the watch saw farther than her magister’s robe, and they let her pass.

  On Tanner’s Street, she opened a weather-beaten door beneath a faded sign: a griffin poised between broken halves of shell. The Griffin’s Egg, the tavern called itself. At that hour it had a scattered crowd of trappers, tanners, a few dusty travelers out of the provinces, shopkeepers, tired women with barefoot children at their knees. Giulia eased through the crowd to the back corner of the tavern, where Justin was fitting pieces of his bass pipe together, and Yacinthe unwrapped half a dozen small drums of various sizes from their cases. Ionia, who played the flute, set a brass bowl on a table with a few small coins in it to inspire their audience. She smiled at Giulia, showing a sapphire fang over one eyetooth. Jewels glinted through her hair, down her shoulder, from the studded rein that she had trimmed from some horse’s fine harness. Yacinthe, beating a drum, danced around Justin, the gold rings on her toes tapping on the floorboards, blue feathers trying to fly in her dark hair. He tossed her a grin, his eyes on Giulia as he went to meet her.

  “I’m sorry I’m so late,” Giulia said. “I had to—”

  He stopped her with a kiss. Then he said softly, “I know what you had to.” She looked closely at him. His eyes were lowered, his smile troubled. He was tall and fair-haired, with a sweet ruffian’s face that was a misleading combination of innocence and danger. His hatred of Pellior House was genuine and unremitting. She had met him in the Griffin’s Egg one night when she searched for a place outside the school to play. Like the instrument she brought there, he was an indulgence and a passion; she knew little of his life outside of the tavern where they played, the tiny room above a shop where he lived. She laid a hand on his chest; he clasped it, but still did not meet her eyes, busy swallowing his protests, she suspected.

  “I play where I’m told,” she reminded him simply. “You know that. It’s my work. And I can’t help loving the music. You know that, too.”

  “I know.” His fingers tightened on her hand. He raised her palm to his mouth, before he loosed her. He looked at her finally, his brows crooked. “I worry about you in the Basilisk’s house. He is unpredictable and ruthless. And you were alone on the streets. There’s a full moon tonight. They’re coming in here to drink hard. The watch challenges anything that moves.”

  “They stopped me,” she said. She slid off the magister’s black beneath her cloak, and then shrugged off her cloak. “They thought I was armed.”

  “They killed a man near Pellior Bridge. They thought he was armed.”

  Giulia, on one knee, froze for half a breath, then continued unbuckling a shoe. “They don’t kill magisters.”

  “Not yet.”

  She kicked off her shoes, then pulled the gold net out of her hair so that it fanned darkly over her bare shoulders, nearly reaching the waist of the short, full skirts that skimmed her knees. Justin watched her, his smile surfacing again. Someone rattled a cup against a table like a drumroll. Yacinthe imitated it. Justin pulled the gilded, beaded leather tie from the mouth of her instrument case. He looped it around her neck carefully, tied it, while she watched the mottled light slide over his brown, muscular hands, and catch in the tangled cloud of white-gold hair. He pulled the instrument out of its case and handed it to her.

  “Magister,” he said gravely. “Don’t break the windows with it.”

  He picked up his pipe again and blew a deep note. She plucked the string, listening until she heard its solitary voice clearly beneath laughter and argument, the roll of dice and clank of pewter on wood. She tuned it to a note out of the north.

  They began to play.

  Three

  Sirina waited until Hollis was fourteen before she left them. Rook had sensed her going long before. Like tide turning, drawn by the moon, by the mysteries of the deep, she had ebbed, little by little, away from him, so that he stood once again on a lonely shore, watching the distance widen between them. She asked him, in many ways, to come with her, before she got tired of asking.

  “Luly is growing tiny,” she had said to him. “There’s not enough room. For all of us.”

  He thought of the stone chambers, tiered like a beehive, the walls so thick not even the sound of the picochet traveled between them. They might have been living there with only the wind and the sea shouting poetry at them in forgotten languages. “There’s room,” he had answered absently.

  “I thought I would take Hollis home,” she said another time. He had stared at her, oddly perplexed by the word, as if what he had thought it meant was wildly inaccurate.

  “He is home. Luly is his home.”

  “I mean to see my father. For a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “Just a while. Just a few months. So he can see what it is to be a court bard. In a house planted on earth instead of stone. With people coming and going. So that, when he’s older, he can make choices.”

  “I made choices without knowing.”

  “I know,” she said softly, her brows crooked at something he could not see. She had grown, he thought, more beautiful through the years: tall and supple, with a line beside her mouth left there by laughter, by pain, by thoughts she did not reveal.

  “Come with us,” she begged.

  “I can’t leave my students.”

  “It’s this rock you can’t leave,” she said, turning abruptly, gazing out at spindrift as pale as her hair. He thought only that she was probably right.

  When she finally made it clear to him that she was leaving, he felt, stunned, that the rock was the only safe and changeless thing he knew.

  “I can’t stay,” she said. “I love you. But I never meant to stay here. I want the world back.”

  “I’ll come,” he said, without moving. She separated her skirts from his tunics, folded them neatly on the bed. “I’ll come,” he said again. “When you find a place. Send word to me—”

  She made an exasperated noise. “You’ll come when the quarter moon falls out of the sky. You’ll come when you can row it to land like a boat.”

  “Hollis—”

  “I’ll let him choose.”

  He stared at her, breathless at the thought. “How can he? He’s a child! How can you ask him—”

  Her face twisted; tears appeared seemingly at random. beneath her eyes, on her cheekbone, beside her mouth. “It’s all I can do!” she cried. “It’s the best I can do. I only stayed for you and Hollis. I am a bard of Luly. I must find my place. As you never did. Ever. Ever. I tried to tell you.” She turned to him blindly; he held her fiercely for a moment, a silky roil of froth, the undertow. Then she slid away from him and was gone.

  Hollis went with her. He came back five months later, looking taller, older, and prickly with moods. “I want to be a bard,” he told Rook tensely. “Like her.” He looked like her, Rook thought; he had her eyes, her tall grace, though his hair was the color of his father’s name. He did not say much more for years, it seemed to Rook.

  And then, like his mother, he became a bard, finding music in a shinbone, poetry within the oyster’s shell. Like her, he was torn between love and land; he became articulate, and began, Rook thought with amazement, to sound exactly like her.

  It was in that spring, he saw clearly later, when the young man with the surprising name came north from Berylon, that the Basilisk’s eye turned toward Luly.

  He was in the middle of a desultory argument with Hollis when he saw the fire on the shore across the singing dark. He started to comment; Hollis paced a step, stood in front of the window, the distant flame a tantalizing ques
tion beside his hand. The world was still on the edge of spring. The winds came that day out of the provinces, mingling newly turned earth with the smell of brine around the rock. Rook, who by now had spent thirty-seven years on Luly, rarely felt the cold. His passage through the school, except on the roughest days, trailed a wake of open windows. Hollis, stars and fire at his back, shivered without realizing it.

  His young face was taut and stubborn. He looked, Rook thought with some sympathy, exactly like Sirina commenting on Rook’s life. Hollis had grown broad-shouldered and lean, like his father; he wore his black hair long and wind-knotted. Unlike his father, he was methodical rather than impulsive; he had known exactly what he wanted for years. Rook, still compact and muscular from climbing up and down the cliff to the dock and hauling in fish when he had to, kept his silver-gold hair cropped short now. His raven’s eyes had not changed; their blackness hid expression, while Hollis’s face changed expression as often as the sea.

  The sight of the harp in Rook’s hands had provoked Hollis, already restless at the smells corning out of the mainland. What they were arguing about seemed nebulous to Hollis and very clear to Rook. He was trying, as Sirina had done, to bring himself to leave Luly and Rook. “I don’t understand why you never learned to play that,” Hollis said tautly. “You could have left this place long ago. Can you explain?”

  Rook loosened a cracked peg on the harp, remembering the day, thirty-seven years before, when he had played Bard Trefon’s harp in the fishing boat, and had set his world on fire. “There is something I want to forget,” he said slowly. “Once, when I was harping, I came too close to remembering.”

  Hollis gazed at him, openmouthed, nonplussed. “What is it you want to forget?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But don’t you think—”

  “No,” Rook said evenly. “I don’t think.”

  “But if you—”

  “If I remember, and learn to harp to please the land barons, then I can leave this rock. Yes. But I don’t want to leave. I’m content here, teaching. You want to leave. Your mother had ambitions and so do you. I don’t.”