Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “So you always say.”

  “So I always say.” He unwound string from the peg, looking perplexedly at his son. “Since that’s what I always say, why can’t you believe me?”

  “I don’t know,” Hollis said tersely. “Maybe because you play everything else like the first bard must have played, and even he got himself off this rock for a thousand years. You belong in the world.”

  “It’s you who should leave,” Rook said patiently. “You belong in the world. Maybe you should row yourself ashore and join your mother for a few months. Leave the boat for whoever is out there in the dark.”

  “I don’t want to go to a land baron’s court.”

  “Why not? The change might—”

  Hollis made an impatient gesture, ending his sentence. “It’s too warm, too soft. I’ll forget what I’ve learned here. I’ll forget to come back. I’m not ready to leave yet.”

  “Well,” Rook said softly, meeting Hollis’s eyes with his raven’s stare. “Neither am I.” He loosened another peg, added more temperately, “You’ll have roots in both worlds: me on this rock, your mother at court. When you need to leave, you’ll always know where to find us both.”

  “It’s not that,” Hollis said tightly. “I’m not afraid of leaving.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know. You let my mother leave you—you’ll let me leave you. For this rock. I just feel—sometimes—that I don’t know you at all.”

  Rook was silent a moment, his eyes straying back to the window. “Your mother used to say that to me,” he murmured. “I never understood what she meant, either.”

  Wind flew like a bird around the workroom, skimming over broken or half-finished instruments, sounding overtones, leaving scents of fish, salt, night. Hollis turned to latch the frame of thick ovals of glass and lead against it. He paused, peered out. “There’s a fire on the shore. Are we expecting anyone?”

  “A young man from Berylon.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “No,” Rook said, rising, wanting the peace and quiet of elements that might complain of him, but not in any language he felt obliged to understand. “I’ll go. You finish this; your heart is in it.”

  He heard Hollis draw a preliminary breath as he took the harp. Rook shut the door before he had to listen, and went to get his cloak.

  Outside, he descended the hundred stone steps from the school to the dock. He lit a lantern from the dock light, hung it from the prow of a boat, and stepped into it. Rowing in the easy tide, facing the little coracle of the moon, he remembered that on the night he himself had come to Luly, so many years before, the moon had been dark. As he neared the shore he smelled meat, heard voices, the fierce cry of a seabird begging. A wave seized the boat, shook it; the sighing became a slow, sullen roar. Rook leaped into the foam. Someone splashed out to help him heave the boat out of the tide. Laughter around the fire encouraged them. Dripping, Rook stepped into the light.

  Three strangers faced him, all young, all wearing their patched mantles and boots, their wild, untidy hair, like some proud livery. Small harps, in and out of their cases, leaned against driftwood, along with skins of water or wine. A hare crackled on a driftwood spit above the fire. In the farthest wash of light, Rook saw large, gentle eyes, the wink of harness.

  He studied two faces, one dark, one fair, then turned to the slighter man beside him, wringing the brine out of his mantle. “Griffin Tormalyne?”

  “Yes,” the young man said instantly. And then, under Rook’s dark gaze, his eyes flickered and he said, “No.”

  The other two were silent now, no longer laughing, watching Rook as if they had handed him a riddle to solve. Rook said slowly, remembering scraps of news, gossip, that had been washed up along the northern coast or carried back to Luly from someone’s travels, “It’s not a name common this far from Berylon. And I would guess not spoken often even within the walls of the city.”

  “It will be,” the young man with the troublesome name said fiercely. “It will be heard.” He hesitated again. “Tormalyne is not my name. But I am of the House, and it’s the name I have chosen and it can be spoken here. Not even the Basilisk can hear this far. In the name of Tormalyne House I have come to learn magic.”

  Rook blinked. He opened his mouth, found himself wordless. Odd memories glanced through his mind: the music from his hands setting the world on fire, the fierce, sweet strings no longer strung to wood but to his heart; the powerful inhuman gaze of the ancient bard who had nearly turned his path toward the hinterlands, where the first bard had trapped all the forces of magic.

  “Here,” he heard himself say.

  “Here.” Then the lean face, browned with southern light, again lost its certainty. “Are you a bard?”

  “No.”

  The young man’s face cleared. “Then you wouldn’t know.”

  “No.”

  “What are you, then?” the dark-haired young man asked curiously. “The ferryman?”

  Rook looked at him. In memory the bard’s dark, challenging gaze hid itself again, freeing him for the moment. He smiled. “Sometimes. I saw your fire first, so I came to get you. We all read the letter from Griffin’s father—”

  “We?” Griffin asked.

  “The teachers.”

  “So you—”

  “I teach, yes.”

  “But you’re not—”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Did you come here too late?”

  “No,” Rook said, refusing to justify himself, even to the engaging stranger, for the second time that evening. Sea was stirring the boat, washing almost to the fire; he picked up the rope looped to the boat’s prow. “We should cross; the tide is turning. I can bring you all over, to rest for a few days. You’ve had a long journey. But there are no stables on Luly.”

  The other two eyed the school on the rock with a certain wariness, as if they expected even the beds there to be made of stone. “We’re returning to Berylon,” the dark-haired man said. “We just rode with Griffin to keep him out of trouble. We’ll take his horse back with us. His family will want to know that he got here safely.” He paused, rubbing one brow puzzledly. “It’s a barbaric wilderness up here,” he added. “What can you learn on the edge of nowhere that you can’t in the middle of the civilized world?”

  “That’s a good question,” Rook said. “I have no idea.”

  Griffin picked up his saddlebags and harp out of the litter of shells and tossed them into the boat. He hugged his companions farewell, promising to send letters with the southerly migration of birds, for lack of more practical means. Then he ran the boat into the sea and said promptly, lighting in it, “I’ll row.”

  Midway across, he finished zigzagging north and south, and found a rhythm for his rowing. By the lamplight swaying behind him, illumining indiscriminately a hand, a cheekbone, some pale gold stubble, Rook pieced him together: neat-boned, strong, his expressions honed by a dedication to something that had brought him this far out of his known world. His family had hated his leaving. His father’s letter had been nearly incoherent with exasperation.

  Reading his mind, Griffin spoke finally. “What did my father’s letter say?”

  “Roughly: he could not imagine why you wanted to waste your youth on this barren rock among raddled, flea-bitten bards who probably never washed, and who, on the pretext of teaching you anything remotely useful, would force you to grow onions and milk goats.”

  The light slid behind Griffin’s head; Rook heard a grunt of laughter from the darkened face. “He has never understood anything. I’m sorry he was offensive.”

  “How do you know that he was? For all you know, we may be just that. Luly is a wild, lonely place, and your father has a point: you are very far from everything you know.”

  “I came to learn,” Griffin said simply. “From you, from anyone. I came to take something from you and bring it back with me to Berylon.”

  “Magic?”

  “Power.”


  Rook was silent, listening to the tide flowing and breaking against the rock, flooding into hidden channels, rifts, underwater caves. He said, slowly, “It’s an elusive force. It’s not taught here. It can be glimpsed, in songs, in tales. If you take it, you must find it yourself.”

  “But it exists.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t know.” He pulled too vigorously, skimming the surface; brine splashed over Rook’s face. “Not being a bard.”

  Salt stung his eyes. He closed them, hearing Sirina again in the stranger’s words, hearing Hollis; for a moment he glimpsed what they had been trying to tell him. With the sudden vision came fire, rilling through him as it had through the harp, turning itself into music, music turning itself into fire. Into power.

  He stirred, trying to see. “Why do you want power in Berylon?”

  The young man’s brooding face lifted abruptly. “You don’t know?” Rook waited, watching the rock slowly mass itself out of the matrix of the night. He heard Griffin’s breath, a patient sigh. “You wouldn’t know, this far from Berylon.”

  “I know that Tormalyne House was destroyed decades ago. No one bearing that name was left alive. Yet it’s a name you want to bring back to life. And that, after all this time, you must still travel this far to say it safely.”

  “Arioso Pellior missed a few minor relatives when he destroyed Tormalyne House. My father is one of them. He is afraid—” The young man’s jaw clamped hastily.

  “Of what?” Rook asked, then: “Afraid for you?” He received no answer; Griffin’s face, bent to his rowing, remained in deep shadow. Rook felt a deep twist of sympathy for Griffin’s father. A forgotten name, a passionate longing for nebulous powers would likely be far more dangerous to the child of the fallen House than to the Prince of Berylon. But Luly might keep the dreamer safe for a time, until he realized that all he learned among the bards was music.

  “Do you know,” he asked, “the tale of how the first bard came to Luly?”

  Griffin’s head lifted. “No. Tell me.”

  “It has something to do with what you are searching for.” He told Griffin the tale, adding, after the first bard disappeared into the hinterlands, “The light to your left is the dock lantern.”

  An oar splashed again, carelessly; Griffin twisted in the wrong direction, then saw the light. “An odd tale,” he murmured. He slewed the boat toward the dock erratically; Rook watched the. light swing out from behind one shoulder, then the other. “Is it the truth? That he carved stone with his singing?”

  “It’s the truth in the tale.”

  “Then there is power in what you teach…Was that the end of him? He vanished in the hinterlands and was never heard of again?”

  “No, that was not the end of him yet. A thousand years later the bard returned, pursued by all the magic in the hinterlands for the magical instrument he had stolen.”

  “The harp?”

  Again he found himself wordless. Then words came to him: the truth of the tale. “No. I think he was pursued for the magic he had stolen; it gave power to anything he played. He crossed the bridge to Luly and cried out a word. The sea rose up on both sides of the whale’s petrified backbone and pounded it into sand. The magic remained trapped in the hinterlands and Luly became a rock isolated once again by water. The bard, having sacrificed his voice in his great cry, spent a day playing the stolen instrument, the sound of which crumbled stone all around the school into earth. Out of the earth grew, on that day, grasses and wildflowers, and the vegetable garden behind the kitchen. At twilight, the bard put the instrument down and stepped into a whale rib. The ghost of the whale, freed at last, carried the bard down deep beneath the waves, singing, as it reached the bottom of the sea, the song that had hollowed stone on Luly.

  “Which is where the whale got its song, and why farmers love the picochet.”

  The boat bumped against the dock, slid into another boat. Rook caught the rope at his feet with one hand, an iron dock ring with the other. He stepped out, knelt to tie the boat. “Don’t drop the oars in the water,” he advised. “You row not badly for a city dweller.”

  Griffin pulled the oars into the boat and clambered out. “What in the world is a picochet?”

  “It has a square, hollow body, a very long neck, and a single string. You play it like a viol, between your knees, with a bow. If you stayed on any of the farms in the northern provinces, you probably heard it.”

  “We stayed in taverns along the coast.” He hesitated. “I remember a caterwauling one night, like cats fighting—”

  “That would be the picochet.” He dropped a hand on Griffin’s shoulder, turning him. “The steps are over there.”

  “You play this picochet?”

  “I am fond of it.”

  “Were you a farmer, then?”

  Rook took a torch from its sconce at the end of the dock, illuminated the steps. “I was born in the provinces. I came here very young. My home and family were destroyed by fire. I don’t remember anything of them. When I try to look back, I see only fire.”

  He heard Griffin’s breath gather and stop, then gather again. “Those of Tormalyne House who were not slaughtered by Arioso Pellior died by fire.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “He should have killed us all.”

  Rook frowned suddenly, disturbed by the flatness in Griffin’s voice. He angled the torch to see Griffin’s face. “Us?”

  The young man turned away from him toward the steps. “It’s secret,” Rook heard through the fire. “It’s deadly.”

  Rook, still frowning, watched his uncertain ascent. “Then don’t tell the wind,” he said softly. “And don’t tell the waves. And above all do not tell the birds.”

  The winds were gentle that night to Griffin, who might have been blown off the steps in a different season. Even so, he was provoked, by the steep angle of cliff and the nagging, edgy persistence of wind, to ask, “Why this lonely place? What possessed the first bard to build his school here, instead of some civilized place where you don’t have to climb down off the edge of the world to buy an apple?”

  “I suppose because that long ago no one had invented the word ‘civilized’ yet.”

  “It’s been around now for some time.” He was panting, Rook heard; they were very near the top. “The Tormalyne School of Music was built on one of the busiest streets in Berylon. Aurelia Tormalyne didn’t believe you had to wrest music with your hands out of wind and sea and stone.”

  “Then why did you not go there instead?”

  “There is no magic in that music.” He left Rook in blank contemplation of that, and took the last few steps alone. He stood silently then, gazing at the sheer wall of stone rising in front of him, with its firelit slits of windows and its massive weather-beaten door, the oak slats bound together with bands of iron.

  “There are two doors,” Rook said, joining him. “One west, one south. Winds are fiercest from the north. The south door opens to the garden. The first bard’s picochet inspired even an apple tree to grow in it.”

  Griffin turned. Wind shook him, pulled the torch fire into strands, hiding his face, then swirled it together to reveal the vague, stunned expression on it. He said, “I can believe this place is older than words.”

  “It is said to be the place where words begin. You can go or stay,” he added gently. “I’ll row you back to your friends now, if you choose. You may find what you want here, you may not. I don’t know. Not being a bard.” He stopped, the word suddenly strange to him, having transformed itself somehow, during their brief journey across the sea.

  The young man who had taken the name of the dead opened his mouth, closed it on a silent word. He bowed his head beneath Rook’s fire and crossed the threshold into stone.

  Four

  In Pellior Palace, the Prince of Berylon’s dragon-eyed daughter stood beside him in a chamber without a door. The chamber was the heart of the palace, a secret known only to the two of them, for the prince,
having discovered it, had eliminated those who helped him furnish it. Luna had penetrated it, to Arioso’s surprise, at a very young age.

  “I wanted to be with you,” she explained when he found her unexpectedly at his elbow. She was unable to explain the powerful conjunction of logic and desire that had transformed the impossible into the only possibility, and led her there. He questioned her as to her methods: she said vaguely, “I watched you.” Pressed, she added, “I was there, where you could see me. But it was me, so you didn’t see.” Then she gave him back his own captivating smile, and he let her stay.

  He did many things in that chamber, she discovered. He read and wrote and drew, made potions and poisons, invented weapons, traps, instruments of torture. He studied the human body, and charts of tides and stars. He played peculiar musical instruments that seemed to be the cause of strange effects. He kept wild animals in cages, killed them in subtle ways. He made lovely gifts: carved wooden boxes, glass roses, pens, jeweled rings, magnifying lenses. They all contained some deadly trick to them: the blade that flew out of the box, the scented ink that ate into the skin, the lens that, held to the eye, wept acid. These gifts left the room soon after they were made, and often preceded an elaborate funeral. They accounted for other funerals, she suspected, that were swift, bitter and held in odd corners of Berylon unknown to her. She never questioned his actions; she only watched him and became adept at whatever he would teach her. Thus she learned many odd things that, her father said, she might find useful one day. She did not doubt that.

  Along with his peculiar gifts and labyrinthine mind, she had inherited his charming manner, his green, almond-shaped eyes, his deceptively pleasing smile. So like him was she that there were those who believed that she had not been born but conjured by him, a changeling made to his specifications, to replace a hapless child born for no other reason than to account for Luna’s existence. A pity, others murmured, he had not replaced his heir instead. With her heavy, copper-gold hair, her sun-gilded skin, her movements as graceful as wind, she seemed, even to her father at times, something formed out of light and air and precious metals melted and molded into a wish.