Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Poetry,” Griffin said. “Not power.”

  Rook smiled, and the flames receded. “One thing at a time.”

  Three nights later he woke them all again with his dreaming, and again, a few nights after that. In the morning, weary and desperate, he found Hollis again and said tersely, “Let me borrow your harp.”

  He saw the relief in Hollis’s eyes. He went wordlessly to get it, said, when he put it into Rook’s hands, “I’ll come with you. Maybe you shouldn’t be alone. You don’t know what—”

  “I do know what.” Rook sighed. “I have always known. Take my students today; that will help me most.” He put his hand on Hollis’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  He sat alone on the eastern face of the rock, emptying his mind of every word until it became the blank, illimitable face of ocean. And then he played, waiting for memory to burn through the sea into his mind. But though he felt his fingers moving, pleading with the strings, his heart, guarded for so many years, refused to yield its secrets. Only the powerful, unfathomable eyes of the dead Bard Horum surfaced in memory, open again, holding his gaze, showing him what path he must choose.

  At dawn, he filled a small pack with clothes and food, slung cloak and picochet over his shoulders, and woke Hollis for the second time that night. Hollis looked at him groggily over the long, bright hair hiding the face on his chest.

  “I’m going,” Rook said softly. Hollis shifted; Rook put a finger to his lips. “Don’t wake her.”

  Amazed, he saw tears gather in Hollis’s eyes. “Don’t forget your way back,” Hollis pleaded. “Those tales—”

  “I won’t forget. Tell my students. If you leave Luly—”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  “If you leave—”

  “I’ll wait,” Hollis said obdurately. “Just come back.”

  He rowed alone across the water, pulled the boat ashore, and left it upside down behind a driftwood log. He walked into the forest, leaving his footprints in a line as straight as the line of raven’s feathers he had once ignored. Not even they broke the silence as he left the world behind.

  He did not know how long he wandered before he met the old woman beside the shallow stream. He had not seen a road or another human being since he had left Luly, only the hawk and the owl and wolves who howled back at his picochet. All dreams had stopped, in that place, as if he had entered a waking dream. It was mid-afternoon. He had passed through the ancient forests and began to climb. He followed the stream up a rocky slope toward green hills scalloped like waves breaking toward a mystery of blue beyond them. He recognized them: the floating hills he had seen from Bard Trefon’s boat. He looked back at all the years that had passed since he been that child wondering if he would ever walk alone through those mysterious hills, and what he might find there. And now I am here, he thought grimly, feeling the sun beating down at him, the ground hard and dry beneath his steps. The old woman’s face turning toward him out of the shadow of a scrubby tree startled him. His foot slipped off wet moss, splashed down in three inches of water. She smiled at that, showing few teeth and no fear whatsoever. He regained his balance, wondering if he still had a voice after such silent days and nights, or if he had left that behind him along with the rest of the known world.

  “Good day,” he said. She did not answer, just gazed at him out of eyes as bright and shallow as the stream, until he felt of no more substance in her mind than his reflection in the water. There was something birdlike about her, he thought. Her nest of hair drifted; a downy feather floated out of it. Her hands, tipping a copper bowl to catch the water, might have been claws. She opened her mouth to speak finally. He expected a greeting in the language of birds, but she surprised him again.

  “Cool your feet,” she said. “I’ll tell your fate.” She patted the ground and pointed. “Sit down. There. In the shadow. Where I can see your face.”

  Her voice, so thin and wavery the mild air might have blown it away, seemed remarkably clear. He let pack and picochet slide from his shoulders as he stepped into shadow, bending into the low curve of branches. Trees on that hill dug deep into earth and clung to stone, hunched over themselves against the bitter northern winds. Sun-warmed now, the tree loosed a scent as sweet as honey at his touch, and dropped a tiny seed cone, like a gift, into his hair.

  He sat, and pulled his boots off, propped his feet among the stones in the shallow water that glided out of shadow into burning light, slid like molten glass down the hill. He looked at the old woman and found her watching him, wind in her hair, water in her hands, her garments mossy and gray, as if she had picked up a patch of the landscape and swirled it around her.

  “I’ll tell your fate,” she said again, and tilted her copper bowl back into the water.

  “It’s not my fate that’s troubling me,” he said, suddenly curious about her, in this desolate wilderness. “It’s my past. Can you see back that far?”

  She only shook her head a little, mute, while the water trickled into her bowl. He wondered where she lived. Nothing under that vast sky seemed human but the two of them, and he was not sure about her.

  She righted the bowl carefully when it had filled, and balanced it among the rocks where it reflected the sky. Then she drew a little copper hammer from a sleeve or a pocket. She caught his eyes in an animal’s wide, expressionless gaze, and he felt as if she had reached suddenly into him and plucked a deep, taut string.

  “Bard.”

  The hammer hit the bowl at the word; copper rang like a sweet bell. The water trembled. She loosed him abruptly to watch its patterns. He drew breath noiselessly. It seemed both a likely fate, and a shrewd guess: she must have seen bards and students from Luly wandering around the hinterlands for most of a century.

  “Can you see dreams in there?” he asked her.

  She ignored him. Copper rang against copper again; she hunkered over her visions, her skirt dragging in the water, her reflection piecemeal among the rocks. Wind blew a complex scent over him, of something flowering, something dead.

  “Your past is your future.” She added, after a few more moments, “Your future is your past.”

  He was silent, waiting patiently while she moved in vague circles around his life, seeing nothing, it seemed, any more clearly than he did. She murmured a few words he didn’t catch: her language, maybe, words as old as the stones on the hill. He wished she would produce his fate, glittering and improbable, out of the bowl, so that he could talk to her.

  She spoke again, still peering into the water. “I see the eagle and the snake, on your road. The cock and the goat. I see the raven in the fire.”

  He stirred slightly. And then sweat broke out over his entire body, as if the fire had come too close, had burned its way out of memory into light. Wind brushed over him; he trembled in a sudden chill. He brought his feet out of the water and sat straight. She was murmuring again, in her strange language. Or maybe, he thought, his body prickling again, the words were strange only to her.

  “City,” he understood. “Bridge. Moon. Mirror.” And finally, very clearly: “Griffin.” She struck the bowl again; the single note seemed to reverberate out of the water and send its slow waves flowing outward around them, as if they sat at the bottom of the bowl. Motionless, he felt each wave melt through him, his bones echoing the ring of copper.

  And then she was looking at him without seeing him. Again he had the eerie feeling that some creature whose name he did not know looked out of her eyes.

  “You will face the basilisk.”

  Her eyes cleared. He said, stunned, “What does that mean?”

  She tipped the bowl, spilled his future back into the stream. “What?”

  “Why did you say—”

  “I said nothing.” She put the hammer into the bowl, set it beside her. “I never speak.”

  She rose, pulling her shreds and tatters back out of the wind. He still could not move.

  “Then who speaks?”

  She smiled, her face wrinkling like a d
ried pool, a piece of the hard brown earth around them. “You do.” He stared at her wordlessly; she studied him as silently, her eyes her own now, and filling, he saw, with sadness. “Do something for me.”

  “I will,” he promised breathlessly.

  She turned a little unsteadily, pointed up the slope. “Over and down the other side. Among the trees. That’s where they are.”

  “Who?”

  “The dead.” She picked up the bowl, and moved away from him, tugged by hem and sleeve and tattered shawl into the wind. “I saw them in my bowl. They need you. You must play for them.”

  She trudged on bare feet across the stream. He rose quickly, calling after her, “Are they yours? Are they your dead?”

  Or, he thought incredulously, are they mine?

  She did not speak to him again; the path she chose led down the hill. He watched her for a long time, until she was as small on the hill as the stones at his feet. Then he put his boots back on, slung pack and picochet over his shoulder, and turned.

  He took the slope with long, easy strides, following the water to the top of the hill, where the stream burrowed suddenly underground, leaving him high and dry. All around him, green, brown, stone gray spilled into one another, blurred across distances into secret, shadowy hills. To the north he saw water again, vast as an inland sea, a glint of deep blue beneath heavy, lowering cloud, like a partially opened eye. No one had ever returned with the name of it.

  He saw the trees on the other side of the hill, halfway down, a flow of delicate green unbroken, it seemed, by village or field. Above the trees, threads of smoke frayed into wind. He smelled it; his throat tightened. A sudden drift of smoke stung his eyes. He closed them and saw the raven flying.

  He followed smoke down the hillside into the wood. The bitter pall thickened within the trees; beneath the trembling, chattering leaves, he heard the silence of the dead.

  He entered it.

  Six

  Justin Tabor, red-eyed from a night at the Griffin’s Egg, stood in a grimy alley between two battered marble mansions, looking across the street at Tormalyne Palace. The mansions had seen better days. Clothes fluttered, drying, on balconies where once banners had hung. Children wailed above his head, cats fought, men and women shouted at one another. The alley stank. The palace, behind an iron railing spiked with black lilies, held no life at all.

  Two griffins guarded the gates; one had lost a wing, the other its head. The gates sagged under the weight of massive chains wound between them, locking them shut. Skull-like, the palace regarded the world out of empty sockets, charred black where fire had billowed out from every window. Only a brilliant shard of glass still clung, here and there, to a rotting edge of frame, flashing unexpected color within the ruined face. A bottle with a few dead marigolds in it sailed out of a window overhead, smashed at Justin’s feet. Slivers of crockery and water sprayed his boots; a battle above him escalated furiously, voices locked together and clawing. Picochet and viol, he thought sardonically. The picochet had the last word. A door slammed; a burly man passed him a moment or two later, muttering, blind with anger. He ground the marigolds into stone without noticing them, or the young man watching him within the shadows of the alley.

  Justin’s eyes went back to the palace. Once every few weeks, very early in the morning, a ribbon or a scrap of cloth blew against the gate and clung there. Invariably the cloth was black. It wrapped itself unobtrusively around a lower hinge, hung there until noon, when a musician carrying a lute in its case over his shoulder stopped beside the gate to shake a pebble out of his shoe. The musician was Justin’s firebrand cousin Nicol, who had drummed the history of their House into Justin’s head since they were small. Nicol was named after the second son of Duke Raven Tormalyne. Nicol Beres knew everything there was to know about Nicol Tormalyne, who, together with his two small sisters, had suffocated in a marble bathroom during the fire in the palace. There had been no question of their identity. Another child had been found huddled against the blackened remains of the favorite dog of the duke’s heir, Griffin Tormalyne. The dog had been identified by the stones in its collar. The child was burned beyond any kind of recognition, though Raven Tormalyne, dragged out of the dungeons below Pellior Palace, was commanded to try. After seven days of imprisonment, the duke himself had been battered nearly beyond recognition. He had lost an eye and his right hand; he could barely walk. He could still cry and curse, which he did; his tears were considered identification enough. He was permitted one last glimpse of his wife, haggard and maddened with pain and grief, as she was slain in front of him. The executioners of Pellior House removed the duke’s remaining eye, and then his life.

  Duke Arioso Pellior had emerged from the bloody brawl between four Houses with the crown of Berylon in his fist. He named himself Prince of Berylon, promised death to any members of the other Houses found bearing arms within the city walls, and pardoned the scattered remains of the Tormalyne family for their relations. Two years later, in a magnanimous gesture, he invited the survivors to his birthday feast.

  Over three decades later Tormalyne Palace was still empty and the birthday feasts had turned into an autumn festival which the entire city celebrated, or pretended to. Justin, a scion of Tormalyne House whose own father barely escaped the Basilisk’s War, had his imagination inflamed from an early age by his cousin Nicol. Nicol inflamed well, even better, Justin thought, than he played the lute. He had become a magister at the music school, which Prince Arioso had appropriated, down to its last demisemiquaver, for the good of the city, though he at least allowed it to keep its three-hundred-year-old name. Nicol taught the lute and the harp, gentle instruments that disguised his true soul. His bitterest moment in life had come early, when he realized he had been named after the wrong son. He was a griffin, born to fight the basilisk, and toward that end he left black ribbons on the gates of Tormalyne Palace, summoning his followers.

  Justin watched his cousin make his customary stop at the gate, bend to loosen his shoe, let fall an imaginary pebble, then free whatever he had left on the gate and drop it into his shoe before he pulled it back on. He was never careless; he would no more fill the weedy palace yard with windblown scraps of black than he would have let a light show from within the charred maze of cellars and dungeons on the nights they gathered there. Griffin’s Claw, they called themselves, the scions of Tormalyne House whose parents had managed to elude the Basilisk’s eye. Their parents, stunned by the devastation of the House, were content simply to be alive and left unnoticed. In secret, their children dreamed the downfall of Pellior House. For years they did nothing but dream. Gradually, growing older and more astute, they began to buy arms.

  Nicol straightened, and Justin slipped out of the alley. They walked a block or two apart, before Justin crossed the street and gave his cousin a genial greeting. Nicol, an ascetic, red-haired hawk, seemed even leaner in scholar’s black. He answered Justin somberly. He rarely smiled, and had little patience with common social noises.

  “There was trouble on the Tormalyne Bridge last night while you were playing at that place—that Griffin’s Beak—”

  “Egg.”

  “A man died.”

  Justin’s brows rose. “How?”

  “His horse threw him off the bridge.”

  “That’s unfortunate for him, but hardly trouble.”

  But Nicol still frowned, walking rapidly even in his magister’s robe. He saw trouble everywhere, Justin knew; he was seeing it now, trying to make trouble out of a horse unnerved by the drumming echoes of water welling up beneath the bridge.

  “They were armed.”

  “Who were?” Justin asked, used to Nicol’s elliptical habits.

  “Three men, riding across the bridge. All of them trying to carry weapons openly into Berylon.”

  “Perhaps they were strangers to the city. They didn’t know.”

  “Or they didn’t care.”

  Justin was silent, puzzled. Nicol, striding vigorously on the scent of mot
ives, mysteries, possibilities, blind to the world, did not enlighten him. It was a wonder, Justin thought, the cobblestones he never saw under his nose didn’t send him flying.

  “Why should we?” he asked finally.

  “Care?” Nicol stopped abruptly, gazing at his cousin; someone behind him nearly fell into his lute. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t. I only wondered how far from Berylon you would have to come to try to ride armed through the Tormalyne Gate.” He paused, lowered his voice. “Gaudi has been trying to find them.” As abruptly, he began to walk again. Arms. Justin thought coldly, and caught up. Nicol scented them like some aberrant animal.

  “I don’t think it could have been personal.”

  “What?” Justin asked patiently.

  “I mean an angry husband, an act of passion, revenge, something like that. That would have begun within the city, or close enough to it that they would have hidden their weapons.”

  “Were they allowed in?”

  “They had to have the body brought up, identified…Of course their weapons were taken at the gate. They were questioned, but accused of nothing. Armed men trying to go unnoticed would have crossed another bridge.”

  “So either they were ignorant, or they were trying to be noticed.”

  “Or they didn’t care,” Nicol said, with his bloodhound persistence.

  Justin drew breath, held it. “Well,” he said finally, “that’s one bridge they’ll never cross again. Why wouldn’t they care about having the Tormalyne Gate slammed in their faces?”

  “If they were deliberately creating a diversion, sending a message that they are willing to bring arms for a price into Berylon.”

  Justin was silent again, refusing to rise to that bait. Nicol could find portents everywhere, even in someone careless enough to be tossed into a ravine. Nicol took his attention off the faceless stranger in his imagination and looked at his cousin suddenly, as if he had just noticed Justin. “You could find out about them,” he said. “You have nothing else to do.”