Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I play nearly every night,” Justin protested. “I dragged myself out of bed early for you—”

  “I don’t have time to stop to eat.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “You’d be far more use to us if your life was less erratic. You’re throwing your talents away on drones up to their ears in ale and so sotted they probably think you’re twins.”

  “Or that I’m playing a double bass.”

  “You should work. Or study, and teach.”

  “I do work!”

  “I mean a real—”

  “Nicol, if this is leading toward an argument about what is real music, I’ll be forced to remind you who comes in her magister’s black to play with us every week. She thinks it’s real music.”

  “She plays the picochet,” Nicol objected absently; the frown inched down between his eyes again. “That mocks her other talents.”

  “You play together. Do you think her talents are questionable?”

  “They’re formidable,” Nicol conceded. “It’s her taste that’s in dubious—taste.”

  Justin snorted. “She risks her formidable reputation to play with us, for no other reason than that nobody at the school can stand the picochet.”

  “It only has one string. It refuses to mingle in harmonious fashion with anything. Besides, there is no proper music for it.”

  “So she is forced to take down her hair and bare her shoulders and knees to drunken tanners.”

  Nicol blinked. “Really?”

  “Just to play an instrument that caught her heart.”

  “Her heart. Nobody plays the picochet by choice. Except in the barbaric provinces. Maybe she spies for Pellior House. Beware of her. Give her nothing. What do you talk about with her?”

  Justin evaded the question. “Nicol, do you think I would babble in a tavern about—”

  “Lower your voice. You get drunk there. How do you know what you say?”

  “She comes to play the picochet,” Justin said tightly. “We talk about ballads. Nicol—”

  “Don’t trust her,” Nicol said peremptorily. “Never trust anyone not of the House. That reminds me, though, of something you might do with your life. We could use someone coming and going in Pellior Palace. For legitimate reasons.” He ignored Justin’s sidelong stare. “You could work there.” His hand, closing on Justin’s shoulder, checked an exclamation. “They want—”

  “No.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “No.” He unclenched his jaw after a moment. “Be satisfied with my life, Nicol. I’ll change it for myself, but not for you.”

  “Listen,” Nicol said.

  “I’m not working for—”

  “It’s the music library from Tormalyne Palace.” He paused; his grip suddenly became uncomfortable. “They stole it.”

  “I thought it had burned,” Justin said blankly.

  “So did the school. Three hundred years’ worth of manuscripts and scrolls so valuable that they were not even kept in the music school. Veris Legere sent word to the school that he needed a librarian to sort and catalog them. Just that. No excuses, no explanation—they burned children, but not before they rescued the music library—”

  “Yes,” Justin breathed, his eyes flicking down the walk. “Nicol. Why did they wait thirty-seven years—”

  “Did he bother to explain? Does he think there is anyone left to care? Someone opened a closet and there it was, a treasure in manuscripts, smelling of smoke, a trifle bloodied, and now he wants a librarian.” He shook his head a little; his hand opened, dropped. “I’d do it, but I don’t trust my temper,” he admitted with rare candor. “But you—”

  “Me,” Justin said thinly. “I’m just the one to stand around in Pellior Palace trying to read three-hundred-year-old signatures on music stolen from Tormalyne House. Thank you. I would rather gut fish.”

  “It would be temporary,” Nicol said, with his infuriating obtuseness, and for a moment Justin felt the family temper shimmer behind his eyes. Then he laughed, which was easier than fighting Nicol, and which Nicol found equally baffling.

  “No. You’ll have to use what talents I have. I can keep an ear open in the taverns for gossip about the riders on the Tormalyne Bridge. But sorting musty manuscripts in some marble room in Pellior Palace—I might as well be dead and buried. I’d get drunk from boredom, pass out among the scrolls, and Veris Legere would drop me out the nearest window like a bawdy song.”

  “Well,” Nicol said, unconvinced. “Think about it. We can speak later.” They were, Justin found to his surprise, nearly at the steps of the music school. “Everything has its dangerous edge. Even you.”

  Justin watched him. Among the students he moved gently, gracefully, giving out spare, melancholy smiles to those who greeted him. People trailed after him up the steps; even here he had his following, mostly pale, limpid-eyed, mouths daintily pursed as if they carried quails’ eggs on their tongues. Justin turned finally, wrestling with the familiar knot of exasperation and affection that Nicol invariably left in him, and crossed the street to the tavern there to find breakfast.

  Seven

  Rook stood in fire.

  He burned in it; he watched it burn; it had already burned the charred, blackened heart of the wood around him. The dead, twisted and melted by flame, were unrecognizable.

  Trapped in memory, he could not move. He was what the fire had left behind it: the ashes in the hearth. He felt sound growing in him, but he could not make a sound, not in the wood, not in the hearth, not with the Basilisk with his golden face and his deadly eyes saying again and again: Is this your son? His father had only one eye to weep sorrow for the faceless child on the floor with its arm around the dog. The other eye wept blood. The child hidden in the vast marble hearth, covered in ash, breathing ash, stared at the mangled ember of the child on the floor, clutching the jeweled collar of the dog in its brittle fingers. Yes, said his father’s tears. Yes, said the dog. Yes, said the dead. I am your son.

  The dead child watched.

  The palace, the wood, had finished screaming; there was only this to finish, that. His sisters had stopped, and his brother. His mother had screamed at the Basilisk; she screamed at the dead child, gave him his name. Then she stopped, and there was only that to finish, because the child was already dead. His father had no more words; he had nothing left to see. The Basilisk finished finally, left the dead in their silence.

  He still could not move. He felt a breeze like silk, like the hands of the dead, on his face, on his wrists. He felt his fists clenched, his body shaking in the sunlit wood, as if he stood in all the fury of winter. He could not move, he could not make a sound. The child still hid in the hearth, breathing ash, swallowing it, the bitter taste of being dead. He stared at the child on the floor, himself, and knew he was the child’s dream; he was only a dream of being alive. The dead had taken his name.

  They had understood, those who had found the dead on the floor. When he came out, covered in ash, unable to speak, they knew that he was the child on the floor. He was ash; he was no one; he had no name. They had given him another. He stared at the eyeless raven on the floor and could not weep, because he was dead. The white-haired man made a circle out of lamp oil around all the dead, himself and his dog, his mother and father. The other men, guards wearing dark cloaks over the torn and filthy griffins on their tunics, led him out of the room. He turned at the threshold and looked back. The white-haired man, his father’s uncle, set a torch to the circle.

  Fire swarmed over the dead. His father moved, turned blindly to look at him. Something rose from him—a dark flame, a word, his name—flew upward out of the fire. Then flames hid him, hid them all, hid everything, the house, the city, the world. He turned away from the fire, walked a step or two before he stumbled.

  Someone picked him up. He could not see, he could not hear. He was dead. They took him out of the world to the kingdom of the dead.

  The raven in the fire.

  Raven To
rmalyne.

  He heard himself make a sound, a rook’s harsh cry. Blinking, he saw the dead among the trees, faceless and silent, as if they had appeared out of his dream. But they were not his dead: a beaded leather shoe told him that, a cooking pot, a piece of striped cloth, an odd painted drum. He wept then, still shaking, unable to move. Tears broke out of him like rain; he wept blood, he wept ash. Ravens circled him among the trees, cried his cries, dropped feathers like black tears. The dead waited, but he had nothing to play for them: the picochet meant life.

  The drum, as silent as the dead, played itself in his head.

  It stood oddly in the midst of the dead, for no reason, dropped like an egg on the floor of the wood. It was made of glazed pottery and painted with eyes. The eyes spoke, as he stared at it. The dead were wordless; their eyes spoke. The ravens spoke.

  He moved then. There was nothing to play it with, so he played it with bone, bringing a charred thighbone high up over his head and then down, and down again, and again down until the drum broke like an egg and the dead flew out of it like wind, poured among the shivering trees, and passed away, followed by a black wind of ravens. He watched them, his eyes as black, his breath still full of ravens’ cries, with ash from the fire, from the hearth.

  He dropped the bone after a while, and sat with the husks of the dead.

  Hours later, in the night, he remembered the picochet and played it in memory of their lives.

  Near dawn, he tasted his name like ash in his throat and swallowed it. I am alive, he realized, amazed. All this time I have been dead.

  He fell asleep finally among the dead.

  In his dreams, he went north.

  He knew the tale his dreams told then: he was both the teller and the bard in the tale. His heart eaten by fires that would not die, he had left Luly and walked through the hinterlands until he found the place at the top of the world where winter was born. There, he thought, would be the cold fires to spawn the instrument to play the ceaseless raging in his heart. In the tale, the bard carried a twisted knot of love and betrayal in his throat; he could not swallow it; he could not sing. In the dream, there was no love, only hatred, and the torn, empty eyes of death. He could make that cold sing for him; he could freeze his own bones and play fire out of ice. He moved into the barren, deadly land without feeling the killing wind: his own fires kept him alive.

  Out of mist and burning cold came the monstrous beast that the powers of his rage had summoned. It was white as winter, red as blood, black as night. Its eyes and breath were fire. It had wings and talons like the raven, and spurs as sharp as knives along the bone from neck to tail. Even dead, it could kill: its skin was venomous; its teeth and scales were sharp as swords. The fire in the marrow of its bones never died.

  The bard said: Give me a bone to play.

  It said: I will give you one. Your life is mine.

  He said: Take my life.

  It turned its flat head and sinewy neck, bared its teeth, and snapped off a small bone in one wing. The bone dripped; snow hissed at its blood.

  It said: Your heart will take my shape when you play. You will summon me out of your bones. I will do whatever your heart asks. And then you are mine. And then you will live where I live. Your bones will be ice; your blood will be fire. Every song you play will become the song you play out of me.

  The bard said: There is no other song.

  He woke. Night lay thick and dark as feathers over his eyes; the wood around him was soundless. He felt something in his hand: a twig, or a small bone. He closed his eyes, slept again. In his dreams, the lion rose from the ashes, the eagle flew out of the fire. The blind raven spoke his name.

  He could not find his way out of the hinterlands. East turned into south or north; the moon and sun had changed direction; he had misplaced an ocean. The hills were no longer empty. He kept meeting people living in small villages, who pointed him in one direction or another, and then distracted him. They offered him food, asked him to sing a story, and gave him odd things to play. He told them the tale of the bard in his dream; they knew the tale, and the fire-bone pipe. There was one in the next village, they heard, and told him how to find it. In the next village, he found the same vague rumors of the pipe: in the next valley, there was one, or perhaps beside the lake. “I must get home,” he told them urgently; they pointed him east and he got lost. They all seemed gentle, kindly people; he could find no reason for the dead. He asked them, but they listened as if he told some long-forgotten story, or a dream. He had traveled into the land of the dead and played for them: that, they somehow knew. Now he could play anything. The trees listened to his picochet and opened new leaves. Birds answered bone pipes he made, and he understood their language. He played a whistle made of a raven’s feather and asked the ravens to find his way back to the sea. They led him here and there, to listen to a flute that only women could play, to gourds that hissed and rattled the language of snakes. Home, he told the ravens. But they could not follow his heart’s path, he knew. Luly was no longer home.

  Home was south, under a burning sky, in a city of stone ringed by water. Home was a place where his name could not be spoken. Home was a reflection in the Basilisk’s eye, into which he must move without being seen. Beneath the summer sun of the hinterlands, he felt his heart take the griffin’s shape, cry the eagle’s challenge. But he must return to Luly for Hollis; he could not vanish out of his own son’s life. And Griffin, with his dangerous secrets and deadly name, filled him with sharp apprehension. Luly was not far enough from the Basilisk to speak that name. Death itself was not far enough…His fierce desire to find Luly grew more compelling by the day. He walked the sun’s path from morning to night, and still daylight left him in an endless wood, or beside a nameless river, among people who gave him shelter, and taught him tales so old he scarcely recognized the language. In the morning, they pointed toward the sea and told him he would smell it by day’s end. At day’s end, he would smell the smoke of another village, and hear, not the boom of the waves and the echo of the whale’s song, but another instrument he did not recognize, another song.

  Finally, when it seemed he had played every instrument made since the beginning of the world, and had begun to learn tales from the birds, he walked out of a wood one afternoon, up a hill, and found himself at the top of the rocky slope where he had found his future.

  He stared at it bewilderedly, then turned to look back at the trees, wondering if all the woods had been hidden within that wood, if all his days had been the same day. He found the shallow stream spilling out from beneath the stones, and followed it down the hill. Midway, he saw, beneath a stunted tree, the glint of copper, and a streak of white, windblown hair.

  He came to her without surprise, looked at her silently, his face hollowed and gaunt now, with the memories and the sorrow that burned within, eating at him.

  She smiled, showing her three teeth. The way the world smiles, he thought wearily. Showing teeth.

  He said, “Can you tell me the way back to the sea?”

  “You’ll find it,” she answered, slanting her bowl to catch the water.

  “I’ve been lost for weeks. I can’t find my way out.”

  “You found the dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “You played for them. I heard.”

  “Yes,” he said again, his face tightening. She heard everything, he guessed. Every spoken word, every word left unspoken.

  “I have a message for you,” she said. “Bard.” She lifted the bowl out of the water, and he felt his breath catch.

  “Is it my son?” he asked, moving closer to her. “Did he come here?”

  She only answered, “You’ll find your way now.”

  She struck the bowl with her copper hammer. The note melted into him, sweet and pure, not dying but growing in force until he felt it in the stones underfoot, until the twisted tree shook with it.

  The water in the bowl burst into flame.

  He stared at it. And then terror raked a claw
across his heart, before he could find a word for what he feared. He shouted, “Hollis!”

  Turning blindly, he smelled the wind from the sea.

  He walked out of the forest accompanied by the croaking of ravens, telling him of fire, of death. In the long summer dusk, the school on the rock seemed to have turned itself back into rock. He could see no light in the windows, no smoke from the kitchens, no movement anywhere. On the shore, boats lay scattered like shells; footprints in the sand fled north, south, into the shadows of the forest. He heaved a boat over, found oars, pulled it grimly into the waves. Tide flowed with him to Luly. As he neared it he saw the thick windows shattered, the stone beneath them streaked black with fire.

  There were no boats at the dock. They had escaped. Or they had been trapped. He refused to let himself think. He tied his boat, his hands trembling, and cursed the hundred stone steps that he could not outrun. He smelled the dead before he saw them.

  They had been asleep, he found; the fire had caught them at night. He moved through the charred rooms noiselessly, as if he, too, were dead. Fire had left the school hollow as an old bone, had transformed blood and song into ash. He did not let himself feel, or name, or weep for any of them, until he found Griffin Tormalyne’s blackened, broken harp beneath the open window of his room. Looking out, he saw the bright-haired, tide-washed body on the rocks.

  He slid to the floor, sat with his back to the wall, his eyes as black as the acrid stones behind him, and as tearless. He shaped a pipe in his heart made of bone and fire, and played it for the dead. For the boy who had taken his name, he played the stringless harp on the floor beside him. For Hollis, he played nothing: the thought of him dead might make it true.

  As the moon rose in the empty window above his head, he heard a step in the hall. Frail wings of firelight brushed through the dark. He lifted his head, feeling the movement of his bones heavy, unwieldy, as if he were slowly turning into stone. He heard more steps, quiet, tentative. The fire burned more brightly along the stones, limned the charred doorway. He pushed himself up, shaken back to life.