Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Please,” he breathed. “Just this one. Please.”

  He was, Giulia realized with astonishment, begging to play her picochet. Some drunken, homesick farmer, she thought at first, and then, still astonished: Why not? No one had ever asked before. She relinquished it and rose. He sat quickly, his head bowed against the long neck, the way her grandfather had played it. She moved to one side, leaned against the wall, listening. He seemed tentative at first; his hands were shaking badly; he did not drive the bow hard enough. Someone tossed an empty tankard at the squeals he made. And then he found the strength he needed, and struck fire from the picochet.

  She listened, her eyes on the floor, until a sudden disturbance blew through the door. Raising her head, she saw basilisks in the shadows. She watched, surprised. They had not come to drink. They pushed through the crowd, searching. Voices flared; a pitcher was broken. Through it, the cold north winds sang out of the picochet, the ghost of someone looking back on his life, singing beyond his death. Giulia dropped her eyes again, found the bottom of the picochet and the stranger’s boots. The picochet was patched there; so were his boots. She lifted her eyes slowly along the line of light running down the dark wood, polished by the hands that had held it. Her eyes stopped at his hands, lingered, then rose more quickly to his face.

  It was half-hidden behind the picochet. But it seemed oddly familiar, a face out of the past, though whose past she could not remember. Some composer carved in white marble, some painting, hanging in a practice hall, of that lean face, with its clean wolf’s jaw and broad, strongly molded bones. She could not see his eyes; the shadow of the picochet cut across them. His short, silver-gold hair looked as if he chopped at it haphazardly with a pruning knife.

  The tavern door slammed behind the last basilisk. The ballad came to an end. The stranger rested his face against the long neck of the picochet a moment, as her grandfather had done, as she herself did, as against a lover’s face.

  Then his eyes flicked through the tavern. He rose, still searching, and turned swiftly. He leaned the picochet carefully against the stool and brought Giulia her bow.

  “Thank you,” he said. She saw his eyes then, so dark they held no color, powerful in their directness. The guards, she realized, had come looking for him; he had hidden himself within his playing. He had stopped trembling, but his haunting face was harrowed, colorless.

  “Who are you?” she asked in wonder. He only gave her the memory of a smile and disappeared into smoke and shadows before she could ask another question.

  Two

  Giulia made her way backward down the marble corridors of the Tormalyne School of Music. Busts of composers, musicians, patrons of the art watched her out of white, pupilless eyes from their niches. Doors opened and closed between the busts, loosing delicate sighs of music, energetic outbursts, sudden collisions between instruments. Someone sang a scale; flute notes leaped up broken chords. A phrase was repeated over and over, pure and liquid, on a glass harmonica. “Magister Dulcet,” she kept hearing. “Just one moment. Giulia!”

  “I have to go,” she said desperately to Hexel Barr, who had sprung like a clockwork figure out of his workroom. He ignored that, calling her stubbornly until she turned again, still walking, students laden with books and instruments dancing out of her way.

  “I need your help,” he insisted. “Now, Giulia. For just one moment. I have one idea, one puny, weak, starveling idea for this opera, and if it is worthless, I can’t go on. Someone else will have to be found.”

  “Hexel, you always say this—every year—and then you—”

  “This year I mean it. I am a desert. A wasteland. Barren.”

  “And then you produce something wonderful—”

  “Because of you,” he said adamantly. “Because of you. My muse.”

  Behind her a young student snickered. “Not now,” she said tersely. “Find another muse until tonight. I must go.”

  “Giulia.” A viol player, passing, touched her arm. “Don’t forget, we are rehearsing this afternoon before supper.”

  “I won’t.” She gazed at the graceful, limpid-eyed woman, who was holding her viol in both arms like a lover. “Why,” Giulia pleaded, “can’t you be Hexel’s muse instead?”

  She only laughed. Giulia, moving, heard her name again, saw her youngest students through an open doorway, surrounded by copper pipes, nails, plant pots, upended buckets, vases, beer mugs.

  “Come and listen,” they begged. “Is this what you wanted?”

  “Try glass,” she suggested. “Something light. And you have no reeds. Remember: even grass sings.”

  She escaped finally into the street, to be confronted by a small, exquisite carriage with basilisks painted on the doors. She hesitated. A page swung open the door, bowing deeply.

  “Magister Dulcet?”

  She entered, speechless.

  The Master of Music for Pellior House met her in one of the appointment chambers within the palace. It was a small room, striped with white and crimson marble. Lily and rose lay underfoot, on the marble floors; they grew in the patterned marble hearth, up striped pillars, along the walls. Only the ceiling, painted gold, and the crimson velvet curtains and chairs, were not made of stone. It was as cold and quiet as a tomb.

  “I know your reputation and your work,” Veris Legere said. “And you know the needs of the house. Something elegant, traditional, elaborate but not lengthy, sumptuous but never gaudy, a touch of drama for the singers to display their skills, and of course a happy ending.” He paused a moment, expressionless; beneath his silver hair, his face seemed ageless and devoid of humor. But Giulia knew that his lack of expression could express a great deal. “One stipulation. The Lady Damiet will sing an appropriate role, as a birthday present for her father.”

  Her Pruneface. Giulia kept her face still. “I see.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I don’t know the Lady Damiet’s voice. The appropriate role would be—?”

  “The maiden, the princess, the virtuous young woman—in short, the heroine.”

  “I see.”

  “She has a vigorous but untrained voice. Her range is limited, but it will be adequate.”

  “And her ear?” Giulia asked cautiously.

  “She has two,” the Master of Music said with precision. “Beyond that I cannot speculate. You ask me why we have a sudden need for a music director for the festival.”

  “I didn’t. I do.” She paused, guessing. “I don’t.”

  “Berone Sidero was advised of Lady Damiet’s determination to sing. Within a day or two he decided to become afflicted with some elusive malady curable only by several months of peace and quiet in the provinces.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your health is good?”

  She hesitated; he lifted one silver brow. “Yes,” she said finally, and the brow descended. He smiled unexpectedly.

  “Good. The prince has mentioned your name once or twice. I thought that someone who plays the picochet in a tavern on Tanners Street and the prince’s music in a consort from the Tormalyne School might be capable of dealing with the unusual demands of this festival.”

  She felt her face warm with horror, thinking of her piecemeal costumes, the beer-drenched floor. “How did he—”

  “The prince’s interest in music is broad and not always formal. He pays attention to detail; he encourages me to do so. You mentioned the picochet to him. He grew curious. When he cannot see and hear for himself, he uses others’ eyes and ears. Sit down.” He opened the door, spoke to someone. She sank onto a hard oval of crimson velvet, seeing Justin suddenly, with her in the Griffin’s Egg, hearing his acrid, pithy comments about the Basilisk. No one could have understood him in that din, she decided. And if she were not in trouble for listening, he would not be for speaking…

  “Now that I have persuaded you,” Veris said, rejoining her, “let us begin to deal with practical matters. I have sent for chocolate, cakes, and the director’s notes for the last de
cade.”

  Two hours later Giulia left him, her arms full of notes, her head cluttered with names and dates, one of which demanded that instead of playing with Justin in the Griffin’s Egg the following week, she teach Lady Damiet to sing.

  “And of course,” Veris had said, “we must have the music. The drama itself. As soon as possible. How is Hexel faring? As usual?”

  “Hexel has no ideas, he is uninspired, he tears his hair, he is surrounded by crumpled paper, his music is trifling, he can’t think of a plot, and he is a barren wasteland.”

  “As usual.”

  She met Justin in the tavern across the street from the school, where he waited, hunched over ale, to hear how she fared in Pellior Palace. She told him, eating hastily before her afternoon classes. He listened silently, picking at a splinter in the table, his brows twitching together now and then.

  He said only, to the splinter, “Then I won’t see very much of you for a while.”

  She put her hand on his wrist, feeling heartbeat and bone, holding him as if for balance between two worlds. “Only for a while. I’ll come to you when I can.” He raised his eyes finally; she read the question in them. Her hand tightened. “Yes. I need you. I need to know you will be there. Or will you be too angry with me?”

  “No,” he breathed, turning their hands to find the milky skin beneath her wrist, that never held the southern light. He kissed a vein. As he raised his head she still saw silent questions in his eyes; these she could not answer yet. She linked their fingers, raised his hand to her mouth, wondering eerily who around them watched the magister and the tavern musician out of the Basilisk’s eyes.

  Returning to the school, she taught lessons on the harpsichord and the lavandre, then listened to her young students beat on their plant pots and copper pipes with stones, shoe heels, and strands of glass beads. She rehearsed a duet for a performance at Marcasia Palace. She ate supper quickly, then hid herself in a practice room with the lavandre and her picochet, which she played softly, caressing the notes out of it, thinking of Justin. Her thoughts wandered, after a time, to the stranger who had hidden from the Basilisk’s guard within its music. He knew its voices, those that sang, those that wailed, those that whispered and threatened and cajoled. But he had finished her ballad for her and vanished, without explaining, into the night. Perhaps he will return, she thought, and then: But I will not be there.

  “Giulia!” Hexel flung open the door of the tiny practice room. Her bow jumped; the picochet screeched. He winced. “How can you bear to share the world with that demented instrument?”

  “Hexel,” she exclaimed, returning from the tavern to the school. “I am to direct music for the autumn festival. Go away and finish your opera and bring it to me immediately—we have no time to waste.”

  Pleased, he caught her hand and kissed it, nearly blinding himself with her bow. “That’s wonderful. You will appreciate my work in ways that Berone Sidero never did. He refused to let me choose singers for my own songs. His taste was never quite disastrous, but—” Attuned as he was to every tremolo of mood around him, he stopped. His hand tightened on hers; he searched her eyes. “But why you? Where is Berone Sidero? He fusses over this festival like a goose with a string of goslings. He is jealous of every flea. Did he drop dead or something?”

  “He became ill,” Giulia said temperately. “Hexel. About the singers—”

  “Illness was not in his schedule a week ago. He was hounding me for music.” He loosed her to fling up his hands. “How can I write music? I have no—but listen to this.” He took the picochet impulsively, found a note, and played a simple, haunting melody. The picochet whined fretfully in his hands; Giulia, lifting the lavandre, repeated it in dulcet tones and smiled.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “It’s a song to an absent lover.” He put the picochet down and tried to pace around it. “Or perhaps a lost love, one mysteriously vanished. I can’t decide. How can I? I have done everything already; there is nothing left to hold my interest. Everything bores me. Lovers, lovers parting, lovers reconciled. That is the only plot in the world and I have exhausted it.”

  “But it becomes new with every pair of lovers who have never loved like this before—”

  “And never will again. I know. The Prince of Berylon wants a bauble for his birthday. An airy pastry stuffed with pastel cream. I am starving on all this sweetness. This year, I am going to kill someone.”

  “Not on his birthday!”

  “Why not? He did.”

  She rapped his shoulder sharply with her bow. “He did not. Which is the reason for the autumn festival.”

  “That he stopped killing people.”

  “That Berylon was at peace again. Which is saying the same thing,” she added as he opened his mouth. “I know. But in language he would wish to hear. And which will not get the music school closed. You may rant at me about the Prince of Berylon, but you will write a confection for him.”

  He sighed, leaning over her, his hands on the arms of her chair, his head bowed. “Then help me.”

  She thought, silent. He straightened, picked up her lavandre, and blew softly, playing his love melody. She set the bow to the picochet, whispered a duet.

  She saw the stranger’s face again, an odd echo of the past, as if a dusty painting had come to life. Hexel, watching, lowered the lavandre. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing. I mean something out of the ordinary. But not extraordinary. Just—”

  “What?”

  “Just a man who came into the Griffin’s Egg and played my picochet and left. That’s all.”

  He leaned back against the door, still watching her beneath half-lowered lids. “That’s not all.”

  “He played like my grandfather.”

  “Did he look like your grandfather?”

  “No.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “No one I have ever met, but somehow familiar…He barely spoke. He interrupted my ballad, finished it for me, and was gone. That’s all. Yet I’ve never heard anyone play like that except my grandfather.”

  “And you.”

  “And me.”

  Hexel made a soft sound; his eyes grew opaque. “The stranger who is not a stranger, returning…”

  “Returning from where? He looked as if he had been born in the provinces and had just walked down from them. He played like it.”

  “Perhaps,” he said softly. “But you like him mysterious.”

  “Well, so he seemed…” She paused, and decided not to invite the Basilisk’s guards into Hexel’s imagination. “He wouldn’t tell me his name. His eyes were—”

  “His eyes?”

  “He looked—” She stopped, inarticulate again, and met Hexel’s curious gaze. “His eyes didn’t look,” she said finally, “as if he had spent his days watching corn grow. But he probably did.”

  “I,” Hexel said, “prefer him mysterious.” She lifted a brow; he did not see. He had focused on the shining coils of the lavandre. “I see him returning from somewhere, some ordeal…Returning perhaps to Berylon, where he was born. And where once he loved.”

  She raised the bow, pressed it meditively to her lips. “And he wonders now—”

  “If she still loves him. If she is still free. If she will recognize him.”

  “Why wouldn’t she recognize him? He can’t be that old.”

  “We must have some dramatic tension.”

  “She pretends not to recognize him,” Giulia suggested, inspired. “She dares not.”

  “She’s married.”

  “No,” she said hastily, remembering Damiet. “She must be virginal for the prince’s opera. You may not raise moral issues.”

  “She’s engaged, then.” He sat straight suddenly. “No. I know. She doesn’t know him. They have never met. Upon meeting, by chance, love flares between them, their hearts are lost to one another. But they must love in secret because their families are bitter enemies. Which is why he was forced to leave the city.�
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  She stirred, hearing overtones of history in his plot. “Hexel, you are treading too closely to truth. Love must have been thwarted like that during the Basilisk’s War, and in the lives and memory of some who will be watching this. They’ll find only bitterness in your happy ending.”

  “And, returning, he is still in danger…”

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Yes, I am. How can you say that?” He caught her shoulders, kissed her exuberantly. “I hang on your every word. You are my muse.”

  Three

  Caladrius found lodgings, a tiny room above a tavern across from the one place he knew that held no sorrow. Some inner compass had led him there, through vast currents of strangers moving ceaselessly between stone and light that could, he learned, be merciless. Its fierce warmth had hatched basilisks in that city, griffins; the phoenix of Marcasia House shriveled in it like paper and was reborn; the chimera of Iridia House could be glimpsed in the hot, shrunken shadows and the shimmering glare of noon. In the cool pale marble of the music school he finally saw beyond the fiery light, to the child who had walked fearlessly through the city and knew his name.

  From his room, he could look down at the griffins still intact on their egg-shaped shields on either side of the front doors. The Basilisk had destroyed the House, but had let the stones survive. A gesture for history, Caladrius guessed. A token to the dead. Watching the students, the black-robed magisters coming and going, their arms cradling instruments, music, books, he remembered his teacher’s face, her luminous, powerful eyes. She had played an instrument for him that he had not heard again until he walked into a village in the hinterlands.

  Perhaps, he mused, she had other strange instruments. She was of Iridia House; she would have no love for the Prince of Berylon. He could ask at the music school; they would tell him where to find her. If she had survived.