Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I must have some drama!”

  “I’ll let you figure out the rehearsal schedule. But we must know where this plot is going, so that I can tell the scene painters.”

  Someone tapped on the door. Hexel, pacing, called peremptorily, “Come.” The visiting bard stepped hesitantly into his path and was seized. “Just what we need—the poet and storyteller. Sit. Listen.”

  “I was looking for Magister Dulcet. I don’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Hexel, let him speak,” Giulia protested. “I’m your muse; you can be rude to me. How can I help you, Master Hollis?”

  He glanced warily at Hexel. “I wanted to ask you—Perhaps later—”

  “No—”

  Hexel sat down on the desk beside Giulia. “Please,” he said with unexpected mildness. “We need help. Perhaps you will inspire the muse herself. Living among the arias of seals, trumpeting storms, choruses of barnacles—”

  “We are trying to work out the opera plot,” Giulia explained succinctly. “Are you familiar—”

  “With opera? No. But with plots…” He paused. Hexel, intrigued, perhaps, by the odd, guarded expression in the bard’s eyes, became suddenly patient. “The librarian,” Hollis said finally. “Master Caladrius. I wondered where I could find him. He is a northerner. Isn’t he? I think we may have met before.”

  “Yes,” Giulia exclaimed, enlightened. “He studied on Luly. But years ago, he said.”

  “Oh.”

  “But maybe you’ve met him since?”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  She thought. “He never said…I can ask him easily enough. I see him often, in the music room at Pellior Palace.”

  The bard opened his mouth, closed it. He produced words finally. “Pellior Palace.”

  “He is cataloguing the music of Tormalyne House.”

  “In Pellior Palace.”

  “It must sound strange,” Giulia said, “if you knew him as a farmer.”

  “A farm—” He bit off the echo, leaned back in his chair, his brows drawn. Giulia, waiting, found her eyes lingering on his long raven hair, that looked wind-swept even within the tranquil walls of the school. His face, abandoning its smile, became oddly grave. She felt Hexel’s eyes on her and shifted.

  “He plays the picochet very well. Does that sound like the man you know? He played mine when we first met, in a tavern.”

  “It sounds—” He nodded, his thoughts returning to them. “Yes. It does sound like him. I believe I met him on Luly.” He spoke carefully, as if the meanings of words he knew were apt to change unexpectedly within the city. “I think my mother knew him. She was there, too. On Luly.”

  Hexel, smelling drama, asked abruptly, “Is he your father?”

  “Hexel!”

  “This plot is far more intriguing than the one you are giving me, Giulia. We could set the opera on that rock, among the bards. Master Hollis could help us with the music—it can’t be that different. The young bard returns there, searching for his father. No. A stranger comes to the rock, spends one night with a woman there—”

  “Damiet?” Giulia interrupted drily. The bard had not taken offense. His face had flushed, but he was smiling again.

  “I do know my own father, Magister Barr.”

  “Well, it was a thought…I should leave such business to my muse. But both you and my muse seem to find some mystery in this man. This farmer who is a librarian who studied to be a bard. I don’t suppose we can get all that into one act.”

  “No,” Giulia said flatly. The memory of the picochet player’s eyes haunted her a moment, stripped of all expression and unfathomably dark. Her eyes flicked to Hollis, questioning now, and found strength in his face, a kindliness. She could trust him, she decided, with the enigmatic northerner. “When I see him next in Pellior Palace,” she said, “I’ll ask him where he lives.”

  The tension left the bard’s face. “Thank you. He wouldn’t be staying there?”

  “No. We both come and go. I’m giving the prince’s daughter voice lessons so that she can sing in the autumn festival.”

  Hollis, about to rise, hesitated. “I don’t quite understand the autumn festival. At Luly, we are taught poetry rather than history. I have some idea that it celebrates a victory?”

  Hexel snorted. “If you call the slaughter of Tormalyne House a victory.”

  Hollis’s hands closed again on his chair arms; beyond that he did not move. “Slaughter?”

  “Berylon had four centuries of comparative peace under the rule of Tormalyne House,” Hexel explained. “By peace, I mean that none of the uprisings of the other Houses were permitted to last long. Then the Basilisk of Pellior House opened his eyes, and members of Tormalyne House began to die in mysterious ways. Raven Berylon suspected Arioso Pellior, and fought back. But by the time there was peace again in Berylon, no one bearing the name Tormalyne was left alive.”

  “No one.”

  “Raven Tormalyne, his wife and children had been slain like animals in Tormalyne Palace. A few scattered scions lived to remember, but no one carries the name.”

  “I see.” His voice was oddly stiff. So was his face, Giulia saw; its expression, brittle as glass, might have broken at a touch. He stared at something in the air between them. “This—Arioso Pellior. It’s his birthday feast?”

  “And his victory feast. He has ruled for thirty-seven years, since he had Raven Berylon put to death with his wife in Tormalyne Palace. Their children had already burned.”

  “Hexel,” Giulia breathed. The bard loosened his grip on the chair, drawing breath.

  “And you write music for him.”

  Even Hexel was silent a moment. “We keep the peace,” he said simply. “He is an aging basilisk, but still astute and very dangerous. He keeps Berylon’s mind out of its memories by providing distraction in the form of a feast, processions, music, a sweet and silly drama—”

  “What would happen if you made a drama out of what happened in Tormalyne Palace?”

  “It would not have a happy ending,” Giulia said soberly. “He is as capable of destroying the Tormalyne School as he was of destroying the House.”

  “I see.” He shifted, looking at her without seeing. “At Luly, such violence becomes transformed into poetry. Time and the traditional order of words makes it unreal. Past. Until the end. When words made themselves real again.” He stopped abruptly.

  “It must be very peaceful,” Giulia said gently, puzzled.

  “Yes. It is. Very quiet.” He got to his feet slowly, with an effort. Giulia, distressed by the vague, stunned expression in his eyes, rose with him. She rounded Hexel’s writing table, stopped Hollis with a touch as he drifted toward the door.

  “Please stay,” she said abruptly. “Hexel has been telling you nightmares. But that’s all they are now. Ancient history. I’m sorry we disturbed you.”

  “I asked,” he said. His eyes cleared a little, as if he finally saw her again. “I don’t understand opera at all,” he added. “I would stay to learn more. But I promised I would find some old instruments that were brought down from the north. There is a storage room, someone said.”

  “I’ll take you there,” Giulia said promptly, and ignored Hexel’s exasperated protest. “I need to get a picochet for Damiet. Hexel, I won’t be a moment.”

  The bard was silent as she led him down the corridors, still noisy with the fitful evening tides of students and magisters. She said slowly, tossing pebbles into his silence, to see what might surface, “While Master Caladrius played my picochet that night, the basilisk’s guards crowded into the tavern, looking for someone. He did not stop playing until they left. He kept his face hidden behind the picochet. I didn’t see it clearly until he stopped. His playing seemed very powerful and very—sad. He reminded me of someone…”

  She saw his mouth tighten. But he did not speak until they stood at the storage room door. He said only, to the door, “I tried to explain the hinterlands to th
e students. I have never been there. I thought some of the instruments might explain it more clearly than I can.”

  She reached for a lamp in the hall and opened the door. Light spilled across tables heaped with odd, dusty shapes. Hollis stepped into the room, his eyes wandering from shape to shape. Giulia watched him move among them, touching a carving, plucking a string, stroking a skin pulled taut across a split, painted gourd. He looked at her incredulously.

  “Most of these I’ve never seen. Some I recognize only from tales…” He continued roaming, playing them in his head, she guessed, as she watched curiously. He made a sudden sound, picked up a pipe. “This one,” he breathed, inarticulate with wonder. “Look at this.”

  She came to his side. The pipe was small, dark, the ovals of its finger holes painted a dull red. “What is it?” she asked. It did not seem extraordinary.

  “I’ve seen it…In a tale…”

  “Play it.”

  He shook his head slowly, still gazing at it. “Not here,” he said inexplicably. “May I stay a while?”

  She set the lamp on a table; shadow shifted across the pipe in his hand. The painted holes in it seemed to glow. She blinked; his hand closed around it.

  “Of course,” she said. “Shut the door when you leave. And be prepared for complaints.”

  “Thank you,” he said again, smiling. The smile did not quite reach his eyes. She lifted a picochet in its dusty case, oddly reluctant to leave him there, among the silent music of the past. But he gave her no reason to stay.

  Returning to the study, she found Hexel seated at his desk, writing furiously. He threw the pen down as she entered, leaving grace-notes of ink between his lines. “I have it! Listen to this, Giulia. A stranger comes to Berylon, the prince’s daughter falls in love with him, not knowing that his family and hers are bitter enemies, and that he has sworn to kill her father.”

  “Hexel—” Giulia said doubtfully. He held up a hand.

  “Hush. Listen. Let me tell you what happens next…”

  Nine

  In the music room in Pellior Palace, Caladrius played the picochet to Lady Damiet. He did not hear what he played; neither did she. Her eyes, pale and moist, clung to his face with an expression of rapture unlikely in anyone actually listening. She spoke now and then. Her words wove themselves somehow into the fitful, eerie cadences of his music, so that he felt them, rather than heard them, and answered her absently without words. Behind him, Veris Legere sorted music discreetly in the cupboards; Magister Dulcet sat quietly on the harpsichord stool, both, by their presence, warding away any hint of impropriety. Caladrius finished an ancient ballad about a cornstalk turning into a woman in the fullness of summer, and withering into a dying stalk in autumn, to the amazement and consternation of the farmer who had found her in the field. It was not, he suspected, a song that had ever been heard by the rosy, smiling faces above them on the ceiling. He wondered, lifting his bow, if they were still smiling.

  “Now. You try it, my lady. Your fingers there. And there.”

  “Master Caladrius, it will not fit among my skirts. Perhaps you could adjust them for me.”

  “Perhaps you could rest it against your knees. For now. It is a peasant’s instrument. It is more used to flax and wool than showers of lace.”

  “Do you like my dress, Master Caladrius? I chose it to match the color of the picochet. Gold-brown. Do you think it matches well?”

  “Very well.”

  “You have not looked,” she said reproachfully. “Your eyes are on my fingers.”

  “Take the bow. Curve your fingers, lift them away from it. The power is in the wrist, in the shoulders. Draw the bow across the string slowly. Feel the tension in the string. Press harder. Harder.”

  “Master Caladrius—”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “I am listening. Next time I will wear silk instead of lace. I have a pale gold which matches the color of my hair.” She drew the bow with a flourish, produced a singing wail that brought his attention momentarily back to the room, to her. It reminded him, he realized, of her voice: energetic, untuned, and oblivious of art. “Master Caladrius.” She played another with vigor. “Or I might wear the thinnest of linens…Which would you suggest?”

  His thoughts drifted again; he only answered, “Good. Spread your fingers like this on the strings. Now lift them one at a time as you bow. Good.”

  “I shall wear the linen, then. The picochet will rest better among my skirts.”

  “Again…Good.”

  She progressed, in peculiar fashion, somehow transforming clothes into music, along with whatever else was on her mind. That something distracted her, he was made vaguely aware by her fixed gaze, by her long, slow sighs when his hand rested near hers on the bow or the string. His own thoughts were acrid with past, disturbed by the glimpse of Hollis in this basilisk’s nest; he could not spare a guess at hers. She was Arioso Pellior’s daughter, milky and bland as unlit tallow; she was, like the paintings and marble pillars, a background detail in the house of the Basilisk. Only her bowing, the unexpected, enthusiastic shrieks she got out of the peasant’s instrument, made her incongruous, and therefore real.

  He was aware, after a time, that the astonishing sounds echoing off the cold white marble had conjured, like a spell, an improbable vision. Luna Pellior appeared out of nowhere, like sunlight falling into a windowless room. For a moment he simply looked at her smiling, secret eyes, the various warm and charming golds of hair and brows and skin. And then, belatedly, he remembered whose gaze held his.

  He rose quickly, interrupting Damiet in mid-screech. He bowed his head, startled at the ease with which she rendered him thoughtless, powerless.

  She said, “Master Caladrius. What strange instrument are you teaching my sister? And what a rare assortment of noises.”

  “It is a picochet,” Damiet answered complacently. “They play it in the north. The color of my dress matches it exactly, have you noticed, Luna?”

  “Indeed it does. How clever of you, Damiet. I won’t disturb you if I listen.”

  Caladrius stepped away from his chair. “Please—” She sat next to Damiet, studied the instrument with interest.

  “It looks old.”

  “Magister Dulcet brought it from the music school for me.” She applied the bow, sent a note careening off the ceiling. “Magister Dulcet also plays the picochet. But I wanted Master Caladrius to teach me.”

  “Did you?” Caladrius, his eyes still lowered, felt her brilliant gaze again, or the sudden touch of her thoughts. “And why is that?”

  But Damiet, her father’s daughter, became unexpectedly evasive. “Because he once studied in the north, as a bard. That seems to be important.”

  “Yes,” Luna said softly; Caladrius felt her gaze burn into his mind. “It is important.”

  “It was long ago,” he said, chilled. “My lady.”

  “Was it so long ago?” She did not let him reply. “My father has many odd instruments that, if coaxed, do unusual things. Perhaps you learned to play some of them?”

  “Not there, my lady.”

  “But somewhere?”

  “No. My lady.”

  “He has one, a very small harp, with a high, sweet voice, whose strings break if someone playing it has told the listener a lie. My father has found it useful. Have you ever played such a thing?”

  He was spared answer by Damiet, who became suddenly restless. “I think we should continue with the lesson, Master Caladrius. I do not want to learn about harps. They bore me. They all sound alike. Master Caladrius must sit beside me to teach me the position of my fingers.”

  “It is not necessary—”

  “It is,” Damiet said firmly. “Very necessary.” She countered her sister’s disarming warmth with blue frost. “Bring another chair, Master Caladrius, if my sister wishes to stay. Put it here beside me.” She patted the air next to her. Luna showed no signs of rising, merely watched as Caladrius settled a gilt chair opposite Damiet.
/>   “It’s easier,” he said, answering Damiet’s wide stare, “for me to see. What you’re doing.”

  “Master Caladrius—”

  “Your skirts distract me.” She smiled faintly then, and straightened her bow. He paused, unsettled by the sight of both pairs of eyes, intense and unblinking, on his face. He cleared his throat. “Now. Where were we?”

  “Where, indeed, Master Caladrius?”

  “Here,” Damiet said, and produced a sound that might have cracked marble, but did nothing at all to disturb her sister’s smile.

  He walked home wearily that night, troubled by Luna. She was the Basilisk’s heir, he guessed, in power if not in name. She was his mirror. If he played the fire-bone pipe for one, he must play for the other, or she would kill whatever harmed her father. He seemed to trouble her as well. She would bring him that small harp, if it existed, and watch, smiling, as he broke strings with his lies. What he had done to make her suspicious of him, and what she suspected him of, he could not imagine. And there was Hollis, not safe in the north with Sirina, but living in Berylon as a bard after the Basilisk had shown so clearly, at Luly, how far he could reach to destroy a name, and all who might have spoken it.

  The night watch saw Caladrius but did not stop him; they recognized him now as one who came and went in the Basilisk’s house. He ate in the tavern, silent and alone, as always. It was late; the place was full of students, and one other solitary man at his supper. This one drew Caladrius’s attention. He seemed, like the woman in the hinterlands, to be made of bird bones or twigs, someone not quite real, who might speak the language of crows. He ate slowly, never looking up from his meal; he was still there when Caladrius took the narrow shadowy stairs to his room.

  He lay awake for a long time, reading the books he had borrowed from the school, learning the history of Tormalyne House through its music. The night was so hot the air itself seemed to sweat. It was full of restless noises: broken words and objects, a cry perhaps human, perhaps not, drunken singing from the students below. He could even hear faint music from within the school, a frail butterfly of sound blown aside by ruder noises. The moon, shrinking now, peered with an old woman’s hooded eye through the window, then passed on. Engrossed in Auber Tormalyne’s account of his impulsive journey into the hinterlands, and his collection of divers strange instruments, he realized only slowly that the sound intruding on his attention was not from the street but at his door.