Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “If he’s not here, she may refuse to sing. She told me this two days ago.”

  “How could she refuse to sing?” Hexel demanded so vehemently that on stage the singer leaped up to an unexpected note. “Because of a librarian?”

  “She sings much better with him,” Giulia said, and was troubled, suddenly, by the ghost of Tormalyne House she had seen in his face. How close, she wondered, would Hexel’s plot cut toward the truth? A group in black entered. She scanned their faces for Justin’s, but he had disappeared again after the morning’s rehearsal.

  “And what does she sing like without him?” Hexel asked suspiciously.

  “She goes flat. She forgets words. She is liable to stop in the middle of a song and ask where he is.”

  “Where does he live?” Hexel asked tautly. “I’ll pay him to come.”

  “He’ll come. He promised.” Her hands were clenched within the sleeves of her gown. She forced them open, and watched servants bring in huge urns of flowers that bloomed apparently in some land without seasons. They set them precisely in the center of the mirrors beneath the basilisks. On stage, the father ended his aria and stomped out. More musicians arrived, added themselves to the scattering among the gilt chairs in front of the stage.

  “Why is everyone straggling in?” Hexel asked fretfully. “You told them noon.”

  “It’s hard to get through the streets,” a flute player explained. “There are basilisks everywhere. Forming processions, slaying griffins, burning phoenixes. The air is getting misty with smoke. They’re beginning to gather already at the gate outside, waiting for the prince to come out and throw bread.”

  “He doesn’t do that until dusk,” the harpsichord player protested. “After his birthday feast.”

  “They’re hungry for gold, I guess.”

  “I don’t think he’s put gold in the bread for years. He just pays people in the crowd to lie about it.”

  A horn player made a sharp noise, his eyes darting to the basilisks in every mirror. The harpsichord player sat down abruptly and ran lightly through a scale.

  The basilisks watched.

  Caladrius walked through the streets of Berylon. Basilisks shrieked and laughed, ran in circles around the burning straw figures, which writhed and twisted and sometimes showed a griffin’s face among the flames. Smoke and smells of food hung in the still air, smudged the brilliant sky. The Basilisk’s guards clustered everywhere, at the scenes of mock battles, bawdy dramas, dances, their human faces cold and humorless among the colorful, glinting masks of birds and animals. Pipes and drums, flutes and viols sounded constantly everywhere as if the music seeped upward from the ground, or drifted from trees with the dying leaves. Near Pellior Palace, the crowds grew thicker, forming shifting circles around jesters and musicians, the enormous painted puppet heads bending to watch as well. Caladrius saw musicians and singers in black robes fighting through the crush; he wondered how many of them were armed.

  He passed with them through the palace gates. In the Hall of Mirrors, only the musicians held the stage, tuning, gliding through scales and arpeggios as guests in their autumn finery began to gather. Caladrius saw the red-haired magister Nicol among the musicians, looking austere, ethereal, carefully tuning a harp. A curtain of silk painted with delicate cascades of ivy hid the scenery. An eye appeared now and then among the ivy, surveyed the hall with bright, unwinking scrutiny, then vanished again.

  Veris Legere moved through the brilliant company to greet Caladrius, and sent a page hurrying across the hall. “Lady Damiet wished to be told the moment you arrived,” he explained to Caladrius. “So did Magister Dulcet. She’ll be glad you came no later.”

  A lean, dark man with long, disheveled hair and an intense blue gaze appeared at Veris’s side and applied his gaze to Caladrius. “Is this the librarian?”

  “Master Caladrius,” Veris said gravely. “Magister Hexel Barr, the composer and dramatist of today’s opera.”

  “You’re Giulia’s mysterious stranger,” Hexel said briskly. “I put you into my plot. Oddly enough, you are in love with Damiet. In art, that is. In life, you are the object of her passion. She refused to sing if you did not come. We are all grateful.”

  “She’s young,” Caladrius said briefly, searching the hall for the swirling eddy of courtiers around the prince. “Her feelings won’t outlast the day.”

  “Perhaps,” Hexel said dubiously. “But I think you underestimate her. Her feelings may change, but not as easily as a wayward breeze. More like a full-blown gale. Already they nearly destroyed my opera.” He paused, still studying Caladrius curiously, seeking the object of passion in the quiet librarian. “You were also among the bards, Giulia said.”

  “Long ago.”

  “That would explain it.” What, he did not say. “At least you will add incentive to Damiet’s singing. Spice. Giulia said she tends to go flat.”

  Caladrius’s attention veered sharply back to Hexel. Veris, staring at him, spoke. “You haven’t heard her sing?”

  Hexel stared back at them. “No,” he said warily. “Why?”

  Behind the curtain, Giulia positioned the chorus in its ranks within a broad trellis covered with silk leaves and flowers. The prince finally entered the Hall of Mirrors, bringing his family and the remainder of the guests. In a brief glimpse through the curtain, she also saw Veris and the librarian, Hexel, court and city officials, musicians and magisters from the school who had escaped working with her. Her hands chilled, her mouth dried. She turned, seeking Justin’s irreverent eyes among the chorus. But even he looked grave, tense; his thoughts had strayed elsewhere. She held up her hands, quieting them. Then, from behind the bower, she signaled the musicians to begin.

  The curtains parted. The chorus drew darkness over the hall, brought the evening stars out above a great city, and then, softly, lightly, sang its evening songs. A stranger entered the city, weary and alone. He had, he sang, come from far away, from a rock in the northern sea where ancient music was born and the great bards taught. He had returned to the city of his birth. His family had been destroyed in a war years before; he had come back to nothing except his memories. He had brought nothing with him, except a magical instrument with which he hoped to please the prince of the city, and gain employment at his court…

  Behind him, the chorus sang of the sea; Nicol’s harp weltered through their soughing voices. The stranger passed into the night.

  Dawn broke over the city. Light warmed the garden where the prince’s daughter, in a pale yellow dress, lightly sang her dreams of love, and tried to choose between her suitors.

  There was a rustling, a faint murmur through the hall as Damiet began to sing. Beside the prince, Taur coughed, and studied the floor. Giulia, her hands clenched again, saw someone turn trembling and scarlet-faced out the doors. Hexel, staring frozen at the stage, looked bludgeoned with each note. The prince, standing in his birthday silks near the front, listened without moving; his green eyes hooded, narrowed, he looked as if he did not even breathe, lest he miss a note. Not even Damiet shook expression into his face.

  The princess did not sing long; her father came out to interrupt her, telling her he had chosen a husband for her. Then a chorus of dressmakers circled her with richly colored swathes of cloth for her wedding dress. She chose; they whirled away, and the favored suitor entered the garden to sing of his love for her. A curious piping wove through his singing, distracting her. In the middle of his protestation, she turned her back to him, followed the seductive, beckoning pipe, and left him singing to himself.

  The prince and the piping stranger walked into the garden. The prince’s daughter, now dressed in smoky blue, drifted after them. The stranger noticed her finally; his pipe song stopped mid-note. Their eyes met, clung. Or they should have: Damiet barely glanced at the stranger before she looked into the crowd to find the librarian. “Who are you?” she asked him in three notes so rounded and tuned that Giulia felt her throat tighten with wonder. Damiet seemed surprised when the str
anger on stage, moving to reclaim her attention, sang his answer.

  The prince’s daughter teased her father into letting the stranger teach her to play his astonishing instrument. The fond father acquiesced. The stranger, piping again, left the garden with the prince’s daughter beside him. The suitor followed, still singing of his love, but only the prince was listening to him.

  The stranger, now in courtly black, appeared again, alone in the garden, to sing with passionate confusion of his love for the prince’s daughter, and of his perilous heritage, for his family and the prince’s had always been the bitterest of enemies…

  Giulia’s attention, diffused through a hundred details of song and staging, and whether Damiet was changing quickly enough for her rose song, suddenly contracted to a single point. She felt a slow prickle glide over her skin; her eyes felt oddly hot, dry. She turned them reluctantly from the stage, to find the stranger in his discreet black, with his face out of Tormalyne history, standing with Hexel near the back of the hall. Like the prince, his face held very little expression. Hexel had buried his in his hand, a gesture usually preparatory to an explosion. She spoke to him anyway, the barest whisper through the song the stranger sang on the stage: “Hexel, what have we done?”

  The stranger finished his song, and reached for his pipe again to call the prince’s daughter into the moonlight with him. He was not worthy of her, he tried to explain. He was of lowly background, he had been born a simple farmer’s son, raised to be a bard; he must give her up. She refused to listen; she looked in all his pockets for his pipe; she repeated again and again, to beguile a more suitable past out of him, “Tell me who you are and I will tell you who I love.” That the prince’s daughter had no interest whatsoever in her piping suitor was becoming obvious; she refused to sing to him, but sang instead, earnestly and inflexibly, to some point toward the back of the hall.

  A few people turned to look, Giulia noticed, among them Taur, wondering what his sister was singing at. His attention, lax until then, had at last found occupation; he stared so long at the librarian that his sister Luna put her hand on his arm and whispered to him. He whispered back; she shook her head, smiling sweetly, keeping a hand on him until he gazed again, blindly, at the stage, frowning so fiercely that the piper forgot where he was and repeated most of his song. Damiet, following his lead obliviously, continued to sing to the back of the room.

  Giulia heard an audible groan from Hexel. The prince’s guests were too polite or too bored to notice; a couple of magisters, trembling and biting their lips, seemed in pain from suppressed laughter. The reluctant stranger, tormented beyond caution by the charms of his beloved, finally confessed:

  “I am your father’s bitterest enemy.”

  The rejected suitor, who had been listening behind a bush, hurried away to tell the prince. The prince’s daughter, unwilling to believe their plight, continued her teasing. They would run away together, she announced, flee to some kingdom where roses opened to the full moon, and swans sang love songs to one another. There was a faint sound from among the chorus, as if someone had sung a note too soon. Giulia, glancing at them, saw Justin staring across the hall, his face rigid, so white he might have been watching someone die.

  Damiet finished her song methodically, as though she were wrapping up a fish, and went to change for her mauve song.

  “I will never write another note,” Hexel was whispering ceaselessly behind his hand. “Never. Not a single note. I am struck dumb. Betrayed by my muse. Mangled, crippled, flayed by my own music. I can never compose again. Never. I have laid down my pen; I will become a tanner. A common laborer. Living by the bitter sweat of my brow, since there is nothing of art left in me that has not been outraged. Defiled. How could Giulia let that idiot girl sing my music?”

  Caladrius, stunned by Hexel’s transformation of his past, could not speak. The prince seemed equally transfixed. He had not moved since the stranger from the north had wandered on stage to the city of his birth with his magical pipe and his bitter memories. Caladrius had slid the pipe out of his shirt; his fingers were locked around it. He waited for the prince to turn, waited for the Basilisk’s eyes to seek him, recognize him, understand the fate shaping itself out of the stranger’s music. He scarcely heard the singing or Hexel’s whisperings; they seemed distant, fragmented by his own breathing, the wash of his blood. The room itself, with its mirrors endlessly reflecting the elegant gathering, seemed as transitory as candle fire; a breath would blow it away. Only the pipe in his hand and the motionless prince were real, and the song, cold as hoar, simple as bone, waiting to be played.

  On stage, the furious father, flanked by a pair of guards, made his entrance and sang his rage. The guards locked chains of gold around the stranger’s wrists and led him away. The melancholy piping from the dungeons flowed into the prince’s song of triumph that he had rid himself of the last of the family that had plagued him. Under Caladrius’s eyes, the Basilisk stirred at last, his head lifting slightly, beginning to turn. Caladrius raised the pipe to his lips.

  An instant before he played, before the prince turned, another pipe sounded from the stage, adding its own strange, haunting melody to the prince’s exultation. Candle fire fluttered as at a sudden wind; the reflections in the mirrors grew oddly vague. The prince’s attention riveted itself to the stage again. Caladrius, not recognizing the instrument, cast a glance away from the Basilisk and saw, in the midst of the chorus, the faint, glowing holes of the fire-bone pipe flickering and darkening as the piper’s fingers shaped his song.

  He recognized Hollis.

  He caught his breath; music waiting in the pipe at his mouth seemed to flow back into him. Hollis, his hands moving almost imperceptibly in the shadowed, silent chorus, loosed a sullen fire at every note. The prince’s aria came to an end; for a moment the two pipes sang together, one sweet and despairing, the other wild, husky, tuned to some raging winter wind.

  Then Arioso’s shout of fury snapped across the room, and Caladrius turned his own horror into answering music. Hexel flung back his head, staring in bewilderment at Caladrius. Veris Legere had also turned in wonder to the librarian. The blood left his face as he saw the pipe. His eyes jerked from it to Caladrius. He closed them, whispering something. The prince wheeled incredulously, caught between pipers. Above them, shadows cast by nothing visible began to swirl; in the mirrors, the basilisks’ eyes grew bright with fire.

  “Stop them!” the prince commanded. The guests and the guards at the doors, hearing only more music, glanced about them perplexedly for the source of the prince’s anger. Veris Legere looked at the prince across the room and then at Caladrius. Suddenly aged and very grim, he folded his arms and studied the floor. Among the musicians, the red-haired harper dropped his harp and rose abruptly.

  “For Tormalyne House!” he shouted. From the chorus came another voice, shaken yet staunch,

  “For Griffin Tormalyne!”

  On stage and in the crowd, black robes fell like old skins; the mirrors glittered suddenly with upraised swords.

  Caladrius barely heard his own name. He let the pipe fall, all his attention on Hollis, who could not seem to move. Hexel gripped him, talking again; he broke loose, moved into the frightened crush. The palace guard, pushing in, were struggling with guests pushing to get out. Damiet, appearing to sing her mauve song to her beloved, stared in amazement at the fleeing audience. She opened her mouth stubbornly; Giulia pulled her away from what had been the chorus spilling, armed and shouting, off the stage.

  Damiet shrieked, struggling in Giulia’s grip, then cried across the hall, “Master Caladrius!”

  The prince, holding ground against the turmoil around him, caught the raven’s eyes and held them in a fierce, unblinking stare.

  I will kill you, it promised.

  Around them in every mirror, pieces of an enormous, winter-white beast began to form: a great, fiery eye here, there a claw that spanned the mirror, a haunch, a line of spurs along the scaled back, the fold of a win
g. Caladrius fought against the shrilling, panicking crowd to reach Hollis, who had found his way off the abandoned stage, looking dazed, spellbound by his own spell. Some of the guards had struggled through to surround the prince and his children.

  Watching a claw emerge from the mirror, one shouted, “Break the mirrors!”

  They shattered instantly at an impatient gesture from the prince, thundering out of the massive frames to the floor. From every piece the beast looked out.

  “Ignore it,” the prince shouted above the screams. “Bring me Griffin Tormalyne!”

  The guard, seeing griffins everywhere, attacked magisters and musicians; the unarmed librarian slipped past their notice. Go, Caladrius commanded his son silently, at every step. Run. But Hollis did not see him, only something flowing up all around them out of the shards broken mirrors. His face lifted, paper white, toward what was forming above their heads. Caladrius glanced up and froze.

  So had the prince, looking up at the massive white coils of snake with its fierce cock’s head, its lidless eyes. It held the prince in its mad, glowing gaze. The great wheels of its coils rippled and tightened as if it gripped some struggling, invisible thing. The prince, his face still and waxen as a death mask, began to take harsh, struggling breaths through his open mouth. He could not seem to move; he hung limply, like a puppet dangling from invisible strings in the basilisk’s stare. A low, hollow piping came from it, as if it sang as it killed.

  All fighting stopped. No one moved, lest a footstep, a flick of bright cloth, attract the fuming, deadly gaze. The prince groaned suddenly, his eyes closing, and Luna raised her hand.

  It was a small gesture, a hand lifted, perhaps in horror, that caught Caladrius’s eye because of the absolute calm in her face. She opened her fingers and in the empty frames of the mirrors, the stone basilisks came to life.

  They killed a guard, two guests, and a magister before they found the object of her desire: crowing, they fixed their onyx gazes upon the white basilisk among them. By then, guards, guests, and rebels were all fleeing the hall. Caladrius, reaching Hollis at last, shook him out of his trance. He still played the fire-bone pipe, Caladrius realized, hearing the music within his silence; it came from his bones, his heart.