A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong

by K. J. Parker

  A barbarian. The old duke used to punish debtors by giving them a head start and then turning his wolfhounds loose. Last year, Sighvat abolished the poll tax and brought in a minimum wage for farm workers. But the old duke had a better ear for music, and he was an extremely generous patron. “I can’t,” I said.

  “Of course you can,” Subtilius said briskly. “Now then, I was thinking in terms of three hundred. That’d cover my expenses.”

  “I haven’t got that sort of money.”

  He looked at me. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you have. Well, what have you got?”

  “I can give you a hundred angels.”

  Which was true. Actually, I had a hundred and fifty angels in the wooden box under my bed. It was the down payment I’d taken from the Kapelmeister for the Unfinished Concerto, so properly speaking it was Subtilius’ money anyway. But I needed the fifty. I had bills to pay.

  “That’ll have to do, then,” he said, quite cheerfully. “It’ll cover the bribes and pay for a fake passport, I’ll just have to steal food and clothes. Can’t be helped. You’re a good man, professor.”

  There was still time. I could throw the door open and yell for a porter. I was still innocent of any crime, against the State or myself. Subtilius would go back to the condemned cell, I could throw the manuscript on the fire, and I could resume my life, my slow and inevitable uphill trudge towards poverty and misery. Or I could call the porter and not burn the music. What exactly would happen to me if I was caught assisting an offender? I couldn’t bear prison, I’d have to kill myself first; but would I get the chance? Bail would be out of the question, so I’d be remanded pending trial. Highly unlikely that the prison guards would leave knives, razors or poison lying about in my cell for me to use. People hang themselves in jail, they twist ropes out of bedding. But what if I made a mess of it and ended up paralysed for life? Even if I managed to stay out of prison, a criminal conviction would mean instant dismissal and no chance of another job. But that wouldn’t matter, if I could keep the music. We are, the Invincible Sun be praised, a remarkably, almost obsessively cultured nation, and music is our life. No matter what its composer had done, work of that quality would always be worth a great deal of money, enough to retire on and never have to compose another note as long as I live—

  I was a good man, apparently. He was grateful to me, for swindling him. I was a good man, because I was prepared to pass off a better man’s work as my own. Because I was willing to help a murderer escape justice.

  “Where will you go?” I asked.

  He grinned at me. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “Let’s just say, a long way away.”

  “You’re famous,” I pointed out. “Everywhere. Soon as you write anything, they’ll know it’s you. They’ll figure out it was me who helped you escape.”

  He yawned. He looked very tired; fair enough, after three weeks in a clock tower, with eight of the biggest bells in the empire striking the quarter hours inches from his head. He couldn’t possibly have slept for more than ten minutes. “I’m giving up music,” he said. “This is definitely and categorically my last ever composition. You’re quite right; the moment I wrote anything, I’d give myself away. There’s a few places the empire hasn’t got extradition treaties with, but I’d rather be dead than live there. So it’s simple, I won’t write any more music. After all,” he added, his hand over his mouth like he’d been taught as a boy, “there’s lots of other things I can do. All music’s ever done is land me in trouble.”

  What, when all is said and done, all the conventional garbage is put on one side and you’re alone inside your head with yourself, do you actually believe in? That’s a question that has occupied a remarkably small percentage of my attention over the years. Strange, since I spend a fair proportion of my working time composing odes, hymns and masses to the Invincible Sun. Do I believe in Him? To be honest, I’m not sure. I believe in the big white disc in the sky, because it’s there for all to see. I believe that there’s some kind of supreme authority, something along the lines of His Majesty the Emperor only bigger and even more remote, who theoretically controls the universe. What that actually involves, I’m afraid, I couldn’t tell you. Presumably He regulates the affairs of great nations, enthrones and deposes emperors and kings—possibly princes and dukes, though it’s rather more plausible that He delegates that sort of thing to some kind of divine solar civil service—and intervenes in high-profile cases of injustice and blasphemy whenever a precedent needs to be set or a point of law clarified. Does He deal with me personally, or is He even aware of my existence? On balance, probably not. He wouldn’t have the time.

  In which case, if I have a file at all, I assume it’s on the desk of some junior clerk, along with hundreds, thousands, millions of others. I can’t say that that thought bothers me too much. I’d far rather be left alone, in peace and quiet. As far as I’m aware, my prayers—mostly for money, occasionally for the life or recovery from illness of a relative or friend—have never been answered, so I’m guessing that divine authority works on more or less the same lines as its civilian equivalent; don’t expect anything good from it, and you won’t be disappointed. Just occasionally, though, something happens which can only be divine intervention, and then my world-view and understanding of the nature of things gets all shaken up and reshaped. I explain it away by saying that really it’s something primarily happening to someone else—someone important, whose file is looked after by a senior administrative officer or above—and I just happen to be peripherally involved and therefore indirectly affected.

  A good example is Subtilius’ escape from the barbican. At the time it felt like my good luck. On mature reflection I can see that it was really his good luck, in which I was permitted to share, in the same way that the Imperial umbrella-holder also gets to stay dry when it rains.

  It couldn’t have been simpler. I went first, to open doors and make sure nobody was watching. He followed on, swathed in the ostentatious cassock and cowl of a Master Chorister—purple with ermine trimmings, richly embroidered with gold thread and seed pearls; anywhere else you’d stand out a mile, but in the barbican, choristers are so commonplace they’re practically invisible. Luck intervened by making it rain, so that it was perfectly natural for my chorister companion to have his hood up, and to hold the folds tight around his face and neck. He had my hundred angels in his pockets in a pair of socks, to keep the coins from clinking.

  The sally-port in the barbican wall, opening onto the winding stair that takes you down to Lower Town the short way, is locked at nightfall, but faculty officers like me all have keys. I opened the gate and stepped aside to let him pass.

  “Get rid of the cassock as soon as you can,” I said. “I’ll report it stolen first thing in the morning, so they’ll be looking for it.”

  He nodded. “Well,” he said, “thanks for everything, professor. I’d just like to say—”

  “Get the hell away from here,” I said, “before anyone sees us.”

  There are few feelings in life quite as exhilarating as getting away with something. Mainly, I guess, if you’re someone like me, it’s because you never really expected to. Add to the natural relief, therefore, the unaccustomed pleasure of winning. Then, since you can’t win anything without having beaten someone first, there’s the delicious feeling of superiority, which I enjoy for the same reason that gourmets prize those small grey truffles that grow on the sides of dead birch trees; not because it’s nourishing or tasty, but simply because it’s so rare. Of course, it remained to be seen whether I had actually got away with aiding and abetting a murderer after the fact and assisting a fugitive. There was still a distinct chance that Subtilius would be picked up by the watch before he could get out of the city, in which case he might very well reveal the identity of his accomplice, if only to stop them hitting him. But, I told myself, that’d be all right. I’d simply tell them he’d burgled my rooms and stolen the money and the cassock, and they wouldn’t
be able to prove otherwise. I told myself that; I knew perfectly well, of course, that if they did question me, my nerve would probably shatter like an eggshell, and the only thing that might stop me from giving them a comprehensive confession was if I was so incoherent with terror I couldn’t speak at all. I think you’d have to be quite extraordinarily brave to be a hardened criminal; much braver than soldiers who lead charges or stand their ground against the cavalry. I could just about imagine myself doing that sort of thing, out of fear of the sergeant-major, but doing something illegal literally paralyses me with fear. And yet courage, as essential to the criminal as his jemmy or his cosh, is held to be a virtue.

  The first thing I did when I got back to my room was to light the lamp and open the shutters, because I never close them except when it snows, and people who knew me might wonder what was going on if they saw them shut. Then I poured myself a small brandy—it would’ve been a large one, but the bottle was nearly empty—and sat down with the lamp so close to me that I could feel it scorching my face, and spread out the manuscript, and read it.

  They say that when we first sent out ships to trade with the savages in Rhoezen, we packed the holds full of the sort of things we thought primitive people would like—beads, cheap tin brooches, scarves, shirts, buckles plated so thin the silver practically wiped off on your fingers, that sort of thing. And mirrors. We thought they’d love mirrors. In fact, we planned on buying enough land to grow enough corn to feed the City with a case of hand-mirrors, one angel twenty a gross from the Scharnel Brothers.

  We got that completely wrong. The captain of the first ship to make contact handed out a selection of his trade goods by way of free samples. Everything seemed to be going really well until they found the mirrors. They didn’t like them. They threw them on the ground and stamped on them, then attacked our people with spears and slingshots, until the captain had to fire a cannon just so as to get his men back off the beach in one piece. Later, when he’d managed to capture a couple of specimens and he interrogated them through an interpreter, he found out what the problem was. The mirrors, the prisoners told him, were evil. They sucked your soul out through your eyes and imprisoned it under the surface of the dry-hard-water. Stealing the souls of harmless folk who’d only wanted to be friendly to strangers was not, in their opinion, civilised behaviour. Accordingly, we weren’t welcome in their country.

  When I first heard the story, I thought the savages had over-reacted somewhat. When I’d finished reading Subtilius’ symphony, written in my style, I was forced to revise my views. Stealing a man’s soul is one of the worst things you can do to him, and it hardly matters whether you shut it up in a mirror or thirty pages of manuscript. It’s not something you can ever forgive.

  And then, after I’d sat still and quiet for a while, until the oil in the lamp burned away and I was left entirely alone in the dark, I found myself thinking; yes, but nobody will ever know. All I had to do was sit down and copy it out in my own handwriting, then burn the original, and there would be no evidence, no witnesses. You hear a lot from the philosophers and the reverend Fathers about truth, about how it must inevitably prevail, how it will always burst through, like the saplings that grow up in the cracks in walls until their roots shatter the stone. It’s not true. Subtilius wouldn’t ever tell anybody (and besides, it was only a matter of time before he was caught and strung up, and that’d be him silenced for ever). I sure as hell wasn’t going to say anything. If there’s a truth and nobody knows it, is it still true? Or is it like a light burning in a locked, shuttered house that nobody will ever get to see?

  I’d know it, of course. I did consider that. But then I thought about the money.

  The debut of my Twelfth Symphony took place at the collegiate temple on Ascension Day, AUC 775, in the presence of his highness Duke Sighvat II, the duchess and dowager duchess, the Archimandrite of the Studium and a distinguished audience drawn from the Court, the university and the best of good society. It was, I have to say, a triumph. The duke was so impressed that he ordered a command performance at the palace. Less prestigious but considerably more lucrative was the licence I agreed to with the Kapelmeister; a dozen performances at the Empire Hall at a thousand angels a time, with the rights reverting to me thereafter. Subsequently I made similar deals with kapelmeisters and court musicians and directors of music from all over the empire, taking care to reserve the sheet music rights, which I sold to the Court stationers for five thousand down and a five per cent royalty. My tenure at the University was upgraded to a full Fellowship, which meant I could only be got rid of by a bill of attainder passed by both houses of the Legislature and ratified by the duke, and then only on grounds of corruption or gross moral turpitude; my stipend went up from three hundred to a thousand a year, guaranteed for life, with bonuses should I ever condescend to do any actual teaching. Six months after the first performance, as I sat in my rooms flicking jettons about on my counting-board, I realised that I need never work again. Quite suddenly, all my troubles were over.

  On that, and what followed, I base my contention that there is no justice; that the Invincible Sun, if He’s anything more than a ball of fire in the sky, has no interest and does not interfere in the life and fortunes of ordinary mortals, and that morality is simply a confidence trick practised on all of us by the State and its officers to keep us from making nuisances of ourselves. For a lifetime of devotion to music, I got anxiety, misery and uncertainty. For two crimes, one against the State and one against myself, I was rewarded with everything I’d ever wanted. Explain that, if you can.

  Everything? Oh yes. To begin with, I dreaded the commissions that started to flood in from the duke, other dukes and princes, even the Imperial court; because I knew I was a fraud, that I’d never be able to write anything remotely as good as the Symphony, and it was only a matter of time before someone figured out what had actually happened and soldiers arrived at my door to arrest me. But I sat down, with a lamp and a thick mat of paper; and it occurred to me that, now I didn’t need the money, all I had to do was refuse the commissions—politely, of course—and nobody could touch me. I didn’t have to write a single note if I didn’t want to. It was entirely up to me.

  Once I’d realised that, I started to write. And, knowing that it really didn’t matter, I hardly bothered to try. The less I tried, the easier it was to find a melody (getting a melody out of me was always like pulling teeth). Once I’d got that, I simply let it rattle about in my head for a while, and wrote down the result. Once I’d filled the necessary number of pages, I signed my name at the top and sent it off. I didn’t care, you see. If they didn’t like it, they knew what they could do.

  From time to time, to begin with at least, it did occur to me to wonder, is this stuff any good? But that raises the question; how the hell does anybody ever know? If the criterion is the reaction of the audience, or the sums of money offered for the next commission, I just kept getting better. That was, of course, absurd. Even I could see that. But no; my audiences and my critics insisted that each new work was better than its predecessors (though the Twelfth Symphony was the piece that stayed in the repertoires, and the later masterpieces sort of came and went; not that I gave a damn). A cynic would argue that once I’d become a great success, nobody dared to criticise my work for fear of looking a fool; the only permitted reaction was ever increasing adulation. Being a cynic myself, I favoured that view for a while. But, as the success continued and the money flowed and more and more music somehow got written, I began to have my doubts. All those thousands of people, I thought, they can’t all be self-deluded. There comes a point when you build up a critical mass, beyond which people sincerely believe. That’s how religions are born, and how criteria change. By my success, I’d redefined what constitutes beautiful music. If it sounded like the sort of stuff I wrote, people were prepared to believe it was beautiful. After all, beauty is only a perception—the thickness of an eyebrow, very slight differences in the ratio between length and width of a nose
or a portico or a colonnade. Tastes evolve. People like what they’re given.

  Besides, I came to realise, the Twelfth was mine; to some extent at least. After all, the style Subtilius had borrowed was my style, which I’d spent a lifetime building. And if he had the raw skill, the wings, I’d been his teacher; without me, who was to say he’d ever have risen above choral and devotional works and embraced the orchestra? At the very least it was a collaboration, in which I could plausibly claim to be the senior partner. And if the doors are locked and the shutters are closed, whose business is it whether there’s a light burning inside? You’d never be able to find out without breaking and entering, which is a criminal offence.

  Even so, I began making discreet enquiries. I could afford the best, and I spared no expense. I hired correspondents in all the major cities and towns of the empire to report back to me about notable new compositions and aspiring composers—I tried to pay for this myself, but the university decided that it constituted legitimate academic research and insisted on footing the bill. Whenever I got a report that hinted at the possibility of Subtilius, I sent off students to obtain a written score or sit in the concert hall and transcribe the notes. I hired other, less reputable agents to go through the criminal activity reports, scrape up acquaintance with watch captains, and waste time in the wrong sort of inns, fencing-schools, bear gardens and livery stables. I was having to tread a fine line, of course. The last thing I wanted was for the watch to reopen their file or remember the name Subtilius, or Aimeric de Beguilhan, so I couldn’t have descriptions or likenesses circulated. I didn’t regard that as too much of a handicap, however. Sooner or later, I firmly believed, if he was still alive, the music would break out and he’d give himself away. It wouldn’t be the creative urge that did for him; it’d be that handmaiden of the queen of the Muses, a desperate and urgent need for money, that got Subtilius composing again. No doubt he’d do his best to disguise himself. He’d try writing street ballads, or pantomime ballets, secure in the belief that that sort of thing was beneath the attention of academic musicians. But it could only be a matter of time. I knew his work, after all, in ways nobody else ever possibly could. I could spot his hand in a sequence of intervals, a modulation or key shift, the ghost of a flourish, the echo of a dissonance. As soon as he put pen to paper, I felt sure, I’d have him.