The Sound of Broken Absolutes

by Peter Orullian

  It had gone much deeper than simply marring the lacquer. This gouge had gotten into the wood, and had torn along the soundboard for the length of two thumbs. It was by far the viola’s worst scar. Before Belamae shattered it. His student might have been the one who slammed the instrument down, but Divad felt responsible. Just as he was responsible for this older scar in the viola face.

  Divad looked away to the window, allowing the sound of the rain beyond to fill him. But try as he might to avoid it, the memory of the next time he saw Jemma rose like a specter in his mind.

  The Cathedral quarter had once been the high district in Recityv. Now, it was maybe a hair’s breadth better than a slum. The smells of bay rum sold by the cask, old urine-soaked straw and rotting mud, and unwashed day laborers filled the air. Jangly music drifted from the windows and open doorways of performance taverns. And children too young to be on their own either panhandled or waited with cunning eyes to pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.

  Divad, oblivious to it all tonight, made his way through the streets to a familiar tavern. He needed a glass of wheat bitter to sip while he continued to struggle with the notion of attunement—a concept introduced to him that afternoon during a lecture on acoustics.

  As he ambled toward the back corner, he passed a seated woman who kept her eyes lowered. At the edge of her table rested an empty mug. He’d nearly passed her when he realized who she was, and stopped abruptly.

  “Jemma? What are you doing here?”

  His sister’s eyes flicked up to him with a mix of concern and embarrassment. She regained her composure within the time of a single breath. “Same as you, I would guess. Resting. Trying to shake off some of the street. Thinking.”

  He smiled and sat down opposite her.

  “At home, it was strong tea and the stump behind the house.” She returned his smile.

  “Here it’s wheat bitter and the stool in the corner,” he said. “What about you? What are you drinking?” He pointed to her empty mug.

  “Nothing. I’m fine,” she replied rather quickly.

  Divad nodded, recognizing when not to press too hard. “How’s Father? Mother? Has the market gotten any better?”

  When she met his eyes he noticed the same discoloration he remembered seeing . . . was that a year ago? But hadn’t it been on the other side of her face?

  “Father’s selling road fare beyond the city wall now. The merchant houses haven’t had fruit for him to vend in months.”

  A heavyset man with a ponderous belly that rolled over his belt like a water bag sauntered up to their table. “You going to buy the lady a drink? Or talk to her all night?”

  “This is my brother,” Jemma said evenly, without looking up.

  Divad caught a twinkle of delight in the man’s eye. “It’s like that then. Well, I—”

  “Go away,” Jemma said flatly.

  She sighed and pulled her empty mug back toward her. The heavy man huffed something under his breath and trundled away. Once he was gone, Divad ordered a glass of Kuren wheat bitter and set to explaining about acoustic attunement, and the parts he was struggling to understand. All the while Jemma nodded and smiled patiently. And though she seemed quite weary, she listened and asked questions. Later, they spoke of small things as only a brother and sister can.

  Divad couldn’t recall what, beyond attunement, he’d jabbered about that night with Jemma. The details were lost to him. But he remembered how it had felt to slip back into that unself-conscious kind of chat that didn’t have to be about anything. Just talk for its own sake.

  It had felt rather like the rain tonight. Soft, lulling. And yet, his hands continued to shake. It was the memory itself that unsettled him. A memory marked by this scar in the wood. To try and settle his nerves, he began to hum. He recalled a particular tune Jemma had been fond of. Then he picked up the taper punch again, holding it firmly but not too tightly.

  Before he could begin, he heard the sound of steps behind him in the shop. “Maesteri?”

  Divad remained poised, irritated yet also grateful for the intrusion. “Back here.”

  A third year Lyren stepped into the light of his lamps. There was a long moment, while Sedri, a woman gifted with a powerful alto voice, surveyed the tabletop. “Are you gouging a new soundboard?”

  He let out a sigh, realizing she wouldn’t be simply shooed away. Sedri was nigh onto fifty, coming to Descant after decades in the performance taverns. Despite her age, she could be as trusting as a child. But her many years had made her rather fearless, an important quality for someone doing the kind of singing he’d been teaching her.

  He nodded for her to sit beside him. Then he gathered in her inquisitive stare, her original need of him apparently forgotten. “If you could go back,” he began, fixing an instructive metaphor in his mind, “if you could back and do it again, would you spend those thirty years singing in smoke-filled taverns?”

  She never averted her eyes, which, far from being sleepy at this forsaken hour, burned with the shrewdness of age. “You mean would I trade the smoke that has gotten into my vocal timbre.”

  Divad nodded. “You came by your craft a hard way. And those long nights airing out your songs through tabaccom haze has surely damaged your vocal chords. Given you some lovely alto tones, to be sure, but mostly given you a smoky sound.”

  She gave him a questioning look.

  “That’s not criticism,” he added. “Your control and vocal strength are equal to or better than Lyren half your age. But . . .” he trailed off, forming his question more accurately, “if you could have the same facility in your voice, but have back the clarity, would you take it?”

  After a moment, her face bloomed into a thoughtful smile. “No. I earned this tone.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “Just so. For my viola here, I’m doing my damnedest to be sure she has all the smoke and haze in her voice that she had before she was broken. Now, you get some sleep. You’ve a lesson on vocal dynamics tomorrow, and the regimen is an athletic one.”

  Sedri stood up.

  “By the way, what was it you wanted when you came in?” Divad asked.

  She smiled down at him. “I had a question about attunement. But I think I’ll hold onto it for now.”

  When her footsteps had completely receded, Divad turned back to the new soundboard—his hands steady as wrought iron—and continued to scar the viola.

  The smell of pine resin was strong in his parents’ home. His father took in a plug every cycle for hauling away the carpenter scraps, which they’d always burned in their fireplace. The scent might have been a perfect welcome if Divad hadn’t returned for Jemma’s wake.

  Six mourners—three of them unfamiliar to him—sat with his father and mother in the foreroom of their home. On the floor in front of the hearth lay a simple casket. The wood shape held an awful finality. Seeing it, Divad gasped. He hadn’t been home in four years. Hadn’t seen Jemma in . . . was it a year? More?

  Time got away from him while he was concentrating on his studies. And until now, he’d given little thought to what he’d left behind.

  He put down the viola case he carried, and went to his father. He struggled to find the right words. Really, his best response to this would be found in his music. He settled on, “I’m sorry.” The words were entirely too small for the feeling inside him, inside this room. His mother reached up, still holding a kerchief, and grasped his wrist. Tortured eyes pleaded with him to do something.

  “Oh Divad . . .” Her voice quavered. “We had no idea. We thought she took a laundry job. Her few coins . . .” She couldn’t continue.

  He looked at his father. “What happened to Jemma?”

  The shame Divad saw rise on his father’s face was terrible to see. Such a look of helpless failure. The man’s own skin looked heavy on his bones.

  His father softly cleared his throat. “Jemma took to beds to earn coin, Divad. The kind of man that would pay her . . . liked to use his fists. It’s my fault, son. I s
hould have been able . . .”

  Divad began to feel a cascade of grief overwhelming him. Grief for Jemma; for his mother’s broken heart; for his father’s feelings of shame and failure; for his own absence during it all. He looked down at the top of the casket. Pine.

  Before he realized what he was doing, he retreated to his instrument, unclasped the case, drew out the viola, and began to play without bothering to resin his bow or tune. He escaped into the only song that came to mind, “If I’m Reminded.”

  The sweet sound of his viola filled the room. It held the unique qualities of both eulogy and sympathy. Long mournful notes resonated beneath his fingers as he played for Jemma. As he did, the story of her life fell into place: the discoloration in her face when she’d handed him a pomegranate; his father’s loss of his cart-trade; an empty mug at the edge of a table—a signal he hadn’t understood until now; Jemma’s lack of beauty, and the only kind of man willing to pay her—one who sought to brutalize as part of pleasure-taking.

  He should have seen it before. He shouldn’t have been so absorbed in his music that he failed to see or help. He began to hate himself for blathering on about his lessons while she waited on the prospect of a few plugs in exchange for being beaten while giving up her maiden box.

  His music had gotten in the way. And yet even now he used it to find refuge from a pine overcoat and the anguish of people he loved but had rarely seen in four years. Refuge from his own shame.

  Sometime during the chorus of his song, his grip loosened. His bow and viola slipped from his hands and fell, crashing against the wood scuttle.

  Divad’s hands became still. His left forefinger had come to the end of the original scar. His right hand remained poised with the taper punch near the surface of the new soundboard. The mark was complete; as nearly identical as he could make it. The one gouge in the antique instrument that utterly belonged to him.

  His leaving for Descant to study music had meant one less wage earner to support the family. He couldn’t have known the produce trade would wane, any more than he could have imagined his sister would take to the mattress to help earn coin. Jemma had never said a word. Not to him, and not to his parents. Her modest contribution had helped them continue to survive.

  “If only I had been there,” he muttered to himself, “instead of here.”

  Music, even the learning of music, had begun to mean something different after that. He no longer took it for granted. And he did his damnedest to put it after his family in his list of priorities. That had meant late-hour repair for fiddle players and the like, who were willing to pay a Maesteri to fix up their decrepit instruments. He’d started to become accustomed to the wee hours sitting in this very shop. And every plug or jot he earned made its way to his father, no matter how healthy the cart-trade was at the time.

  As the rain continued to whisper beyond the window, he nodded to himself. The soundboard was done. But he didn’t, just yet, stand to leave. Instead, he remained in the company of wood smells and old spruce, thinking about smokiness.

  SIX

  THE SELLARI PRISONER sat bound to the trunk of a tall poplar tree. I’d asked Baylet for a deaf one, like our Shoarden men. He’d assured me this one could not hear. The man appeared to have been severely beaten—for information, I assumed. The blood on his face had dried in the cold night air, and his chin hung slack so that his sleeping breath gave out slow tendrils of steam in the moonlight.

  I stood a ways off, considering what I must do.

  The lesson in the score given me by Divad had become clear. Scordatura was a kind of music notation used for altered tunings, as the viola d’amore usually had. That particular instrument was rarely tuned in fifths. In fact, it might employ twenty or more different tunings, each one to suit the individual piece. The various tunings made it possible to play chords and individual notes that weren’t playable using conventional tuning.

  Scordatura told the musician how to tune his instrument and where to put his fingers. But not what note to expect.

  Some called it finger notation. On the page, the music appeared to be dissonant, filled with minor seconds. But because the strings were tuned differently, scordatura notation merely indicated finger position, the possible note combinations were unique.

  That night I realized what scordatura could teach me about absolute sound, song with absolute value. That’s why Divad had given me this piece of music in the Chamber of Absolutes. Trying to make sense of the notes proved frustrating, until I let myself simply consider where my fingers would rest on the strings, not knowing which note would sound, but trusting that the right one would.

  Like scordatura tuning, singing a note with absolute value meant finding the right place inside a thing to resonate with, regardless of the note. If I meant to produce music that could stop Shoarden men, it would have to be of the absolute kind. I needed to figure out how to resonate with some part of them even when they could not hear me. I needed to go beyond my training, and figure out where to play these Sellari, the song of them.

  In a real way, I’d be playing them like a scordatura-tuned viola d’amore. And the song that came out of me would resonate inside them as though they were aliquot strings.

  I gave a weak but grateful smile, thinking of Maesteri Divad. He’d been trying to help me, even as he’d tried to convince me to stay. Perhaps he’d known I would come here to fight, regardless. But I still had to find that Sellari string to play. And looking back at the captive, I decided how I would do it.

  As I approached him, the frozen ground crunched beneath my feet, the sound of it loud in the night. The Sellari couldn’t hear me, so I tossed a small stone at his chest. His slack mouth slowly closed, and his eyes opened. He looked up at me, seeming to gauge whether or not he’d be beaten again. After a moment of silent regard, I allowed myself to become attuned to the figure sitting before me. To hear the song of him.

  I began by focusing on his wounds, understanding how physical pain would feel in my own face and neck. Then I recalled the feeling of being restrained and threatened—a particularly worrisome moment I had suffered at the hands of a gang of five street brawlers the year I arrived at Descant. Then I summoned the images of the fallen from this very war, both theirs and ours.

  Like a string being drawn across by a long bow, I began to feel the first notes of resonance between us.

  In my mind, I identified musical phrases, performing mental turns in a descending Lydian scale to suggest surrender and helplessness and the simplest fear for self. And I let the look in the other’s eyes, the vaguest hope of returning to his own loved ones, sweeten a bitter musical signature that rumbled inside me.

  It wasn’t the memories or thoughts themselves that brought us together, but their residue. The combinations of like things produced a kind of vibration we both shared.

  I was attuned. I could hear the song of him. But what I had never done, never been taught to do, was sing that absolute value. Though now, I had a model for it. A scordatura model.

  Rather than define the note or song I might sing to find a resonance inside him, I concentrated on a sense of him, the emotional fabric that made him who he was. And when that crystallized in my own mind, I opened my mouth and let come whatever most resonated with that sense.

  I had never before made or even heard the sound that followed. It began as a low pitch that shifted so subtly that it lived in the space between notes. In those first few moments, the Sellari’s ravaged lips curled into a smug smile; he must have thought he was safe from my song. But mere moments later, his brow tightened, creasing into several deep ridges. Concern rose on his face, his eyes darting from my mouth to my eyes and back.

  I modulated a fourth up, then another minor third, singing with a glottal tone like the muggy feel of air thickened with rain. As I did, the Sellari’s lips began to tremble, and a single runnel of blood issued from his nose.

  He shook his head in confusion and worry, and pulled at his bonds in panic. I then began a steady pul
sing change in pitch, letting each new note come without forethought, landing in a modal set unlike anything I’d ever heard—part Aeolian, part Dorian. But never rushed, and never loud.

  When the Sellari looked back at me, abandoning his effort to break his bonds, the fear was so palpable I could feel it. This was the moment of resignation that precedes some final pain or gasp. But this Sellari’s pain was less about the fear of not living another day, and more about what he left behind: days he would never spend in the company of a son and daughter; regret for failing to do something he wished he’d made time for; the forgiving smile of his wife.

  I sang his absolute value, resonated with him at the most fundamental level, and caused a violence inside him that tore him apart. He appeared to try and scream, but he could only tremble and sweat and suffer as my song undid him.

  Finally, in a darkly beautiful moment, the resonance was complete. That’s when I stopped, and he collapsed. The sweat and blood that coated him steamed in the moonlight. I felt both triumphant and sick inside, my own sense of attunement fading. But in those moments of song, I had found the place of the Sellari, that fingering a Lieholan could use to target the song of an entire people.

  It was a broad and bloody thought. And once I’d found it, I began to weep. It was not a song I should know. The moral weight of that knowledge stole my strength and turned my legs to water. I fell to the mulch of rotting poplar leaves and sat there, smelling their autumn brown and the scent of cold soil.

  SEVEN

  DIVAD TURNED THE length of Pemam wood slowly over the alcohol flame. He’d been at it for three painstaking hours. He carefully heated each thumb-length of the bow-stick over a small clay pot filled with sour-mash-soaked gauze. Using a strong wheat whiskey served a whimsical notion he couldn’t explain. He was also of the opinion that the spent wheat alcohol infused the bow with the grace seen in an unharvested wheat field brushed by a slow wind. Then he put the heated section to the camber, bending it gently before placing it on the edge of the flat bench. With a caliper, he measured the distance from the benchtop to the upper edge of the bow. For best performance, the bow camber needed to follow a gently increasing arc.