Songspinners

by Sarah Ash

  ‘Do lie down again, Illustre.’ Sister Crespine’s hand closed around his arm, coaxing him back towards the couch.

  Orial Magelonne? How could she be singing his music? Did it mean that his triumphant apotheosis was nothing but a plagiarism of some existing work? The thought filled him with a deep and dragging sense of self-loathing. Had the fire so sapped his abilities that he could not even string together a series of notes without borrowing from some lesser composer?

  Or – was there some other explanation?

  ‘I must talk to her.’ He reared up from the couch, only to be pressed gently back.

  ‘I can’t disturb her when she’s with a patient,’ Sister Crespine said firmly. ‘Dr Magelonne would not approve.’

  By dusk Amaru Khassian reached the River Gardens. He was not sure how long he had been aimlessly wandering the streets and terraces of the city. Now the clear light was fading from the hillsides and birds were twittering in the branches as they fluttered and settled to roost.

  The pleasure gardens were all but deserted now; the winding paths that led amongst bosky groves were lit by little lanterns to show the few remaining promenaders the way to the gates.

  The evening air was fresh and damp; heavy dew was already soaking the grass parterres. Khassian found himself in front of a little temple in the antique style, neglected amongst the cypresses. Entering beneath the crumbling pediment, he saw that the walls were painted with murals.

  Dragonflies darted in a frieze of faded water-blue and rush-green above a black stream where pale lotos floated. He hardly noticed them. One thought alone obsessed him.

  So it had come to this. His compositional powers were so enfeebled, so wasted by the accident, that all he was capable of was plagiarism.

  He must have heard the melody in the Sanatorium whilst he lay in fever – and assimilated it as his own. It was probably some current Sulien ditty with a crude refrain, sung in all the taverns and qaffë shops.

  How else could the girl have been singing the very notes he had been thinking? The realisation filled him with a rank feeling of disgust.

  The River Avenne ran close by; in the evening’s stillness he could hear the waters foaming over the wedge-shaped weir. Drawn to the tumultuous sound, he found himself walking up towards the rail that overlooked the river.

  Swollen with spring rains and mountain snow-melt, the Avenne swirled in full torrent over the weir, sending up flecks of white spray.

  Khassian stared down, unseeing, into the dark turbulence of the waters. The raw, untamed force of the river called to him.

  They would not find his body until days later when it was washed up miles downstream.

  Better to finish the work half-done by the Opera fire. He stood poised above the churning waters. Flecks of spray kissed his face, colder than snow. Frozen tears. His mind was as blank as the void below.

  Now.

  ‘Illustre!’ Someone shouted his name. ‘No!’

  He glanced around and vaguely saw through the mist of spray the tall figure of Acir Korentan tearing up the path towards him. A defiant smile twisted his lips. At least he would die knowing he had eluded the Commanderie.

  He turned back – and stepped out into nothingness.

  CHAPTER 6

  Acir saw Khassian poised on the edge of the swollen river. He saw him glance back – caught the look of defiant triumph – then throw himself into the waters.

  Acir was pulling off his jacket as he ran forwards, kicking off his boots as he vaulted over the railings. He paused a moment to scan the bank for a branch, a loose railing, but there was nothing.

  Khassian’s head rose once above the churning waters at the centre of a swirling vortex – and then it sucked him down.

  Acir took a breath – and plunged into the torrent.

  The shock of the ice-cold water almost knocked the breath from his lungs. He went under – chaos of black water, white spray – then kicked upwards again, reaching out blindly for Khassian’s current-tumbled body.

  His hands caught hold, his arm crooked about Khassian’s neck, dragging the head above the water.

  Don’t fight me. Don’t fight me now.

  The water tore at him, tugging Khassian’s body as he fought to pull it to the shore. It was a limp weight now, dragging him down, he was struggling to keep a hold on it, he was losing feeling in his fingers, they were numbed with the icy cold –

  The river had become a lethal adversary – he fought it for possession of Khassian. If he lost the fight, they would both drown. He took in a mouthful of water, coughed it out, spluttering…

  One foot grazed against the muddy bank. He scrabbled to keep the foothold and heaved the water-sodden body half up out of the water. Rushing waters still dinned in his ears, a roar louder than the roar of his own pounding blood. Khassian’s body seemed to be slipping back into the river. Acir slithered around in the mud until he could hook his arms beneath Khassian’s and pull him right out of the water.

  The last effort exhausted him; he slipped, falling over Khassian, water streaming from his sodden clothes.

  ‘Khassian,’ he whispered, coughing. ‘Khassian!’

  Khassian lay without moving, head lolling, muddy water running out from a corner of his slack mouth.

  Sweet Mhir, let him not be dead.

  Acir swept the soaked hair from his own face and bent over the composer, one hand on his chest. The ribs were still; he could feel no heartbeat beneath the wet jacket.

  He looked desperately around for help – but the fast-darkening gardens were empty. Only a solitary bird sang, high in a bare-branched tree.

  He tipped the composer on to his side, trying to empty the water from his open mouth. Still no stir of life.

  ‘Help!’ he shouted to the empty gardens. ‘Help, here!’ His voice echoed in the twilight – but no one appeared.

  There was nothing for it. He knelt astride Khassian and covered the open mouth with his own, breathing in his own panting breath… then pressed his palms rhythmically on the still ribcage. Khassian’s lips were cold and wet, slimed with the foul taste of riverwater.

  ‘Breathe, Khassian.’ Acir willed life into the limp body as he worked. ‘Damn you, breathe.’

  A faint shudder convulsed the composer’s body. He turned his head a little to one side – and vomited up a gush of foul water into the grass.

  ‘Why?’ he said faintly, and then retched again, ribs heaving now as he gasped in lungfuls of air.

  Khassian was alive. Acir began to shake with relief; relief – and cold. Only now did he realise that he too was soaked to the skin. And the evening chill was fast settling into the river valley.

  ‘What’s going on down there? I heard shouts!’

  Acir looked up and saw a man approaching through the early-evening gloom.

  ‘Can you fetch help?’ Acir’s teeth began to chatter. ‘Th-there’s been an accident.’

  ‘You stay here. I’ll get help.’

  Stay here. The irony of the words would have made Acir smile if his mouth had not been so numbed with the cold.

  He could just make out the crumpled shape of his jacket where he had flung it in the grass. He scrambled up the bank and retrieved it, tucking it about Khassian’s body.

  Khassian’s eyelids flickered open.

  ‘Why, damn you?’ he whispered.

  ‘Self-destruction is the ultimate sin,’ Acir said, though the sternness of his words was lessened by the involuntary chattering of his teeth. He seemed unable to stop shivering. ‘I c-could not let you put your immortal soul in danger of p-perdition.’

  ‘You really – believe all that, don’t you? Damnation, salvation. You poor deluded simpleton –’

  And then torchlights illumined the bank. The rescuers had brought blankets and a stretcher. They carried Khassian to the lodge-keeper’s cottage at the gates to the gardens, Acir following, squelching as water dripped into his boots.

  There the lodge-keeper and his wife helped them out of their wet clot
hes and wrapped them in blankets. Acir found himself thawing in front of the fire, hands clasped about a mug of mulled cider.

  ‘A foolish accident,’ he told them. ‘My companion was leaning over the river when the wind carried his hat away. He tried to fish it out with a stick… and fell in…’

  ‘Visitors, eh?’ The lodge-keeper gave his wife a knowing look. ‘The Avenne’s treacherous this time of year. Sulien folk won’t go near her till spring’s past. Then she runs as smooth and placid as a minnow-stream.’

  Khassian, sitting hunched in his cocoon of blankets and towels, slowly raised his head.

  ‘You can’t go back to your lodgings in those wet clothes,’ the woman said. ‘Shall we send for dry ones?’

  ‘You’ve been most generous…’ Now that the crisis was past, Acir found himself fighting off drowsiness; as the warmth of the fire and the spiced cider glowed in his veins, he felt an overwhelming urge to curl up in the flames’ glow and sleep. Yet he must keep awake, keep vigilant. Given Khassian’s morbid frame of mind, he might easily attempt to kill himself again.

  ‘You lied, Captain Korentan.’ Khassian’s voice rasped, rough from retching up the riverwater he had swallowed. ‘You lied to protect me. Doesn’t that mean you’ve tarnished your immortal soul?’

  Acir came awake with a start. Khassian was watching him, his eyes lit with a dull gleam. Hard as pebbles seen through riverwater…

  ‘Does that bother you?’ Acir asked.

  ‘Why are you still here? Afraid I’ll set fire to myself? Impale myself on the fire-poker?’ He broke off, coughing. ‘But then I’m no use to you dead, am I?’

  Acir chose not to reply. He sensed that Khassian was spoiling for a fight. And he was too tired to fight. Too damned tired…

  A little while later, the grating of carriage wheels on the gravel path outside woke Acir. He must have lapsed into a doze. He sat up, inwardly cursing himself for falling asleep on duty.

  Cramoisy flung open the door and swept into the firelit parlour.

  ‘I came as soon as I got your message! Whatever possessed you to fall into the river, Amar?’

  Acir stood up, clutching the blanket to him.

  ‘And you, Captain Korentan, you leapt in to rescue him. What a hero!’

  The castrato seemed charged with the excitement of the situation, his gestures and voice too large for the little parlour.

  ‘The clothes, Cramoisy,’ Khassian said wearily. ‘Have you brought the clothes?’

  ‘Heavens, yes. And Mistress Permay’s making a nourishing barley soup for you.’

  Acir cleared his throat. It pained him to have to make the request, but he could not think of any alternative course of action.

  ‘Diva, if I might borrow a pair of breeches and a shirt… I will have them laundered and returned to you on the morrow.’

  ‘You have no other clothes with you, Captain?’

  The Diva would not know, of course, of the vow of poverty he had made.

  ‘We travel light in the Commanderie.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t do for you to wander the streets of Sulien naked beneath a blanket?’ The castrato tweaked teasingly at the edge of Acir’s blanket; horrified, he took a step backwards and sat down rather suddenly on the couch. Cramoisy laughed and turned away. ‘How fortuitous that I gathered several items of clothing of Khassian’s with me. I thought he might be cold.’

  ‘Fortunate, Cramoisy,’ Khassian said quietly. ‘Fortunate.’

  ‘Whatsoever,’ Cramoisy said, ignoring him as he pulled out shirts, breeches, socks, and laid them on the fender to warm. ‘There you are.’

  Cramoisy stood looking at Acir expectantly. It was only then that he realised the castrato intended him to get dressed in front of him. Acir felt his face burning – and not from the heat of the fire.

  ‘Why this modesty, Captain? I’m an old trouper, well used to cramped dressing rooms in provincial theatres. D’you think I haven’t seen it all before?’

  ‘Cramoisy,’ Khassian said warningly. ‘Go and give my thanks to the good people who have sheltered us. Some remuneration would be appropriate in the circumstances…’

  Cramoisy paused a moment. Then, shooting a venomous glance at Khassian, he left the room, slamming the door.

  Acir turned away from Khassian and, in the shadows, shed his blanket to pull on a pair of breeches. As he turned back into the light of the flames for a shirt, he saw Khassian regarding him with curiosity.

  ‘What is that?‘

  Khassian was staring at his bare chest. Acir glanced down and felt a flush of heat sear his face again.

  ‘A battle-scar?’

  ‘What, this?’ Acir touched the tattoo that covered his left breast, suddenly self-conscious. ‘The mark of the Order of the Rosecoeur.’ He tugged the shirt on, hastily covering it.

  ‘No. Let me see.’

  Acir found himself uncovering the sacred mark to show the composer. Perhaps if he could explain his devotion to Mhir he might win Khassian over…

  Khassian raised one damaged hand as if he wanted to touch the dye-stained skin…

  ‘A black-thorned rose… what are these three crimson spots, what do they signify?’

  ‘It commemorates the miracle of the bleeding Rose. Mhir’s martyrdom. The three drops of blood that fell from the Rose that grew from the dead Prophet’s breast and restored Elesstar to life. The thorns represent the difficulties we encounter in our life’s journey; the three drops of blood, the three virtues: love, fidelity and –’

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Amaru!’ Cramoisy’s voice shrilled outside the room, shattering the moment’s strange, still intimacy. ‘Are you ready?’

  Khassian let his hand drop back.

  ‘Another minute, miu caru!’

  Acir could not help but notice the immediate alteration in his tone as he called to Cramoisy; the voice he had heard a few seconds earlier betrayed a different Khassian entirely – gentle and sensitive.

  ‘Pass me those clothes.’

  Acir had handed him the warmed clothes and turned to look away as Khassian shrugged off the blanket. From the smothered grunts of effort he could tell that the composer was trying his best to dress himself. And only then did he realise that there was no way that Khassian would be able to do up the fastenings.

  ‘You’ll have to help me. If that’s not too demeaning for a member of the secret Order of the Rosecoeur? Or perhaps you’ve taken a vow forbidding you to touch other people’s clothing?’

  ‘Would you rather I called the Diva?’ Acir said, stung in spite of himself.

  ‘Good gracious, no. I’ll have to endure him fussing over me as he waits for me to develop a chill. Keep him away for a few moments longer.’

  Acir turned around and saw that Khassian had managed to manoeuvre his arms through the shirt sleeves and wriggle into the breeches. The breeches however were flapping open.

  This was no different, Acir told himself, from aiding a wounded confrère. He had stripped away blood-soiled, slashed uniforms, he had bathed and salved wounds, he had eased clean garments on over bandaged limbs.

  And yet it was different. As he knelt beside the couch and leaned across to fasten the shirt ties, damp strands of his hair fell forward, brushing Khassian’s bare chest. The leather thong that usually confined his hair must have been lost in the river. He raised one hand to push it out of his eyes and saw that Khassian was looking at him. Firelight burnished red glints in Khassian’s water-tangled hair, glimmered in shadowed laughter in his eyes, at the corners of his mouth.

  And it occurred to Acir that the composer was in some obscure way mocking him.

  Only an hour or so ago he had covered that mocking mouth with his own, warmed it back to life with his own warmth, his own breath.

  Angered, he snatched his hands away.

  ‘What’s the matter, Captain Korentan?’ Khassian’s voice was dark, fire-edged and dangerous. ‘Burned your fingers?’

  Riverdreams.

  Orial sank down, down beneath the blac
k waters. Dark shapes, long and sinuous, snaked past her.

  Drowning.

  Black waters, white shroud. Bound from head to foot, she could not kick free. Spiralling on down into the muddy depths.

  Her jaw was bound, she could not move, she could not cry out. The lead weights dragged her down to the bottom. Weights, cerements –

  They had given her to the waters, thinking she was dead.

  But I’m alive!

  She heard the snap and grind of razor-teeth close to her ear. The water swirled.

  The water-snakes. They would devour her, alive or dead, they would strip the living flesh from her bones–

  ‘Noooo!’

  She was sitting up in her own bed, staring wildly into the darkness, her arms crossed against her breast, hands clutching her bare shoulders.

  The Antiquarian, Dame Jolaine Tradescar, rubbed her eyes. Old age was an extreme irritation. Nothing worked properly anymore: hearing failed, sight dimmed – and just when she needed her senses to be at their most acute.

  The desk was stacked with notebooks filled with page after tightly packed page of her small, neat script, her meticulous drawings of the hieroglyphs, a lifetime’s scholarly obsession. A lifetime spent searching for hidden clues, following false trails.

  Many times in the past, she had been certain she had been about to crack the code. She should know better by now! And yet she could not suppress a shiver of anticipation as she took out her eyeglasses to study the new find more closely.

  A soaking in a bowl of clean water had removed the encrusted mud. She could see what it was now. A rolled sheet of fine pewter.

  A curse.

  With trembling fingers she took up tweezers and, with extreme delicacy, began to smooth the ancient pewter sheet flat.

  The custom of inscribing a petition to the Goddess Elesstar and dropping it into the sacred spring was still popular amongst the people of Sulien. A generous donation towards the upkeep of the Temple was the customary fee. Most petitions were pleas for a cure for various ailments – but a few were vengeful curses, imploring the Goddess’s aid. No one was certain when the custom had begun but the Priests and Priestesses did not discourage it, especially as the petitioners usually brought generous gifts of food and wine with them. And no one knew anymore why it was essential to scratch the petition backwards – it was merely the tradition.