Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  Most marine trumpets are as tall as a man, or even taller, but they are, for historical reasons, almost exclusively played by women. The evolution of musical instruments through the ages has a somewhat checkered history, entangled with the history of prostitution as well as the history of religion—which two contexts have not always separated themselves fully—but in the case of the marine trumpet the evolution mostly took place in a religious context, beginning with the rites of the mystery religions and continuing in the tradition of monachism that developed in such exoteric religions as Christianity and Druidism—both of which, of course, laid claim to the invention and accused the other of imitation.

  Whatever the truth of the matter—and it has been severely confused as well as concealed by deliberate mystery—there was a period in the history of the Empire’s various religions when it was considered indecent for women to play the trumpet, presumably because the operations of the mouth and effects on the cheeks were uncomfortably reminiscent of operations not involving cold brass. As a result of that, trumpets and similar instruments were restricted in various religious ceremonies to male performers, while females were restricted to stringed instruments, perhaps primarily and at least including the one that was called a marine trumpet, not because it had anything to do with the sea, but because of feminine associations with the name Marie, itself connected with the etymology of words such as “maternity.”

  At any rate, to cut a long and inescapably vague story short, the only marine trumpets on Mnemosyne, and the only habitual players of the marine trumpet, in the present Age of Not-Quite-Enlightenment, were to be found in the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar, where the distaff side of the ancient bardic tradition was supposedly maintained as a kind of devotion. Hence, Hecate Rain’s regular visits to the Convent: she was, as she had baldly declared, without further explanation, learning to play the marine trumpet.

  Evidently, she was taking lessons from the Mother Superior herself. Equally evidently, the Sisters were willing to let her take one of their instruments out of the Convent, when the time came, so that she could accompany herself when she gave public performances of “Eurydice’s Lament,” which she was presumably planning to do when the tourist season began again in late spring.

  Perhaps, given that I now knew that the Mother Superior was not bound to seclusion, the entire company of Sisters of Shalimar would be in the audience, kindly overlooking the blatant paganism of the poem’s theme in the spirit of religious tolerance that the successors of the Divine Julius had been wise enough to make into one of the cardinal principles of Imperial organization. History might have been very different if the Divine Julius had been as jealous as certain other gods I could name—for one thing, the Empire might have been smashed to smithereens by religious wars and schisms, as had become a very real threat more than once.

  Was it, I wondered about to become a threat again? Surely not, if what was coming to the surface in the matter of Monsieur de Toustain’s enigmatic legacy was a squabble between the rival cults of Orpheus and Dionysus. No matter how successful the residues of the cults were in matters of political promotion, they were still small-scale affairs, deliberately exclusive and esoteric. They could not possibly threaten the kinds of upheavals that had occasionally been threatened by exoteric creeds that boasted millions of adherents, such as Christianity and its eternal rival, Druidism. The battle of the saints against the bards really had been on the brink of eruption into civil war more than once in the last two thousand years—but the Empire’s essentially secular military organization had always quelled the storm, enforcing compulsory tolerance, in spite of the paradoxicality of the oxymoron, just as it had always withstood so-called barbarian invasions from without.

  And the Empire had, in my view, always been right, even if its methods had occasionally been a trifle brutal. It really was in the interests of adherents of all religions to live in peace rather than seeking to exterminate one another, and it really was in the interests of barbarians to learn the disciple of civilization. Whether the ends justified the means or not, they were ends worth fighting for, and worthy of attainment. Where would arts like mine be, if the Empire had dissolved into chaos? I couldn’t think about it without shuddering. And if one looked at it cynically—as I, inevitably, tended to do—didn’t religions thrive on martyrs? Didn’t they benefit from memories of oppression and the heroes who had been prepared to die for the faith? Weren’t the Christians proud of having a Martyr’s Mount in the Capital, even if it was nowadays the abode of artists, whores and apaches? One cannot truly appreciate the value and benefits of peace without having experienced the occasional lack of it—and that applies on the personal level as well as the provincial and imperial levels. All in all, it is not entirely a bad thing that peace of mind is sometimes difficult to obtain, and that the emotions we cannot command sometimes pose inordinately stern challenges to its attainment.

  Such were the ideas that were running through my mind while I walked home, hunching my shoulders against the unseasonable chill, and groping with my lungs for a satisfaction that was somehow no longer fully present in the air. I had grown used to the slightly strange odor, but it was still there; there really was something wrong with the atmosphere, and it really was ominous, if only in a purely physical and natural sense. I suddenly had an impression of how tiny and vulnerable humans are in the face of elements that are far beyond their control. Do we really need the supernatural, when a trivial change in the behavior of the sun, or the arrival of some unexpected comet from the depths of space, could bring civilization on the surface of our insignificant globe to an abrupt end?

  I tried to shove those ideas to the back of my mind and concentrate on something more comfortable as well as more authentically urgent. I thought that I might perhaps be able to get a little work done, in spite of the poor light, now that I had delegated the mystery of the Toustain legacy to hopefully-competent authorities.

  It was, of course, an optimistic chimera. I was caught up in something now, and whatever it was, its toils were not going to let me go without a struggle.

  There was a carriage waiting outside my house when I arrived, and inside the carriage, less than happy about having had to wait on the road, was the Marquis de Mesmay.

  “I rang,” he said, stonily, “but there was no answer.”

  “My profuse apologies, Milord,” I said. “I sent my servants to help a new neighbor move in.” I waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the former Toustain house.

  I opened the door myself and showed the Marquis directly into the studio, partly because I assumed that he had come to see how his triptych was coming along, and partly because there was still no fire in the drawing room. I busied myself stoking up the one in the studio while my client scrutinized the middle panel of the project, doubtless measuring the progress I had made since the last time he had called.

  “I’m truly sorry to have forced you to wait outside, Milord,” I said, when I had finished. “At least we can be glad that the north-west wind has not resumed yesterday’s force, and the snow did not settle, even if it has left the roads a little muddier than usual.”

  I expected him to tell me that he hadn’t come to talk to me about the weather, but apparently it was not a topic of complete disinterest to him.

  “Did you notice anything anomalous about that snow, Master Rathenius?” he asked.

  “Yes I did,” I admitted. “It appeared to be impregnated with soot.”

  “That’s what you think it was?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  “The soot is accountable,” he said, as if he were agreeing with me, “but how do you account for the pillar of fire that is supposed to have produced it?”

  He had me completely at a loss. I could only repeat: “Pillar of fire?”

  “You haven’t been down to the harbor, then?”

  “No, Milord, I’ve been visiting friends.”

  “You must h
ave walked back briskly, to stay ahead of the rumor. The crews of two boats that docked this morning, having been fishing in the Oceanic waters beyond the Breton Isles, reported that a gigantic pillar of fire had been seen rising out of the Ocean the night before last.”

  I took note of the formulation of the report: the pillar had been seen; the crews of the boats had not claimed to have seen it themselves. They were passing on second hand rumor, gleaned at sea or in the ports of the Breton Isles. Under other circumstances, I might have assumed that it was a tall tale or a hallucination—but I had seen the black snow.

  On the other hand, a pillar of fire emerging from the Atlantic! That merely pushed the prodigy one step back, without making it any less prodigious. Quite the contrary in fact.

  “The fishermen are saying that it’s an omen,” Mesmay added. “The islanders are a superstitious lot, I know, who see omens everywhere, but still… if gigantic pillars of fire can’t qualify as omens, what can?”

  “Indeed, Milord,” I said, nodding my head.

  “By nightfall,” the Marquis continued “they’ll doubtless have come up with some ancient prophecy, Bardic or Christian, real or invented, making the prodigy a sign of some kind… perhaps of the end of the world...”

  He was evidently fishing, but for what, and why? His speculations were closely akin to my own, and naturally so, but that only made me want to try even harder to defuse them.

  “I’ve never heard any mention of pillars of fire in all the years I’ve been on the island,” I told him, “and I must have heard all the local legends by now. If there’s any ready-made implication in the stories the fishermen are telling, I have no idea what it is.”

  He nodded, as if any agreement or sympathy. “And how many years have you been on the island, Master Rathenius?” he asked, too casually for the question to be genuinely casual, even if it hadn’t been a question that suddenly seemed to be on everybody’s mind.

  Given that at least one person was supposed to be able to put a number on it, and there really were hundreds of indigenes old enough to remember a time when I hadn’t been here, I saw no reason not to tell the truth.

  “Twenty-seven years,” I said.

  “That’s time enough to get to know it thoroughly,” he observed, as if conceding a point. “Tell me, Master Rathenius, do you know whether the Cult of Dionysus has any presence on the island?”

  I wasn’t taken by surprise by that. I answered, with all evident frankness: “Not so far as I’m aware—but as it’s supposed to be a secret society, I assume that if it did have any presence here, it would have done everything possible to prevent my being aware of it, just as the Cult of Orpheus would have done, with exactly the same result. Can I offer you something to drink, by the way, Milord? Do sit down, if you’ve finished studying the painting.”

  The double deflection seemed to work. He did take a seat, in the armchair I’d brought up to the fire for Tommaso Dellacrusca, and he did accept a glass of wine—but when I sat down with him, he got back to the point.

  “I assume that you’re mentioning the Cult of Orpheus because you’ve heard rumor that I might be a member of it?”

  “I’ve even heard rumor that I might be a member of it, or of its mortal rival,” I confirmed. “People who are accustomed to look for omens and hidden meanings in everything easily draw the wrong inference from appearances. You’ve commissioned me to produce a triptych of paintings on the subject of the Orpheus myth. That’s enough, in the minds of some superstitious people, who already suspect me of being a magician, to imply probable membership in a secret cult. We both know how ridiculous that is, because we both know that an artistic appreciation of the symbolism of mythology is a world away from any kind of religious belief or political conspiracy.”

  “Indeed,” said Mesmay. “I understand, by the way, that your new neighbor is the painter whose Eurydice I have hanging in my a small drawing room?”

  “He is,” I said. “And he has brought his Eurydice with him. She’s as beautiful in the flesh as she is in the painting, although necessarily a trifle less ethereal.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “I could see when Madame Mavor first showed me the painting that it had been painted with love. He paints her often, I understand, in various roles—but only Eurydice would allow him to imagine himself as Orpheus. I said as much to Madame Mavor, and she told me that he is indeed a music lover, a skilled performer on the violin.”

  “So I believe.”

  “And he has a prodigy of his own, if what Madame Mavor says is true—a daughter with a genuine gift. Since she’s here, and there’s so little to do in the dead season, we really ought to make arrangements to hear her, don’t you think?”

  “She’s very young,” I said, “and with all due respect to Myrica, she does have a tendency to exaggerate, only natural in an artists’ agent. I met the girl last night, and she seemed to me to be rather shy. I’m not sure that she’s ready yet to give concerts.”

  “Still,” said the Marquis, with more insistence than I thought the situation warranted, “we must make our new guests welcome—and Parenot is one of the artists whose work I’ve patronized. I really ought to organize a reception for him at my house, so that he can be properly introduced to Fion Commonal and the other members of the Island Council, and other notables... all the more so as Madame Mavor’s hastily-improvised reception seems to have been a disappointment to all concerned.”

  I took note of his use of the phrase our new guests, suggesting that he was indeed beginning to think of himself as a resident of the island and not merely a summer visitor.

  “That’s a kind thought, Milord,” I said trying not to sound too unenthusiastic, and wondering what his hidden agenda might be.

  “And it would be a perfect opportunity for the young prodigy to make her debut, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, no longer attempting to dissimulate my lack of enthusiasm, “but as I said, Milord, I really don’t think that she’s ready to play in public, and it wouldn’t be kind to invite her to do it. She’s very young.”

  “We shall see,” he said, serenely. “It’s very kind of you to have lent them your servants to help them settle into the old Toustain house. I imagine that it will require a good deal of work to render it comfortable.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been inside.”

  “Really? I understood that you and Toustain were friends?”

  “Nodding acquaintances,” I said, by way of polite correction. “As a painter, who spends a great deal of time absorbed in my work, I prefer not to have much interaction with my neighbors. Monsieur de Toustain seemed to feel the same way.”

  I expected him to bring up the legacy then, but he didn’t—not directly, at least.

  “But you know, don’t you, that Toustain was not his real name?”

  “I hadn’t the slightest idea of it until last night. Apparently, there’s a rumor going round to that effect, but I don’t know whether to believe it. The island’s rumors are not renowned for their reliability.” I was tempted to add: People even claim to have seen pillars of fire rising out of the sea, as an example of their unreliability, but I didn’t. I had held its soot in the palm of my hand.

  “You can believe it,” Mesmay assured me. “I have it from his notary, who is now mine.”

  I knew that it was a risky move, but I didn’t want to leave all the fishing to him. “And is that why you asked me about the Cult of Dionysus?” I said.

  “Yes it is,” he said. “But you were only nodding acquaintances, you say? So you would never have had any reason to suspect him of being a Dionysian, whatever meaning one can attach to the term nowadays?”

  He still hadn’t mentioned the legacy, but the absence was beginning to become conspicuous, and provocative.

  “No reason at all,” I said. “At least until I found the parchment hidden in the binding of one of the books he left me.” There was no point in keeping quiet about it: the whole point of gi
ving a copy to Niklaus Hylne had been to spread the news, so that any gangs of Italian bravos who happened to land on the island would discover that their cat was out of the bag.

  “A parchment?” Mesmay repeated, in a voice whose intonation was almost as indecipherable as the mysterious symbols.

  “Yes,” I said. “Would you like to see it? I can’t make head nor tail of it, so I’ve sent copies to various scholars here and in the Capital, in the hope that one of them can unravel its meaning.”

  Mesmay was keeping his face rigidly straight, but he looked a good deal paler now than when he had sat down, in spite of the fact that I had stoked up the fire. He was trying hard to conceal an intense interest, and the strain was showing.

  “You’ve sent copies…,” he echoed, as if he were having difficulty believing it.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have no way of knowing, of course, whether it has any connection with the Cult of Dionysus, and I don’t suppose any of the scholars will be able to work it out, either, but I thought that I ought to make an effort, in the interests of scholarship.”

  “Of course,” he said. It wasn’t the feeblest of course I’d ever heard, but it was a close-run contest. He didn’t take long to add: “May I see the parchment?”

  I went to fetch it from the hiding-place in the wine-cellar in which I’d placed it, and set it down on a table in the studio. “It’s rather fragile, I’m afraid,” I told him. “It’s perhaps best if we don’t handle to too much.”

  He didn’t object. Indeed, there seemed to be a certain reverence in the way that he bent down to inspect the parchment, scanning it very carefully with a gaze that seemed extremely intense.

  That contemplation lasted for several minutes—almost as if he were trying to commit the image to memory, or striving to find an intuition that would permit him to grasp its meaning.

  “Do you know what script it’s written in” I hazarded.

  “No,” was the inevitable reply. I had no idea whether the denial was honest or not, but I felt sure that he knew something—or, to be strictly accurate, that he thought he knew something—that he wasn’t about to share with me.