Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. McKillip

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

From the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Bards of Bone Plain.

Something half-woke in him, and he froze on the threshold, seeing misshapen faces billow in the flames.

As a child, Rook had been taken in by the bards of Luly, and raised as one of their own. Of his past he knew nothing—except faint memoires of fire and death that he'd do anything to forget.

But nightmares, and a new threat to the island that had become his own, would not let him escape the dreadful fate of his true family. Haunted by the music of the bards, he left the only home he knew to wander the land of the power-hungry Basilisk who had destroyed his family. And perhaps, finally, to find a future in the fulfillment of his forgotten destiny...

Release date: December 1, 1999

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 320

Sample

Song   for
the  Basilisk

Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE
WINTER ROSE

SONG FOR THE BASILISK

Song   for
the  Basilisk

Table of Contents

PART ONE

Caladrius

One

Within the charred, silent husk of Tormalyne Palace, ash opened eyes deep in a vast fireplace, stared back at the moon in the shattered window. The marble walls of the chamber, once white as the moon and bright with tapestries, were smoke-blackened and bare as bone. Beyond the walls, the city was soundless, as if even words had burned. The ash, born out of fire and left behind it, watched the pale light glide inch by inch over the dead on the floor, reveal the glitter in an unblinking eye, a gold ring, a jewel in the collar of what had been the dog. When moonlight reached the small burned body beside the dog, the ash in the hearth kept watch over it with senseless, mindless intensity. But nothing moved except the moon.

Later, as quiet as the dead, the ash watched the living enter the chamber again: three men with grimy, battered faces. Except for the dog’s collar, there was nothing left for them to take. They carried fire, though there was nothing left to burn. They moved soundlessly, as if the dead might hear. When their fire found the man with no eyes on the floor, words came out of them: sharp, tight, jagged. The tall man with white hair and a seamed, scarred face began to weep.

The ash crawled out of the hearth.

They all wept when they saw him. Words flurried out of them, meaningless as bird cries. They touched him, raising clouds of ash, sculpting a face, hair, hands. They made insistent, repeated noises at him that meant nothing. They argued with one another; he gazed at the small body holding the dog on the floor and understood that he was dead. Drifting cinders of words caught fire now and then, blazed to a brief illumination in his mind. Provinces, he understood. North. Hinterlands. Basilisk.

He saw the Basilisk’s eyes then, searching for him, and he turned back into ash.

“Take him to Luly,” he heard the white-haired man say clearly. “No one will expect to find him there. If they ever suspect he is still alive.”

“To Luly? That’s nowhere. The end of the world.”

“Then it might just be far enough from the Basilisk.”

“But the bards—they’re scarcely human, are they? They live on a rock in the sea, they go in and out of the hinterlands, they can turn into seals—”

“Tales,” the white-haired man said brusquely. “Go before they find us here. I’ll finish this.”

“You’ll be killed.”

“Does it matter? Tell them to call him Caladrius. After the bird whose song means death. Go.”

He looked back as they led him from the room, and saw a ring of fire billow around the dead. The eyeless man turned in the flames to look at him. A dark word flew out of his mouth, spiraled upward through the smoke on ravens’ wings into the night.

He closed his own eyes, made himself as blind, as silent, so that he could enter the kingdom of the dead.

It was a long journey. The wind’s voice changed, became harsher, colder. It began to smell of sea instead of light-soaked stone or earth. The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.

Over the shoulder of the stranger who rowed them through the waves, he watched a dark mass separate itself from the night. A constellation of vague, flickering lights formed among the stars. The small boat veered erratically into hollows between the waves. Wood smacked water; brine flicked across his face. He opened his mouth, tasted the odd, dank mingling of bitterness and fish. He swallowed it, and felt a word form in his throat, the first since he had died.

“Where,” he heard himself say. No one else did, it seemed for a moment. Then the man behind him, whose hands braced him against the fits and starts of tide, loosed a long breath.

“That is Luly,” he said softly, his voice very close. “The school on the rock. You’ll be safe there among the bards. Just learn what they teach you, and stay out of the hinterlands, and don’t swim with the seals. If you remember your name, keep it secret, lock it away somewhere until you are old enough to know what to do with it.”

He saw fire on the rock then, and words died again. Ghosts began to form in the flames. He closed his eyes, hid himself and his memories in the ashes of a ruined palace. He burned; he watched himself burn until he knew that he was dead, and that the boy in the boat who saw fire on the rock had no memories, no past. The boat bumped against something. He opened his eyes, stared unflinchingly at the windblown flames on the dock while the boy buried himself in the ashes, until he turned into ash, until the ashes themselves disappeared.

He rose then, stepped out of the boat to meet the fire.

It turned itself into torches. Men and women circled him, questioning in lilting, sinewy voices. Their long hair and windblown robes flowed in and out of the night; the uneasy tide spilled against the rock behind them, tossed a glittering spindrift over them, so that they seemed to reshape themselves constantly out of fire and wind and sea. Their faces resembled the faces of animals in old tapestries: lean-jawed wolves and foxes, golden-eyed owls, falcons, even a unicorn, with white skin and hair, and eyes like ovals of night. But they spoke and smiled like humans. Their words, holding no shadow of grief, weariness, despair, seemed of another language, that he once knew, and still recognized.

“Caladrius,” said one of the men who had brought him, in answer to a question. “Call him Caladrius.”

He felt a hand under his chin, met eyes that seemed, in the torchlight, as gold as coins. She was a sea creature, he saw: half fish, half woman, who rose up out of waves on the backs of his father’s chairs, with a shell in her hand and a mysterious smile on her face. The woman drew damp strands of hair out of his eyes. Her own hair, the color of wheat, fell in a fat braid over her shoulder. It seemed to him like some rare, astonishing treasure; his fingers lifted of their own accord, touched it. Her mouth smiled, but her eyes, not quite smiling, searched for the past he had abandoned.

She said slowly, “It’s a complex name for one so young.”

“That’s all we were told.” The man’s hands lay gently on his shoulders, still holding him; his voice was dark and taut with past. “After we found him in the ashes. The farm in the provinces burned with everything in it. His family. Everyone. Tell him that when he asks. He doesn’t remember anything.”

“Then who told you his name?”

“His great-uncle. I doubt that even he lived much longer, after he told us to bring the child here. Will you keep him?”

He heard tide gather and break, far away. Gather and break. His breath gathered; he waited, watching the woman’s face. She spoke finally, her slender fingers, white as spindrift, sliding over his head.

“We’ll call him Rook, for his black, black eyes.” She glanced around the circle, her gold brows raised, questioning silently; there was no dissent in the strange, wild faces gazing at him. “Rook Caladrius. And if he begins to remember?”

“Then he will name himself.”

The man’s fingers tightened on his shoulders, then loosed him abruptly. He turned, saw all that was left of his past get back into the boat. For a moment ash sparked, flamed in his chest; he swallowed fire, watching until the boat was only a tiny, glowing lamp swaying above the waves. He turned then, feeling nothing, empty as the air between sea and stars. He followed the strangers up the endless stone stairway along the face of the rock, his eyes on the next step, the next. Near the top he stopped abruptly, staring up at the tiers of fire-washed windows carved out of the stones. The woman behind him, keeping a hand at his back, asked, “What is it, Rook?”

He said, astonished, “The rock sang.”

The ancient school on Luly, he learned, was older than the name of the rock, older than the language of humans. It rose out of rock like something sculpted by wind, shaped by storm. It was never silent. Sea frothed and boomed constantly around it. Gulls with their piercing voices cried tales passed down from bards who spoke the forgotten language of birds. Seals, lifting their faces out of the waves, told other tales to the wind. Wind answered, sometimes lightly, sometimes roaring out of the northern hinterlands like the sound of all the magic there, if it had one word to speak, and a voice to speak it with. Then the rock would sing in answer, its own voice too deep to be heard, a song that could be felt, running from stone into bone, and from there into the heart, to be transformed into the language of dreams, of poetry. Rook heard the rock sing again the first night he slept there. Later, out of stone, he made his first song.

He played it one day on a single-stringed instrument whose unpredictable sounds, sometimes tender, sometimes ragged and eerie, said best what he saw. Bard Galea, the woman who had named him, was pleased. Bard Trefon, whose deep eyes and dark skin reminded Rook of the seals that peered out of the waves around the rock, was not.

“I hear seagulls squabbling in it,” she said. “And the wind. And ravens calling your name.”

“I hear the picochet,” Bard Trefon protested. “I am trying to teach him the harp.”

“Well, he was born in the provinces, of course he would be drawn to the picochet. It’s the farmers’ instrument; he must have heard it in the womb.”

“He has an ear for the harp.” They argued amicably, their voices spirited and strong, tide tangling with wind on a bright day. “It’s the harp that the land barons will want to hear in their courts, not the peasant’s instrument.”

“I think,” Bard Galea said, looking deeply into Rook’s eyes, “he has an ear for whatever he touches. Can you put words to your song, Rook?”

“They burned,” he said briefly.

Her eyes changed, became strange with thought, like birds’ eyes, or the unseeing eyes of students lost in their music. “Then you know something that’s hardest to learn. Words change, here. You must make them new as if you had never spoken them before.”

He looked at her, his eyes gritty, charred with sudden anguish; an ember flared out of the ashes. He plucked the single string; past and terror receded, blocked by sound as tuneless as a wave. “I never have spoken them before,” he answered, remembering the taste of the sea on his lips, the first word forming in him as they rowed toward Luly.

Bard Trefon broke off the piece of a word in the back of his throat. He took the picochet from Rook gently and set it aside. He wore a harp at his back like a butterfly’s wing, as if it had unfolded there and never left him. His eyes consulted Bard Galea’s in the way that they had, saying things silently. She said softly, “They were right to bring him here, I think. This may be where he belongs. Rook, do you know the story of how the first bard came to this rock?”

“No.”

“The first bard in the world learned all his words new; he had no father and no mother, and no one to teach him. So he went exploring the world, to put names to all the wonders in it. He was following the path of the sun across the sea to find the land where it set, when an enormous whale rose out of the water and swallowed him, coracle and all. The bard began to sing in the whale’s belly, a song of such heartrending beauty that the whale could not bear to stop it. It swam toward the setting sun until finally it came to a barren rock. The whale opened its mouth and the bard stepped out, still singing, this time to the rock. At the song, the rock loosed its fierce clench on itself and grew hollow, letting the song carve chambers and doors and long hallways that caught wind in them like breath and molded it into music. The whale, unable to leave the bard, fed itself to the birds and the fish, and left its backbone for a bridge between rock and land, and its ribs for boats. One day, the bard, ever curious, walked across the whale’s backbone and disappeared into the hinterlands.

“A thousand years later he returned, pursued by all the magic in the hinterlands for the magical instrument he had stolen. That’s the one you played for me. The picochet.”

“It depends,” Bard Trefon said to a passing gull outside the window, “who tells the tale. I think he stole the harp.”

Rook looked curiously at the picochet’s square painted belly and the long, single string that wound around a peg above his head. “What is magic?”

She paused. “A word. It changes things, when you know what it means. The magic in the picochet makes things grow. So the tale goes, and so the farmers of the provinces south of the hinterlands believe.”

“The picochet,” Bard Trefon said, “would hardly be worth picking a quarrel with all the magic in the hinterlands.”

She smiled her sea smile at him, her eyes catching light. “That’s how the tale goes.”

“But what is the truth of the tale?” He took the picochet gently from Rook and set it aside. “Magic comes from the heart, and it’s the heart that plays the harp. Come with me, Rook. I’ll show you.”

Her smile left her, like light fading on the sea. “Be careful,” she told them both.

Bard Trefon took him out in a boat, rowing away from the rock until they were safe from the exuberant swell and thunder of breaking waves. Then he dropped an anchor stone over the side, baited a line, and let it drift. He took the harp out of its case and handed it to Rook. “See what comes,” he said, his dark face sparkling with brine, his eyes intent, like the seals when they rose out of the water to watch. The boat, veering and darting around its anchor stone, nearly tossed the harp out of Rook’s hands before he struck a note. He positioned it awkwardly, plucked one tentative string after another, the haunting scale Bard Trefon had taught him. The land beyond them dipped and rose, the flatlands to the south luminous with morning, the northern forests still receding into shadow. In the distance, a misty blur of hills rose out of the forests, rounded like bubbles. They seemed to float above the still, dark trees. He narrowed his eyes against the light, tried to see beyond. Bard Trefon, tugging at his line, said, “You’re looking at the hinterlands. They go north to the end of the world.”

“Who lives there?”

“You never know until you go there. Everyone who goes returns with a different tale.”

“Have you gone?”

“No.” He pulled up his hook. The bait was gone, so was the fish that had taken it. “Not yet. It’s where you go to ask a question. About your life, perhaps. Your future. Or your past. People there tell you. If you listen. If not, you come back at least knowing some odd tales, very ancient songs. Some never come back.”

“What happens to them?”

“They go elsewhere. They may return to Luly, many years later, and tell what happened to them. Sometimes the bards only hear of them in a song.” He let his line drop again. “Play the song you made for the picochet. See if you can find it on the harp.”

He tried, but the sea kept getting in the way of the song, and so did the hinterlands. He gazed at the floating hills, wondering what he would see if he walked across them, alone through unfamiliar trees, crossing the sun’s path to the top of the world. Who would he meet? In what language would they speak to him? The language the sea spoke intruded then, restless, insistent, trying to tell him something: what song he heard in the seashell, what word the rock sang, late at night under the heavy pull of the full moon. His fingers moved, trying to say what he heard, as the sea flowed like blood in and out of the hollows and caves of the rock, trying to reach its innermost heart, as if it were a string that had never been played. He came close, he felt, reaching for the lowest notes on the harp. But it was his own heart he split, and out of it came fire, engulfing the rock in the sea.

He cried out. A string snapped, curled with a wail like wood in fire. Bard Trefon, staring at him, reached out, catching the harp before Rook flung it into the water. “No,” he said quickly. “Rook.”

Rook stared at him, his heart still burning. “It was on fire.”

“I know,” the bard breathed. “I heard. Rook. Try again. But this time—”

His fingers curled into fists. “I will never play it again.”

“But you have a gift for it. And there are other songs.”

“No.” He added, as the bard watched him, brows crooked and questioning, “There is a fish on your line.”

“Rook.”

He turned away, tugged at the dancing, thumping line until Bard Trefon finally put the harp away and helped him.

The more the bards taught him, the farther back he drove the fire and what lay within it. He built walls of words against it; he charmed it away with music. There was nothing, it seemed, he could not learn in order to escape. He changed the meanings of words without realizing it. Becoming a bard meant becoming someone who knew no past but poetry, he thought. A bard changed the past to song, set it to music, and made it safe. So he learned the tales of the hinterlands, the provinces; he played their instruments even in his dreams, until he woke with strange cadences and ancient languages he almost understood fading in his head. He was taught, in cursory fashion, of the city south of the provinces, which had a sheathed, dangerous paw on the world around him. But its music made him uneasy. Like the harp, it led him back, toward the past; it smelled of fire. Its bright, sweet, complex language was not rooted in wind and stone; it was too new. It held no word for bard. So he reached back, finding past and eluding it, as far as he could, to the first words, the first tales, the first sounds fashioned out of the language of birds and insects, the whine of wind and wolf, the sough of the sea, the silence of death, all the sounds the first bard had woven into his song. After eight years on Luly, he could spin poetry from his dreams, and play anything his hands touched. After three more years the bards of Luly said that he was ready to choose his future.

He had grown tall and muscular, his long, fair hair usually a rook’s nest of wind and brine, his rook’s eyes, beneath level brows, so dark they seemed without pupils. His rare smile softened their grimness. When he played, his face lost its usual calm. Someone else, the boy in the boat perhaps, staring unflinchingly at fire, looked out of his eyes; they reflected what he did not remember seeing.

“You should call yourself Caladrius,” he was told sometimes. “It’s a name more suitable for a bard.”

He would shrug. “Rook suits me.” And when he played, they saw the raven in his eyes.

He sat on a grassy slope outside the school one sunny day, imitating birds on the clay pipes, when the bards summoned him to make his choice. The summons came in the form of Sirina, a land baron’s daughter from the northern provinces. She had been at the school for three years; she had a restless nature and a spellbinding way with a harp. “You’re wanted,” she said, and sat down on the grass beside him. He looked at her, still playing, and realized in that moment how she had changed, from the slight, freckled girl he had first met. Her harper’s hands were pale as sea spume; her long hair gleamed like pearl. She knew things, he thought suddenly. She held secrets, now, in the long, slender lines of her body; she held some music he had never heard before. “Rook,” she prodded while his pipes spoke back to a passing gull. He lowered them finally, still gazing at her.

“Who wants me?”

“Bard Trefon, Bard Galea, Bard Horum. They want you to make a decision. About your future.” She had a northerner’s way of chopping sentences into neat portions, as if they were carrots.

“There’s no decision to make,” he answered simply. “I’m staying here.”

“It’s more complicated. They said. What you must choose.”

“Staying or going is one or the other. It’s not complicated.” He added as she sighed, “I’ll stay here and teach. It’s what I want.”

“How can you not want to be a bard? How can you want this rock?” she asked incredulously. “You could have the world. If you would only learn to harp. It’s what the world wants.”

“I don’t want the world.” The spare, taut lines of his face softened at her bewilderment. “Sirina.” The color of her eyes distracted him suddenly; he forgot what he was going to say.

“You can play anything else. You can tell any tale. Sing any song. Why do you balk over a harp? Anyone can play it. You don’t have to play it with your heart. Not to please the land barons. Just with your fingers.”

“I prefer the picochet.”

“Peasant.”

He smiled. “Very likely.” Her eyes had changed at his smile, become shadowy, mysterious. Their color kept eluding him. “Mussels,” he decided, and her gaze became skewed.

“What about them?”

“It’s a riddle,” he said, following an ancient formula. “Answer: I am the color of mussel shells.”

Her eyes narrowed faintly, holding his. “Is that so,” she said softly. “Answer: I am the color of a starless night.”

“Is that so.” His hand dropped to the ground, very close to hers. Neither of them blinked. “Answer: I am a son without a father, a bird without a song. Who am I?”

He watched her lips gather around the first letter of his name. He bent his head, gently took the rest of it from her. She opened her eyes as he drew back; they had grown very dark. He heard her swallow.

“Rook.” Her fingers shifted in the grass, touched his. “They’re waiting.”

“Will you?” he asked as he stood. He had an impression, as her hair roiled away from her into the wind, of someone rising out of foam. “Will you wait?”

Her eyes answered.

He felt something leap in him like a salmon, flicking drops of water into light on its run toward home. I’m never leaving, he thought, striding toward the ancient, drafty pile of stone in which he could still hear, late at night, between the wind and the wild burst of the tide, the final cry of the bard imprisoning all the magic in the hinterlands. Never.

“You have three choices,” Bard Galea told him. Her hair was more silver now than gold, but she still had the mermaid’s enchanting smile. “You may choose to stay here and teach. Which is what I think you want.”

“Or you may choose to master the harp and be called bard,” Bard Trefon said. “Which is what I think you should do. Then you will leave Luly and find your future with some house or court or school in need of a bard. If you choose that, remember that the farther you go from Luly, the more the word ‘bard’ changes, until, if you go far enough south, you will hardly recognize yourself.” He waited, dark brows lifted, still questioning, after so many years, still hoping. Rook turned to Bard Horum, a tall, very old man who looked, with his pure white coloring and ancient, oval eyes, as if he might once have been a unicorn.

“Or,” the third bard said, “you may take the path across the sea to the hinterlands, and let what comes to you there decide your fate. If you choose that, remember that you may not find your way back to Luly.”

Rook started to answer. The unicorn’s eyes held him, powerful and still. Did you? Rook wanted to ask. What did you find there? “I choose,” he said to Bard Horum, and caught himself, startled and breathless, as if he had nearly walked over a cliff. He blinked away from the ancient gaze, and it dropped, hid itself. He turned back to Bard Galea’s smile. “I choose to stay.”

That night he dreamed of fire.

He woke not knowing his own name, consumed, as with a sudden fever, by the knowledge that he had a past hidden by fire, another name. Somewhere on the mainland, the blackened, crumbling walls of a farmhouse held his name. He could not find his future without his past. He could not play a true note, even on the picochet, or sing a word that meant itself, without his past. He lay awake in the dark, staring at it, listening to the rill of the tide filling hollows beneath the school. When night finally relinquished its grip of him, he still felt blind, memoryless, as if he had only dreamed his life, and had wakened to find himself among ashes, without words and understanding nothing.

“I can’t make a choice yet,” he told the bards in the morning, trembling with weariness, rubbing at the rasp behind his reddened eyes. “I’m going to the provinces.” This time the seal’s eyes watched him, curious, approving. The unicorn’s eyes were still hidden.

•   •   •

He left three days later at dawn. Sirina rowed him to shore. They did not speak until the boat scraped bottom and he jumped into the waves to run it out again on the outgoing tide. She said, softly, her face quiet and pale in the new light, “I’ll give you a thread. To find your way back.”

“Or for you to find me,” he breathed, and she nodded. She leaned forward abruptly, kissed him before tide pulled the boat out of his hands. He watched her row halfway to Luly while he stood knee-deep in surf, pack and picochet dangling from his shoulders, still tasting her sea-salt kiss.

Finally he turned, found a beach littered with driftwood and mussel shells, without a footprint, human or otherwise, anywhere in the sand. Beyond it lay the wild land north of the provinces, the forests and hills flowing to the end of the world. He felt its pull, its mystery, as strong as the tide carrying his heart back to Luly, as strong as the name waiting to be found in the provinces. He waded out of the water, shook the sea out of his boots, and began to walk south toward the villages and farmlands, the great houses of the provincial barons. Ravens cried at him from the ancient forest, raucous, persistent. He did not know their language, he explained silently to them; he did not understand. Later, when they dropped a black trail of feathers to guide him into the unknown, he refused to see.

He played the picochet in farmhouses, in inns, the flute and the lute in barons’ courts all over the provinces. Sometimes he stayed a night, sometimes a month or two, playing whatever he was handed, singing whatever he was asked. He was given lodgings, coins, new boots, new songs, a strange instrument that had found its way out of the hinterlands, a haircut, an embroidered case for his picochet, many local tales, and offers of positions ranging from tavern musician to court bard. But he could stay nowhere. His rook’s eyes searched for fire everywhere. He was shown charred, ruined farmhouses, or the place where they had been before they were rebuilt, or the cornfield where the farm had stood before it burned and its ashes were plowed under. Solk, their name was, or Peerson, or Gamon. They had lost a baby, or a cat, or all their horses, or everything but each other. A terrible fire with only one child, a son, left alive? That sounded like the Leafers, but no, only the grandmother had been left alive in that one. She had wandered out of the house in her nightgown in the middle of the night, thinking she heard her baby son crying. She woke to hear him crying to wake his own children inside the burning house. The Sarters in the next valley had lost their cows when the barn burned, but . . . The Tares’ girl had lost her parents, but there were those who said she had started the fire herself.

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