A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong Read online

  I was invited to lecture at the University of Baudoin. I didn’t want to go—I’ve always hated travelling—but the marquis was one of my most enthusiastic patrons, and they were offering a thousand angels for an afternoon’s work. Oddly enough, affluence hadn’t diminished my eagerness to earn money. I guess that no matter how much I had, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to add just a bit more, to be on the safe side. I wrote back accepting the invitation.

  When I got there (two days in a coach; misery) I found they’d arranged a grand recital of my work for the day after the lecture. I couldn’t very well turn round and tell them I was too busy to attend; also, the Baudoin orchestra was at that time reckoned to be the second or third best in the world, and I couldn’t help being curious about how my music would sound, played by a really first-class band. Our orchestra in Perimadeia rates very highly on technical skill, but they have an unerring ability to iron the joy out of pretty well anything. I fixed up about the rights with the kapelmeister, thereby doubling my takings for the trip, and told them I’d be honoured and delighted to attend.

  The lecture went well. They’d put me in the chapter-house of the Ascendency Temple—not the world’s best acoustic, but the really rather fine stained-glass windows are so artfully placed that if you lecture around noon, as I did, and you stand on the lectern facing the audience, you’re bathed all over in the most wonderful red and gold light, so that it looks like you’re on fire. I gave them two hours on diatonic and chromatic semitones in the Mezentine diapason (it’s something I feel quite passionate about, but they know me too well in Perimadeia and stopped listening years ago) and I can honestly say I had them in the palm of my hand. Afterwards, the marquis got up and thanked me—as soon as he joined me on the podium, the sun must’ve come out from behind a cloud or something, because the light through the windows suddenly changed from red to blue, and instead of burning, we were drowning—and then the provost of the university presented me with an honorary doctorate, which was nice of him, and made a long speech about integrity in the creative arts. The audience got a bit restive, but I was getting paid for being there, so I didn’t mind a bit.

  There was a reception afterwards; good food and plenty of wine. I must confess I don’t remember much about it.

  I enjoyed the recital, in spite of a nagging headache I’d woken up with and couldn’t shift all day. Naturally, they played the Twelfth; that was the whole of the first half. I wasn’t sure I liked the way they took the slow movement, but the finale was superb, it really did sprout wings and soar. The second half was better still. They played two of my Vesani horn concertos and a couple of temple processionals, and there were times when I found myself sitting bolt upright in my seat, asking myself, did I really write that? It just goes to show what a difference it makes, hearing your stuff played by a thoroughly competent, sympathetic orchestra. At one point I was so caught up in the music that I couldn’t remember what came next, and the denouement—the solo clarinet in the Phainomai—took me completely by surprise and made my throat tighten. I thought, I wrote that, and I made a mental note of that split second, like pressing a flower between the pages of a book, for later.

  It was only when the recital was over, and the conductor was taking his bow, that I saw him. At first, I really wasn’t sure. It was just a glimpse of a turned-away head, and when I looked again I’d lost him in the sea of faces. I told myself I was imagining things, and then I saw him again. He was looking straight at me.

  There was supposed to be another reception, but I told them I was feeling ill, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I went back to the guest suite. There wasn’t a lock or a bolt on the door, so I wedged the back of a chair under the handle.

  While I’d been at the recital, they’d delivered a whole load of presents. People give me things these days, now that I can afford to buy anything I want. True, the gifts I tend to receive are generally things I’d never buy for myself, because I have absolutely no need for them, and because I do have a certain degree of taste. On this occasion, the marquis had sent me a solid gold dinner service (for a man who, most evenings, eats alone in his rooms off a tray on his knees), a complete set of the works of Aurelianus, ornately bound in gilded calf and too heavy to lift, and a full set of Court ceremonial dress. The latter item consisted of a bright red frock coat, white silk knee breeches, white silk stockings, shiny black shoes with jewelled buckles, and a dress sword.

  I know everything I want to know about weapons, which is nothing at all. When I first came to the university, my best friend challenged another friend of ours to a duel. It was about some barmaid. Duelling was the height of fashion back then, and I was deeply hurt not to be chosen as a second (later, I found out it was because they’d chosen a time they knew would clash with my Theory tutorial, and they didn’t want me to have to skip it). They fought with smallswords in the long meadow behind the School of Logic. My best friend died instantly; his opponent lingered for a day or so and died screaming, from blood poisoning. If that was violence, I thought, you can have it.

  So, I know nothing about swords, except that gentlemen are allowed to wear them in the street; from which I assumed that a gentleman’s dress sword must be some kind of pretty toy. In spite of which, I picked up the marquis’ present, put on my reading glasses and examined it under the lamp.

  It was pretty enough, to be sure, if you like that sort of thing. The handle—I don’t know the technical terms—was silver, gilded in places, with a pastoral scene enamelled on the inside of the plate thing that’s presumably designed to protect your hand. The blade, though, was in another key altogether. It’s always hidden by the scabbard, isn’t it, so I figured it’d just be a flat, blunt rod. Not so. It was about three feet long, tapering, triangular in section, so thin at the end it was practically a wire but both remarkably flexible and surprisingly stiff at the same time, and pointed like a needle, brand new from the paper packet. I rested the tip on a cushion and pressed gently. It went through it and out the other side as though the cloth wasn’t there.

  I imagined myself explaining to the watch, no, the palace guard, they wouldn’t have the ordinary watch investigate a death in the palace. You know he was a wanted criminal? Quite so, a convicted murderer. He killed a man, then killed a guard escaping from prison. He was my student, years ago, before he went to the bad. I don’t know how he got in here, but he wanted money. When I refused, he said he’d have to kill me. There was a struggle. I can’t actually remember how the sword came to be in my hand, I suppose I must’ve grabbed it at some point. All I can remember is him lying there, dead. And then the guard captain would look at me, serious but reassuring, and tell me that it sounded like a straightforward case of self-defence, and by the sound of it, the dead man was no great loss anyhow. I could imagine him being more concerned about the breach of security—a desperate intruder getting into the guest wing—than the possibility that the honorary doctor of music, favorite composer of the marquis, had deliberately murdered somebody.

  The thought crossed my mind. After all, nobody would ever know. Once again, there’d be no witnesses. Who could be bothered to break into a locked house on the offchance that there might be a candle burning behind the closed shutters?

  I waited, with the sword across my knees, all night. He didn’t come.

  Instead, he caught up with me at an inn in the mountains on my way home; a much more sensible course of action, and what I should have expected.

  I was fast asleep, and something woke me. I opened my eyes to find the lamp lit, and Subtilius sitting in a chair beside the bed, looking at me. He gave the impression that I’d been dangerously ill, and he’d refused to leave my bedside.

  “Hello, professor,” he said.

  The sword was in my trunk, leaning up against the wall on the opposite side of the room. “Hello, Aimeric,” I said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  He grinned. “I shouldn’t be anywhere,” he said. “But what the hell.”

  I couldn’t see a weapon;
no knife or sword. “You’re looking well,” I said, which was true. He’d filled out since I saw him last. He’d been a skinny, sharp-faced boy, always making me think of an opened knife carried in a pocket. Now he was broad-shouldered and full-faced, and his hair was just starting to get thin on top. He had an outdoor tan, and his fingernails were dirty.

  “You’ve put on weight,” he said. “Success agrees with you, obviously.”

  “It’s good to see you again.”

  “No it’s not,” he said, still grinning.