A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (3 page)

“You’ve written something,” I said.

“Oh yes.” From inside his shirt he pulled a sheaf of paper. “A symphony, in three movements and a coda.” I suppose I must have reached out instinctively, because he moved back gently. “Complete, you’ll be relieved to hear. All yours, if you want it.”

All my life I’ve tried to look civilised and refined, an intellect rather than a physical body. But when I want something and it’s so close I can touch it, I sweat. My hands get clammy, and I can feel the drops lifting my hair where it touches my forehead. “A symphony,” was all I could say.

He nodded. “My fourth. I think you’re going to like it.”

“All mine if I want it.”

“Ah.” He did the mock frown. “All yours if you pay for it. Your chance to be an illustrious patron of the arts, like the Eberharts.”

I stared at him. All mine. “Don’t be so bloody stupid,” I yelled. “I can’t use it. It’d be useless to me.”

He pretended to be upset. “You haven’t even looked at it.”

“Think about it,” I said, low and furious. “You’re on the run from the Watch, with a death sentence against your name. I suddenly present a brand new Subtilius symphony. It’d be obvious. Any bloody fool would know straight away that I’d helped you escape.”

He nodded. “I see your point,” he said mildly. “But you could say it’s an old piece, something I wrote years ago, and you’ve been hanging on to it.”

“Is that likely?”

“I guess not.” He smiled at me, a sunrise-over-the-bay smile, warm and bright and humiliating. “So I guess you’ll just have to pretend you wrote it, won’t you?”

It was like a slap across the face, insulting and unexpected. “Please,” I said. “Don’t even suggest it. You know perfectly well I could never pass off your work as my own. Everybody would know after the first couple of bars.”

Then he smiled again, and I knew he was playing me. He’d led me carefully to a certain place where he wanted me to be. “That won’t be a problem,” he said. “You see, I’ve written it in your style.”

Maybe shock and anger had made me more than usually stupid. It took a moment; and then I realised what he’d just said.

“Hence,” he went on, “the symphonic form, which I’ve never really cared for, but it’s sort of like your trademark, isn’t it? And I’ve used the tetrachord of Mercury throughout, even quoted a bar or two of the secondary theme from your Third. Here,” he said, and handed me a page—just the one, he was no fool—from the sheaf.

I didn’t want to take it. I swear, it felt like deliberately taking hold of a nettle and squeezing it into your palm. I looked down.

I can read music very quickly and easily, as you’d expect. One glance and it’s there in my head. It only took me a couple of heartbeats to know what I was holding. It was, of course, a masterpiece. It was utterly brilliant, magnificent, the sort of music that defines a place and a time for all time. It soared inside me as I looked at it, filling and choking me, as though someone had shoved a bladder down my throat and started blowing it up. It was in every way perfect; and
I could have written it
.

“Well?” he said.

Let me qualify that. No, I couldn’t have written it, not in a million years, not if my life depended on it; not even if, in some moment of absolute peace and happiness, the best inspiration of my entire life had lodged inside my head, and the circumstances had been so perfectly arranged that I was able to take advantage of it straight away, while it was fresh and whole in my mind (which never ever happens, of course). I could never have written it; but it was in my style, so exactly captured that anybody but me would believe it was my work. It wasn’t just the trademark flourishes and periods, the way I use the orchestra, the mathematical way I build through intervals and changes of key. A parody could’ve had all those. The music I was looking at had been written by someone who understood me perfectly—better than I’ve ever understood myself—and who knew exactly what I wanted to say, although I’ve always lacked the skill, and the power.

“Well,” he said. “Do you like it?”

As stupid a question as I’ve ever heard in my life, and of course I didn’t reply. I was too angry, heartbroken, ashamed.

“I was quite pleased with the cadenza,” he went on. “I got the idea from that recurring motif in your Second, but I sort of turned it through ninety degrees and stuck a few feathers in it.”

I’ve never been married, of course, but I can imagine what it must be like, to come home unexpectedly and find your wife in bed with another man. It’d be the love that’d fill you with hate. Oh, how I hated Subtilius at that moment. And imagine how you’d feel if you and your wife had never been able to have kids, and you found out she was pregnant by another man.

“It’s got to be worth money,” I heard him say. “Just the sort of thing the duke would like.”

He always had that knack, did Subtilius. The ability to take the words out of the mouth of the worst part of me, the part I’d cheerfully cut out with a knife in cold blood if only I knew where in my body it’s located. “Well?” he said.

When I was nineteen years old, my father and my elder brother and I were in the cart—I was back home for the holidays, helping out on the rounds—and we were driving out to the old barns where my father boiled the soap. The road runs along the top of a ridge, and when it rains, great chunks of it get washed away. It had been raining heavily the day before, and by the time we turned the sharp bend at the top it was nearly dark. I guess my father didn’t see where the road had fallen away. The cart went over. I was sitting in the back and was thrown clear. Father and Segibert managed to scramble clear just as the cart went over; Segibert caught hold of Dad’s ankle, and Dad grabbed onto a rock sticking out of the ground. I managed to get my hand round his wrist, and for a moment we were stuck there. I’ve never been strong, and I didn’t have the strength to pull them up, not so much as an inch. All I could do was hold on, and I knew that if I allowed myself to let his hand slip even the tiniest bit, I’d lose him and both of them, the two people I loved most in the whole world, would fall and die. But in that moment, when all the thoughts that were ever possible were running through my head, I thought; if they do both fall, and they’re both killed, then when we sell the business, it’d be just me, best part of three hundred angels, and what couldn’t I do with that sort of money?

Then Segibert managed to get a footing, and between them they hauled and scrambled and got up next to me on the road, and soon we were all in floods of tears, and Dad was telling me I’d saved his life, and he’d never forget it. And I felt so painfully guilty, as though I’d pushed them over deliberately.

Well, I thought. Yes. Worth a great deal of money.

“More the old duke’s sort of thing,” he was saying, “he’d have loved it, he was a man of taste and discrimination. Compared with him, young Sighvat’s a barbarian. But even he’d like this, I’m sure.”

A barbarian. The old duke used to punish debtors by giving them a head start and then turning his wolfhounds loose. Last year, Sighvat abolished the poll tax and brought in a minimum wage for farm workers. But the old duke had a better ear for music, and he was an extremely generous patron. “I can’t,” I said.

“Of course you can,” Subtilius said briskly. “Now then, I was thinking in terms of three hundred. That’d cover my expenses.”

“I haven’t got that sort of money.”

He looked at me. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you have. Well, what have you got?”

“I can give you a hundred angels.”

Which was true. Actually, I had a hundred and fifty angels in the wooden box under my bed. It was the down payment I’d taken from the Kapelmeister for the Unfinished Concerto, so properly speaking it was Subtilius’ money anyway. But I needed the fifty. I had bills to pay.

“That’ll have to do, then,” he said, quite cheerfully. “It’ll cover the bribes and pay for a fake passport, I’ll just have to steal food and clothes. Can’t be helped. You’re a good man, professor.”

There was still time. I could throw the door open and yell for a porter. I was still innocent of any crime, against the State or myself. Subtilius would go back to the condemned cell, I could throw the manuscript on the fire, and I could resume my life, my slow and inevitable uphill trudge towards poverty and misery. Or I could call the porter and not burn the music. What exactly would happen to me if I was caught assisting an offender? I couldn’t bear prison, I’d have to kill myself first; but would I get the chance? Bail would be out of the question, so I’d be remanded pending trial. Highly unlikely that the prison guards would leave knives, razors or poison lying about in my cell for me to use. People hang themselves in jail, they twist ropes out of bedding. But what if I made a mess of it and ended up paralysed for life? Even if I managed to stay out of prison, a criminal conviction would mean instant dismissal and no chance of another job. But that wouldn’t matter, if I could keep the music. We are, the Invincible Sun be praised, a remarkably, almost obsessively cultured nation, and music is our life. No matter what its composer had done, work of that quality would always be worth a great deal of money, enough to retire on and never have to compose another note as long as I live—

I was a good man, apparently. He was grateful to me, for swindling him. I was a good man, because I was prepared to pass off a better man’s work as my own. Because I was willing to help a murderer escape justice.

“Where will you go?” I asked.

He grinned at me. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “Let’s just say, a long way away.”

“You’re famous,” I pointed out. “Everywhere. Soon as you write anything, they’ll know it’s you. They’ll figure out it was me who helped you escape.”

He yawned. He looked very tired; fair enough, after three weeks in a clock tower, with eight of the biggest bells in the empire striking the quarter hours inches from his head. He couldn’t possibly have slept for more than ten minutes. “I’m giving up music,” he said. “This is definitely and categorically my last ever composition. You’re quite right; the moment I wrote anything, I’d give myself away. There’s a few places the empire hasn’t got extradition treaties with, but I’d rather be dead than live there. So it’s simple, I won’t write any more music. After all,” he added, his hand over his mouth like he’d been taught as a boy, “there’s lots of other things I can do. All music’s ever done is land me in trouble.”

What, when all is said and done, all the conventional garbage is put on one side and you’re alone inside your head with yourself, do you actually believe in? That’s a question that has occupied a remarkably small percentage of my attention over the years. Strange, since I spend a fair proportion of my working time composing odes, hymns and masses to the Invincible Sun. Do I believe in Him? To be honest, I’m not sure. I believe in the big white disc in the sky, because it’s there for all to see. I believe that there’s some kind of supreme authority, something along the lines of His Majesty the Emperor only bigger and even more remote, who theoretically controls the universe. What that actually involves, I’m afraid, I couldn’t tell you. Presumably He regulates the affairs of great nations, enthrones and deposes emperors and kings—possibly princes and dukes, though it’s rather more plausible that He delegates that sort of thing to some kind of divine solar civil service—and intervenes in high-profile cases of injustice and blasphemy whenever a precedent needs to be set or a point of law clarified. Does He deal with me personally, or is He even aware of my existence? On balance, probably not. He wouldn’t have the time.

In which case, if I have a file at all, I assume it’s on the desk of some junior clerk, along with hundreds, thousands, millions of others. I can’t say that that thought bothers me too much. I’d far rather be left alone, in peace and quiet. As far as I’m aware, my prayers—mostly for money, occasionally for the life or recovery from illness of a relative or friend—have never been answered, so I’m guessing that divine authority works on more or less the same lines as its civilian equivalent; don’t expect anything good from it, and you won’t be disappointed. Just occasionally, though, something happens which can only be divine intervention, and then my world-view and understanding of the nature of things gets all shaken up and reshaped. I explain it away by saying that really it’s something primarily happening to someone else—someone important, whose file is looked after by a senior administrative officer or above—and I just happen to be peripherally involved and therefore indirectly affected.

A good example is Subtilius’ escape from the barbican. At the time it felt like my good luck. On mature reflection I can see that it was really his good luck, in which I was permitted to share, in the same way that the Imperial umbrella-holder also gets to stay dry when it rains.

It couldn’t have been simpler. I went first, to open doors and make sure nobody was watching. He followed on, swathed in the ostentatious cassock and cowl of a Master Chorister—purple with ermine trimmings, richly embroidered with gold thread and seed pearls; anywhere else you’d stand out a mile, but in the barbican, choristers are so commonplace they’re practically invisible. Luck intervened by making it rain, so that it was perfectly natural for my chorister companion to have his hood up, and to hold the folds tight around his face and neck. He had my hundred angels in his pockets in a pair of socks, to keep the coins from clinking.

The sally-port in the barbican wall, opening onto the winding stair that takes you down to Lower Town the short way, is locked at nightfall, but faculty officers like me all have keys. I opened the gate and stepped aside to let him pass.

“Get rid of the cassock as soon as you can,” I said. “I’ll report it stolen first thing in the morning, so they’ll be looking for it.”

He nodded. “Well,” he said, “thanks for everything, professor. I’d just like to say—”

“Get the hell away from here,” I said, “before anyone sees us.”