Songspinners Read online

  ‘He runs the Sanatorium.’

  ‘Praise be,’ said the man. ‘Because –’

  A groan, low and ragged, issued from the shadows of the shrine behind him. Orial froze.

  ‘What was that?’ she whispered, and tried to look over the man’s shoulder. ‘Who’s in there? Who are you hiding?’

  The stranger shifted, trying to block Orial’s view. He placed his hands, heavy with ornate jewelled rings, on her shoulders.

  ‘Can I trust you, Orial?’

  ‘Trust me?’ She stared up into his eyes suspiciously. But all she saw there was weariness and desperation.

  ‘Cra… mois… y…’ It was a man’s voice, faint and racked with pain.

  ‘You can trust me, I swear it. On my mother’s name,’ Orial said swiftly.

  ‘Now tell me what’s wrong.’

  The stranger beckoned her into the painted chamber.

  Another man lay in the corner of the shrine, half-propped against the wall. His head lolled forward, face covered by his dishevelled hair.

  ‘He needs urgent medical attention.’

  ‘But why did you not bring him to the Sanatorium? Why down here?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’ The stranger knelt down beside the man, dabbing rather ineffectually at his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘We had to be sure.’

  Orial knelt on the other side; the man’s breathing was shallow and she could see sweat glistening on his pale, stubbled face. His body seemed to exude a sour odour – the stale fearsweat overlaid with another, more pungent, smell. The smell of charred flesh…

  ‘Sure – of what?’

  ‘Is it safe, Cramoisy?’ the man whispered.

  ‘Safe from the officers of the Commanderie?’ asked the stranger he had called Cramoisy.

  ‘The Commanderie?’ Orial repeated, not understanding.

  ‘We are refugees from Bel’Esstar. Artists persecuted by Girim nel Ghislain’s regime. Surely you have heard of Girim nel Ghislain?’

  Orial shook her head.

  ‘My father read me an article about Prince Ilsevir’s conversion, but I have never heard of this Girim nel Ghislain before.’

  ‘There! I told you!’ Cramoisy said to the man. ‘Now are you satisfied? We’re safe.’

  ‘Safe…’ he repeated, and his head slumped back against the wall.

  ‘He’s wounded?’ Orial ventured. She was swiftly calculating how she could bring help – and not betray her secret. Someone was bound to ask what she was doing down here when she had been sent to post a letter.

  Cramoisy nodded.

  ‘Badly wounded?’

  ‘This is no ordinary man, Orial Magelonne. He needs the very best medical care available.’

  ‘But what is wrong with him?’

  Cramoisy drew back the cloak which he had draped over the man’s body. The sickly odour of burned flesh grew stronger. Orial stared.

  ‘His hands?’

  Makeshift bandages swathed the man’s hands. Even in the flickering light Orial could see that the white gauze was stained where some fluid had leaked through, clear and yellow as varnish.

  ‘The Commanderie torched the Opera House,’ Cramoisy said. ‘His scores were inside. He insisted on going back in to try to rescue them. We tried to hold him back –’

  ‘A fire,’ she repeated softly, hardly hearing what Cramoisy was saying. She looked from her own hands to the clumsy bandages.

  White fire flickers from her clawing fingers, the bones broken sticks of charcoal against the flamedazzle…

  Coincidence… or premonition?

  Cramoisy reached out and clutched hold of her; Orial felt the jewels in his rings bruising her arms.

  ‘Do you think your father can help him? I’ll pay anything he asks. Anything. It’s just – if he loses his hands – he’s a musician, Orial. A composer.’

  A composer. A real composer.

  ‘My father hates music. Even the mention of it,’ she said.

  ‘But if he’s a physician, he’ll have taken an oath – an oath to treat the sick, the wounded. No matter who they are, what they have done.’

  Orial considered. Her father’s voice, coldly accusing, resonated in her mind.

  ‘Musicians. How could you disobey me, your own father. Orial? After all my warnings?’

  ‘Orial, I beg you…’ Cramoisy’s eyes had filled with tears.

  Orial looked again at the man with the burned hands. The pale face drifting between unconsciousness and waking was young, she saw now, he could not be so many years older than she. And for a moment she felt the anguish of his situation as acutely as if it were her own. Young, gifted, with all the promise of his life to come, blighted by an act of crazy, selfless bravery.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said, starting to her feet. ‘I’ll go and fetch help.’

  ‘Well, where is this new patient?’ Dr Magelonne demanded, coming out of his office. ‘I hope our visitors from Bel’Esstar realise that I do not normally treat outside Sanatorium hours.’

  ‘They’ve taken him to your consulting room, Doctor,’ said Sister Crespine crisply.

  Orial hovered apprehensively in the shadows as her father strode down the corridor. Spring was late this year in Sulien and the staff were still obliged to light the lamps by five in the afternoon. As Dr Magelonne reached the doors to the consulting room, Orial saw Cramoisy rise from the chair where he had been waiting.

  Dr Magelonne stopped abruptly.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said in a low, tight voice. ‘You know you are not welcome, Cramoisy Jordelayne.’

  ‘I come not for myself,’ the man said, drawing himself up to his full height, ‘but for my friend Amaru Khassian. Please help him, Jerame.’

  ‘I won’t have you near my daughter. I won’t have you corrupting her. God knows what malign trick of fate has brought you two together –’

  ‘I came here because I could think of no one else who could help. No one else with the expertise.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear your blandishments.’

  ‘I can pay,’ Cramoisy said with chilly hauteur, ‘if that is what is concerning you.’

  Dr Magelonne looked at him without speaking.

  He’s going to refuse, Orial thought, anguished. He’s going to send them away.

  ‘You’d better wait here,’ Dr Magelonne said. He opened the door to his consulting room and shut it smartly behind him before Cramoisy could follow.

  Orial saw him surreptitiously dab at his eyes with his kerchief. She ventured out of the shadows and approached.

  ‘You are shivering, sieur. You must be cold and hungry after so difficult a journey. Can I offer you a dish of tea?’

  Cramoisy nodded.

  ‘That’s most kind of you. But – are you not afraid that I might corrupt you, child?’

  ‘Please take no notice of my father. He doesn’t mean to be so abrupt.’

  The patients’ parlour was deserted but coals still glowed in the grate. Orial hurried down to the kitchens and ordered a tray of tea with sponge fingers and seed cake.

  By the firelight, she poured the tea into the delicate porcelain bowls.

  ‘Sugar? Lemon? Do try Cook’s sponge fingers… they are excellent dipped into the tea.’

  Cramoisy cupped the bowl in his fingers and raised it shakily to his lips, sipping at the hot liquid.

  ‘Have you lodgings for tonight?’

  ‘I must wait to hear how Amar is first.’

  Amar. Orial could still hardly believe it.

  ‘Is he really Amaru Khassian? The composer of the opera Firildys? The Cassalian Canticles?’

  ‘The very same,’ Cramoisy reached for a sponge finger.

  ‘And you are –’ The light, musical voice, the smooth, hairless cheeks… Orial was sure now that she was in the presence of one of the fabled castrato opera singers of Allegonde.

  ‘His Firildys.’ Dark eyes met hers conspiratorially over the painted rim of the tea-bowl.

  ‘The Jordelayne!’ O
rial clutched her hands together in excitement. ‘The Diva! The toast of Bel’Esstar!’

  ‘So my fame travels even over the mountains?’ A slight smile flickered for a moment on the singer’s lips.

  ‘That was how you knew my mother.’

  ‘Your mother, Orial, taught me everything I know. Without her I’d still be singing in the back row of the chorus. Your mother was – an inspiration.’ Cramoisy reached for another sponge finger. ‘You were only five when I last saw you. You don’t remember me, do you?’

  ‘I had no idea. I – I –’ Orial tried to scry into the shadows of the past. Five years old. Just before everything had begun to fall apart – and her life was changed irrevocably.

  ‘I was nineteen. At the start of my career. And I came all the way across the mountains to study with the greatest singer of the age: Iridial Magelonne. Do you know what they used to call her? The Sulien Nightingale. Her sudden fatal illness… so tragic. She had so much to live for.’

  Cramoisy’s eyes, warmed by the coals’ glow, gazed into Orial’s. ‘So much to give.’

  A thousand questions came bubbling up into Orial’s mind. Here at last was someone who had known her mother. Someone who seemed not only prepared but eager to talk about her. Maybe Cramoisy could provide answers to some of the mysteries that shrouded Iridial’s death. Mysteries that haunted Orial. She knew she had never been told the whole truth. She had a right to know what had really happened. She was hungry for information – and yet apprehensive of what Cramoisy might reveal. Was the past better left undisturbed?

  She leaned forward and lifted the teapot.

  ‘More tea?’

  A turbulence of notes swirled about Khassian’s brain with the violence of an autumn storm. Music so wild, so visceral it shook him to the roots of his soul Soon the page was spattered with a myriad black dots as he feverishly dipped his pen in the ink again and again

  But as he scribbled on, desperate to capture the notes before they whirled away into the darkness, the black dots began to move on the page. He rubbed his eyes. Tiredness must be playing tricks with his sight. But no. The notes were milling around, a horde of tiny insects, crawling off the page on to his hands.

  He tried to shake them off but still they came until his hands were covered in a coating of milling black insects. And the more violently he shook his hands, the tighter they seemed to cling.

  He could feel the tug of tiny serrated mandibles, nibbling into his fingers, his palms, stripping away the flesh –

  He was being devoured, eaten alive by his own creation.

  In desperation he began to scrape his hands against the edge of the desk but only gobbets of raw flesh came away. He could see the white, bloodied bone beneath –

  His mouth opened in a scream, a rasping scream of denial.

  ‘Noooo!’

  ‘Try to lie still, Illustre.’

  Blinking in the lamplight, Khassian saw faces above him, faces he did not recognise. A man of middle years, his brown hair peppered with grey, was gazing thoughtfully down at him through gold-rimmed spectacles; a woman in a starched cap stood beside him.

  ‘Who – are you?’

  ‘My name is Jerame Magelonne.’ The man’s voice was quiet yet authoritative. ‘You are in my Sanatorium in Sulien.’

  The nurse was unwrapping Khassian’s bandages, peeling away layer after stained layer. Beneath lay something claw-like, a raw, red mess of tissue oozing yellow liquid. A few charred flakes of skin still adhered to parts of the claw, others had stuck to the bandages and come away as the slow unravelling had gone on.

  ‘Tsk, tsk!’ Dr Magelonne clicked his tongue against his teeth in disapproval. ‘Pus.’

  ‘What – are you – doing?’ Khassian said in a gasp.

  ‘Lie back, Illustre.’

  ‘What’s happened to my hands? They shouldn’t look like that.’

  ‘Please lie back, Illustre.’

  Sickened, Khassian sank back, fighting a sudden surge of nausea. He had always been squeamish, disgusted at the mere sight of blood, and hated himself for his weakness. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘A little infection, that’s all,’ Dr Magelonne said briskly.

  A little infection? The smell of the oozing flesh told Khassian that the physician was not being wholly honest with him.

  ‘I’m going to drain the pus, Illustre. This may prove a little uncomfortable. Steel yourself.’

  The doctor’s probe sliced into his flesh. The pain of cold metal sang with a white and whining purity, honed steel drawn screeching across glass.

  And then the cacophonous storm came whirling back and tipped Khassian into a howling vortex where all was chaos and darkness.

  Orial sat gazing at her hands in the firelight. Slowly she raised them to the blaze until the flames lit the pale, flawless skin with fiery gold.

  White fire flickers from her clawing fingers. The skin is blistering, flaking away in flecks of flame –

  She shivered.

  Not my hands, but his.

  Amaru Khassian was a stranger from a foreign country. She had never seen him before in her life. And yet here in Sulien, at her mother’s shrine, she had experienced his agony as the conflagration in distant Bel’Esstar seared his hands – as if it were her own.

  What drew him here?

  She saw again the pale face, the blank look of loss dulling the dark eyes that stared into hers.

  What links us?

  She gathered the tea-bowls on to the tray and set out towards the kitchen.

  ‘The situation is grave, Diva.’

  The door to her father’s office stood open.

  ‘Very grave. It is possible,’ and Orial heard her father lower his voice as she went past, ‘I may have to amputate.’

  ‘Amputate his hands!’ The Diva’s rich voice rang out, echoing the length of the corridor. ‘But you can’t! He’s a composer – a keyboard player.’

  Orial stopped, shocked.

  ‘When did he sustain the injuries?’

  ‘Three nights ago.’

  ‘And how long have you been on the road?’

  ‘We’ve been travelling since the night of the fire. Friends smuggled us out of Bel’Esstar in disguise.’

  ‘If he’d seen a physician straightaway, then maybe there might have been some hope… But infection has set in. Wound fever. If it spreads, it will kill him.’

  ‘And if we’d stayed to find a physician, he’d have been lynched for certain. Or burned alive for heresy. I believe that was their intent. Burn the Opera House – and all the heretics inside. Are you going to condemn him too, Doctor?’

  ‘Of course I’ll do all I can. Do allow me a certain professional pride, Diva.’ Orial heard the stiffness in her father’s voice; Cramoisy’s words had stung him. ‘I have the most advanced techniques at my disposal here in the Sanatorium. But there will be no miracles. The Illustre has suffered a very serious injury. Even if we can save his hands, I doubt that he will ever be able to play a musical instrument again.’

  CHAPTER 2

  He called me Iridial.

  Orial stood at the oval looking-glass in her bedroom, gazing at her reflection by the soft lamplight. Her hair was still pinned up, confined beneath her starched nurse’s cap. Slowly she drew out the pins and shook her hair free about her shoulders.

  Do I really resemble her?

  But her mother’s hair had been fair, bright with the yellow-gold of early celandines. Her own hair was the golden-brown of velvet gaillardia petals – yet in the lamplight it glinted… was that what had made Cramoisy cry out? Or was there some other likeness, more subtle, of which she was unaware? Was it the way she moved, the way she held her head?

  Orial sighed as she stared at her reflection. She could not remember. Try as she might to recall her mother clearly, her memories had faded to a few, bitter-sweet sensations. They were of a closeness, a warmth, never since recaptured; a voice, sweet and low, lulling her to sleep.

  The portrait of Iridial th
at hung in her father’s bedroom showed an ethereal young girl of delicate beauty, her hand resting against her cheek, gazing on some distant horizon. The colours of the portrait were muted, cloud colours glimpsed through a rainbow-haze of mist… Even her mother’s eyes seemed touched with the iridescence of the rainbow: palest blue, striated with pink, amber, violet.

  Rainbow eyes.

  Orial had always thought it some fancy of the painter’s. But now, as she unhooked the wire spectacles from her ears and peered more closely at her reflection, she saw for the first time that her own eyes were changing. The pale blue of the iris, paler than a dawn sky, was no longer the intense azure she had been born with. Were those streaks of rose radiating from the dark pupil in the centre? And gold? And darker violet?

  ‘Just a few minutes, Diva. He’s still very weak…’

  ‘My poor, brave Amaru.’

  ‘Cramoisy,’ Khassian murmured as the singer bent over to kiss him. ‘Are we… safe?’ He shifted a little in the bed, wincing as the pain in his hands flared dully again, distant fires glimpsed through rolling smoke.

  ‘Your hands. Do they hurt terribly? Dear, dear, you’re feverish…’

  The Diva dabbed at Khassian’s forehead with a cologne-soaked handkerchief. The pungent scent nauseated Khassian.

  ‘They’ve given me some kind of opiate to control the pain. I’m not always sure when I’m awake and when I’m dreaming.’ His words sounded slurred, his tongue moved slowly, clumsily, in his mouth.

  ‘I’ve brought a few little presents, miu caru, to distract you.’

  Khassian blinked as the little room seemed to fill with hothouse flowers: scarlet trumpet-lilies, green-spotted orchids, bouquets and garlands which should have adorned the singer’s dressing-room after the first night of the new opera.

  ‘Cramoisy – you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Nonsense. Nonsense.’ He settled himself down beside the bed.

  ‘The opera. It’s gone, Cramoisy,’ Khassian blurted out. ‘Burned. Destroyed.’ Damn it! He could feel tears welling in his sore eyes. He must not cry. Crying would not bring the opera back. Why this damnable weakness now, of all times, in front of Cramoisy?

  ‘I know,’ the castrato said softly. ‘I know, Amaru.’ His plump white hand reached out and rested gently on Khassian’s arm. ‘But there’s time now, time to recover your strength.’