I began by focusing on his wounds, understanding how physical pain would feel in my own face and neck. Then I recalled the feeling of being restrained and threatened—a particularly worrisome moment I had suffered at the hands of a gang of five street brawlers the year I arrived at Descant. Then I summoned the images of the fallen from this very war, both theirs and ours.
Like a string being drawn across by a long bow, I began to feel the first notes of resonance between us.
In my mind, I identified musical phrases, performing mental turns in a descending Lydian scale to suggest surrender and helplessness and the simplest fear for self. And I let the look in the other’s eyes, the vaguest hope of returning to his own loved ones, sweeten a bitter musical signature that rumbled inside me.
It wasn’t the memories or thoughts themselves that brought us together, but their residue. The combinations of like things produced a kind of vibration we both shared.
I was attuned. I could hear the song of him. But what I had never done, never been taught to do, was sing that absolute value. Though now, I had a model for it. A scordatura model.
Rather than define the note or song I might sing to find a resonance inside him, I concentrated on a sense of him, the emotional fabric that made him who he was. And when that crystallized in my own mind, I opened my mouth and let come whatever most resonated with that sense.
I had never before made or even heard the sound that followed. It began as a low pitch that shifted so subtly that it lived in the space between notes. In those first few moments, the Sellari’s ravaged lips curled into a smug smile; he must have thought he was safe from my song. But mere moments later, his brow tightened, creasing into several deep ridges. Concern rose on his face, his eyes darting from my mouth to my eyes and back.
I modulated a fourth up, then another minor third, singing with a glottal tone like the muggy feel of air thickened with rain. As I did, the Sellari’s lips began to tremble, and a single runnel of blood issued from his nose.
He shook his head in confusion and worry, and pulled at his bonds in panic. I then began a steady pulsing change in pitch, letting each new note come without forethought, landing in a modal set unlike anything I’d ever heard—part Aeolian, part Dorian. But never rushed, and never loud.
When the Sellari looked back at me, abandoning his effort to break his bonds, the fear was so palpable I could feel it. This was the moment of resignation that precedes some final pain or gasp. But this Sellari’s pain was less about the fear of not living another day, and more about what he left behind: days he would never spend in the company of a son and daughter; regret for failing to do something he wished he’d made time for; the forgiving smile of his wife.
I sang his absolute value, resonated with him at the most fundamental level, and caused a violence inside him that tore him apart. He appeared to try and scream, but he could only tremble and sweat and suffer as my song undid him.
Finally, in a darkly beautiful moment, the resonance was complete. That’s when I stopped, and he collapsed. The sweat and blood that coated him steamed in the moonlight. I felt both triumphant and sick inside, my own sense of attunement fading. But in those moments of song, I had found the place of the Sellari, that fingering a Lieholan could use to target the song of an entire people.
It was a broad and bloody thought. And once I’d found it, I began to weep. It was not a song I should know. The moral weight of that knowledge stole my strength and turned my legs to water. I fell to the mulch of rotting poplar leaves and sat there, smelling their autumn brown and the scent of cold soil.
SEVEN
DIVAD TURNED THE length of Pemam wood slowly over the alcohol flame. He’d been at it for three painstaking hours. He carefully heated each thumb-length of the bow-stick over a small clay pot filled with sour-mash-soaked gauze. Using a strong wheat whiskey served a whimsical notion he couldn’t explain. He was also of the opinion that the spent wheat alcohol infused the bow with the grace seen in an unharvested wheat field brushed by a slow wind. Then he put the heated section to the camber, bending it gently before placing it on the edge of the flat bench. With a caliper, he measured the distance from the benchtop to the upper edge of the bow. For best performance, the bow camber needed to follow a gently increasing arc.
He turned a fair hand as a bowmaker, and had made countless bows in his day. The viola bow, in particular, proved to be a favorite, though, as its three extra finger-lengths over its violin counterpart allowed for a greater-than-usual variety of breaks and spreads. He’d fit it with a wider ribbon of horse hair, too—two hundred fifty strands. But the gradations he worked through now were the thing. They needed to be precise so that the bow remained equally flexible from tip to handle.
He sight-checked his work with a wooden template, too, though he preferred the exact measurements he got with his caliper.
Lesser luthier shops rushed through bow construction. They missed this crucial bit. Divad liked to tell his impatient students that: The viola, it is the bow. His overemphasis on the need for precision in its construction would, he hoped, mean they’d take care in all parts of making an instrument. It was true, though, that a well-made bow had a marked effect on the timbre of the instrument. More than anything else, he thought it gave the player a better hand at legato. Easy,
