TEN
FOUR DAYS AFTER Amilee went to her final earth, Divad sat again in the warmth and silence of morning sunlight inside his workshop. Motes danced slowly in the shafts of light, reminding him that even in silence there’s a kind of song that stirs the air. These last few days he’d been preparing gut for his viola. Now, all that remained was to string the instrument.
Gut was best taken from the animal while the body is still warm. It needed to be stripped of fat and placed in cold water. Later, it would be transferred to wine or a solution of lye to help remove any last unwanted matter that still clung to it. Strips were cut to length, twisted together in various numbers to create different pitches, and rubbed with almond or olive oil to prevent them from becoming brittle.
Divad had thoughtfully done all this, and now picked up the first length and began stringing the repaired viola. One by one he fixed the aliquot strings to their bone points, and ran them up through the neck to their pegs. When he’d finished the resonant gut, he did likewise with the playable strings.
Next he tuned the instrument. Never rushing. Turning the peg as he thumbed each string to find the extended tuning for the first song he intended to play on the salvaged viola. The sounds of the tuning were somehow muted in the morning stillness, almost as if the air was resisting the sound.
When the instrument was finally ready, he sat back, regarding the fruits of his labor. The work had been tedious and filled with reminders. Both things were part of the process, something he knew from experience. But he felt satisfied that he had done well, and smiled genuinely for the first time in many days.
In every part, there’d been meaning. That mattered. From the spruce top harvested from a performance tavern bar, to the gut that Amilee had willingly surrendered from her own body. This last element might prove to be the most important, Divad thought. If there was truth to his notion of sonorant residue, then a piece of Lieholan that had sung Suffering might make this incarnation of the viola better than its predecessor. To teach resonance and play for the fallen, he could think of nothing better.
When the moment felt right, he took up the viola, and the bow he’d completed the prior day, and stood in the light of the window. There, he drew the bow across the gut, fingering the first notes of “If I’m Reminded.” He then muted the top strings, and listened intently as the aliquots continued to resonate in the silence that followed.
A long time, he thought, and smiled. A long time since I’ve heard this song. Later, when the resonating strings ceased to hum, he would play it for Amilee. He’d play it finally for Jemma. For now, though, he stood still, allowing the aliquots to ring, and learning something more about resonance.
ELEVEN
IT WAS NOT DAWN when I arrived at the line. Midday had come and gone.
It was not the start of battle. They’d been fighting for hours.
It was not ceremonious. I simply found the front of the line and started to sing.
I sang the song of them. And almost without thinking, I blended the absolute value of the Sellari with a passage of Suffering—Vengeance.
Before my training at Descant, my experience with the word, even the idea of vengeance, came mostly from pageant wagon plays. Now I realized they’d treated the notion rather too simplistically. And I thought I understood why. Either the players didn’t themselves really know. Or, if they knew, they believed most folks would be better off remaining ignorant on the topic. For that, I wouldn’t blame them.
Then later, under the tutelage of the Maesteri, as I learned Suffering, my understanding of vengeance grew by half. But it was still a clean thing, theoretical. It remained a nearer cousin to the pageants, where vengeance sounded like melodrama, performed by a player wielding a wooden blade, wearing a silly mask, and moving in exaggerated motions. If it had a sound, it was that of a recalcitrant child screaming, “I’ll get you back.”
My Sellari song of vengeance was nothing like this. It was blind and messy. It pulsed with hatred. It knew nothing of justice or balance or making something even. And if my other recent songs had been rough-throat, this sounded as though I’d just gargled with crushed stone. I half expected my throat to start bleeding.
So I walked into their midst, unhurried, letting the song out. It was like playing a great chord, strumming a thousand strings. Ten thousand. Some men simply fell. Others began losing blood from every orifice. The flesh of many sloughed from the bone. Wails of anguish filled the air. There came the sound of countless bodies thumping onto cold ground. Some made a few retreating steps before the song got inside them.
Bright red blood spilled across the vast field.
It was a terrible song. And it was also mine. Since at his core it was resonance.
The property of resonance in sounding systems serves as a metaphor for love. One system can be set in motion by the vibrations of another. Two things, people or strings, trembling alike for one another.
That was one of the first Predicates of Resonance. The awful, practical knowledge I added to it was this: there were many resonances that could cause a man to tremble; love was but one of them.
With each note, my song grew stronger, feeding off itself, swelling as a wave traveling a broad ocean. I had no idea which of my enemies actually heard
