The Sound of Broken Absolutes by Peter Orullian (fun to read .txt) 📗

the scores piled loosely before me, “are airs we send to the line. Tell us which one you’ll use.”

A chair creaked as Holis, the man with one eye, leaned forward, turning a bit sideways to have a good view of the stack.

“We’ve already selected morale songs to encourage those who carry steel,” Baylet added. “Holis has a good eye for that.”

The men exchanged scant looks of mirth, as if the joke were as tired as the men themselves.

“Shem’s put aside for later a song of comfort and well-being. Something he wrote himself.”

“Calimbaer,” I muttered, recalling the class of Mor song that accompanied medical treatment.

Baylet looked across at Shem. “He’s also found a good sotto voce for Contentment.”

I knew that class of song, too. Two classes really. Sotto voce, an incredibly difficult technique to master, in which singing happened almost under the breath. But Contentment . . . it was a type of song sung to one who is beyond help, one who can only be given a spot of peace before going to his final earth.

Holis and Shem produced the music Baylet had spoken of, and dropped it on top of the pile before me. I fanned them out and began to scan. The morale song read like a blaze of horns—written for four voices with two soaring lines above a strong set of rhythmic chants beneath. I could hear the mettle and resolve in my mind as I tracked the chord progressions.

Shem’s Calimbaer was an elegant piece composed of few notes, each with long sustain. The movement was languid and would be rendered in a thick legato.

But it was the sotto voce piece that really got to me. I sat poring over the note selection, which made brilliant use of the Lydian and Lochrian modes, the composition effortlessly transitioning between the two. It had me taking deep relaxing breaths. Parts of the melody, even just scanning them, instantly evoked simple, forgotten memories. In those moments, I recalled the marble bench on which I sat the first time I kissed a woman. How cool it had been to the touch, contrasted with the heat in my mouth. I then remembered kneeling in my mother’s garden, dutifully clearing the weeds, when I spontaneously created my first real song, or at least the first one I could still recall. And last to my mind came the memory of lying awake, scared, in my first alone-bed, until I heard the comforting, safe sounds of adult voices talking in the outer room.

Baylet swept those selections aside and tapped the original stack again. “Mors who have influence in their voice.” He gave me a pointed look. “Mors like you. Have each been sent to different lines so that only the Sellari will hear their song. And suffer by it.”

The field leader then began to hum a deep pitch, a full octave lower than any note I could reach. The sound of it filled the tent. He gently lifted the topmost score, written on a pressed parchment, and placed it in my hand. When he stopped singing the single note, the silence that followed felt wide and empty, like the bare-limb stretches of late autumn.

He let that silence hang for a long moment before saying, “This is what they will sing today. They have already set out. You should choose quickly.”

It wasn’t the urgent request or the song he’d sung or the lingering sotto voce that left me in a panic. I put the score aside and began to leaf through the rest of the stack. While I got the impression that the chests I saw in the shadowed corners of the tent carried more music, the fifty or so here would prove to be enough.

Some were reproductions on newer, cleaner paper that still smelled of ink. Most of these were Jollen Caero songs, very old. Jollen was a composer thought to have come down out of the Pall when my Inveterae ancestors had escaped the Bourne. Any other time, I would have liked to study these longer; the melodic choices were as unpredictable as the vocal rhythms. Other selections had been transcribed on parchment that looked like it had seen the field before—ratted edges and smudges where dirty thumbs had held them. Many of these were as interesting as the Jollen songs but for an entirely different reason: their composers were not generally known. And until now, I’d never seen the full scores—only snippets had survived in the forms of childhood rhymes and song-taunts. Seeing the full context for phrases I’d sung here and there all my life left me feeling a bit ashamed and naive.

Before I’d left to study with the Maesteri at Descant, I could have read maybe half of these scores. Back then, I was fluent in six different types of music notation. Now I could read more than thirty. Some of the music here was just that, music only. No lyrics. The Lieholan singing these scores was free to sing them using vowels of his choosing, so long as he didn’t attempt to sing actual words.

Other songs in the stack were nothing more than lyrics, but so familiar that any Lieholan worth his brack would know them. The harder part with these came in the language. They hadn’t been translated. I counted at least four different languages: early Morian, a difficult Pall tongue, lower Masi, and a root language we knew as Borren. Most Lieholan would perform these phonetically, singing words they didn’t understand. For my part, having spent four years at Descant, where language study went along with music training, I could make out the meaning in the lyrics. These were terrifying words. There’d been little effort at rhyme in them. The worst was a litany of tragic images with no narrative or resolution. It might have been the darkest thing I’d ever read. Something I couldn’t unread.

I scanned from one sheet to the next, moving from standard Mor notation, to the subdominant axis approach typified on the necks of the men