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 around me, to a symbol-centered system that referred to a mandola neck, to the more elegant Petruc signifier, where slight serifs and swoops on a handful of characters gave the singer all the information he needed to render the pitch. I liked the Petruc system best. Those delicate strokes could be added to written language, allowing the lyrics to become the central part of the piece, while subtle Petruc ornamentation on its letters carried the melodic direction. Originally, it had been created as a code, back during the War of the First Promise.
Probably the most interesting music, though, was a pair of songs written in an augmented Phrygian mode. They were unattributed, but the parchment was old and the Sotol music notation fading some. This music would require vocal gymnastics to carry off, and two voices besides. Though separately composed, they were clearly a call-and-response orchestration. In my mind I could hear where notes sounded together and where vocal runs built tension on top of beautifully dark counterpoint. I wanted to sing this song, whose first bridge was the only portion I had ever heard, and then only the caller side of the arrangement.
All of them I’d heard or sung, if only in part. But the familiarity was precisely the problem and the thing that alarmed me.
When I’d made sure there was nothing unfamiliar, I looked up and locked eyes with Baylet. “You haven’t brought the Mor Refrains with you?”
Holis laughed, the squint of his eyes as he did so pinching the lid of his eyeless socket into a pouch of skin. “I see now. You think that’s why we called you back. To sing the Refrains. Ah, sapling, we’ve had it more bitter than this, and not fallen to such foolish desperation.” His one remaining eye widened, the way it might if he’d happened on some realization. “But your asking tells us something about you, I think.”
The captain knocked on the tabletop once to silence them. “The field men have already marched. Are you rested enough? And is there one of these you know by rote?”
My heart ran cold. They meant to send me to the field…today. I stood there, struck dumb for a long moment before nodding.