Divad said nothing. He’d denied Alosol’s several requests for admission to Descant. The man had Lieholan in him, all right. And Divad would have liked to take him in. But as important as talent was, being teachable mattered more. Alosol carried himself with a callow arrogance, the kind that smacked of someone who thinks he’s got the world figured out.
“Speaking of religionists,” Ollie said, running the towel over the bartop by habit, “listen to this. I was laying up some of that there wheat bitter in the cellar, keeps the temperature right, you see. But I’m running out of room down there. So I’m moving shelves, and I find a cellar door I hadn’t noticed before. A closet. Inside, there are maybe eight crates sealed tight. Dust on ’em as thick as carpet. And what do I find inside?”
He waited on Divad to guess.
“More bitter?”
“You lack imagination,” Ollie quipped, proceeding with his discovery. “No, hymnals. And some other papers, besides. Turns out, before this place was Rafters, it was a chantry. Don’t you just love that?”
Divad smiled over the top of his glass. He did, in fact, love that. The idea that these walls had been a devotional songhouse of sorts, even before becoming a tavern, tickled him for no good reason.
“To a new kind of sacrament, then,” Divad said, hoisting his bitter. And part of him meant it. Songs sung in memoriam were damn important. Suffering itself took that theme more than once.
Ollie didn’t drink. He tasted all his stock, but he never finished anything. ‘I’ll keep my wits, thanks,’ he was fond of saying. But he took his bar rag and pretended to clink glasses with Divad.
“That’s not the half of it,” he went on, gleefully. “That stage, the balcony balustrade…my dear absent gods, even this bar,” he chuckled, “altar and pews, all of it.”
Divad drank down half his glass and nodded his amusement. Just then, the first musician of the night began. Divad swiveled in his seat to find a young woman slouching at the rear of the stage. Her first notes were hesitant, like a child stuttering. The melody—a mum’s lullaby known as “Be Safe and Home Again”—hardly carried past the first table.
The first musicians of the night were those Ollie thought had talent, but who had little reputation yet. They played mostly to empty seats.
Beneath her timid first notes, though, Divad heard what Ollie surely had. He got the young girl’s attention with a simple hand wave. When she looked over, he straightened up tall on his barstool, threw out his chest, tilted back his chin, and took an exaggerated breath to fill his lungs. He then narrowed his eyes, and screwed onto his face a look of confidence. The young girl nodded subtly, mid-phrase, and at her next natural pause, drew a deep breath, stepped forward on the stage, and threw back her head and shoulders. The diffidence of her tone vanished. A clear, bright sound transformed what had been a plaintively beautiful lullaby into a clarion anthem of hope.
Now that’s teachable.
The rest of the night only got better. As music flowed from one to the next, Rafter’s filled to standing room only. Between acts, conversation buzzed with anticipation for the next performer. Divad would turn back toward the bar to try and avoid too many inquiries about Descant admission. Mostly that failed. But he did it anyway.
During one of the brief intermissions, an overeager percussionist sidled up close to him. To announce himself, he began to beat on the surface of the bar. With one hand he set a beat in four-four, while with the other he tapped increasingly faster polyrhythms: three-four, five-four, six-four, seven-four. He then repeated the entire cycle at double the tempo. It was rather impressive, actually. But when the young man reached out a hand in greeting, he knocked over Divad’s third glass of wheat bitter. The amber liquid washed over the bar, giving the worn lacquer new shine.
Ollie appeared out of nowhere with his rag, and began mopping up the spill. Some of the bitter remained in shallow grooves scored into the bar.
The indentations looked familiar somehow, and Divad sat staring, thoughts coalescing in his mind. All kinds of songs had passed across this bar, ribald tunes, laments, fight and love songs (which he thought shared more in common than most other types), dirges. And those melodies had risen from strings and woodwinds and horns and countless voices.
And all that just since it had become Rafters. What about its years before that? Divad found himself grinning at the idea of countless songs for the dead sung here when it had been a chantry.
It got him thinking about sonorant residue—the idea that exposure to music could create subtle changes in the fabric of physical reality. The notion found its roots in the Alkai philosophies of music. To Divad’s ear, the evidence was something you could hear in old, well-used instruments, and in the music of musicians who’d spent their lives listening, teaching, performing. It got in you, as was said. Not an elegant way to express it, but it got the point across.