Chapter 62
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
The history of Albion is the history of tribes at war. Now, ages hence, I finally understand that my victories over Caesar’s legions and my own kinsmen were only as valuable as the love I had for my people and my dear Fflur.
—Chancellor Caswallawn, Ancient Stratum, excerpt from “Chancery Response to Shiguan Hegemonic Motion”
Cassius dragged me away from the wraith and hauled me to my feet. Gone was his centurion armor. He wore a leather vest over a long, black-and-grey-striped shirt. Gaulish, I thought.
We stared into each other’s eyes, and I squeezed his hand. “Thank you. Cas—”
“That can wait. What is the plan?”
Lakshmi came up beside me and handed me my lantern. “Jack, even with Cassius and the priest, the wraith is too strong.”
I looked around. Kincaid was crouching with his metal rods in his hands, protecting the Ward. He nodded to me. I raised a hand in thanks, then turned back to the raptorial. “I know,” I said, still gasping for breath. The rest of my friends had gotten up but were struggling to stand.
And from far out on the Ancient Stratum, new sounds like thunder rolled toward us.
I turned toward the wraith. A few notes of Handel’s unheard Messiah had brought it storming to consume me.
I’d just heard my friend sing a third verse I’d been trying to find for twenty-five years.
If a metal singer could struggle so long to finish a song, I couldn’t imagine what a musical giant like Handel must feel, who’d been at it for centuries. His unfinished song had to be the key.
The wraith gathered itself and started toward me, shrieking, black smoke trailing from its mouth. The scars in my shadow flared, and a rush of bad memories flashed in my mind.
Cassius and Lakshmi closed ranks, weapons raised.
I lifted my bow and struck my lantern so hard that several bowstrings snapped. A flash of revelatory light showed me the wraith’s Rupture, but not what lay beneath it.
The wraith screamed, driving Cassius and Lakshmi aside, and began racing toward me.
I set my lantern against my chest and began to play it ferociously, focusing everything I’d learned about Handel and his unfinished Messiah into the light, trying to wrap it all around the composer’s great scar.
Brassy tones blared as the light blazed inside him and penetrated that deepest part of his shadow.
The wraith came to a sudden stop before me and stood, looking down, like a cloud of darkness in the shape of a giant man. I pulled one last stroke, peered into his shadow, and Illumination opened his Rupture to me . . .
. . . handing his father his recorder, which the man snaps before forbidding Handel from visiting any friend’s home where music might be heard . . .
. . . softly playing a sonata by candlelight on a spinet he’ d secreted into the attic on his tenth birthday, and trying to muffle the sound so it wouldn’t wake his family . . .
. . . his father dragging him away from music school across a snowy courtyard to the admission office for civic law . . .
. . . stooping over his father’s grave, eye patches over both eyes, an assistant guiding his old, trembling hand to place a copy of Messiah on the man’s headstone . . .
I thought I understood now.
Handel was trying to get Messiah right to prove himself to his father. He might not think it was his best music, but something inside him seemed to acknowledge that it might be his only chance at a legacy that would prove his father wrong about Handel’s pursuit of music.
The wraith seemed suddenly aware of my peering and reared up, like it meant to drape me in its folds again. If it succeeded, I didn’t believe I’d get away a second time.
I needed to shine it all back at him in a new light—soften him, so that he could be turned, renew the ward.
So, I peered into his Rupture again, but this time I also sang a variation of Handel’s gleaming notes.
I first voiced his “Moonlight Sonata” pattern quiet and low, to capture the fragile ache of the boy he’d been.
Once I had the sound of his darkest memories, I began to brighten the song, introducing major-seven broken-chord melodies and singing pictures of crowded churches, faces flush with exhilaration, people dressed in their Christmas finest crying with joy.
The wraith’s Rupture brightened, too, and it stopped as though listening.
After a few moments, into the silence it whispered, “Imperfekt,” in a vague German accent.
Then its Rupture began to darken again, closing me out.
The wispy folds of its long coat and ribbons of black smoke billowed up, its whisper rising to a full-throated scream.
My song faltered. My voice wasn’t enough to alter Handel’s feeling of abandonment and failure. Time seemed to stop, and I felt like the boy in the window again—like I could fight another losing battle on my own, or run away.
But there is always a third option.
And it was standing all around me. Lady, Church, and Chuey to my left. Cassius and Lakshmi to my right. Kincaid with his rods on the other side of the wraith.
These people didn’t have to be here. But they were here, at the bottom of history, facing down all hell with me. Just the way a family would. What’s more, they were people from so many different places, times, and paths. All of whom, I was betting, knew Handel’s famous song.
I signaled my friends to be ready and quickly returned to the dark melody of Handel’s deep wound. This time, though, I wove it forward toward his great Hallelujah chorus—the one he’d never truly finished—but singing his latest version, penned in his attic office on the Renaissance Stratum.
The wraith leveled its head at me. “Cease this!” The clouds of him roiled, thin veins of crimson and gold shooting through his billowing form like lightning. Waves of dense, freezing air rolled over me.
I spread my feet and kept at it.
There was no great ensemble to accompany the song, no expectant crowd, no performers or venues or librettists with their demands for change upon Handel’s musical heart. There was just me, giving simple voice to a refrain he’d ached for centuries to get right.
Then I gestured to my friends to join me. Chuey came in without hesitation, his terrible voice somehow lending the song authenticity.
Handel turned toward my oldest friend. “Who sings this?” “A friend from the world above,” I said. “Mexico, no less.”
Cassius came in next. He sang an octave down, giving our tune the strength of his war cry.
“From Gaul and Germania,” I added. “Centuries before you even wrote the music.”
Then Church and Lady joined in, broadening the song with tenor and alto melodies. Though unpracticed, their voices rang out with love for the music.
“She cared for fallen soldiers, and tended London foundlings in your own time,” I told the wraith. “And he is a man of intellect and compassion from the era of Earth’s great wars.”
Kincaid began to sing, too, coming in with the full-chested sound of an archangel. The wraith spun to look at him.
“A priest,” I said, “and caretaker in the abbey where you’re buried in the world above.”
Lakshmi sang last, almost too quiet to hear, until I realized her notes were a soft high soprano, lilting and lovely. The beauty of it like seeing a child’s first smile.
“And this voice belongs to a raptorial,” I told him, “born in Calcutta, and sworn to maintain Precedent Law above all else. Yet here she is, singing your song . . .”
We didn’t sing the whole oratorio. Just that one word in its joyful refrain.
We’d sung it through a few times, when from Handel’s shadow a broken voice joined us, gently correcting melody and rhythm as we sang it softly together. We didn’t rush. And frankly, it sounded cracked and halting and a bit uncertain.
A few moments later, Handel glided toward me, slowly shaking his giant head, even as he continued to sing with us, ever so slightly modifying his song toward its best end.
Then, the notes began to repeat in the same pattern, our voices growing firmer, louder, and more confident. We let it grow and swell, singing with as much joy and purpose as any one of us might have wanted to hear in the song of our own souls.
Like a family, we sang that beautiful music.
Our voices, from across history, across the world, across spiritual paths, shone back the Rupture inside Handel not as a repudiation of his music or the failure of an imperfect song, but as the confirmation of his path and the very legacy he’d thought had escaped him.
At last, we pulled together in one final powerful chorus that echoed out into the dark over the long, ancient plain.
When it had echoed its last, all fell to silence, and Handel again stood right in front of me.
“Even if this one song is all anyone ever remembers,” I said, “it’s enough. Almost three hundred years later, people still sing it. Maybe not the version we just did, but the spirit’s the same.”
Then like an overtone you barely hear, Handel softly cried, the sound rising from his Rupture. “I wish my father could have heard this,” he said.
I was in no position to offer advice about parents. Still. “For what it’s worth, I think your dad would have liked it.” Then I remembered my dad
driving me to the airport and what he’d said to me about being happy. “Actually, from what I’ve learned about you and your father . . . I think he’d be proud.”
“Perhaps,” said Handel. “And maybe, in his own way, he just wanted what was best for me.”