The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One (4 page)

Michael sighed and slumped deeper into the chair. There were too many good reasons, too many motivations to want to stay to risk blowing a tenure position—and if he wanted to stay long enough to be considered for tenure at all, then he had better make certain there was a department in which to teach, and the best opportunity to make his case for that was at the meeting requested by the Rector. He picked up the letter and scanned it quickly for the scheduled time, then let out a loud groan. The meeting had been set for this afternoon—four hours ago.

The view from the battered old chair was his favorite—a sweeping panorama of the city and the Vienna hills, and over to the far right, a glimpse of the Danube. He crumpled up the letter from the University and flung it against the glass.

Eventually, he got tired of drumming his fingers and stewing in his own juices, and looked at the desk where the plum-colored invitation and orange ticket still lay. He decided.

Snatching up a jacket and the invitation, Michael opened the door and left before he could change his mind.

***

CHAPTER TWO
The Soloist

The note hung in the crisp, early-evening air, sweet and clear; it was a purity of sound which was unmatched by the cacophony of street sounds wafting into the open balcony doors. In the tasteful residential section in one of Vienna’s southern districts, those walking below who could hear it ringing into the approaching night may have wondered if it was some great applauded voice, preparing for a concert that was not advertised; or an undiscovered virtuoso, on the cusp of a wondrous career. Only a few had the capacity to discern the quality in the sound that marked it as a recording, not an actual voice; and fewer still would recognize that it was a recording more than ten years old.

Mikaal Gunnar-Galen shut off the turntable, then, thumbs twitching, switched it back on, and the clean, beautiful melodies again broke out into space.

* * *

In a city where musical virtuosity was practically encoded in the genes of its children, Mikaal Gunnar-Galen was a cultural phenomenon without precedent. Awarded a position in the renowned Vienna Boys Choir at the age of three, Galen dominated every performance in which he sang, and two things became quickly evident: the usual venues of performance, however notable, would not sufficiently showcase his talent; and his ego would not allow him to ever be a true ensemble performer.

As he grew older, concessions were made to his abilities, and many strictures of youth set aside so that he could more fully focus on developing his voice. Housing was a given, and a University education was practically delivered to his doorstep before he’d even taken steps to enroll. Essentially, the Viennese had decided that the same lightning-in-a-bottle which had created Mozart had struck again in the form of this young fair-haired prodigy, and they determined as a collective that if he could be used to forge a new identity for Austria as the undisputed cultural capital of Europe, then they would make the path to that goal as obstacle-free as possible.

The prodigy, however, while he had no objection to the Viennese handing him the world on a silver skewer, had other plans for his career goals.

Galen had rejected the offers of some of the traditional opera companies, all of which he considered to be stale and immovable in their adherence to tradition. Instead, he formed a company of his own, and promptly blazed a cultural trail across Europe with the skill of a Caruso and the moxy of the young Orson Welles. Much as Kenneth Branagh had taken his theater company and revolutionized Shakespeare, the Gunnar-Galen Opera Company presented the finest operas ever written in lavishly designed productions, to be performed in the venues of Emperors and Kings, and Galen performed all of the great roles—all, that is, save one.

By any standards, the tour was an astonishing success; by Galen’s standards, it was merely the warm-up act to what promised to be a career of unparalleled accomplishment. Recordings of his performances had made him wealthy, and he had the freedom to choose when, where, and how he performed. An unprecedented invitation was subsequently extended for Galen’s company to orchestrate, design, and perform one of the annual productions of Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
at the Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth—an invitation which Galen accepted. Over recent years, the various productions of The Ring had run the gamut from innovative to scandalous, some equaling the choice once made by Welles to write a version of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
to be performed entirely in modern dress. Nevertheless, any direction Mikaal Gunnar-Galen wished to take the performance would be welcomed with open arms and prideful smiles: the annual festival in Bayreuth was a symbol of national heritage and identity, and Galen was, at the moment (and to the great chagrin of the Austrians), Germany’s most favored adoptive son.

The company had one final performance in Switzerland, after which the remainder of the year would be dedicated entirely to preparing for
The Ring
.

Due to a mistake in scheduling their performances in Brussels, the opera company had arrived early in Lucerne, and by Monday evening had made all of the necessary preparations for the first performance on Wednesday. Thus, there was a full day for the performers to relax and rehearse, or, if they so chose, to take in the sights. Having seen several of the sights clustered around the entrances of the performance hall, all long legs and smiles, straining to connect with one of the newly-arrived celebrities, Galen decided on the latter. After all, what is the point of being a celebrity-in-the-making if one cannot use one’s status, fame, and allure to do something to be properly ashamed of?

Her name was Ella, and she was the ideal image of the virginal young maiden—although a few minutes alone with her at her father’s stables convinced Galen that she was not virginal at all, and would do her level best to make him deliriously glad of the fact. He also thought it prudent not to inquire exactly how old she was.

She was fully as tall as he was, her breasts were large and shapely, and she smelled faintly of orange blossoms. She giggled as he moved against her, and crossed her legs over his back, clutching him tighter.

It was not the sort of situation where he would have suspected, feared, or even had the imagination to conceive that he was proceeding rapidly on a track that would mean the end of his career, nor would he foresee the form it would take.

In his mind’s eye, he could imagine that he had seen it, tines pointing upwards, sticking out of the hay, that he had twisted in midair, missing it by inches, that both he and the girl had laughed in relief at their good fortune. Perhaps, that would have happened if they’d fallen, or if they’d been in a hayloft, or if there’d even been any hay. As it was, the pitchfork was real enough, and in the end, that was all that mattered.

He could recall a slight expression of alarm crossing her features just before the blow was struck, but at the time, he read it as an expression of an entirely different kind. It was his most fervent regret that he had not been more attentive to his surroundings, that the opportunity for the incident to have been averted was there, fleeting, and passed. He could not, however, ever recall regretting having initiated the situation to begin with.

The girl’s father was a cultured man, a banker, not one accustomed to the use of common farm implements; but in stumbling onto the scene before him, he suddenly found the ability and the inclination to do so, not to mention a certain creativity in its use. When he shoved the pitchfork into the intruder mounting his daughter, piercing the back of his neck, Galen was still nuzzling her chest. This was the mistake—the tine drove straight through Galen’s throat and into her bosom, piercing her heart.

She died.

Galen didn’t, but he might as well have.

* * *

The catastrophe which ensued nearly destroyed Galen, and completely devastated everyone around him. The grieving banker, a well-known mainstay of the community, was arrested, tried, and given a suspended sentence in the attack on Galen. The death of his daughter was ruled a tragic accident. Galen himself spent almost four months in the hospital—luckily, the tine had missed his spinal cord and the major blood vessels. Not so luckily, it pierced and badly scarred his vocal cords. Galen would never sing again.

With the loss of their center, the opera company almost of necessity dissolved—which was just as good, for the publicity surrounding the attack, the trial, and the scandal resulted in a flurry of rescheduling by every city in which they were to perform. No one was willing to have them—not without Galen, anyway. And as bad as it was throughout the rest of Europe, in Austria the once-promising virtuoso had been declared persona non grata: officially, he no longer existed. Within a year, Galen was without friends, his professional reputation was in tatters and already fading from the public’s memory, and he was nearly penniless. He had found only a minor position teaching music at a grade school in Portugal, where the quality of his voice was irrelevant, and no one cared to ask him about the whitening scar at the base of his throat.

Amidst all of the fallout, only one non-event continued to plague Galen’s mind in dreams both waking and asleep: he had not performed at Bayreuth. He had not sung Siegfried. And now, he never would.

* * *

The road back to respectability was as hard as his ascent into the pantheon had been easy. Galen moved farther into the world of academia, refining his innate but unexpressionable skills into a very respectable talent for musical theory and analysis. He wrote as he taught, generally under an assumed name, and when he had published enough, replaced the burden of being Mikaal Gunnar-Galen, musical virtuoso, with Mikaal Gunnar-Galen, musical authority.

His teaching responsibilities had stair-stepped from the grade school in Portugal to a small college in Madrid, to a respected music conservatory in Flanders. Gradually, he began to work his way back to Bavaria, and, eventually, home to Vienna.

The Viennese are not tolerant of their mistakes; as a performer, Galen was virtually unknown and forgotten. As an academician, however, he had become very respected, and thus was able to secure a part-time position as an assistant choir director in the Music department at the University of Vienna. This was not to last long.

Whatever the mistakes of his youth, and regardless of the damage to his voice and soul, Galen still possessed a considerable ego and an equally formidable drive to excel —not all of his earlier success had been inborn talent or gifts from the state. Within six months, he was a full-time assistant, and before the year was up, he was the choir director. At the end of his second year in Vienna, he chaired the Music department, and four years later he was respected enough to attain the post of Vice-Rector. His return to Vienna it seemed, if somewhat quieter than his departure, was complete.

* * *

As part of his administrative obligations to the University, Galen had been forced to attend a hearing earlier that afternoon regarding whether or not to continue the funding for an associate professor’s post and the department he sponsored; the academician in question never showed up, and the entire committee spent almost two hours doing very little other than stare blankly and fume. The future of the department and the absent professor, was not, in Galen’s opinion, an altogether rosy one.

He was considering spending the evening writing a memo to the Rector, advising the expansion of the powers of the Vice-Rectors to encompass many responsibilities currently handled by the University Senate, but for some reason, he couldn’t seem to stop playing his old recordings. One after another, though all the performances he did and the one that he didn’t, which when he came to it he sang silently inside his head—for some reason, the evening seemed to be ordaining itself a night of performances both seen and unseen. It was this thought that was on his mind when he heard the envelope slipped whisper-silent under his door.

Brow furrowed, Galen quickly strode to the door and opened it. No one was in the hall in either direction, and no doors were closing suddenly. He frowned and buzzed the usually dependable doorman—but the older Swiss man told him that no one had entered or left the building for the better part of an hour.

Galen shook his head and picked up the small plum-colored envelope. It was addressed to him, but bore no other identifying marks. It was possibly for some social function—the invitation was not unlike many he’d been sent throughout the years, although in his second incarnation in Vienna he’d been less inclined to attend as during his first—but gatherings of that kind were not the sort of occasion which resonated in Galen’s soul; not anymore.

Out of curiosity, he thumbed open the sealed flap and removed the matching plum card which was inside. It was not an invitation to a party, but rather an invitation to attend some sort of performance at a nightclub. It appealed to him by name, and made some rather transparent efforts to flatter him into coming, but as invitations go it was no great shakes. His conclusion that it was a low-rent affair was confirmed when he turned the envelope over and a cheap orange ticket fluttered to the floor.

Galen crumpled up the invitation and tossed it to the ashtray near the door, then bent to retrieve the ticket. As he did so, he glanced again at the envelope and was suddenly struck by an odd feeling, as if an unusual odor had entered the room. He looked more closely at the envelope, then flattened out the invitation and suddenly saw what had bothered him: they were both addressed to him, but they were addressed differently.

The invitation addressed him simply as Professor Gunnar-Galen; but the envelope itself addressed him as Mikaal Gunnar-Galen, Rector, the University of Vienna.

Had he not been so focused on the discrepancy and possible reasons for it, intentional or otherwise, he might have noticed that his hands were shaking. As it were, Galen couldn’t accept the thought that it was a mere error; nor could he deny the fact that he had not noticed the incorrect means of address on the envelope. He couldn’t deny it, because that was how he saw himself—the envelope just happened to be the first time he had ever seen himself addressed as Rector outside of the plans in his own mind.

The Rector and Vice-Rectors who acted as the academic heads of the University served for a four-year term, and this was the last year of that term. One of the other Vice-Rectors, a Linguistics professor whose main abilities seemed to center on the manipulation of microfiche, was no threat at all, and unlikely to be re-elected. Another was fairly competent but, at eighty-three years of age was just as unlikely to be any competition. And the last Vice-Rector had, just a few days before, apparently suffered some sort of spiritual possession, and was expected to spend the balance of the year weaving baskets at a very comfortable hospital in Linz.

By his estimation, Galen had the support of the Senate, but the Administrative Director, who could sway the balance of the faculty, supported the current Rector, Andreas Raeder. Thus, there were three options available to clear his path to the Rector’s office: gain the Director’s support; gain Raeder’s support, or eliminate Raeder from the running altogether. All were difficult, but any one would do the trick, and once Galen was in the position he desired, any tactics used or egos trod upon in the process could be easily covered or bought.