Yet, though the schools were closed, folk must still be taught such useful things as reading and ciphering and tongues, or what use could they be to the Theocracy? Therefore Edeyrn permitted a sort of instruction to be put forth by a sort of bard: a sanctioned bard, controlled and managed and ever under the eye and hand of the Ravens. For all his rules and safeguards and vigilance, though, the Marbh-draoi never knew how subtly—and flagrantly—his tame bards did violence to his intent; never knew until later, and by then it was too late. But it was not only bards who were the secret enemies of the Marbh-draoi and his works…
Among the others who were so, in Daars at least, were our teachers of record: Ailithir, of course; for as few folk, and no Ravens, yet knew him for a Druid, he was free to teach us as he—and Ygrawn—saw fit to.
But we had two other teachers, Arthur and I: One of them, Elphin Carannoc, was one of those subverter-bards I have just now spoken of. A master-bard too, if anyone in those degenerate days could be said to be a master at all; and to his everlasting honor Elphin never called himself so. But he was a bard if ever bard there were: a bard in his soul; and after all is said and sung, that is where bards are made. So he taught us both: history and tongues and mathematicals and enginery, philosophy and astrography and rhyme; taught us well, if I may say so.
Our third teacher—Since the closing of the Fianna academies and the great WarCollege on Erinna, the soldier's art had fallen off in Keltia. Though Edeyrn indeed had need of bully-boys to enforce his will on the folk, it was not his will that highly trained warriors should ever again be raised up in a body, as formerly, lest they should unite to depose him; and so his own troops were given but minimal instruction in special garrisons, under the gentle tutelage of Ravens.
But there were still true-trained Fians in Keltia all the same—my own sister Tegau, I would later learn, was herself one of them, and one of the finest—and whether by Ygrawn's contrivance or some other's, we had a secret Fian for our tutor in war.
"Hold! Wrong! Again!"
The shout rang like a bell through the faha, and as regularly as a bell did it seem to sound these days. We had learned to obey it, Arthur and I, and to disobey it at our sore cost: We heard its iron tongue even in our dreams.
Scathach crossed the faha and stood before us, surveying our flushed and chagrined faces. I myself had less far to look up these days—I had been at Daars more than two years, and had grown near a hand and a half, though for speed of growing I could not match Arthur, who was shooting up like a young red birch—and now I lifted my eyes to my teacher's.
She was herself not overly tall for a woman of the Kelts, nor more than averagely fair to look upon; but even then I thought Scathach Aodann beautiful, for when she was lost in her art, when that thing that speaks the same to all of us blessed with the gift of a calling was speaking to her—when it had caught her up in its grip as it would later have me in my bardcraft, and Arthur in his artistry, and others in music or magic or feats of skill and strength—she was in those moments fairer than Ygrawn herself.
But this was not one of those moments, and if Scathach was caught up in anything just now, it was annoyance with her two pupils—my sorrow to say her wrath was not often misplaced; though to my guilty relief it was Arthur, not I, who seemed to be the offender on this particular occasion.
"Well then? What do you say for yourself?" She pulled off her leather practice helm, ran her fingers through the straight shoulder-length dark crop and fixed him with her eye.
Arthur breathlessly launched into a spirited defense of the maneuvers he had employed in the sword-drill we had just been engaged in. Much to my surprise, Scathach, who had at first been listening to him with that ages-old expression with which a teacher will hear a clever pupil's inventive excuses, suddenly began to look interested, then genuinely interested, and at last somewhat taken aback; amused, even, and admiring, in a grudging kind of way. Abruptly she gave him a brief nod and an unreadable smile, cuffed him lightly on the ear and walked away; and I wished I had been paying attention to what my fostern had been telling her.
I taxed him with it later. "What did you say to her, I have never seen the old she-bear look so confounded!"
Arthur shrugged happily and thrashed bare tanned legs in the water; we were in the pool-baths after our bout's conclusion—the customary soak that followed exercise and preceded the nightmeal.
"Something she was not thinking to hear. I have been reading and studying a little on my own—it was but an idea that came from it."
"Oh aye! It surely seemed to be a plausible one."
He grinned. "It did seem so, did it not… Well, you know how it is for you, Talyn, when you have the need to put something into words?"
I nodded my understanding, for I knew very well: The little bound book given me by Benesek was long since filled with my scribblings, and now had half a dozen fellows beside it on a secret shelf in my cupboard.
"For you, it is feeling," Arthur was saying, addressing the vaulted tiled ceiling as he floated on his back in the warm water. "For me, it is—well, doing. I know not how to say it better: It can be sword-drill, or bowcraft, or the spear-toss, but more than any it is the planning of such things, to bring them together and make of them a pattern—to wield them together as one weapon."
"If that is how you see things," I said judicially, "you should go to train for a Fian."
He rolled over onto his front, gave me a strange look. "That is what I have said to my father, and to Ailithir."
"And what do they say in answer?"
"Oh, what can they say—that Fianship is dead in Keltia, and any lass or lad who showed promise of being such a warrior would quickly be reived away by Ravens, to train for Edeyrn's service. And since I would sooner be dead in a ditch than serve that one—'
He shrugged again and splashed away down the pool with a strong stroke. The dull burning loathing I had never been able to overcome seized me once again at sound of Edeyrn's name, and I spoke what came to my lips, though Arthur did not hear.
"That will never be your fate—you shall be all you wish to be, and more besides: to bring the Marbh-draoi down, and all his creatures with him; to restore to the throne its rightful blood."
But that was an aisling if ever there was one, a vain and waking dream, and well I knew it: The House of Don, Keltia's royal house for the past five hundred years, was all but dead, and some even held that it had perished utterly. When Ederyn had overthrown his friend and master, Alawn, last king of the Doniaid to rule, he had ordered not only Alawn but his queen Breila Douglas and every other living member of that line to be put to the sword—men, women, children, all—any with a blood-link however distant to the rightful righ-domhna.
But one there was the sword had missed: Within a year of the slaughter of her kindred, a new Queen of the House of Don had been proclaimed. Queen in hiding, queen in exile, queen with a price on her head, but Queen of Kelts all the same: Seirith, who struck back hard; and after her, her son Elgan, and his daughter Darowen. A slender thread to hang a royal house upon, but soon the thread thickened: Darowen and her consort Gwain produced three sons, and two of them became king.
Even I, as a babe at Tair Rhamant, had heard of the first of those: Leowyn, called the Sun Lord, as much for his blazing temperament as his golden hair. He had become his mother's heir on the mysterious death of his brother Amris; had wed a princess of Galloway; and had been cried ten years since as lawful King of Kelts; a meaningless title even so, as Edeyrn still held the Ard-tiarnas, and his Ravens still held the sword-hand uppermost.
Yet even Edeyrn, for all his evil, had never dared put on the Copper Crown, nor wield the Silver Branch nor sit upon the Throne of Scone. Perhaps some lingering inhibition from his days long past as a true and faithful Druid forbade it; perhaps the crown and throne and scepter carried some arcane protection of their own, an innate menace that warned him away. Whatever the reason, Edeyrn had never claimed these royal symbols, or the name of King, for himself;
though all else in Keltia lay trodden deep beneath his boot…
A splash beside me brought me out of the aisling, and I was looking into Arthur's damp and grinning face.
"Where have you been?" he asked. Any other lad would have ducked me under for such woolgathering; but he knew how I still woke in terror from dreams of Gwaelod, walls of water roaring through my sleep.
I smiled back, and began to paddle toward the pool's edge. "Nowhere in especial—nowhere at all."
It was about that time that Ailithir began to claim more and more of our time for special schooling, though we did not notice at first the direction this schooling was taking.
To us, it was dull and unexciting: meditations, mainly—exercises in visualization, training in focusing, disciplines of stillness of body and mind. Even the simple magics I had learned from Ailithir at Tair Rhamant—to shape the clouds or call the tinna-galach—were forbidden us now, and any greater magic was denied us.
Or so at least we thought then: We were too young, and too new to the ways of magic, to see what Ailithir was doing-how he was preparing the ground for the greater seed that would fall, and letting the bearing earth of our souls lie fallow until that seed-time should come. We were only lads, and impatient as lads and lasses will be, and too clever for our own weal; and so we deserved what our insistence earned for us…
"Show us some magic, athro."
Arthur, bored as usual with the lesson—as these days he was with anything that did not require him to have a sword in his hand—looked up at Ailithir from under the red-brown glib, straight brows lifted with a hopeful, artless look that nearly made me choke.
But Ailithir did not seem annoyed at our unwillingness to concentrate on the lesson; only gave us both an indulgent glance that had some kind of measuring behind it that I had not seen before, and which should have warned me right then that a new sort of lesson was about to be taught.
"So you two heroes would see magic—what was it you had in mind to see?"
"Oh, I know not!" Arthur could scarcely believe our teacher's apparent concession. "Something greater than pishogues, any road."
Ailithir raised his own brows at that. But his voice stayed mild. "And are you both such masters of lore that you judge it time to move on? Well, perhaps you have the right of it: Sit there, then, and let us see what may be seen."
Except for our certain knowing that we were still seated on our cushioned stools, in our own schoolroom, the afternoon sun still streaming in at the windows, it was all at once as it had been that moon-silvered midnight in the Arvon hills, when
I had sat beside Ailithir on a granite knob and looked to see visions in the rolling clouds. My heart began suddenly a slow pounding as the room darkened around us, and I could not feel my own body or the seat beneath me. Though I could not see him sitting beside me, I knew it must be the same for Arthur, for I heard him gasp as the darkness took him.
Then the dark lifted and lightened, but when I could see again it was not the familiar schoolroom that I saw: A long blue inland sea rimmed with mountains lay below me now—I say 'below' because I seemed to be hanging motionless in the air high above it, as if I sat astride a falair. Far distant, along the line of a trail through a pass, five horsemen were making their slow way across the mountain's green breast. It was the distance that made their pace seem so stately, for I sensed a desperate urgency in their errand, whatever it might have been, and when I strained my sight for a closer look I could see that they were riding hard.
Try as I might, the only thing else vouchsafed to me was the color of their mounts—two white horses, two black, one bay—and a glimpse of the golden hair of the one who seemed to be leader. Whether that one was man or woman, I could not even tell so much, for darkness swept down again, to veil all the bright picture, and when it lifted once more I was back in my chair in the schoolroom, shivering a little with the mystery of it and staring at Ailithir; for I knew that never would he have allowed us such a Seeing without some great reason.
He, however, was watching Arthur, and when I too turned to look at my fostern I realized that whatever he had seen, it was not what I myself had beheld. Arthur said nothing to either of us, though, and it was not until Ailithir, with an enigmatic smile, had quitted the room that Arthur spoke.
"What did you see, Talyn?"—and listened, strangely subdued, as I recounted my vision.
"And you?" I pressed, when he seemed to forget that he owed me a telling in return.
Arthur started a little. "Oh aye, I was forgetting… Well, it was a far place—not in Keltia, I think—a strange hot dry world. There was a hard black plain, and mountains like stone knives edging it, and fire-mounts in full eruption, two of them, like twin horns of flame. And the sky—it was not blue, but dull red."
There was a long silence in the room. Just when I had decided to speak again, he continued.
"And there was a ship—dark green of hull—a starship, a ship of war, such as I have never seen in Keltia; a ship such as the ones we had before Edeyrn came. It was falling like a meteor, straight for one of the mountains of fire." He looked sidewise at me then, visibly shaking off the magic and the mood as a dog will shake off rain, and managed a fair imitation of his usual care-naught grin. "Well, I asked for magic, did I not? But next time, Talyn—next time you have leave to cut my tongue out before I so ask again."
* * *
Chapter Five
That cautionary lesson of Ailithir's—if indeed caution was all there was to it, and I have never for an instant believed that—accomplished such purpose all the same: Arthur, though soon his cheerful self again, displayed a new thoughtfulness, and a marked willingness to accept his teacher's pace and not force a swifter. As for me—well, let us say that Ailithir was pleasantly surprised to find both his pupils less reluctant to practice those disciplines they had previously so chafed at.
But time passed no matter who was pacemaster. Five years now since my coming to Daars: half a lifetime to an eleven-year-old. A summer at that age is near a year, a year seems near eternity; while to me now—as must have been to Ailithir then—a year spins by like a month. Rising twelve, I had about the weight and inches that were usual for one of my age, coupled with a gravity that I suspect would have better befit someone ten times my years. I knew every inch of my beloved Caer-in-Arvon, from the castle down to Stanestreets, the ancient quarter of twisting wynds and lanes and alleys that made a quaint muddle-maze behind the city walls. I had a horse of my own, a sturdy dun garron with black points, whom I called Faor, and a half-share, as it were, in Luath, a tall gray-brindle staghound whose only love was the chase and whose only gods were Arthur and myself.
The nightmares of Gwaelod were all but gone now. Five years of continuing love and protection had taken away the terror, though the memory would never leave me; and never even in that terror's tightest grip had I prayed that it should, some calamities are better remembered than not. Ygrawn and Gorlas had well fulfilled the trust placed in them: If Ygrawn was perhaps a little overwhelming at times, or Gorlas less effective than he might be, I knew they loved me as they loved Arthur, and I had come to love them as devotedly as if they had been my birth-parents. And many times there were—and are even now—when I was obliged to set myself to remember that they were not.
Not that I forgot Gwyddno, or Medeni whom I had never even known: They lived forever for me in memory, and in more than memory once I began to master the framing of my feelings in words. My notebooks were filled with reflections on them, and those others I loved, or would come to love; and the skill to craft those reflections was being shaped by a master hand indeed.
I have said before that Keltia's ancient arts of Druidry and bardcraft and Fianship were quashed by Edeyrn's policies. But though this was for the most part true, it had come slowly clear to Arthur and to me that true bards and true Druids and true Fians yet existed; and that, by dan or by design, we had all three for teachers. As I say, it took some time for this knowledge to come upon us; indeed I d
o not recall even now being told straight out, as a child, that Ailithir was Druid, or Scathach a Fian. Such dangerous secrets, with their counterpoint of life and death, were not to be entrusted to twelve-year-olds, though I think that we could well have kept counsel on the matter. For we were learning concealment of mightier secrets yet in those days, learning in great gulps and leaps, as the ground Ailithir had taken such pains to prepare drew near at last to sending up its first green shoots.
But if our studies in Druidry were much of a match, Arthur and I had outdistanced each other in our other trainings, the ones that were to set the pattern for the rest of our lives: he as warrior, I as bard. So while he was off with Scathach, refighting historic battles or planning future ones, I spent my days with one who was to have as great a part to play as any in the dan for which we were all preparing—or for which we were being prepared.
If I have not yet spoken as much of Elphin Carannoc as I have of Ailithir or even of Scathach, it is by no means out of slighting or spiting. On the contrary: Elphin was one of those teachers that a gifted student, if fortunate, will come by earlier in life rather than later; not to form or force the untaught talent, but to clear the way for it to move and grow of itself. And for me there in Daars, hungering for words and the lessoning to use them, Elphin seemed sent by the Holy Awen Itself.
Though music has ever played its rightful part in bardery, in the very earliest days of Keltia to be a bard was to be one for words alone. And such words: aers and scriptals and saltars and ranns, the Stories Great and Stories Minor, the epics and annals, the tales and the triads, the chaunts and the colloquies, all the lovely treasure a bard is heir to. Oh, mistake me not, the music is no less fair or mighty, and I pride myself more than perhaps I should that since my time—and in large part because of me—it has become so important in a bard's training, though it was chance first made it so. Still, Frame of Harmony is by my side even now, and I can hear pipe and harp and fidil from morn to middlenight here at Seren Beirdd…
The Hawk's Gray Feather Page 5