The double edge of the old saw sobered me instantly. "I will not, then… And from now on ale and usqua meet not in any mether of mine."
"Good. What more do you think can be learned from this?"
He was watching me with that same measuring look that Ailithir so often used upon me, and almost as often upon Arthur. Under the impassive green stare I began to fidget a little, desperately afraid that that seeking eye should find a flaw; and in my fear I began to babble.
"I think I have learned—learned that I know nothing? And that I can learn how to learn." Miraculously, it was the right answer: Elphin's dark handsome face split in a grin. I added cautiously, lest I might ruin my success, "Though I do not yet know, athro, what it is you would wish that I learn?"
He said nothing, but let his glance wander over to rest upon Frame of Harmony, my beloved harp, where it stood in its accustomed wall-niche. When he spoke it was with sudden decision, as if some question long thought-on had been just now settled in his mind.
"If bardic colleges still existed in Keltia, would you now be thinking of going off to one of them to study?" Seeing the blank astonishment, he smiled. "What I mean to say, Talyn"—and that was cause for further astonishment, almost never did he call me by my truename—"is only this: Is it your wish to become bard? For if not, a true gift has been wasted on you."
"'A true gift'? You mean—me? Mine? My gift?" In my excitement and sudden shyness, my voice went squealing out of control, as it did now it was breaking. Chagrined, I relaxed my throat muscles to recover the new baritone deepness. "You can offer this to me? I thought you were not—I mean to say—" It seemed my manners had gone the way of my voice, and again I was silent, reddening at my lapses. But Elphin only laughed, and slouched down luxuriously in the chair Arthur had vacated. "Oh aye," he said. "I know very well what you thought I was not—a bard trained. It has been better that folk should think so—well, at least most folk. But now there is need for you to know differently, so listen and I shall tell you: I am a true bard, an ollave, trained in the true schools. Not at Seren Beirdd, to be sure, as I would have liked, and as you should be; but—in secrecy—brought up through the degrees in the ancient way."
I stared at him, too confounded by what I was hearing—both the words and the unimagined implications—to think of myself or my ale-head or anything else save what I had just learned: Elphin my teacher was a true bard, and he had said that I might be one too.
"How can this be?" I asked after a while, out of all the whirling welter of questions that filled my brain.
"Well, your sister Tegau is a Fian, is she not, and Fians are every bit as proscribed as bards. Not to mention Druids, whom we had better not mention—It should not come as such surprise: Ederyn may have forbidden the schools, but he cannot forbid the knowledge."
"But—where can such things be learned? Who is there to teach them? How long has it been so? When can I—" In my bubbling excitement I had bounced forward on my knees in the bed, and now almost fell out of it altogether.
"In good time," said Elphin, catching me before I went over the side. Turning the topic: "Yesterday, down in Stanestreets—Arthur tells me you knew this Perran was a Raven, come to Daars to seek you. You knew this before Arthur did?"
I nodded. "It came to me as soon as we turned round and saw him there blocking our path. It was—it was the way it felt; had it been only some old far-a-tigh doing the marketing it should have felt very different… But it was Arthur thought quicker than I, and acted on it, praying him come take the nightmeal here in the castle."
"Yet it was you saw him first for what he was." Elphin tapped his chin thoughtfully with the edge of his closed fist. It seemed to me, watching him with all my yearning soul in my eyes, that he had come to yet another decision, akin to that one he had earlier made—and it seemed also that this new one would not have been shared with me, as was about to happen, had I answered differently the questions he had been asking.
"You know how Edeyrn does permit tame bards, of a sort, in Keltia?" he said then. "Bards he thinks have been force-formed into his own pet drones?"
"Aye, else how would children be taught even such simple skills as ciphering and mathematicals? An ignorant population is less use to him than even a half-educated one. But I have wondered often as to those bards."
"Well you might," said Elphin, "for they are not all they seem, any more than I am. A great part of their number—I should put it at one of every three, and most like more even than that—are in fact no bards of Edeyrn's making, but of ours."
The room had gone very still. " 'Ours'?" I repeated blankly. "Well—whose!"
Elphin rolled up his eyes. "And this is the same lad can sniff out a spying Raven in a public street! The Counterinsurgency's, bach; whose else?"
Now it was said I only wondered that I had not guessed before. Vague clouded pieces of the hitherto unsuspected puzzle suddenly shifted into place, the whole great and beautiful picture beginning to form before my dazzled eyes.
"All this time—secret bards, and so of course secret Fians, and secret Druids as well. The old way is not dead after all."
"It never even fell gravely ill," said Elphin with a smile. "Oh, to be sure, we had to scurry in the early years, to save the records and the skills and those who carried the secret of both." The smile had ghosts behind it now, and the room seemed thick with presences: It had not been so easy after all; the measure of the suffering was to be seen in the gallant gaiety of the smile. "Aye," he said briefly, "and many, many were lost… But for long now the learnings have been safe in place, and we who have been trained in the crafts are forever seeking out those we may ourselves train up, that the knowledge does not die as did those whose deaths saved it. And, Taliesin Glyndour ap Gwyddno"—he used my name gravely and deliberately, and it sounded in my ear like some high and proud title of old Keltia—"I think I have found one such in you."
I sat for a while in perfect stillness, and Elphin respected it. Within, I was anything but still: My young soul felt as some small mountain lochan into which the hand of a god had suddenly cast a giant boulder. The ripples were dashing back and forth and the countercurrents clashing; all I could do was wait out the turmoil, until my being like the lochan's surface once again cleared to calm.
"You know that it is what I have ever wanted," I said then, still uncertain if I could trust my voice; both of us heard the tears that stood behind it—I think it is the hardest thing there is, to get what one has wanted. Lack is ever easier to deal with than gift… "And if you offer it I accept most gladly. But also I have been thinking to train as a sorcerer—Ailithir has been directing our steps that way, both Arthur's and mine—
"And nothing to keep either of you off that path; in fact, from what I hear, both of you are well along it. But the one training does not of necessity preclude the other. Arthur, as you may by now have guessed, is being taught also as a Fian—by a Fian."
"Scathach!"
"And Berain," said Elphin composedly. "And there are others in this very castle who have been walking other paths, other ways—But it will be for them to tell you when they judge it best, not for me to do so now."
I leaned back against my pillows with a long, happy, heartfelt sigh. "You have told me already more than I think I can quite encompass."
"Then let me tell you but one thing more, and we will speak no more of it today." Elphin leaned forward in the chair, his hands clasped in front of him and his elbows on his knees. All the smiling was gone now from him: Face and body alike were suddenly taut and focused, and I felt myself going very still and small to hear what he would tell me.
"It was your sister Tegau sent warning to the Lady Ygrawn, that the Marbh-draoi's attention might be turning to Daars; and now we see the proof of that in Perran's visit. How think you that warning was passed on?"
"I had not thought—some secret messenger?"
"It came from Tegau's lips to Ygrawn's ear through a chain of bards."
And then of course it
was all there for me, the last puzzle piece dropped into place. In a blaze of clarity I saw it all: The bards that Edeyrn thought to be his own tools were instead the tools of his downfall, and the tools of the re-making of Keltia. In his blind arrogant traha he had thought them his, and so gave them freedom to roam the worlds. Some in fact were his; they had taken the Marbh-draoi's coin, had been bought for gold as no true bard could ever be. But those were few, and in the end they would not matter; they would fall with their master and be swept aside, and his hand would not be strong enough on that day to save either them or himself. Elphin had quietly watched the revelation blazon itself upon my face, and now he spoke again. "One day, Talyn, I promise you it will be so; and I think not long now. We shall both live to see it, as so many of our dear ones did not, and if the Mother allows we shall have a hand in it yet. Not bards alone will do it but Druids and Ban-draoi and Fians and brehons, and the plain folk of Keltia who have naught to throw against Edeyrn but their lives. It shall be done."
"And I may help! I will put my life and skill and strength—"
"I doubt it not," said Elphin, and reached out to ruffle my hair. "Not yet a while, though, young Gwion"—and I knew from the name that our secret conclave was over—"and I think not from here; not from Daars. But we shall see. In the meantime"—he took up one of my copying-books from the table and tossed it at me—"I suggest a review of the secondary precepts of meter. Your lines yesterday had more extra feet in them than a ceadchosach."
Alone, I sat in bed hugging my copybook and my new staggering knowledge both alike, my potsickness utterly vanished and forgotten. It did not occur to me to wonder that Elphin should choose to impart all this to me now, nor that he had given me not even the most cursory cautioning against speaking of it—and, no mistaking, this was the sort of knowledge that one might, quite literally, die for. Indeed, as Elphin had said, many already had… and if I accepted the knowledge, with its price, I myself might yet.
But the other side of that coin was the realization that Elphin would never have told me had he not thought I could grow to the size of the knowing. I was thirteen; not yet a man, certainly, but as certainly no longer a child. I had seen Tair Rhamant. I could keep my counsel.
"A true bard," I said aloud, testing the sound of the words on the air, on my lips, in my soul. It had been promised; and when I had won it, I would make Gwaelod—and Gwyddno—the lament their deaths had earned them. That too was promised.
But first must come the learning, and so I opened my book.
In the wake of Perran's spying visit, all we in Daars were more alert, more aware, more watchful even than usual, as a warrior will be when he knows battle is imminent, but not from what quarter, or even in what guise, it will present itself. All he knows is that it will come, and that he must meet it; and so it was with us.
Arthur and I stood somewhat apart from this: Our lessons continued unchanging, no added content or altered tack to reflect the new knowledge we had been given of our part in both present and future. Even that knowledge, though, was an equivocal gift at best: We had been thought grown enough to be told, yet still too young to be given aught real to do… We understood the reasons for this very well, but—as had been declared—we were still children and so we fretted a little (in truth, more than a little, and more than we should have done) that for us it was still the schoolroom and not yet the battlefield. But we spoke of it to each other whenever we had need of comfort, to reassure ourselves that it was true, what we had been told, and not some aisling one or the other of us had woven out of dreams and hope and air.
"So you will be a Fian after all, then, as you have longed to be." I was talking to Arthur one night, as he lay with his head pillowed on Luath's flank, both of them looking well content.
Arthur's dark eyes lighted. "It seems so—and you to be a bard, and a spy… Did I not tell you it should be so, that we should be permitted to do what we might for the Counterinsurgency?"
"Hush," said Ailithir, not lifting his eyes from his texts. "Do not speak that name aloud, even here to me."
"Why not? Is not our own home safe enough from Edeyrn's ears?"
"Safe? Maybe; but no place in all Keltia is safe these days. Daars, it is true, has been safer than many, but as your sister Tegau has told us, Taliesin, it is now less safe than most. We would all do well to guard our tongues—and our thoughts—more even than formerly."
"Well," I said, determined not to be quashed overmuch by our teacher's dour uncheer, "when you have taught us to be sorcerers, Druids such as you yourself are, that will be easier. We shall but summon our magic, and the thing will be done."
At that Ailithir did look up, his glance moving from me to Arthur and back down to his book. "And who is it has told you I am Druid?"
"Why—no one told me—us—I but thought—' I stammered in my shock. "Athro… are you not then Druid?"
He threw back his head and laughed, a full warm laugh such as we had never heard him give before.
"Aye, lad, I am Druid right enough! And doubtless I should not have said that aloud either… But since all round me are owning up to their hidden ranks—Elphin and Scathach and Berain and the rest—I warrant it was time I did so too. Much good the knowing will do you both though," he added darkly, "for you will not be able to speak of it."
"You mean we must not speak," said Arthur, his chin now on Luath's back so that he might watch Ailithir.
"Nay, I mean that you will not speak," said Ailithir evenly. "There is compulsion on you both that you may not."
"A spell!" Arthur shot up in his excitement, all but overturning Luath. "You mean you have put some rann on us, athro, and we never even knew it?"
"Something of the sort." He saw our dazzled faces. "It is no great sorcery," he assured us. "Nor is it that I felt I could not trust you to keep silence on your own. But with Perran here in Daars, and perhaps others about, it seemed best to take precautions. When you are Druids yourselves, you will understand."
But Arthur had in the midst of all this heard something more, and with his usual straightforwardness went to the heart of his fears.
"Will the Marbh-draoi slay my father, athro, as he did Talyn's?"
Gone were the days when the mention of my murdered parent brought me to tears; I felt a twinge of distant sorrow pinch at my heart, but after eight years of warm and abiding love from Ygrawn and Gorlas, the memory of Gwyddno had receded, and with it my sense of loss. So it was that I could consider Arthur's question almost as equably as could Ailithir; and looking at him, I could see also that he had not been surprised that Arthur had asked it. But his answer was a brief one.
"As to that, I have not Seen, one way or another."
Not good enough, plainly; now Arthur swung that devastating dark glance on me. "This, then, is what you have been trying to hide from me, Talyn, for the fortnight past; not so?"
No use to try to lie; even then he could read truth in face and voice—more than that: He could read it in hearts.
"Aye, braud, it was," I admitted miserably. "It was your mother asked me to keep silent on it. My sorrow but I could not go against her wish: yet I promise there is naught known. Only a word from my sister, passed on by the bards to the Lady Ygrawn."
Arthur seemed surprised that I should apologize. "How could you do other than keep it hid, if she did order you to do so? But listen now: If my mother fears this, then it is truly a thing to be feared, and no mere saulth or half-taish." He leaped up, and Luath sensing his mood rose too, stiff-legged as if for battle, hackles half-lifted. "Is there naught we can do then, athro? To save my father? Or Daars?"
The anguish in the question throbbed in the air of the room. Ailithir put down his book and came round the desk to stand before Arthur, his hands on the boy's straight shoulders and his eyes upon the flushed and frustrated face.
"Listen well, Arthur of Arvon," he said slowly, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stirring like Luath's hackles at the power that was now in my teacher's voice. And
hearing it, I wondered if all along I had not known what he truly was—more than Druid, even, though that I was not to learn until later… He was speaking again to Arthur, and to something, or someone, beyond Arthur and me and the room in which we stood; and he was heard.
"What must be, shall be; even I cannot See it, not just yet. There are greater things moving than this of Daars alone, and you shall come to stand among their chiefest motivers. You also, Taliesin, and others… and if Gorlas must perish for it, or Daars, or Gwynedd itself, that were small price to pay for what will be bought by such a spending." He lowered his hands then, and Arthur shook himself all over, one great convulsive shudder from head to foot, still staring up at Ailithir.
I did not wonder, for I could not take my eyes from Ailithir myself: I seemed to be seeing him truly for the first time in long—seeing him, not merely the outward seeming of him: the tall spare figure in blue robes, the iron-gray hair and high-bridged jutting nose and clear-cut chin, and above all the eyes… And my thought went back to that night in the hills between Gwaelod and Daars, when I, tired and terrified and not quite six years old, had awakened to see my beloved teacher transformed to a being of terrible and near godlike powers: Ailithir standing upon a high rock in a howling wind, lightning leaping from his upflung hands.
Then Ailithir smiled upon us both, a smile of great sweetness that was blessing and banishing both together: blessing for us whom he loved and banishing for the fear he knew he had set within us. He made a small gesture, and the room seemed to breathe again; indeed it seemed that all Daars had held its breath while he had spoken.
Still, try as I might—and Arthur too, for we compared notes on that moment often enough after—I could for all my soul recall no word of what Ailithir had said. And I say now, as I would have then had I only been able to remember, that in truth it was best we should not recall his words, lest sheer terror should have frozen us where we stood. All came to pass as he had said, and more, and greater beside; but had we known that too, the terror would have been all the sooner.
The Hawk's Gray Feather Page 8