Indeed, over the years there were many times I forgot altogether that past which had heretofore been ever with me—Daars, and Gwaelod before that—forgot even that Arthur my fostern and friend and the one I loved best in all the worlds was himself only two hundred miles to the west, or five thousand miles to the north, or whatever. But two hundred miles in those days was more daunting a journey than two hundred lightyears are now. We were in those times as confined to our homes and the townlands roundabout as were Kelts of old on Earth; for of course it was very much to Edeyrn's purpose that we should be so. Travel was for most of us a thing we dared not dream of, reserved as it was almost solely for Ravens and false bards and others in the Theocracy's good graces. Had I not been bard, I should doubtless have lived and died and never been more than a day's journey from my homeplace, as was the lot of most of my countrymen. As with so much else, Edeyrn had stolen the freedom of our own homeworlds from us all.
It was more than halfway through my term as institutional bard, and at one of our remoter refuges—far in the isles of the east—that I came to make that innovation for which, rightly or wrongly, I have been more celebrated than for aught else I have ever done—at least among my fellow bards. Not by any intent of mine did it come about, but rather, as most such happy discoveries do, out of boredom and chance and sheer expediency—in short, it was all by way of making things easier for my own selfish self.
That day I was supposed to be committing to memory one of the interminable lists of synchronisms—timelines of events and personages stretching all the way back to Earth—but early on I had grown bored with the repetition, and as so often when bored my hand had found its way to my harp. Without conscious intent, then, I began to play along with the lists I was studying.
Now bards had not heretofore been known primarily for music; though they often accompanied themselves on various instruments, and acquitted themselves well, the chief study of any bard had ever been words. Indeed, the memory-work that went into the making of a bard was little short of phenomenal, though I say it as should not. In our first homes on Earth, almost all knowledge was in the unwritten tradition, the spoken word; and little if aught was ever put down on paper or scroll. In that time, a bard's memory was often all that could be trusted, the sole bulwark between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice: In matters of inheritance, or relationship, or history, or simple entertainment, the bard's word was the final word. And for that to be so, and for the trust of the folk not to be betrayed or misplaced, the memory of a bard must be trained to unvarying perfection.
Some of us had less trouble with this than others, but at one time or another all of us would have difficulty, and it was out of that difficulty that my feat came to the birth…
As I played idly and unthinkingly to help my memory along, at some point something moved inexorably into place, and I found myself no longer chanting the boresome lists but making them into a sort of musical mnemonic. So well did this work that, once my synchronisms were set in my mind, I began to do the same for other rote-work, and after a few hours of this I had the beginnings of a great and subtle system indeed.
As near as I can make it, trying to recall it from my present distance of years and intervening events, it was at that point that the revelation burst upon my thought, and all I could think of was not how clever I was, but what a dizzard I was not to have thought of it before.
I have said that bards—true bards, not Edeyrn's creatures—were spies for the Counterinsurgency; here had I to hand a way of communicating information that could be encoded in the music itself. I could combine bardic dichtal, the secret finger-language, with any of the ancient lays and chaunts, to produce patterns that only a bard trained could detect and decipher. Anyone listening, or even watching finger-work on harp or pipe or fidil, would notice nothing untoward, and the sound of the music, and burden of the chaunt, would remain unaltered. Information could thus be passed along directly in front of enemies, even: Many times in the course of their travels bards would sing in the maenors and brughs of those high in the Theocracy, for in such places much could be learned by a clever spy who listened with more than ears alone, and saw with more than eyes.
But to pass on such knowledge to another bard was done at the price of great peril, not only to the bards alone. Now this that had sprung of my boredom might be a means to help reduce that risk to nearly naught…
I bent again over my notations, excited and alight with possibilities. When my scribblings seemed to read to my satisfaction, I began to play out some of that which I had labored to set down. I played for who knows how long, and it was not until I put by my harp awhile to ease my aching shoulders and wrists and hands that I realized I had had an audience all this time.
"Whence came that, Talyn?" asked Elphin quietly; he had, it turned out, been listening for over an hour as I had played.
"It is but a thought I had," I answered, suddenly doubtful, and shy of my half-formed creation. Suppose it was after all not a tenth so wondrous, a hundredth part so, as I had thought… I went on, a little defensively, "Bards have by tradition used music as well as words, if not as often, but I was wondering if the means of playing, the fingerwork itself, could not be made to serve another purpose?"
I began to explain, in a hurried rush of words and harped accompaniment, and as I did so Elphin's face began to take on that look I had seen so often on Scathach's in time past, when Arthur was explaining to her some new tactic or sword-trick of his own devising.
"And not only the dichtal," said Elphin after I had finished my explanation. "But the different instruments used—the music may be the same for all playings, but a message encoded into the dichtal devised for fidil-music would carry a very different meaning from the same message encoded to a pipe or a borraun or a clarsa."
I nodded eagerly. "And no outsider could break the code, for only a bard taught and trained would know the dichtal and its variants. Common folk would see naught, and false bards know not the finger-speech."
Elphin leaned back, hands behind his head, a grin upon his face that made him look scarce older than I.
"Do you know what you have done?" he asked presently.
"Something useful, I have hoped, out of my own sloth—"
"Nay, much more than that, bach! I mind you bade me never speak of it again, but this is your first step on that road we spoke of—and I claim for myself the honor of being the first to call you so… Taliesin Pen-bardd."
"Ah, do not," I muttered, embarrassed. "It is but a little small trick, anyone might have worked it out…"
"Yet until now no one ever has, and surely all the elements have been there for the mixing: dichtal, music, boredom… You will have to defend this before the Chief Bard, you know—I say 'defend' but defense is scarce the word, she will embrace this like a sister. It will speed news, and spare error, and most of all it will save lives. That, Talyn, is no 'little small trick,' and did you do naught else as bard for all the rest of your days it would serve to put you into the ranks of immortals."
"Enough," I said, shaking off embarrassment renewed, as the excitement of creating claimed me again. "Let us get down to some real work: If this is to be presented before the Chief Bard, in hopes that she will sanction its use, it must be as perfect a piece of bardery as ever came from any hand. My own life I would trust to less, but never the lives of my fellows."
And so we worked.
Sometimes—and any maker will know well whereof I speak—a created thing will create itself, and all its creator need do is guide it, provide it with the means by which it may make itself manifest in the world: a tale that tells itself, and you but the voice that speaks it or the pen-hand that writes it out; a sword that forges itself, and you but the one who tends the fire of the smithy; a song that sings itself, and you but the scribe to set down the notes. The thing is not made by you at all, but found.
So it was with my invention (if I may call it so for convenience's sake). But though I knew from the start that it wa
s not mine, others thought differently, and much against my inclination it came at once to be known as the Hanes Taliesin—'hanes' in our Vallican dialect signifies 'secret' or 'tale' or 'reporting,' and as such seemed a name most fitting. As for the other—well, I daresay my inmost vanity was pleased that the new code should be called for me, but that was not why I had made it—or found it—and it took me long and long before I could call it even 'Hanes,' and not some such by-name as 'system' or 'cipher' or whatever. Part of my reluctance was simple and honest modesty, but most of it stemmed from my conviction that this achievement was not mine to claim; and since I have been neither slow nor shy to claim otherwise, before or since, where I have created, I must have had the right of it here. The Hanes was a gift, and I but the one to pass it on to all its owners.
Any road, when Elphin and I deemed it fit to be shown, we brought it to Maderil Gabric, she who was Chief Bard in that time; and, again as Elphin had predicted, she fell upon it as a gift from the sacred Awen—an assessment with which I heartily concurred.
So Maderil worked with me, and Elphin also, to perfect the discovery, so that by the time my term of study came to an end, and it remained only for me to submit to the test for the ollaveship to which all my labor had been so long directed, the Hanes was already well established among the true bards of Keltia, and already working better than even Elphin had foreseen. As for me, I won my golden star in the end, not because of it, but almost in its despite; and for reward Maderil sent me, with Elphin, home to Coldgates, until such time as my craft should find need for me, and summon me to take my place among those who fought the secret war.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
Home! It had been seven years since I had seen Coldgates—though I had in those seven years seen just about all there was to see of the rest of the planet, and been made bard and ollave beside. But then one day as Elphin and I went north again, there was Sulven behind her sheltering pale, wearing her summer crown of high snows. It was some weeks yet to Lughnasa; even here in the End-lands the air was heavy and sleepy and warm, though behind the languor it already bore the bite of coming cold.
When they say you cannot come again home they do not know the half of it: Home has changed, and you have changed, and there's an end. Though Coldgates was still the place I thought of as my home—indeed I had no other—I found it strangely altered. Or perhaps it was only my perceptions of it that were altered, for in all tangible senses save the smallest it was in truth little changed: The shieling itself was still safe and secure; Ygrawn and Uthyr, looking no whit aged, greeted me with loving delight; my sister Tegau was now a Fian general, and my other sibs too had advanced in rank; all my friends were well; no one I loved had suffered mishap, or worse. Yet still there was change, and I saw it most clearly when I looked on the babes.
But the twin Pendreic princesses were babes no longer, they were young misses rising eleven years old, no more alike in spirit than they were of countenance. Morgan was tall for her years and slim of build—all bones, her mother lamented, but that was not so—with dark-gold hair and her father's direct hazel gaze, possessing that charming formality only a child can command. (And for all I had been hearing of our shared dans and lives to come, there was as yet no way I could look on her as aught but a younger cousin or friend, by no stretch of thought as my lifemate to be. Indeed, the idea was most unsettling, and almost before I had recalled the prophecy to mind I had banished it utterly.)
Marguessan her sister was shorter and rounder, her hair a lighter, brighter gold, her blue-gray eyes disturbingly ringed round the irises with fine black lines. No biddable child, either of them, and their parents must be having an unenviable time of it: Marguessan was by turns a cool arrogant trimmer—aye, even at ten years—and a little scrat-cat; while Morgan, for the most part grave and mannerly as a child could be, could also turn wild and ungovernable as a spireling, that flaring storm of wind and fury offworlders do call the huracan. That would be a thing she must learn to master, and soon: Ygrawn, full of maternal pride and magicianly satisfaction, had already told me of her younger daughter's demonstrated flair for sorcery. The matter had been settled some time now, and soon Morgan would be leaving the shieling to begin her Ban-draoi studies, as Gweniver and others had done before her.
But for all the happy reunions, the one I had wished most, and waited longest, to see was not yet again in Coldgates…
"He has been near as busy as you yourself," said Uthyr, and my ear caught the warm burnishing glow of pride that lay upon the words. So, I thought with relief, that at least has not changed; or changed only for the better if it has—Amris's son is still his uncle's treasure.
"In a rather more perilous occupation, Lord," I replied, for even in the few short days I had so far been home I had already heard more than I liked to know of how my fostern had been spending the past years. In seven years' time Arthur and I had seen each other but thrice only; for safety's sake even our messages had been few and brief. Now I waited impatiently for him to return, and wondered even as I waited who it was that I should see when he came: my much-loved and long-absented brother, or the beginnings of the legend.
Ten days later, I stood in the gallery of the ship-cave, watching from a safe distance as the craft that had brought him up from the far south settled to the landing-floor, trying in vain to compose myself, to bear myself in a way that would chime with my newly acquired bardic dignity. I was an ollave now, and must behave appropriately, I told myself with some severity. Small chance: I felt as a borraun must feel upon being strucken, there was a shivering in my chest that all but shook me to pieces. Then the ship's main hatchway opened, and without knowing how I came there I was out on the floor, and then he was there too…
We ran together, flinging our arms round each other's neck, thumping each other on the back, embracing again, our words incoherent with joy, or perhaps there were no words, I cannot in all truth recall. But at last we drew away a little to study the other's face.
I do not know what he saw in mine save a few more years added—we were near twenty-six now, had known one another two full decades—and perhaps some wisdom gained; but his countenance was greatly changed, and I stared at him in wonder. Not simple externals—the beard that edged his jaw, the faint line of a scar across his brow—but subtle differences in the set of his mouth, the deeps of his eyes. And in the end they were not subtle at all but came from the core of his being—yet for all that it was still his face, and he still there behind it.
"You look well" said Arthur. He flicked the golden star of my ollaveship that I wore openly here in the shieling, and that I had put on today to honor us both. "I see you have done well also, at least for one who has been holed up like a wounded stoat these seven years past—' But his smile, and what lay behind it, belied his teasing words; it was as if the moment's emotion were too overpowering for aught save brotherly taunts.
Not for him alone, either: I, master-bard that I was, was just as impoverished for the proper words, and fell back likewise on jest…
"Oh aye, and you come back as Ulkessar, mighty in triumph," I said through happy tears—and Arthur's eyes too were bright. "Or is it Alasdair Mor you are, weeping for that there are no more worlds to win?"
He gave a small disdainful snort. "Goleor of worlds—I have not so far managed to win even this one we stand upon. But even in our fastnesses we have heard of some masterful new thing called I think the Hanes Taliesin…"
"And even in stoats' dens we have heard of the reivings of Arthur the young, and what slaughter he does work upon the Ravens, that they might be falling partridges, and he a hawk of the rock. We have both been 'busy,' as the King your uncle puts it."
As I spoke, I had put my arm round his shoulders—or as near as I might make it, startled to find how much taller he had grown—and he set his round mine, and together we went off to our old rooms. At my last words, though, he laughed aloud.
"Doubtless we have! But bards have ever loved to 'broider up
on the fabric of plain truth—though I will not say there may not have been some Ravens the fewer to go croaking round Gwynedd once my sword was done with them. And not my sword alone," he added quickly, lest I should call him on his boasting, "but Grehan's, and Kei's, and Tarian's, and—"
"Mighty warriors the lot of you," I said, unable for all my bard's tricks to keep from my voice a feeling I had long time had, and which did me no credit whatsoever. His ear having ever been a quick one, I was certain he had heard it, but did not dare look to learn for sure, only babbled on to cover the break. "Methryn has told me all about it," I said, my voice strained and strange to my own ears. "And the King, and Scathach, and Merlynn—oh aye, they are all here. I have myself been here more than a sevennight now, and between the King on the one side and the Queen on the other, my ears are twice their natural thickness with tales of Arthur and his Companions."
At mention of the King and Queen, he had shot me a swift sidewise glance, which I felt rather than saw, and now I sensed the look shifting somewhat.
"So they are called my Companions, are they?" His voice shifted as well. "And why do I hear such a note of heartscalding as even an ollave cannot manage to control? There is naught and none can ever take your place with me, Talynno, though we be not together from now until Rocabarra rises."
"I know that," I muttered, shamed and shyly proud all in one. "It is just that I have been wanting to be with you and the others doing slaughter amongst the Ravens, and instead I am trapped in Tinnavardan wound about with harpstrings."
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