by Janny Wurts
The bass note that emerged should have been nothing special. Yet his extraordinary, expressive breath shaped a tempered statement that raised the small hairs at the nape. The vagabond’s regard stayed riveted upon Efflin’s form, dull and abandoned to listlessness under the blankets. The ferocious attentiveness brought to bear bespoke nothing else but an awareness of the uncanny.
The flute’s voice dwindled like a cry into nothing. In fixed focus entrained upon Efflin’s blank face, the dark-haired fellow paused once again, then uncovered the next hole and ran up the scale. The highest tone faded. This time the silence hung like blown glass. Head tilted, he engaged the small instrument, and by tentative phrases, began to unreel an evocative melody.
Ragged nails and rough callus had hidden the fact that those fingers belonged to a talent: his touch on the flute spoke, exquisitely sure, and laced calm through the stuffy room. The outlay of music refigured the senses, until familiar perceptions acquired a chisel-punched clarity. The neat, coloured petals in Kerelie’s embroidery glowed, alive in the handcrafted counterpane. Fire-light shimmered like a warm caress over the quaint patterns carved into the pine bedstead. Moonlight glittered the frosted window-panes to opalescence, and buffed a sheen on the grain of worn floor-boards. Vitality became magnified, until the clean sigh of the onlookers’ breaths flowed like spun silk, entwined and then braided by the intimate love expressed between them as a family.
The vagabond took charge of his composition and wove in the flicker of a sprightly lilt. All the while his gaze stayed locked upon Efflin’s features. Change had crept in, almost unseen: the invalid’s brow was no longer smooth, or the lips, slack with bitter indifference.
Soon the furrowed frown deepened. As if the happy lift in the tune somehow chafed, Efflin gritted his teeth with annoyance.
Like the hook of a burr, the musician seized his bold theme and expanded its rankling influence. His melody soared into foot-tapping joy, then took flight with grace notes that skittered with laughter. Caught up, then wound in and gripped by his spell, the listeners smiled as the tonal harmonics seized their hearts and flung open the gates of remembrance.
Swept away, they relived the forgotten cadences of better times, when an older brother’s mature strength had worked the croft side by side with their uncle. The lost days of their childhoods re-emerged, before the high temple’s decree had seized their father as a troop conscript. The ribald jokes, the wry pranks, and the long, summer days spent lazily fishing, while Aunt Saff smoked the beehives to harvest the honey, and the sun-drenched barley fields ripened to yellow. The crushed scent of greenery, and boiling jam, and the spike to Fiath’s jack whiskey brewed in the cold snap of autumn – the ease of those gilded years flooded back on a poignant wave of nostalgia.
Efflin’s eyes were closed still. But his wracked fight to stay separate now became a pitched battle that rammed his frame rigid.
The musician played on. Tempo quickened as he sliced golden showers of sound out of silence. His merry measures described Efflin’s grace, until none watching could deny the sorrowful ache of a lifetime laid down by abandonment. The brother who wasted in bedridden inertia became an agony to behold. Kerelie fought the fierce need to shake him, and Tarens shuddered with clenched fists, raked by the urge to pick a rife fight.
But the voice of the flute raised a wall in restraint, fashioned to smother harsh action. Bright as the struck peal of bronze chimes, the notes quickened with shimmering urgency. To Efflin’s being, as once he had been, the musician added a descant theme teased in counterpoint through the base melody.
Kerelie whitened, first to identify the uncanny source of the tune’s inspiration. ‘He’s playing the boys! Paolin and Chan, do you hear? Light above,’ she gasped, aching, ‘Make him stop! I can’t bear it.’
Her appalled shock only spurred the musician to seize on the fuel of her distress. He reached into that molten core of sheer agony and played love, his tender measures swelled to a shout that scalded with more brilliance yet. Two deceased children were respun from the grave. Vibrant, as though living – almost! – the eye saw them in etheric vision beside Efflin’s bed. Their young spirits would have showed laughter and verve, unmarked by the loss of their mother. With all of life’s wonder undimmed, their memory beseeched the grown man to open his jaded eyes and acknowledge them.
The insistent demand: to be what they were, must crack, through a fiercely kept isolation and loose the agonized grief kept imprisoned by steel reservation. The music commanded, until stone itself could have wept in unbridled sympathy.
The musician dared further. Theme and playful embellishment flowed into refrain, and resounded, more haunting yet. The pervasive gloom of the sick-room air parted before the sweet scent of Aunt’s cherished roses.
Which lyrical impact raised Kerelie’s tears and winded Tarens like a punch in the chest. But Efflin’s response outstripped them both: quaking as though seared inside by hot iron, he bit his lip to the verge of drawn blood.
This time, Tarens unriddled the astonishment. ‘Light’s own grace,’ he whispered, appalled. ‘Efflin! Aunt Saff! For mercy, how deeply he must have loved her!’
As if his cry unleashed comprehension, the innocent melody that bespoke the two boys reached consummate pitch. All three of the musician’s laid lines became welded into a harmonic nexus. Imperative artistry cascaded, peaked, and stripped bare an indelible truth: that Efflin’s theme was the backbone that cradled the effervescence of both little boys.
‘The children were Efflin’s!’ gasped Kerelie, rocked by the bolt-strike of epiphany. ‘Paolin and Chan! Bone and breath, they were Efflin’s!’
Facts fit.
With a sting like the snap of a brittle stick, the flute’s call destroyed all reserve. On the bed, Efflin turned his head into the pillow and buried his ravaged face. He groaned, stricken through by stark anguish. Then his bent shoulders shook to a sob as though his very spirit had shattered. The sorrow never expressed leaped the breach, dredged up from his locked well of silence. He wept for a loss that no other but Saffie could have understood. His blessing, and his curse, that she had not lived long enough to share his distraught pain as he served the last rites for their two little sons.
Hammer to anvil, past memories reshaped: of Uncle’s seamed face, eased from years of pent strain in the delight brought by Paolin’s birth. Fiath could not have known. Saffie and Efflin had never been seen to touch hands, not within anyone’s presence. But the hours spent whistling in quiet content as he hauled the mulch and manure, built and bent the arched trellis, and dug the beds for Aunt’s roses: hindsight unveiled all of his secret regard, lavished onto her garden in tender devotion.
Tonight, shown the shocking depth of his wound, Tarens and Kerelie bestowed no blame. Aunt Saffie was not their blood relation, except through the kin ties of marriage. The indiscretion just bared to light could not provoke a betrayal. They knew Fiath’s contentment had hidden no falsehood. His presumed paternity never had been under question throughout the boys’ raising. No harm could befall the dead, after all. But for the benighted siblings left living, the course of bereavement changed shape. Shared grief emerged that broke like a squall and closed the familial circle. Sister and brother piled onto the bed. They held Efflin together, as if their clasped arms could bind up a fissure that, till this night, had been as the abyss, wide and deep and beyond insurmountable. The cankered sore that had tormented a bereft father no longer lay gagged under honour-bound silence.
Efflin wept, freed. Bonded once more into seamless fellowship, none noted the moment when the flute player ceased his infallible effort. Amid softened quiet, gently fire-lit and warm, the three siblings revisited their sorrows in depth, and together shored up the wreckage of a brother’s unconsoled spirit.
‘If my act was wrong-doing, no one took hurt,’ Efflin murmured at due length, replete. His exhausted defiance asked for no forgiveness. ‘Uncle never knew. Aunt Saff asked for nothing, nor begged a thing more beyond her sore
need that pined beyond hope for the chance of conception. She had sensed my indecent feelings, I’m sure, although I never broached a word to her. When she realized her fertility might pass her by, she pleaded with me, and begged not to make use of a stranger. She was that desperate to give Fiath the children they both ached to rear. And for all our sakes, the croft demanded a secured future, besides.’
‘Efflin, hush,’ murmured Kerelie. ‘No need to explain. With Saff and Fiath both gone, it is meet that we share your burden.’
Tarens swallowed, unable to speak. Embarrassed at last for his kinsfolk’s breached privacy, he turned his head, first to notice the empty room at his back. The child’s wooden flute, that Efflin had carved for a son who called another man father, rested abandoned on the window-seat. The stops were silent. Smoothed wood gleamed in the etched spill of the moonlight, never to sound the like of those piercing measures again.
Only the partially re-tailored jacket had been removed from the arm of Aunt’s chair.
The night was the family’s to rejoice in relief for the gift of Efflin’s recovery.
The bleak hour before dawn brought the True Sect’s temple examiner, arrived in a ground-shaking thunder of hooves with a lathered entourage of mounted lancers. Elite dedicates, drilled lifelong to bear arms, they poured down the lane without warning, polished to a frost glitter of armour and headed by the pomp of their Sunwheel standards. They carried a warrant to shackle the guilty, verified by a vested diviner sworn to uphold the faith. A blessed talent who served divine Light, he claimed to have sensed the emanations raised by a minion’s dark practice.
Tarens wakened to the commotion. Still halfway clad in yesterday’s clothes, he grabbed his boots and charged downstairs, just as the double column of horsemen crammed into the cottage yard. Indoors, the candles were long since pinched out. Ghostly in her night-rail, Kerelie poised in blanched dread at the kitchen casement. Tarens crossed the rug and peered over her shoulder, then swore through his teeth as the arrogant brutes trampled their shod mounts over the rose-beds. He yanked on his footwear, further enraged as they commandeered Efflin’s trellis to snub the lance captain’s makeshift picket line.
‘You can’t stop them, Tarens,’ Kerelie said, frightened. Her alarmed grasp sought to restrain his tense wrist, shaken off in savage rejection.
Outside, the steamed horses jostled and stamped. Steel jingled to someone’s brusque demand to form up a cordon. ‘Quickly, mind! Strike to kill if anyone tries to escape.’
Efflin slept on through the upset. Dreamlessly convalescent, he never stirred as the flare of held torches speared through the front windows. Nor did he hear the marched scrape of boots on the frosted ground as temple guardsmen with ready weapons surrounded the house, then a smaller group detached under orders to move in for the shake-down.
‘What should we do, Tarens?’ Kerelie fretted.
A last-moment evasion was already futile, with Efflin too weak to stand upright. To move him at all would require a litter, and even unburdened, a hale man on foot would be ridden down as a marked target.
Tarens faced the bad call. His questionable traffic with the vagabond cornered them all, with barely seconds left to forestall the sure threat of disaster.
Flooded light through the panes juddered over the pots by the chimney as the dedicates’ advance crunched up the garden-path. As their tread boomed in step up the planked stair to the porch, Tarens grabbed Kerelie and forcefully dragged her into the downstairs bedchamber. ‘Stay with Efflin.’ A snatched view from the window-seat let him measure the strength of the temple’s invasion: eight sword-bearing heavies in gold-and-white surcoats flanked the entry, backed by two more bearing brands. At ground level, poised before the placed cordon, the talent diviner stood rapt as a ferret, his stainless white cowl and blazon lent a sulphurous tinge under the flame-light.
This was not a warrant for inspection but a company dispatched to seize custody.
The lance sergeant’s fist hammered into the door. ‘Open up! Or the Light’s protectors will claim their due right!’
‘Tarens!’ cried Kerelie from Efflin’s bedside, ‘Unfasten the bar straightaway, or they’ll break it.’
‘More like fire the thatch in their zeal to flush heretics,’ Tarens snapped, grim. He shoved from the window-seat and plunged back towards the darkened kitchen, still talking. ‘Let them have their way. After all, what ugliness can they find?’
‘Go after him, sister!’ The rushed plea was Efflin’s, croaked from the pillow. ‘Whatever he’s planning won’t be to the good.’
‘Tarens! Hold back!’ Kerelie’s appeal raised no answer, an ominous sign. Worried, she bolted a scant step behind her impulsive brother’s intent. The banked hearth shed no gleam on his purpose. The sultry glow of the torch-flames through the mottled glass only dazzled her vision and swathed his quick movement in velvet shadows.
‘Wait, Tarens! I beg you!’ Her appeal stayed ignored.
Already, Tarens had flung wide the door. He hoisted the trestle bench as a shield. His other hand brandished the poker snatched from the hearth. Head down, shouting curses that blasphemed the Light, he clouted his way through the startled dedicates placed to secure the entry. Several crashed over, yelling. Their fallen weight staggered the torch-bearers backwards. Mazed in the swoop and flicker of confused light, the lancers left upright scrambled and surged forward to stop him, too late.
Tarens bulled onwards down the porch stair. His leveled spike gaffed the partridge-plump breast of the Light’s diviner. Blood blossomed. The gush smirched the sacred Sunwheel emblem and spread scarlet over the spotless robes of divine office.
Kerelie’s scream overpowered the stricken man’s grunt of agony. Those lancers still astride roared in black rage and raked spurs to their idle mounts, while their foot-bound comrades charged to retaliate. Tarens moved faster, grabbed the speared victim, and hauled his collapsed frame upright by the collar.
‘Spying scum!’ The crofter jerked out the impaled barb of the poker and flung the gored implement end over end. The tumbling length of iron spun into the forelegs of the inbound horses. Half of the beasts shied, which broke and unravelled the concerted attack. Exposed, made the target of two dozen swords, Tarens dumped his grisly trophy into a sprawling heap at the feet of the horrified temple examiner. While the corpse writhed in the throes of fatality, the brazen crofter dropped to his knees in surrender.
Arms outflung, head up, Tarens’s burly form invited the vengeful lance, or the punitive blade to strike downwards and finish him.
‘No!’ pealed the command of a ranked authority. ‘Take the murderer alive!’ Emerged to the fore, the speaker wore the hooded regalia of the True Sect’s temple. ‘He shall die for his crime. But the execution will take place in public as a moral example!’
Life dedicates trained to unquestioned obedience, the men pulled their steel. En masse, they slammed into Tarens and wrestled him prostrate on the frosted ground. Their captain attended the savaged diviner, whose blessed talent would track no more minions of Shadow for the faith.
While the men on the porch pinioned Kerelie’s struggle to rush down the stair to her brother, Tarens cried, ‘I’m the only one guilty! The others knew nothing.’
‘I’ll be the one to determine the charges,’ declared the Light’s Lord Examiner. A vigorous official, ablaze in white cloth and the rippling glitter of diamond-set appointments, he gestured. ‘Set the criminal in manacles. He must face the scaffold, but all in due time. His kinsfolk will stand trial on their own merits. My official inquiry begins immediately.’
‘You’ll find nothing!’ yelled Tarens.
A mailed fist cuffed him silent. Hardened to Kerelie’s weeping, and roughshod before Efflin’s mortified weakness, the dedicates invaded the cozy croft cottage with their hobnailed boots and pine-torches. They tore through each room, upended the furnishings, and bashed over the plate cupboard. Smashed porcelain became ground into the braided rug as they raked kettles and ladles from the
ir rowed hooks and slashed into the flour-sacks hoarded for winter until the puffed contents emptied. Against Efflin’s desperate, sensible pleas, they demolished the larder. Jars of preserves were smashed to the floor, and the waxed cheeses pulped underfoot. When the exhaustive search found no artifacts of dark practice amid the litter of wreckage, men rifled the wood bin and barreled upstairs to kick through the contents of clothes-chests and closets. Room by room, the desecration proceeded, cloth goods and belongings savaged to destruction, and floor-boards mauled into splinters.
When the invasion burst into the sick-room, Kerelie’s outraged language met deafened ears. ‘Where is mercy? Have you no care for illness?’
Efflin’s blanketed form was thrust into a chair. When his tattered bedding yielded no hidden cache of arcane talismans, he was forced to endure the further brutality as the lancers secured Tarens by stringing him up by chained wrists from the rafters.
There he swung, bashed and bleeding, worried by the point of the sergeant’s sword at his throat.
He railed, nonetheless. ‘Leave my family be! They’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Clap a lid on your noise!’ the sergeant cracked.
Tarens spat, which earned a back-handed blow to the face that pulped his nose and set Kerelie shrieking.
‘Silence that bitch!’ snapped the captain, annoyed. His sideward glance cut through the turpentine taint of the torch smoke. ‘There’s a dish-rag? Then gag her.’
But Kerelie quieted, before being forced. Against the shocked quiet, Tarens unclenched his bruised jaw. Shaking, he spoke through the slur of split lips and the jet of streamed blood from crushed nostrils. ‘My sister and brother are innocent! Until tonight, they had no knowledge I sheltered a fellow who trifled with sorcery!’