The Gift

by Alison Croggon

  After he cast off his Secret Name, Sharma was called the Nameless One. He attracted followers, to whom he promised unending life and absolute power, and many Bards went to his side, betraying the Light; and these became Black Sorcerers, and were known as Hulls, for they were but the shells of Bards. The Nameless also made alliances with the remnants of the Elidhu who hated and feared the Light, most notably the Elidhu Karak, who held dominion over the realm of Indurain, east of the Osidh Annova, after the armies of the Nameless had destroyed it and slaughtered or enslaved those of the Dhyllin who had lived there.

  The campaign of the Nameless One to overthrow the Light in Annar succeeded in A2041, when his forces overwhelmed the last desperate alliance of Lirion and Imbral on the Firman Plains near the Findol River. That defeat was the end of the Dawn Age, and the beginning of the Great Silence.

  The Great Silence

  The Great Silence lasted from A2041 to A3234. At this time the Light retreated in hiding to the areas that later became known as the Seven Kingdoms: along the coast of Edil-Amarandh, and to the south. The Bards did not build cities or towns, and lived in great hardship, working always against the Dark; but they did not succeed in overthrowing the Nameless until the coming of Maninae, heir of Laurelin, in A3157. Maninae, a Bard, united resistance in the Seven Kingdoms and after many years—a story too complex to even begin to relate here—he succeeded in casting the Nameless off his throne and restoring the Light to Annar. He then became the first King in Norloch, and the first to rule over all Annar.

  A new year-count, the Annaren Calendar, was then introduced. It was also called the Norloch Reckoning.

  The Restoration

  When peace was restored, Maninae' founded the citadel of Norloch and the system of the Schools. Twenty-five Schools were founded across Annar and the Seven Kingdoms, and roads were built across the country to allow free movement between all of them. At this time more areas of Annar were settled, although there were large regions of wilderness in the center of the land, and Edil-Amarandh was always a continent more thickly populated near its coast than at its center.

  Once again there was a great flowering of Bardic culture, and the tenets of Afinil were restored. But Maninae also gave thought to martial strategies, and the culture of Norloch was warlike, unlike that of Afinil. For Afinil had never been a city of Kings, and although all Bards were routinely trained in the arts of the sword, they never gave them especially high honor.

  The Restoration lasted for 300 years. After that came a period of consolidation, called the Middle Years, in which all the Arts flourished in peace and harmony. At about the year N720 came the first promptings of disquiet, and also the last King; for the heirs to the throne made war on each other in an argument about succession, and in the strife the ruling line of Norloch was destroyed. The Seven Kingdoms at this time revised their alliances with Norloch and restated their autonomies.

  After this, the Bards ruled alone in Norloch, incorporating into the authority of the White Flame the triple scepter of the Kings of Norloch; and after the destruction caused by the rivalries of Kings, it seemed to some this was better, and that the Bards, constrained by their vows to the Light and the Balance, would rule more wisely. But there were others who said this was a distortion of the Balance; and they also pointed out that women were no longer placed in authority in Norloch, as they continued to be in most other Schools, and saw this as another symptom of imbalance.

  Gradually, over the next two hundred years, it became clear that things were amiss in Annar. The fortresses in Den Raven were rebuilt, and the sorcerer Imank made war on the Suderain, although he was fiercely resisted. There were other signs of imbalance: the White Sickness, never seen before, began to ravage parts of Annar, and some Schools began to be estranged from their people, demanding high tithes and begrudging their services, which caused an enormous loss of the Bards' prestige in many parts of Annar, and sometimes outright and violent resentment. There were more frequent sightings of wers and other servants of the Dark, and for the first time since the Restoration, Hulls were seen in Annar. More disturbingly, some Bards began to report a disturbance in the Speech itself, which they found impossible to express, but which troubled them deeply; they said that it seemed to them the Speech was losing its ancient virtue. However, it was not until the School of Pellinor was sacked and burned to the ground in N935, followed by Baladh and Jerr-Niken in the south within the next four years, that a few Bards began to suggest that the Nameless One had at last returned.

  OF ANNAR AND THE SEVEN KINGDOMS

  ANNAR, sometimes called the Inner Kingdom, was the greater part of the continent of Edil-Amarandh, and was generally held to be that land south of the Lir River, west of the Osidh Annova (the Mountains of the Earth) and north of the Southern Deserts.

  The Seven Kingdoms were smaller, situated in a loose ring around Annar along the western coast: from the north, they were Lirhan, Culain, Ileadh, the Isle of Thorold, Lanorial, Amdridh, and the Suderain. The Suderain was close to the realm of Den Raven—sometimes called the Lost Kingdom—a poisoned country that was the stronghold of the Nameless One, and that continued to be the biding place of Hulls and his surviving servants even after his defeat by Maninae' the Great and the Restoration of the Light in Annar.9

  Maninae united all of the Seven Kingdoms under one rule for the first time after the Nameless One was thrown down, ushering in a long peace. Maninae was unusual in that he was both a King and a Bard, although in him the Barding was not strong and he forswore Barding when he became King. With one other exception, the Kings and Queens of Norloch had never been Bards; and this was considered a crucial element of the Balance.

  The Monarch's authority over the Seven Kingdoms was extremely limited, and was freely given rather than asserted by force; the situation parallels more closely an alliance of city-states and the loose autonomous regions surrounding them. It is telling that the only name for the whole continent was the extremely archaic Edil-Amarandh, which dated from before the Dawn Age, and that this name was seldom used. The unity of Edil-Amarandh was a result of the influence of Barding, rather than any enforcement under Kings. The Bards were also a source of the relatively loose hierarchies in Edil-Amarandh; since a Bard might come from anywhere, even the poorest of communities, it was entirely conceivable—and commonly happened, especially in the first centuries after the Restoration—that the lowest might hold sway over the Wise.10

  The regions were called kingdoms, but they were not strictly kingdoms or principalities in the generally accepted sense. This was because of the dual authorities of Barding and ruling authorities, both of which shared governance of their various peoples, and which by their complex nature mitigated against absolute rule. Over many years this evolved into a complex political and social system, differing in each region, of mutually interdependent autonomous structures. It appears that in many Fesses—the regions around the Schools—and other regions there operated a variation of democracy: stewards were elected by popular vote, and all adults over twenty-five, no matter what their social status, had the right to vote. Only the monarchy operated on a system of hereditary rule, and many Bards saw this as a primitive system, tracing from this "original sin" the subsequent demise of the monarchy.11 However, it has to be admitted that the monarchy, within its limited powers, governed over a peaceful kingdom for several centuries before it degenerated into civil war.

  The dual system—which only roughly parallels the medieval division of secular and religious power between church and state, although it is a tempting syllogism—was considered to be at its most ideal in the community of the Dhyllin, where Bards and the community lived and worked closely together, to their mutual benefit and pleasure. It was not in practice always ideal, and at times disagreements or rivalries led to bickerings and even war, sometimes between Bards and monarchs, sometimes between rival regions. All such occurrences were regarded by the Wise as a corruption of the Light.12

  THE SPEECH:

  SOME GE
NERAL NOTES

  THE Speech, the defining attribute of a Bard and the central mystery of the Knowing, is a topic that exercised many Bardic thinkers over many centuries.13 Much therefore might be written about it, of which only the barest sketch can be given here.

  The Speech behaved like a language, with certain crucial differences, and could in fact be learned; it was, for example, spoken by the Dhyllin people as their first tongue. But in the mouths of those who learned it, rather than in those with the Gift, it had no Bardic virtue.

  Bards used it when speaking of matters of gravity and importance, because it was considered impossible to lie in the Speech. This was, in fact, not accurate: Hulls used the Speech and were able to lie, although this usage was not considered to be the Speech proper, and was sometimes called Dark or Black Speech. There was also the question of those who attained the Speech but were never taught the Knowing of the Light and, more crucially, never came into their Bardic or Secret Name (also known as their Truename). This was a circumstance that usually had tragic consequences, since such people were unable to properly understand or channel their powers, and were never able to enter their full Gift. This, generally, was rare, if more common as the Schools fell into disrepute after the demise of the Monarchs of Annar. There were also the cases of those who had only a slight Gift. Such people might have been village witches (hence the expression "witch-speak"), and they generally spoke a truncated and bastardized version of the Speech, with no more than a few words of potency, although sometimes they could attain considerable, if limited, power; but they were not considered to be Bards, since they did not attain the whole of the Speech, nor did they know their Names. Consequently, they were sometimes referred to as the Unnamed, which is to be distinguished from the Nameless, who had rejected his Name.

  This clearly makes possession of the Speech less straightforward than it might at first appear. The fact that the Speech could be learned by those without the Gift suggests that the virtue of the Speech was not inherent in the words themselves, as was argued by many Bards in the Middle Years, but that it expressed the mysteries of the cosmos itself within its syntactic relationships and the vibrations of its utterance, from which were drawn its unique powers. 14 The chief reason given for the argument that potency was inherent in the words themselves was the priority and importance given to Names in the Speech, and to Bardic Names. The truth quite possibly resides in an amalgamation of both arguments, as was pointed out by other Bards.

  Bards were the only people who bore Secret Names, and a Bard's Name was and remains a central mystery that can only be partially discerned and puzzled over. The only complete written record of an instatement and Naming ceremony occurs in The Riddle of the Treesong, which confirms rather than negates the ritual's crucial importance. Other writings indicate that the most important mysteries were not written down but kept in the "rings of living memory." In the Treesong15 text the authors felt compelled to defend their choice to record it, remarking that since entire forests of knowledge had been hewn down by the Dark, "it is necessary to preserve, even in such a crude way, such Secrets as are known to us, in case the Knowing vanishes from the earth."16

  It appears that a Bard's Name was much more than a mere appellation or signifier of status or origin: it was a Bard's being, and its achievement was a sign of a Bard's maturation into full power. One who knew a Bard's Secret or Truename had power over him or her, and thus Names were guarded closely and given only to intimates as a sign of ultimate trust. Rejecting one's Name was unheard of until Sharma's Spell of Binding, and was regarded as the ultimate blasphemy. Sharma of Den Raven, however, remained the only Bard to successfully do so. Hulls did not use their Names, but were unable to reject them completely, and those who possessed the Names of Hulls could still destroy them.

  Because the Speech was not learned in the normal way, and so was not subject to the same forces of change or cultural variety, it remained more constant than other human languages. Bards from vastly differing regions had no difficulty understanding each other if they used the Speech, despite the gulfs in tradition and culture that separated them. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there were variations in the Speech; although it sprouted, as it were, always from the same stem, different environments encouraged its growth in differing ways. There was, for example, a noticeable, if slight, difference between the Speech of Afinil and the Speech of Maerad's day; and, to Maerad's ear, Saliman's Speech, being from far south of her region, would have had the equivalent of an accent.

  Those with the Gift used the Speech for all the Arts of the Knowing. The use of the Speech was central to healing, to song— which was held high as an art of wisdom—and to all spells, as well as to investigations—such as astronomy or natural science—we would be accustomed to thinking of as scientific. The Bards made no distinctions, as we do, between art and science, considering them parts of a single Knowing. The Speech also enabled those with the Gift to converse with animals and, less frequently, plants. The Speech did not need to be physically spoken to be potent; Bards could use it effectively merely as a mode of thought. This raises the most important and difficult differences between the Speech and other languages, which are the subtleties of its registrations as a mode of mental communication. These, crucial as they are, cannot be explained, and here must be glanced over by reference to the Bardic paradox that the "center of the Speech is Silence." It is also why, despite the fact that Bards had a very sophisticated written culture, orality, and the mnemonic arts that go with it, still held precedence.

  History

  It was generally considered that those with the Gift, known as the Starpeople—the Dhillareare—or the Singers, first appeared in the Inner Kingdom at the end of the Age of Elementals, some five thousand years before the events recorded in The Naming. 17" Records or even a count of years were not kept until the founding of Afinil during the Dawn Age, more than a thousand years after the end of the Age of Elementals. There was a tradition that claimed that as the Elementals withdrew into their natural forms, "somewhat of their power dispersed from them and was taken up in human form; and so there appeared, in all places where the Elementals had dwelt, the Starpeople. And they were so named because their eyes held a distant fire, as if they had themselves come from the stars, and they delighted in the fire of the stars and so, unlike other peoples who feared and cursed the Darkness, they loved the Night, and called it sacred."18

  There were, of course, other traditions, including a durable theory that Bards arrived from the west shortly after the disastrous Wars of the Elementals reshaped the lands of Edil-Amarandh. Another account held it that the Bards appeared first in the north, being forced there from the lands now inhabited by the nomad peoples of Zmarkan. The truth behind these competing theories, which became popular after the Restoration, might well be that many Bards of Annar found their linking with the Elementals, however far back, to be disreputable, for the Elementals had been held in distrust by Annarens since the alliance of the Ice Witch with the Nameless One. It was this alliance that led to the defeat of Recabarra, Queen of Lirion, and Laurelin, last King of Imbral, and the evils that followed: the slaughter of the Dhyllin, the razing of Lirion and Imbral, and the tyranny over the Inner Kingdom that came to be known as the Great Silence.

  The Restoration of the Monarchy and the Bards was chronicled many times. "The story of the downfall of the Nameless One is long and hard and desperate, and many parts of that tale never returned from darkness," wrote Ghoran of Desor. "I have often thought of those who fought him, lonely and afraid and hopeless, knowing no whisper of their courage would meet any new dawn. For many generations the land was in thrall, and the Keepers of the Light fled and hid in far places, keeping secret the Knowing, the Lore, the Singing, the Speech. And in time a King appeared from the west, where the bloodline of Laurelin, last King of Imbral, had been kept alive in hiding. Maninae, helmed with Light out of the deeps of time, took up his fell inheritance, and through great suffering the powers of the Namele
ss were turned against him, and at last the realm of Annar was released from slavery and the Balance restored. That was a time of great joy."19

  Maninae is credited with the establishment of the Schools (the Libridha) around Annar, and decentralizing the influence of the Bards: "And at that time Maninae determined to make his seat in Norloch, southward in Annar at the mouth of the Aleph River, and he built a great and fair city, and appointed the Circle of the High Bards, and there he and the Queen Marva dwelt in peace. But neither did he wish that the Lore and the Singing should become hidden and secret, the knowledge only of a select priesthood. He decided the Lore would be more safely kept in many centers, and so across Annar he established the Schools."20

  Twenty-five Schools were established in every region of Edil-Amarandh and became centers of learning and culture. To an extent this was merely a formalization of a situation that had already occurred: communities of Bards existed in all the Seven Kingdoms, where they had been driven during the Great Silence, and had been instrumental in the defeat of the Nameless One.