Ashes of Heaven

by C. Dale Brittain

  He loosed his sail until it flapped in the wind, lay down so that no one would see him, and waited. The skiff drifted across the harbor, as though abandoned. After half an hour he heard the sound of oars. He picked up his harp and began to play.

  Now he heard voices, surprised at the sound of music. He began to sing softly, a lay of doomed lovers who had to part and died of sorrow. The voices grew closer, and he sang more loudly. His poignant song floated across the harbor. Then a boat bumped against the side of his skiff, and suddenly a lantern flared, and several faces looked down on him.

  “Where am I?” he asked, as though disoriented and half in a dream. It did not take much effort to appear confused. “Have I died, and are you angels?”

  “You are in Eire, at the royal capital,” they answered. “Who are you, and why are you drifting?”

  “Eire?” he repeated, as though only half understanding. “The winds and tide must have carried me here. Praise be to God, I have reached a Christian land.”

  “But why are you drifting?” they repeated. “And how did you learn to sing so beautifully? And what happened to your leg?”

  He pushed himself half into a sitting position. “Moorish pirates,” he said. “I am a minstrel, and I liked to pride myself that I was a fairly good one. The king of Scotia and the duke of Bretagne both admired my skills and rewarded me richly. But I made the mistake of wanting even more wealth. I took the money I had saved and bought a merchant ship, and I sailed to Ispania to load up with luxuries. And then as we were coming back north up the coast, pirates attacked our ship. They seized all the goods and killed my crew. Me they spared, because it was so clear I was just a harmless minstrel, but I had been wounded as you see in the fighting, and they set me adrift in this skiff. At first I tried to sail, but now for forty days and forty nights I have merely drifted, too weak to direct my course. The pirates must have had poisoned blades, for this cut on my leg has grown progressively worse. And now I fear that I am near death, but at least I have reached a land where I may receive Christian rites.”

  He flopped back down in the bottom of the skiff, with an exhaustion entirely unfeigned. The story, he thought, was very plausible, explaining both his wound and why he was alone in the skiff. No one would be reminded of Morold’s slayer by a minstrel who had barely survived a pirate attack.

  “What is your name, minstrel?”

  A name! He had neglected to think of one. The name of Tristan would be well known here after Morold’s failure to obtain tribute from Cornwall. “Tantris,” he gasped. “My name is Tantris.”

  “Well, Tantris,” said the sailors, “we are going to take you to a physician skilled in healing, for it would be a shame if so talented a singer should die.”

  And so they towed the skiff in to shore, and carried him through the gloaming up into town, to the house of someone who, they assured him, had studied medicine in Sicilia.

  The physician was pleased to have such an intriguing patient, with his story of pirates and his beautiful songs, but he had no more idea what to do for Tristan than had the herbalist in Tintagel. Tristan grew no weaker but he also grew no stronger. The physician began to speak of having to amputate the leg at the hip, but Tristan, in a panic, urged him to wait another week before taking such a drastic step. When the physician had gone out, he looked through the narrow window of the chamber where they had put him, toward the minster and the whitewashed castle, and wondered how he was going to attract the attention of Queen Isolde.

  On the third morning, when the physician came to see how his patient had passed the night, Tristan would not open his eyes, but tossed back and forth, moaning softly. “I fear my end is near,” he murmured. “Is there a priest to whom I may confess?”

  The physician, frightened that he might die unshriven, sent his servant running off to the minster. Tristan propped himself up by the window and watched until, in less than a quarter hour, he saw the servant returning, accompanied by a black-robed priest. Then he picked up his harp and began to play, a hymn he knew from Bretagne about the deeds and martyrdom of Saint Denis.

  The priest lifted his head at the sound of music. When he entered the room Tristan appeared not to notice him, absorbed as he was in singing and playing.

  The priest broke the beautiful mood the hymn created, however, by saying, “What is that stench?”

  Tristan put down the harp and turned to him with a sad expression, answering very politely. “Excuse me, Father, I did not notice you enter. I was singing to cheer myself up and to prepare myself to meet the saints, as I know I shall do very shortly. I must ask you to excuse the stench, for it comes from the wound that will shortly kill me.”

  “Poor young man,” the priest murmured. “You are a minstrel, I understand? Usually minstrels do not sing of sacred subjects.”

  “Oh, but those are the songs I love best to play and sing!” said Tristan. “Especially now that I know that my final hour is fast approaching. If only there was some way that my life could be spared, so that I could atone for all my sins and devote myself even more fully to hymns.”

  The priest nodded thoughtfully, put his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, and proceeded to perform the rites. Tristan made up some sins that seemed appropriate for the minstrel Tantris to have committed, reassuring himself that the priest was shriving a non-existent person, not Tristan himself. If his wound grew even worse, he thought to himself, as it soon might, or if the physician followed through on his threat to amputate, then he would reveal his true identity and have his true sins wiped away by the sacrament.

  As the priest was preparing to leave, Tristan said, “If only there was someone here in Eire skilled enough to draw the poison from my wound! I am heartened by the holy rites you have performed, Father, and I know the physician who is taking care of me is very learned, but if there were only some way to draw the poison the pirates’ blades left behind, then at least I might die comfortably.”

  The priest again nodded thoughtfully and left. Tristan, feeling he had done all he could, watched until he was gone and then started playing the harp again, love songs and ballads this time. People gathered outside in the street to hear his sweet playing, and the story spread all over the city of the dying minstrel with the golden voice.

  But no word came from the castle, and when, hoarse and with fingers raw, Tristan finally stopped singing at the end of the day, he was in despair. Healing might lie less than a mile away, but he could no longer walk, and he could think of no reason he could give why he and his stinking wound needed to be carried to the royal court.

  And Morold might well have lied about the healing abilities of his sister the queen.

  At dawn he was awakened by a sharp knock. He dragged himself to the window and looked out, as the physician opened the door. “Is there someone ill who needs my services?”

  A young woman with dark, curly hair, wrapped in a black cloak, stood in the street. Several men waited in the shadows behind her. “My mistress has heard of the wounded minstrel who is staying with you,” she said in a low voice. “Seeing him and practicing her skills on him might help her break free of the great sorrow that grips her. If you would not take it amiss, learned sir, I would like to have him carried to the castle at once.”

  To the castle! Tristan feigned sleep as the men came into his chamber. The moans of pain that he gave as they shifted him onto a litter and carried him out were entirely genuine. “Thank you for all your kindness,” he gasped to the physician, then he was out in the street and being carried briskly up the hill, to where the morning sun had just touched the top of the castle towers.

  II

  The castle, as well as Tristan could see it through half-closed eyes, appeared to have a great deal of new construction, as though it had recently been modernized and expanded. The men carried him through the gates and up the stairs into the great hall of the castle, then down stone corridors and up narrow, twisting staircases, where twice his foot was accidentally knocked against a wall, sending fr
esh pain shooting through him. He had snatched up his harp as they carried him out of the physician’s house, and he clutched it so tightly in his effort not to scream that he feared he would break it.

  They came out at last into a solar at the top of the castle, where the open windows looked out on the sun rising over the harbor. A tall woman dressed all in black, with a regal bearing but wearing no jewelry, stood by the window. She turned as Tristan was carried in and nodded shortly to the men. They bowed briefly and left, but the curly-haired young woman who had come to find Tristan remained.

  The tall woman’s face was lined with grief, and her eyes looked as though she had had little sleep in weeks. But she spoke kindly. “So you are Tantris, the minstrel of whom I have been hearing. If rumor is true, your voice is sweeter, your playing finer, and your knowledge of songs greater than any minstrel in Eire.”

  Tristan made a quick guess as to who she might be. She was slender and beautiful where Morold had been brawny and disquieting, but he saw similarities in the eyebrows and the angles of the cheeks. Her voice, like his, was touched with the accents of the south. “My queen, you honor me,” he murmured. “My voice, praise be to God, has not yet suffered as the rest of my body slowly dies, so I have sought to use it as well as I can in the final days that may be left to me.”

  “And I have also been hearing of your great wound,” she continued. “There is little doubt that you were struck with a poisoned blade.” He had been laid down by the open window, and she stood a short distance away, her nose wrinkled. “But I think I recognize the poison that was used, and if so I know the antidote.”

  At these words Tristan burst into tears. It was not what he had intended to do, but it did turn the younger woman toward him—she had been standing by the door with her thoughts turned inward, as though not even hearing his conversation with the queen. “We have had so much sorrow,” she said softly. “Perhaps if we can heal this young minstrel, it will mean at least one brighter event.”

  “And perhaps he could teach my daughter,” said the queen. “If I healed you, Tantris, would you engage to tutor her? She is talented and has a sweet voice, but so far she has only learned the lyre, not the harp. Eire is known for its harpists, but so far I have found none I would trust as her teacher.”

  Tristan wiped the tears from his face. “Revered queen, heal me and I shall teach whatever you like to whomever you like. My whole life is in your hands.”

  “Therefore,” said Queen Isolde, with more energy than she had shown so far, “we shall start at once to cure you of this poison.”

  The queen did not use the herbs and powders that had been tried on Tristan already, but rather potions and syrups taken from a collection of evil-looking bottles, blue or dark red, with labels written in strange languages, stained with decades of drips. Some she made him swallow straight, though they made him gag; some she mixed as a tincture into water which she used to bathe his wound; and some she made into a paste that made the cut burn more painfully than ever when she smeared it on.

  At first he became not better but worse. Most of the first week he passed in something of a delirium, where the tall, black-haired queen seemed constantly to be bending over him, looking at him with Morold’s eyes and increasing his agony. In his few lucid moments he wondered if she knew all along who he was and was deliberately torturing him.

  At other times the queen seemed strangely different, younger, and not dark-haired but blond, and when she seemed like this she also seemed much more gentle, sometimes holding his hand or murmuring what seemed encouraging words.

  In the second week his lucid spells grew more frequent, and both the pain and the stench from his wound seemed less. Hardly daring, he reached down with his hand under the sheet to ascertain that, yes, his leg was still there and had not been cut off.

  In the third week there was no question, his wound was healing at last. His appetite came back, and he was able to sit by the window and enjoy the breezes of autumn. He did not see the blond young woman again and concluded she had been a fever dream. A shame, he thought, for she had been the most beautiful dream he had ever had. The queen came by every day to check on his progress, but primarily he was attended to by the curly-haired young woman who had fetched him originally. She was gentle but quiet and seemed to be weighed down with a great sorrow. Her name, he finally learned, was Brangein.

  In the fourth week King Gurmun himself came to see him. He was fair skinned and freckled, his auburn hair just touched with the first strands of white, and seemed extremely proud of his wife. “So the queen has healed you, young man!” he told Tristan. “Rejoice, for there are few that Queen Isolde cares to interest herself in. Her skill as a physician is great, though it is as exhausting for her as it is beneficial to her patient!”

  “I shall always be grateful to the queen’s skill and willingness to treat a lowly minstrel,” said Tristan, entirely sincerely.

  “Perhaps it is good,” the king continued in a lower voice, “that she has had something to occupy her mind these last few weeks, for she was distraught over the loss of her brother. Morold, his name was, and a great champion of the Irish cause, though he came originally from Ispania. He was cowardly struck down by some knight in Cornwall. The knight deceived him, I understand, declared a truce and then struck when his back was turned. The loss has been a great sorrow to the queen.”

  Tristan bit his tongue. “I am sorry for her loss,” he managed to say.

  “And what of your singing and playing?” the king continued more jovially. “All the stories are that you have the voice of an angel.”

  “I have not been able to play or sing for many weeks,” Tristan said apologetically.

  “Well, I hope that your skill returns as you grow stronger,” said King Gurmun, “for the queen would like you to take over the tutoring of our daughter. She is a sweet, gentle child, who has never mingled much with men, and we require someone refined and courtly.”

  “I have promised the queen to teach the princess the harp,” said Tristan, “but you cannot expect me to stay long in Eire!” Once he stopped being a haggard cripple, he thought, the chances would increase of someone at court recognizing Morold’s slayer. “After all,” he added hurriedly, “I have a wife back home in Gales, and she will be wondering sorrowfully why I never returned home from my last voyage, the voyage where the pirates attacked.” He raised his left hand. “See, here is the ring she gave me as a token of our love, on the day that we were married.”

  King Gurmun smiled. “I would never wish to keep a man from his wife, but the seas will be too rough for you to return to Gales before spring. And a married man is just what I would have hoped for, to tutor my daughter.”

  “What is the young lady’s name?” Tristan asked resignedly.

  “We named her for her mother. Her name is Isolde.”

  A week later Tristan finally met the princess. He recognized her at once: she was the blond young woman he had thought was just a product of delirium. She was slim and graceful, not as tall as the queen but with the same regal bearing. Her eyes were brown flecked with green, and her hair was pale gold.

  “So you are to teach me the harp,” she told him, a laugh lurking in her eyes and the angle of her cheeks, although her lips remained sober. “My mother has considered and rejected a dozen harpists. All, she concluded, were too rowdy for a princess. Perhaps she chose you because you are married. Or perhaps, being well aware of your wound, she knows I could outrun you if need be! Beware, minstrel Tantris, that you never tell her when you can walk easily again.”

  Tristan laughed. It felt good to laugh. “I shall be a complete cripple for many months, Princess, if it means I can spend them near you. Would you care to begin your harp lessons with a hymn? With a ballad of daring deeds?”

  This time the laughter was on her lips, not just in her eyes. “With a love song! Perhaps it will make you fall in love with me, and then you will have to obey me in everything.”

  And so he began teaching her
the harp, the two of them sitting close together, his hands on hers as he showed her how to strike the strings. Brangein sat across the room, sometimes embroidering, sometimes just listening quietly to the music. The queen and the princess sometimes addressed her like a daughter and sister, sometimes more like a servant. A poor relative, Tristan concluded, brought to live with the family but never quite their equal.

  Young Isolde was an apt pupil, though Tristan thought privately that if her father considered her “sweet and gentle,” then there were aspects of her he had never seen. She learned quickly, but she always insisted they play the songs she wanted, not the ones Tristan thought most appropriate for her. Once she had her own harp and he began to teach her duets, she would sometimes start playing faster and faster, just to see if he could keep up.

  Yet sometimes, if his wound began to ache or if he had difficulty levering himself out of his chair, with only his crutch for support, she could be surprisingly sympathetic. “You are the first person my mother let me help heal,” she told him one day, supporting him with her strong young arms as he positioned his crutch. “I am so glad you are healing, for it would have been too difficult to watch you die.”

  Another day she said, “It is curious, Tantris, but you never have told me about your wife back home in Gales.”

  While teaching Isolde the harp and in telling her tales of far lands, which he remembered from his own tutors, Tristan had nearly forgotten that he was supposed to be married. He smiled and said, “It is so painful to me that we are parted that I try not to mention it, so that at least for a few moments I might be free of this torment. I miss her every day and every night, Princess.”