The dog started yapping and Taliesin lifted his head, scrambling to his feet when he saw who it was. Feeling a little self-conscious, she continued on until only a few yards separated them.
“Hi,” she said.
Taliesin gave her an odd look, then raised his face to the sky. Sara wondered what he was doing, then realized that the “gift of tongues” had translated her greeting literally.
“I meant, hello,” she said. “How’s it going?” She shifted uncomfortably, feeling very cold and wet. Wasn’t he even going to invite her to sit by his fire?
“M’lady,” he said formally, continuing to regard her curiously. “If I offended you in some way yestereven, I beg your pardon. It was not intentional. I am unused to your ways and—”
“Hold it a sec’,” Sara broke in. “You didn’t offend me.”
“But you disappeared. So suddenly. I thought . . .”
“Ah. Well . . .”
This was where she was supposed to tell him that he was just a figment of her imagination. A part of a dream she was having.
“I didn’t exactly disappear,” she said. “I mean, it might have seemed that way to you, but what actually happened was I just woke up. This is—this isn’t making much sense, is it?”
But Taliesin nodded. “I think I understand. You are not here in body, but in spirit? Like a sending? Yet . . .” His brow furrowed. “Last night I touched you and you seemed solid enough to me then.”
“But this is just a dream,” Sara said, feeling more awkward every moment. “My dream, you see?”
The harper smiled.
“You are dreaming this?” he asked. He made a sweeping motion with his arms that encompassed the whole of the shore, the cliffs and the sea. “You are dreaming me?”
“Well, I. . . .”
“I thought you were of the Middle Kingdom, perhaps. One of Gwyn ap Nudd’s people or some spirit come to walk the world awhile—visiting from the Otherworld.”
“Well, no. That is I do come from the Otherworld. An Otherworld, at any rate.”
“You are awfully wet . . . for a dreamer,” he said, still smiling. “Yestereven, I mistook you for one of the fey folk by the way you vanished. Your apparel seemed odd to me. Becoming, to be sure, but not a style that the maidens in my homeland wear. But I thought to myself: ‘This is a strange land, Taliesin. The garments, the very customs will be different. Make no judgments, lest you judge unwisely.’ Yet now that I have learned that it is all but a dream, well. . . .”
He shrugged.
“You’re making fun of me!”
“And you are not? Playing the jester with me?”
“I’m not!”
“And yet you speak of dreams. . . .”
“Oh, this is absurd!”
“Come,” Taliesin said. “Dreaming or not, you are still discomforted. I have tea brewing—do you know of tea in this land? It comes from the far east, they say, or at least the learning of it did. What I have steeping here are the last of the rosehips I dried ere I was exiled from Gwynedd. Share it with me and we will speak of dreams or whatever you will. I’ve been a long time at sea and in strange circumstances. For all that I had Hoyw here as my companion, I’ve been lonely, m’lady—”
“My name’s Sara.”
She didn’t feel comfortable being called “m’lady”—especially not when she looked like a ragamuffin. Which, she admitted, she usually did, but right now more than usual. She’d had to smile at the dog’s name. Her new knowledge in languages had translated it for her: “Alert.” The old dog seemed anything but.
“Yes,” Taliesin said, nodding. “I’d not forgotten your name. But I had not thought to presume in using it.” His shoulders lifted and fell easily. “New customs and all. Have a seat, Sara. Would you be averse to another small spell?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this.”
He stepped before her and gently, so as not to startle her, took her by the shoulders. He hummed under his breath and a warm tingle ran down Sara’s arms from his touch and she realized that her clothes were drying. Sara took a startled step back. The scent of apple blossoms filled the air.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“How? Do you wish a lesson in magics?”
“Yes. No. I mean, not now. But how did you do it? Where did the . . . ability . . . power to do it come from?”
The harper tapped his chest.
“From within,” he said. “From the deep silences within the magics grow.”
I was right, Sara thought with a certain sense of satisfaction. It’s something inside. And I must have it too, or I wouldn’t have been able to return here.
So enrapt was she at digesting this new knowledge, that she let Taliesin steer her to a flat rock and sit her down. He took an extra cloak from his pack and settled it across her shoulders, fixing it at her throat with a simple silver clasp, but her chill had left her. Not until the harper handed her a mug of tea did she remember where she was. And who she was with.
“Thanks.”
She cupped her hands around the mug. It was made from a plain reddish clay, fired without a glaze and made without a handle, but the lip of it was smooth when she brought it up to her mouth and it held the tea’s heat well.
“I have the feeling,” Taliesin said, “that there is a tale to be told in your arrival here. You are as much a stranger to this shore as I am, is that not so?”
“Sort of. I’ve been here before—but it was different.”
Taliesin nodded. “You mentioned a village yestereven.”
“It used to be over there,” Sara said, pointing back the way she’d come, and tugged the cloak back around her.
“I saw no sign of it. No ruins—nothing.”
“That’s because it hasn’t been built yet.”
“A riddle?” Taliesin asked. “I’ll warn you. I’m more than a good match when it comes to the telling of riddles.”
“Well, maybe you can figure this one out, then.”
Sara fished in her back pocket to see how her tobacco pouch had fared from its dip in the sea and Taliesin’s subsequent drying magic. Miraculously, even the papers were dry. She rolled a cigarette, leaned forward and took up a twig from the fire to light it, then gratefully blew a wreath of blue-grey smoke into the morning air.
“Different customs,” Taliesin murmured, his eyes widening.
“It’s called a cigarette.”
The word came out in English, there being no translation for what it was in the Welsh she assumed they were speaking. She wondered briefly what year it was that Sir Walter Raleigh came back to England with tobacco. Jamie would know.
“Is it part of the riddle?”
“Indirectly, I suppose it is. You see, Taliesin—” That was the first time she’d spoken his name aloud. It had a nice ring to it, she decided.
“You see,” she continued, “I know all about you. Well, not everything. It’s just that, where I come from . . . you’re a legend. You lived some fifteen hundred years ago. So . . . I have to make up my mind: either I’m dreaming, or, somehow, I’ve gone back in time.”
She shot him a glance to see how he was taking this information and saw that he was taking it very well. He didn’t even seem . . . well, shocked or anything. Curiosity was there, in those deep green eyes, but that was all.
“Doesn’t that even surprise you?” she had to ask.
“I find it strange,” he replied, seeming to choose his words with care, “but perhaps you forget that I have dealt with faerie for most of my life. It seems to me that of the two of us, you should be the most startled.”
“I am. It’s . . . an adventure and all, I guess, but it scares the hell out of me at the same time.”
She didn’t say anything for awhile, just stared out over his shoulder at the sea, smoking her cigarette.
“I don’t even know how to describe where I come from,” she said at last. “I’d have to—to explain how I got her
e—but I don’t think your language has words for any of it. Yet.”
Taliesin nodded thoughtfully, then glanced at her ring.
“Perhaps you should begin with that,” he said. “It seems a twin to my own. In fact, it could be mine.”
Sara looked from her finger to his and shook her head.
“They’re hardly the same size,” she said.
Taliesin removed his. “Mine has the strange property of fitting whatever finger it is placed on. It was a gift—from one of my teachers. A man named Myrddin. And yours?”
“I sort of inherited mine.”
“May I see it?” Taliesin asked.
When she’d pulled it off and handed it to him, he passed his own to her. She tried it on, while he tried on hers. She’d expected it to be about twice the size of her own ring, but found that it fit snugly. And hers . . . hers fit the harper’s finger as though it had been made for it. Taliesin removed her ring and studied it closely. When he looked at Sara finally, there was an odd look in his eyes.
“This could be my ring,” he said slowly, “given the wear of the years. It has the same . . . resonance as my own, save that yours is older. I find it . . . disquieting.”
“What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
They returned each other’s rings and sat quietly, considering.
“Tell me your tale,” Taliesin said, “for all that you think you won’t find the proper words. Perhaps if we exchange tales, we might make some sense out of our strange meeting on this lonely shore.”
Where’ve I heard that before? Sara thought, then decided that the harper would be different from Kieran. He seemed to genuinely want to understand. So she told him everything she knew, from when she found the ring straight on through to the present moment. It took two more cigarettes and another mug of tea—and surprisingly, her new vocabulary had enough words for the telling.
“And before?” Taliesin asked. “Before you found the ring? What was your life like? Did it prepare you for these events?”
“No. At least not intentionally, I’m sure. Or—Oh, I don’t know.”
So she told him about Tamson House, which was a difficult concept to exchange with one who knew smoky halls, peat huts and leather tents; and about her uncle Jamie. Then she recounted what she could remember of the legends that surrounded the poet Taliesin in her own time—from the story of Gwion Bach and the magical cauldron, to that day in Maelgwn’s court when he put to shame all of the king’s bards.
“It is strange what the years can do to a man’s name,” he said when she was done.
“Those stories aren’t true?” Sara asked, feeling vaguely disappointed.
“Not so much untrue as garbled.”
“You didn’t write ‘The Battle of the Trees’?”
“ ‘Cad Godden’?” Taliesin repeated and the words stayed in their Welsh. “Not I, though I know it well. Those verses hold all the secrets of bardic lore in their riddling lines, Sara. They are the magic and the mystery of the world.”
“But what does it mean?”
“ ‘I was in many shapes before I was released,’ ” Taliesin quoted. “The first line tells all. Such is the Way we follow through life. Many shapes. The knowledge gained through wearing them. And one day comes the release that is the harmony—attained when one is one with all.”
“I’m not sure I followed all of that.”
Taliesin smiled. “If you did, you wouldn’t need to ask. And if you need to ask, then those verses remain the riddle that they are. That is the bard’s Way, Sara. To become a master of riddles and then step beyond them.”
“Is that what you are—what you’ve done?”
“No. But I am trying. Let me tell you of my beginnings—for we promised each other the sharing of tales—and then we can try to unravel what meaning ‘Cad Godden’ holds for our meeting. This will be the true tale—not my life as the legends would have it. You are not too tired?”
Sara shook her head. She had known he wouldn’t cop out like Kieran, and the thought made her feel good. Like she’d just found a friend. Taliesin shifted his long legs in the sand before him and laid his hand on Hoyw’s head, ruffling the thick fur around the old dog’s ears.
“Taliesin am I,” he began. “Chief bard in the west was I and my original country was the Region of the Summer Stars. The tale has it I was a foundling, cast up on the shores of Gwynedd by Dylan Eil Ton, he who rules the waves and is Aranrhod’s son, who knows the sea as most men know their palms—” He paused, looking at her. “Why are you smiling?”
“I don’t know. It all sounds so formal.”
Taliesin grinned ruefully. “I am used to telling the tale in the halls of kings—not to friends. I will try to leave out the bardic resonances.”
So he told her how Elphin, the son of Gwyddon, found him cast up on the shore in a wicker and leather coracle, how he brought the babe home and how his wife and he raised the foundling as though he was their own son.
“If ever I was named Gwion Bach,” he said, “as the legends would have it, that memory is long gone from me. Much knowledge have I gathered, but it was twenty-one long years of tutorship under the bard Myrddin that made me what I am—not three drops from the cauldron of Ceridwen. Hard work it was, that learning, for I was lazy as a boy and preferred wandering the woodlands to learning in the sacred groves. Many a day and night I sat under the boughs of the Red-Branch, the central tree in Myrddin’s grove that was sacred to the Moonmother and her Horned Lover, and many a longer year I walked the roads with him, from high moors of Alba to Arthur’s Caerlleon upon Usk. And still, to this day, that process of learning goes on.”
A long charmed life he’d led, with adventures that ranged from the land of the faerie folk in their Middle Kingdom, to nights spent in thatch-roofed inns in the company of brigands and thieves; from king’s courts to the lonely wildlands. He told her how he won Maelgwn’s enmity.
“It was not a fair contest,” he explained. “His bards were not true bards—not in the old sense of the word. They did not follow the Way. Theirs was the poetry untouched by the Moonmother—more bound in histories, often false histories, with never a spark of Her fey light in what they recited or sang.
“She was with me that day I sang their tongues mute and cast the skill from their harpers’ fingers. I freed my forefather Elphin that day, but the deed came back to haunt me for, when at last I wearied of the road and longed to settle down in the only homeland I knew as my own, Maelgwn had his druids bind me and cast me, my harp and my dog and all, adrift on the sea.”
“And here you are.”
“Here I am, a foundling once more, cast again upon a shore by the will of Dylan Eil Ton.”
“How did you survive the journey?” Sara asked.
“My magics sustained me. I turned inward, focused on the heart of my being—my taw, the inner stillness that is like magic, or more like the silence between the notes than actual music itself.”
“Phew!” Sara murmured. “If I hadn’t already been through some weird things myself, I’d find it hard to believe you.”
Neither of them said much for a while. Sara looked seaward and tried to imagine Taliesin’s voyage, but only ended up shaking her head with the wonder of it all.
“What’s it like,” she asked at last, “this . . . taw?”
“Do you play an instrument?” Taliesin asked.
“A little bit. Not wholeheartedly. I guess I don’t really do anything wholeheartedly.”
“Have you ever felt as one with your instrument? That moment when nothing stood between you and what your heart bade you play?”
“A couple of times—I think.”
Taliesin smiled. “That is what your taw is like. When you can maintain your contact with it, you have taken a long step along the bard’s Way. To learn the inner magic of a thing, always to have your taw close at hand, you must pursue your calling wholeheartedly. It need not be thro
ugh music. That is the bard’s Way. Other Wayfarers have their own methods.
“But for me—the harmony between player and instrument—that was the key to unlocking the primary magic. Magic that stayed in my music and shaped my life. It is like touching the Moon’s heart, Sara. There is no other feeling like it. Imagine that celestial ship rising above a forest. That first moment when she lifts from the trees, that moment filled with promise and wildness and potent magics . . . that is what my life is, following the Way. That is what my taw holds for me.”
“You make it sound . . . perfect.” Sara sighed. “I wish I could get in touch with myself like that.”
“What makes you think you cannot?” Taliesin pointed to the ring on her finger. “That ring—it is a gifting ring. My master Myrddin gave mine to me. Such a ring does not find its way to the finger of one without the potential to be a Wayfarer.”
“Nobody gave it to me. I found it in a box in the back of my uncle’s store.”
Like a Cracker Jack box, she thought. “Free Gift Inside!”
But Taliesin shook his head.
“It is still a gift,” he said, “no matter how it came to you. Such rings have a kenning—a sense of their wearer’s rightness.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s just a fluke that I found it—that I’m here. There’s no meaning in all this for me. Take yourself. You’re someone important with magic powers and everything.”
“Magic is just a side road along the Way.”
“It’s a pretty wild side road. No. I’d just be kidding myself and I know it. There’s something wonderful going on and I’m sure you’re a part of it. But me? I think I just lucked into it, that’s all.”
Taliesin frowned. “That is your friend Kieran speaking.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“Nevertheless, you are merely repeating the words you told me he spoke to you. I know this, Sara: There is no such thing as chance in the workings of the world. While it is true that we make our own decisions, those decisions are there to be made because a greater power than we may ken has placed them there. Over such moments we have no control. But we do control the decision of which path we will take. If you step away from this now. . . .” He sighed. “You will never know, will you?”
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