started the music box again.
“I’m capable –“ Essonine started to say, but her voice vanished in mid-sentence. Her mouth fell open, and she cleared her throat several times, but with little result.
“Come on, boy.” Auoril beckoned to Sabanus. “She’ll never help herself. It’s up to us.” Sabanus darted from the ballroom with Auoril to find Essonine some water but had to settle for a small cask from the wine cellar. When he proffered the miniature barrel to Essonine, she pushed it away. “I have no need of that. See? My voice is back.”
“Guard your voice,” the flower bard warned her, his normally light-hearted voice as stern as Leroc’s. “Night is only half over.”
Essonine scowled at Auoril for his advice and Sabanus for bringing the cask that seemed to stand as proof of her weakness. At last with a sigh, she uncorked it and raised it to her lips.
While Essonine restored her voice, Auoril sang a tender ballad about irises and sunflowers.
“Leroc would give his eye teeth to hear this,” Sabanus whispered to Essonine. However, she betrayed no mirth. After what seemed an eternity, Essonine was able to sing again.
“How do you feel?” Sabanus asked.
“The wine was good for wetting my throat.” Essonine’s frown added that she resented his help.
Another hour passed, though to Sabanus it seemed to last moments. Essonine’s skill surpassed songs she had played for him and tales she told while they were on the road. But she was losing her voice again. At the end of “Whisper of Rose,” she stopped. Her hand trembled as she massaged one in the other.
“Don’t worry,” Sabanus said. “We still have the music box.” But as he turned the key, something within the box gave a dismaying crunch, and it would play no more.
Auoril cast a wary glance at the other spirits. “I would play to help you, but it is useless. Only songs of the living will appease them. Suppose you play for us?” he asked Sabanus.
But Sabanus knew Essonine would not surrender the last rose until she dropped from exhaustion, especially after Auoril’s help. Still, the ghost had a good idea, if only there were another instrument. Sabanus cast his eyes around the room’s accumulated junk for something, anything that could help them. Then he sighted a flute among the party favors, a child’s toy. As he debated whether to get it, the hum of ghostly conversation took on a more menacing tone. Then Sabanus decided.
It was surprising how many songs he could coax from the toy flute. As he played, he reflected that after this unexpected concert, playing for the bardic masters would not make him nervous -- with the exception of Leroc.
Although Sabanus felt somewhat self-conscious playing a child’s toy before one of the century’s greatest bards, Auoril was delighted. “Marvelous!” he declared when Sabanus bowed at the end of one of his songs. “A ridiculous instrument, but you have a real talent with it, not to mention ingenuity. What a story this would make. That I lived to compose it!”
Sabanus glowed from the flower bard’s praise. How different his approach was from Leroc and the classical masters who sought to improve their students by cataloging their music’s flaws. But night’s heavy darkness yet hung over the windows, when Sabanus could play no more.
Still dizzy and breathless from such an extended period of flute-playing, Sabanus scuttled with the flower bard to the pillar where Essonine rested.
“How much of the night remains?” she asked after Sabanus shook her gently awake.
“I am certain that a final long story would finish it,” the flower bard said.
Essonine stood, resolute despite her drawn face. “I have no legends left in me,” she said. “Though I do have one story for them…” Something strange that could not be weariness entered her voice.
Essonine came to the front of the assembly, which raised a cheer. “This story I am about to tell contains no heroes and their mighty deeds, nor great beauties and epic loves. It is the story of a single changed life. It begins with a simple peasant girl. Her parents were killed in a fire, forcing her to live with her uncle. A disgraced soldier, his unwavering loyalty since his discharge was to the bottle…”
And then Sabanus knew. At last Essonine was telling the tale he had longed to hear since their traveling days, that of her own hidden self. When he shared his boyish dreams with her, of joining Asudar Isior, of wandering the world as a bard and composing sagas of his own adventures, she had returned only silence or a detached observation. She had traveled with him, even stood up for him, but never trusted him. Always he had wondered about the girl whose emotions masked themselves in cynicism and indifference; over time he longed to know her. But the distance between Essonine and him – and everyone – was one that only she could bridge. Now Sabanus leaned forward, forgetting shades and safety, falling into the spell Essonine’s voice wove.
“He disappeared, often for days at a time, leaving no food in the house. They lived outside the village, so no one could hear her cry. The girl thought she would die from hunger. Yet she soon learned when he was away drinking and sleeping in ditches, she would escape beatings and his perpetual insults of her mother, whom he despised even in death.
“When the girl was nine, a party of gypsies passed her uncle’s house, singing. She had heard her uncle’s drunken singing of course, tuneless, and joyless as despair. But, she seemed to have memories of time before time, when all was warm darkness, a comforting yet muffled song that rarely ceased. The girl stepped over her uncle – he lay corpse-still, dreaming drunken dreams and reeking as one pulled fresh from the grave – and crept outside to investigate the gypsies’ revelry. There was clapping and singing, instruments and smiles all around. She joined their dance at the end of their line. Suddenly the forest was not her prison, but a place of sunshine and laughter. Never had she felt so alive. They made camp in a clearing and discovered her, a little scarecrow girl among their well-fed contentment. The soft brown women tempted her with sweet-breads and cider; the children all wanted to dance with her, little strangeling as they called her. Toward night, the men built a fire and drank, but merrily. The women and children wanted to keep her. Traveling with them, the little foundling would grow plump, brown, and strong and lose the frightened look in her eyes.
“Then her uncle appeared at the camp’s edge, demanded her back. Despite their gaiety, the gypsies were a persecuted people. Should they refuse, the other villagers would turn against them, despite how they despised the girl’s uncle.
“When they returned home, the girl’s uncle beat her. But the joy of that afternoon never left her. With the song standing against her fear, the girl dared to do many things she never had before. At dearly-stolen school days, she sought all knowledge she could about the bards, who made music their lives. She decided that was what she would become, though the preparation might take years, and the journey, months.”
And Essonine told of the girl’s years alone. During her uncle’s drunken jaunts in town, she went to neighboring villagers to learn all she could of music. Many musicians were pleased to show her the secrets of their art. One year, a bard named Tervasan stayed in the village for an entire month to make instruments from the surrounding trees. He and the girl became close friends, and she learned much from him. Before he left to continue his wanderings, he gave her a lute that he had made and showed her how to replace the strings.
Sabanus’s tears emerged with Essonine’s. If Asudar Isior would not permit her after this, he would fight the bardic masters alongside her until they did.
“Several years later, the girl reunited with Tervasan. His latest creation was a lute of honey-golden wood and strings that glittered like frost in the sun. He let her cradle it for a time, caress it; then he asked her to play. He said nothing about her songs for such a long time, she worried that she had offended him. When she asked him, he answered that he hardly knew her for the same musician, she had improved so much.
“Then she
knew it was finally time for the journey to the bardic province. Though bardic law would never permit it, she would live among those for whom music was a way of life.”
When Essonine finished her story, the flower bard’s cheeks shone with patches of silver. “I am honored to have heard your tale, Essonine of Irangiln province. I believe it will soon have a place among the bardic legends.”
Sabanus gazed at Essonine through watery eyes. Though in traveling with Essonine, he had come to know her better than many, he had still known so little.
“Dawn,” a distant voice declared. “Let us conclude our revels at last.”
“Thank you for your courage, Essonine,” Auoril whispered. “Hearing your song and tidings of the hall, I lived again.” The bard meant it. Sabanus felt it, an almost living warmth emanating from his eyes and voice. “Alas, I cannot stay. But it is my hope that in whatever lies beyond, there is adventure enough and music there, too. So long it has been since I have played...” With each sentence, his voice became fainter, his form paler. “If the hall does not believe you – and that old curmudgeon Leroc probably won’t – show them my name on the back of the last rose’s neck. I painted it there in gold letters when I was young and vain, a signature on a great piece of art which,
The Last Rose Page 4
