A String in the Harp (14 page)

“Well, cheer up,” said Jen. “The day’s almost over.”

“I always used to want it to last, so Christmas wouldn’t be gone so quickly,” mourned Becky.

“You all look festive and happy,” remarked David, coming out to supper. “Can’t you at least pretend to be jolly?”

“Why?” demanded Peter. Jen glared at him, but he refused to look at her.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas, for one reason,” said David, “and we’re all together, for another.”

“It doesn’t seem like Christmas somehow,” said Becky.

“That’s nonsense!” There was a trace of sharpness in David’s voice that made Jen wary. “Christmas is Christmas no matter where you are.”

“I wish we were home,” said Peter, daring his father’s anger.

“You’ve made that plain over and over,” retorted David. “There is no point in saying it again.”

“You never seem to pay any attention.”

Jen caught her breath. Peter was deliberately provoking an argument.

“Peter—” began Becky, her face pinched-looking.

“I don’t care where we are—it’s no good if it isn’t home!” Peter burst out across her. “It isn’t
fair!
You never asked if we wanted to come here, you just brought us. You never even bothered to say why we came. How can you expect me to understand when you won’t try to understand
me?
I don’t believe you care one bit what we think, and it’s not fair!”

Becky’s hand, holding a forkful of green beans, was paralyzed, her eyes alarmed. Jen was afraid to look at David. She could feel his anger like electricity in the air.

“Peter,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet, “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. If you think I came to Wales and brought you with me without the most careful and painful consideration first, you’re very mistaken. I didn’t just pack a few things in a trunk and buy some plane tickets. It may interest you to know that your mother and I had planned this trip—for this very year—long ago. We wanted to wait until you were all old enough,
mature
enough, to appreciate living in a foreign country and until I got the right offer. This was the year. And after a lot of hard thinking, I decided I should go ahead with those plans we’d already made.”

“But you never asked us!” cried Peter passionately. “It was different before!”

“Before your mother died? You might as well say it, if that’s what you mean. Of course, it was different, I’d never pretend it wasn’t. But your mother wanted us to come here very much. We were waiting until I’d heard from the University before we told you. But that was—after. Peter, you have no monopoly on being lonely or homesick. You aren’t the only one to miss your mother; you’re being selfish if you think you are. Jen and Becky lost as much as you did.”

“But they don’t
mind
being here. You took away everything I had, everything I wanted. You brought me to this awful place where there’s nothing at all, and then you ignore me and you expect me to be happy. You don’t care what happens to us anyway, you just shut yourself up in your study or go off to the University all day. It doesn’t matter to
you
how we manage.” All the bitterness and anger came pouring out of Peter. His face was white and intense, his eyes blazing.

“Of course it matters!” David raised his voice. “But I expect you to be old enough to take some responsibility for yourselves. I expect you to make an effort to get along, and I don’t think you have, Peter. You’ve never given Wales a chance—your school, this house, the town, any of it. You made up your mind not to like it before we even came and you refuse to try. You’re behaving like a baby instead of a twelve-year-old boy and I’m ashamed of you! We’ve all listened to your complaints, God knows, and I can tell you I’m getting fed up with them. Now, unless you can buck up and try to make the best of things, I think you’d better excuse yourself from the table.”

Without a word Peter got up and left the kitchen, and they all heard the lounge door slam a moment later. No one felt like finishing supper after that. Jen, glancing at her father, saw him look at Peter’s empty chair with a bleak expression in his eyes, and she looked away quickly. It was a terrible end to the day. David said nothing more, but left without dessert, presumably to shut himself in the study again.

“I don’t see how it can get much worse,” said Becky in a small voice.

Jen could think of no comfort for her. This kind of trouble frightened her. Family quarrels were one thing, but this was much more serious and it had never happened before.

The answer to her own problems, she had been sure, was to be with her father and Becky and Peter again. Well, here they all were together and yet further apart than they’d ever been.

“It’ll be better in the morning,” she said finally.

“I hope so,” said Becky.

***

An overwhelming sense of injustice filled Peter. He had finally come out and told his father exactly what he thought, and his father had sent him away from the dinner table. He hadn’t listened, he hadn’t
tried
to understand. He’d closed his mind. What chance did he, Peter, possibly have? And Jen and Becky had just sat there and listened to their father shout at him and made no move to help. He was alone, terribly, terribly alone, and no one cared. He felt martyred and bitter and very unhappy.

He was, in fact, very close to tears, which made him even more resentful because he hated crying. He hadn’t cried since his mother had been killed, and only once then, days after, when it had begun to hurt, when he’d realized what had happened.
She
would have understood, he told himself fiercely.
She
wouldn’t have made him stay; she’d admit she’d been wrong. But deep down he felt a little betrayed knowing that his mother had helped plan this trip. He hadn’t known that before.

The lounge was dark. No one came to try and make peace or to cheer him up. No one came to turn on the lights and apologize, so Peter sat on in the darkness, biting his lip and feeling wretched.

And the Key began to sing to him. At first he fought against it, wanting to hold his grief like a bed of nails, not wanting to be distracted from it, but the Key disregarded him and its song grew, teasing, insinuating itself into Peter’s head, ignoring the black thoughts.

It sang of summer and a pretty breeze, the dizzying shout of skylarks lost in an endless blue sky. Insects chanted in the long grass that shimmered in the sun beside a river.

Taliesin, now a grown man, sat on the bank, his head cocked to one side, eyes narrowed against the reflected dazzle
of sun, his bare feet turned to gold in the peaty water. He was trying words to himself, singing without sound, listening, searching for the right ones. The neck of his coarse blue tunic was open, the sleeves pushed above his elbows, and his face and arms and throat were the weathered brown of a peasant laborer. But where his coppery hair had lain across his broad forehead, the skin was pale and seemed almost to shine when the breeze brushed it clear.

His companion this time was not Aneirin, but a gangly, near-grown boy, as brown and careless as he, flung on his stomach near Taliesin, watching fish flick in the shallows. Aneirin was nowhere to be seen. He was gone.

“Can you catch them in your hand?”

“Fish?” asked Taliesin without moving.

“Mmm.” The boy nodded. “Without traps or lines or weirs, I mean.”

Taliesin smiled. “When I am hungry.”

“Would you teach me?” the boy asked eagerly.

“Are you hungry?”

The boy rolled onto his back. “No. But if I never learn I may be one day.”

“A good answer. Reason enough for a king’s son to learn to fish!”

“Then you will?”

Taliesin got to his feet and the boy scrambled up. Though younger, he topped Taliesin by several inches. “A good half,” said Taliesin, “is knowing where to find what you look for. Remember that, Elphin Rheged.”

The spot he chose was further upstream, among the trees, where a noisy beck joined the river, sun-speckled as a trout’s belly. Taliesin stretched himself on the edge of the stream beside a wide, slow-moving pool, and Elphin Rheged squatted near him peering into the water.

“Do you see?” asked Taliesin. He sank his arm up to the elbow, his hand moving slowly toward a large fat fish that
hung almost motionless in the clear stream. Elphin watched intently as the hand worked closer, slow and patient, its fingers moving gently with the same motion as the fish’s gills. They touched the underside of the creature, they stroked it, they scratched it, and the fish responded like a kitten being rubbed. Elphin Rheged could almost imagine it purred. Taliesin’s eyes were half closed and there was a smile touching his mouth. For a long moment they stopped thus, almost frozen: boy, man, and fish totally absorbed in one another. Then, with reluctance, Taliesin moved and moved so quickly the boy saw only a sudden flash of light and a glittering rainbow of drops in the air above the pool, and Taliesin held the great fish helpless in his hand, watching it gulp, its eyes bulging.

“You are too foolish and trusting,” Taliesin told it softly. “Another time you will not be so fortunate.” And he released the trout again to its own element. It rested, stunned, for several seconds, then with a thrust of its tail, it vanished into the muddy safety of the pool’s depths.

“But why?” demanded Elphin Rheged. “He was so big and you caught him fairly.”

“I had no need of his life,” replied the man. “Hunting that has no point is worse than going hungry. That, too, you should remember.” His words were grave, but he laughed at Elphin’s disappointment. “Come! You shall try it yourself further upstream where the fish will not have wind of us yet. But keep in mind the dinner Urien Rheged, your father, will set before us tonight.”

The sun slanted gold through the trees and the shadows were stretching when at last Taliesin and Elphin Rheged left the beck, Elphin with a new skill in his fingers and new thoughts in his mind, but nothing to show for his afternoon’s fishing. He still struggled to understand what Taliesin had been teaching him and his head was full. Taliesin, for himself, was pleased with the day and sang softly.

But on the riverbank they were met, unaware, by a party
of rough, wild-looking men with salt-tangled hair and beards, and before man or boy knew what had happened they found themselves seized and bound. Their captors spoke a language that was unfamiliar to Elphin Rheged. He struggled blindly, kicking with his bare feet when they secured his arms, but they were much stronger than he and laughed crudely at his efforts. Taliesin stood still, offering no resistance, and when Elphin saw him, he too stopped fighting; he saw what Taliesin had immediately seen: that to struggle was useless. And he saw also Taliesin’s slight nod to him.

The men began a heated discussion, with many gestures and shakings of fists in one another’s faces, their voices colliding in the startled air. That Elphin Rheged and Taliesin were the subject of the discussion there could be no doubt. At last they seemed to reach some kind of agreement, and the prisoners found themselves caught up among them and moved quickly off, along the river toward the coast. They were marched shoulder to shoulder with men tight on all sides around them, rough and disagreeably unwashed.

“Who are they?” whispered Elphin furiously. “Do they know who
I
am? My father will not stand for this!”

“They are Irish. I know a little of their speech, enough to gather that they are sea raiders and we are being taken to their ships. As to your father, I do not believe they will have advised Urien Rheged of their plans.” The man at Taliesin’s right said something and gave him a shove forward. Obviously the prisoners were not meant to communicate.

“Wait,” murmured Taliesin. And Elphin was forced to bide.

More men waited on the shore, and among them was one who was evidently their chief. Though wild and unkempt like the others, his clothing was incongruously fine, and he wore a heavy gold chain around his hairy neck. When he spoke, he silenced those with whom he stood. Taliesin guessed that their fate lay in this man’s hands. His small eyes gleamed shrewdly
under a tangle of hair and great black eyebrows. He listened to the raiders and squinted at the captives. Elphin Rheged looked away from him in discomfort, but Taliesin returned his gaze calmly.

At length the chief raised a huge, ring-studded hand, and the explanations ceased.

“You are natives?” The words were so strongly accented that Elphin did not realize at once that he understood them.

“Yes,” replied Taliesin.

“Laborers?”

“No. I am a bard from the land of Cymru.”

“He, too?” indicating Elphin Rheged.

“My companion,” said Taliesin simply.

“A bard.” The man was silent, stroking his wiry beard. “You are not much of a prize,” he said at last.

“We are what we are,” replied Taliesin evenly.

“Not much of a prize is better than none at all, eh?” Around them the Irish nodded, quick to agree, though they had not understood what he had said.

“You are Irish slaves now,” said the chief.

It was a miscellaneous cargo the raiders stowed aboard their broad, high-sided sailing ships: small livestock such as sheep and poultry, and even a young bull calf, shields, swords and daggers taken from some chief’s store, odd pieces of silver and gold work, a heap of good woolen material, and a handful of miserable looking Britons—two men, four girls, and a boy younger than Elphin. These were divided among the six ships. Taliesin was put aboard the first, that of the chief, and Elphin Rheged in another.

“Have faith, Elphin, and do not despair,” were the last words Taliesin ever spoke to him. And that night, with the turning of the tide, the raiders made sail for their own land.

P
ARENTS WERE SUPPOSED
to
cope,
Jen thought resentfully, sitting in the kitchen after Becky went up to bed. They were supposed to be able to handle crises like this one, but David wasn’t. She had never before seen her father and her brother so totally opposed, so irreconcilable. They were strangers, people she didn’t know at all, and worse, people she didn’t want anything to do with.