Still, when the old Master saw how patient Robinton was with some of the more backward students, he began to mellow a trifle.
He even delivered a word or two of appreciation. Lobira himself was too short-tempered, and quick with a slap for the inattentive, so Robinton was given not only the slow but the very young, who had to be taught the basic Teaching Ballads. He didn’t mind: in fact, it was a pleasure to sing those songs of his which Master Gennell had incorporated in the early Teaching Songs. It was a quiet contentment to him that his songs were used and he could sing them with a clear conscience.
He was also assigned the duty of spending several days of each seven-day going to the distant holds, often the only outsider they would see. These trips would end once the heavy weather settled in
the high hills; so he copied out extra music for the holders to keep and study until his next trip. He had to write a report for each of his journeys; to his surprise, Lobira went over these reports carefully.
Besides Robinton and Lobira’s three apprentices, there was another journeyman harper, Mallan, who was High Reaches born, and who handled other Teaching routes and also some of the classes in the big Hold. The two journeymen shared a small inner apartment on the Holder’s floor with two bed cubicles and a decent-sized day room, and shared the bathing facilities down the hall with the three apprentices who were quartered in one big inner room. Master Lobira had an outside apartment with his wife, Lotricia, a faded woman with an enchanting smile and a kindly manner reminiscent of Betrice’s. She had been an apprentice healer when she met Lobira, but when they had become espoused she had ended her studies and accompanied him to his posting at High Reaches, where she devoted herself to rearing the four children of their union. The one daughter had married a High Reach holder and occasionally visited her parents with her children. The sons had been apprenticed to other trades, although they returned now and again for a High Reaches Gather.
“None of them could carry a tune in a sack,” Robinton once heard Lobira say in total disgust. “Took after their mother’s side.
But they’ve done well. They’ve done well.”
Lotricia was always bringing “her boys’ – as she called the journeymen – extra food. “You’re all growing, and you’re all nothing but bones,” was her happy complaint, and her offerings were always welcome.
With such constant travel and the busy schedule in the Hold when he wasn’t travelling, Robinton had little time to compose. He took to writing the tunes which filled his head while on the road, stopping frequently to note, in tiny cramped script, the measures that he had piped, whistled or sung into being as he trudged up and down steep tracks. He barely missed injuring himself on several occasions when composing so distracted him that he strayed off the narrow runner traces that were sometimes all he had to follow to his destination. The advantage of composing as he walked was that
he could sing and play as loudly as he wished – often getting an answering echo from the hills around him.
With the first big snowstorm, his travelling came to a halt. In fact he was trapped for three days in Murfy Hold, which was cramped at best, and worse when the fifteen members of the hold were confined day and night.
Murfytwen, the twentieth man to hold there, broke trail for Robinton when the storm had died. He had an urgent need to collect supplies which he hoped were awaiting him at High Reaches, a trip he had delayed far too long.
“Easier to haul it all back on snow, though,” Murfytwen said cheerfully as he lashed the supplies to the sled which had been loaned him for the trip. “See ya when I see ya, Harper. Thanks for them new tunes. We’ll learn “em good. An’ Twenone will know his times tables by the time you’re back again. Promise!”
With his gloved thumb up in a final gesture, Murfytwen started trudging back the way he had come.