sings, his songs are attended, remembered, and copied by
those in the regions nearby. If a song is a new one, it carries
to still farther regions by word of mouth, from bard to bard,
from orator to folksinger to storyteller to bard again.
It is a tangled process, and the words change sometimes
in the telling, no matter how we try to rightly remember.
The old lines from Arion’s song I heard in Solamnia as
THE PRAYER OF MATHERI
MERCIFUL GRAMMAR OF THOUGHT
I had heard in the small town of Solace as
THE PRAYERS OF MATHERI
MERCY, GRANDMOTHER OF THOUGHT
and the southern lines made me laugh, distorted like
gossip in their passage across the straits.
For I had the book with me, and within it (he truth
unchangeable. As I traveled, I knew I would come to a
place when I would hear those scratched and worried lines
of my father’s – the lines about Pyrrhus Alecto, about
Lightbringer and history and glory – but I would hear them
in a different version.
And I would know at last what Pyrrhus Orestes had
altered.
*****
Across the Straits of Schallsea I once stowed away on
a ferry. The enraged ferryman discovered me under a pile
of badger hides, and he threatened to throw me overboard
for evading his fee. He relented when he pushed back my
hood and saw the scars from the burning.
“Firebringer,” he snarled. “Only my fear of Branchala, of
the curse upon bard-slayers, stays my hand from your
murder.” I cherished his greeting. It was the first of many
such conversations.
Over the grain fields of Abanasinia I wandered, in a
journey from summer to summer and threat to threat. Three
times I heard “Song of the Rending” – once from a minstrel
in Solace, again in the city of Haven from a seedy,
unraveled bard who had forgotten entire passages about the
collapse of Istar, whereby his singing lost its sense, and
finally from a blind juggler wandering the depths of the
plains, whose version was wild and comical, a better story
by far than Arion’s.
The minstrel and the juggler repeated Father’s altered
lines word for word. But the juggler recited them with a
curious look, as though he was remembering words contrary
to those he was speaking. Although I asked him and asked
him again about it, he would tell me nothing. Faced with his
silence, I began to believe I had imagined his discomfort,
that it was only my hope and dreaming that had expected to
find the missing lines.
And so, back across the straits I sailed, in the summer
of my sixteenth year, and again the ferryman called me
Fire-bringer, cursing me and spitting at me as he took my
money.
On Solamnic shores once more, I started for home, but
discovered that no village would shelter me on the journey.
“Firebringer,” they called me, and “Orestes the Torch,”
meeting me on the outskirts of the hamlets with torches of
their own, with stones and rakes and long peninsular knives.
Some even pursued me, shouting that the fires would
die with the one who brought them. Like the ferryman, like
Finn, they thought I was my father.
*****
To the north lay the great Solamnic castles – Vingaard and
Dargaard, Brightblade and Thelgaard and DiCaela. Each
would take me in of a night for the sake of my grandfather.
These families would nurse me on occasion, for my scars
burned with growing intensity as the seasons turned and the
fires to the west raged and the years passed by me.
Sometimes the knights let me stay for a week, perhaps two,
but the peasants would clamor, would talk of traitors and
firebrands, and I would be asked to leave, would be
escorted from Solamnic holdings by a handful of armed
cavalry.
The knights would apologize there at the borders, and
tell me that their hearts were heavy for me … that the
welfare of the order and the people took precedence . . .
that, had there been another way, they would have been
glad to …
In all those high places, I asked after Arion’s song.
Solamnia was, after all, the bard’s sanctuary, the harp’s