Chapter 1
Drummer, beat, and piper, blow Harper, strike, and soldier, go Free the flame and sear the grasses Tfl the dawning Red Star passes.
Almost as if the elements, too, mourned the death of the gentle old Harper, a southeaster blew for three days, locking even the burial barge in the safety of the Dock Cavern.
The storm gave Sea Holder Yanus too much time to brood over his dflemma. It gave him time to speak to every man who could keep rhythm and pitch, and they aH give him the same answer. TTiey couldn’t properly honor the Old Harper with his deathsong, but Menolly could.
To which answer Yanus would grunt and stamp off. It rankled in his mind that he couldn’t give voice to his dissatisfaction with that answer, and his frustration. Menolly was only a girl: too tall and lanky to be a proper girl at that It galled him to have to admit that; unfortunately, she was the only person in the entire Half-Circle Sea Hold who could play any instrument as well as the old Harper. Her voice was true, her fingers clever on string, stick or pipe, and she knew the Deathsong. For all Yanus could be certain, the aggravating child had been practicing that song ever since old Fetiron started burning with his fatal fever.
“She will have to do the honor, Yanus,” his wife, Mavi, told him the evening the storm began to slacken. “The important thing is that Petiron is properly sung to rest. One does not have to record who did the singing.”
‘The old man knew he was dying. Why didn’t he instruct one of the men?”
“Because,” replied Mavi with a touch of sharpness in her voice, “you would never spare him a man when there was fishing.”
“There was young Tranflty…”
“Whom you sent fostering to Ista Sea Hold.”
“Couldn’t that young lad of Forolt’s…”
“His voice is changing. Come, Yanus, if 11 have to be
Menolly.”
Yanus grumbled bitterly against the inevitable as he climbed into the sleeping furs.
“That’s what everyone else has told you, haven’t they? So why make so much of a necessity?”
Yanus settled himself, resigned.
“The fishing wffl be good tomorrow,” his wife said, yawning. She preferred him fishing to stomping around the Hold, sullen and critical with enforced inactivity. She knew he was the finest Sea Holder Half-Circle had ever had: the Hold was prospering, with plenty for bartering set by in the storage caves; they hadn’t lost a ship or a man in several Turns either, which said much for his weather-wisdom. But Yanus, at home on a heaving deck in foul weather, was very much adrift when taxed with the unexpected on land.
Mavi was keenly aware that Yanus was displeased with his youngest child. Mavi found the girl exasperating, too. Menolly worked hard and was very clever with her fingers: too clever by half when it came to playing any instrument in the Harper Craft Perhaps, Mavi thought, she had not been wise to permit the girl to linger in the old Harper’s constant company once she had learned all the proper Teaching Songs. But it had been one less worry to let Menolly nurse the old
Harper, and Petiron had wished it. No one begrudged a Harper’s requests. Ah weH, thought Mavi, dismissing the past, there’d be a new Harper soon, and Menolly could be put to tasks proper to a young girl
The next morning, the storm had cleared off: the skies were cloudless, the sea, calm. The burial barge had been outfitted in the Dock Cavern, Petiron’s body wrapped in harper-blue on the tilter board. The entire Fleet and most of the Seahold followed in the wake of the oar-driven barge, out into the faster moving current above Nerat Deep.
Menolly, on the barge prow, sang the elegy: her clear strong voice carrying back to the Half-Circle Fleet; the men chanting the descant as they rowed the barge.
On the final chord, Petiron went to his rest. Menolly bowed her head, and let drum and stick slide from her ringers into the sea. How could she ever use them again when they had beaten Petiron’s last song? She’d held back her tears since the Harper had died because she knew she had to be able to sing his elegy and you couldn’t sing with a throat closed from crying. Now the tears ran down her cheeks, mingled with sea spray: her sobs punctuated by the soft chant of the steersman, setting about