“When I think how hard I had to work to walk the tables for journeyman for what he just picked up listening to me, I …
I’m speechless.”
“Rantou doesn’t want to be a musician, love. He wants to do what he does do, manage forestry. Even the instruments he makes are just a hobby with him.”
“That may be very true, Mere, but what you fail to realize is that the Harper Hall needs more young folk to train up than come to us.
Pierie needs a full-time journeyman, not a vacationing one.” Petiron was pacing and robbing his hands together, a sure sign to his spouse of his rising agitation. “Everyone has the right to learning -that is the traditional duty of the Harper Hall. We are desperately short of harpers.”
“But people do learn the Teaching Ballads and Songs, as they have here,” merelan said. “As I did.”
“Only the usual ones, but not all the important ones,” Petiron said sternly with a scowl. When he frowned like that, his heavy eyebrows nearly met over the bridge of his aquiline nose. Though
she’d never tell him, Merelan adored his eyebrows. “They don’t know the Dragon Duty Ballads, for instance.”
merelan suppressed a sigh. Was it only people brought up in strict Harper Hall tradition who believed that Thread would, not just might, return in the next fifty or so turns? Or was their belief merely an extension of the traditions of the Hall?
“You are teaching those, as I am. And I don’t think anyone here, now that they’ve met you and seen me again, would take it amiss if you did suggest that one of the more talented youngsters looked towards the Harper Hall as a life’s work.”
Petiron gave her a strange look. “You don’t?”
She pursed her lips. That tone was his driest and most repressive: the one he reserved for apprentices who had not studied hard enough to suit his exacting standard.
“There was plague, you know, as well as that storm which took many lives from this hold,” she said as casually as she could. “This may be a small hold, but to do all that is required properly also takes a fair-sized population. Sometimes there are none to be spared.”
“Yet they spared two lads to the Weyr,” Petiron said begrudgingly.
Merelan tried to hide her laugh behind her hand but failed, the look of him was so jealous.
“And I suppose you wouldn’t have accepted being Searched for the Weyr?” “I wasn’t.”
“I know, but if you had been Searched by Benden Weyr, would you not have gone?”
“Well,” he said, hedging, “I certainly don’t dispute the honour of
being Searched… but not everyone Searched Impresses a dragon.” “They Impressed greens,” Merelan replied.
“Then they were lucky indeed.”
“Neither of them would have been good as harpers,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye.
“Now that’s not fair, Mere,” Petiron replied stiffly.
“Think on it a bit, my darling,” she said, and continued neatly folding the clothes which she had laundered that afternoon.
It was Petiron who was almost apoplectic with fear when he heard that Merelan was teaching Robinton to swim.
“But he’s only just started walking,” he protested. “How can he swim?”
“All our children learn to swim in their first year,” Segoina told him. “Preferably before they learn to walk, because they remember
swimming from their womb days.”
“They what?”
Merelan put a warning hand on Petiron’s arm, for his body was rigid with shock at the dangers his son had just been exposed to.
“It’s true,” Segoina went on. “Ask at the Healer Hall when you return.” Petiron recoiled slightly, but Segoina continued affably, “It is the best time to remind a child of what it knew in the womb. And then we don’t have to worry so constantly, with us so near the sea as we are.” She pointed down the steps to where a gentle surf made white scallops on the equally white sand. “There is a rite of passage which requires a lad to dive from that height,” and she pointed to the headland that jutted out a fair distance into the sea, “to prove he is a man.”