“Are you all right, Mere?” he asked, holding her by the arms.
“Of course I’m all right. Why, it’s an answer to one of my childhood dreams: going adventuring in a trader’s van.”
When she favoured him with the wide smile that put dimples in both cheeks, she was more his Merelan than she had been since before her pregnancy. He folded her into his arms, hugging her -remembering to be gentle, as he felt how thin she still was in his embrace. That reminded him what he might not have, and he was about to put her firmly away from him when she clung tightly.
“It’s safe enough,” she murmured, and he clasped her with a passion that he had been aching to express but had sternly repressed. He didn’t even have to worry about an inopportune interruption from the baby sleeping in the spare crib in Dalma’s wagon. So he loved Merelan with a single-minded urgency which had been denied him far too long. Nor was there any reluctance in her response to him.
The slow trip south was really a very good idea.
At some point during that ambling three-week journey to the southern tip of South Boll, Petiron realized that he had been nearly as strung out, emotionally and physically, as Merelan. Being in the Harper Hall, with music, musicians and instruments constantly heard, caused one to think only of music to write for instruments and voices to perform. On the road, he was not compelled by the tacit competition rampant in the Harper Hall to produce yet more complex and glorious sounds. For the first time since he had started his apprentice years, he had an opportunity to realize the richness – as well as the simplicity – of life all around him. He’d come from Telgar Hold, one of the largest, so he had never really been short of the necessities of day-to-day existence. Living in the Harper Hall had been a continuation of his childhood’s conditions.
He took so many things for granted that it was a lesson to him to be denied easy access to, say, the well-tanned hides for musical compositions which he was accustomed to coveting with quick, large notations. Now he learned to write economically, using small marks which allowed him to fit more than one work on a single hide.
Eating was another thing he had never given much thought to.
Food arrived in the Hall with no indication to those who dined of its acquisition or preparation. Now he learned to hunt and fish with the other men of the caravan, even as the women gathered firewood and nuts and, as they continued to the warmer areas, early greens, fruits and berries.
Petiron could stride along with the other traders all day long now, and Merelan too put on weight and became weather-tanned and fit. She walked part of each day with Dalma and the other young mothers, at a pace slow enough for the youngest toddler to keep up. Her cough disappeared and she was once again vivid with the beauty which had stopped Petiron’s heart five turns earlier.
And he began to realize just how restrictive he had been in the Harper Hall; so immersed had he become in composition and practice that he had forgotten that other things existed: a normal life.
The caravan camped for three days by one of the Runner Stations and, as usual, the Station Master sent out his runners in all directions to alert those who lived far off the southern road.
“Some of these people are very shy,” the Station Master told his guests. “You might even find them … well, a bit … odd.”
“You mean, from living off in the hills?” Merelan asked.
The man scratched his head. “They got odd notions, you might say.”
Merelan knew there was something that he was not saying, and she couldn’t understand his sudden reticence.
“Ah, d’you have something that isn’t harper blue?” he blurted.
“I do,” Merelan said, “but I don’t think Petiron does. Oh! You mean, he might aggravate someone?” She smiled to show that she understood perfectly.
“Ah, yes, that’s about the size of it.”
“i’ll see what I can do about keeping him occupied,” she said, smiling sympathetically.