The old rock road from Akkalan to the cities of the Inland Seas is
long and broken. Deserts spin their sandy webs across the shards of
its ancient cobblestones. Gaunt black ruins of forgotten cities can be
glimpsed dimly in the fading sunset, at the foot of the Samarinthine
Hills, or standing atop the stone slabs that mark the caravan routes
from Pint to Kanadar. Few used the old stone road, and the few who did
travel it were so wrapped in their own cares--for this was a road much
frequented by criminals and their like--they had no thought for the man
and woman who sat by the edge of a running stream, twenty feet from the
crumbled side of the highway.
Kael's long fingers swept the taut strings of the silver harp, and a
burst of clear sound came flowing forth in a wild, free call. And then
the sound was softening, deepening, and in it was something of the peat
bogs of Iar Connacht, and something of the chill wind that sweeps the
Finnihy from Kenmare to Killarney. A soul wept bitterly in the strings'
twanging, with the tears of Deirdre staining its cheeks, and the
terrors of Strongbow's son clutching its middle.
"Ai, to be like Ossian, with the power to move men to laughter or to
tears with the playing of his fingers on the strings," he whispered to
Flaith, where she lay with her chin pillowed on a white fist, staring
at him. "But a man does what he can with what he must, and I'm not one
for blaming the tool in my hand. It's a good harp."
"It was made by Brith Tsinan," Flaith told him dryly.
The McCanahan opened his eyes at that, and held the harp so as to
admire its fluted curve and ornate column. He touched the strings again
and they wept at the deftness of his touch. He moved them again and
made them laugh.
Flaith wriggled her naked toes to the lilting rhythms he drew from
the strings. Across the star lanes and the paths of distant planets,
men and women had carried these tunes, and though they lay as dust in
their graves, something of their memories sat in Kael McCanahan's
fingers this day.
He made the harp sing of Tara and the great hall of Cormac MacAirt, of
the baying hounds that ran in the hunts at Clonmell, and the cursing
stones of Monasteraden.
The girl rolled on her back in the grass, and the worn cloth of her
blouse grew taut across her breasts. "Teach me words to put to those
songs, Kael McCanahan," she whispered, "and we'll eat well from the
coppers and silver bits we take in the marts like Clonn Fell and
Mishordeen."
"Words? Songs? I don't know anything about those. Make up your own
words while I play to your ears and the sunlight, and the joy of being
alive!"
And at the thought of life, he thought of death, and remembered his
father lying on the floor with a Thorn blaster close at hand, and
remembered Captain Edmunds and Cassy Garson and the rest who had lifted
from Senn in the S.I.C. _Eclipse_, and what had happened to them after
that!
He stood suddenly. The scowl was black across his face as he lifted the
harp. He threw it from him roughly. Its strings screamed angrily as it
skidded across the ground.
"I sit here and play music, and my father calls to me in whatever grave
they gave him! I ought to be thinking of finding the High Mor and
choking the life from his throat with these hands!"
Flaith put her long fingers to her red hair and shook it free to the
breeze. Her slant eyes brooded at him as she remembered that day--weeks
back--when they had stood outside the walks of Akkalan watching the
destruction of the _Eclipse_ under the cruiser beams of the High Mor's
space fleet.
Kael had watched, sick and twisted. "That rotten mother's son ordered
her smashed! He couldn't find me, so he played it safe and killed them
all!"
He went mad for a little while, and Flaith clung to him with sharp
nails digging into his arm and back, screaming in his ear. Only when
she buried her teeth in his neck and tasted blood did he come back to
sanity.
Now, remembering all that, and knowing how the death of his father and
the destruction of the _Eclipse_ ate in his middle with a sort of
sharp, acid bitterness, Flaith watched the McCanahan lift the harp from
where he had flung it. A silvern string was curled up, snapped by the
rocks across which it had skidded.
"Now, how can we replace that?" Kael wondered. And then his fingers
were slipping off his boot and lifting loose the harpstring he had
taken from his dead father's wrist.
"It isn't a d-note," he told Flaith, "but it will have to do. I'll not
touch it oftener than I must."
He attached the string, and tested it with sweeping fingers. He
growled, "Only Ossian himself would know the difference."
The McCanahan brooded less and less in the days that followed, and as
they moved along the road that bent in a wide arc about Drekkora and
beyond the snowtopped hills of Sharn, he slipped back into the Kael
McCanahan she had known in the taverns. Laughter came back to his
lips, and he turned more and more to the harp, coaxing magic from its
strings, that seemed to soothe his spirit.
As he played, Flaith hummed with him, and words came to her lips, words
that matched the wild, clear music, and she sang these words to the
ancient melodies, and at last they came to Clonn Fell.
* * * * *
The stalls that lined the Square of the Balang were hung with priceless
tapestries from the looms of Beinoll and Drithdraga, and were bright
with the potteries of Lamanneen. Men and women of city house and desert
tent brushed through the stalls, fingering the wares, haggling over
prices, dipping into leather purses for stored coins. Many there were
whose fingers waved to the sounds that came from the big fountain in
the square where a tall man sat and played a silver harp.
No man would have known the McCanahan in this brown stranger with the
naked chest gleaming through the rents of his worn, dusty jerkin,
with his loose cloth trousers fastened at naked ankles with metallic
cording. And no man would have known Flaith in the dark-skinned gypsy
wanton, with her midriff bare above her flapping skirt of transparent
teel and below the woven halter that bound her breasts. She was a
gamin who laughed and swayed her hips as she sang, and her eyes flashed
and flirted with the slack-jawed farmers in from fields and furrows.
A sudden jostling took the farmers and the merchants as they listened
to the harpstrings. They made way sullenly for the file of sfarran
warriors who came shouldering a path arrogantly through the press. They
were tall, handsome men, their lean faces swart and dark. They looked
like fighting men, trim in black and gilt field uniforms. Their black
eyes moved everywhere, missing nothing.
Now the sfarran detail was closer to the marble fountain where Kael sat
with Flaith huddled close against him. He could feel the shiver run
through her bare arm where it pressed his side.
She whispered, "They look for us," and her dark eyes surveyed him,
studying his disguise. He could read the approval in them.
The sfarri glanced at them and passed on.
A man cursed softly from the shadows. There was a wild flurry of capes
and sandalled feet. A peddler, with a scraggly gray beard flowing
across his chest, ran like a frightened rat from a group of Kash
cattlemen and into a thick thong of rug merchants from Stig.
"A rykinthus peddler," whispered Flaith.
Kael felt the fury rise in him. The sfarri governed the people of this
planet as they might a herd of cattle. There was no emotion in the
chase. It was hunt and man down, capture him! Take him to the sfarri
tribunal, where an atomic disintor ray would blast him into thick white
powder.
The peddler ran past Kael on shaking legs.
In his darkest eyes Kael read the angry terror that lay deep within
him. Teeth gritted, Kael moved clumsily, bumping into the foremost of
the sfarri pursuers, throwing him off balance. Two others ran into him
and fell heavily to the cobblestones of the square.
The sfarran officer rose, tight-lipped at this clumsiness. His hand
went to the holster of his addy-gun. Kael rammed a fist to his middle
and slid sideways, his harp still in his hand. With a backward lash of
his arm he drove the harp's heavy crown into his temple.
The blow knocked the harp from his hand. He scrambled after it, where
it lay on the cobblestones. His fingers missed as he snatched at it
and swept across the strings. At the harsh, discordant sound that rose
into the air the sfarran officer who had been reaching for him fell
awkwardly to the stones, sprawling lifelessly.
Other sfarri were falling too, as if the breath of life had been blown
from them. They lay here and there beside the fountain, like dead men.
Kael stared dumbly, hearing the shouts of the people of Clonn Fell
falling back from the lifeless sfarri.
Then he whirled and slipped in among the crowding merchants and
farmers, pretending that he was driven by stark terror.
A moment of wild, flurried movement, and he was free, darting behind
a wooden wagon toward the heavy drapes of a carpet stall. Flaith was
shrinking back, also losing herself in the milling mob.
Kael saw her, dove toward her.