The Fire and the Fog (3 page)

Sheane had a basket beside her from which she
pulled delicately painted porcelain cups and saucers, as well as a
flagon of what Gel assumed would be well-chilled tea.  Gel
knew that there would be goodies in the basket as well; cookies,
muffins, possibly pastries, or maybe little tiny triangular
sandwiches and, while he couldn’t wait to try them, he wondered, as
always, how Sheane managed to pack the basket so full of snacks and
drinks and cups, and never break a one.  Sheane was a perfect
lady, that’s all there was to it.

Mae, on the other hand, sat leaning back with
her hands in the grass, and she had already started to tear out
clumps of the stuff, most likely to dump on Gel’s head, or down his
shirt, at some point during the day.  She did so frequently
and, though he fought back, Gel always managed to wind up on the
losing side.

Quickly, and more in an effort to stave off
any grass attacks from Mae than any urgent need to play, Gel leaned
over and began to remove his lute from its case. 

‘I wrote you a song on the walk over’ he said
as he made small adjustments to the lute’s tuning pegs, tuning by
ear and instinct.

‘Wrote who a song?’ Mae questioned excitedly
as she sat up, her small hands still clutching at wads of grass,
and leaned forward, hugging her knees to her chest.

Gel sighed slightly as he finished his
tuning.  Sheane had sat forward excitedly at the prospect of a
song as well, and she sat absently holding a cup of tea out to the
side for her sister, her excitement-filled eyes a perfectly blue
match for her sisters, both fixed on Gel.

They were both so beautiful.  Eyes like
sapphires surrounded by fields of golden-wheat hair.  Gel
didn’t really like that metaphor, but he smiled absently anyway,
already knowing what their reactions would be.

‘Can’t it be for both of you?’ he asked,
trying to inject his words with as much feigned innocence as
possible, eyes wide in what he hoped was an endearing
look. 

Sheane smiled and nodded, her head moving in
small, quick jerks of assent, just as Mae spoke out vehemently.

‘No!  Pick one of us.’  Just as Gel
knew she would.  Mae always competed with Sheane, and Sheane
always deferred to Mae.  It was funny, really, but it always
made Gel feel even worse about choosing just one of the
sisters.

‘Fine’ Gel said, openly grinning now, ‘Then I
wrote this for Mr. Oak, the tree’ and he began to play, and the
afternoon drifted slowly away.

II

If life were all girls and music, Gel would
have been more than happy.  But as the warm, heavy sun of the
afternoon faded slowly into the pale evening; as reminders that
humans unfortunately require more sustenance than cakes and tea; as
rumblings of hunger sounded, too deeply to ignore, the trio headed
for home.  They walked together back to the town, but split
ways when they reached the change between dirt and cobblestone
road.  Sheane and Mae lived at the Eastern edge of town, just
off the main road, while Gel had to make the long trek to the top
of the low hill the town was built upon.

As Gel walked home through the narrow
cobblestone streets towards the Mayor’s house at the edge of town,
he found himself thinking of the song he had written for Sheane and
Mae, and had played for the old Oak tree.  He had thought of
it at the time as blue; slower and more mellow than the jumpy,
excited yellow of Don Vole’s song from earlier, yet with enough
movement, enough transition and change to remain interesting. 
It was a nice song, and had been perfect for his audience. 
Calm and smooth enough for Sheane, with enough trills for
Mae.  Balancing anything between the two of them could be
interesting, though with music Gel thought he could always give
them both what they wanted.

He did wonder though.  He always played
for people, and he was always, or nearly always, able to understand
what his audience wanted to feel from the music, was always able to
pull that feeling out of the notes and make it come alive for his
listeners. 

Sheane and Mae wanted to feel warm and loved,
and Gel had no problem letting that feeling out through his
music.  He had trouble expressing feelings with words, with
actions, but with music? With music his feelings just flowed. Gel
often wondered why he should speak, when he could play instead.

Many of the nobles that Gel had played for
wanted perfect renditions of ancient songs, note for note as they
had been written and, while boring, he was always able to provide
that too.  The feeling he got from those songs was stuffy,
uptight, and not more than a little wrong.  He always wondered
if this was how those ancient composers had wanted their legacies
to be played.  But if stuffy was what the nobles wanted,
stuffy was what he would play.

His tutors, as well, wanted him to play
exactly what they told him to and, while he could generally manage
that too, it became much more difficult if he got distracted, which
happened much more often than he’d like to admit.  Part of the
problem was the difficulty of obtaining proper tutelage in the
small, remote town of Feyen.  His fourth tutor in two years,
Gel’s parents had already told him that if he ran lady Vaen away
that would be it.  Not that he was worried.  He figured
that he could do better on his own anyway.  He was the best
after all, even if no-one had yet realized it.

Gel’s parents just wanted to hear him
play.  As with all parents, they loved anything he did; it was
their job.  It made them at the same time the hardest and the
easiest audience to play for.  On the one hand, he could do no
wrong.  On the other, he always felt he had to do better for
them, in order to truly deserve their love and praise.

This all brought Gel back to the song he had
played that afternoon.  The song he had claimed to be playing
for the old Oak tree on the hill.  That pretty blue song had
not been written or played for the tree, not truly, but what if it
had?  What if he had written it for the old Oak, and played it
for the tree to grow, to sway and dance in the wind?  What
would that sound like, feel like; what colour would it be?

Gel walked alone through the empty streets,
the sun setting slowly at his back.  The sounds of his
footsteps on the worn cobblestones and the occasional twit of a
robin or lark that had taken to nest in the awning of a nearby
house were the only sounds that accompanied him on his walk
home.  But inside his head, his mind was buzzing.  His
‘Ode to the Tree’.  He knew it would have to feel green, how
could it not, but how should it start?  Some light arpeggios
on a major scale?  Or was that too light green?  A song
for the old oak, that solitary, ancient tree, stuck in the middle
of miles of empty, rolling hills and short, twisted grape vines, a
modern town of wood and stone its only company, a song for the old
oak would have to be slow, mellow, in a minor scale.  Possibly
C Minor, with a slow tempo, plenty of legato notes.  The song
would have to be a dark, ancient green, as deep and ancient as the
tree itself.

Just as Gel began to write the first bars of
his new song in his head, his fingers moving through the empty air
in concert with the notes he imagined, he walked into the large
iron gate of the Mayor’s house.  Stepping back quickly and
realizing where he stood, and what he had run into, mild
embarrassment coloured Gel’s cheeks, and he quickly forgot about
his song for the Oak, at least for the moment.

‘Right.  Home.’ Gel muttered to himself,
laughing in his head as he shook it slowly, hoping no-one had seen
his gaffe, and trying to remember when he had climbed the incline
to the house as he opened the front gate.  The gate was heavy
and tall, but the stark wrought-iron swung easily as he pushed on
it.

The Mayor’s house was his fathers’ house, and
thereby he supposed his house.  It sat on a low hill at the
Western edge of the town.  The large stone manse loomed over
the town, its height and gravity separating the town proper and the
wheat fields in the East from the towns’ vineyards to the west.

The Mayor’s house was a ‘gift’ to the Mayor
from the church.  If ever Gel’s father was removed from his
position as Mayor, Gel’s family would be removed from the house,
not that that was likely.  Gel’s father was a good Mayor.
 But it still made it hard for Gel to think of the house as
his own, even though he had lived there all his life.

The Mayor’s house was one of only two stone
buildings in the town, the other being the old church.  Other
buildings had stone in them, mostly as foundations, but only Gel’s
house and the church were made wholly of stone.  Both the
manse and the church were old, much older than the rest of the town
around them, and both must have been built at the same time. 
No-one alive knew when they were built, or from which quarry the
stone for the buildings had come from; there were no quarries for
miles and miles in any direction.  All Gel knew was that the
grey stone slabs of the two buildings, seemingly arranged
haphazardly and all the more beautiful for it, were much nicer than
the newer polished and painted wooden houses that populated the
rest of the town.  Gel would live in one of these old stone
buildings one day, and it would be like a castle or keep out of his
mothers stories.  Cold and drafty but defendable, maybe with a
moat, and it would have open fires in braziers and swords on the
walls and knights on horses galloping about…

He was getting sidetracked again, and he knew
it.  But, as Gel opened the polished wooden door at the front
of the house, he was sure.  Once he was done his Ode to the
Oak, he would write a song for the old stone manse; possibly a
dirge of some sort, grey like the houses’ stone; heavy, but with an
airy sound; open and clean.

As soon as the door was open, Gel was hit by
the smell of stew and freshly baked bread.  Suddenly
remembering he was ravenous, Gel took the stone stairs to his room
two at a time, threw his lute on his bed, and rushed back
downstairs, skidding through the kitchen door in time to watch his
mother place a large bowl of steaming stew, thick with meat and
potatoes and other earthy goods, and a thick slice of fresh bread
at his empty spot at the table.

‘Nice of you to join us’ Gel’s father
rumbled, blowing lightly on a chunk of meat from the stew as Gel
quickly slid into his seat at the table.  ‘Is this your house
only when it comes to food, or do you intend to sleep here tonight
as well?’

Othwaithe was a large man.  Big of
shoulder, broad of chest, hands that looked large enough to crush
bricks into dust.  He could be intimidating at times, looking
as he did like a large bear.  But he was always gentle, kind,
and fair.  Gel had written a song for his father years ago,
when he was seven years old; a slow, deliberate song filled with
held staccato notes that Gel still felt perfectly matched the way
his father, or a bear, would walk.

‘Soreh’ Gel mumbled, trying to speak through
the stew-soaked bread he had just shoved into his mouth.  ‘Ws
wth Shne n Mae.’

‘Gel,’ his mother cut in, ‘chew your
food.  You will choke.’

‘And how would we explain a dead son to
Fulhar Chaeveh?’ his father rumbled again, smiling as Gel washed
down the bread with a gulp of watered-down wine.  The Fulhar
was the Church’s representative in the town.  He was nice
enough, but generally entirely too serious. 

Smiling as she shushed her husband with a
wave of her hand, Maerge turned to Gel.  ‘How was your lesson
today Gel?’

‘Do we have to find you another tutor again?’
Othwaithe rumbled in the background, his eyes focused on his stew
as Gel spoke over him.  Gel’s mother tried to throw a quick
glare in his direction, but Othwaithe’s already diverted eyes
shielded him.

‘The lesson was boring,’ Gel whined, dragging
out his syllables as he rolled his eyes.  ‘Lady Vaen had me
playing more of Don Vole’s 4th cantata, but it’s just wrong, and
she won’t let me fix it.  So I went and played for Sheane and
Mae instead.’  As Gel took a break from talking to shove in
more mouthfuls of stew, his mother spoke up.

‘What did you play for them?  And have
you decided who you’ll take to the Harvest Festival?’

‘And have you forgotten that you have to play
Don Vole’s cantata for the Duke in two days?  You had better
learn it well.’ Othwaithe said as he leaned back calmly and began
wiping the bottom of his already empty bowl with a torn-off piece
of bread.

There were a few moments of silence as Gel
voraciously shoveled spoonfuls of stew into his mouth.  His
parents waited calmly, both eating with the patience that comes
with years and the knowledge that food normally doesn’t disappear
if it’s already in a bowl in front of you.

As Gel finished off his first bowl of stew,
he looked up to respond.

‘Yes, father, I know I have to play in two
days, but it doesn’t matter,’ he replied, exasperated.  ‘I
know the song already, and more lessons on it are just
boring.’ 

Othwaithe began to open his mouth to respond
as Maerge fetched Gel another bowl and more bread, but Gel
interrupted.  ‘And yes, father, I know.  Practice makes
perfect.  But I already am perfect, so why should I
practice?  Gel said, smiling smugly at his father as only a
teenager could manage.

‘And the girls?’ his mother interrupted as
she put more stew in front of him, trying to bring him back on
track to what was important, to her at least.

‘Right’ Gel said, smiling as he cut up a
large chunk of potato into more manageable pieces.  ‘Well, we
went to the old oak tree and I played them a song I wrote. 
It’s like Don Vole’s, only I fixed it, and made it into a smoother
blue for Sheane and Mae, instead of yellow.  It was really
nice.  Then I played them some more songs, and we talked, and
Sheane brought tea and pastries.’  Gel took quick bites in
between sentences, keeping just enough stew in his mouth that he
could eat and talk at the same time, leaving all his sentences
slightly muffled.  ‘And now I’m going to write a song for the
Oak, and one for our house too.  They’re old, and they seem so
lonely.’