Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

Lisseut looked at the old performer with a mingling of affection and sadness. She had not seem him for a long time. He did look older now, frail. His round, kind face, scarred by a childhood pox, seemed to have been part of her world forever. A great deal would change when Ramir was gone, she realized, watching as he came shuffling forward. He didn't walk very well, she saw.

"Well, really—" Remy began, under his breath. " Shut up. " Aurelian spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness. The lanky troubadour's face had an odd expression as he looked at Ramir.

Alain rose from his seat and hurried to bring Ramir the performer's stool and footrest. With a gentle smile the old joglar thanked him. Troubadours didn't tend to assist joglars, but Ramir was different. Declining Alain's offered hand, the old man cautiously lowered himself onto the low stool. He stretched out his left leg with an audible sigh of relief. One of the Gotzlanders laughed. Ramir had some trouble with the thong on his lute case and Lisseut saw an Arimondan at the table on the other side of them cover his mouth to politely hide a smile.

Ramir finally slipped his instrument out of the case and began tuning it. The lute looked to be as old as he was, but the sound, even in the tuning, was achingly pure. Lisseut would have given almost anything for such an instrument. She looked around The Senhal. The silence was a nervous one now, broken by whispers and murmuring. It was so crowded in the tavern it was hard to move. On the upper levels people had pushed to the railings to look down. Over on the eastern wall, on that higher level, Lisseut saw a gleam of long, dark hair by candlelight. She was a little surprised, but not greatly so. Ariane de Carenzu, her hair down, as ever, in defiance of tradition, sat beside a slender, handsome man, her husband. Lisseut knew Duke Thierry now. Before coming to Lussan she and Alain had spent a fortnight in Carenzu, at the particular request of the queen of the Court of Love. They each had a purse full of silver to show for it, and Lisseut had been given a crimson vest of fine wool trimmed with expensive squirrel fur against the coming cold. She had told Remy earlier in the evening that if he damaged her new vest in any way he would replace it or die. He had ordered a bottle of Cauvas gold wine by way of reply. They had been joking then, laughing about Midsummer, celebrating.

She looked back at Ramir. He was still tuning the lute, loosening his fingers as he did. Lisseut's uncle had taught her about that, one of the first lessons he had given her: whatever else you do, never rush the beginning. Start when you are ready to start, they will not leave as long as they see you preparing.

"We have a challenge here," Ramir said, almost conversationally, one ear tilted down towards the lute, fingers busy on the strings. His voice was pitched so they all had to lean forward to hear. The silence abruptly became complete. Another old joglar's trick, Lisseut knew. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, that Remy was now smiling as well.

"A curious challenge, really." For the first time Ramir looked briefly at the table of Gotzlanders. "How is one to fairly choose among the music of different countries, different heritages? Surely there is fine music made in Aulensburg and in Arimonda at the court of King Vericenna, as has just been urged upon us so… soberly… by our friend over there." There was a titter of amusement. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Ramir's voice had begun to chime and weave with the apparently random chords he was playing upon the lute. Aurelian's face as he listened, Lisseut saw, was entranced, rigorously attentive.

"We are asked, in the light of this truth, why Arbonne should be pre-eminent." Ramir paused, looked around the room, not hurrying. "We are also asked, in nearly as many words, what there will be to mourn if Arbonne is lost."

He left a silence after that, save for the gentle, almost casual notes drawn from the instrument as if unconsciously.

Lisseut swallowed abruptly, with difficulty. Ramir said, "I am only a singer, and such questions are difficult to answer. Let me offer a song instead, with apologies if it should be found inadequate and fail to please." The ancient phrasing, that, no one used it any more. "I will sing a song of the first of the troubadours."

"Ah," said Remy under his breath. "Ah, well." Ramir's fingers were busier now, the music beginning to take shape, the notes gathering as if from scattered places in the world at the joglar's bidding. "Anselme of Cauvas was of modest birth," Ramir said, and this too was of the old fashion, the vidan, the tale of the composer. No one in the newer generation did this any longer when beginning a song. "Anselme was clever and gifted, though, and was brought into the chapel of the god at Cauvas, and then Duke Raimbaut de Vaux took him into his household, and finally he came to the attention of the count himself, Folquet, and the count honoured Anselme for his wisdom and discretion and employed him in many affairs of state in all of the six countries for many years. And Anselme had several great loves among the noble ladies of his day, but always he was chaste and honourable, and never did he speak the name of any of these women, but in his passion and desire he began composing songs for them, and this was the beginning of the troubadours of Arbonne."

The music beneath the spoken words was beautiful, delicate as lace or the gems of a master jeweller, precise, many-faceted. Ramir said, "I could sing a song of love of Anselme of Cauvas tonight, I could sing his love songs all night long until the dawn came to draw us out the doors, but we have been given a different kind of challenge here, and so I will sing a different kind of song. With the permission and by the grace of all those gathered here, I will sing a song Anselme wrote once when he was far from home."

The music changed and was alone then, creating room for beauty by candle and lantern light in a thronged tavern, with the first cold breezes of autumn beginning to blow outside. Lisseut knew the tune immediately. Everyone at their table knew this tune. She waited, feeling close to tears, wanting to close her eyes but wanting also to watch Ramir, every movement he made, and a moment later she heard the jongleur sing:

When the wind that comes from Arbonne

Sweeps north across the mountains,

Then my heart is full again, even in far Gorhaut,

Because I know that spring has come to Tavernel and Lussan,

To the olive groves above Vezét

And the vineyards of Miraval,

And nightingales are singing in the south.

Ramir's rich voice paused again, as he let the simple, sweet notes of the music take them away with it. There was an old, plain roughness to the song, words and music both. It was worlds removed from Jourdain's intricate melodies or the subtle interplay of thought and image and changing form in Remy's best work or Alain's new songs. This, though, was the authentic voice of something at its very beginning. Lisseut knew her own origins were here, those of all the joglars and troubadours, and, yes, of that table of Gotzland trovaritz, and all the Arimondan singers and Portezzan, and of those men in Gorhaut and Valensa who might actually venture to shape music of a different sort from the interminably thunderous battle hymns of those northern lands.

As if in answer to the flow of her thoughts, Ramir's voice was lifted again, not so vibrant perhaps as it once had been, but purified by years and the wisdom of those years into an instrument rare and fine as his lute:

Here in Gorhaut, so distant from my home,

Among men who care nothing for music,

And ladies who utter little of courtesy to poets

And even less of love, the memory of songbirds