Guy Kay: A Song for Arbonne

From the vidan of the troubadour, Anselme of Cauvas…

Anselme, who has ever been acknowledged as the first and perhaps the greatest of all the troubadours of Arbonne, was of modest birth, the youngest son of a clerk in the castle of a baron near Cauvas. He was of middling height, dark haired, with a quiet manner in speech that was nonetheless wondrously pleasing to all who heard him. While yet tender in years, he showed great skill and interest in music and was invited to join the celebrated choir of the Cauvas sanctuary of the god. It was not long, however, before he felt the beginnings of a desire to make music very different from that acceptable in the service of the god, or indeed of the goddess Rian in her temples. And so Anselme left the comforts of the chapel and choir to make his way alone among the villages and castles of Arbonne, offering his new songs shaped of tunes and words such as he had heard sung by the common folk in their own speech…

He was later brought into the household of Duke Raimbaut de Vaux and honoured there, and in time his prowess came to the attention of Count Folquet himself, and Anselme was invited to pass a winter in Barbentain. From that time was Anselme's fortune assured, and the fate of the troubadours of Arbonne likewise made sure, for Anselme swiftly rose high in the friendship and trust of Count Folquet and in the esteem and very great affection of the noble Countess Dia. They honoured him for his music and his wit, and also for his discretion and cleverness, which led the count to employ him in many hazardous tasks of diplomacy beyond the borders of Arbonne…

In time, Count Folquet himself, under the tutelage of Anselme of Cauvas, began to make his own songs, and from that day it may be said that the art and reputation of the troubadours has never been diminished or endangered in Arbonne, and has indeed grown and flourished in all the known countries of the world…

On a morning in the springtime of the year, when the snows of the mountains were melting and the rivers swift in their running, Aelis de Miraval watched her husband ride out at dawn to hunt in the forest west of their castle, and shortly after that she took horse herself, travelling north and east along the shores of the lake towards the begetting of her son.

She did not ride alone or secretly; that would have been folly beyond words. Though she was young and had always been headstrong, Aelis had never been a fool and would not be one now, even in love.

She had her young cousin with her, and an escort of six armed corans, the trained and anointed warriors of the household, and she was riding by pre-arrangement—as she had told her husband several days before—to spend a day and a night with the duchess of Talair in her moated castle on the northern shore of Lake Dierne. All was in order, carefully so.

The fact that there were other people in Castle Talair besides the duchess and her ladies was an obvious truth, not worthy of comment or observation. A great many people made up the household of a powerful duke such as Bernart de Talair, and if one of them might be the younger son and a poet, what of that? Women in a castle, even here in Arbonne, were guarded like spices or gold, locked up at night against whoever might be wandering in the silence of the dark hours.

But night, and its wanderers, was a long way off. It was a beautiful morning through which they now rode, the first delicate note of the song that would be springtime in Arbonne. To their left, the terraced vineyards stretched into the distance of the Miraval lands, pale green now, but with the promise of the dark, ripe summer grapes to come. East of the curving path, the waters of Lake Dierne were a dazzle of blue in the light of the early sun. Aelis could see the isle clearly, and the smoke rising from the three sacred fires in Rian's temple there. Despite her two years on the other, larger island of the goddess far to the south in the sea, Aelis had lived her life too near to the gather and play of earthly power to be truly devout, but that morning she offered an inward prayer to Rian, and then another—amused at herself—to Corannos, that the god of the Ancients, too, might look down with favour upon her from his throne behind the sun.

The air was so clear, swept by the freshness of the breeze, that she could already see Talair itself on the far shore of the lake. The castle ramparts rose up, formidable and stern, as befitted the home of a family so proud. She glanced back behind her then and saw, across the vineyards that lay between, the equally arrogant walls of Miraval, a little higher even, seat of a lineage as august as any in Arbonne. But when Aelis looked across the water to Talair she smiled, and when she looked back at the castle where she dwelled with her husband she could not suppress a shiver and a fleeting chill.

"I thought you might be cold. I brought your cloak, Aelis. It is early yet in the day, and early in the year."

Her cousin Ariane, Aelis thought, was far too quick and observant for a thirteen-year-old. It was almost time for her to wed. Let some other girl of their family discover the dubious joys of politically guided marriages. Aelis thought spitefully. But then she was quick to withdraw that wish: she would not have another lord such as Urté de Miraval visited upon any of her kin, least of all a child as glad-hearted as Ariane.

She had been much the same herself, Aelis reflected, not so long ago.

She glanced over at her cousin, at the quick, expressive, dark eyes and the long black hair tumbling free. Her own hair was carefully pinned and covered now, of course; she was a married woman, not a maiden, and unloosed hair, as everyone knew, as all the troubadours wrote and the joglars sang, was sheerest incitement to desire. Married women of rank were not to incite such desire, Aelis thought drily. She smiled at Ariane though; it was hard not to smile at Ariane.

"No cloak this morning, bright heart, it would feel like a denial of the spring."

Ariane laughed. " When even the birds above the lake are singing of my love," she quoted. " Though none can hear them but the waves."

Aelis couldn't help smiling again. Ariane had the lyric wrong, but it wouldn't do to correct her, it might give too much away. All of her ladies-in-waiting were singing that song. The lines were recent and anonymous. They had heard a joglar sing the tune in the hall at Miraval only a few months before during the winter rains, and there had been at least a fortnight's worth of avid conjecture among the women afterwards as to which of the better-known troubadours had shaped this newest, impassioned invocation of the spring and his desire.

Aelis knew. She knew exactly who had written that song, and she also knew rather more than that—that it had been composed for her, and not for any of the other high-born ladies whose names were being bandied about in febrile speculation. It was hers, that song. A response to a promise she had chosen to make during the midwinter feasting at Barbentain.

A rash promise? A deserved one? Aelis thought she knew what her father would have said, but she wondered about her mother. Signe, countess of Arbonne, had, after all, founded the Courts of Love here in the south, and Aelis had grown into womanhood hearing her mother's clear voice lifted in wit or mockery in the great hall at Barbentain, and the responding, deep-throated laughter of a circle of besotted men.