A Song for Arbonne

by Guy Gavriel Kay

It was silent in the castle; he felt very much alone, and a long way from home. An unusual feeling, that one: home hadn’t meant much to him for a long time. People still did, though, sometimes, and there was no one here who was really a friend yet, or likely to become one in the time he was allowing himself at Castle Baude. He wondered where Rudel was tonight, what country, what part of the world.

The light was the extraordinary thing, the way in which the sun in a deep blue sky seemed to particularize everything, to render each tree, bird on the wing, darting fox, blade of grass, something vividly bright and immediate. Everything seemed to somehow be more of whatever it was here, sharper, more brilliantly defined.

Midsummer was a time between times, a space in the round of the year where all seemed in suspension, when anything might happen or be allowed.

‘Fear makes men label women’s power an act of darkness. Only fear.

Sometimes the best things in our lives come to us of a night and are gone in the morning. Have you never found that?’

The god knows, and sweet Rian knows I’ve tried, but in twenty-three years I’ve never yet found a woman to equal her.

‘There will be no reproach. We must be what we are, or we become our enemies.’

One poet I know has gone so far as to say that everything men do today, everything that happens, whether of glory or beauty or pain, is merely to provide the matter of songs for those who come after us. Our lives are lived to become their music.’

‘And am therefore resolved that I will not live through the death of my country as I endured the death of the woman I loved.’

He did. He loved it with a heart that ached like an old man’s fingers in rain, hurting for the Gorhaut of his own vision, a land worthy of the god who had chosen it, and of the honour of men. Not a place of scheming wiles, of a degraded, sensuously corrupt king, of people dispossessed of their lands by a cowardly treaty, or of ugly designs under the false, perverted aegis of Corannos for nothing less than annihilation here south of the mountains.

Men were often no more or less than what others saw in them, and no one in the world would ever look at this tall northern coran the same way ever again. That might, he thought suddenly, explain the sadness.

And it would be all right, Lisseut thought, as she ended the song. She was no longer a child. Life did not always or even normally grant one the wishes of the heart. Sometimes it came near, sometimes not very near at all. She would accept, with gratitude, what seemed to have been allowed her tonight—with a hope, a prayer to Rian, that there might be more such moments graciously allowed, before the goddess called either or both of them back to her.

‘We can say no and die. It is a choice, my lord of Garsenc. In the face of some things asked of us it is the only choice.’

The times are evil,’ she said. ‘Mortal men and women are what they have always been.

Courage and skill and the rightness of a cause were sometimes not enough. They were seldom enough, he thought, tasting that truth like poison in his mouth: Corannos and Rian had shaped a world in which this was so.