“Stay close son, else I might just leave you to the bodysnatchers.”
“We will leave no son of mine behind, Sven. Unless you want to lose a certain body part of your own to some lunatic’s plate.”
My father visibly blanched under my mother’s glare. My brother Eres was nestled in her arms, shaking his head wildly and cawing at the sky like a madman. He was always hyper-energetic when crowds were involved.
It was my father’s day off, the one day he allowed himself to roam the markets with his family. He walked a few steps in front while I followed, one hand on my mother’s dress. The crowds were a swathe of colours that washed past us, from the haughty silks of the noblemen and their pointed boots to the rough, patched rags that the low-born wore on the streets as they padded about in their bare, cracked and calloused feet. It was a mixed crowd, but an incredibly unbalanced one. Many nobles deemed the streets too dirty for their shoes.
Market Square was more a rectangle than a square, stretching all the way from the docks past the slums and to the high-born areas. It buzzed like a hive and smelled like sweets, sweat and stone. Stores lined either side of the street in a giant, unbroken slab of greystone buildings that chased the border like a great wall, wind brushing hinged signs and chimes. From apothecaries to bakeries and gentlemen’s clubs, if it existed, you could bet your socks you’d find it up for sale in the Square. I almost strained my neck peering into the murky windows as we walked past, though to my father, it was the standard thoroughfare.
The abundance of tall buildings and the open exchange of money meant one other thing—urchins. If you flicked your gaze around quickly enough you might see shadows out of the corner of your eye, like roaches scuttling into the darkness. The feral children of Siraph, or the Scamps as some called them, were inhabitants of alleyways, sewers and rooftops—essentially, any place that was dark and dank. Much like feral animals, they slept in filthy holes made from tossed barrels and crates. When they weren’t sleeping, they were scavenging through dumpsters for things to eat or sell, or running their filthy hands through oblivious purses, or picking locks to the upper storeys of locked shops. Pickpockets, cutpurses, thieves, call them whatever name you wanted, but they all meant the same thing. Scamps weren’t spoken of in a very favourable light, but most people agreed on one thing: they had sacks of steel. It took a certain kind of madness to leap and bound across the treetops, but when your “trees” were stoney giants that towered yards and yards above the ground and one misstep meant a messy death, being unhinged was the least of your worries.
There was a saying that went around these parts. Don’t think it’s raining just because it’s wet; a lot of the time it’s Scamp sweat.
My father took us further down the Square, past the specialist stores to where the air was tinged with sea and salt and fish guts. Once you passed through Scamp territory, you reached the stalls—a multitude of stands and parked wagons that bartered in mostly food products. Open crates of fruits and vegetables competed against buckets of fish and chum, guarded by a sprinkling of flies. Animals were quite common here, everything from caged chickens to wide-eyed piglets and patched donkeys waiting next to their wagons. The crowds were much lower-born, much louder and much rowdier, with each merchant trying to yell over the other to have their prices heard. Eres pitched in with his unintelligible squealing, rattling his fist in delight.
“Fresh fruit! Come get yer fresh fruit, ripe and sweet for the eatin’!”
“Fresh fish! Come get your fresh fish, scaled and gutted for the roastin’!”
“Sven, can you hold Eres for me?” my mother asked. Her eyes were shining.
“Alright.” My father sighed, taking the boy in his arms. He cooed and clawed a lock of my mother’s hair into a vice-like hold. “Just don’t spend it all, woman. I know how much you like your lace.”
She rolled her eyes, gently prying his stubby fingers apart. “Just enough for a few good meals. You never appreciate my lace, anyway.”
“I do. But once you stir me into a frenzy, all the lace in the world won’t save you.”
My mother pinched him and waltzed off, hand tightly pressed against her purse. Eres scowled, before a gull drew his attention. My father looked at me, my brother’s paw wrapped around his neck. “How about it, Svalinn? Shall we go watch the buskers? I need something to distract me from your mother’s devilish hips.”
I didn’t quite understand, but nodded anyway.
It had become a long-standing tradition of ours to go watch the buskers perform while my mother tended to her needs. I can’t recall when it started, but my eight-year-old self could scarcely remember a day at the marketplace without listening to the street musicians perform.
Market Square had a special area for performers, right near the dockside statue of Vor with his horned helm. While fishermen prayed to the God of the Seas before their expeditions, buskers prayed to it for a different reason. The statue just happened to be smack-bang in the middle of the docks, so well-placed that you couldn’t pass through it without coming under the stormy gaze of the bearded god himself. It was the one space where cries of “Fresh fish!” didn’t exist, mainly because performing musicians drew far greater crowds than a loud voice.
There was a man performing now, a beet-skinned Highlander with a fiery mustache that coiled cleanly in a down-spiral. He held a lute in his hands as delicately as if it were a lady, strumming its strings with calloused fingers. His voice was low and grated, and mixing in with it were the cries of the gulls and the clink of iron coins joining the stash in his lute case. I recognized the song as To Market, and my fingers moved by my sides, playing an imaginary fingerboard. How I longed to have one under my fingers. It is an ache only a fingerboardist would know.
“To market, to market to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
To market, to market to buy a fat hog,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
To market, to market to buy a plum bun,
Home again, home again, market is done.”
It was a fitting song for the occasion, and a few others had joined in the chorus, hoarse voices ringing. My father tossed an iron penny into the man’s lute-case, tapping his foot to the beat.
We walked around some more, listening to the musicians play. There was an unspoken agreement between performers not to stray too close to one another, nor to drown each others voices or instruments deliberately. We are an honourable type, us musicians, and we stick to our subtle laws with utmost devotion. Most of us, at least.
There were about four buskers in total that day—two lutists, a harper and a fingerboardist. I’d heard all their songs before, or variations thereof, and was listening to the talented fingerboardist play when one of his keys made a harsh, scratching sound. It brought the melody, and his singing, to a screeching halt. The player was a young man in a noble’s doublet who sat with a stormy scowl on his face. He hammered the key a few more times as if unable to believe his ears.
It was an eighty-eight key fingerboard, the type that only the wealthy could afford, one that could be folded up into a large wooden slab that looked quite cumbersome to carry. It was one of the keys of the highest pitch that had snapped, one that most songs did without.
The nobleman slammed his palms across the ivory, evoking a harsh noise that sent seagulls scattering. Standing beside my father, I felt only pain in my heart as he abused the instrument, violating her and kicking at her sides before leaving in a huff. The noises that escaped her oaken body were screams to my ears.
The crowd that had gathered began to disperse, and soon the fingerboard was left destitute in its small corner. I found myself walking towards it with careless thought, my only desire to stroke its polished surface and comfort it. It was a poor, abandoned animal, and it needed me.
My father must have said something, but I didn’t hear him. He sat down at a distance, Eres rocking sharply in his lap, and watched. With his trailing ash hair and savage beard, he almost looked like an incarnation of Vor himself.
I gently, tenderly stroked one of the keys. It gave a respondent sigh, as if rubbing itself against my hand. The noise was clear and sharp. I was used to the dull, slightly muffled sound of my mother’s fingerboard, and the note surprised me at how… full it was. With a sound like this, you didn’t need to sing at all. The instrument had its own voice.
At once, I realised what I had to do. As a child, I had listened to my mother play two types of tunes. The first was the singing, rousing type, the type to play in front of an audience at a bar where the air smelled like ale and meat, and the roar of a crowd rang true in your ears. These were the songs we sung together, the rhyming, vocal songs that caught and stayed in your ear long after you’d finished them.
The other type of songs she played, far more sparingly, were the ones reserved for an audience that gave you their utmost attention. They had no lyrics, for the notes sung themselves. If you listened and allowed them to pull you, tug you into their cadence, their rhythm, you would see things in your mind. Pictures painted by music, sounds of stories that came to life around you. All you had to do was close your eyes, and things would unfurl. These were the hardest tunes, the ones my mother tripped upon—quite often. A single misstroke and the illusion would break, and you would resurface from the pool of dreams to which you’d been sent.
A fingerboard of such grace and beauty, of such elegance only deserved the best. I knew the scales, the chords and jumps, the differing tempos and softnesses and loudnesses. I had the tools. I had the instrument beneath my fingertips.
All I needed was a story to tell.
I cast my mind back, to when I was a suckling baby listening to my mother’s bedtime stories. My fingers fumbled blindly across the keys, searching, searching, searching. They touched a note and retreated. It was the wrong one. They touched another one and it was right, inevitably so, as if fate had guided us. Those were the notes for the melody. There could be none other.
I opened my eyes and began to play, oblivious to the small crowd that had begun to gather.
My composition had no name, but it would soon come to be known as Sonata by the Sea. A name of the utmost irony, for reasons you will soon come to learn.
It was the tale of a sailor and his wife, and was set in a time of storm and strife. It began soft and low, keystrokes gentle, whispering like the sea-wind that eavesdropped on the couple as they said their goodbyes. The man was off to war, leaving behind his woman and their unborn child. The coaxing melody of the treble was like the sea’s soft waves lapping against the shore, while the bass boomed ominous thunder on the horizon.
Horns blared as the ship set sail. The fingerboard trembled as we roared in anguish. It was a deep, heartfelt anguish of the separation of lovers, steeped in their desire to meet once more. I was so deeply intertwined with my story by this time that the instrument and I could have been at the bottom of the sea, or in a roaring tavern.
My fingers flew across the keys as we progressed to the second act, of the sailor in the storm of war. Lightning cracked and thunder roared, the small ship tossed about like a ragdoll at nature’s divine mercy. I descended into a staccato rhythm, a sharp pattering like storming rain, interspersed with frightening chords of lightning. The sailor was thinking of his wife as he lay on the deck, blinking through blinding rain and bleeding wind. He was scared and wanted no more than to be safely back in her arms again, with their newborn child. He couldn’t care less about his country, about the war. He simply wanted it to be over.
Despair tugged at my soul. The story was a sad one, a tragedy, and I almost loathed to see it to its end. If only it had ended differently. If only.
I almost thought to end it right there, the foreboding gloom too much to bear for my young heart, when I was saved.
A second voice entered the fray. A high-strung voice that sung hope, and longing, and love, cutting through the tempest like a needle. It was a wordless voice, an equal to my fingerboard. I grabbed onto it like the sailor and hauled myself, ourselves, up and to our feet. There was no doubt in my mind; it was his wife, singing for him to come home, praying every night for his safety.
The whirling storm reached a crescendo. We entered the eye. A stillness fell upon us as the deciding blow was dealt, the sailor watching expectantly with baited breath. My fingers paused, tired, but not resting, not even considering rest. It was a necessary silence, for it is only with silence that we can truly appreciate sound.
Then, victory reared its noble head, and the storm cleared. The voice of my fingerboard was alone once more, strumming a gentle celebration. Cheers were had, beers were downed, but the sailor had only his wife in his heart.
The voyage home was quieter, mellower, almost uncertain. Years had passed since they’d last seen each other. Was she still waiting for him? Had she given him up for dead, and taken another man? How old was their young one? Would she recognize him?
The doubts welled up in waves. I ran my hands up, higher along the board, and then back down. I built anticipation. The swelling of the sea returned, the cries of the gulls as the man returned to his home, searching for his loved one.
Searching.
Searching for the voice that had saved him in the storm, that had kept him going during the long years abroad.
I knew it would come. I was as certain as I had ever been, in my eight brief years of life.
The second voice started up again, taking over my melody. I allowed her to sing, because my part was done. The tale was hers to end.
I played the seas and the wind and the gulls as the woman emerged from her house with their young daughter in tow, uncertain, trying to recognize the man. She searched his face for the young lover she’d seen off. The voice sang a bitter-sweet softness, one that slowly quickened as realisations dawned.
The two lovers stumbled towards each other, uncertainty cast away like iron-bound chains. I poured my happiness into their ending, as did she. The voices of our instruments intertwined like the tangled lovers and their child, who would grow up healthy and happy knowing a mother and father. They slowed, and then we finished together on a single note that lingered in the air, smiling upon the reunited couple.
There was silence for the longest time. No one spoke. There were only waves lapping against the coast, wind rubbing across cobble and fierce cries of seagulls in the distance.
Finally, I opened my eyes, blinking back my emotions. I had enraptured and ensnared an incredible audience by the docks. I had spirited them away, turned them into the sailor’s crew, the soldiers in the war. They stood before me moist-eyed and unmoving, a crowd of a good hundred, cocooned in the spell I had so carefully woven. Slowly, as if waking up from a dream, they clapped. One man at first, and then two, and then four and twenty, and more. Their applause thundered over me, the young boy who had simply wished to soothe an abandoned instrument, but had unintentionally created a three-piece symphony.
As I stood up bashfully, prepared to run back into my mother’s arms, I saw her.
A beautiful girl of my age stood beside me, skin like a sliver of the moon, hair as black as midnight that flowed smoothly down her shoulders, eyes like clear-cut sapphires at the bottom of a spring. She wore a simple travelling robe and strapped sandals, and her smile was through wet eyes. To anyone else she might have been just another travelling busker, a plain country girl of fair skin, but to me, she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. I only wish I had more words to describe her with, but my memory of her from this time is faint, and it is this faintness that makes it precious.
I stared at her with a slackened jaw. Ashamedly, it took me another moment to realise she held a fiddle and a bow in her hands, and her forehead was glistening with sweat—much like my own.
Her fiddle was my second voice. She was the Luna to my Sol.
"Hello," she smiled, and her voice was like a bell. "To whom do I owe the pleasure of this waltz?"
"M-my lady" I responded. "I am Svalinn."
"Svalinn," she mused. "A fine name."
"Wh-what about you?"
The girl tucked her bow under one arm and extended a small hand. She smelled of summer roses.
"Sonata is my name. I do hope we can play together again."
