The Gift (61 page)

THE Speech, the defining attribute of a Bard and the central mystery of the Knowing, is a topic that exercised many Bardic thinkers over many centuries.
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Much therefore might be written about it, of which only the barest sketch can be given here.

The Speech behaved like a language, with certain crucial differences, and could in fact be learned; it was, for example, spoken by the Dhyllin people as their first tongue. But in the mouths of those who learned it, rather than in those with the Gift, it had no Bardic virtue.

Bards used it when speaking of matters of gravity and importance, because it was considered impossible to lie in the Speech. This was, in fact, not accurate: Hulls used the Speech and were able to lie, although this usage was not considered to be the Speech proper, and was sometimes called Dark or Black Speech. There was also the question of those who attained the Speech but were never taught the Knowing of the Light and, more crucially, never came into their Bardic or Secret Name (also known as their Truename). This was a circumstance that usually had tragic consequences, since such people were unable to properly understand or channel their powers, and were never able to enter their full Gift. This, generally, was rare, if more common as the Schools fell into disrepute after the demise of the Monarchs of Annar. There were also the cases of those who had only a slight Gift. Such people might have been village witches (hence the expression “witchspeak”), and they generally spoke a truncated and bastardized version of the Speech, with no more than a few words of potency, although sometimes they could attain considerable, if limited, power; but they were not considered to be Bards, since they did not attain the whole of the Speech, nor did they know their Names. Consequently, they were sometimes referred to as the Unnamed, which is to be distinguished from the Nameless, who had rejected his Name.

This clearly makes possession of the Speech less straightforward than it might at first appear. The fact that the Speech could be learned by those without the Gift suggests that the virtue of the Speech was not inherent in the words themselves, as was argued by many Bards in the Middle Years, but that it expressed the mysteries of the cosmos itself within its syntactic relationships and the vibrations of its utterance, from which were drawn its unique powers.
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The chief reason given for the argument that potency was inherent in the words themselves was the priority and importance given to Names in the Speech, and to Bardic Names. The truth quite possibly resides in an amalgamation of both arguments, as was pointed out by other Bards.

Bards were the only people who bore Secret Names, and a Bard’s Name was and remains a central mystery that can only be partially discerned and puzzled over. The only complete written record of an instatement and Naming ceremony occurs in
The Riddle of the Treesong,
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which confirms rather than negates the ritual’s crucial importance. Other writings indicate that the most important mysteries were not written down but kept in the “rings of living memory.” In the
Treesong
text the authors felt compelled to defend their choice to record it, remarking that since entire forests of knowledge had been hewn down by the Dark, “it is necessary to preserve, even in such a crude way, such Secrets as are known to us, in case the Knowing vanishes from the earth.”
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It appears that a Bard’s Name was much more than a mere appellation or signifier of status or origin: it
was
a Bard’s being, and its achievement was a sign of a Bard’s maturation into full power. One who knew a Bard’s Secret or Truename had power over him or her, and thus Names were guarded closely and given only to intimates as a sign of ultimate trust. Rejecting one’s Name was unheard of until Sharma’s Spell of Binding, and was regarded as the ultimate blasphemy. Sharma of Dén Raven, however, remained the only Bard to successfully do so. Hulls did not use their Names, but were unable to reject them completely, and those who possessed the Names of Hulls could still destroy them.

Because the Speech was not learned in the normal way, and so was not subject to the same forces of change or cultural variety, it remained more constant than other human languages. Bards from vastly differing regions had no difficulty understanding each other if they used the Speech, despite the gulfs in tradition and culture that separated them. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there were variations in the Speech; although it sprouted, as it were, always from the same stem, different environments encouraged its growth in differing ways. There was, for example, a noticeable, if slight, difference between the Speech of Afinil and the Speech of Maerad’s day; and, to Maerad’s ear, Saliman’s Speech, being from far south of her region, would have had the equivalent of an accent.

Those with the Gift used the Speech for all the Arts of the Knowing. The use of the Speech was central to healing, to song — which was held high as an art of wisdom — and to all spells, as well as to investigations — such as astronomy or natural science — we would be accustomed to thinking of as scientific. The Bards made no distinctions, as we do, between art and science, considering them parts of a single Knowing. The Speech also enabled those with the Gift to converse with animals and, less frequently, plants. The Speech did not need to be physically spoken to be potent; Bards could use it effectively merely as a mode of thought. This raises the most important and difficult differences between the Speech and other languages, which are the subtleties of its registrations as a mode of mental communication. These, crucial as they are, cannot be explained, and here must be glanced over by reference to the Bardic paradox that the “center of the Speech is Silence.” It is also why, despite the fact that Bards had a very sophisticated written culture, orality, and the mnemonic arts that go with it, still held precedence.

It was generally considered that those with the Gift, known as the Starpeople — the
Dhillarearë
— or the Singers, first appeared in the Inner Kingdom at the end of the Age of Elementals, some five thousand years before the events recorded in
The Gift.
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Records or even a count of years were not kept until the founding of Afinil during the Dawn Age, more than a thousand years after the end of the Age of Elementals. There was a tradition that claimed that as the Elementals withdrew into their natural forms, “somewhat of their power dispersed from them and was taken up in human form; and so there appeared, in all places where the Elementals had dwelt, the Starpeople. And they were so named because their eyes held a distant fire, as if they had themselves come from the stars, and they delighted in the fire of the stars and so, unlike other peoples who feared and cursed the Darkness, they loved the Night, and called it sacred.”
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There were, of course, other traditions, including a durable theory that Bards arrived from the west shortly after the disastrous Wars of the Elementals reshaped the lands of Edil-Amarandh. Another account held it that the Bards appeared first in the north, being forced there from the lands now inhabited by the nomad peoples of Zmarkan. The truth behind these competing theories, which became popular after the Restoration, might well be that many Bards of Annar found their linking with the Elementals, however far back, to be disreputable, for the Elementals had been held in distrust by Annarens since the alliance of the Ice Witch with the Nameless One. It was this alliance that led to the defeat of Recabarra, Queen of Lirion, and Laurelin, last King of Imbral, and the evils that followed: the slaughter of the Dhyllin, the razing of Lirion and Imbral, and the tyranny over the Inner Kingdom that came to be known as the Great Silence.

The Restoration of the Monarchy and the Bards was chronicled many times. “The story of the downfall of the Nameless One is long and hard and desperate, and many parts of that tale never returned from darkness,” wrote Ghoran of Desor. “I have often thought of those who fought him, lonely and afraid and hopeless, knowing no whisper of their courage would meet any new dawn. For many generations the land was in thrall, and the Keepers of the Light fled and hid in far places, keeping secret the Knowing, the Lore, the Singing, the Speech. And in time a King appeared from the west, where the bloodline of Laurelin, last King of Imbral, had been kept alive in hiding. Maninaë, helmed with Light out of the deeps of time, took up his fell inheritance, and through great suffering the powers of the Nameless were turned against him, and at last the realm of Annar was released from slavery and the Balance restored. That was a time of great joy.”
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Maninaë is credited with the establishment of the Schools (the Libridha) around Annar, and decentralizing the influence of the Bards: “And at that time Maninaë determined to make his seat in Norloch, southward in Annar at the mouth of the Aleph River, and he built a great and fair city, and appointed the Circle of the High Bards, and there he and the Queen Marva dwelt in peace. But neither did he wish that the Lore and the Singing should become hidden and secret, the knowledge only of a select priesthood. He decided the Lore would be more safely kept in many centers, and so across Annar he established the Schools.”
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Twenty-five Schools were established in every region of Edil-Amarandh and became centers of learning and culture. To an extent this was merely a formalization of a situation that had already occurred: communities of Bards existed in all the Seven Kingdoms, where they had been driven during the Great Silence, and had been instrumental in the defeat of the Nameless One.

Norloch flourished as the center of the Light in Annar, being both the seat of government and the highest School of the Light — two authorities that were at this stage formally separated by Maninaë’s relinquishment of his Bard status.

It is not only the origin of the Bards that remains shrouded in mystery, but the reason for the appearance of the Gift in any individual. Bloodlines were no guarantee of a Gift, which could die out in a family in which it was previously strong and appear in a family in which it was previously unknown. This characteristic had a profound effect on the social and political organizations of Annar and the Seven Kingdoms.
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Bardic communities, partly for this reason and also by reason of Bards’ longevity, sometimes more than three times the lifespan of an ordinary human being, were remarkably tolerant. Bigotries of sex or race were unknown in Afinil, as prejudice of any kind was thought to cloud judgment and was abjured as a sign of corruption of the Mystery of Barding. The Bards also venerated what they called “The Way of the Heart,” which was considered a major component of understanding the Silence of the White Flame; there were mystics who wrote long poems on this subject, the most famous being “The Birds of Anakatin” by Lorica of Turbansk. The Bards had a sophisticated culture of erotic art, although the western idea of the libertine was unknown, and romantic love was considered a central mystery. Homosexual love was not considered aberrant, and was never persecuted as it was in some less-civilized regions of Edil-Amarandh. It was celebrated in many popular lays, such as “The Lay of Lamark and Colun,” just as the lays of Andomian and Beruldh or Ardina and Ardhor celebrated the love between man and woman, or man and Elidhu.

Bearing children and child-rearing were also honored, and were interestingly related to eroticism in a way that again is unknown in the west, though some vestige of that might be discerned in the Archaic Greek child-god Eros. The long life of Bards — which meant that child-rearing occupied a relatively small proportion of their lives — meant that women were never considered merely procreators of children, as they are in some traditional dogmas; and it appears that child-care was considered a responsibility not only of both parents but of all adults socially connected to a child. The family was a much broader concept than the contemporary nuclear family, or even the older extended family.

This ethos of tolerance lasted better in the Seven Kingdoms than it did in Annar, where the machinations of the First Circle during the Middle Years began certain imbalances, including the appointment of fewer and fewer women to the Circle.
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By N945, no women had been appointed as Bards of the First or Second Circle within living memory, and this in itself became the justification for appointing no more. This tendency was strongly resisted in the Schools of the Seven Kingdoms, and was often condemned as a distortion of the Balance.
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Nevertheless, from circa N500 on, a patristic ideology was aggressively argued by successive Bards. Studies of Bard lists in the various Schools revealed some fascinating figures. They show that by N700, every member of Norloch’s First and Second Circle was male, and there were only three female Bards in the entire School. This contrasts sharply with Schools such as Baladh, Pellinor, and Innail, where the instatement of Minor Bards and appointment of Bards to the Circle largely reflected the demographics of the surrounding population: the proportion of women instated and appointed to positions of authority was generally about 52 percent, and Bards came from all social classes.
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