I was at a harmonica lesson, because someone decided that every Outdoor Ed teacher should know how to play the harmonica, and while I was listening to twenty people play in harmony I thought of a harmonica-playing Link.
I've always liked to think of Link as a serious character, sorry to see his old life go.
She finds him sitting on her father's porch, playing the harmonica, and the day has grown late. There is a cool orange sun low in the west, throwing long shadows in the corn fields; they are not his, of course. He owns no land or animals. He herds sheep.
He is not the only harmonica player in the village, but he is the only one who never plays the blues — usually upbeat tunes, airy little melodies. The kids love him, following him up and down dirt lanes, through the hayfields, down to the lake, where he serenades them on long summer days as they swim among the reeds and the fish, trying to find wapato to eat with dinner.
But it is nearing the end of summer, and the harvest moon is rising. At dusk she finds him uncharacteristically alone, playing a mournful tune in the key of G. His eyes are closed, and he looks rapt, swaying slowly from side to side. She smooths her apron, home-sewn pink on white, against her shirt, tucks her hair behind her ear, and approaches from the east.
"Evenin'," she says, quietly. He finishes the phrase and then stops, opening his eyes and looking at her, and his is a dark and penetrating gaze. His eyes have gotten even bluer, she thinks. Every day they get bluer. Ever since the mark appeared.
He motions with his chin for her to sit beside him. She does, and he closes his eyes begins to play again. And though he doesn't speak — he hasn't spoken, since the mark appeared — she somehow knows that the land on which they sit was once a desert, and before that, a sea.
And she sees it, too — an endless expanse of water, and a boy on a red ship; a man on a bird, soaring through thin air; a wolf, at twilight; two friends parting on a bridge, perhaps forever. And she feels it, too — that crushing, crushing weight of time: seven years lost, three days to live, all these layers and lives that leave a mark, an indelible stain.
When he finishes her lullaby her head is aching, from all these things she somehow knows. When she sees her right hand it is marked, too. She meets his gaze, blue on blue on blue, and she is afraid of what is to come.