More late-night musings. Always a bad idea. Just finding new ways.
In the beginning, there was a song. But that was a while ago now.
The doors are bolted, and the fire's been stocked up half-a-dozen times. It's well into the small hours, and the drink's been flowing for so long that even if you could count how many you'd had it wouldn't matter. Friends and brothers have been embraced and pounded round the back. The old stories have been recounted and the words have been poured out to the point where they have run out altogether, pooling on the floor with the spilt beer, and all that's left is song, and once that's gone, only music.
Music works better with your eyes closed. I suppose it's because there's less to concentrate on. With music, there's no reason to see. You can hear it, you can feel it. You don't need to look down to know where your fingers are, and besides, they're moving so fast now that there's very little point. You don't need to look up to know what the others are going to do, because you know - you know the path the tune takes, its windings, the place where it ends, or as so often happens, passes into yet another tune. On and on. No need to look, no need to think. Just to play, play until your fingers ache and there's not a breath left in your body.
But your mind, even when entirely immersed in the music, can still tell that something is wrong, unbalanced. There's the high trilling, thrilling of the flute, soaring up into the smoke among the rafters. There's the low murmur of the clarinets, and the rich deep velvet tones of the viols, like a late autumn's afternoon. There's the drumbeat, pounding, insistent, so constant that you know somewhere, deep inside you, that if it ever stops, ever, your heart will stop too, and the music will wither like a leaf.
And you can't bear to let it stop. Even when the last note comes, with a flourish, and around the table people bend back to massage their fingers, or tighten a string, or take another mouthful of beer, the flute doesn't leave your lips. You play the one of the oldest tunes you know, the one that everyone knows, the one they call 'the challenge tune'. It's a drunken brawl of a song, a tune that gets up and dances on the tables and kicks the tankards to the floor all of its own accord. It's fast and raucous and bittersweet. It jigs and whirls and loops and laughs, and speeds up and up and up until the drum beat starts to falter and you can't find space to breathe. Then you pass it on to your left, a thrown-down challenge, even though you know that the fiddler can always drag out an extra mile, grinning all the way.
When the tune stays there, half-finished, well, that's the point when you look up. The last echoes have died away, and you meet the drummer's gaze, just briefly. The space to your left has a stare that is harder to drag your eyes away from. It's a year-old stare, a year and three score of days. It speaks of drinks undrunk, songs unsung, and broken strings. A life you never saw leave, and, for a moment, you had forgotten had left. And suddenly it feels heartrendingly, cold-cruelly unfair, that a tune can stretch from the First Age to now, changing and changed yet still the same, and yet, and yet…
The quiet notes of a lament start up in the corner. It's a viol. But the tune was written for a fiddle, though its delicate notes would fit a harp just as well. But there's nothing you can do about that. There's nothing you can do about the fact that you're here and they're not. You can't shout or scream or punch a wall. You can't fight. You can't cry, not any more, and you don't want to remember. All you can do is play.
Eventually, the music will be all that's left.