Chapter 9
L'gal took T'rin to the Harper Hall a couple of days after he had sent his initial letter. He brought Solpeth in to land off to one side of the dancing square, not to attract too much attention, and T'rin avoided his usual haunts. He had no wish to to try to explain the reason for his visit to his cheerful, but still immature friends, not until he had had the chance to talk to Horgey.
Horgey was sitting up in bed, a far cry from the fat, mean faced boy he had been. He had lost most of the fat that he had used as weight to lean on other children; and his face was pinched. But T'rin's letter lay beside him, close by his hand on the coverlet; and the practice instruments that the boy Tyrin had brought to him were within reach. His eyes were closed when T'rin came in; but he did not seem to be sleeping.
"Hello Horgey" said T'rin.
The boy's eyes flew open; and briefly a look of happiness flashed across his face.
"Tyrin! – Oh, I mean T'rin" his old, wary, closed in look came back.
"I'm a fardling heel" said T'rin. "Horgey, I should have come to see you before."
"You were glad to be shut of me and managed to forget, huh?"
T'rin looked at the floor.
"It came close to that" he admitted in a low voice.
Horgey gave a crow of pure delight.
"Great! You can admit to not always being goody-goody!"
"I never said I was goody-goody!" declared T'rin indignantly. "It was you labelled me thus! I just figured you'd had a raw deal all your life, and it wasn't fair so I wanted to make it up to you a bit! Not that you ever seemed pleased to see me when I did come anyway – I guess part of me thought you might be glad to be shut of ME!"
Horgey tried to put on a sneer: but instead two great tears squeezed out of his eyes and ran down his face.
"I was glad to see you. I didn't want you to know. I didn't want to make you feel that you had any power over me" he sniffed hard. "It's so lonely here. No-one has time to talk; and I guess they'd not anyway, not to an expelled renegade. I've driven away everyone who tried to be kind and I've never had any friends, not real friends." Fresh tears spilled.
"No family at all to visit?" enquired T'rin. The boy shook his head.
"Not that I care for – or care for me. Why d'you think I joined the Harper Hall? I thought it'd be softer than tending crops and being beaten half senseless when my father had had a jug too many. And it was. Much softer. I even enjoyed the music – though I guess I didn't ever live for it the way some of you chaps seemed to, always humming to yourselves. I even thought that was showing off at first until I realised that the ones that did it most were the ones who had already impressed people and didn't need to show off – like Journeyman Menolly."
T'rin put a hand on his old enemy's shoulder; and the floodgates opened.
It was best for him to let it all out.
Disjointedly, he told T'rin about his miserable childhood, beaten by a drunken father who had killed the boy's mother in a drunken rage; sexually abused by an uncle, the reason he had taken to gorging to make himself fat and unattractive. At the Harper Hall he had become at first a target for the bullies because of his fatness and being used to being a victim; and had managed to escape their attentions by becoming one of them. By putting down the other boys ha had tried to build up his own poor self image. Then along came Tyrin. Tyrin who would not be bullied; who fought back. Who made friends easily and led them against the bullies. Tyrin to whom music came as easily as breathing.
"And I hated you most" finished Horgey "Because I was so envious of your friends!"
Faylina had come into the room, shocked at the sounds of violent sobbing; and the Blue Rider seated on the crippled boy's bed with a comforting arm about him had given an imperious little flip of dismissal with his hand. Faylina opened her mouth to protest; but T'rin stared her down. He drummed in the air,
DDDDgood for himDDDD
Faylina realised why she recognised the dragonman; it was that imp who had first come to visit the little red-haired Weyrwoman and stayed as an apprentice.
But the habit of command had grown in T'rin; and the woman withdrew.
After a while, Horgey's sobs subsided.
T'rin asked him quietly,
"How much help do you need? With daily routine?"
Horgey flushed.
"I can't keep clean" he muttered. "Sometimes I know before….like sometimes my legs hurt instead of being numb."
"Come, that's good!" said T'rin, and added as the boy stared in surprise "If there is some feeling it may – only may, mind! – get better enough one day for you to be able to choose when to crap and piss, so you can ask to be lifted onto the necessary. It has the potential for more dignity."
"Do you think?"
T'rin shrugged.
"I'm not a healer. But my sister Sh'rilla got more pain as she got more use in her legs after the illness that crippled her. Maybe the spine's mending some. But don't get too hopeful; at least you have your arms, I didn't manage to break the spine so high you lost everything below the neck."
"I hate being a baby in nappies…..and – and being cleaned up reminds me of my uncle….."
"My foster mother reasons that if you put a chamberpot under a baby when it's just fed, its body gets used to going; and if you could do that and not have to lay in it, you could clean yourself up. It's maybe worth trying" suggested T'rin.
"Why are you interested in such a filthy subject?"
"I can't fardling well leave you here, can I? And I'm going to need what we're going to have to do for you at H'Reaches, aren't I?" said T'rin, as though the suggestion were the most reasonable one ever. As to him it was. T'bor had said he might bring the boy to the Weyr if it seemed a good idea.
Horgey stared.
"You'd take me back with you?"
"Not this time. I need to make arrangements – accommodation, drudges, help and so on. I've not, myself got TIME to nurse you properly. I dare say I could – I told you, I helped m'sister. But those who are trained to it can do it better and hurt you less."
"Why?"
"You've no friends here. At High Reaches you can make a fresh start – and believe me, I don't mean by entertaining disappointed Blue Riders of Homosexual tendencies, you need not fear THAT abuse ever again for we protect our own in the Weyr, including from Dragonlust-maddened young idiots who are also our own. And you could join in with our little harper group" he added as a guilty shift from Horgey showed that the boy had wondered if he might be subject to abuse, being helpless to stop it. Horgey frowned at the last suggestion.
"I was expelled, remember?"
"Well, I won't tell if you don't" shrugged T'rin. "Besides, I can always start pestering Master Robinton to reinstate you, if you'd like me to."
"Life's so simple for you. You set a goal – and achieve it."
"In the difficult days when Sh'rilla and me were on our own and hungry it was the only way. It kinda gets to be habit."
Horgey stared wistfully at T'rin.
The journeyman had not had it as easy as the older boy had always assumed he had; but he still was unfailingly cheerful. Horgey wondered what life would have been like if he had managed to stand up to bullies himself and avoid the trap of becoming a bully; and what life might have been had he made a friend of Tyrin when he first came to the Harper Hall.
"But" he thought grimly to himself "I could not have; I didn't have that strength of mind."
Master Oldive arrived at this moment, sent by a rather flustered Faylina.
"Ah, Tyrin – T'rin, that is" he said. "Are you tiring my patient?"
"I want him here" said Horgey sullenly.
"I'll come back in an hour" promised T'rin. "But he's right. You should rest a while."
T'rin asked Master Oldive several pointed and pertinent questions; and received mostly non-committal answers on many of them.
"When the spine is broken it damages the spinal cord that runs through it" Oldive explained. "That seems to be responsible for feeling and movement. Sometimes it is severed, and that kills all feeling and movement below the break. As Horgey feels some pain – quite a lot, actually I think – the cord is probably intact. But we do not understand how it works and whether he can regain much more I do not know" he shrugged lopsidedly, emphasising the hump on his own back that was another incurable condition. "We just know too little."
"It's not like D're's leg, then, that he feels when it's not there?" queried T'rin.
"I think not. For sometimes the lad has advance warning of….excretory functions too" explained Oldive.
"But you don't tell me not to have some hope? Even if he's moved elsewhere?"
"Any bone break is healed by now. Moving him can do no worse. No, I don't tell you to give up hope; but I do tell you not to encourage him to live in too much hope."
With that, T'rin had to be satisfied.
T'rin visited Horgey again before he left, as he had promised; and persuaded the boy to play his pipes while T'rin drummed an accompaniment. It cheered Horgey somewhat to play with somebody else: and T'rin promised to return as soon as he might to take him away where he would have other apprentices to play with.
T'rin had an interview with the Masterharper before he left; and told Robinton all he had gleaned.
"If you'll only reinstate him, sir, he can start again at High Reaches. He can at least enjoy music – and also help with teaching the little ones" pleaded T'rin.
Robinton was reluctant; but impressed by T'rin's faith and fervour.
"I'll upgrade my previous 'no' to an 'I'll think about it'" he said in his melodious voice.
T'rin grinned boyishly.
He was fairly certain the Masterharper would relent.
If T'bor was in any way dismayed that T'rin had taken up his impulsive offer to care for another cripple at High Reaches he gave no sign; and indeed never regretted making such an offer. Dragonmen WERE pledged to protect, after all. He nodded enthusiastically when T'rin suggested that Horgey could help teach the youngsters to earn his keep, for the Weyrleader had learned that all decent folk liked to feel that they could give as well as take. And it was those who did not feel that way that he did NOT welcome in his Weyr.
"If he feels useful and has reason to be offered a place, it will help him too" T'bor said. "If you wish, T'rin, you may even put it to him as a condition of his care here, if you feel it will assuage his pride."
"Why sir, I declare you are as devious as a Harper!" grinned T'rin.
"I'll take THAT as a compliment!" said the Weyrleader.
Horgey accepted the Weyrleader's suggested condition gladly.
"But I'm not an accredited Harper" he pointed out.
"No-one's asking you to teach advanced gitar fingering. Only Duty Ballads and help with reading and writing. F'lim will help too, he's good with the little ones. He only occasionally puts his head under the sleeping furs to have a good private curse" grinned T'rin.
The journey dragonback was painful for Horgey; but the perspective from dragonback thrilled him, and he was amazed by Sh'rilla's hoist that lowered him gently into his own wheeled chair that H'llon had made. There were as many unshed tears of gratitude and emotion as of pain in his eyes as T'rin welcomed him to High Reaches and wheeled him over to the ramp that led to his own room near the teaching cavern. Weyrlings stopped to look curiously; but the number of those with special needs at High Reaches meant that most did not gaze on him with the horror or pity that many reserved for those who had crippling deformities, only with idle nosiness about a newcomer. Horgey wondered that T'rin had ever been able to bear to leave such a place to go to the Harper Hall; and answered his own question, that T'rin had needed music, and could rely on the people here to still love him while he was away; which meant he could carry part of this in his heart. Horgey hardly dared hope that this place might become a true home for him – and that he might even learn what people meant when they spoke of 'home'!
Horgey had been dreading teaching; but when he started his first class he was amazed at the well mannered behaviour of the High Reaches children! Coming from a rather rough background where it was sport amongst the older cotholder boys to disrupt the seasonal school he had always assumed that good manners were weak – but this was what dragonmen expected, and no-one could say that dragonmen were weak! The young Healer Journeyman Ketilin had volunteered his services in nursing Horgey, with the aid of a simple, but willing male drudge, Danel; and being a practical man who had absorbed a lot of T'lana's theory on top of his Healercraft training soon devised a regime that helped keep Horgey in regular habits; and with the aid of his own quickly constructed hoist, enabled the boy to do more for himself using H'llon and T'lana's ingeniously constructed gearing systems. Allessa too took a hand in helping Horgey, he being one of 'her' harpers; and in her he found a substitute for the mother love he never remembered having.
Horgey wondered if, despite his disabilities, this came close to being happiness!
L'gal was at first dubious about including the disgraced harper in lessons, as Master Robinton had said no more than that he would consider reinstatement; but it was T'arla who made up his mind for him.
"You gave me a chance, you big oaf" she said softly.
"It's different"
"Is it so? My kin are Holdless. Few enough craftmasters accept my kind as apprentices. And I half expected to be turned down by the Weyr when I came. High Reaches maintains the highest standards of protection – including the protection of second chances. Don't think I've not heard whispers about B'lova and even L'rilly being less than the respected Weyrwomen they are now. I heard L'rilly once flamed T'lana a-purpose, for she could not make friends; and now look at us all worrying about her being caught in that blizzard for we all love her! And I also remember M'sel's bunch of cronies having to be reproved by H'llon. And all but one of THEM Impressed."
L'gal sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
"I suppose I must accept what you say – for it is true" he said. "But we are not supposed to train someone who has been expelled."
"Is he the same boy who was expelled?" she asked.
L'gal shook his head.
"No. No, he's not at all. He's eager to please, though he pretends still to be truculent."
"And he helps with the youngsters perfectly adequately"
"I should protest that….Fardles, T'arla, you're right. And I back T'rin to get him reinstated if anyone can."
"Good" said T'arla; and demonstrated her approval of her lover's decision quite graphically.
L'gal was happy to bask in her enthusiastic approval!
