Oh gods and devils, where’s an angel when you want one??
There has been a slight further technical hitch in my reposting last night’s confused and confusing plant photos and I can’t get hold of Blogmom. And it’s midnight and I have to ring bells tomorrow morning. Or rather, this morning, which means I have to go to bed.
So, speaking of bells, here’s the first page or so of The Bells of Mazahan because it’s much too late to come up with an entry from zero. This is the beginning of the draft after I realised it wasn’t going to stay a short story, but you’ll notice its antecedents as an Elementals Air story. As well as some creative input from my so-called real life. And I make no promises as to how much the first page or so will look like this in its final form either.* My stories are capable of death-defying leaps of (in)credibility pretty much up to the last minute.
When the bellmaster of Mazahan told Tathtalar’s father that she was to come to him the year she turned sixteen, Tath was outraged.
“I don’t want to learn stupid bell magic! We don’t go to zharhia in this family! We go to dlora! You went to Esfalamanhidar and mum went to Zilambaz and all your brothers went to Esfalamanhidar too except Fen, and he ran off to the filanon so he doesn’t count, and–”
“Peace,” said her father. “If you have such a gift for the bells then you must use it.”
Tathtalar, nearly weeping, stuttered, “W-why couldn’t you invite a h-horsemaster here? Why a bellmaster?”
“I did not invite him,” said her father patiently. “He wrote to Menlor-sola–or his deputy wrote to Obadan–saying that he was visiting all the villages along our Ridge, and he wished to pay his respects. He was here a dozen years ago, but you wouldn’t remember; you were nearly a baby.”
“Don’t horsemasters ever visit the Ridge?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Her father sighed, and she knew she should stop, but she couldn’t help herself. She had been horse-mad since she was born, and bells were . . . bells. Everyone on the Ridge rang them; you learnt to ring like you learnt to dress yourself; the Ridge was near the Border, and the Border must be rung. But she didn’t love bells. Bells were a bit creepy really. No one understood why the spirits of air that lived in them chose to live there–nor why they sometimes didn’t. Menlor-sola was famous for having sent a bell back to its foundry before it’d ever been hung, saying no spirit of air would live in it; and he’d been right too, because the foundry had tried to send it somewhere else, which didn’t have as clever a sola as theirs, and they’d hung it, and no spirit of air would live in it. But Menlor-sola himself admitted that no one understood what the relationship between human bell ringers and their bells and the bells’ spirits of air were, or why bell magic protected the Border, or could do any of the other stuff bell magic was said to be able to do, although nobody did much of the rest of it any more. Tath’s private opinion was that the whole bell thing got too creepy even for bellmasters and their friends, and everyone had just quietly cut down on doing a lot of bell magic over the years.
Tathtalar didn’t want to go to a zharha and ring creepy bells for years and years. She wanted to go to a dlor, and ride lovely horses. Horses were alive like people were alive, and they ate and slept and were born and got old and died–no one even knew if the bell spirits were mortal–and horses were warm and breathing and glad to see you (or not). You knew where you were with horses.
She wanted to go to a dlor, and then marry someone else who had also been to a dlor, and have some babies and breed and bring up horses for the rest of her life, the way her parents had. You couldn’t breed and bring up bells.
“It’s a different system,” said her father. “There are dlora all over Damar; the zharhia are fewer, and mostly near the Border, and, well, horses are more conspicuous, aren’t they? A horse pulling a plough is still as much a horse as the dlora’s finest ghillhia are horses.” Which was to say that farmers’ children grew up horse-mad just as dlorian graduates’ children did, and even if you weren’t good enough to stay at the dlor and train ghillhia–few people were–even farmer’s children sometimes got to go to a dlor for a year or two. There were horses all over Damar, and Damar would grind to a standstill without its horses.
“Horsemasters don’t have to go looking for students; they come–good and bad.” This last was said somewhat drily. Everyone who had ever trained at a dlor had tales of truly hopeless first- and second-years. Mostly the hopeless didn’t linger beyond their second year, although it did happen. . . . Tath had been looking forward to telling some of her own tales.
”Bell ringers are chosen.” He looked at his daughter thoughtfully. “You should be pleased. Not many are chosen.”
Tath bit down on the words that wanted to fly out of her mouth. I am not pleased! I don’t want to be chosen as a ringer–could there be any curse greater than to be chosen dahamyar and stay at your zharha forever? There were lots of people who trained for only a year or two at the dlora–there would be more, only the dlora couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take them all–people were hauled involuntarily into their local zharha for a year when some patch of Border ringing wasn’t good enough to do its job. To the extent that Tath had ever thought about this, which she hadn’t–to be nobbled to go to a zharha!–she was aware that with Menlor-sola overseeing the Ridge ringing, theirs was good enough, and reluctant conscripts weren’t necessary.
Tath was almost thirteen years old–too old for tantrums–and her father had better things to do than persuade her to accept the inevitable. Because it was inevitable: pleading was irrelevant. The horrible bellmaster would have her in less than four years. Four years. If she’d suddenly and unexpectedly been accepted into a dlor it would have seemed an age; since she was doomed to a zharha it felt like tomorrow.
She hadn’t thought anything of it when her mother had told her that the bellmaster of Mazahan was coming to the Ridge. She remembered, vaguely, that this or another bellmaster did come to the Ridge occasionally; and she was mildly interested in his visit when she heard that he would be bringing an entourage: perhaps that meant they would perform some fancy ringing. The Ridge’s bells wouldn’t know what hit them; there weren’t many local ringers who could scramble through more than Firefly Circles or Gold Coins on Six. Tath knew the diagram–the sliithoon–for Back of Beyond Two Sun; it was the awfullest and wiggliest of the all the sliithooni that hung on the wall of her home Tower, and so of course she had learnt it. (There was plenty of time, while you rang endless Plain Coins for the beginners, to learn every sliithoon on the wall, but once this had dawned on Tath she started, of course, with Two Sun, because it was the worst. She had spent months diving for the number Three bell when Plain Coins was called, because where you stood while you rang the Three was the best view of it. After she’d learnt it she learnt all the others too, but Two Sun was still her favourite.) She’d never heard it rung. Surely the entourage of a bellmaster could ring it.
Be fair, she thought. She’d been very interested in hearing the dahamyari ring. She just didn’t want to be a dahamyar herself.
* * *
* Also note that Word keeps automatically respelling Tath’s name That, and I’m not perfectly sure I caught them all. You’d think all those capital ‘T’s in the middles of sentences would make it nervous, but nooooo. And yes, I could add it to the dictionary, but I don’t want to: not till this book is official book-in-progress.^
^ Authors are weird. Pass it on.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.