‘I can see them but I can’t feel them,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand. They just fell off Dar-volci.’
Andawyr grinned. ‘You don’t understand?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand. He’s always doing things like that. Things he shouldn’t be able to.’
Dar-volci looked up at him and blew a slow gurgling raspberry. ‘You mean like this?’ he said, and reaching out, he picked up one of the lights from the floor and placed it fastidiously in the centre of one of his incisors.
‘How’s that for an infectious smile?’ he said, stand-ing on his hind legs and beaming malevolently. The star twinkled mockingly at Andawyr whose face crumpled in frustration.
‘How do you do that?’ he demanded desperately, offering Dar-volci his two clenched fists.
Dar-volci ignored the plea and dropped back on to all fours again. ‘Do excuse me,’ he said, smiling again. ‘I must mingle.’ And, with a sinuous wriggle, he was gone.
Hawklan could not help but laugh at Andawyr’s discomfiture.
‘I should know better than to play tricks on him by now,’ the little man said, unsuccessfully trying to brush the splashed lights from his own robe. ‘I always come off worst.’
Suddenly, above the hubbub of the milling guests, a drum beat sounded; a single steady beat. The noise in the hall fell and the guests began to move away from the centre of the floor expectantly. Hawklan took Andawyr’s arm and led him aside.
From the same doorway through which Isloman had entered, came a solitary drummer, clad in a traditional carver’s smock, simply decorated with designs of the cellin plant with its spiky green leaves and its red berries. He was stepping out a leisured march to his own slow beat.
Several paces behind him, moving at the same stately pace and similarly dressed, came a man and a woman playing a low, nasal, droning ground bass on long pipes.
As the little procession moved into the hall, two more pipers emerged, playing a slow, jerking melody that bobbed and jigged over the drum beat and ground bass like the flames that danced from the radiant stones. Higher pitched than the other pipes and also double-reeded, their sound was strangely harsh, but far from unpleasant, and drivingly powerful in its rhythm and intensity.
Some of the audience began a soft clapping to the drum’s beat.
Then came two more drummers. With drums clamped under their left arms, their short, double-headed drumsticks flickered rippling embellishments to the pulse of the first drummer.
The clapping increased and the playing became louder.
Agreth, Arinndier and the other Fyordyn, captivated by the sight and sound of the players, began to join in with the clapping, and then found that the crowd around them was beginning to sway from side to side. Nods and smiles from their neighbours encouraged them to join in that also.
The music grew louder still, though without chang-ing tempo, and on every fourth beat the audience began to add a resounding foot stamp to their clapping. One or two shrill cries went up.
Arinndier felt his arms tingle with excitement at the sound, and into his mind came the thundering Emin Rithid that the Fyordyn had unexpectedly sung in acclamation of Sylvriss at Eldric’s mountain stronghold. It seemed to him that the two tunes were in some way the same.
Then, abruptly, it ended and he almost lurched forward into the sudden silence. Another great cheer went up.
‘What was that, Lord?’ Jaldaric asked Arinndier, his face also flushed with exhilaration.
‘I don’t… ’ began Arinndier, but the remainder of his admission was lost as the drummers began again, this time with a bouncing rhythm that would make any foot tap. More musicians ran into the hall and whoops and yells rose up from the guests, as couples began to run into the middle of the hall to line up for what was obviously to be a boisterous dance.
Arinndier tried to play the old man and turned discreetly to seek sanctuary with Rede Berryn who was seated at the edge of the hall, but a female form intercepted him.
‘I have no one to dance with, Lord,’ Tirilen lied, smiling and holding out her hands to him.
Jaldaric and Tirke too had little time to ponder the etiquette of selecting a partner as they were cut out from the melee by two girls moving like skilled sheepdogs.
Even Dacu and Tel-Mindor failed to merge into the background sufficiently to escape yet two more swift and sharp-eyed predators.
Dacu turned to a grinning Isloman and flickered a plaintive hand signal to him as he was led away. Isloman looked across at his brother earnestly. Loman examined the scene then furrowed his brow in concentration and, pursing his lips, shook his head like a death judge. Looking back to Dacu and clamping his fist to his heart, Isloman pronounced sentence. ‘Think of Fyorlund, soldier,’ he shouted.
And thus the celebration continued; under An-dawyr’s starlit night sky, faces, happy, mischievous, besotted, moved in and through the lights and shadows of the firelight and the glittering tree, bound in a swirling mosaic of music and dance and laughter. At the touch of the Spirit of the Winter Festival, rivalries and differences, fears and ambitions, all disappeared; the old became young as they swung through the dances, and the young became sage and sober as they viewed such transformations-though not for long. Anderras Darion was indeed a holy and wondrous place, but it was Ethriss’s greatest creation that was celebrating his greatest gift to its full.
Finally escaping the dance, Hawklan flopped down by Gulda. She was chuckling to herself about some splendid confusion that Tirke had caused by moving left when he should have moved right. In common with everyone else, her face was flushed and happy. It had a haunting quality.
How old are you? Hawklan wanted to ask. How beautiful were you once? But the questions laughed at him. She was as great an enigma as he, but like him, whatever she was, or had been, whatever strange mysteries lay beneath her relentless personality, she was here now; whole and unencumbered.
As if reading his thoughts, Gulda turned to him and smiled radiantly. ‘A happy thought this, healer,’ she said. ‘You have a sure touch.’
Hawklan acknowledged the rare praise. ‘No spectre would dare visit this feast,’ he said.
Gulda nodded and then looked around at the guests. Agreth was in earnest, hand-waving conversation with a rather large, well-hocked, lady. Arinndier, red-faced, and mopping his brow, had reached the sanctuary of Rede Berryn’s altar and was clinging to it for the time being, though he exuded some gameness still. Dacu and Tel-Mindor were back to back, facing overwhelming odds, and Jaldaric and Tirke had been taken captive somewhere.
Overhead, in the gold-tinted darkness, a star-bedecked Gavor glided hither and thither like a silver, moonlit kingfisher, swooping down incessantly to encourage or torment the dancers as the whim took him, or to offer trenchant observations to some of the many debates that were proceeding amongst the watchers. Mirroring him on the ground, Dar-volci rolled and scampered, occasionally standing on his hind legs and emitting hoots and whistles which seemed to betoken considerable approval.
All around, figures moved, shadows flitted, and the wall carvings danced and changed at the touch of the flickering firelight.
Gulda took Hawklan’s hand and squeezed it affec-tionately.
Later, Hawklan slipped quietly out of the hall. As he walked away down the long corridor, it seemed to him that the laughter and the music was ringing through the whole castle.
The impression did not leave him even as he stepped out into the cold night on top of the great wall. Myriad coloured torches all about the towers and spires lit the snow-covered roofs and transformed the castle into a strange and magical landscape. And though the silence was as deep as the night was black, the whole seemed to vibrate with some irrepressible inner energy.