Black Pearls (16 page)

Though it was a lie and the giant had cast no spell to keep me his, it was the same as if he had. The lad and his mother no longer tried to play me, and, having no songs of my own, I remained silent. I sorely missed the times when my master's loneliness had pulled tunes from my throat. Alas, no one but me mourned his death at all. Until the villagers at last succeeded in heaping dirt over his great fallen body and constructing thereby a massive fortification outside the town's gate, my poor giant lay looking with unblinking eyes at an endless procession of curiosity seekers who traveled to see the slain monster. And, of course, to heap praise on "Jack, the Giant Killer," as they soon christened the boy.

Jack loved to meet a crowd of such travelers by the mountainous corpse and tell over and over how he had bested his fearsome enemy. "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum," he would howl, loud and gruff as the voice of Death in a Whitsunday pageant. "Those be the very words this hell-fiend screamed when he came after me." He would brandish an imaginary sword, swirling it in mad arcs around the giant's arm or leg. "But I was not afeared, you know.
It required only a bit of derring-do to smash this clumsy oaf to kingdom come."

By the end of his tale, which grew and changed with every telling, young Jack had always made himself out the bravest, most courageous young man in all the world, one who richly deserved the coins and treasure he had pilfered from my master. And each time he recounted his glorious adventures, he was wont to bring folk home to gawk and make much of his hen and his golden harp. "Lest ye believe me not," he would tell them all, "here be the magic proof."

When the body of my old master was at last moldering under a vast hillock of earth and thatch, it was clear that the cocky young man who had killed him now had more time than he knew what to fill it with. There were no more travelers to listen to his tales of glory, and the prettiest of the village girls—the one on whom he had set his heart—grew tired of listening to her suitor talk about himself. (As he wooed her by the hearth, the hen and I were privy to most of their conversations and to her final announcement that she had decided to wed the mayor's son.) Suddenly, then, Jack remembered me.

"I shall take this magic harp to be restrung," he announced to his mother, only two days after his ringleted sweetheart had abandoned him. "Perhaps it was damaged when the giant fell. If I can make it play again, we will have some gay parties and mend my heart soon enough."

"But what of the giant's curse?" his mother asked. "I thought only the black of heart could play her strings." Her expression as she studied me was half sorrow, half yearning.

"That was just a tale I told, Mother," Jack said. "I wanted to keep her safe from prying hands."

"Ay," the woman said, still watching me doubtfully. But when she glanced again at her son, she was once more his doting mother. "Why, lad, 'tis a fine idea," she told him. "And then you might take up that flute your father left. He played it like an angel, he did."

Jack was already dragging me from my place at the fireside. "Perhaps, Mother," he told her, wrapping me in a dark cloth, shutting out the light. "But think of the seasons wasted while I must learn to put my fingers just so on the stops. This harp will play by itself."

"Or there's the viol," his mother offered. "Your uncle says 'tis the favorite instrument at court."

"Mayhap, good dame." The young man's voice sounded agreeable, but he tightened his grip on the bundle he'd made of me. "Yet that one will take even longer to master. Besides, they've nothing like my golden harp at court."

So saying, he juggled me to his back and trundled me down the street before his mother might think of another instrument for him to play. We wound around corner after corner, and though I could see nothing through my swaddling, the cries of vendors, the smells of fish and pies, and the stench of chamber pots poured into the gutter, brought memories of my girlhood in my aunt's village rushing back.

At one turning, where my owner stopped, I thought we had reached the studio of the musician who would fix my strings. But I was wrong, for Jack began to yell and curse at someone nearby. "Have you no better bed than the street, old pissant? Out of my way, I say."

Clearly the young man's anger had gotten the best of him, for I could feel that he was kicking whoever blocked our path. He kicked so fiercely and with such hatred, I fell from his back and lay on my side, the cloth that had covered me undone and my eyes staring into a deep puddle where rain had collected between cobblestones in the street. I hadn't far to search to find the object of my owner's scorn. An old man dressed in beggar's rags, with a face as red as fire, lay curled like a baby against the vicious kicks.

When Jack stopped to catch his breath, the old man lowered his arms and glanced toward me. His yellow eyes narrowed, and when he had assured himself he saw what he saw, that I was not an airy dream brought on by mead, a smile cut his face like a knife. He stared at me now and held my gaze even after my owner had resumed his savage attack.

"Move on, move on, you worthless carrion," Jack screamed. He stooped to retrieve the cloth in which he'd wrapped me and began to beat the man about the head with it. "Are you deaf, you old turd? Get up and let your betters by."

It was then, while the young man yelled and the old one stared, that I felt, as strongly as ever I had at the giant's castle, a song well up in me. Though he did not point and he did not speak, I heard the beggar's command as clearly as if he had been my dead master, leaning against a brocade pillow and bellowing, "Play!"

So I did. Right there, in front of my astonished owner, I reached out to pluck my strings. Once again, at long last, the painful ecstasy took me, and the words ran like a waterfall uphill, charging from my throat: "
I once had a love that was truer than true.
"

The old man's knees dropped from his chest, and both he and Jack were still as stones while I played. "
'Twas long ago when the world was new.
"

I could see the woman in the beggar's eyes, a dark gypsy with a hungry, heart-shaped mouth. "
Kiss me once and kiss me twice and beg me thrice to stay.
"

The man's eyes closed now and he lay as quiet as a sleeping babe. "
And keep me in your prayers tonight though I be far away.
"

When the song ended, Jack turned to me, triumphant. "You
can
play, after all. And here I was about to spend a pretty penny to put the music back in you, sly wench." He gave the nipple on one of my golden breasts a tweak, then stepped carelessly over the old man, who still lay unmoving in the street. "Wait till they hear your songs now! They shall be begging to dance to my tunes, all the beauties in town." He bound me up in the cloth again and headed back the way he had come. "And won't she be sorry, Miss Proud Heart who would have none of me? Won't Miss High and Mighty pine to be invited, too."

But, of course, it did not happen that way. For when we got back and Jack called his mother to come see, when he removed my covering and commanded me to play, he still had not a single song in his heart, and I remained silent.

"I fear the musician does not know his work, my boy." Jack's mother had settled herself on a chair for my concert but seemed little perturbed by its postponement. "You must take the harp back straightway and make him do it right."

"But I tell you, this harp played." Jack was yelling now, though his mother had done nothing to deserve his harsh tone. "Just by the miller's courtyard, right in the street, a song for all to hear." Jack would not rest until I played again, and two times, three times, he pointed at me and shrieked, "Play, you harlot! Play!"

Two times, three times, I felt no song to play and my head remained bent and unmoving above my strings. Even after his mother had urged him to come to supper, to forget about music until the morning, he ranted and raved and ground his rude thumb in my eyes. "You
shall
play," he promised at last, kicking me so that I landed on my side and clattered against the hearthstone.

"Look what you have done to the poor thing," his mother said. She stooped to set me right, took a handkerchief from her sleeve, and knelt down beside me. Making small clucking sounds like the hen when it settled to roost, she spat upon the cloth and used it to polish my head and shoulders. It is a sad thing, indeed, to put a name to something precious you have lost. So it was for me when the woman stroked and petted me. I felt, of course, neither the warmth of her hand, nor even the weight of her fingers against my golden skin. Yet the memory of touch—of embraces and holding hands, of strolling arm in arm, or jostling up against a market crowd—all this came back to me so that I was loath for her to stop. But stop she did at last, rising and standing back, arms folded, to check her work. She looked at me with the same self-satisfied smile my aunt had often bestowed on a gleaming goblet or platter, then followed her son to table.

That was not the last time Jack's mother picked me up and rubbed me to a shine. My surly owner saw fit soon enough to hurl me again to the floor in a fit of temper. One night when Jack and a companion came home from hunting, they sat by the hearth to eat a late supper and drink toasts to their own prowess with bow and arrow. After many boastful toasts and too much mead, Jack forgot that there was anything he could not do. And so he pointed his finger at me and commanded me to play.

I tried, you must believe, to find a song in that bleary-eyed lad. As I listened, two shadows, one tall and the other short, fell across his heart. The tall figure sang to the smaller one, but though I knew it would serve me to hear the words, I could not make them out. Like a fairy tune from a faraway wood, his song was lost and dim. I remained as quiet, then, as any other harp without a master to play it, and I dreaded what my silence might cost.

Instead of getting angry, though, Jack laughed and bade his friend try his hand, too, at making me play. But the other hunter, who had just toasted his own skill in felling a pregnant doe, had no more music in him than Jack, and so the two of them proposed at last to make their own songs. They laughed and roared tuneless ditties at each other till I dared to hope they would fall into a drunken slumber and leave me in peace.

It was not to be. For when the uproar woke Jack's mother, she came into the great room in her shift, her hair undone, and begged them be quiet. Perhaps because she had just been torn from a dream and a piece of it was still in her head, I felt how much she yearned for the earlier, simpler times she and her son had shared. Her despair at her laggard boy and her own regrets brought my arms to my strings: "
If I had a cow, a large brown cow, a jug of milk I'd bring thee.
"

Even in their cups, the two friends were stunned by my newfound voice. Jack's companion looked as if he thought black magic was afoot, and Jack himself rose from his seat, startled from his stupor.

"
If I had seeds and a patch of earth, I'd grow a sweet pear tree." I
felt a small, warm pride as a dappled day half dawned in the woman's heart. "
And all the lords for miles around would beg me for to try ... One small bite of that sweet pear, one glance from your fair eye.
"

But I had no chance to sing the rest of her song, for Jack came toward me, anger blushing his cheeks, so that even in the light of a single candle, his face looked like a Turk's. "You sing for a beggar, do you?" he snarled. He hauled me from the hearth and lurched for the door.

"And now you think to sing all by yourself, do you?" He opened wide the door, howling into the night air. "Go sing to the moon about cows and seeds. We'll none of your country airs!" With that, he shoved me outside, slamming the door so that I heard no more of his bluster and lay cradled in the grass till his mother tiptoed out to rescue and polish me, then set me again by the hearth. Once in the night, I thought I heard the trace of a song in someone's dream. It might have been the pale shadow tune I'd felt earlier in Jack. It was not bold enough to rouse me, though, and I slipped back into dreams of my own.

Perhaps my song had emboldened her, or mayhap she intended to dispose her son more kindly toward me. In any case, it was Jack's mother who finally carried me to the musician's house. She hired a fellow to hoist me onto a wagon and then drove into town herself. While she visited the baker and milliner, the sweaty little man to whom she'd entrusted me worked for hours restringing and tuning, yanking and tightening until I thought my chest would burst. At last he was done, and she drove home to set me proudly before Jack. "Now ye shall hear this harp play proper at last," she promised, pleased with herself and the pleasure I was sure to bring the spoiled young man.

"Are ye certain that fellow's done the job?" Jack asked.

"As certain as certain," his mother assured him. "For I stopped on the way home and commanded it to play."

Indeed, she had. And when she'd pointed and ordered music, I had felt a whole flood of tunes dammed up in her heart. They were fair to drowning us both, and I'd had a hard time choosing which one she wanted most.

"And?"

"And it played as lovely as you please."

"And sang?"

"Like an angel in the house of the Lord."

"Well, then." Jack's greedy smile made his face almost handsome. "We shall invite the neighbors and have that musicale at last." He bade his mother draw up a guest list, making certain she included the maidens he admired most. "I will go to the butcher myself," he offered, "and fetch back some venison and lamb."

The party was held three nights later, when it appeared that half the town had assembled to hear me play. Or rather, to hear Jack order me to play. Dressed like a peacock, in apricot and turquoise silks, my owner moved from dame to damsel, offering his hand and honeyed words. He looked and acted very differently, indeed, from the fellow who spent most of his days lying about the house, gaming or drinking with his friends. Inside, though, he was no different at all, and soon he was to prove it.

When all were supped and seated, he bellowed, nearly as loudly as the giant, "Where is my magic hen?"