The Eagle And The Nightingales

he was about to flee and had tried to stop him.

To a fatal end....

That was the reason for his black depression. It did not matter that he had killed in self-defense; the point was that he had killed. The man he had eviscerated in his pain and hunger-madness had only been doing his duty.

In fact, no matter what Harperus claims, since he was doing his duty, to the best of his ability, he was as 'good' as I_perhaps my spiritual better. Certainly he is_was_not the one with blood on his conscience.

Could this mean, in the end, that the fanatics who had called him a demon, and evil, were actually right? The question haunted him, and Harperus, who had found him shivering in a field after his flight, had not helped. Harperus merely shrugged the entire question off, saying that the guard had followed the orders of a superior who was in the wrong. He further claimed that the man must at some point have known that his superior was in the wrong, and that evened the scales between himself and the man he had murdered.

But Harperus is a Deliambren, and they are facile creatures. They can make white into black and sun into midnight with their so-called logic. Harperus simply could not understand why this should torment him so; after all, it was over and done with, and there was nothing more to be said or done but to move on.

Oh, yes. To move on, without a load of guilt upon my soul so heavy that I cannot fly.

T'fyrr sighed gustily, and turned away from the window, waving at the machine again. It started right up obediently. Not that T'fyrr didn't know this particular human song by heart, but he wanted to have every nuance that Harperus had recorded. This was a love duet, sung by two of the finest of the human musicians_at least in T'fyrr's estimation_that Harperus had ever captured in his little cubes.

Lark and Wren. Why do so many of these humans bear the names of birds, I wonder?

Of course, part of the passion here was simply because the two who sang this song of love were lovers, and they allowed their feelings free voice. Still, T'fyrr had heard other humans who were their equals since he had descended from the mountains of his homeland, and not all of those were represented in Harperus' collection.

The one called Nightingale, for instance....

A Haspur's memory was the equal of any Deliambren storage crystal, and his meeting with Nightingale was fraught with such power and light that for a moment it completely overwhelmed his terrible gloom.

He and Harperus had taken a place for the Deliambren's living-wagon in a park, a place created by Gypsies for travelers to camp together. This was enlightened altruism; they charged a fee for this, and the intent of the place was to sell them services they might not otherwise have in the wilderness between cities.

Still, they erect and maintain such Waymeets; surely they deserve recompense I cannot fault them for charging fees.

T'fyrr had been restless, and Harperus had not seen any reason why he should have to remain mewed up in the wagon_the Gypsies were very assiduous about protecting the peace of their patrons. So he had gone for a walk, out under the trees surrounding the camping-grounds, and after an interval, he had heard a strange, wild music and followed it to its source.

It had been a woman, a Gypsy, playing her harp beside a stream. He had known enough about humans even then to recognize how unique she was. Black-haired, dark-eyed, her featherless skin browned to a honey-gold from many miles on the open road beneath the sun, she was as slender and graceful as a female of his own race and as ethereal as one of the beings that Harperus called 'Elves.' With her large, brooding eyes, high cheekbones, pointed chin and thin lips, she would probably have daunted him in other circumstances, since those features conspired to give her an air of haughty aloofness. But her eyes had been closed with concentration; her lips relaxed and slightly parted_and her music had entwined itself around his heart and soul, and he could not have escaped if he had wanted to.

They had shared a magical afternoon of music, then, once she finished her piece and realized that he was standing there. She had been as eager to hear some of the music of his people as he had been to learn the music of hers. An unspoken, but not unfelt, accord had sprung up between them, and T'fyrr sometimes took that memory out and held it between himself and despair when his guilt and gloom grew too black to bear.

The wagon lurched, and T'fyrr caught himself with an outstretched hand-claw.

Deliambren chairs were not made for a Haspur; the backs were poorly positioned for anyone with wings. Harperus had compromised by having a stool mounted to the floor of the wagon, with a padded ring of leather- covered metal that T'fyrr could clutch with his foot-talons a few krr above the floor. It was only a compromise, and T'fyrr found himself jarred out of his memory of that golden afternoon with Nightingale as the wagon lurched and he had to clutch, not only the foot-ring, but the table in front of him, to avoid being pitched to the floor.