The Minstrel Boy by Sharon Stewart

Author:Sharon Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1997-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

David’s fingers stumbled over the harp strings. He took a deep breath and tried the run again. Failed again.

Blast! he thought. What’s the matter with me? I’ve done this before! Annoyed, he set Beauty down a little too hard, and the harp’s strings twanged in protest.

Emrys winced. “Stop torturing my harp! If you’re more ham-handed than usual today, you’ve no-one to blame but yourself.”

David jumped up. Biting back angry words, he paced back and forth, rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry,” he mumbled at last. “I don’t know what’s got into me.”

“No?” said Emrys dryly, looking up at him. “I’d have said you aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing.”

“I am, too,” David began hotly. Then stopped. He wasn’t. His thoughts had wandered off again. To Meri.

“A bard needs more than moonshine between his ears,” said Emrys severely. “You’re getting nowhere. Wasting my time. And I won’t have it.” He got up, drawing his cloak around him and stood looking down at David from under his shaggy brows. “I can’t have it,” he added in a lower voice. “There is great need to bind the tribes, lest the Saxons destroy us separately. That is my work, and I am sorely pressed. You can help, if you will, but not if you don’t give your heart to the work.”

David hung his head.

Emrys sighed. “Well. Before I teach you any more, you’ll learn a thousand lines of that genealogy I gave you. As proof that you’re willing to work at minstrelsy.”

“A thousand lines! But that’s . . .”

“Silence!” roared Emrys. “A thousand, I say. Perhaps that will focus your wits. And until you’ve done as I say, leave Beauty alone.” Seizing his staff, he strode out, muttering under his breath.

David mumbled a few choice words of his own. A thousand lines—that would take him weeks! He kicked Emrys’s chair halfway across the hut. After a moment, though, he picked it up and set it back in its place.

Emrys is right, he thought. I’m not getting anywhere. But how can I, when she, when she . . .

Meri was driving him crazy. Oh, she’d seemed pleased enough to see him when he and Bear got back. Her face had lit up as she gazed at him.

“I thought you’d gone,” she said.

“I tried losing him in the woods, but he followed me home,” said Bear, grinning.

She made a face at him. “You’ll be staying, then?” she asked David.

“If they’ll let me.”

“I’m glad,” she said, as she turned away.

But the next time they met, she was with some other girls, and she greeted him with no more than a nod and a toss of the head. Then she whispered something to the girl next to her, who giggled. David flushed and walked away.

Another day, when he was rinsing the porridge pot at the river, Meri and her friends peered down at him from the bank.

“Fine mess you’re making of that,” Meri said critically. “Don’t you know to soak it, then rub it with clean sand?”

“Uh, no.

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