The Towers of the Sunset - L. E. Modesitt [129]
“Do we need it?” she asks. “How soon?” He doubts that he has heard those questions less than a score of times. Yet she is right. What do they need, and when do they need it?
Creslin wants everything done now, and with everything to be done now, who has time for wizardry? The order-strengthening he has learned is wonderful for encouraging plant growth, but he cannot encourage what is not growing. So he has managed to dragoon some of the more venturesome consorts, a handful of the remaining fisherwomen, and two disabled fishermen into plowing and sowing the few abandoned fields on the lower plateau to the north side of Land’s End. Lydya has located another spring or two, and the would-be farmers have rebuilt the ditching.
He rubs his sore shoulders. Someday he may get back to finishing his and Megaera’s house, now nothing more than two half-finished bedrooms and four enclosed and unfinished rooms: the dining room, the common room, the so-called study, and the kitchen.
“That might do it . . . for now,” Hyel says tiredly. “But that won’t solve the hostility. They still drink and stare at each other.”
“What about a minstrel?”
“Who would come here? At least now?”
The silver-haired man nods, thinking of his sister’s note. “Perhaps there is a solution. We can at least try.”
“What—”
“I’ll meet you at the public room after the evening meal.”
The tall man stands with a puzzled look on his face.
Creslin smiles. “It either works, or it doesn’t.” Then he departs, heading uphill toward the black stone house that still remains unfinished and alone upon the cliffs overlooking the eastern shores of Recluce.
When he reaches the door, he calls. “Megaera!” But there is no answer, and he senses no one in or around the dwelling or on the terrace.
After fetching the guitar, he sits on the wall, the low sun at his back, and lets his fingers find the strings and the tones. Despite the calluses on his hands, his fingertips are no longer as tough as they once were. So he puts the guitar back into the black leather case, and thinks. Thinks about the songs he once sang, the few he has composed, and the many he has learned, left to him by another silver-haired man.
As he reflects, the sun drops behind the hills at his back, but Megaera has not shown up, not that he would expect her now that she has begun to identify with the Westwind guards. Most nights she sleeps in her room, but that is all; she takes her meals in the keep with Shierra, or spends time talking to Lydya.
As twilight nears, Creslin picks up the guitar and walks down to the town and makes his way to the public room at the half-finished inn.
Hyel is waiting. “What is that?”
“A guitar. Someone once told me that sometimes music helps.”
Hyel follows the younger man through the open door at the western, and mostly completed, end of the inn. The windows have neither glass nor shutters, although Klerris has been working with Megaera and a small furnace and has promised that rough and cloudy glass will be on hand before long.
As he stands inside the too-large room, Creslin waits a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Only half a dozen small lamps—borrowed, he suspects, from the keep—light the walls, and a faint odor tells him that they are fueled with some type of fish oil.
He drags a wobbly table—another of Klerris’s efforts, he suspects—to a point directly before the doors, then turns to Hyel. “Find me a stool of some sort, if you can.”
The guard captain shakes his head but makes his way toward the small doorway that leads to what will be a kitchen but serves now only to store their limited stock of beverages, plus too-old cheese and crumbling biscuits.
“. . . what’s he doing here?”
“First . . . she starts coming with the bitches . . . now he’s sitting apart from anyone . . .”
Creslin ignores the whispers and looks into the