Page 7 of Awariye

I had been to some of the valleys around there, and a stone dropped in my stomach when I realized why. Back when I had just graduated from the monastery and was new to being a traveling bard, I'd naively delayed seeking out a patron and instead visited some of the most war-torn areas that bordered Helvetica, thinking I could collect songs and folktales where they might be at risk of dying out. I’d found things much worse that I'd even imagined, with both the people and their stories nearly extinct.

That was where I had seen the hunger stones for the first time.

Whenever a river in this region got low enough to cause famine, the people would carve into the stones of the riverbed at that level to warn the generations in the future, and mark the date along the list of other decades and centuries in which this terrible fate had occurred. The one I had seen had shattered me, a permanent visage marked in my memory. It had simply said, "If you see me, cry."

Then one thought led to another, connecting fluidly like water cascading over riverbed stones, and I remembered what the hunger stones reminded me of in Vorarlberg. Further north into the Danubian planes, at a river that itself was named after the Celtic mother goddess Danu, another stone had been revealed in recent centuries that likely had not been uncovered for thousands of years before that.

It was written in Gaulic, the umbrella language of the continental Celts that had once been the richest civilization Europe had ever known. Their culture and language ran through deep veins in the land, even though the people themselves had been all but obliterated when they suffered genocide at the hands of Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor. Though the tribes of the Celts had been fierce fighters and had thrived for centuries, Caesar had used their differences to pit them against each other to successfully divide and conquer. Had the Celts been able to face the Romans as a united front in the Gallic Wars just a few decades before the birth of Christ, they would have been unstoppable, and the landscape of Europe would be very different today.

The stone revealed a message, written using the Greek alphabet, which was how the continental Celts had rendered Gaulic in the rare occasions they'd needed to write it down. Immediately after word got around of the river dipping low enough to reveal the stone, the message had been picked up by the bards, and by said bards it was titled “The Hymn of the Conquered”:

Please,

If it's my death you seek,

Take me away.

And please,

As I'd kill you,

But not your weak ones,

I beg you let them stay.

That was of course not what had happened. The men had fallen in battle, the boys were murdered, and the women and girls were sold into slavery.

"How about something happier, bard?" Sigrid prompted softly.

I snapped out of my reverie with a gasp. "Oh nein, I apologize for singing something so sad. I was just thinking about my travels in the area..."

I chanced a look up at Igor, mortified that I could have brought up horrific memories for him. He was now a full-time fighter on behalf of a warlord on the other side of the mountain range, after all. That did not bode well for his home village. Any community would keep a strong young man if they could. The fact that he was so far away from home could very well mean his home did not exist anymore.

I apologized again. "Entschuldigung, Igor."

It took a long moment for him to meet my eyes, and indeed my song seemed to have sent him somewhere far away and painful. "Alles okay," he replied, his voice hollowed out.

All three of us fell quiet a moment, the feelings that had been evoked so intense I didn't have an answer until they abated at least a little bit.

In shame, I fidgeted around in the bath and hummed a note here or there, searching in my tapped-out mind for memories of any folk songs from his local area that I could sing instead. I had to believe that the reason I couldn't find any was my own exhaustion, and not the tragic option that these songs no longer existed because the people who sang them had been driven into the night without anyone left to carry on their story.

"There was a song, taught to us by a bard that came through before my village was raided," said Igor, his tone soft. "His name was Ceredigion."

Though still surrounded by warm water, a chill ran through me as another synchronicity linked up and more pieces fell into place, delineating the flow of magic through the world. "You remember his name? That must have been some years ago now. Ceredigion was one of the bards that taught me, back when I was training. I was actually planning to meet with him when I wound up here."

Igor nodded. "I remember his name because of the song he taught me, and because his name was so unusual."

Indeed, it was a Welsh name; bards that trained in non-Germanic language traditions tended to take a bardic name to represent that, though of course everyone in this region could also sing the Germanic folksongs and epic poems such as the “Nibelungenlied.” I remembered Ceredigion explaining to me that he'd chosen a place name from Wales as his bardic name because it was a hilly region that reminded him of his home in Alpine Austria.

"Which song was it?" I asked, hoping I knew it.

After a pause, I glanced up to find Igor furrowing his brows in a way that was so cute it would have made me chuckle if the moment weren't so heavy.

"He said it was from a tombstone, and it was the oldest song in the West, from Ancient Greece," said Igor, clearly unsure. "I remember the way he sang it. Translated into German, it put me at ease."

"The ‘Seikilos Epitaph,’" I answered as recognition thrummed through me. "I know it. And you're right—it was on a tombstone dated around two hundred years before the birth of the Christ of a Thousand Ages."

Igor's expression filled with hope, and I found it hard to tear my gaze away and focus on what I was doing.