LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002617002645
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
DEDICATION
To Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow,
partners in folklore, fairy tales, and balladry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with most novels, various people played a part at various stages in the development of Rhymer. The author would like to thank a few who played significant roles in its gestation. First, Jonathan Maberry, with whom the original “T. Rhymer” tale was concocted. Although this version has journeyed a long way from there, none of it would exist at all had it not been for an initial idea discussed over beers, lo, many years ago. Second, my thanks to author/translator Craig Williamson for all the Anglo-Saxon riddles in his A Feast of Creatures. Neither Thomas nor Taliesin would exist as they do without you. A special thank-you to Oz Whiston, proof- and beta-reader nonpareil. I cannot imagine getting feedback from anyone else as reliable and helpful as yours. You are the “True Thomas” of this text. Finally, to my agent, Marie Lamba, for doggedly representing the project through its various permutations.
PART ONE:
TRUE THOMAS
I. On Huntley Bank
“Ya understand?” Onchu asked, and Thomas realized suddenly that his brother had been speaking to him. He looked up, mouth agape, lips slack as a drunkard’s. He squinted. He pushed dirty fingers through his unkempt hair. Shook his shaggy head. They weren’t at home, their mother and father weren’t here, their sister, neither. What was Onchu saying?
“God, he’s gormless.” Baldie laughed. He stood behind Onchu, halfway to the river. The river . . .
Onchu shushed Baldie and tried again. “You stay here now, Tommy. It’s dry an’ ye ken sleep in the grass while we fish upriver, right, little brother?” He tenderly brushed back Thomas’s hair.
Thomas took in the tall, reedy grass around him, the glimmering of the river ahead; then he twisted around to see the trees behind him. Black alders. He knew where he was, remembered they had come here from home, the route Onchu, Baldie, and he always took, though the specifics of the journey itself eluded him. So many things eluded him. They’d been walking, but anyway he wasn’t allowed on a horse. He closed his eyes, saw his feet, plodding, plodding, plodding along a path, following it from their big wooden wall with the keep upon its scarp, past sties and the well, across countryside past Oakmill on the Tweed to the Yarrow where it met the Ettrick Water—Onchu’s fishing path.
The weight of his brother’s hand slid down and pressed upon his shoulder. “Sit,” Onchu gently ordered, and he opened his eyes again. Memory slipped away like a school of minnows.
Thomas Lindsay Rimor de Ercildoun, half-witted fourteen-year-old son of a locally powerful family, did as he was bade and squatted down in the grass. He was lean and black-haired, and his fierce blue eyes could pin you sharp as blades if you could get him to focus on you for longer than an instant. Had it not been for the fits that plagued him and the simpleness of his mind, he might have been a fine catch for most any girl in the town. The trouble was, everyone there and for miles around knew of his peculiarities. Some thought him possessed. Others were certain he was touched, perhaps even divine. Weren’t the sibyls of ancient days similarly cursed? And the poet Taliesin as well? Opinions varied widely.
Those closest to him—his father, even his mother (privately), and definitely his brother—believed him to be a harmless idiot. His sister, Innes, alone thought him blessed by God in a way no one yet understood. Which wasn’t to say that Onchu didn’t love him, he did; but Thomas was more often than not a burden to him.
Pushed down, he sat cross-legged among the reeds. He smiled to Onchu.
“Hey-o,” Baldie said, “there’s a relief.” His thick mouth smirked beneath a nose bent crooked ever since the first time they had brought the idiot with them.
That morning, Thomas had been seized by a fit, fallen face-first into the Ettrick Water, and would have drowned if Baldie hadn’t waded in quick and grabbed hold of him. But Thomas, unaware of everything including his savior, had flapped and windmilled and swung his head wildly back, cracking the bridge of Baldie’s nose, getting himself dumped facedown in the water again, until Onchu hauled him out. Baldie, cursing and spitting, refused thereafter to touch him for all the treasures of the fay.
When Onchu had flung him safely onto dry land, he’d rolled about and babbled, “The teeth of the sheep will lay the plough to rest!” and then fallen quiet and still. As his “predictions” went, it made about as much sense as any.
There were no fish caught that morning. Spluttering Thomas had scared them off.
Since then, Baldie continued to give him a wide berth. If he’d set himself on fire now, Baldie would only have nodded in appreciation of the blaze from a respectful distance.
“Ye don’t follow us now,” Onchu told Thomas. He knelt close, rubbed Thomas’s back. “Ye stay here and sleep till the sun’s down. Or, I don’t know, count the leaves on that black alder.”
Thomas tilted back his head and looked at the nearest tree upside down. “Two thousand nine hundred sixty-eight,” he said.
“Leave him already!” Baldie called. Boots off, he was wading into the water, hissing at every plashing step from one big and precarious stone to another.
“Christ yer,” Onchu cursed. “Then count the damned bulrushes.”
“Eighty-seven. I could see more were I standing.” He started to get up.
“Well, you’re not standing, Tom. Lie back now, count birds flying over, count clouds, count catkins till we come get ye and then tell me all of what you’ve seen, hey, sweet boy?”
He did as he was told, and stared into the sky, all but forgetting that Onchu was there.
“Come on,” insisted Baldie. “It’s feckin’ cold and I’m not gaunny stand here till meh balls crawl up inside me!”
Thomas heard Onchu, laughing, tug off his boots, and wade out after his friend. Plump Baldie was generous (though he would never admit it), but Thomas saw him as true as the tenderness in Onchu’s heart for himself. Heard them on the far bank then, Baldie chattering about the harvest.
Their voices faded into the world where birds sang songs—no two alike, a conversation he could very nearly understand as he tracked it back and forth—and the reeds sizzled now, waving accompanied by breezes, and thoughts jittered and split and swarmed.
Every moment took him off somewhere. He hardly noticed when the sounds and sensations of the whole world absorbed his brother and Baldie like soil soaking up rain. Time isolated him from before and after, cause and effect, sealed him off from human communication, from meaning. It could be sunrise one moment and night the next; such discontinuity was just how the world was to Thomas. He was quite used to losing most of it. What was lost wasn’t important, wasn’t noticed.
After awhile, he tilted his head back again. “Two hundred seven catkins,” he said of a goat willow, “larger than my fingers.” He held up his hand to study those fingers. Dirt encrusted the broken nails. The sun was hanging to the west now. Afternoon had arrived—new shadows, different lines, angles, and slices out of the light.
