“It was only just made a town in my own.”
“The world is wide to us all.”
“And what do I call you, sir?”
“My name is Taliesin.”
Thomas blinks. “There was a poet Taliesin. People used to say in front of me I was like him because of the riddles that pour out of me.”
“Riddles,” says the old man in some dismay. “Not poems?”
He smiles modestly, realizes the poet can’t see him, and says, “No one would mistake them for poems.”
“Then you’re nothing like him at all. Taliesin is a bard, a poet, a seer. Not a simple riddler.” He says the word with great disdain, and then launches into a recitation:
“The Catraeth men rise with the sun,
Circling their prince, that raider of cattle,
Urien of Rheged is he.
The feast of princes is his charge,
For warrior Urien is of all about him lord.
Came the men of Prydain in their legions
To Gwen Ystrat, valley where battles sweep all.
No field there nor tree to offer shelter
When the two sides clash.”
He pauses, tilts his head.
Thomas remarks, “You declaim well, sir.”
“Felly, of course I do.” He taps his chest. “I’m Gwion Bach ap Gwreang. I’m Taliesin.” Then his attention seems to drift away again. “I wonder how Owen mab Urien made out—royal blood was Urien’s son.” His pale blank eyes shine. “Very long ago, if ’twas a day. Way time flows here, all’s dust before the verse is e’en sprung.”
Not quite following the poet’s wandering thoughts, Thomas says, “I’ve passed through Catraeth once.”
“Sure it will be different now.”
“On my way north.”
“And who is king in the north these days?”
“It’s David. King David.”
Taliesin shakes his head. “Dafydd. Na notion of that name. Be he a good king? Do the poets compose verses around ’im?”
“I don’t . . . Maybe. On his account I fought, and after, I was given land to farm.”
Taliesin claps him on the shoulder. “Come, we must upon every single thing discourse. Ti will tell me of the world passing by, because as you can see—as once I did—we’ve nowhere to go. Time has devoured you, Thomas Rimor, and this”—he points feebly to the central circle—“this is its gullet.”
The first thing he learns is where to sit in relation to Taliesin to minimize the stink. The second thing is that Taliesin has only occasional lucid moments, and that Thomas has to listen closely to make any sense of them. Sometimes the poet drifts into verse and seems unaware of his presence. He babbles in Welsh, sometimes holds conversations with an invisible companion or two, sometimes Urien—even asking that unreal lord of Rheged’s opinion—and sometimes another whose name he doesn’t say. Thomas thinks, this is what he looks like to everybody else while talking with Alpin’s ghost, so who’s to say Taliesin is mad? And where is Alpin’s ghost these days? Not answering again.
That first morning, however, Taliesin asks about the Queen, remarking that she turned him into various creatures “using her energy ball.” He’s sure he wrote it all down back when he could see, but now can find neither the parchments nor his quills. He’s certain someone has stolen them. It’s not as if there are places in the cells where things can be hidden. “One of the others,” he says, which presumably means other previous occupants of these cells, of which Taliesin has mentioned a few. It sounds as if they were here when he arrived and subsequently died or sufficed as a teind.
Before Thomas can get more information out of him, however, he suddenly leans over and puts his ear to the floor, then climbs stiffly to his feet, backside facing Thomas, who instinctively leans well away from it.
Taliesin says, “Our meal is arriving.” He drags a wooden paten out from behind the garderobe stand. It’s the same sort that Thomas has been fed from while kept by Nicnevin. “Here, you must set this in the center. And we in our cells must be else they will not feed us. I learned that early on. Come, come, come. Go to yours now.”
He shuffles back through the small arch and to his pallet.
Uncertainly, Thomas returns to his cell, waits just inside the arch, watching the central space to see how the food arrives, hopeful that this must reveal the way out.
Not a minute passes before the walls cease to glitter and deepest shadow absorbs him. The suddenness of the pitch dark catches him off guard. A brief low musical note sounds, stops. He stumbles a step in the blackness, but even as he does the walls glow again, and there in the circular center are two fresh wooden patens containing some kind of steaming meat over grains, what looks like barley, with a piece of honeycomb beside it, and a wood mug filled with water. How this has appeared, he cannot say—his mind is strangely muddled. The whole thing took only an instant, but how did he miss that instant? It’s almost as if the food manifested in the dark out of the music.
Confounded, he walks out, picks up a board, and carries it to Taliesin, sets it down beside the pallet. “Here,” he says, and guides the poet’s hands to it.
“Most kind.” Taliesin pats his wrist. “Mark me, ti must always eat. Never reject a meal here. They can be quite cruel if they believe ti to be disobedient.”
Thomas returns to collect his own food, but he’s thinking, They can be quite cruel anytime at all.
Time is impossible to measure. Is it a day after he’s eaten and slept? The twinkling starlight only goes out when the meals come. Otherwise it never varies. He’s long lost all sense of day versus night in any case.
After Taliesin sleeps, most times, he has to reintroduce himself. The conversations that follow are discontinuous. Taliesin claims to have been Nicnevin’s lover, too. “Wrth gwrs, that was so very long ago I might as well have dreamt it.” It’s devastating to contemplate. If he is truly the poet who played for Bran the Blessed, then he’s many hundreds of years old. Generations have come and gone while he’s been a prisoner of the elves, and it’s not lost on Thomas that this is his planned fate, too.
