Free Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino Page B

mholadh
… something or other.”
    “It is a hymn, surely,” she said. “But not to the Virgin.” She thought for a moment, picking up the thread of a mnemonic, then began to sing, her untrained voice reedy and thin:
    “
Stiurad me dod molad
    Cia nac ollam me am eígis,
    A gnúis ainglide, gan loct!
    Tug sugad t’ucta dom réigteac
.”
    When she finished, there was silence in the school. Jeff had stopped his practicing. Kevin had his eyes closed as though trying to hold onto some inner vision.
    Dave’s head was sticking out of the doorway again. “What was that? German?”
    “Gaeid—” She caught herself. She had given the words the sounds they had had when she was young, when they had still possessed the corners and edges that passing centuries had worn away. “Irish.”
    “Never heard Irish like that before.”
    “It’s… my dialect, perhaps.”
    “You sing well.”
    She smiled uneasily. “Not really. It’s not natural to me. But…” She thought of Judith, of her incredibly pure, incredibly strong voice. How often had she heard it after they had begun their studies? “But I had a friend once who could sing…”
    She suddenly wondered what Judith had given up in order to remain with her. Her voice? Something so important?
    Troubled, she picked up her guitar and left.
    “Well, Kevin-me-lad,” said Dave. “How did it go?”
    Kevin’s eyes were still closed. He sighed, rubbed at them.
    “Well?”
    Again, he looked at the sheets of tablature in his hands. “She’s fucking scary, Dave.”

----
CHAPTER SIX
    « ^ »
    Close to midnight, Christa’s studio was dark save for the dim glow of the city that filtered through the backyard trees. Ceis, unveiled, stood pproudly, silently. If it had any opinion about the strange instrument of plastic and steel that had intruded into this sanctuary, it said nothing.
    Under Sruitmor, Christa had spent twelve hours a day in utter darkness, alone save for her harp. Derived of sight, restricted to a world of touch and sound, she had learned to let her hands guide themselves through the intricacies of polyhonic technique, and the notes that had chimed from her instrument had grown in meaning and weight until she had come to understand not only the subtle energies generated by her playing, but also the massive powers that those energies could control.
    Suantraige. Gentraige. Goltraige
. Sleeping. Laughing. Crying. But these traditional abilities of the harp were only a beginning. There was more to music, much more: powers to heal, to change, to create. And in her fourth year of study, Christa had begun to unlock those also. Her fingers were quick, her mind receptive, and the skills of the
Cruitreacha
had come to her almost effortlessly. Too effortlessly, it seemed, for she had decided that she could learn from Sruitmor and the Sidh both, and that arrogance had cost her everything.
    But in the darkness of her studio in Denver, she was relearning music, relearning magic, preparing to win back from the Sidh what she had once lost; and as she had once practiced the harp, so she now practiced the guitar: in the dark, incessantly. Eyes closed, ears straining to hear each nuance of sound that came from the fretted and plucked strings, she explored the personality of a new instrument, the yearning earthiness of the blues, and the coruscating fire of harmonic minor. She had no amplifier, but no matter: there was time for volume later on. For now, she learned notes and scales, and she felt with elation the strange but potent energy that washed down her arm when she stretched a string up and shook it with a gentle vibrato.
    Among the frets of the Strat, she found old songs and melodies from her training with Sruitmor, the straightforward modal airs of the Corca Duibne school. Layered throughout the familiar, though, were chromatic potentials: the sharps and flats that play between the strings of her harp, unthought of by ancient harpers either mortal or immortal. With the