Free Bard I by Keith Taylor

felt only suspicion and fear of the bard, and longed to escape him.
    Felimid used the boar-spear as a staff. to aid him in hopping along. With his other hand he gripped the boy’s shoulder. The boy’s arms were still bound tightly to his sides by sheets of grey spider-silk, although he could move his feet.
    I’ll not hold him long with one hand. Surely he’ll bolt.
    Best I collar his neck with my sword-belt. A sore indignity that. He’ll hate it, and me. But if I don’t halter him so, I may as well turn him loose now.
    The boy himself snatched that decision from his captor. With a swift movement of his head, he sank teeth in Felimid’s arm, tore himself free, and going belly-flat to the ground, writhed into a deep thicket of thorns. Felimid heard him squirming about, to get the grey swathings stripped from him. A draconian way to gain freedom. He’d lose half a yard of hide in there.
    Felimid sucked the bite he’d received. Well, doubtless the boy thought it worth some lacerations. He seemed harmless enough, except to snails and acorns, and could neither speak nor understand speech unless his muteness had been cunningly feigned, which Felimid did not believe.
    The boy flashed out of the thicket’s far side, a few rags of cobweb hanging on him yet. He scuttled up a tree-trunk and vanished. His celerity made the bard blink.
    Felimid didn’t curse or rage. He felt no anger. If the boy disliked his company, that was the boy’s poor judgement. He hobbled back to the hut.
    He hadn’t broken his ankle. He’d sprained it badly, though, which was just as painful. He’d not be walking about for some days. That didn’t perturb him greatly, either; to what had almost happened, it was nothing. He had ways of getting food without stirring far from one spot, if he had to, and he judged this an occasion where powers must be spent.
    He played upon his harp. Summer’s wealth and greenery flowed out of the plangent strings. Blackberry whins fruited within the hour. Felimid filled two osier baskets with the sweet-fleshed berries. Then, licking the juice from his fingers, he played again. Summer in the little glade gave way to autumn, mellow and crisp. Leaves changed color. A hazel bush grew fat nuts by the hundred. Laying his harp away, Felimid plundered those freely too. He gathered mushrooms broad and thick as steaks. Such a way of gathering food took more energy than it gave back, but for Regan’s sake, with hunting beyond him now. he had to do it. It troubled him sorely that he could not get her to eat much of the magical windfall.
     
    He awoke flushed and groggy, with what he recognised as the first signs of Regan’s illness. Outside, it had begun to rain once more. a slow thin drizzle closely blended with mist. Wet brown leaves were falling, in the small untimely autumn he had made. Felimid took his throbbing head in his hands.
    ‘Give you good day.’
    The bard started, for he’d heard no voice but his own and Regan’s in many days. This voice sounded deep. thick and reverberant, like a drum of hide stretched on a heavy wooden frame. Like Kisumola the wizard’s drum.
    Mistrust leaped in Felimid. even before his mind recognised the likeness. He stared through the rain. A vague bulk stood motionless beneath the dripping trees.
    ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded, wildcat tense.
    ‘One who means no harm. Shall I come forward that you may see me?’
    ‘Yes. Do.’ Felimid cursed his clogged head. He wanted his wits about him, and his wits, at present, were floundering in a quagmire.
    The stranger came ponderously forward. About Felimid’s height. he was heavy of build, even gross. Earth stained his brown wool robe. Thick nail-less fingers with webs of homy skin between them held a rowan staff.
    The other hand reached up to doff a peaked badger-skin hat. Like the stranger’s body, his head was large and heavy. Moisture settled at once on a broad brown hairless pate, glistening.
    His startlingly ugly face held