What is it that earns the title ‘Talesman’?
Bardelys looked at his hands.
They were stained with sap and juice from the weeds he had been pulling. His fingernails were worn to the quick, and ragged. The fingers were broad and coarse. They were the hands of any worker in the fields.
He wondered whether a man was what he did. If so, then his nature must change as he went through life. A nursling, a student, an apprentice, a lover, a scapegrace, a wanderer. Some men, Bardelys considered, took up one trade and held to it all their lives, while others went from trade to trade. A seaman, now, might hole up in a port and work at some tasks for three or four years before he took to the sea again. But a seaman was a seaman for all his life in spite of this.
What about a talesman?
Once upon a time, Bardelys had been a talesman. It was his trade by training and the great love of his life. He loved telling tales, dreaming on them and shaping them. He loved this more than he had loved any of the women who had come and gone from his life. Because he loved it, and only left it to return to it, did that mean he was a talesman now and forever, the way a seaman belonged to the sea? There was a difference, though. Everyone knew a seaman on sight. They smelled of the sea, they marked their bodies with signs of the sea, they swore sea-dogs’ oaths, their skin was dark and leathery from the brine and the sun that blazes upon the mirroring waters. A talesman, on the other hand, had no look, and if he didn’t carry with him the tools of his trade or wear any dress that bespoke him of the brotherhood, no one would know what he was.
If men didn’t take him for a talesman, and he didn’t tell tales, was Bardelys not a talesman any longer?
The strange part of the riddle, he thought as he bent down again and worked his hoe, was that he felt most like a talesman when he wasn’t telling tales. It bit him like homesickness, the feeling of his calling, and when he looked at his hands, he didn’t think they were farmer’s hands, but made for the shaping of words and magic in the hearts of an audience. He felt somehow that even though it had been so long since he had climbed onto a barrel or plank before a crowd in the marketplace, he knew better how to make a tale than he had long ago. He felt that working in the earth had given it to him, that dealing with the other men in the fields, and hearing their stories, and watching the hawks float high above the fresh-cut fields, and the sparrows darting in the evening, swooping up insects out of thin air, that the knowledge of shaping a tale had grown in him, as though these common things were part of a lifelong apprenticeship.
And yet his heart told him plainly, No. It wasn’t true at all, and the only way a man learned his trade was by working it, let him be a potter or cooper or talesman, it made no difference there. He, Bardelys, only felt he had grown in his trade because he knew no better — because he hadn’t felt the shame of trying to tell a well-shaped tale and failing, of losing his audience, boring them, hearing stony silence where the laughter should be, or a chortle where sobs and sighs should come. All he had done of late was to talk in the way of common things, and tell shortly of the day’s happenings, with a flourish here or there, such that the other toilers didn’t know how to do. And because he judged himself alongside them, his only companions for some years now, he judged himself better than he was.
Of late, Bardelys thought, taking out his stone to sharpen the hoe, and feeling the heat of the sun on his back, the dreams had come to him more strongly. He felt the old longing, to speak, to caper, to entertain. It taunted him — daunted him as well, so that though he toyed in his heart with taking it up again, and trying to shape some simple tale, or to pick up again one of the threads he had been working on for years now, unfinished fragments with only the promise of what he had wanted them to be, he never went so far as to do it. Not yet. And yet, was not the whisper growing louder, and the longing more intense?
A call came from up the valley. Bardelys turned to see the old man waving, calling him to the house. The other men were already at the valley’s head, and the sun, Bardelys noticed, had fallen already below the naked brown shoulder of the hill.
He shouldered his hoe and followed after the old man.
Maybe tomorrow he would take up one of those threads, and try to finish it while he worked the earth.
Or maybe the day after.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 26, 2008)
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