[wotd challenge] #3
As so many of the misadventures of our kind do, it started with ennui.
Mine, hers-- a bit of both... It was my boredom with court that had me in the uncouth north, off in the disreputable moors and crags, to first meet Thomas.
Thomas! Thomas of Ercildoun, Thomas Rhymer, True Thomas. Idiot. Charming in his way, but really.
I met Thomas on a Sunday morning bright and bold as you could hope for, bonny summer skies and stiff wind that bore the sound of his luting to me. It wasn't bad playing, either-- for a human. So I made my merry (merrie, in those days) way over to the lad, popped up over a hedge, and said a good day to you, Tommy Rymour, that's a fine sweet sound you're drawing from her, now place your hands just as I show you and see how you like the singing of her now.
Why thank you kindly, sirrah (he said), I do like the sound of her, pray show me more.
So I did.
It was pleasant. He was a quick and eager student, and easy to awe where those at court were bored and boring. Ten years I taught Tommy to harp and sing, to pluck and fret, out on the wild Scottish moors. I shouldn't have noticed that it had been years had not Thomas composed a mourning-song for his father and played it for me.
I asked what the man had died of, and Thomas answered me, why, age, of course. A man has three-score years, three-score and ten, if he be strong, and lucky.
And how old are you, Tommy Rymour?
A score and five, friend Hob. I was a lad of five and ten when we did meet.
Ten years? Already? Play it again then, Tommy, the end needs work...
It was her boredom that led me to mention him at all.
Milady's appetite is constant for diversions. Court was, as mentioned, dull then, dull and old and weary; we were in need of a good war to spice things up, but silly me, I gave her Thomas instead.
She said my playing and my poesy wearied her; I asked with some pique if a human would serve her tastes the better; she said one might indeed if any had the skill; I spoke with justifiable if regrettable pride of my Scottish bard of five and twenty.
I shall meet him then, said she, and by such words are men doomed.
There's a ballad. Not Thomas's work. Mine in part, though some bastard named Scott got hold of it centuries later and added and reduced and generally bollixed up my craft. It tells the gist of things-- that milady came on Thomas as he lay beside a river, that she challenged him to kiss her, then swore him to seven years of service. That they forded the river of blood and passed the roads to heaven and to hell.
That she brought him back to Faerie, where, in today's jargon, he was a chart-topper.
He had her favour, which was the sine qua non; to please her was everything at court in those days, unless milord was otherwise inclined. And he had talent, and he had skill (developed by yours truly), and he was a pretty thing, and he was human. Oh, and he was not allowed to speak to any save her, by her command, or he would be 'damned' to stay among us forever.
(The games people played to try and get him to talk!)
I was delighted my own self. Thomas was a joy to have at hand. I could teach him without the interruptions of winters or his relations or mortal needs and so forth. And he wouldn’t age, here; wouldn't go on to two-score and three-score and then to dust. Furthermore, milady was pleased with me for bringing Thomas to her attention.
My good humour over the affair lasted about a month.
Thomas was in demand at all court affairs to serve as minstrel; I was... not. (Though I did gain some malicious pleasure from watching my lords and ladies grand insisting he play them human tunes, and then dancing, solemn in their finery, to songs that had been written to herd sheep.) Thomas was the favorite, the darling, the one looked to for a jest or tale or song. And of course Thomas the one taken to milady's bed.
Irritating, wondering which one you're more jealous of. I'd tumbled my bonny bard a few times under the blue summer sky, but milady doesn't share; if she denied him simple speech to anyone else, you can imagine how she felt about sex.
"What's she like in the sheets then, Tommy?" I asked one day as he was tightening the strings of his lute. Thomas looked up at me with the besotted smile of a fool in love and strummed a complex chord of breathtaking beauty.
"That good, hm?"
His smile broadened, and he bent his head back to his work.
Right, then. I was obviously going to have to kill somebody.
As it turned out, I really didn't have to do very much at all. Milady's own fault, that; there are days I think she is bent on her own destruction. It was an open secret to be sure that milord Auberon was as hornéd as any cuckold to ever labour under the knowledge that his wife fucks other men, but really, there are lines, and allowing herself to conceive by Thomas while Auberon was at campaign... tch.
(Poor bastard. We came home from a year in the field fighting ogres to find the queen in birthing pains for no son of his. Auberon stayed in the courtyard long enough to change our horses and armor, then dragged us off to the territories of the pestiferous goblins and led such a thorough razing that it took three centuries before they dared attempt a raid on Faerie again.)
By the time we returned, the child, a boy-child with his mother's coloring and his father's name, was several years old and the apple of Titania's eye. Auberon quietly smoldered on his throne; I stood nearby and fanned flames. Thomas continued to play for court, dandled his boy on his knee, and looked at the world with the sweet bliss of the ignorant damned.
In those days I abominated him to the point that I mostly wanted to push him over a parapet, but even so I tried once to warn him.
"She'll tire of you, you know."
Thomas ignored me, busily cutting a set of pan-pipes for the sprog. I rolled my eyes and dropped into a seat; Tommy, take two, gravitated instantly in my direction and tugged at my trousers until I sighed and lifted him onto my lap, bouncing him absently as I attempted to speak some sense into his father.
"She will. I've seen it, Tommy. Again and again. She takes a human lover for a spell, and while you're hers she's yours, she'll promise you sky and earth and her eternal amative devotion, and then--" I snapped my fingers, "--like that, she's lost all interest." I turned to the lad and bounced him more energetically on my knee, making wide eyes at him.
"And d'you know what shall happen to your da then, my little tomtit? Why, he ought pray to his own God that he's already out of Faerie, or milord the king-- why yes, that's right, Obbon, except you say Au-ber-on, good boy-- will use your bright and bonny little head as marker for the deep grave they'll put your da in, and if your da is very very lucky? He'll be dead when they do it! Can you smile for your uncle Puck? Oh, there's a good lad! Oi--"
Thomas had stomped over, disgruntled, and swept the boy out of my lap and into his own arms. He glowered at me over his son's shoulder, then pointed at the door. I got to my feet, shaking my head.
"Are you really that arrogant, Thomas? Do you think you mean that much to her?"
In answer, he raised the pipes he was making for the boy and blew one sharp clear note. I am the father of her son.
"You are an idiot," I said, and left.
The teind drew near.
I shall have more cause to speak of that some other time, but the short version, if you do not know, is that, every seven years, due to certain contractual obligations, Faerie gives souls to Hell. We keep humans handy because it saves us the trouble of giving ourselves.
Auberon was all for Thomas as the sacrificial lamb, after I wearied of waiting for the idea to occur to him and pointed it out myself. All of Faerie communally bought popcorn and waited for the fantastic row that our king and queen would have over this.
Milady queen confounds expectations, though, and chose right about then to-- as I had predicted-- tire of him. She still bore him affection, but it was waning; he wasn't worth a prolonged fight with Auberon to keep her harper by her side. So she paid him his wages (truth, the poor bastard!) and sent him home.
(Faerie heaved a sigh of disappointed anti-climax and grumbled about wanting their communal money back.)
I do fondly remember the look of disbelief that graced Tommy's face as she bade him go. Told him so. Idiot.
So he left, and had Thomas been a different sort, and had I not still felt myself unsatisfied, it might have ended there.
But a few months later I was back in the world again, and the sound of a lute caught my ears; no shepherd's song, but a clear summons, a song I'd taught him to call me to come play teacher.
I came, rather in disbelief that he should have the nerve. But then humans think everyone else is at their disposal.
"Well?"
"Hob. Puck." His voice was odd to hear in speech, after so long hearing it only in song. "My friend. My mentor. I need your help."
I snorted and looked him over. "Aye, you seem to at that."
No more of the finery and gems he'd worn in Faerie, or even the plain but well-made clothes he'd had before. He was in rags and tatters, his hair a tangled mat, a five days' beard on his sometime-shapely jaw.
Pity the bard who cannot flatter, swindle, or lie.
I finished my inspection, then shrugged. "I cannot undo her gift to you, and shouldn't if I could, so--"
"No. Not that. Hob, I want my son," he croaked.
I stared in disbelief, then slapped my knee with laughter. "You want your son? Hers too, you fool. You'd steal the little tomtit from her?"
He was gaunt, but his eyes burned at my laughter. "I would. If I had to call down every saint and angel from holy Heaven to aid me, to take my son from that virago, that evil lying creature, that factitious--"
"Bitch?" I smiled. "And the angels would turn you away, True Thomas."
"Then I shall go to the devils," he spat. He shook his head, composing himself, then said, "But I have come to you, Hob. You tried to warn me-- you were still my friend, I see it now, forgive me for not heeding--"
You do see what I mean about his being an idiot? Poor sod thought I had given my warning out of kindness.
"Please, Puck-- help me. I cannot enter the blessed lands on my own."
I paced slowly in midair, my hands behind my back. "You would have me... help you to steal... from the queen of all the realms beyond... her only child. I have seen her order people flayed alive then sent to the salt mines for daring to step on the hem of her gown, and you would have me steal that which she counts precious beyond all the gold of all the kings of all the world?"
"Yes. Yes. Please, Master Hob."
"...oh, all right."
I despised Thomas, but then, I despised milady more.
So we pulled it off. I opened a door or two, from his world into mine, from the outside of the castle to the inside; I arranged that young Thomas should be lost in pleasant dreams and that milady should be elsewhere in a high-stakes game of draughts, and that a swift steed should be waiting. Thomas the elder lifted his sleeping son from the cradle with none the wiser and fled, fled fast and far, back to the lands of sunlight and mortality.
Oh, but the wrath of milady was a thing of beauty.
Ten days of storms! Constant lightning and thunder. She called the wisest and the witchiest to put their craft to work finding where her son had gone, and who had taken him. Had I not troubled myself to lay a few false trails and hide the true one, she would have had him before he regained reality.
As it was, it wasn't long before the wail of the Sidhe was heard across the moors, and Thomas knew that he was hunted.
I rode with the hunt-- I wouldn't have missed it for half the world-- and Thomas led us on a merry chase in the night, the sound of his horse's hooves always ringing just ahead, our own steeds making not a sound.
Again, there are ballads and poems, it's all already been told and I shan't repeat in prose what's better told in verse, even if this bit is harder to find than the first half of the story. Suffice to say we caught him, Thomas-the-wretched, and milady made her way to the monastery where Thomas had hid away his son.
I watched her trade the father for the child; I watched Thomas taken behind the gates; I watched milady curse as she realized the boy had been baptised in the new faith and was forever beyond her reach. So the queen of all the realms beyond returned to Faerie with empty hands and endless anger, and a curse always on her lips from that day forth for any man named Thomas.
Thomas himself lived-- both of them-- but the father was a broken and a beaten man, a shadow of the pretty thing who'd played such songs at court. The son... well, he's a tale of his own, and for some other time.
Auberon knew that someone had engineered the departure of the younger Thomas, and I think he knew that it was me. Titania suspected him, and he never bothered deflecting her suspicions; he only smiled at me, and no doubt considered it my service to him, to have removed the bastard from the court.
And myself?
I won, as I reckon it. Once more first bard and merry-andrew of Faerie (and the one with the rights to the inevitable movie).
But it's best not to let me get bored.
Words: factitious, abominate, sine qua non, pestiferous, virago, ennui, amative
OOC: In the traditional story of Thomas Rhymer, Robin Goodfellow plays no part. The ballad also does not include any mention of Thomas's son or the Sidhe-hunt; these are additions included in the retelling of the story by Mayland Long, in Tea With the Black Dragon, which I highly recommend picking up.
Mine, hers-- a bit of both... It was my boredom with court that had me in the uncouth north, off in the disreputable moors and crags, to first meet Thomas.
Thomas! Thomas of Ercildoun, Thomas Rhymer, True Thomas. Idiot. Charming in his way, but really.
I met Thomas on a Sunday morning bright and bold as you could hope for, bonny summer skies and stiff wind that bore the sound of his luting to me. It wasn't bad playing, either-- for a human. So I made my merry (merrie, in those days) way over to the lad, popped up over a hedge, and said a good day to you, Tommy Rymour, that's a fine sweet sound you're drawing from her, now place your hands just as I show you and see how you like the singing of her now.
Why thank you kindly, sirrah (he said), I do like the sound of her, pray show me more.
So I did.
It was pleasant. He was a quick and eager student, and easy to awe where those at court were bored and boring. Ten years I taught Tommy to harp and sing, to pluck and fret, out on the wild Scottish moors. I shouldn't have noticed that it had been years had not Thomas composed a mourning-song for his father and played it for me.
I asked what the man had died of, and Thomas answered me, why, age, of course. A man has three-score years, three-score and ten, if he be strong, and lucky.
And how old are you, Tommy Rymour?
A score and five, friend Hob. I was a lad of five and ten when we did meet.
Ten years? Already? Play it again then, Tommy, the end needs work...
It was her boredom that led me to mention him at all.
Milady's appetite is constant for diversions. Court was, as mentioned, dull then, dull and old and weary; we were in need of a good war to spice things up, but silly me, I gave her Thomas instead.
She said my playing and my poesy wearied her; I asked with some pique if a human would serve her tastes the better; she said one might indeed if any had the skill; I spoke with justifiable if regrettable pride of my Scottish bard of five and twenty.
I shall meet him then, said she, and by such words are men doomed.
There's a ballad. Not Thomas's work. Mine in part, though some bastard named Scott got hold of it centuries later and added and reduced and generally bollixed up my craft. It tells the gist of things-- that milady came on Thomas as he lay beside a river, that she challenged him to kiss her, then swore him to seven years of service. That they forded the river of blood and passed the roads to heaven and to hell.
That she brought him back to Faerie, where, in today's jargon, he was a chart-topper.
He had her favour, which was the sine qua non; to please her was everything at court in those days, unless milord was otherwise inclined. And he had talent, and he had skill (developed by yours truly), and he was a pretty thing, and he was human. Oh, and he was not allowed to speak to any save her, by her command, or he would be 'damned' to stay among us forever.
(The games people played to try and get him to talk!)
I was delighted my own self. Thomas was a joy to have at hand. I could teach him without the interruptions of winters or his relations or mortal needs and so forth. And he wouldn’t age, here; wouldn't go on to two-score and three-score and then to dust. Furthermore, milady was pleased with me for bringing Thomas to her attention.
My good humour over the affair lasted about a month.
Thomas was in demand at all court affairs to serve as minstrel; I was... not. (Though I did gain some malicious pleasure from watching my lords and ladies grand insisting he play them human tunes, and then dancing, solemn in their finery, to songs that had been written to herd sheep.) Thomas was the favorite, the darling, the one looked to for a jest or tale or song. And of course Thomas the one taken to milady's bed.
Irritating, wondering which one you're more jealous of. I'd tumbled my bonny bard a few times under the blue summer sky, but milady doesn't share; if she denied him simple speech to anyone else, you can imagine how she felt about sex.
"What's she like in the sheets then, Tommy?" I asked one day as he was tightening the strings of his lute. Thomas looked up at me with the besotted smile of a fool in love and strummed a complex chord of breathtaking beauty.
"That good, hm?"
His smile broadened, and he bent his head back to his work.
Right, then. I was obviously going to have to kill somebody.
As it turned out, I really didn't have to do very much at all. Milady's own fault, that; there are days I think she is bent on her own destruction. It was an open secret to be sure that milord Auberon was as hornéd as any cuckold to ever labour under the knowledge that his wife fucks other men, but really, there are lines, and allowing herself to conceive by Thomas while Auberon was at campaign... tch.
(Poor bastard. We came home from a year in the field fighting ogres to find the queen in birthing pains for no son of his. Auberon stayed in the courtyard long enough to change our horses and armor, then dragged us off to the territories of the pestiferous goblins and led such a thorough razing that it took three centuries before they dared attempt a raid on Faerie again.)
By the time we returned, the child, a boy-child with his mother's coloring and his father's name, was several years old and the apple of Titania's eye. Auberon quietly smoldered on his throne; I stood nearby and fanned flames. Thomas continued to play for court, dandled his boy on his knee, and looked at the world with the sweet bliss of the ignorant damned.
In those days I abominated him to the point that I mostly wanted to push him over a parapet, but even so I tried once to warn him.
"She'll tire of you, you know."
Thomas ignored me, busily cutting a set of pan-pipes for the sprog. I rolled my eyes and dropped into a seat; Tommy, take two, gravitated instantly in my direction and tugged at my trousers until I sighed and lifted him onto my lap, bouncing him absently as I attempted to speak some sense into his father.
"She will. I've seen it, Tommy. Again and again. She takes a human lover for a spell, and while you're hers she's yours, she'll promise you sky and earth and her eternal amative devotion, and then--" I snapped my fingers, "--like that, she's lost all interest." I turned to the lad and bounced him more energetically on my knee, making wide eyes at him.
"And d'you know what shall happen to your da then, my little tomtit? Why, he ought pray to his own God that he's already out of Faerie, or milord the king-- why yes, that's right, Obbon, except you say Au-ber-on, good boy-- will use your bright and bonny little head as marker for the deep grave they'll put your da in, and if your da is very very lucky? He'll be dead when they do it! Can you smile for your uncle Puck? Oh, there's a good lad! Oi--"
Thomas had stomped over, disgruntled, and swept the boy out of my lap and into his own arms. He glowered at me over his son's shoulder, then pointed at the door. I got to my feet, shaking my head.
"Are you really that arrogant, Thomas? Do you think you mean that much to her?"
In answer, he raised the pipes he was making for the boy and blew one sharp clear note. I am the father of her son.
"You are an idiot," I said, and left.
The teind drew near.
I shall have more cause to speak of that some other time, but the short version, if you do not know, is that, every seven years, due to certain contractual obligations, Faerie gives souls to Hell. We keep humans handy because it saves us the trouble of giving ourselves.
Auberon was all for Thomas as the sacrificial lamb, after I wearied of waiting for the idea to occur to him and pointed it out myself. All of Faerie communally bought popcorn and waited for the fantastic row that our king and queen would have over this.
Milady queen confounds expectations, though, and chose right about then to-- as I had predicted-- tire of him. She still bore him affection, but it was waning; he wasn't worth a prolonged fight with Auberon to keep her harper by her side. So she paid him his wages (truth, the poor bastard!) and sent him home.
(Faerie heaved a sigh of disappointed anti-climax and grumbled about wanting their communal money back.)
I do fondly remember the look of disbelief that graced Tommy's face as she bade him go. Told him so. Idiot.
So he left, and had Thomas been a different sort, and had I not still felt myself unsatisfied, it might have ended there.
But a few months later I was back in the world again, and the sound of a lute caught my ears; no shepherd's song, but a clear summons, a song I'd taught him to call me to come play teacher.
I came, rather in disbelief that he should have the nerve. But then humans think everyone else is at their disposal.
"Well?"
"Hob. Puck." His voice was odd to hear in speech, after so long hearing it only in song. "My friend. My mentor. I need your help."
I snorted and looked him over. "Aye, you seem to at that."
No more of the finery and gems he'd worn in Faerie, or even the plain but well-made clothes he'd had before. He was in rags and tatters, his hair a tangled mat, a five days' beard on his sometime-shapely jaw.
Pity the bard who cannot flatter, swindle, or lie.
I finished my inspection, then shrugged. "I cannot undo her gift to you, and shouldn't if I could, so--"
"No. Not that. Hob, I want my son," he croaked.
I stared in disbelief, then slapped my knee with laughter. "You want your son? Hers too, you fool. You'd steal the little tomtit from her?"
He was gaunt, but his eyes burned at my laughter. "I would. If I had to call down every saint and angel from holy Heaven to aid me, to take my son from that virago, that evil lying creature, that factitious--"
"Bitch?" I smiled. "And the angels would turn you away, True Thomas."
"Then I shall go to the devils," he spat. He shook his head, composing himself, then said, "But I have come to you, Hob. You tried to warn me-- you were still my friend, I see it now, forgive me for not heeding--"
You do see what I mean about his being an idiot? Poor sod thought I had given my warning out of kindness.
"Please, Puck-- help me. I cannot enter the blessed lands on my own."
I paced slowly in midair, my hands behind my back. "You would have me... help you to steal... from the queen of all the realms beyond... her only child. I have seen her order people flayed alive then sent to the salt mines for daring to step on the hem of her gown, and you would have me steal that which she counts precious beyond all the gold of all the kings of all the world?"
"Yes. Yes. Please, Master Hob."
"...oh, all right."
I despised Thomas, but then, I despised milady more.
So we pulled it off. I opened a door or two, from his world into mine, from the outside of the castle to the inside; I arranged that young Thomas should be lost in pleasant dreams and that milady should be elsewhere in a high-stakes game of draughts, and that a swift steed should be waiting. Thomas the elder lifted his sleeping son from the cradle with none the wiser and fled, fled fast and far, back to the lands of sunlight and mortality.
Oh, but the wrath of milady was a thing of beauty.
Ten days of storms! Constant lightning and thunder. She called the wisest and the witchiest to put their craft to work finding where her son had gone, and who had taken him. Had I not troubled myself to lay a few false trails and hide the true one, she would have had him before he regained reality.
As it was, it wasn't long before the wail of the Sidhe was heard across the moors, and Thomas knew that he was hunted.
I rode with the hunt-- I wouldn't have missed it for half the world-- and Thomas led us on a merry chase in the night, the sound of his horse's hooves always ringing just ahead, our own steeds making not a sound.
Again, there are ballads and poems, it's all already been told and I shan't repeat in prose what's better told in verse, even if this bit is harder to find than the first half of the story. Suffice to say we caught him, Thomas-the-wretched, and milady made her way to the monastery where Thomas had hid away his son.
I watched her trade the father for the child; I watched Thomas taken behind the gates; I watched milady curse as she realized the boy had been baptised in the new faith and was forever beyond her reach. So the queen of all the realms beyond returned to Faerie with empty hands and endless anger, and a curse always on her lips from that day forth for any man named Thomas.
Thomas himself lived-- both of them-- but the father was a broken and a beaten man, a shadow of the pretty thing who'd played such songs at court. The son... well, he's a tale of his own, and for some other time.
Auberon knew that someone had engineered the departure of the younger Thomas, and I think he knew that it was me. Titania suspected him, and he never bothered deflecting her suspicions; he only smiled at me, and no doubt considered it my service to him, to have removed the bastard from the court.
And myself?
I won, as I reckon it. Once more first bard and merry-andrew of Faerie (and the one with the rights to the inevitable movie).
But it's best not to let me get bored.
Words: factitious, abominate, sine qua non, pestiferous, virago, ennui, amative
OOC: In the traditional story of Thomas Rhymer, Robin Goodfellow plays no part. The ballad also does not include any mention of Thomas's son or the Sidhe-hunt; these are additions included in the retelling of the story by Mayland Long, in Tea With the Black Dragon, which I highly recommend picking up.