The Last Song of Taliesin’s Student

Reading time: 8-10 minutes  |  Ages: 6-12  |  Tradition: Welsh  |  Theme: Hope and perseverance-story-for-kids/”>perseverance

In the hills of Cymru, where the mountains hold their faces close to the clouds and the rain comes in sideways off the sea with what can only be described as great personal enthusiasm, there was once a girl who could not sing.

This was remarkable, because in that valley, in that time, everyone could sing. The old men sang while they mended nets. The women sang at the river. The children sang when they walked to school and coming home from school and, if they were particularly inclined, during school itself. Song was as natural as breathing in Cwm Hir, and about as necessary.

But Nest could not sing.

She could produce sounds. She was not entirely mute. But what came out when she tried to make music was something that made dogs tilt their heads uncertainly and caused her mother to say, “Never mind, cariad, you have many other gifts,” in the patient voice of someone who has looked carefully for a thing and not quite found it.

Nest was eleven years old. She had dark eyes and a serious mouth and she loved stories with the specific, hungry love of someone who needs them to make sense of the world. She had walked the same hills every day of her life and named every rock and stream and she could not, for all her love and all her trying, make music.

The bard who came to the valley was called Caradoc ap Rhys, and he was very old and very accomplished and he smelled of the long road. He had a harp with thirty strings and a voice that made the mountains listen. He had traveled, he said, every road in Cymru and several roads that were not strictly in Cymru by any sensible geography.

“I am looking,” he said, at the fire in Nest’s father’s hall, “for a student. Someone who will carry the songs forward after I am gone.”

The young men of the valley sang for him, one by one. They were good singers, most of them – clear-voiced and strong. Caradoc listened to each with courteous attention and said nothing for a long time after.

Nest did not sing. She sat in the shadows by the wall and listened to the bard listen, and she thought about what it must be like to be a carrier of songs.

“None of them,” said the old bard at last.

There was a murmur through the hall.

“Good voices,” he said. “Good technique. But I am not looking for someone who already has the song. I am looking for someone who is still searching for it.”

Nest stepped out of the shadows before she knew she was going to.

“I am searching,” she said.

The hall went very quiet. Everyone knew that Nest could not sing.

Caradoc looked at her for a long time with eyes the grey-blue of mountain water. “Sing for me,” he said.

“I will disappoint you,” she said honestly.

“Sing anyway.”

So she sang. Or tried. What came out was the shape of a song without the music inside it – recognizable as an attempt, kind to nothing, the sound of someone reaching for a thing that wasn’t quite there.

When she finished, the hall waited.

“Come back tomorrow,” said Caradoc. “At dawn.”

He did not take her as his student immediately, or even soon. He made her walk with him through the hills, and he taught her to listen first – to the way wind moved through different valleys, to the intervals between one bird’s calls and the next, to the natural rhythms in water over stone. He taught her that music lives in the world before it lives in a voice, and that you can only give out what you have first taken in.

Nest walked and listened and tried, every morning, to sing what she heard.

The trying was not comfortable. There were mornings when her voice went wrong in new and interesting ways, and the sheep on the hillside moved away, and she felt like crying and sometimes did, quietly, where only the clouds could see.

There were other mornings when something nearly worked – a phrase, a bar, something that felt from the inside like the thing she was reaching for. These were fewer than the bad mornings but they mattered more.

Caradoc never praised too much and never dismissed too quickly. He said: “Again.” He said: “Listen to where the river changes speed – that is the rhythm you are looking for.” He said: “You are trying to sing the word. Sing what the word feels like.”

One morning in spring, six months after she had first stepped out of the shadows in her father’s hall, Nest stood on the hillside above Cwm Hir and looked out over the valley, all green and silver and moving in the morning wind, and she opened her mouth.

What came out was not perfect. It was not the voice of someone who has always known how to sing. It was rougher than that, and more personal – the specific voice of someone who has listened very hard and tried for a very long time and has begun, slowly, to find the note that was always theirs.

But it was true.

Caradoc was standing below her on the path. He had not moved for the length of the song. When it was done, he was quiet for a moment that stretched out long and wide.

“That,” he said, “is a voice.”

“It is still rough,” said Nest.

“All the best voices are rough when they are young,” said the old bard. “Smooth voices are only interesting in glass. In a person they indicate either that they have never struggled, or that they have learned to hide the struggle, which is not the same as overcoming it.”

He handed her the harp.

Not his own harp – a smaller one, her own size, that she had not seen before. She had not even asked for a harp. She was still thinking about voice.

“The songs of Cymru have been waiting a very long time,” said Caradoc. “They don’t want the person who could already sing them. They want the person who had to fight their way to the music. That is you, Nest.”

She held the harp. The wood was warm, slightly, already, as though it had been waiting to be held.

Below them, the valley of Cwm Hir went about its morning in the Welsh way – rain arriving, then leaving, then thinking about arriving again, the streams loud over stone, the grass green as something that intends to remain. Somewhere below, someone was singing while they worked, the old easy habit of a valley that had always known how.

Nest added her voice to it, small and rough and searching and very much her own.

The mountains listened.

It was enough. It was more than enough. It was, in fact, everything.