In the Hills of Emerie by Himring

Chapter 1: Mouth Music

Young Ancalime sits and thinks about music and other things.

Warnings for dysfunctional family.

Ancalime sat half-hidden in a dell of the green hills. There were sheep droppings and the sound of faint baas of sheep, from a certain distance, but most of the flock was out of sight. Above, a skylark rose in the clear air, its liquid warble seeming now closer, now farther away.

Ancalime was singing to her doll Nuneth, making mouth music, the way the shepherdesses did, when there was no piper around for them to dance to his music. Nuneth, the doll, was named after her grandmother, because she had been her grandmother’s present and because the many small grey braids reminded Ancalime of how her grandmother wore her hair. Maybe that was how they did it in the Westlands or maybe it was her grandmother’s personal style. Ancalime had seen her grandmother once, when she had visited, but Mother and Grandmother had had words and Nuneth had not come to Emerie since. Ancalime had been rather indignant at the crushing hug Nuneth had inflicted on her as soon as they met, without asking first, but afterwards she regretted her instinctive protest, a bit, when she realized she would not be hugged that way again. Ever since then Erendis had intercepted any letters from Nuneth to Ancalime, reading only selected bits, and Ancalime had been afraid she would not be permitted to have the doll her grandmother sent.

But something in Erendis had softened at the sight of the doll, perhaps precisely because she was not life-like, with her paddle-like body and black-and-brown markings, less realistic than the well-mannered princess doll that grandmother Almarian had given her, which hadn’t quite survived the contempt that Erendis poured on it and sat neglected in a corner in Ancalime’s room.

‘I had a doll like that myself, once,’ Erendis said, holding the paddle-like body almost tenderly, before passing it to her daughter.

And so Nuneth had become Ancalime’s doll and companion on all ventures, and now she was the admiring audience as Ancalime practised mouth music, the way she had heard Zamin and the others do it. Ancalime feared that Nuneth was being too uncritical. It didn’t sound quite right.

What a stupid custom this was anyway! Why was it “simply not done” for a woman to play when there was no man around to do so? In fact, why should a woman not play, if she wanted to, even if a man was around?

One would expect her mother to have sharp words to say about this custom, the way she sometimes talked about other customs that favoured men, but Erendis had never objected to it, as far as Ancalime knew. Probably that was because this particular custom suited her mother down to the ground. She didn’t even encourage singing, in the white house, not if it was louder than a hum.

Ancalime sighed.

‘When I am Queen, Nuneth, I will have a band of pipers and they will all be women.’

Except, she thought, she actually liked the sound of mouth music. Sometimes she liked it better than the sound of pipes or a fiddle.

‘When I am Queen, Nuneth, I will have a band of pipers and another band of women who make mouth music for me!’

Chapter End Notes

Outside Arda, mouth music is a Scottish and Irish Gaelic style of traditional singing, sometimes said to have developed because people were too poor to own instruments or because bagpipes were banned. Here is a sample from YouTube, performed by Elisabeth Kaplan of Quadriga Consort.