Gone With The Harp's Echo by Narya

Chapter 3

After graduating, Robin travelled for a while in his own world. He spent a summer drifting around Greece, exploring Olympia and Kameiros; he wandered the streets of Rome, and ate oranges above the Phoenician tombs of Tangiers, but found no more doorways and portals into other realms.

Eventually he settled in Taunton, and took a job with a firm of chartered accountants. It was not the high flying career he suspected his mother had wanted for him when he obtained his place at Oxford, but the work was undemanding and the people were kind, and he had time in the evenings and weekends for reading, and exploring, and spending time with his friends. May found work at a nearby mental health trust, and soon their routine felt much as it had at Oxford, though the days had lost the magical cast lent by the old-gold stone and the ancient soul of their university city, and worries such as bills and deadlines peppered their peace more often than they would like.

As time wore on, Robin found more and more that the memories of his travels grew faint. He knew they had happened, but could no longer recall with precision the feeling of the glass-hard lake under his hands, where fire-creatures shone in the dark, reedy depths, nor remember the taste of Myrrmyki feasts, or what the centaurs had argued under the pair of twin suns. Sometimes, when the wind blew the right way or a particular light broke through the clouds, something would come to him sharp as a blade – a sense of clarity and intoxication at once, and a memory of peace and belonging – and then it would pass, and he'd wonder what it was he had glimpsed or recalled.

“Do you ever feel like you might have gone wrong somewhere, and not realised it?” he asked his flatmate, Laurie, one evening.

Laurie looked up from the sofa by the window, where he was elegantly sprawled with his guitar. “What do you mean?”

“Only that...perhaps somewhere, long ago, I made a choice, and at the time I didn't know I was making it. And now I'm afraid that it wasn't the right one.”

His flatmate smiled – a beautiful thing, Robin thought. When it caught him unawares it had the same effect as a cool western wind, or a thin beam of sunlight striking the sea; deep in his soul something would stir, and for a moment the world would stand still. “I've gone wrong plenty of times in my life,” Laurie replied. “Usually I've known it, but not always. Sometimes we choose what we think is best, and it's only years later that we realise we were wrong.”

“Mm.” Robin sighed and closed his eyes, listening to the gentle twang of the music. “What do you do about it?”

Laurie paused halfway through a chord. “Walk on. There is usually nothing else that I can do.”

It seemed strange to ask Laurie for life advice in this way; Robin suspected that only a few years separated them in age, though he wasn't entirely sure. They had known each other in a vague sort of way at Oxford, but they hadn't been friends, not then. Robin had been surprised when Laurie – enchanting, beautiful, enigmatic – had answered his advertisement for a flatmate. He had assumed that, as an All Souls fellow, Laurie would go on to make academic history. The idea that he might want to settle down as a freelance musician in Somerset seemed somewhat unlikely, though there was no question that he was talented. When he played the guitar – or the piano, or hand-harp – Robin felt the same yearning sweetness he knew when he tried to recall what it had been like to walk between worlds.

Now he stared at the scars on Laurie's right hand, as he sometimes did when his friend wasn't looking.

What is it that you can't or won't say?

Laurie looked up, and his smile widened. “What's brought this on?”

“I wish I knew.” Robin got to his feet and stretched. “I'm going out for a while. Don't wait up for me.”

“Take care.”

Robin paused. Was that a warning, he wondered? It seemed somehow heavier than that phrase often did – but perhaps that was simply the music that ran beneath Laurie's voice.

As he unlocked the front door, his friend began to sing.

“The Gulls of Balar
They fly very far
From Tol Ciriyar
To glad Brithombar...”

It was cheerful enough, but Robin felt the familiar pull under his ribs as the syllables rolled and rang through the hall – a sense of stories untold, and a long-vanished past.

Chapter End Notes

'The Gulls of Balar' is a fictional piece of Hobbit-poetry written by Lferion, and borrowed with permission.