I rode past a pile of glittering jewels each as large as my head; I did not dare to touch them, for they looked at me with dead eyes. I rode through a river that crackled like glass; Gull would not cross it until I carried her on the saddle before me. I rode under a willow tree that wept blood. I looked up, and there perched a great bird with the face of a fair, sorrowing woman, her long hair flowing down around her yellow, clawed feet.

I heard the music of a harp.

On the seventh day after I left hope behind me at Tintagel, I heard the music of a harp being played by a peerless harper. Never since I was a boy in Lothian and heard my first harper had the music echoed through me so. I heard no singing, no voices but the grunting of the tors, the tittering of the forest; it did not matter. Each note of the harp rang me as if I were riding inside a golden bell. That yearning music—it cried of mortal sorrow, yet by some glorious alchemy it turned sadness to surpassing joy. Love, life, happiness, light after all, the harp sang. The notes soared like larks, like eagles; even the trees listened. I shivered; it was like meeting the Grail.

I rode toward the sound of the music. I had to find the harper. I could not do otherwise.

There in the middle of the tangled wildwood grew a walled garden, like Queen Guinevere’s garden in Camelot but not square; the stones and hedges of this wall stood in a great circle. I rode in—it was so great a garden that one could ride in on horseback. Roses grew as tall as trees there, and fruit trees interlaced like druid vine work into lattices and arches and pavilions, and yew bushes stood in shapes of peacocks, their tails bright with red and blue berries. Fountains of gold rose as tall as castle towers. In every way it was more splendid and fair than any garden I had seen or imagined. And over it all the sweetness of the harp music spread like the perfume of the roses, notes like petals falling.

Then, at the very center of the circular garden, I saw a great spiral cage standing. And in it, a hawk, playing with its beak upon the golden and silver wires that enclosed it as if upon the harp of Taliesin himself.

I had found the harper.

It was so humbling a marvel that I dismounted, and put aside my shield and helm, and left my horse behind. With Gull padding beside me I walked closer, gazing.