Such songs had sent a thousand singers to their death already.

And the song which dogged his aching steps and begged him pleadingly to sing it was completely unfamiliar.

Only the stars and mountains knew it. But they were old. And man was new, and chained to simple, useless rhymes; thus he could not understand the majesty that settled down upon him.

But daily now it played upon his heart and swept his soul, until the joy exploded his awareness—crying near the edge of sanity, “Sing … sing … S I N G!”

II

It is strange how oftentimes the air speaks.

We are sane as long as we hear voices when there are none.

We are insane when we hear nothing and worse we are deaf.

He worked the wood and drove the pegs methodically.

The shavings from the adze piled high upon the floor.

“Earthmaker, full of mercy,” he said, when evening had come, “I am a tradesman!”

“No,” said the silent air, not a tradesman—a troubadour instead!”

“A tradesman!” he said firmly as he smashed his mallet on the vise.

“A troubadour!” the silence thundered back.

III

Two artists met one time within a little wood. Each brought his finest painting stroked by his complete uniqueness. When each revealed his canvas to the other—they were identical.

So once in every solar system there are two fingerprints alike.

But only once.

His seeming madness made the music play a hundred times more loudly than before.

It lured him from his highland home.

He left the mallet broken on the vise and walked away.

Never had he been the way he walked, and yet his feet knew every step. He could not cease to marvel how they moved his body forward through the mist of circumstances which he vaguely knew by name.

His naked feet intrigued him, for they moved with purpose which his mind had not yet measured. Besides they each one wore a curious scar of some wound as yet unopened; yet they had been there long before his birth. What twist of meaning had Earthmaker given him, to scar his feet before he ever walked?

From the hills, he walked ever downward to the valley miles below.

Down, down, down—until the vegetation thickened into shrubs, and the desert gave way to river jungles.

And there where water lapped at his fatigue, he heard a singer, singing his compelling carols to the empty air.

The tradesman knew that it was an earth song, for it was different from the Star-Song which begged him be its singer—yet somehow like it.

The River Singer finished and they walked into the trees.

“Are you the Troubadour, who knows the Ancient Star-Song?” the tradesman softly asked.

“No, you are the Great Troubadour for whom the songless world, so long has waited,” the River Singer said. “Sing, for many years now, I have hungered to hear the Ancient Star-Song …”

“I am a tradesman only …”

Then the River Singer waded out into the water and beckoned with his hand. Slowly the tradesman followed.