Being a Green Mother Read Online Free PDF

to be like that, only much, much more. The Song of the Morning is just one of the five majorSongs of Nature, or perhaps one aspect of the whole, while the Llano
is
the whole. It is the ultimate in music, the song for which all Gypsies long, and from which all Gypsies take their inspiration, however poorly they understand it. When we die, we hope to join the province of the Llano and listen to it and play it for eternity.” He glanced around. “What do the rest of you know?”
    A young woman, a dancer, spoke up. “I heard a tale of the Llano, I know not if it be true, but I think it is. It is of a young woman, a Gypsy like me, who loved a mundane prince, but he would pay her no mind at all unless she gave up her band and her wandering and settled forever in his castle, and that would have killed her, for no Gypsy can survive such confinement. But she knew she would die, too, if she did not possess him. So she went to his castle and stood outside the turret where he stood, and she sang him a piece of the Llano. And he came down from that tower, mounted his fine horse, rode out, picked her up, and rode to her band, and he married her and joined the Gypsies, and their love was forever, because of the Llano.”
    Orb listened, entranced. What a song that must be, if just a little piece of it could do that!
    Now an old man spoke. “I know a tale of the Llano. A Gypsy man like me was caught by the mundanes and sentenced to be hanged for stealing, when he had only pursued his normal way of life. Seeing that they refused to understand that he had taken the bread only to feed himself and his family, and knowing that no help was close by, he gave himself up for lost. But then he remembered a bit of the Llano he had heard once years ago, and now the melody returned to him clearly. And as they laid the noose about his neck, he sang that fragment. And they took away the noose, unbound his hands, set him free, and gave him money, too, because of the Llano.”
    Orb liked that story, too. She wondered if the Llano could enable her to escape punishment when she did something wrong. In a way it had already, when she had avoided trouble by explaining about the Song of the Morning to her father.
    A child spoke. “I know a tale of the Llano, too. A child like me was out in the forest gathering berries, and a big old wild beast, I don’t know what it was, maybe a wolf or a mountain lion or a dragon or something, it came and wasgoing to eat him up ’cause it was hungry, and the boy was scared stiff, but he remembered a bit of the Llano and he sang it, and that beast calmed right down and became his pet instead, because of the Llano.”
    Taming a wild beast with a song? Orb liked that, too.
    The Gypsy leader looked around the group, but no other person spoke. “It seems that’s as much as we know about the Llano,” he said. “It is very little, I know, but if we knew how to find it, we would be seeking it for ourselves and not dallying here in the swamp. Maybe you, if you can hear the Song of the Morning, will someday hear the rest of it. We know of these Songs of Nature, but few of us can actually hear them. I was adopted by the Raggle-Taggle tribe because I could hear the voices and songs of the natural ones.”
    “I guess it’s enough,” Orb said, mollified. The hamadryad was silent, so the Gypsies moved away. In a moment the entire band was gone.
    “But is any of that true?” Luna inquired when they were back in the tree. “Maybe they made it all up.”
    “They adapted it,” the dryad said, and Orb translated, as Luna still could not hear her. “The originals may not have been Gypsies, but probably the episodes happened. The Llano is said to be the ultimate in music. I did not believe in it, but maybe I was wrong. If only we hamadryads knew it, we could protect our trees from the depredations of man.”
    They worked some more on Orb’s music, but in only a moment, it seemed, Niobe was back, and the session was over. By common