Hawk of May Read Online Free PDF Page A

falcon.”
    I wanted to sing. I glanced down and murmured, “You bring me luck. I have to do everything well when you are here, Mother.”
    She laughed. “My! So you have a way with words too, then? I think we should spend more time together, Gwalchmai.”
    I swallowed and nodded. My mother was the wisest and most beautiful woman in all the islands of Britain and Erin. To be allowed to spend time near her was a gift from the gods.
    â€œListen, then,” she said. “I have been talking to Orlamh. He says that you are a fine harper, as good as many bardic students, but more interested in the stories and sweet tunes than in the knowledge involved. It seems to me that it would be a fine thing if you could learn the histories and genealogies without having to know the chants by heart. Would you like to learn to read?”
    My jaw dropped. Reading was the rarest of all skills in the Orcades. The druids had their ogham script, but they taught it to no one but their initiates, and forbade its use for any purpose but memorial inscriptions, saying that what a man memorizes he has for ever, but what he writes down he may easily lose. To learn to read meant to learn Latin, which was spoken in parts of southern Britain, but used as a written language from Erin to Constantinople. In all the Orcades, I believe only my mother could read. The skill is common enough in Britain and, now, in Erin in the monasteries there, but in the Orcades it was regarded as a kind of magic. And now my mother was offering to share her power with me!
    â€œWell?” asked Morgawse.
    â€œI…Yes, yes, very much!” I choked out.
    Morgawse gave a smile of satisfaction, almost, I thought for a moment, of triumph, and nodded. “When you are finished with weapons practice, then, I will give you your first lesson. Come to my room.”
    â€œI’ll come right n…”
    She shook her head. “Come after you have finished with these. Hit the target fifty times for me. The Latin will wait.”
    I hurried with the spears until I realized that hasty throwing would not help me hit the target, and finally got my fifty hits. I raced to the Boys’ House, dropped the spears in their corner—I would have been whipped for leaving them in the yard where they could rust—and ran to my mother’s room.
    The first lesson was a simple one, though it seemed hard to me. First my mother drew out the letters of the alphabet on a wax tablet with the sharp end of a stylus, explaining to me meanwhile what an alphabet was. Then she gave me the tablet and told me to copy the letters. I did this, several times, and she told me which sounds they made. Then she took back the tablet, criticized the way I had drawn the letters, and smoothed over the wax with the blunt end of the stylus, afterwards drawing the letters again. She smiled, then, and handed me the tablet and the stylus, telling me to memorize the letters and come back after weapons practice the next day.
    I ran to Medraut and told him about it, showed him the letter forms, told him what Morgawse had said about my skill with weapons, and jumped for joy all over the stables.
    The rest of the summer was wonderful. I continued my lessons in Latin, rising from the alphabet to groups of syllables to the words they composed, and finally to writing out sentences which my mother set for me. I improved with my weapons to a point where I could hold my own with the other boys and was no longer the butt of every joke. My twelfth birthday came in late May, and I began to dream of when I would be fourteen and able to take up arms, a dream which now I hoped to fulfill. I could become a warrior in my father’s warband, and he would be pleased. The war, though, seemed incredibly remote from the slowly passing summer days, with their long green twilights and the short nights when the stars were like silver shield rivets in the soft sky. But my mother listened tensely to the reports