Displaced

Chapter 9

Sigurd plucked lovingly at the strings of his oud and listened to the clear notes as they sounded out in the silence of the room.

The instrument was Sigurd's favourite possession, and as far as he knew, the only one of its kind in Kattegat. Bought from a trader at the market several years earlier, he had taught himself to play by a process of trial and error, by listening to the music that others played, remembering the sound of the notes, and trying it for himself until it sounded right.

He was proud of himself for that. He was proud of what he could do with a piece of wood and a set of strings. Music was the one thing he had that was his, and his alone; the one thing that made him unique, made him stand out among his brothers. It was the one thing that was guaranteed to lift his spirits, no matter what else might be happening in his life.

Although, he wasn't sure it was going to work this time...

He looked down at fingernails still encrusted with dirt from the journey home the day before. He looked at hands that were not his own, with rough skin and calluses from Ivar using them to drag himself around. They were not the hands of a musician.

He ached everywhere; not just his legs, but also in his arms and his shoulders, his back and his neck. Even his head ached, throbbing as though he had spent the night before drinking and singing until the early hours instead of going to bed almost immediately after dinner.

Getting out of bed that morning had been an effort, and one that he already regretted, but he had had no choice in the matter. Once he had awkwardly taken care of nature's call, he had been unable to get back into bed. He had given up after the third or fourth attempt.

One thing was for certain, he was never going to laugh again when he watched Ivar struggle to do something.

He sat on the floor, in a corner of the hall, leaning his back against two walls simultaneously for support. His – Ivar's – legs rested straight out ahead of him, still bound by the leather straps that he had not bothered to remove before bed. He took a deep breath, and tried to block out everything that he was feeling and concentrate only on the instrument in his hands.

He paid close attention to the weight of it, to the way that the strings felt under the tips of his fingers, and the subtle vibrations from the strings that were transmitted through the wood as he held it in his hands. It felt familiar, but unfamiliar at the same time, almost as though he were playing a new instrument, one with subtly different dimensions that resulted in him missing strings and hitting wrong notes.

He very deliberately did not think about the fact that it was the hands he was using to play that were different. He pushed that fact to the very back of his mind, and concentrated instead on what he was doing.

He took his unfamiliar fingers through the motions of playing a series of basic notes, first forward, and then backward. He repeated the sequence again, increasing in speed as he did. As his confidence began to grow, and as his fingers became used to the size and shape of the instrument, he found that he could look away without missing notes. He allowed his eyes to close, and played the sequence again, first forward, and then backward. The notes came so quickly now that they almost tripped over one another as the fingers of one hand plucked the strings, while the other slipped expertly up and down the fretless board to control the notes.

As he played, the world around him melted away, lost in the familiarity of the music; the act of creation. For a perfect, blissful moment, nothing existed but himself, the oud, and the music that he was putting out into the world.

When he was confident that he could play, he switched from the scales to a familiar tune, one of the first that he had learned to play all the way through, and still one of his favourites. With fingers moving almost independently of thought, he hummed the words to the old song under his breath as he played, relaxing into the familiar act of making music.