Finbar was very ill. This time, he thought, he’s not going to get out of it. In the past two years he had been frequently sick, mainly had stomach aches sometimes accompanied with fever. As time went by it became worse, and he was going through attacks which, with their passing, left him feeling worn out, lifeless, with no energy to do anything.
But this attack seemed to take longer, would not pass after the initial day or two. He was lucky not to have had it when he was alone on the road by himself, where no one was to care for him. He had already been two days in the village before it occurred, entertaining the villagers with his stories and songs. They had fallen in love with them, as usual, and were ready to take care of him when he was taken ill.
The Minstrel woke up from a disturbed sleep, burning and shivering with high temperature, his body twisting following wave after wave of reccurring pains. The people of the house the Minstrel was staying at took turns in looking after him, putting cold poltices on his head, washing and trying to feed him at need.
“You’re so good to me, Martha,” he whispered on one such occasion to the face peering at him for a moment out of the thick fog, in which his mind had been swimming; he had to make an effort to give the right name to the face. It was a good face though not particularly pretty, round and white like the Moon, the eyes shining at him almost like silver. Their goodness had reminded him of his elder sister, who had taken care of him as a child. He was back now innumerable years, to the time he had taken advantage of a slight cold so that Ronna would spoil him, and he would avoid going out for his regular chore – herding the couple of cows she had managed to save for the family. Hers was not a light job, after their father had left the family never to return, and their mother always ill, especially in her head. It was Ronna who had taken care of the rest of the family – some five or six children, he could not remember now – as well as the house and the farm. It was lucky for them their elder sister was the person she was.
Finbar did not dislike herding the cows; actually, it was his favorite chore, as it enabled him to roam the wild pastures, at least while the weather was fine with no rain or snow. It allowed him the freedom he had yearned for so much, before he upped and ran away to become a minstrel. He had loved his elder sister, and was even ready to take her with him; but at that time she was already married, with one child and another on the way. And, anyway, her sense of responsibility had always been too great to ever abandon those who were dependent on her.
It was Aile who would have gone with him, if she could. She was two years younger than him, pretty and wild, her body still as flat as a boy’s, unlike the gentle, round-bodied Ronna. As much as Finbar liked Ronna best of all his siblings, Aile liked Finbar best; she had always attached herself to him, neglecting her own chores in order to accompany him to pasture, telling him her imaginary stories. Indeed, she could have been a minstrel herself, as good as he had ever been! Why couldn’t they run together, she would say, roam the roads, visit the villages, sing and tell their tales? She had so many of them, the product of her weird brain!
“Girls do not roam the roads,” he used to laugh at her.
“I’ll dress as a boy,” she argued – her arguments had always been so rational, even when they had no sense at all.
Poor Aile! She fell ill that memorable summer, even as his own plans to run away were taking shape. She raved in her fever, spoke non-stop about wandering in the fields, busy doing what she liked best – gathering little kids, with two or three adults joining them for a lark; they would do it underhand, ashamed of being attracted to a young girl’s follies – granting them a taste of her made up fairytales. Finbar would have stayed behind when Aile fell ill, he did not want to leave before she got better; but she never did, and her little grave was one of the thing he had left behind, one of the memories for ever coming back to haunt him, and one of the sources for his never ending tales.
Martha came and put another cold compress on his feverish head, and the sick Minstrel felt again a touch of his elder sister’s hand. He loved Ronna so much! Sometimes, while growing up, it might have been the kind of love forbidden between sister and brother. He remembered Ronna blossoming into womanhood, getting rounder every day, her body filling up in various places, her breasts forming into two eye-piercing fruits – those forbidden fruits from the Garden of Eden! How did he yearn to cup them in his palm, kiss the full lips, interlace his legs with hers… In a strange way, the burning fever flared his withered loins, of which he had not made use for years…
As Martha was bending over him, he stared at the image growing before his eyes, the woman thinning up, her body meandering around his in a snake-like shape, her head elongated and her mouth opening to reveal a pair of fangs.
“Who are you?” Finbar asked, shivering with cold and fear.
“Don’t you know me?” it hissed at him; “don’t you recognize the figure of Death of Sins that prevented you from sleeping with your sister?”
“You are Sinful Death!” the Minstrel cried weakly in his alarm, then mustered his courage and replied, defiantly, “But I have never committed that sin! I never slept with Ronna!”
“Sometimes thoughts are as bad as deeds,” the snake uttered, “I’ve come to take you to the place from which you can never return!”
Finbar’s head fell back on the pillow and he shut his eyes. “I don’t care, everyone else is dead, anyway…”
“No,” hissed the snake, gradually retreating back into the womanly shape of Martha; “I’ll let you be this time, because you don’t care enough for life anymore…”
“What are you saying, Minstrel?” Martha said, full of concern. But Finbar fell back into his disturbed, feverish sleep, to the wild dreams that were pestering him.
This time, the image of young Ronna was replaced by that of his mother, always sick, sometimes a little mad. The birth of each child made her more and more ill, until her husband could take it no more and took off, and she herself sunk into a mental and physical depression. By the time she reached fourty, she looked like an old, crazy hag, who sometimes lay on her bed for days on end, and other times roamed the village aimlessly, muttering crazy sayings no one could understand.
That was how it looked to Finbar now, in his feverish dream. Suddenly, it was a bright, sunny day and he saw himself as a boy of eleven, half watching the two cows in the pasture, half looking away at the green hills surrounding the village, with dots of flowers strewn in them. A song stirred in his mind and he was humming to himself, when a shriek pierced his ears. He turned to look and saw that hag, his mother, dancing wildly outside the village, her arms spread wide to her sides. Under the tatters she wore he could see parts of her thin, wrinkled body, and as usual he felt ashamed of her appearance. He started walking in her direction when she began to transform. He body got thinner and thinner, shedding parts of flesh together with the scant garments covering it; from under it, bones peeped out, taking a greater and greater part of the body until nothing but a skeleton was left, dancing on the green hills. The boy Finbar stood still, sacred out of his wits to the sight. The skeleton got gradually nearer to him, until it stood in front of him.
“Hi, Finbar,” it said in a grating voice, “leave these miserable animals; you’re coming home with me, now.”
“Who are you? What have you done with my mother?” asked Finbar, his voice shaking.
Bursting out with a horrible laughter, the skeleton replied, “You know me, Finbar, I am Mother Death!”
“You are not My Mother!” he shouted back, his whole body shuddering with fear and rage. “Go away!”
Laughing and shouting, the skeleton started another dance around Finbar, its bones rattling, threatening to fall apart. Finbar, feeling sick, raised the long stick he always used to chase the cows with, and shook it toward the aparition. “Go away! Go away!” he cried, his voice full of tears of terror and sadness.
“Minstrel, Minstrel,” a soft voice penetrated his dream, shaking him gently out of his terror. He opened his eyes and saw Becca, Martha’s daughter, her lovely young face bending over him, half-covered by a halo of golden-silver hair. “Have you had a bad dream? It must be the fever. Here, I brought you some soup the healing woman made for you. I’ll help you drink it and it will revive you.”
She helped him to a half-sitting position, took the wooden bowl in her hand and brought the wooden spoon to his mouth. But his throat burned too much to swallow, and the liquid dripped down his neck. Weakly, he shook his head, and she put the bowl down on the little sideboard beside his bed. “We’ll try later, then perhaps we’ll wash you, so you’ll feel more comfortable.”
She left then, and he returned to his dreams, seeing her as a princess with golden-silver hair locked in a tower, waiting for the cruel dragon to come and devour her, as it happened in some of his tales… He was walking along with his bag on his back, telling himself one of the tales he used to tell his audience on dreary nights, to shake them into a pleasant fright before going to sleep in their warm, comfortable beds. He had just left the village he had been staying at and was going to the direction of another, passing through a dry and deserted countryside.
An unexpected sight appeared before him, a high tower of whose existence he had no idea. Its blank walls had no windows, and immediately the thought of the beautiful Princess, who must be locked up in it, came to his mind. At the same time he recalled the Dragon for whom she had been waiting, trembling with fear, and the brave handsome Knight that must come to save her… Finbar looked around him in search of this knight, when a sudden idea leapt to his heart. Was not he, in fact, that very knight who was going to save the Princess and win her love?
He heard the noise then, something between a growl and a shriek, and he knew the dragon was coming to claim his catch. Finbar pulled out his sword – of course, he had a sword, more like a knight than a minstrel, for whom a sharp knife had always been enough. As he prepared a stand against the beast, it appeared before him, a huge creature all firey red, dotted with black and yellow spots that enhanced that terrible image. But the monster, instead of approaching the tower, headed straight toward Finbar himself! Why was that? How did the tale go wrong? The creature opened a huge mouth, from which flames burst out, scorching the Minstrel’s hair and heating up his face.
“Hey, Dragon,” he dared shout with a scant breath, “aren’t you making a mistake? Aren’t you supposed to attack the girl in the tower?”
“No, Finbar,” the beast roared, “it’s your turn to die now, and you can’t escape this time!”
“I’ll save you, Finbar,” he suddenly heard an old, grating voice, hoarse for the many tales he had told and many songs he had sung in his life. Turning in surprise, Finbar saw his Mentor, the Old Minstrel who had been dead for many years. Here he stood, as large as life and as young as he was when Finbar had first met him. The Old Minstrel had been visiting Finbar’s village on his wanderings; all through that night, fifteen-year-old Finbar listened to the words and the music when everyone else, including the storyteller himself, had been falling asleep. The next day it was when his young sister Aile suddenly fell into the sickness, of which she died within three days. The Old Minstrel, sensing Finbar’s feelings, stayed until it was all over; then took him with him to roam the roads, never to return home again.
“You can’t save me from the Dragon, Master, you’re dead yourself!” Finbar protested, feeling himself trapped between the dead and the deadly.
He recalled now the years he had been wandering with the old man, learning the profession of minstrel. He learned how to gather and preserve everything he saw and heard, shaping the raw material into proper forms, which he sang before an enchanted audience. He learned how to keep his audience charmed, so that later he could get his food and a place to sleep at night in exchange for his songs and tales. After the first few months the Old Man had let him do his part in the entertainment, and gradually, as the Mentor was getting older and weaker, his student was becoming stronger and more sure of himself. Finbar began using his own material, both what he had miraculously found in his head, and what he recalled of his dead sister Aile’s stories. Sometimes he felt as if she was coming back to him, finding room in his own mind, from where she was enriching the treasure of his tales and songs. Her inventive power had been greater than his, and he learned how to use this power for the benefit of his trade.
One morning, having stayed at night under a big old oak tree on the side of the road, Finbar woke to find the Old Minstrel dead. Without much thought he found a shallow hole in the ground, in which he put the body, covering it with a few stones and erecting a cross he had created out of two wooden sticks. He did not say a prayer on the grave, only a few words of farewell, took what he found as valueable from the old man’s sack, and went back to the road. Again, as when he had left home, he never looked back.
“You can’t fight Time, Boy,” the old man said to him gently now, stretching him arm to Finbar, “come with me, I’ll take you home.”
“No, no, no!” Finbar cried, running away from heroism as well as from affection. “It’s not my Time yet! Death as a Friend cannot take me more than Death as a Monster!”
The scene dissolved around him, and he went back to his sleep. Uncounted figures from his tales and his songs came up to surround him, and he stared at some of them, talked to others, regarding all of them – the pretty girls and the old hags, the weird monsters and the funny creatures – as his friends of all time. Then Martha came back, her Moon face engulfing him with its kindness.
“Lie quietly, now, please don’t get so upset,” the Moon-face said to him as it peered out of a layer of the fog that surrounding it. But it looked different now, gradually enlarging to encompass the world. It emitted a bright white light which blinded his sick eyes, and he shut them tight.
“Who are you?” he asked in a whisper. “You’re not Martha, where has she gone?”
“Martha can’t help you any more, Finbar. I’ve come to take you with me,” sang an enchanting voice from the light. “You’re my sister Aile, aren’t you? I haven’t seen you for such a long time, I’ve almost forgotten…”
“Yes, dear Finbar. But now, we need never part again. Come, let’s leave this miserable world and go over, for the Light.”
“But you’re dead, Aile! Where can you be taking me?”
“To the land we all go when our life is ended, Brother. Come!” The bright figure of light stretched an arm of light and touched Finbar on his forehead. The Minstrel felt himself lighten up, with no more pain or heaviness. Slowly he rose and followed the bright figure, not looking back to see his inert, dead body lying on the bed.
Tala Bar says, "I grew up in a library, my father was a librarian and my mother a bookbinder. My literary career started by translating into Hebrew a couple of classical books – Jurger by Cable and The White Goddess by Robert Graves. I translated more than twenty books of English classics.
"Although I live in Israel, I acquired an M.Phil. degree in literature from the London University. I have had published three novels, one book of stories and one book of poems – all in Hebrew. I now write literary articles on the Internet in Hebrew, and have my stories published in English. "