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Aunt Gretna… she’s probably the smartest person in the Bright Band and I love her to pieces but, like, she pretty much goes with the first idea she has every time. Like… oh, this is a funny one. Do you know “Griffin’s Lullaby?” Yeah, that one. Aunt Gretna was the one who wrote the Common version of the lyrics and made it popular up North, here. Some time before they pulled my sorry ass out of the work camp, they were all caravanning through the badlands, and the folks they were staying with, they sang that one at night. And the thing about the Tapnunsi – that’s what the Pachydon nomads call themselves, the ones we call the Pathbreakers – the thing about their music is, it’s all about the harmonies and the decorations, not the lyrics. The way Aunt Gretna tells it, the original song has just, like, two words, repeated over and over: they mean, basically, “Griffin Sleeps.” But the important part is all the, like dada-dada-dada dah, and the eee-EE-wah-ooooOOo, and the lyrics are just sort of, like, there.
And I mean, that’s great and all but like, this is Tal Dorei; even the drinking songs have a plot. But Gretna, she figures, well, what kind of bard can’t improvise some extra lyrics on a theme, so she came up with “High on the cliff, the Griffin sleeps” and “Darling, don’t fear, the Griffin sleeps,” and all the rest of it. And it’s a terrific song, right? I mean, there’s a reason you already knew those lyrics.
So by the time they picked me up, this was like, the Bright Band theme song and it was the first song they taught to us new kids when they took us in. Don’t have to speak the language to do eee-EE-wah-oooo, and it’s a fun song.
So, they’ve gone and adopted me and they’ve done… whatever they were doing in that war, I honestly still don’t know beyond what they did for me, and we picked up Faith so I wasn’t the new kid anymore, and we’re headed back up to Droversford to settle in for a while. We were on the main road, you know, passing the same people that passed you a few days ago, over and over, and sometimes we’d share a campfire, and, you know, sing or whatever.
So, one night, there’s this peddler at our camp, thick Marquesian accent, huge flirt, and I think he was maybe hoping to buy a couple of unused scrolls off Dad? And Gretna’s kind of bragging, and the peddler’s kind of egging her on – you know, salesman, always happy to stroke any egos around, so we’re gonna sing, and Connie’s like, “This guys from Marquette, we have to do the Lullaby. Hey, mister, we learned this Marquesian lullaby you wanna hear it?”
This was fifty years ago, remember – it wasn’t a cliché yet. So this peddler’s like, “Of course, of course, let’s hear this lullaby.” And so Justin and Uncle Shandor do the Ahh-uuuummmm, and Connie starts the ee-ee-EE-ee… And poor Mr. Geddemore about falls of his camp stool in shock. No, seriously, like, leaps backward and gets glitter all over and brings up his hands like he’s gonna cast something. And we all stop dead, like, what? And Mr. Geddemore takes like, twenty minutes to calm down enough to explain...
So it turns out, that lullaby? You get caught singing that anywhere in a week’s ride of Ankharel and you can get arrested. The Tapnusi aren’t singing about some random High Plains predator, they’re singing about The Griffin, notorious bandit queen-slash-cult leader-slash political martyr from the City’s founding period. What they’re saying when they sing “Griffin Sleeps” is less, “cat’s away, let the mice play,” and more, “The spirit of The Griffin is sleeping, not dead; you keep up like you’re doing now and you’ll wake it up and you don’t want that.”
You guys, Aunt Gretna was so embarrassed. But they’d been singing the lullaby version for years by that point, so, you know. Too late. I don’t know if a scary, angry version would have gotten as popular anyway.
What, the peddler? More about the peddler? Let me think… I mean, he was very shiny – kind of a funny mix of real gold and cheap glamours, had a handcart that he had warded up better than a military payroll wagon. Faith tried to get in and told us that afterward – she was cute enough to get away with it back then. And I mean, I was just a kid and all the grownups looked old to me, but now I think he couldn’t have been more than… oh, twenty or so? Assuming he was human? Pretty sure he was human. And he had one of those faces… you know how some guys, they look like they’re about thirteen until they turn thirty? And then they suddenly look like they’re fifty until they turn ninety and then after that they look like turtles? Yeah, so, he’d grown this enormous mustache to try and not seem like a kid but his chin didn’t have any corners yet, so he really kind of looked like he was trying to snort a weasel. Nice speaking voice, very expressive, but couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Flirted with anyone who stood on two legs to pee. I think he teamed up with the grownups to clean up a manticore rookery outside of Westruun. No idea how a bunch of manticores got up there; I assume a wizard got cocky.
His first name? Oh. Hum. It started with S... Right. Sahan. He had this dumb slogan: “You always get more, with Sahan Geddemore.” And I think Dad did give him some armor or something for the manticore fight and then let him keep it. Sahan Geddemore, that was it. Wonder what ever happened to him. But I was telling you about Aunt Gretna…