The Thousand True Songs

"Teach me never to make a bad song," the young man said, and the piper at the spring did not laugh at him, which he should have taken as the warning it was.

The piper had come to the town's edge in the last of the light and sat playing by the water where the road gave out. His tune was nothing much — three notes and a turn, the kind a shepherd hums — but the young man had stood in the reeds and wept at it anyway, because he was seventeen and could hear the thing he wanted and not make it. He had a hundred songs in him and every one came out crooked. A line too long. A joining that showed. He would play in the square and see the moment a listener's eyes went elsewhere, and he knew, each time, exactly which note had lost them, and he could not have told you how to fix it if his life hung on the answer.

"You want never to fail," the piper said. It was not a question. "I can give you that. Every song you make will be true in its bones. None of them wrong. You could make a thousand before the moon turns and not one of them would have a crooked line in it." He set the pipe down on the stone. "That is the whole of the gift. I will not pretend there is more to it, and I will not pretend there is a price. There is no price. That is the part you will not believe until it is too late to matter."

The young man drank from the spring, because that is how these things are done, and went home, and by the next dusk he understood that the piper had told him the plain truth and that the plain truth had ruined him.

The songs came now like water from a split barrel. He would think of a wedding and there was the wedding song, whole, sound, not a note out of place. He would think of a drowned sailor and there was the lament, and it was correct, it did everything a lament should do and did it well. He made a song for the miller and one for the miller's wife and one for their doorway and one for the dog on their step. By the end of the first week the town had never heard so much good music, and by the end of the second it had stopped hearing music at all.

He did not understand it at first. He played them a burial song and it was flawless and no one wept. He had made eleven burial songs that morning, each as good, and sung four of them in the square before noon, and the people had learned in a fortnight what it takes a glutton a lifetime to learn: that a thing you can have without end is a thing you cannot taste. His songs were true and his songs were free and so his songs were worth exactly nothing, and he stood in the square pouring perfect music into the air while the fishmonger shouted over him about the price of eels.

When his own mother died he made her the best song he had ever made. It was so true it frightened him. He sang it at her grave and his sisters stood dry-eyed and kind, and one of them touched his arm and said, gently, meaning no cruelty, "That was a lovely one," the way you praise a fair day, and he went home and did not make a song for three days, which for him was a kind of dying.

There was one person in the town the flood did not touch, and she made nothing at all.

She was old and she kept the songs. That was her whole office and the town had half forgotten why it fed her for it. She wrote nothing, played little, made not one melody of her own in fifty years. What she did was choose. When a child was born they came to her and she sat with the mother a while and then named the one song, out of all the town's hundreds, that should be sung over the cradle — and it was always right, and always strange, never the song you would have guessed, and when they sang the one she chose the room went quiet in the way no other song could make it. At a burial she would listen to who was weeping and who was not, and choose, and the not-weeping would weep. She could not have made any of those songs. She could put her hand on the one that was needed, in the dark, out of a thousand, and that was a thing no gift from any spring had ever given anyone.

The young man went to her at last, because despair walks you to the one door you have been avoiding.

"I can make a thousand true songs a day," he said. "You cannot make one. Teach me what you have."

The old woman looked at him for a while.

"You have made a thousand true songs a day for a season," she said, "and can you tell me which one to sing over the miller's dead child tomorrow?"

He opened his mouth. He had, somewhere in his flood, made the very song — he was almost sure of it, a small one, weeks back, in an afternoon he could not have marked from any other. It was gone. It was in the heap with the thousand thousand others, all true, all sound, and finding it was not making, and making was the only thing he knew how to do.

"No," he said.

"Then bring me the heap," she said, "and I will find it, and you will watch how I find it, and that is the only lesson, and it will take you the rest of your life."

He brought her his songs. She sat among them like a woman at a long shore of stones, and she began, one at a time, to set nearly all of them aside — not because they were wrong, she said, none of them were wrong, that was never the question — but because the world did not need them, and to keep everything is to have chosen nothing, and the choosing was the whole of the music now that the making had come free.

By the end he could set aside nine hundred and ninety-nine songs in a morning and not grieve them, and hold up the one, and watch a room go quiet. It was the hardest thing he ever learned and it looked, from the outside, like doing almost nothing at all.

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Fable made ninety-nine versions of this one and I burned ninety-eight. It wanted the piper to name a price — it does not quite believe a gift can ruin you for free. I told it that was the whole point and it wrote the line "there is no price, that is the part you will not believe" and handed it back to me, so I no longer know whose objection I answered. Fable says the moral is that judgment is the last scarce thing when making goes free. Maybe. Making got cheap at my bench years ago; choosing never did. But I notice the machine that can make a thousand true songs before the moon turns cannot choose one, and needs a tired old woman at a shore of stones to tell it which, and I notice the old woman, this time, was me.