War Drums

It was during the war when Mon Aman Rhir was most quiet.

At the start of the fifth war, they were the first to go. The state had deemed them least important, and thus placed our best musicians on the frontlines to bear the flags and swords instead of violins or flutes in the battlefields of the towns of Nuar, Balruk, and the rest of the first few towns in the outskirts of Mon Aman Rhir that were under siege. The Queen was willing to give those towns up – they were the most unproductive, and therefore dispensable. Besides, they needed the better men from those towns to join the army.

It was a mandate, and anyone who refused in the name of his passions was led to the guillotine. This was the fate of the first five of the state’s best musicians who left their widows and children silenced by the state under threat of death, should they start a rebellion. This was not the time for internal political unrest; the higher good of the state was at stake, they were told. Two weeks into the war, Mon Aman Rhir still had the painters, the artisans, and the thespians to spare; the state had kept its military intact.

As the weeks progressed, there were more widows and fatherless children, as is always the case during wars. Children, most especially the boys, were told to burn their instruments if they did not want to risk their own lives and be sent to the barracks as errand boys, or worse, to the front lines when they came of age.

She was told a similar thing by his father, a military man, when he left to fight long after the artisans had passed on.

He was afraid for her -- he knew she was a brave, spirited girl. This was always to her detriment. She did what she wanted, and had no care for propriety. She did what she thought was not wrong; and among his children, she was always the one reprimanded the most.

And like always, she could not be stopped and did far more than the small town ruckus her father was afraid she might do.

On that fateful day, the troops from the two warring states were positioned in the fields, waiting for a signal to attack. She knew what was to happen; her father had told her many stories of this. The heads will parley, and if nothing good still comes of it, the battle will begin.

As the heads reached the middle, she began to play.

Because there are always no instruments in the battlefield, one of the men began to sing. He sang a drinking song and was horribly out of tune. These were the only songs he knew because he had not grown up to lullabies, what with his mother having died from childbirth. He normally didn't sing when he and his friends used to drink because, as now, he was always out of tune. But he was bursting at the seams, and was compelled to echo the songs that he used to sing only in his mind.

Yet another one could not help his limbs, for all he cared. He did not care that he could die dancing; he knew he was a good dancer; and through all those years he had nursed a deep wound of anger for this repression. Should he die that day, he would die with one of the bravest people he had ever seen, a girl of but fifteen years, he thought. And so it was his resolve, the firmest he has ever made in all his years alive, to die dancing to this girl's playing. As he looked around however, he saw the ones nearest him begin to clap their hands in time. Yet another soldier joined him. Another one, who came to fight in such a drunken state for all the fear that gripped him when he was sober, searched for a pebble and began to tap his bottle of rum. One by one, the soldiers sang, clapped, danced, wept. Each one dropped their swords; they needed their two hands, after all.

On the other side of the field, the men of Mira Rhir were struck dumb and could not move; their general eventually gave up screaming countless times at the top of his lungs to attack.

By the end of the day, thousands lay sprawled on the ground, exhausted from singing and dancing to my great grandmother's war drums.

decoded for, and from the archives of, the Cellist of Sarajevo.