The Song
There is a land beyond the forests. A land so beautiful that as you stand at the edge of the trees and gaze across the pastures to the snow-brushed mountains, you know that heaven is surely but a step away. From this land comes a song, and from the song comes a story. A story of murder.
Down from the mountains one day came three shepherds. They had been in the high pastures for weeks with their flocks and were glad to be heading home, but in the minds of two of the shepherds, there was death.
The third shepherd, the youngest of the three, and maybe the richest and maybe the most handsome, knew nothing of this, until one of his lambs, the smallest lamb, that he had saved from dying in a late spring snow, came to him and warned him of the plot to kill him.
Now the shepherd looked sadly at his lamb, and said:
“If this is true, then I am doomed to die. But, my faithful creature, do this for me. When they have killed me, tell them to lay my bones somewhere close by, and bury my pipes with me, so that when the wind blows, it will play a tune and my sheep may come near, and my dogs too.
“Tell them not that I am dead, but instead that I went to marry a princess from a distant land. Tell them how a star fell at my wedding, tell them how the sun and moon came down to hold my bride’s crown, tell them how the trees were my guests, and the mountains my priests. How birds were my fiddlers, and stars my torchlight.
“But if one day you meet a white-haired woman, my mother, my old mother, tell her simply that I went to marry a princess, there on Heaven’s doorstep.”
And so it all came to be.