The Piper’s Song

I provide my service, and then they pay me, or they don’t. It makes no difference to me. I murder their children, or I don’t. That makes no difference either, because, you see, piping is not about the money. I buy nothing. Merchants can offer me silk gowns or mahogany chairs, jewel-studded mirrors or plates of finest porcelain. I have no home; I have no need for a hoard of bric-a-brac. Neither do I need coins for food or drink, or lodging, or ferrymen’s tolls. I have my pipe, and it provides.

When they give me money, I throw it in a river.

Piping is about power. A town feels distress because there are locusts, or barbarians, or pathogens or drug addicts. Or rats, of course. The problem becomes a plague so that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put their peace together again, and then I am there with my offer. It can all go away, for a fee. Money can dispense with nearly every ill in our world if people have the will to part with it.

Sometimes, I am accepted, and the contract is fulfilled. I play my melody and lure the bad things elsewhere—often to another town, though the desperate rarely ask questions. I do my work; my patrons give over the demanded sum. They work so hard for that money, and then they must watch me waltz away and hear my jingling pockets.

At other times, I am refused. The people clutch their bills and coins and suffer on like the fools they are.

And sometimes, more often than you might think, I meet those who are not only fools, but thieves. They lack humility. I perform on my pipe; they cheer to be free, but withhold what is mine.

I drowned the children of Hamelin. I led them to the Steinhuder Meer, all of them dancing and laughing for fifty kilometers, even as their shoeless feet bled on the stones of the road. I played my pipe and they danced into the waves, giggling even while the mere filled their lungs and they died in water scarce over their heads. The muck, too, obeyed my pipe and swallowed their bodies below. The thieves of Hamelin might have found their children with ease if only they had known the tune.

I play those notes myself, whenever my work brings me nearby. I stand on the shore with my pipe and all the dead children rise to float on the waves. I play, they bob and I can hear their parents’ wails on the wind; I pause and listen. Once the cries fade and the bodies sink, I move on to the next plague in the next town.

The world is large, and I know many tunes.