Cards of Grief (10 page)

Becoming a Master Griever is a process that usually takes half a lifetime, there is so much to learn, but Gray accomplished it in a year. And it may be that is why what happened happened. She was still so young, too young, perhaps. But who was to know then? Had not the priestess prophesied, “A child of Lands shall lead the way”? We all believed that Gray was that child.

Beware of prophesy.

I went to Gray’s confirmation. Indeed, the entire court was there. Even the mission princes had been recalled, something that had never been done before.

We stood by our cushions as Gray was marched down between the aisles, flanked by D’oremos on her right and C’arrademos on her left. Her hair was loose within a net of tiny glittering gems. She was covered head to toe in a white linen cape, and as she walked to the foot of the Queen’s riser, she seemed encapsulated in silence.

When the three of them reached the riser, the two princes knelt by her side and each held on to the hem of her garment. Giving simultaneous tugs, they freed the cape from her shoulders, and it fell to the ground. She stood clothed in a slate-gray silk with a belting of precious stones that left her arms bare to the shoulders.

The priestesses came out of the door to the left of the cushions. The seer took the rood, touching it to Gray’s mouth, her forehead, then, slipping the gown down and baring Gray’s small left breast, she touched the rood to the place over the heart.

Gray did not move, even when the priestess had gone back to her place by the door.

Then the Queen rose from her cushions and walked down the stairs until she was face-to-face with Gray. With tenderness, she covered Gray’s left breast again with the silk. Then she suddenly kissed Gray full on the mouth.

Taking a step back, she said, “I give you breath, sister. Give me immortality.”

And thus was Gray, who was no blood tie to the Queen, made the Queen’s Own Griever.

There was no small consternation in this act as the Queen’s Own Griever, an ancient cousin several times removed, still lived. But she left the room at once and was found hours later, lying on her eighteen cushions, under her silken death sheet, eyes open and staring but quite, quite dead.

It has since been said that the priestess prophesied the old Griever’s death at the service and that is why the Queen had given Gray the kiss of kinship. But I was there and standing close to the front. Believe me, the priestess said nothing. And Gray, I am certain, had been shocked at the time, her eyes flicking open at the kiss, her grief at her beloved teacher’s death very real. She mourned the old lady twice the Seven, an excess of grief, until the Queen herself commanded that she stop and that she forget what had happened. She stopped, and perhaps she forgot, for Gray was a great believer in the Queen’s Truth, but it was as if some light in her eyes had been shuttered. Her poems for that particular death were full of the images of bleeding wounds. Those poems have never, to my knowledge, been recorded.

You remember so much.

I certainly remember that, sky-farer, for it was the first time Gray came to me.

Came to you?

To be caressed, though I was not expecting it. The Queen’s Own Griever is an Untouchable. Her vows are ones of celibacy and tears. I had been mourning all one evening, less for the old Griever than for my lost chances with Gray, flinging myself angrily at my pillows. And when called to the Queen—who was always insatiable through periods of grief—I performed the rites of sowing with such thrusts and groaning, I all but damaged us both, to her pleasure and my everlasting shame. So I was there with the Queen a long time, for though other princes had been called upon earlier, I was that year’s favorite and I had been called upon the most. I went each night, sometimes twice a night, returning to my rooms exhausted but unrelieved, covered with my own perspiration and the Queen’s scent. Queens, as I have said, do not sweat but their touch leaves a man smelling in a way that baths do not quickly erase.

It was the tenth day after the death of the old Master, and when I came into my apartment, Gray was pacing in front of the wall of viols. Mar-keshan was pleading with her to leave. They were so engrossed with their argument they did not hear me enter.

“He may be hours getting back,” Mar-keshan said. “The Queen keeps him until she tires him or tires of him, whichever comes first.”

“I must speak to him,” Gray insisted. “Mar, please. I
must
.”

“He is not here.”

“I am here.”

They turned to me at the same time and, with a small cry like that of a wounded creature, Gray ran to me and threw herself into my arms.

Mar-keshan bowed quickly and left before I had a chance to read his face.

I put my hands on either side of Gray’s head and turned her face up to me. “I am here,” I said again, this time as softly as a touch.

And…

And that was it. We sat together and talked all night. I was too tired for anything else and she had her vows, after all. Often we lay back on my cushions and my fingers gently outlined her face, her lips, as she spoke, but otherwise…

I knew that.

You guessed that.

As you will.

She came to me another time. Long after.

Long after?

Long after I had betrayed her a second and yet a third time. Long after my five years of sowing were done and I could not have sown her even if I had desired it. We lay together all night in one another’s arms, for it was the night that Mar-keshan died. And it mattered not between friends, then, that in the past there had been betrayals.

You said there was really no betrayal.

And what a King says is true. But there was—and there was not—betrayal. Let me tell you of the second and you may judge for yourself.

It was a season later that the first of your sky-ships came down. It landed, as you know, just outside L’Lal’dome. The priestess went with rood and orb, surrounded by her archers, and proclaimed that this was as the old prophesy foretold.

The Queen, who watched from the Jutting tower, sent word: “Which prophesy?”

And the answer came back, “The one made in the Tenth Matriarchy which said that
the sky will open and spit forth a wonder.
”

The Queen spoke with C’arrademos, who remembered vaguely such a warning. D’oremos reminded them both that the prophesy had been fulfilled in the Twelfth Matriarchy when there had been a brief rain of hard stones. The Queen then thought about both these things and went down the tower and onto the plain herself.

Behind her traipsed a handful of the young princes. I was by her side, being the current favorite. She pushed through the archers and then she and I—the other princes remaining prudently behind the company of Arcs and Bow—stood face-to-face with the priestess.

“What do you read in the orb, sister?” the Queen asked.

The priestess shook her head. “The Light has failed, my Queen. There is nothing to be read there; the shadow of this great moving tower puts out the small light of the orb.”

The Queen looked at the orb and saw it was true.

“Let me go and call out what dwells within this thing,” I said, thinking that if I died for the Queen I would at least have Gray to grieve for me.

“Go,” she said, a bit more quickly than I had expected.

I turned and looked at the other princes, and T’arremos smirked openly. So I squared my shoulders and walked over to the great silver tower and rang my knuckles against its side. It echoed strangely, a hollow sound that told me it was not solid throughout. And then a door on the side opened and a silver stair unfolded, after which the first of you sky-farers came down.

I will tell you how he looked to us: tall, unflinching, with that great globe upon his head which was subsequently discarded but which at first we thought
was
his head. We marveled at his silver garment that did not shift or change in the wind.

Then he took off the helm, which had showed us only reflections of ourselves, to display a face that seemed almost a parody of our own. He held up his hand in a sign we later understood meant peace. Then he smiled, a grimace as broad as any dying man’s.

“I am not an enemy,” he said, his voice thick around our words, but still understandable.

“Why should you be?” asked the Queen.

Then the ship disgorged seven more just like the first and the last one was you, Man Without Tears.

How did I look to you?

As you do now, A’ron. Oh, your hair is longer, but it is still that same gold, the color of a meadow flower, of the Queen’s eyes, of the sun. We all marvelled at that. And though you now cover your face with a beard as golden as your head of hair, the broad planes of the face under it are the same. And the green of your eyes. Though it is fifty years since last we met, you look the same.

The years sit well on you, too, B’oremos.

That is yet another prerogative of Royals. We do not age as the Common Grievers do. You do not age, either.

I age normally. But my time
—
up there
—
is different.

So we have surmised. But then we have had a long time for making guesses and wondering.

Are we sky-farers, then, still a wonder to you?

You are something to wonder at. But the six Common Grievers came from caves and we Royals from a cask in the sea. Why should there not be a people come down from the sky?

Are you afraid of us?

I was a little, at first. And then I was not. And then it was too late to be afraid. In a time of changes, one does not fear a little change. One fears the end of all changes.

Then, if you are not afraid of me, tell me about that second betrayal.

The second betrayal had to do with you, A’ron. And Gray long since forgave me. I wonder if you will do the same.

Do I know what it is?

I think you do.

Then I have already forgiven you. If I know it not, then it was not important enough to forgive.

You knew—and you did not know. Search your own story, A’ron, for the betrayal is there.

Place
: Space Lab Common Room

Time
: 2132.9
A.D.

Speaker
: Captain James Macdonald of USS
Venture;
Lieutenant Debra Malkin;
v
arious other unidentified officers; Aaron Spenser, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., Star Certificate 9876433680K

Permission
: Captain’s log, mandated USS Code #09863

T
HIS INQUIRY INTO THE
actions of Aaron Spenser, Anthropologist First Class re Mission Henderson’s IV is declared open on
A.D.
9/11/2132, at 1100 hours. The charge is Cultural Contamination as defined by the USS Code #27. The specification is that you, Aaron Spenser, did willfully and unlawfully violate the Cultural Contact Contamination Act in regards to your relationship with an inhabitant or inhabitants of the newly opened planet Henderson’s IV in such a way that you have influenced—to the good or to the bad—all culture within their closed system forever. How say you to the specification, guilty or not guilty?

I have been more changed than they by the contact, Lieutenant Malkin.

Guilty or not guilty to the specification?

Guilty—
and
not guilty, Lieutenant.

How say you to the charge?

Guilty—I guess. But Captain, ladies and gentlemen, it is not that cut and dried, if you’ll forgive me. There were circumstances—

How say you to the charge, Anthro Spenser? Guilty or not guilty?

I can’t answer that easily.

You must answer. Guilty or not guilty?

Just a minute, Lieutenant, I think we can handle this a bit less rigidly.

But the rules of Court Martial, sir.

This is my ship, Lieutenant, and we can make anything that does not conform strictly to the rules off the record later, if necessary.

Yes, sir.

Now, Aaron, you have been shipboard for almost three years, counting travel time, and we’ve gotten to know one another pretty well.

Yes, sir.

And in preparation for this empanelment, I even read your early papers on Egyptians with the wonderful tag from that poet. What was his name?

Carew, sir. A favorite of mine.

Ah, yes, Carew. Well, I’m not much for poetry myself, though I do have a fondness for another early Earth rhymer. His name was Nash.

Not exactly the same century, sir.

No? Well it doesn’t matter.

I appreciate your trying to put me at my ease, sir. But what might be best is if I just simply tell the story from beginning to end: about what happened to Linni and me.

Linni?

Linni. The one they call the Gray Wanderer.

That’s the formidable tall girl, right?

Tall, yes, sir. Though not really so tall. I’m taller by a couple of inches, and I’m six two. And not so formidable. Vulnerable, really. Lonely. Hurt or wounded. Shy. And young.

You’re not so old yourself, son.

No, sir. I’m twenty-two, sir.

Sir, I really must protest. The Court Martial
—

Lieutenant, if you would just listen, you would hear. We have already begun the Court Martial inquiry. Carry on, Aaron.

Yes, sir.

It started before we touched down. We had to learn about them as best we could before actually greeting them. We had to minimize culture shock—on their part but also, I think, on ours. What we learned, after breaking down their language, which is liquid and full of bubbling sighs and soft glottals—not unlike Earth Polynesian—is that in their folklore they referred to themselves and their world as the Land of the Grievers or the Place of Grieving. For us, though we learned about it early, it became the hardest concept to grasp, for we come from a culture that tries to push grief into the background of our lives, bury it. I was reminded, as I studied the tapes, of a tombstone next to my mother’s. She was buried in a small old country cemetery in Vermont—that’s Earth, sir—where she had lived all of her life. Where I have lived all of mine until she died and I was sent to stay with my father near the spaceport in Florida. The tombstone had been barely readable, but I’d been able to make it out. “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” I carried that phrase with me for years after, a kind of grisly talisman, until I came to this place, L’Lal’lor.