Cards of Grief (2 page)

I was ready. Had I not spent many childhood hours playing at the Hall game? Alone or with my brothers I had built our own Halls of willow branch and mallo snappings. We had set the tables, made signs, drawn pictures. Always, always my table was best, though I was not the oldest of us all. My table had more than just an innocent beauty, decked in ribbons and bordered by wildflowers: red trillis for life, blue-black mourning berries for death, and the twining of green boughs for the passage between. No, my table had a character that was both mine and the grieven one’s. It had substance and imagination and daring, even from the time I was quite young. Everyone remarked on it. The other children sensed it and a few resented it. But the elders who came and watched us at our play, they knew for sure. I heard one say, “She has a gift for grief, that one. Mark her well.” As if my height and the angularity of my body had not marked me already.

But even before that I had known. As a child I had started crafting my own grief poems, childishly lisping them to my dolls. The first poems aped the dirges and threnodies I had been taught, but always with a little twist of my own. One in particular I remember, for my mother shared it with the elders as a sign of my gift. My grandmother argued against that poem and for another, but this quarrel my mother won. The poem began:

I sail out on my dark ship

Toward the unmarked shore

With only the grieving

Of my family to guide me.”

The ship breasts the waves…

The dark ship, the unmarked shore—they were but copies of the usual metaphors of grief. But the wording of the fifth line, the
penta
—which foreshadowed the central image, that of a carved figurehead of a nude woman, something of which I should have had no knowledge, for we were a people of the Middle Lands, tillers of soil and grinders of grain—that fifth line convinced them. I, the daughter of a miller, gangly and stalk-legged, I was a prodigy. I basked in their praises for weeks and tried to repeat my success, but that time I could not. My subsequent poems were banal; they showed no promise at all. It was years before I realized that, truly, I grieved best when trying for no effect at all, though the critics and the public and the silly men at court did not always know the difference. But the craftswoman knows.

And then the day came when I was old enough to enter the Hall of Grief. I rose early and spent many minutes in front of the glass, the only one in our house not then covered with the gray mourning cloth. I drew dark circles under my eyes and deep shades on my lids as befitted a griever. Of course I overdid it. What new griever does not? I had yet to learn that true grief makes its own hollows in the face, a better sculptor of the body’s contours than all our paints and pens. Artifice should only heighten. But I was young, as I have said, and even Great-grandmother in her dusky room was not enough to teach me then.

That first day I tried something daring. Even that first day my gift for invention showed. I painted my nails the color of my eyelids and, on the left hand, on the thumb, I took a penknife and scraped the paint on the thumbnail into a cross to signify the bisecting of life and death.

Yes, I see you understand. It was the beginning of the carvings I would later do on all my nails, the carvings that would become such a passion among young grievers at court and be given my name. I never do it myself anymore. It seemed such a little thing, then: some extra paint, an extra dab of darkness onto light. An instinctual gesture that others took—mistook—for genius. That is, after all, what genius is: a label for instinct.

I plaited my long hair with trillis and mourning berry, too. And that was much less successful. As I recall, the trillis died before half a day was over and the berries left my braids sticky with juice. Yet at the moment of leavetaking, when I went upstairs to give Great-grandmother the respect I owed her, I felt the proper griever.

She turned in her bed, the one with the carvings of wreaths on the posters, the one in which all the women of our house have died. The air in the room was close and still. Even I had trouble breathing. Then Great-grandmother looked at me with her luminous half-dead eyes, the signs of pain beginning to stretch her mouth wide. She was ill with something that gnawed inside her.

“You will make them remember me?” she asked.

Knowing my mother and grandmother must have already made the same promise before they left, I nevertheless replied, “Great-grandmother, I will.”

“May your lines of grieving be long,” she said.

“May your time of dying be short,” I answered, and the ritual was complete.

I left at once, not even checking to see if the Cup on the table by the bed was filled. I was far more interested in the Hall of Grief and my part in it than in my Great-grandmother’s actual time of death, when the breath leaps from the wide mouth in an upward sigh. That is, after all, a private moment and grieving is a public act. At thirteen I longed to show my grief in public and win the applause and my Great-grandmother’s immortality. I know now that all our mourning, all our grieving, all the outward signs of our rituals are nothing compared to that one quick moment of release. Do I startle you with my heresy? Ah, child, heresy is the prerogative of old age.

I did not look back at the dark room, but ran down the stairs and into the welcoming light. My mother and her mother had already gone to the Hall. I marched there to the slow metronome of the funerary drums, which cousins of my cousins were always trained to play, but my heart skipped before.

The Hall was even larger than I had dreamed. Great massive pillars with fluted columns and carved capitols held up the roof. I had seen the building from afar—for who had not; it dominated our small town square. But I had never been allowed close enough to really distinguish the carvings. They were appropriate to a Hall, weeping women with their long hair caught up in fanciful waterfalls. You laugh. Only in the countryside could such banal motifs still be seen. It was a very minor Hall to be sure, but to my eyes then it was magnificent, each marble weeper a monument to grief. I drank it all in, eager to be part.

I told the guard at the gate my name and clan and he sent a runner in. My mother appeared shortly and spoke in quiet undertones to the gatekeeper, assuring him that it was my time. He let me in with a brief smile that slit open between the parenthesis of his mustache.

We walked up stairs that were hollowed by years of marchers and entered the Hall. Inside, the clans had already set up their tables and Mother threaded her way through the chaos to our usual stand with an ease born of long experience. Under the banner proclaiming our colors and the sign of the millstone was a kidney-shaped table. It was littered with the memoria of our dying ones. We had had three diers that year, counting Great-grandmother now in our attic. I can still recite the birth lines of the other two: Cassa-Cania, of Chriss-Cania, of Cassua-Cania, of Camma-Cania was the one. Peri-Pania, of Perri-Pania, of Persa-Pania, of Parsis-Pania was the other. And of course, in my own direct line I can still go back the twenty-one requisite names. We had no gap in that line, the Lania, of which I am still, though it sometimes makes me laugh at myself, inordinately proud. I am really the last of the Lania. No one will grieve for me properly, no sister of the family, no blood child, and sometimes it troubles me that this is so, my own tiny sisters having gone before me when I was too young to grieve for them and my brothers unable to carry on the line.

The daughters of Cassa-Cania and Peri-Pania were already there, having no attic grieven of their own and no new grievers to prepare for their first Hall. They, poor ones, had born only boys. And of course my own little sisters had gone in one of the winter sicknesses, their tiny mouths stretched wide in the smile of death, their eyelids closed under the carved funerary gems. Though I had not officially grieved for them, I had certainly practiced grief in my games with the boys.

Our table was piled high with pictographs of their dyings, for of course that was before the strangers had come down from the sky with their strange cam’ras that captured life impressions on a small page. And since Cassa-Cania’s daughters were known for their fine hand, there were many ornately lettered lamentation plaques on the table. But for all its wealth of memoria, the table appeared disordered to me and that disturbed me greatly.

I spoke in an undertone to my mother. “May I be allowed to arrange Great-grandmother’s part?”

At first she shook her head and her dark graying hair fell loose of its crown, cascading down over her shoulders like the weeping women of the column. But it was simply that she did not understand my distress at the disorder, taking my request as a display of adolescent eagerness. However, I was still thought to be too young to do more than watch and listen—and learn. I had yet to be apprenticed to a griever, to one of the older cousins. I had, for all my reputed genius, only a meager background, the pretendings of a child with children (and brothers at that). I knew no history, could recite none of the prime tales, and could only mouth a smattering of the lesser songs and stories of the People. So I was sent away while the older women worked; I was sent off to look at the other tables in the Hall, to discover for myself the many stages and presentations of Grief.

Alas, the other tables were as disordered as our own, for as I have said, we were only a very Minor Hall and the grievers there were unsophisticated in their arrangements. One or two had a rough feeling I have since tried to replicate in my own work. Touching the old country grief has, I think, given me my greatest successes.

To think of it, walking in a Hall before the days of the strangers from the sky, walking in it for the very first time. The sound of the mourners lining up in the galleries, waiting for the doors to open. Some of them actually wailed their distress, though in the Major Halls that rarely happens anymore, except on great occasions of state—an exiled princess, the assassination of a prince, a fallen Queen. Most of the time the older princes gossip rather than weep, and the younger ones are too ready to make an impression on the Queen.

But that Minor Hall was not a place of Queens or princes. Grief actually walked there. I could feel it start in my belly and creep up into my throat. Only that I was inside and not beyond the doors kept me from wailing, too, for inside the grievers moved silently, setting up the stalls. I remember one old woman lovingly polishing a hoe, the symbol of the farmer her dying granduncle had been. She stood under the sign of a grainfield and she rocked back and forth beneath it as if the wind that tossed the grain on her sign tossed her as well. There is another I remember: a woman with ten black ribbons in her hair, placing a harp with a broken string beside a lamentation plaque that read:
One last song, one final touch.
I have always liked the simplicity of that line, though the broken string was a bit overdone.

Then the doors were flung open and the mourners came in. In the first crush I lost sight of our own table and was pushed up against the wall. If I had been smaller, I might have panicked, but the one great gift of body that I had was height. I was at least as tall at thirteen as an adult, as tall as the smallest of the princes even then.

Soon the crowds sorted themselves and I could see how the lines made a kind of pattern. There were long lines by the tables that gave away garlands and crying cloths, though the longest by far was in front of the harper’s stall where a live singer—a princeling on his mission year—recalled in song all that had been great in the harper’s life. He used the old songs, of course, and set the facts in the open measures of the songs with such facility and with such a good sense of rhythm that it was never apparent what was old and what was interpolated.

I learned two things that day, before ever apprenticing: to please the crowd and draw a line is easy, but to keep the lines coming back again and again is not. Once the garlands were gone and the cloths given away, once the singer stopped for a draught of wine, the line of mourners broke apart and formed again elsewhere. And none of the mourners remembered the grieven one’s name for longer than that day, though some remembered the names of the grievers. There is no immortality in that.

By noon I had toured the entire Hall, carrying with me a wilted garland and three cloths embroidered with names of grieven ones whose deeds I no longer recalled. And I came back again to the place I had begun, the stall of my own clan under the millstone, piled high with disordered memoria.

“Let me take a turn while you eat. It will be a slow time, now, while the funeral meats are set out,” I told my aunts and my mother, my grandmother having gone home to tend to mill business and to prepare her mother’s last meal. They thought I could do no harm then, when most mourners were off eating or doing their home chores. It was neither planting nor harvesting time, so there would be an afternoon grieving in the Hall, but that would not be for a while. They left me at the table.

I busied myself at once, rearranging the overwrought items in a new way so that the whole picture was one of restraint. And then I sat down and composed a threnody, the first of the ones recognizable in my so-called Gray Wanderer period, because for the first time the figure of the cloaked soul-traveler appeared. The words seemed to tumble into my head, the stanzas and chorus forming as if on a slate. In fact the poem wrote itself, and quickly. In later years I was to force myself to slow down, for I have always had a facility that, at times, betrays me.

You know the poem, of course: “The lines of her worn and gray cloak…” You are nodding, child. Does it seem strange to you that someone real wrote a song that you have known all your life? Well, I wrote it as if in a fever that day. It all seemed to fit. I never thought that I would be called the Gray Wanderer myself—I, who have never wandered very far and whose life has never seemed exceptionally gray. Of course the scholars insist that “the lines of her worn and gray cloak” refer to the lines of mourning. I did not mean that, just that the cloak fell from her shoulders in comfortable, familiar folds. That is how I saw the Gray Wanderer that day in the eye of my mind. Perhaps it was my great-grandmother I was seeing, bent over a bit but still strong despite the thing that ate away at her. But never mind. Scholars seem to know more about such things than we grievers do.