Cards of Grief (20 page)

Then I fled down the mountainside, holding Linnet in my arms, and we were both sick several times, though I had sat a pyrewatch before and had never blanched. It is odd how one can be sick with nothing in the stomach but bile.

I left Linnet with A’ron and went down the mountainside to the city, directly to the King’s Apartments, and knelt and said, “The Gray Wanderer is gone.”

“You will make them remember her?” he asked. It was a proper response, but I had wanted something more from him. I knew how he had treasured her.

“Your Majesty,” I said, giving him back ice for ice, “I will.”

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

I turned and left. He knew that I had left out the last line of the ritual. I would not give him the satisfaction of my words. He would not hear “May your time of dying be short” from me. I did not care then if his were short or long. The one I cared about had already had too many betrayals, too long a time of dying, too short a time of living.

I went back to the cave, remembering her words. I pinched my cheeks for color and sat down with A’ron’s gi’tarr to compose a small dirge, a threnody, a lament. I had become fond of the sweetness of the strings and he had given me the gi’tarr for my own. But nothing came. Even Gray’s own words were too soft for my feelings.

I stared at my reflection in the small mirror I had put up for Linnet, who had a child’s passion for such things. Real tears marked a passage down my cheeks. I could have painted over them with tear lines in any color I wanted, but I could not just paint my face and let her go.

I spoke to her under my breath: “Forgive me, Gray. Forgive my excess of sorrow.” She would have shuddered at the ocean of tears. But though I was no girl of her lines, I was her true apprentice. She was dearer to me than a line mother and I had to do something more to honor her. She would have long, long lines of mourners to remember her. I would give her immortality for sure.

So all that next night, in the Royal Hall of Grief, with mourners passing in and out, speaking their ritual parts with as much or as little sincerity as they could manage, I began to devise the Cards. A’ron kept Linnet away, because if they had been there to mourn with me, I could not have borne it.

I was silent while I worked and it may be that it was my silence that first called the mourners in, for if I had any reputation at all as a young griever, it was not for silence.
Sharp-tongued
was one of the kinder things that was said of me. But if it was the silence that drew them in, it was the Cards of Grief that brought them back.

It took a week of sleepless days and nights before I was done with the painting. And then I returned to the cave, where I slept for a solid week, hardly knowing who I was or what I was or where it was I was sleeping. I did not even know that while I slept, A’ron—to contain his own grief—was building a house around me, a house as unlike a cave as it could be, filled with light and sky. When at last I really woke to my surroundings, my hands were so stained with paint that it was months before they were clean again. A’ron said that each time he had tried to clean my fingers, I had fought him with a fury that could not be restrained. I would not have believed him except he showed me his eye, which I had blacked, and I kissed it many times in an effort to beg forgiveness, which he laughed away. The clothes I had worn for that week I burned. I never recovered my memory of that seven days. I had only A’ron’s word for what happened, but I believed him. He never lied.

I brought Gray a line of grievers as has never been seen before or since—long, solemn rows: young and old, men as well as women, children who had never once seen her grieve. Even the sky-farers came, borne in by curiosity I am sure, but staying to weep with the rest. You are, it seems, a people of Occasional Tears. And each time the Cards are seen, another griever is added to her lines. Oh, the Gray Wanderer is an immortal for sure.

I was there. I was one of those sky-farers who wept her down.

Were you? I do not remember you.

I am hard not to remember. You must not have seen me.

You are correct; it is impolite for me to say that to you. But I am glad that you were there.

And what of the Cards?

The Cards? I have not forgotten. Here, put the paints away. That little painting? It is nothing, just a quick sketch.

May I keep it?

Certainly. And each time you look at it, you will remember Gray.

I would have liked to have known her more.

You would have liked her? I see you know our rituals. So I will answer you in kind. She would have grown by your friendship. And
that
is quite true. Though she eschewed the ways of your people, she did not forget to grow in her art by understanding. And of course she
loved
A’ron before he became one of the People, one of us.

Yes.

And now the Cards. You see, I have not forgotten.
Now
is the time to show you.

Is this how you want them?

Set them here.

The first pack was an eleven, not the more ornate thirteen plus thirteen that gamesters use. I drew the Cards on a heavy paper that I made of soaked and pressed reeds. I drew lightly so that only I could really discern the outline. Then I colored them in with the paints and chalks I used for my grief masks. That is why the colors are so basic, not the wider palette of art, but the monochromatic range of the body’s grief paints. The red? That color has been so remarked upon. Here is the truth of it. It was not paint at all. It was my own blood. I drew it from the soft inside of my left elbow, the turning closest to the heart. You can still see the scar. It is no more than a raised pinprick now. A’ron said that was why I slept so long after. Not from exhaustion or from grief. I had a disease of the blood for which he had begged medicines from your ship. When he was given none by your people…

He knew we could not. It is against all our vows.

He held me through my fever, even when I raged and beat on him with my fists. Even when Linnet cried, he held me. There is nothing to show of that fever but the scar. I do not remember….

The Cards?

To this day the original thirteen is called the Prime Pack. Does that confuse you? You are counting on your fingers. There were eleven done at the Hall of Grief and then, after my week of fever and sleep, I rose and painted two more. The Prime Pack is kept on velvet in the Council Museum, under glass. They are arranged at each month’s turning in a new order, as if the order matters now.

That first pack spoke directly to my need. There was no arcane symbology. The Seven Grievers were one card for each of the seven great families. The Cave That Is Fed By No Light, the darkest card, is of course the death card. For as we come from the womb cave, so we go to that other cave in the end, and, of course, my beloved Gray came to her end in a real cave. The picture on the card is an exact rendering of her last resting, the bed in the cave’s center, twined with trillis and mourning berry, her bed.

The Queen of Shadows is the major card, for Gray was always loyal to her Queen. And the Singer of Dirges is the minor card. The moving card, the card that can go with ease from high place to low, was the card I called after her, my Master, the Gray Wanderer. Its face is her face and the dark hair under the gray cloak is twined with flowers. But it is the Wanderer as she was young, not crabbed with age and pain; when her face was unlined and she had a sky prince for a lover.

Seven Grievers. The Cave. The Queen. The Singer. The Gray Wanderer. Eleven cards in all. And, after my sleep, I added two: The Man Without Tears and the Cup of Sleep.

I sometimes think it was only a sentimental gesture. Gray often warned me about confusing sentiment with sentimentality. I wonder what she would have thought of it. But I meant it for her; I meant it as all true grievers mean the poems and scriptings and songs and pictures we make. Those are the old, slow ways, but for all that they are old and slow, they are about birth and death and the small passage we travel between.

I did not have to explain the Cards to the many lines of mourners who came to honor Gray. Not the way I have to explain them today. Over and over, to those like you who come from the sky; to my own people who now ape grief with comic songs and dances and who have turned even the Cards of Grief into a game.

But I will do it one more time. One final time. I will tell the Prime Pack. Forgive me if the telling is one whose parts you have heard before. This time I will tell it with infinite care, for there are times that I—even I—have told them as a rota, a list, without meaning. This time I will unwind the thread of honest grief. For the Gray Wanderer. For myself. For A’ron and Linnet and the rest. The story, the story must be told till the end.

I will lay out the Cards, one by one by one. Listen well. Do not rely on your boxes, sky woman. Use your eyes. Use your ears. Memory is the daughter of the eye and ear.

I will listen and see, Grenna. I will turn off the box and hold the memory in my ears and in my mouth.

Good, Dot’der’tsee. That is how it should be.

Here are the Seven Grievers.

One is for Lands as I am from Lands, for all those who work the soil. We were here before all the rest and we will remain when all the rest are forgotten. Lands wears the brown tunic and trews of my family and rides a white sow.

Two is for Moon, for those who count the season’s turning, seers and priestess who speak the prophesies and carry rood and orb.

Three is for Arcs and Bow, who hunt the forests and fields.

Four is for Waters and all who plow there.

Five is for Rocks, who scrape the mountain’s face and craft gems from the stone.

Six is for Stars, who script our poems, whose memories are short, who study and forget.

Seven, the Queen’s Own, the tall Royals. They came from the sea, twinned, to rule us.

Seven Grievers who were touched by my Master’s words.

And from those Seven, now come these. Queen of Shadows to rule them. Singer of Dirges to betray them. The Cup of Sleep to change them. The Man Without Tears to watch them change. The Gray Wanderer, who speaks of them all till she enters the Cave of No Light.

That was how I told them then, in a singsong voice dripping with tears. That first thirteen were known as the Cards of Dark, for all the faces on the original pack were dark, since I drew them in my grief. The thirteen cards added later by the gamesters were called Cards of Light, and all the figures grin, their whitened faces set in a rictus, a parody of all we hold sacred.

Here, you can see the difference even in this pack. In my drawing of the Man Without Tears, he wears a landing suit and holds his hands outstretched by his side, the light streaming through a teardrop in each palm. But his face cannot be seen, obscured as it is by the bubble of his headgear. Yet in the gamesters’ thirteen, he wears a different uniform, in blue, with stars and bars on the shoulders. He has a beard. And though his hands are still outstretched, with the light reflecting through the palm, his face is drawn as plain as any griever’s and he smiles. It is a painful, sad grimace.

You can see the difference also in the Queen of Shadows. In my pack, she is dressed in red and black and her picture is a dark portrait of the Queen who had been on the throne when Gray was master of them all. But the packs today are no-faced and every-faced, the features as bland as the mash one feeds a child. There is no meaning there.
My
Queen wore a real face, narrow, feral, devious, hungry, sad. But the Card looked back to an even older tale. You know it? The Queen mourning her dead chief consort went into the Cave at the Center of the World. She wore a red dress and a black cloak and carried a bag of her most precious jewels to buy back his release from Death. In those days Death was thought to live in a great stone palace in the world’s center surrounded by circles of unmourned folk who had to grieve for themselves. Death was not satisfied with a Royal touch, seeing that, in the end, Death could touch and be touched by any and by all.

The Queen followed the winding, twisting cave for miles, learning to see in the dark land with a night sight as keen as any Common Griever. Many long nights passed and at last she stopped by a pool and knelt down to drink. She saw, first, the dartings of phosphorescent fish, as numerous as stars. Then she saw, staring up from the pool, her own reflection with its shining night eyes, big and luminous. She did not recognize herself, so changed was she by her journey; but thought it a Queen from the night sky, fallen from the stars. She so desired the image that she stayed by the poolside, weeping her precious gems into it, begging the jewel-eyed woman to come to her.

After thirteen days of weeping, her grief for her consort was forgot and her gems were all gone. She returned home empty-handed, babbling of the Queen who fell from the sky. Her eyes remained wide and dark-seeing, a visionary and a seeress who spoke in riddles and read signs in the stars and was never again quite sane. She was called the Queen of Shadows.

You do not understand the other Cards in the deck? The Singer of Dirges is, of course, named after B’oremos when he was on his mission year. He brought my Master her fame but betrayed her three times. That is why on the Card he wears three faces. And so the Singer Card within the deck helps the other Cards move in three ways through the pattern, up or down, side to side, or on a diagonal through time.

And the Cup? It is the changer. If it precedes a Card, it changes the Card and its pattern. If it follows a Card, it does no harm. The only Card it cannot change is the Cave.

When I first told the rota, I only told it bare of all this. “One is for Lands…” I said. But over the years I have considered the rest and that is what I tell you now.

So now I know the Cards as well as you do, but still I do not know why you made them.

To help me grieve, sky-farer. To remember Gray.

I think there is more.

What more can there be? The Cards are my grief. Oh, now they are used by all the People as a game, telling the future, retelling the past. They make common what was singular. They have taken what was mine and made it….