Cards of Grief (3 page)

You are smiling. You have heard me say all this before. Do I, in my age and illness, repeat myself endlessly? Well, what else is there to do, lying here in the darkness, but retrace the steps of light? Here I throw no shadows and that is how it should be. But once my shadow—the shadow of the Gray Wanderer—covered the entire land. I guess there is a certain pride in that, and a certain immortality.

I remember I had just finished the threnody in my head and was tracing out the words onto a tablet. It was slow going. I had not the grace of my aunts’ hands and each letter had to be painstakingly drawn. You have such hand’s grace, child, and that is one of the reasons—though not the only one—why I kept you past your training. No, do not blush. You know it is true. Do not confuse humility with self-denial. You have an old hand grafted onto a young arm. Not for you are the easy strangers’ ways, the machines from their great ships that multiply letters. Hold on to the best of the old ways, child. Pass them on.

Yes, I drew the words slowly and my hand faltered on a phrase. Oh, the phrase was fine, but the lettering was traitor to its truth. I was casting around for a scraper when I realized that someone was standing over me. I looked up and it was a youth just past that blush of boyhood, when the skin still had a lambent glow yet is covered with soft down that has not yet coarsened into a beard. It was the singer, the princeling. Before, I had concentrated on his singing, which had been very lovely. Close by, I was overcome by his beauty. He was tall, of course, and his bones more finely drawn than any of our Lands men. And he had a quick though infrequent smile, not the slow vanishing slits of mouth and teeth that my brothers and their friends used.

“I would have liked them,” he said in his low, ripe voice. He nodded at the memoria to my great-grandmother and great-great-aunts.

It is the ritual opening, to be sure, the mildest approach to an unknown grieven one. But somehow I sensed it was sincerely meant. And though I answered with the words that have been spoken already a thousand thousand times by grievers, he knew my own sincerity in them.

“They would have grown by your friendship.”

I scraped the linen free of the mistake and finished the threnody while he watched. I blushed under his scrutiny. My face was always a slate on which my emotions were writ too large, and I have carefully schooled myself against such displays. I pulled the linen free of its stretcher. The linen curled up at the edges just a bit, which was what I had hoped. It meant a reader had to flatten it by hand and in that way actually participate in the reading.

He took the time to read it, not once but several times. And then he read it aloud. His voice, already changed, had been trained since birth. He was to be a member of the Queen’s Consort and she had only the best. In his mouth the words I had written took on an even more palpable sense of grief. A fine singer can make a song, you know.

Soon we were surrounded by the other table watchers. He knew how to project his voice, he was a prince after all, and the others caught phrases that beckoned them, drew them in.

And that was how my mother and my great-aunts found us when they returned, with a long line of mourners standing under the millstone sign. All the other stalls were empty, even of watchers. The mourners were saying with him, as he repeated the threnody yet one more time, the chorus that is now so famous:

Weep for the night that is coming,

Weep for the day that is past.

Yes, it is simple. Every child knows it now, in the time of the strangers. But I wrote it that day when the strangers were not even a dream, and I wove my great-grandmother’s name into the body of the poem that she would not be forgotten. Her lines were long indeed. I was glad to have done it that day, for she was dead when we returned home and already my brothers had set out her husk on the pyre and pylons for the birds of prey.

The next seven days, as true grievers, we mourned upon the stage of the Hall for our grieven one’s passage to the world of everlasting Light. How my great-grandmother must have smiled at her lines of mourning. Such long, loyal lines. My mother said there had never been such lines in our Minor Hall except when the singer Verina died who had been born in the town next but one to ours and whose relatives numbered in the hundreds in the countryside. My grandmother disagreed, mentioning a painter whose name I had never heard of and whose lines, she claimed, had been longer. But then my mother and grandmother always found things to disagree about. They agreed, though, that the longest lines had been for the last Queen, though that had been well before my mother’s time and when my grandmother had been but a girl.

I wrote three more Gray Wanderer threnodies and one thirty-two-verse dirge which the harper prince set to a modal tune. The Hall throbbed with it for days, though one can hear it only occasionally now. It takes too long in the singing, and the strangers brought with them a taste for short songs. But Great-grandmother has not been forgotten and I still have pride in that, for I made it so.

After the seven days, it was incumbent upon my mother to find me a Master Griever from our clan, though, by tradition, there should have been a year between my first entrance into a Hall and any formal apprenticeship. But the elders had come to her as soon as the Seven was over. They even spoke in front of me, which was unheard-of at that time.

“She must be trained now, while the grace of tongue is still with her,” said one. She was a hen-keeper by trade who had lost her own voice young and still mourned it.

My mother agreed.

By habit, my grandmother disagreed. “There is no one here worthy of our Linni,” she argued.

“Do you not have some long connection on the coast?” asked another Elder. She was unfamiliar to me, though the white streak in her hair proclaimed her of Nadia’s line.

“We do not have the means,” my mother began.

“We will borrow if needs be,” my grandmother said. As she was now head of the Lania, I knew it would be so.

They argued it out over and over as we walked home. I felt the injustice of my mother’s stand, though in my heart I did not want to impoverish them for my poetry’s sake. They ignored me and no one asked me what I wished. And what did I wish? For some magic to descend upon us all and make us wealthy or take me away somewhere, so that I could do nothing but make my poems in peace.

That very day there came a knock on the door. Ah, I see you are ahead of me. Have I told this before? It was the singer, B’oremos, the prince from the Hall. He had left after the first day, gone—I had assumed—to finish his young man’s pilgrimage from Hall to Hall. I had hoped that he would stay awhile but I had only my words to hold him. In those early days, knowing the pull of the plump and lovely Lands girls on the princes, I did not value my own talents enough. I knew he would be there only a short while at best. I did not want to be the only girl in our village who had been slighted by a prince. Of course he had already paid me a great deal of attention, but that was part of his training, singing for different mourners, setting their threnodies to tunes. I had hoped he might stay over with us and instead he had left precipitously. But he had not gone on along his route, though, forgetting me for some saucy pigkeeper’s daughter. Instead he had doubled back and told the Queen herself what had happened in our Hall. It had taken three days to get an audience with her and a day for her to make up her mind. But at last she had said to him, “Bring me this Gray Wanderer, that I may see her for myself.” And that, of course, was how I was named.

So I was brought before her, the Queen from whose own body should have sprung the next rulers. Only she was girl-barren. Her many princes plowed her, but there was no harvest. She had no girl children to grieve her, only boys. She did not know when I came to her that her bearing days were already over and that her sister’s son would rule after her.

But we did not know all that would transpire then. The Queen asked to see me out of simple curiosity and because the news was brought by a beautiful young man.

I dressed, as was appropriate to my age and clan, in a long gray homespun gown pricked through with red and black and green embroidery. I had done it myself, the trillis twined around the boughs and a sprinkling of mourning berries along the hem. My mother called it fine, my grandmother complained of the stitchery.

My hair was plaited and pinned upon my head. My grandmother thought it silly to travel that way, my mother said it was best to have it off my neck. I thought them both crazed to argue about my looks. I had never been any great beauty, but a great gawking girl a head taller than the rest.

They agreed on one thing, though.

“Stand tall,” my mother said, pulling at the sides of my dress.

“Pride in bearing can make the difference,” added my grandmother, fussing with my hair.

I assumed they began quarreling again as soon as I left, and to tell the truth for many long years I missed the sound of their banter. It was never quarreling in anger, but a kind of conversation between the two of them, statement and response, as predictable and satisfying as an antiphonal poem.

Because they had asked it of me, I held my head high, though I took the braids down as soon as we were out of sight. It was too heavy for the long trip piled up that way.

What happened along the road I forget, though I know I wanted B’oremos to turn and talk to me. But he was intent on finding the quickest way there.

And when we arrived at the great city of L’Lal’dome, with the twin towers marking the place like gigantic stone arrows, I was suddenly too frightened and too homesick to react. So I kept to the silence that B’oremos had begun.

When the Queen saw me, she smiled. I was so young, she told me later, and so serious she could not help but smile at me. She smiled as most Royals do, more lips than teeth, but widely.

“Come, child,” she said, leaning forward and holding out her hand.

I did not know any better and took it, oblivious to the mutterings around me, and that marked the beginning of our strange friendship. Then I leaned forward and whispered so that she alone could hear it. “Do not fear the dark, my lady, for I am sent to light your way.”

It was not the speech I had practiced with my mother, nor yet the one my grandmother had made me promise to recite. Nor was it the one I had made up along the way as I traipsed behind B’oremos hoping he would turn and speak to me. But when I saw the Queen with the grief of all those girl-barren years sitting above her eyes, I knew why I had come. B’oremos was just a pretty thing, a toy forgot. It was to serve
this
Queen and our land that I was there. So I spoke those words to her; not for the applause of the court or to turn B’oremos’s head, but for the Queen alone. And because I did it that way, she knew I was speaking the truth.

She bade me sit at her feet, perched on the lowest cushion of Queenship. I thought I would never leave.

Then she asked to see my grief poems and I took the first of the Gray Wanderer ones from the carry-basket. They are in the Queen’s Hall now, behind locked doors, where only the scholars can read them, but once they had been set out for everyone to see.

She read them with growing interest and called up the white-robed priestesses to her.

“A child of Lands shall lead the way,” the priestess said cryptically, rubbing her hands along the sides of her robe. They always speak thus, I have found, leaving a leader many paths to choose from. Grievers and priestesses have this elliptical speech in common, I think, though the priestesses would claim True Knowledge and Infallibility while I can only speak in symbols what I feel here, here in the heart.

The Queen nodded and turned to me. “And can you make me another threnody? Now? Now, while I watch, so that I can see that you made these without the promptings of your elders?”

I said what I then believed. “I have no one to grieve for, my Queen.”

She smiled.

In those days, remember, I was young and from a small village and a Minor Hall. What did I know of Queens? I thought it was a pitying smile. I know better now. It was a smile of power.

Several days later word came that my grandmother had died and I had much to grieve for then. I wondered what my mother would do without someone to argue with, whether she would become a silent husk herself. But I was not allowed to go home to do my grieving or to offer myself as the other tongue to my mother’s lost duet. No, the Queen herself set me up at a table in a Major Hall and on that stage, surrounded by the sophisticated mourners of the court, I began my public life. I wrote thirteen threnodies in the seven days and composed a master lament, though I should not have had the skill. My grief was fed by homesickness and by the image of my mother struck dumb by grief.

Grief was the gag that silenced her,

She never sang again.

That was really about my mother, and it turned out to be true.

I had those hardened mourners weeping within a day. The Queen herself had to take to bed out of grief for my grandmother, though the strangest thing was that I had never realized before how much the old woman had meant to me.

The Queen called the best grievers in the land to teach me in relays after the Seven was up. Within the year I knew as much as they of the history of mourning, the structure of threnodies, and the composition of the dirge. I learned the Queen’s birth lines to twice the twenty-one names and the lines of her cousins as well. I held in my mouth and mind the first of the hundred prime tales and was already beginning on their branches. What I learned I did not forget. And when I had Mastery conferred on me, I stood in the Room of Instruction with the other apprentices and had the tale of the Seven Grievers given to me. All this, which usually takes half a lifetime, I learned in a year.

And for a night I had a prince as a lover, though I never bore him a babe.

But I see a question in your eyes, child. Do not be afraid to ask. Wait, let me ask it for you. Did I regret my years of service to the Queen when I learned that she had had my grandmother slain? Child, you have lived all your life with the knowledge of the strangers from the sky. You are one of the changed grievers. We did not question a Queen. She did what she did for the good of our land. I do what I do for the good of my art. My grandmother’s lines were long and full of Royal mourners; her dying was short and without pain. Would that we could all start our journey that way.