Cards of Grief (6 page)

He opened the door himself, an indication of the importance he attached to our meeting, though he smiled me no greeting. I matched his control, merely nodding my head, the young prince to his father.

He gestured to a set of ten pillows.
Ten
pillows! It was better than I had hoped. I set the plecta on the floor and sank back against the pillows, waiting.

He lay back on his twenty cushions and stroked the long graying strands of his mustache before speaking. “You are home before time. I will not insult your intelligence or mine with games. Tell me what you have to tell me and then we will eat.”

I had thought to make a long, convoluted tale of it, with choice anecdotes about the plump and pretty girls I had met and my successes in the Halls. And if it had been the other major prince, C’arrademos, such a ploy would have worked well. But one look at D’oremos’s face stayed me. I was direct with him.

“In a minor Lands Hall I met a girl. Her name is Lina-Lania. She is tall, yellow-eyed, slim, and in her first Hall has written a poem that is like no other I have ever heard. It has simple grace and is the most moving thing…” I stopped.

“You sound like a fool made from tumbling,” D’oremos said. He said it without rancor or judgment. It was a simple statement.

“I would not ally with a Middle Lands girl, though I might tumble her,” I said. “But her words fit my songs, the songs I have not yet written, the ones I am meant to write.”

He did not answer.

“We were told to look for Royals begat in earlier sowings.
You
told me, in this very room.
Reap the Harvest
.” My voice took on a slightly petulant tone.

Still he did not speak.

“Lina-Lania is one. I am sure of it.”

He looked up at the ceilings, which were draped in red-and-gold silks. Without meaning to, my eyes followed his. The corner of one silk had pulled away from its fastening and drooped slightly. D’oremos clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, a small deadly warning, and I knew that there was a servant who would be given the choice of the Cup or dismissal come morning.

“I also was certain I had found one,” he mused. “The next year she grew fat on Royal food and I realized that her yellow eyes were only a muddy reflection of a boy’s desire. She did not last long and took the Cup willingly.” He smiled at the memory. “She was a pretty thing, for a while.”

I was silent.

“T’arremos brought back twin boys, and you know how rarely there are twins born. Perhaps once every three of four generations. They were marvelous children. Very inventive physically, but stupid beyond belief. Even the Queen laughed at T’arremos. He sent them home, denying them the last comfort of the Royal Cup. We are, I fear, breeding fewer and fewer.” He pulled on one side of his mustache, which gave his face a lopsided, quizzical expression. “How sure are you?”

I reached out for the instrument, my eyes never leaving his, and brought the plecta onto my lap. It was such a wonderful, sturdy old thing and I knew it would need no further tuning, which would have spoiled the moment. I played the Gray Wanderer’s song.

On the second time through, D’oremos’s thin, reedy tenor, slightly off-key, joined me in the chorus:

Weep for the night that is coming,

Weep for the day that is past.

Tears began to leak from his eyes, down the well-worn grooves in his face. I had not expected that. My fingers slowed to a stop.

“My father,” I whispered.

“She shall have her audience with the Queen,” he said, leaned back against his pillows, and closed his eyes.

I waited a minute more, hoping to hear the terms of our mutual undertaking. Then, understanding that there would be no demands from him, that finding Lina-Lania was enough, I rose and went back to my rooms.

I should have celebrated, I suppose, celebrated both my return to the comforts of L’Lal’dome and the success of my shortened mission. But I felt strangely cold and sick at heart. I slipped out of my robes and lay in the darkness, pressed against my eight pillows.

Mar-keshan came and went several times on quiet feet. He left bowls of sweet-smelling fruit to tempt me and slipped two new pillows under my head.

“Sent from Lord D’oremos,” he said, pride in his voice.

But I could not eat and I could not sleep, though I must have dozed off in the end, for I dreamed that a gray-cloaked figure stood at my feet, carefully away from the cushions, and offered me a cup of blood, crying all the while I drank.

We shall speak of this again tomorrow.

Place
: Queen’s Hall of Grief, Room of Instruction

Time
: Queen’s Time 23, Thirteenth Matriarchy; labtime 2132.5+
A.D.

Speaker
: Queen’s Own Griever to the apprentices, including Lina-Lania

Permission
: No permission, preset, voice-activated

A
ND HERE CONTINUES THE
song of the Seven Grievers as was told Master to Master down through the lines from the hour of the waters receding to the moment of my tongue’s speaking. I have saved these mournful dirges in my mouth and in my heart for the time when, as the Queen’s Own Griever, I have had to wail for the dying of the land once more.

Hear then, listen well. My word is firm, firmer than sleep or the Cup that carries it, firmer than the strength of heroes. My voice makes the telling true. To listen, to remember, is to know.

Onto the great crescent that was once the floor of the sea moved Lands and with them the folk of Moons and Stars, those who sowed no grain and grew no corn but reaped a harvest of words.

Moons
, the white-kirtled seers who with lavia and chronium chart the warm winds and cold, who chronicle the seasons and count forth the falling rain, who with rood and orb prophesy the end of one life, the beginning of another.

Stars
, who carry knowledge in their hands as well as their heads, who script the histories of Queens and track their lines, but whose words are barren of immortality or art.

Then from the ranks of Lands and Waters, Rocks, Moons, and Stars there arose a hardy, foolish few.

“Why must we live like cattle, browsing on the tillage of the soil,” they cried, “captive of the winds and storms that worry the fields? Give us red meat that we snare from the teeming forests, that we trap with the cunning that is in our hands.”

And they ran off into the woods to hunt and fight and live like beasts. There they tempered their anger with hunger and tempered their hunger with fear, for in the woods they were both feeder
and
fed on, and many fell to the cunning of fang and claw. These runners were known first as Hunters and later as Arcs and Bow, and for many years they set themselves apart from the rest. Though they were all children of the Night-Seers—sturdy, stout, and low—they came not near their kin but bred with their own. They bore many children, though most died young.

Then one arose from the ranks of Arcs and Bow, a great hunter and a mother of girls, who saw farther than the tops of the trees that kept them prisoned, who saw more deeply than the deepest hunting pits.

“Why do we not live, one upon another, trading our red meat for the yellow grain, sharing with our long cousins the bounty of forest and field?”

And from that time, Arcs and Bow joined again with their cave kin. They were like sisters under one roof, quarreling, who separate for a time and then come together again in their mother’s house to celebrate the seasons and the harvesting of days.

Selah.

Place
: Palace of the King, Apartment of King

Time
: King’s Time I, First Patriarchy; labtime 2137.5 +
A.D.

Speaker
: the King, called B’oremos, also called the Singer of Dirges to Anthropologist Aaron Spenser

Permission
: King’s own

I
BETRAYED HER THREE
times.

Do you want to begin that way?

It is our custom, sky-farer, to let a person tell his story in his own style, neither judging nor questioning. Is your recorder set?

It is.

Then forget it. It will do what it must do. But you must learn to listen.

I will listen.

I betrayed her three times. I thought each a loving act. I did it for the Queen and, perhaps, I did it for myself. It brought me here, to the thirty cushions of Kingship which I hold until the time there is a princess old enough to ascend the throne. And it brought me as well to the Cup of Sleep. Truly it is said, “Kick at the world, break your own foot.” I limp and thus I learn. But had I to do it over, there would still have been only the one way. Though I might have understood it better, I would have betrayed her again. The Queen demanded it and I followed the Queen’s way.

On the second morning after my meeting with D’oremos, there came a message from him that said quite simply: “Bring the girl.”

I left at once, neglecting to carry even the plecta with me, though the lack of any instrument riding between my shoulders was heavier than if one had been there. I took one of D’oremos’s riding beasts, for this was not a mission trip where every stone in the path and every straw mattress along the way is to leave its impression upon the body of a prince. I was—this time—on an errand direct from the Queen. And, as we were all reminded, “Queen’s time is now!”

The beast was a fat slug given to long lunches, but riding it was quicker than walking on my own. I stayed in none of the towns along the way, preferring a celibate blanket in a meadow sweet with windstrife and the heavy musk of night-blooming moons’ cap. I guess I wanted to find Gray without the prints of hands on my body or the bruises of mouths on mine. I had been washed clean by my stay in L’Lal’dome and I wanted to remain that way.

Certainly it made for early starts. Each morning began with a streaky sunrise, birdsong, and the tiny snip-snap of the moons’ caps closing. I prayed for strength, for courage in the woods, for the mind-set of a girl from Arcs and Bow. I fear I was sadly lacking in woods’ grace or the nuances of the hunt and I had neglected, in my eagerness to be on my way, to take the bag of bread and cheese that Mar-keshan had left out for me. By the time I entered Gray’s small holdings, I was starved for both food and conversation. A few nuts and berries (I know at least
that
much about the forest) and a sluggish steed fed neither hunger well.

I rode right up to the Hall of Grief, which had not improved in my absence, and left the horse outside. I wondered again that such a catastrophe of commonplaces as this town could have produced that startling willowy girl.

Inside, the usual cries and wailings could be heard, and a tune or two of such stifling unoriginality that I fear I yawned as I searched for her. It was a yawn lent strength by my nights in the woods. I covered my mouth as I looked around. A prince needs to remember his manners.

As a Royal, I am a head taller than the Lands folk, something you strangers—taller even than we—will have noticed. So one sweep of the Hall convinced me Gray was not there.

I made my way to the table under the millstone sign.

“The girl,” I said. “Lina-Lania. Where is she?”

A sallow-faced, blue-eyed boy with dark hair like a curtain over his forehead, stared up at me. He was slack-jawed, uncomprehending.

“Your sister-cousin, Lina-Lania.”

“Linni?”

The idiot knew his kin only by a family pet name, and a name which so ill suited her I fear I snorted at him. He jumped back. What could one do with such a mentality but rule it?

“Is Linni the tall one?”

He nodded slowly as the answer came to him. “You want Stick-legs? She’s at the mill.”

Without a word more—he deserved nothing better—I turned. I would not give him the satisfaction of even a public touch and I made sure the rest of the crowd noticed the dismissal. He would be taunted for that for a good while. I walked straight out the door.

Since mills are always on the east of a village and along the waterway, I did not have a difficult search. The millhouse squatted like a stone beast over the race, its wheel dipping in and out of the water in noisy rotation. That sound would accompany my stay and later I put it in the song cycle of the Gray Wanderer.

I have heard it.

You are supposed to say, “I would have liked her.”

And you would answer, “She would have grown by your friendship.”

You have learned our ways well, sky-farer.

I did not learn them fast enough.

You have not said whether you enjoyed my songs.

Can one
not,
like a King’s song?

I was a musician long before I was a King. I want the truth.

The songs brought Lina-Lania back to life for me.

Is that your way of saying…

I loved her? Yes.

No, no, you must say, “I would have
liked
her,” not, “I loved her.” We do not know the word
love
except in your own tongue. There are different degrees of liking: a friend, a child, a Queen, a night’s tumble. “I would have
liked
” is the beginning of ritual and relationship. Say it.

That, too.

Then my grief songs worked. Did you notice the sonority of the drone strings of the plecta? That was the mill’s sound. Except for my first song with her, this cycle is my bid for immortality. As long as it is played, she—and I—will be remembered.

I
will certainly remember.

Good…Then I will tell you the rest, for there is much more to be added to your memory. Your understanding of what occurred is sadly incomplete. Of course, we say here on L’Lal’lor that in every experience there is one to live it and one to tell it.

I have heard that bit of wit before.

Good, then you are prepared to listen well.