Cards of Grief (7 page)

My King, that is what I have been trained for fully half of my life
—
and all of yours.

Then I will continue.

The millhouse was low and crowded with heavy dark wooden furnishings. Tables and chairs vied for the center of the one main room. An alcove under the loft stairs held several buttressed cupboards carved with deathheads and weeping women. The room was ringed with curtained beds. Privacy here was a matter of the imagination. It was like most of the country houses I had visited along my way. Even in Lina-Lania’s house I longed for the light of L’Lal’dome.

Gray herself answered my knock. She looked straight at me, eyes level with mine, but did not smile. She must have been surprised to see me, but she did not show it, did not giggle and mince and touch me the way her Lands kin had done over and over in every small town I had visited on my mission. It made me favor her the more.

She nodded her head slightly and stepped aside. I walked in. Her mother and her mother’s mother, both short and squat and dirt-colored, sat at the table preparing food for the dinner meal and arguing. They rose on seeing me, their eyes and mouths apologizing simultaneously.

I took the cleanest chair, the one farthest from the raw food. I am afraid I wrinkled my nose as they swept the peelings into a slop pot. Sometimes even a prince forgoes good manners. But I did nod to them at the last.

They did not mistake my mission.

“We have been waiting a long time for this discovery,” began her mother.

“You have not been waiting. You denied her prodigy. It was I who first noticed,” interrupted the grandmother.

“The long years have begun to addle you,” answered her daughter.

Gray was silent between them.

“There is no one like her in our family,” the grandmother said. Quickly she recited their twenty-one lines, being three times interrupted by her daughter. “And never was there one who looked or sounded like our Linni.”

Gray made only a small movement and stared at the floor. She had always known she had a gift for grieving, but her body’s length had been a torment to her. Stick-legs, indeed. Children can be cruel. Even princes. Her shoulders might have rounded under the burden of their insults; she might have tried to shrink herself into some kind of easy acceptance, but she had been too proud to bow under their tongues.

I walked over to her, put my hand under her chin, and drew her face up. It was as if she swam up to me from a great depth, for her eyes pooled with unshed tears and her mouth trembled somewhere between a frown and a smile. I felt my own hand shake with the touch and moved away from her.

“Gray,” I whispered, though I am not sure any of them remarked the significance of the name.

“She is called Lina-Lania,” said her mother.

“Linni,” insisted her grandmother.

“She will be known as the Gray Wanderer,” I said.

Gray smiled at me slowly. And indeed, ever after, she was known to me and mine only by that name.

We started out the next day after I had insulted all of them but Gray by insisting on sleeping in one of the darkly hung beds by myself. The women whispered long into the night about that—and perhaps about other matters as well—but I could not bring myself to tumble any of the brothers or the mother, who was long past childbearing anyway. And to touch Gray here, in the dark, as a duty, was beyond imagining. She would be brought to L’Lal’dome and into the light, where, in the privacy of my rooms, I would clothe her in silken gowns and she would be pleasured like any Royal woman.

She chose the coarsest of Lands gowns for our trip: gray, with embroideries of the rudest sort. With all the beauty of her tongue, she was a five-fingered disaster. The borders of her dress were childishly wrought—red, black, green, with threads carelessly dyed by berry juices. The work was unsophisticated, lacking charm. But she wore the clothes as if they were skins ready to be cast off. I could scarcely wait for her metamorphosis. Under my tutelage this Lands girl would emerge a Royal beauty.

The horse could not carry two, so I left it with the millwife. It was not—as someone suggested later—an ill-conceived payment. Rather I hoped to prolong the trip. Anticipation is one of the best parts of enjoyment. Thinking about a wine is often more satisfying than the first bitter sip. That is why I walked ahead of her much of the way, turning only infrequently to look. Each time I turned back I could savor the glimpses, taste them again and again in my mind.

She hardly spoke as we walked. In fact she was one of the most silent girls I have ever known. Perhaps it came from living with those two quarrelsome women, or perhaps it came from something deeper than that. I did hear her whisper to herself at night but I never asked what it was she said. Somehow her presence, though very satisfying, made me unaccountably shy; I was equally wordless. And without an instrument to hand, I could not sing.

Only once did she share an entire thought with me. It was on the second morning. She had bathed in a pebble-strewn stream unselfconsciously. I had spied on her from behind a rock as she splashed cold water across her small breasts. Her hair, shaken loose of the braids, was thick and full down her body and the curling ends were like dark fingers caressing the small of her back. Even after she dressed, I was still trembling from the sight of her and the skin on the backs of my hands and the inside of my thighs ached. But still I did not talk.

She looked at me, almost as if I were not there, and said, “The long years before I came to you were simply a rehearsal; dark passages on either side of a great light.”

My knees uncoupled at that and I sat down suddenly, thinking that now, now she would come to me and we would touch, out here in a meadow of windstrife, its silky tendrils being blown over us by a soft breeze. But she walked past me and I was glad that I had not spoken then because I realized that in fact she had not been speaking to me at all. She had been working on a poem, a presentation for the Queen.

I thought about those words more coldly. They were overwrought, childish, dishonest. They were as laughable as her dress.

“We should hurry,” I said brusquely, getting up and wiping the windstrife from my clothes.

She nodded, though her eyes, for a moment, looked startled. Then she braided her hair quickly, tying the ends as we walked.

Do you really remember that well?

We pride ourselves on what we hold in the mouth and mind.

Oh.

Besides, my friend, you must not confuse what is actual with what is true.

I am not sure
—

What I say now is true. Whether it happened
exactly
that way is not as important as what I am saying. Do you understand? It is important that you understand.

Yes.

Then I will tell you what transpired when we arrived at L’Lal’dome.

As we approached the city the paths became roads, the roads streets, and dirt led into cobbles. She seemed to draw even further into herself. The silence, which had seemed companionable, even sensual before, became an unbridgeable distance between us.

I tried to direct her attention to the twin towers looming ahead. If she saw them, if they meant anything to her, she did not say. She was already well in retreat from me, focusing on the Queen alone. For a moment I was shot through with such jealousies they could scarcely be borne. But my training took over. By squinting my eyes I could make her into what she was: a tall Lands girls with golden eyes and an ability to rhyme, nothing more. D’oremos had been right in that.

And so we came to my quarters with silence a stretched ligature between us. There we were greeted with high civility by Mar-keshan and my other servants, but it was Mar-keshan who really took her in.

He saw in her, he told me years later right before dying, the haunted look of his sister’s daughter. She had been a very minor sort of griever, taller than her family and with green-gold eyes. So she had been taken by a prince to L’Lal’dome. Mar-keshan’s confession surprised me. Oh, I had been a chosen Confessor before and had heard many strange things that had lain heavily on a man’s heart, blocking his passage into the Light. But I had known Mar-keshan all my life and had never heard him mention any family. I had believed that I was all he had. He had never found his sister’s daughter. She had been discarded and drunk from the Cup a year before he had gone looking for her. So he took Gray under his wing, a silent, stubborn protector.

The song I wrote for his passage was a slow dirge about service; I never mentioned the rest of what he said. In fact, you are the only one to know of it. I did not think he wanted it bruited about to those in his mourning lines, for though he may have left the sea to seek someone, he found me instead. I let
our
relationship stand as the marker for his immortality.

When Mar-keshan took Gray’s hand they exchanged looks and names. She called him Mar from then on, meaning simply “Man from Waters.” He was the only one in L’Lal’dome to call her Linni.

They disappeared at once into the inner rooms where the servants live. If I had thought that after a bath she would emerge already transformed in the silken gowns of court, I was sadly mistaken. Mar-keshan swore to me that he had laid out a magnificent swath of silk for her, but she presented herself to me, with a slight bob of her head, in the same gray gown. Its wrinkles had been steamed out by Mar-keshan’s attentions, but it was no more flattering than before. She had plaited her hair, though, and with Mar-keshan’s help had fashioned it back up in a crown twined with some of the colorful flowers plucked from the courtyard gardens: golden-eyed Wood-cheese, trailing Mourning Glory, and a spray of Queen’s Breath all purple and pink.

“Am I… presentable?” she asked. She did not ask if she looked well, if she were pretty, or some other coquetry. Simply
presentable.

I would not lie to her.

“Presentable,” I said.

Mar-keshan grunted and she turned to him.

“If you stand tall, they will know your true beauty,” he said. “Beauty is in the bearing.”

She smiled at him. “You sound like my mother.”

“And her grandmother,” I added.

She looked at me and perhaps my tone had been ungentle, but she did not comment further. So once again in silence we went out through the winding halls.

Tell me about those halls. I never could map them.

The princes’ apartments in L’Lal’dome are in an ever-spiraling circle like the whorls of shells that sometimes wash up onto our shore. Why should you try to make a map of them?

So that I might find my way alone.

Only a prince may walk those halls. Only a prince and those who companion or serve him.

Call it
—
curiosity, then.

You sky-farers have a strange curiosity. It drives you ever outward. Does it drive you inward as well?

What we learn of the outward world we apply to the inward.

Then think of a shell. Like a true man of Waters, Mar-keshan collected such shells and he once gave me a prize one, whole and unmarked, sliced through and both halves mounted on a wooden stand. We have a musical term for such a pattern as well. We call it lara’lani, a circle-puzzle.

We have such things on our home world as well. They are called chambered nautilus.

Cham’bured naut’lus. A strange word.

The word
chamber
also means living space or apartment.

How fine. I love playing with words. But you see, we needed no maps. The apartments, the cham’burs, were not mazes to a prince. Of all the places in our world it is what I know the best. But for the uninitiated, the place is truly a circle-puzzle, a labyrinth. I expected therefore to see puzzlement writ large on Gray’s face.

But she followed me with that same silent grace, head high, not a word about the spiraled puzzle path we traced.

In the very center of the lara’lani lived the Queen, though there is more than one entrance to those apartments. Still, when coming for an audience, it is the main spiral that one always uses for approach. At each footfall, once past the Apartments of Princes, bells announce the way. I used those bells thematically in the second section of my song cycle, repeating them near the end of the songs, a refrain and a death knell at once.

I remember it well. I thought the bells beautifully punctuated the phrasing.

Punctuation? Yes. Exactly. How clever of you…. But of course. You are a musician, too.

Only the bells seemed to bring Gray out of her silence. She said, “I am called—” then stopped.

I shrugged. One can get used to any cacaphony, make music out of the strangest sounds.

She shook her head as if shaking the thoughts free. Just as she did, the great wooden doors opened.

Heads turned toward us. I saw T’arremos, smirking, hiding his map-face behind a ringed hand. And my brother princes, those who had already completed their missions, in the bright colors of the Queen’s Consort, turned on their cushions and looked up as we walked in.

On the first and second levels below the Queen’s dais, on twenty cushions each, lay C’arrademos and D’oremos, their faces showing no more emotion than the stone caryatids outside. On the highest level, surrounded by the thirty cushions of Queenship, lay the Queen herself. Long and slim, so slim the skin seemed neatly tailored over her bones, she made no move except a blink. So Royalty schools itself.

We waited for a signal from her. At last she moved her hand. I pulled Gray to my side, then with a little nudge started her down the aisle and followed close behind.

Without looking back at me to make sure she was doing the right thing—which any other girl from Lands might have done—Gray walked to the foot of the risers. C’arrademos tucked his feet under his buttocks to make room for her to walk up, but D’oremos did not move.

“Come, child,” said the Queen, leaning forward and holding out her hand, a singular honor indeed.

Gray walked up the stairs. By accident she stepped on a corner of C’arrademos’s outermost cushion, which caused great consternation in the Hall; but Gray did not falter. She stepped over D’oremos, which saved him from a like humiliation. And when she was on the level with the Queen, she knelt and took the Queen’s preferred hand.