Cards of Grief

by Jane Yolen

  Tape 4: THE SEVEN GRIEVERS, PART II

  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

  AND 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.

  Tape 5: PRINCE OF TRAITORS

  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.

  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 s
eemed 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.