Cards of Grief

by Jane Yolen

  I will never know which argument decided them, but they gave me into her hands.

  “You will not see her again,” the Gray Wanderer told them, “except from afar. But her name will still be your name. And I promise you that she will not forget her lines.”

  And so it was.

  And the Cards?

  No, do not rush me. I will get to the Cards. But this must all come first so that you will understand.

  I was sixteen summers then. Not as young as the Wanderer herself had been when she had been chosen, but young enough. Yet I left home without a backward glance, my hand on her robe. I did not even paint my tears for the leaving, it was such a small grief. I left them pawing the silks, greedier than their own swine, who sensed my leaving and mourned the only way they could, by refusing a meal. Later, I heard, my mother and one of her sisters came to L’Lal’dome and asked for more silks or at least, they said, a Lumin nut.

  They were given a single silk with the embroidery of a great red lizard beast sewn on it—along with a beating.

  “If you come again,” the warning had been set, “she will have more names to add to the lines of grief. And they will be your own.”

  Well, no one likes to be called to the Cave before her time. They knew the threat for real. They did not set foot in the city again.

  So I became, in effect, the Gray Wanderer’s child. I would have taken her family name had she let me. But she had made a vow that I would retain my own, and she set great store by all her promises. So I kept my name, Grenna. But in all else I was hers.

  I learned as much as she could teach—and more. For even when she did not teach, I learned from her by watching and listening and—as I learned later—by loving. It is a fine word of yours. There are, it seems, some good things that you can bring.

  But Gray was already old and so all of our time added together was still short, five of our years. Excuse my tears. Crying, she used to say, is for art’s sake. But of course I am not a griever now. Those who come after will grieve me.

  So I come now to the part you wish to hear: about the Cards. But first I must touch upon her death, for it was that which inspired the Cards of Grief. It was many, many years ago, but it is still a memory clear in my mind. That is because I have never set it down. To hold in the mouth is to remember. My voice makes the telling true.

  Here, let me paint it for you and tell the pictures aloud. You come from the sky and your memories are false. My paints are over there, in the round wooden box on the stand. Yes, that is the one, with the pictures of tears that look like flowers on the top. A’ron carved it for me after a story he knew from old Earth. I treasure it. Bring it to me.

  First I will sketch the cave as it was, just one of the many rock outcroppings in the lower hills. You would be hard put to believe this is the same place. We have had many years to change it.

  Gray and I were three days finding it, though it was the walk of one day. She knew where it was, but she had a palsy, a halting gait, that made walking slow. We camped at night under a roomom tree and watched the stars together. She told me their names, strange names they were, in your language. She knew many stories about them. Does that surprise you? It should not. The Gray Wanderer walked among you and listened. She remembered everything she ever heard you say, though she did not ape your ways.

  I see.

  Just as in your language you say “I see,” meaning that you understand, we say “I hear.” A’ron showed me that. And of course Gray’s hearing was better than anyone’s.

  This then is the cave. The entrance was hidden behind a tight lacing of wandering thornfire. I was hours undoing it. Gray would not let me cut apart the vines.

  She had discovered the cave when she had first come to be the Queen’s Own Griever. Often, she told me, in that first year after her Master’s death, she ran off to the hills to think. She was terribly homesick and something had angered her. Oh, I see by your face that this part of her story is known. Well, anger and homesickness were often her companions. Not mine. I had not been happy until I left my home. I would have been sick only at the thought of returning there. If I regretted anything, it was leaving my poor pigs to the mercy of my kin.

  In the cave was a bed—a cot, really—constructed of roomom wood with a weaving of stripped vines strung from side to side. The thought of her dethorning those vines, strands and strands of them, here alone was enough to make me want to weep. I packed a new mattress for each of us once a week with sweet-smelling windstrife, grasses, and the musky roomom leaves. I set candles at the head and foot of the beds. There was a natural chimney near them and the smoke from the candles was drawn up it and out in a thin thread. Once I fancied it was Gray’s essence slowly unwinding from her, unwinding and threading its way out of the cave. Here, I’ll draw it like that. Do you see?

  And then A’ron came and of course everything was changed. He and B’oremos brought the news that the Queen was dead, which made Gray both stronger and weaker. But little Linnet and her laughter filled the cave and for a time seemed to heal Gray. She breathed more easily, as if a shadow were gone from her.

  If she knew that she was still dying, she did not dwell on it. If there was pain, it could only be guessed at. For the child’s sake she was never sad. She was like a gourd with a new candle inside. For a while all you see is the light; you do not notice, until it is too late, that the gourd has rotted from the inside out.

  She was feverish with stories and songs for the child. And she set me the same task, retelling all I remembered of the history of grieving. She wanted to set it in my memory and Linnet’s for good. Since I had been with her five years, I had many, many hours of recounting to do. We spoke back and forth, an antiphony that Linnet loved. She would sway as we spoke, her little head leaning first towards me, then toward Gray.

  When we had gotten to the end of all the tales, Gray added a new story, one whose parts I had only heard from others. And she spoke it to me alone. I remember it as if she just told it this morning. It was her own tale.

  She did not put A’ron in it by name, nor did she mention Linnet. Perhaps that is because she had been sworn to another truth by the old Queen, whose death sealed her in that lie.

  But that day, when the telling was done, when Linnet and A’ron were off picking wildflowers, Gray bade me bring her the Cup of Sleep, putting her hand out to me—thus. I can scarcely draw her fingers as thin and gnarled as they were then. It makes me ache to see them again, but that is not what stops me. Drawing them requires a delicacy that, alas, my old hands have forgot. But as thin and pale and hollowed out as she was, her hair was still that vigorous electric dark it had always been. I plaited it as she instructed, with red trillis for life and blue-black mourning berries for death. I twined green boughs around the bed for her passage in between.

  Then she smiled at me and comforted me when she saw I would weep—I, who rarely wept for anything in my life.

  I stood there with the Cup in my hand. Does the figure look strange to you? A bit cramped? Well, it should. My back and neck hurt from the tension of wanting to give her the Cup to ease her pain, and yet not wanting to because though her pain would be over, Linnet and A’ron and I would have pain that would go on and on and on. Of course in the end I gave her the Cup and left as she bid, before she drank, before I could stop her from drinking.

  I stood outside the cave and think I drew the first real breath of air since giving her the Cup, and just then A’ron and Linnet came back from their walk. The child was carrying a straggly bouquet of limp moons’ cap and trillis and those little yellow wild-flowers whose center are shaped like eyes, I forget their names.

  Wood-cheese or Wood’s eye.

  You have studied our world well. A’ron was right to admire you. Well, I moved quickly down the path to meet them and made up a story to keep them from the cave. As we walked—with the child running before us, chirruping and leading the way—I had to smile. A’ron caught my hand as we walked. We often just touched that way. If
it meant payment, I did not reckon for what. And something suddenly broke apart deep within me. I thought it was the grief, but A’ron looked at me.

  “You are laughing, Grenna,” he said. “Listen, Linnet, your mama can laugh.” But she was already too far along the path to hear or care. He spun me toward him and touched my face with his fingers. But my eyes were filled with tears and when he saw that, he guessed.

  “Gray?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  And he began to cry, soundlessly at first, and then with great heaving sobs. I had never heard the like. I held him and when he stopped making the noise, I drew his face down to mine and kissed away his tears.

  That was how Linnet found us, crying and kissing. And she held her hands up to us so that she might be picked up and touched, too. And we both kissed her and she put the flowers on our heads and said, “Now you both belong to me and to each other.”

  Ah, Dot’der’tsee, you have tears in your eyes, too. Do you cry for the death of the Gray Wanderer?

  I am not sure, Grenna. I cry about some loss, anyway.

  But nothing can be lost, Dot’der’tsee, if you hold it in your mouth and ear. If it is remembered, it is not lost.

  Then I do not know why I am crying. Please, continue the story.

  We put Linnet down and she skipped up the path and into the cave before I could stop her. When she cried out, we ran in.

  Gray was lying as I had left her, her face composed, her hands laced together. It surprised me to see her look so young and beautiful.

  A’ron and I brought her husk out and put it up on the pylons. Gray and I had built them months before, though in truth she had only watched, her hand pressed against her side, while I had done the work.

  I sat a whole day, still as a stone, not speaking to A’ron, though often I cuddled Linnet on my lap. I sat until the first birds came and settled on Gray’s husk and one, a black bird with wild white eyes, took the first bite.

  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.