Cards of Grief (15 page)

“One day,” said B’oremos. “For it will take all of that for the court to come and view her.”

I dared breath again. “As you will.” And bowed. The peculiar thing is that I believed him. I was convinced that he and the court wanted to pay their respects to our dead Queen and it would never have occurred to any of them that we had tricked them. Though the princes might scheme, such Earth trickeries were beyond their imagining, or so it seemed to me. What a Queen says is true, and Dr. Z had been—in B’oremos’s eyes—our Queen. But still, as Hopfner said, we didn’t want to take any extra chances.

Dr. Z lay in state all that day with Hopfner standing at attention at her head, Clark at her feet, and a guard on either side. Whenever there was a break in the line of mourners, Hopfner complained to me.

“They are greatly honoring her,” I said. “Normally, the dead body is shoved up onto a pyre for the birds. Only Queens are viewed and mourned.” So he was stilled.

N’Jymnbo knelt frequently at Dr. Z’s side, as if crying over her. In reality he was checking on the vital signs. Any change would be an indication of actual acute distress rather than transsleep, which would mean Plan B, or as Dr. Z had put it the night before, “which means getting me the bleep out of there. I’m not really a martyr type. Just a conscripted fairy tale motif.”

As the last rays of the L’Lal’lorian sun were descending, and the gray fingers of night crept around our clearing, the Queen herself showed up, flanked by Linni and the priestess carrying the orb and rood.

The Queen sobbed, pronouncing the words that began the period of a Royal Seven: “A Queen has died. Let the tears flow.” Then she left for the Hall of Grief, signaling us all to follow.

We left Hopfner, Clark, and N’Jymnbo on guard duty. I explained this small break in their ceremony in terms of the medieval concept of vigil (
Analogue, analogue,
I heard Dr. Z’s voice in my mind), and though it was strange to B’oremos, it seemed likely. He did not insist that those three leave her side, though he left one of his own retainers, Mar-keshan, as a sign of further respect.

The Hall was lit by torches that flared upward toward the open roof. Though the mourners walked slowly to the sound of great pounding funerary drums, the shadows on the walls danced madly, creating an orgiastic parody of the somber procession. Only I seemed disturbed by the irony.

The L’Lal’lorians seemed really moved by Dr. Z’s death, though they had known her only a day. We sky-farers reacted more like tourists than like grieving friends. I only hoped the Queen and her retinue would take such gawping as our traditional show of grief.

Linni mounted to the stage and, after her, B’oremos. They proceeded to speak and sing long throbbing dirgelike songs and sonorous poems backed by chordings of incredible minor progressions. This was grieving for a queen.

It was while Linni was chanting the third long poem of the night, and the crowds of mourners stood gazing raptly up at the stage, arms around one another, swaying to the rhythms of her words, that I began to realize what a truly great artist she was. For as I attended, with the years of training of a professional listener, I understood that she had woven in the few details of Dr. Z’s life that she had been able to glean, adding observations of a physical nature that astounded me. And she did it all
as
she spoke within the strict confines of the rhyme scheme—intricate, formal, contrapuntal—and within an elongated metaphor of grief. It was a masterful performance.

The Queen standing near me sobbed openly, with little passionate gasps. She touched my hand and her fingers seemed to burn their prints onto my skin.

“I liked her,” she said. “And I would have liked to know her more.”

Biting back a quick answer about “Then why did you have her die?” I said instead, “She had already grown by your friendship. Had she known you longer, she would have grown more.” Some imp inside me, with Dr. Z’s voice, added, “Though some would say she had already grown quite enough.”

“What did you say, A’ron, in that rough tongue of yours?” the Queen asked, and I realized with a start that I had spoken the last aloud in English.

“I said…may she grow in the Light,” thinking again that light was something Dr. Z never was.

“Then you know of the Light, too,” said the Queen. “We must talk of it. Come to my room now, that we may converse further.” Her hand burned on mine.

“It is our custom to mourn by the side of our grieven one,” I said, explaining “vigil” to her.

She looked at me through hooded eyes and left in a swirl of shadows, her servants following quickly.

I don’t think I began to breath again until she was gone. Her hand’s fire still burned atop mine long after she had left.

When the Queen had departed, the mourning ritual began to wind down slowly and at last Linni left the stage. Walking in a slow, cadenced manner to the beat of the drums, she marched over to me.

“Man Without Tears,” she said, “I will grieve for you and yours not because the Queen commands it but because I sense that whatever else you tell the Queen, you do not—perhaps cannot—truly grieve.”

“Perhaps I do not know how, Lina-Lania,” I said.

“Perhaps there is no need,” she answered.

I was stunned for a moment, wondering if she had seen through our charade. Then I decided that she was talking metaphorically about our lives in general as she perceived them.

“When there is neither plukenna nor ladanna but only an in-between state…” she began.

“Love is not in between,” I said, “but better than both.”

“That I do not believe.”

“Perhaps you cannot.”

“Perhaps there is no need.”

It was not an argument but an antiphony and my heart beat with the rhythm of it. Her eyes were bright and, in the darkening Hall, seemed to glow.

Just then B’oremos joined us. “Thus ends the first night of mourning,” he said. “We must feast, now, eating the portion which would ordinarily have gone to your Queen.”

I smiled. “Then we will have much to eat.”

Linni looked scandalized, but B’oremos clapped me on the back and though he did not laugh, I believe he came very close to it.

“Come back to my apartment. There will be plenty of good food. Mar-keshan prepared it early. Gray will come, too.”

“Gray?”

“Lina-Lania. The Gray Wanderer. It is what we call her.”

“Gray.” I rolled it in my mouth, not quite liking the sound or implication.

Linni saw my hesitation. “Which name do you prefer?”

“Linni. It reminds me of the linnet, a little singing bird of Earth, my world.”

“And what is the color of that bird?” she asked.

I smiled. “There
is
one variation called a gray linnet,” I said.

“There,” she said. “Words of two worlds cannot lie. Call me what you will.”

“Linni,” I said. “I will leave you
Gray
in B’oremos’s mouth. For in our world that is a color that is somber, washed out, sad, without sparkle. It does not suit you.”

“You do not, in fact, know what suits me yet, Man Without Tears,” said Linni. “I sense that hesitation in you. A wondering and a holding back. A poem not yet sung.”

I smiled directly at her, closing B’oremos out. “I will sing that poem someday, I promise you.”

B’oremos insinuated himself back between us. Taking my right hand he pulled me out of the Hall of Grief across the cobbled streets to the palace, then through the maze of hallways to his rooms. Linni followed.

Did the Queen know that you had gone with them instead of back to the ship for your vigil?

I didn’t know, nor, I must admit, did I give it any thought at the time. I told myself I was observing, studying, learning; a true anthro. But I think, in fact, I was enjoying.

Ladanna.

I beg your pardon, sir?

I was just musing. Carry on, Aaron.

In B’oremos’s room I sank back against a fall of cushions as easily as if I had done so all my life. B’oremos lay back on his own, his foot touching against mine. Only Linni sat upright, like a punctuation mark between us.

I asked questions, phrased more like statements and B’oremos gave me answers phrased more like puzzles. It was almost a game between us and I was beginning to fit into their way of thinking. Just as there is a moment in the learning of a language when one suddenly dreams in the new tongue and knows it, so there is this moment of acculturation. We are told
of
it in the classroom, but the explanation is lame. When it comes, though, there is no mistaking it.

I had quite forgotten Dr. Z’s “death,” and so, when a servant arrived summoning B’oremos to the Queen’s Apartment, I was unprepared for his heavy sigh.

“Grief makes her think of her immortalities,” he said.

“Grief?” I asked. “Immortalities?” The long day and the glasses of wine that B’oremos served, much stronger than any I had yet tried, were making me slow.

“The death of your Queen grieves her and she thinks of the time when she, herself a Queen, will be in the Cave without the comfort of blood daughters to mourn her. She longs for another child. Tonight she insists on being sown and we will all be rewarded if there is a harvest.”

“She asked me,” I said. “She invited me to her room but I told her no.”

B’oremos and Linni looked shocked.

“One does not deny a Queen,” Linni said.

“We do our sowing with
love
,” I said. “And with
love
there is always a choice.”

“A man has no choice in these matters,” said B’oremos. “A man has so little time, it must be expended in the service of the Queen. She calls and I…” He brushed his hand across the front of his chiton and there was a noticeable bulge there. “I am a man and must answer.” He looked at me grimly. “Either you are playing with us and are not a man or—”

“I am a man,” I said simply.

“Or for you time runs at a different pace,” Linni finished.

To this I made no answer. I did not dare.

B’oremos touched my shoulder and left quickly by a door that was hidden behind a drapery, and Linni and I were left alone.

“
Is
time different for you?” she asked.

I tried to think of a way to phrase it so that it would not further compromise our mission. “We count in a different way,” I said at last.

She was silent for a while, her angular face solemn, reminding me of madonnas on the glass windows of cathedrals on old Earth. Finally she looked at me. “You have much to teach us, sky-farer.”

“I am here to learn, not to teach,” I said, my mind strangely sharp. I seemed to see each word before pronouncing it. Absently, I reached out to pluck a word out of the air, turned it over in my hand, and said, “The word is
ladanna
.”

“I will teach you the difference between plukenna and ladanna,” said Linni, “without words.” She said it earnestly. “For it is certain I cannot teach a man to grieve unless he feels that grief here.” She moved over to sit close to me and touched me over the heart, her hand palm down, fingers spread wide.

“But where does a man feel the difference between plukenna and ladanna if not here?” I said, covering her hand with mine. Hers trembled beneath.

“I have never been
touched
,” she answered, then added as if the simple statement needed explaining. “In my village I was odd, even odder than the usual Royal sowing. And here, as I am the Queen’s Own Griever, I am Untouchable. Do you understand what that means?”

“Little linnet,” I said, almost whispering, “sweet singer. I, too, have never been
touched.
I’ve been too busy studying and learning. But now—it would also be against all my vows to touch you.”

Her hand moved off my heart and onto my lips.

I kissed her fingers one by one. They were roughened and there was a crescent-shaped scar on her left thumb. Then I dropped her hand and reached for my cup of wine and drained it. On the bottom lay a single small black seed like a period at the end of a sentence.

“What is this?” I asked.

She took the cup and looked, then put her hand to her brow. “It is what is left of a Lumin nut after it has been soaked in wine. B’oremos had those three Kernels which your Dot’der’tsee gave back to him. He has put one in the cup for you.”

“Oh, God. Am I a dead man?” I asked, beginning to feel a warmth swelling up my legs. If this was death, it was not at all unpleasant.

“Oh, no, A’ron, not dead. Three kernels bring death. Two will give you nightmares and hysteria. But one…” Her voice became soft and out of focus. “One is for a night of wild rejoicing.”

“Have you, too, drunk wine with a kernel?” I asked, suddenly eager for her answer.

She looked into her cup, drained it, looked again. Her eyes were golden and wide. “We will be unable to stop what has already begun,” she said. “If there is a fault, if there has been a betrayal, it is B’oremos’s. You—and I—we are innocent.” She rose, blew out the candles one by one by one, then came toward me in the lingering shadows and lay down by my side.

The first kiss and the first touch were sweet, but not as sweet as all the ones that followed.

You need not describe any more, Aaron.

Thank you, sir, but I could not even if ordered. The Lumin muddled my senses and I’m not sure what was real and what was not. But I love her, sir. And I know she loves me.

What makes you say that?

Because as she was blowing the candles out, I looked into her cup. There was no little black seed in it.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have all heard Aaron Spenser’s testimony. I want you to consider it carefully. There are three things to examine: motive for contamination, method of contamination, and of course whether in fact contamination has occurred.

Excuse me, sir, but there is something that I don’t understand. What happened between Linni and me was personal. When B’oremos returned, Linni and I had already parted, she to her own room and I back to the ship, where I was to help prepare Dr. Z’s transfer into a transsleep capsule. Linni and I had decided that we needed time to sort through our feelings about what had happened, though we were not going to speak of it to anyone else. She reminded me that vows broken under the influence of Lumin do not count. So I have been puzzled all along at this Court Martial. But as I promised to tell the truth of it to this court, I have—to the best of my ability.