Cards of Grief (19 page)

Place
: Cave 27, now the center of Aerton

Time
: Council time 35; labtime 2142.5
A.D.

Speaker
: Grenna to Dr. M. F. Zambreno

Permission
: Direct

Y
OU HAVE COME TO
see me about the Cards? You have left your calling until it is almost too late. My voice is so weak these days I can scarcely sing an elegy without coughing, though there are those who would tell you that singing was never my strong point. And that is true enough. While others in the Halls of Grief could bring in lines of mourners by the power of their singing and others by the eloquence of their rhymes, such was not my way. But many, many have come to watch me draw grief pictures on paper and board. Even now, when my hand, which had once been called an old hand on a young arm, is ancient beyond its years, I can still call mourners with the power in my fingertips. Oh, I often try to sing as I draw, in that strange high fluting voice that one critic likened to a “slightly demented turtle dove.” But I have always known it is the pictures, not the singing, that brings mourners to my table.

That was how Gray found me, you know, singing in my high warble and drawing at a minor Minor Hall for one of my dying great-great-aunts, a sister to my mother’s mother. In those days our mother lines were quite defined.

We were a family of swineherds and had always been so. I found it easier to talk to pigs than people; their remarks were more direct, more truthful, more kind. And I had never played at any Hall games with other children, having neither brothers nor sisters, only pigs. Once I had made up a threnody of sow-lines. I think I could still recall it if I tried.

No matter. The irony is that I can remember the look of my favorite sow’s face, but the great-great-aunt I mourned for, her face is lost to me forever, though of course I know her lines: Grendi of Grendinna of Grenesta and so forth.

The Gray Wanderer (she was still called that by backwater folk like us, though all the city called her Gray) had been on a late pilgrimage. She often went back to country Halls. “Touching true grief,” she liked to call it, though I wonder how
true
that grief really was. We tried to ape the court at L’Lal’dome, and we copied their way of singing from the voice boxes the sky-farers brought. Many of my first drawings were tracings of their tracings. How could I, a pigkeeper, know otherwise?

But she saw me at a Hall so minor, both pillars and capitols were barren of carvings. There was only an ill-conceived painting of a weeping woman decorating one wall. Its only value was age. Paint flaked off it like pallid scabs and no one had time or talent to paint it anew. What it needed was not retouching but redrawing. The arms of the woman were stiff, the pose awkward; I knew it even then, though I had not the words to say it.

“The girl, let me take her,” the Gray Wanderer said.

Though it was clear I had been Royal sown, being tall and golden-eyed, I was awkward and my mother and her sisters did not want to let me go. It was not love that bound us but greed. I worked hard, harder than anyone else, because I preferred it to being in their company. The pigs would suffer from my leaving. Besides, in the recent year since I had been allowed into the Hall, I had become quite a success as a griever in our small town. My mother and her sisters could not see beyond our sties to the outside world.

But the Gray Wanderer pointed out, rightfully, that they had no means to educate me beyond this Minor Hall. “Let her come with me and learn,” the Gray Wanderer said, “and I will give you silks besides, to find another pigkeeper.” She did not offer them touches, for she could read into their greedy, grit-filled souls.

They hesitated.

“She will bring mourners to Halls over the land to know the names of your lines, to remember you.” She waved the rainbow-colored silks before their faces.

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.