Tales of Wonder (10 page)

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 gold besides, to find another pigkeeper.”

They hesitated.

“She will bring mourners to Halls all over the land to know the names of your lines. To remember you.”

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.

No, do not rush me. I will get to the cards. But this, 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 face with tears for the leaving. It was such a small grief. I left them counting the gold, greedier than their own swine, who sensed my going and mourned the only way they could, by refusing a meal. Later, I heard, my mother and one of her sisters had come and asked for more gold. They were given 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 did not set foot in the city again.

I became, in effect, the Gray Wanderer's child. I would have taken her family name, had she let me. But she had promised I would retain my own. So I did. 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. By watching. By listening. By loving.

But she was already old, and so all of our time added together was still short. Excuse my tears. Crying, she used to say, does not become a griever. But of course, I am not a griever now. Those who come after will grieve me. But I am as near the cave as makes no difference.

So I come 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 is many, many years ago, but as you can see, I have not left off my grieving.

I remember it as if it were yesterday. Here, let me paint it for you and tell the pictures aloud. My paints are over there, in the corner, in the round wooden box. Yes, that is it, the one with the picture of tears that look like flowers on the top. Bring it to me.

First I will sketch the cave. It was back in the mountains above the palace, one of the many rock outcroppings in the lower hills. We were three days finding it, though it was only a walk of a day. She knew where it was, but she had a palsy, a halting gait, which made walking slow. We camped at night and watched the stars together. She told me their names; strange names they were, in a language not our own. She knew tales about many of them. Does that surprise you? It should not. The Gray Wanderer remembered everything she ever heard from you starfolk. And used it, too.

Just as you say in your language, “
I see
,” when you understand something, we say, “
I
hear
.” And of course the Gray Wanderer's hearing was better than anyone's.

This then is the cave. The entrance was hidden behind evergreen branches, so cleverly concealed that only she knew of it. She had discovered it when she had first come to be the Queen's own griever. Often, she told me, in that first year she had run off into the hills for quiet. She was terribly homesick. Not I. I had not ever 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 that same evergreen wood with weaving strung from side to side. I packed a new mattress for her each day of sweet-smelling rushes, grasses, and sharp-scented boughs. I set candles at the head and foot of the bed. There was a natural chimney in the cave, and the smoke from the candles was drawn up it and out in a thin thread. Once I fancied it was the Gray Wanderer'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?

She knew she was dying, of course. It was why we were there. She set me the task of retelling all I remembered of the history of grieving, to set it for good in my memory. Since she had taught me every day I had been with her, I had many, many hours of recounting to do. But when I had told nearly all I knew, she added a new story, one I had heard only from others. It was her own tale. I still remember every word of it, as if it had been told to me just this morning.

Then she 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. It makes me ache to see them again, but it is not that which stops me. It requires a delicacy that, alas, my own hands have forgot. But as thin and as pale and as drawn up as she was, her hair was still the vigorous dark color it had been when she was a child. I bound it up for her as she instructed, with red trillium for life, and blue-black elderberry for death. I twined green boughs around the bed for the passage between.

Then she smiled at me, and comforted me when she saw I would weep—I who never wept for anything in my life before.

I stood here, with the cup in my hands. 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 the cup to her to ease her pain, and yet not wanting to because, though her pain would be over then, mine would go on and on alone. But in the end I gave it to her and left as she bid. I left, and went outside and waited two days. I sang all the grief songs I knew to keep from crying again, but I never ate. Nor did I draw.

At the end of that time, I went back into the cave. I had to cut the boughs away again, so quickly had they grown over the entrance.

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

I brought her husk out and put it on the pyre and pylons we had built together outside, though in truth she had only watched, her hand pressed against her side, while I did the work of the building. I sat another day, still as a stone, until the first birds came and settled on her, and one, a blackbird with wild white eyes, took the first bite.

Then I fled down the mountainside where I was sick several times, though I had sat pyrewatch before and had never blanched. It is funny how one can be sick with nothing in the stomach but bile and tears.

I went directly to the queen's own room and knelt and said, “The Gray Wanderer is gone.”

“You will make them remember her?” she asked. She was always a cold woman, rigid. It was the proper response, but I had wanted more. I knew she had loved the Wanderer in her own way.

“Your Majesty,” I said, giving her back ice for ice, “I will.”

“May your lines of grieving be long,” she said.

I turned and left. She knew that I had left out the last line of the ritual. I would not give her the satisfaction of my words. She would not hear “May your time of dying be short.” I did not care if hers was short or long. The only one I cared about had already had too long a time of dying, too short a time of living.

I went to the rooms we had shared and wept again. Then I dried my tears with one of the many towels the Wanderer had collected in her years of grieving in Halls. I pinched my cheeks for color and sat down with a harp to compose a small dirge, a threnody, a lament. But nothing would come. Even the Gray Wanderer's own words could not contain my feelings.

I stared at my reflection in the glass. Real tears marked a passage down my cheeks. I could paint 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
, I said.
Forgive my excess of sorrow
. She would have shuddered at the ocean of my 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 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 night in the royal Hall of Grief, with mourners passing in and out, speaking their ritual parts with as much sincerity as they could manage, I began to devise the cards of grief.

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. 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 days and sleepless nights before I was done with the painting of them. And then I slept for another week, hardly knowing who I was or what I was or where it was I was sleeping. My hands were so stained with paint that it was months before they were clean again. The clothes I had worn for that week I burned. I do not think I ever truly recovered my health. But I brought her a line of grievers as had never been seen before, long solemn rows of mourners; young and old, men as well as women. Even the starfarers came, borne in by curiosity I am sure, but staying to weep with the rest. And each time the cards are seen, another griever is added to her line. Oh, the Gray Wanderer is an immortal for sure.

The cards? I have not forgotten. Here, put the paints away. The painting? It is nothing, a quick sketch. Certainly you may keep it. And each time you see it, you will remember the Gray Wanderer.

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 now the cards. You see, I have not forgotten. Now is the time to show you.

That first pack was an eleven, not the more ornate thirteen plus thirteen that gamesters now use. I drew the cards on a heavy paper that I made of pressed reeds. I drew lightly so that only I could see the outline. Then I colored them in with the paints and chalks I should have used for my grief mask. 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.

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 sleep, I rose and painted two more. The Prime Pack is kept on velvet in the Queen's Museum, under glass. They are arranged at each month's turning in a new order. As if the order mattered now.

That first pack spoke directly to my need. There was no arcane symbology. The Seven Grievers were one for each of the 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 Wanderer came to her end in a real cave. The picture on the card is an exact rendering of her last resting.

The Queen of Shadows is the major card, for the Wanderer was always loyal to the queen on the throne. And the Singer of Dirges is the minor card. The moving card, the card that goes with ease from high place to low, was the card I called after my master, the Gray Wanderer. Its face is her face, and the dark hair under the cloak of gray is twined with flowers. But it is the Wanderer as she was when she was young, not crabbed with age and in pain, but when her face was unlined and she had a prince for a lover.

Seven Grievers. The Cave. The Queen. The Singer. And the Gray Wanderer. Eleven cards in all. And after my sleep I added two: the Man Without Tears and the Cup.

I sometimes think it was only a sentimental gesture. Gray often told me I must not confuse true 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 they make. Those are the old, slow ways, but for all that they were old and slow, they were about life and death and the small passage between.

I did not have to explain the cards to the many lines of mourners who came to honor my master. Not the way I have to explain them today. Over and over, to those like you who have come from the far stars with voice boxes and light boxes and faulty memories, who say “I see” even when you see nothing at all. And over and over to those of my own people who now ape grief with comic songs and dances and who turn even the cards of grief into a game.

But I will do it once more. One final time. I will tell the Prime Pack. Forgive me if the telling is one whose parts you have heard before. And this time I will tell it with infinite care, for there have been times that I, even I, have told them as a rota, a list, without meaning. This time I will unwind the thread of honest grief. For the Gray Wanderer. And for myself. For the story must be told.

I lay out the cards, one by one. Listen well. Do not rely on your boxes. Use your eyes. Use your ears. Memory is the daughter of the eye and ear.

Here are the Seven Grievers.

The figure on each card is dressed as one of the great families. There is not a person in our world who cannot trace connection to them. I am myself of Lands. And all who work the soil—farmers and stockmen, harrowers and pigkeepers—are here. So it is the Number One card because it is mine. We Lands were first before all the rest, and will remain when all the rest lie forgotten. In the Prime Pack, Lands wears the brown tunic and trews of our family and rides astride a white sow because that is, in a sense, how I was found.