Tales of Wonder (9 page)

You know the poem, of course:
The lines of her worn and gray cloak
…, which scholars insist refer to the lines of mourning. I did not mean that, just that the cloak fell from her shoulders in comfortable, familiar folds. But never mind. The scholars seem to know more about such things than we grievers do. You smile. You have heard me say all this before. Do I, in my age, repeat myself endlessly? Well, what else is there to do, lying in darkness, but retrace the steps of light? Here I throw no shadows. But once my shadow—the shadow of the Gray Wanderer—covered the entire land.

I had just finished the writing of the threnody and was tracing out the words onto a tablet, and it was slow going. I had not the grace of my aunts' hands, and each letter was painstakingly drawn. You have such grace, and that is one of the reasons why I kept you past your training. No, do not blush, child, you know it is true. Do not confuse humility with self-denial. You have an old hand grafted onto a young arm. Not for you the easy, strangers' ways, the machines that multiply machine-drawn letters. Hold to it. Pass it on.

Yes, I drew the words slowly, and my hand faltered on a phrase. Oh, the phrase was fine, but the lettering was traitor to its truth. I was casting around for a scraper when I realized that someone was standing over me. I looked up. It was a youth just past that blush of boyhood, when the skin still has a lambent glow yet is covered with soft down that has not yet coarsened into beard.

“I would have liked them,” he said, nodding at the memoria to my great-grandmother and great-great-aunts.

It is the ritual opening, of course, the mildest approach to an unknown grieven one. But somehow I sensed it was sincerely meant, and though I answered with the words that have been spoken already a million million times by grievers, he knew my own sincerity in them.

“They would have grown by your friendship.”

I scraped the linen free of the ink and finished the threnody while he watched. Then I pulled it free of its stretcher. The linen curled up at the edges just a bit, which was what I had hoped. It meant that a reader had to flatten it by hand and that way actually participate in the reading.

He took the time to read it, not once but several times. And then he read it aloud. His voice had already changed, and it was low and musical. He was in training for Queen's Consort, you see. And in his mouth the words took on an even more palpable sense of grief. A singer can make a song, you know.

Soon we were surrounded by the other table-watchers. He knew how to project his voice, and they had caught phrases that had beckoned them, drawn them in.

And that was how my mother and my great-aunts found us when they returned, with a long line of mourners standing by the table and all the other stalls empty, even of the watchers. The mourners were saying with him, as he repeated the threnody yet one more time, the chorus which is now so famous:

Weep for the night that is coming,

Weep for the day that is past.

Yes, it is simple. Every child knows it now, in the time of the strangers. But I wrote it in a fever that day, when the strangers were not even a dream, and I wove my great-grandmother's name into the body of the poem that she would not be forgotten. Her lines were long indeed. I was glad to have done it that day, for she was dead when we returned home, and already her husk had been set out on the pyre and pylons for the birds of prey.

The next seven days we mourned upon the stage of the Hall for our grieven one's passage to the world of everlasting light. How my great-grandmother must have smiled at her lines of mourning, for they lit her way through the dark cave of death. Never had there been such lines in our minor Hall, except when General Verina died, who had been born in the town next but one to ours and whose relatives numbered in the hundreds in the countryside, and of course, I was told, the last Queen. I wrote three more Gray Wanderer threnodies and one thirty-two–verse dirge which the harper set to a modal tune. The Hall throbbed with it for days, though one can hear it only occasionally now. It takes too long in the singing, and the strangers brought with them a taste for short songs. But Great-grandmother has not been forgotten and I still have pride in that, for I made it so.

After the seven days, it was incumbent upon my mother to find me a Master Griever among our clan though, by tradition, I should have had a year between my first entrance into a Hall and my formal apprenticeship. But even the elders had come to her as soon as the Seven was over and begged her to forgo that year. They even suggested seeking out some long connection in one of the coastal towns, where gold flowed along the seashore. But we did not have the means to do such a thing.

That very day there came a knock at the door. I see you are ahead of me. Have I told this before? It was the singer, the one from the Hall. He had left after the first day, gone I had assumed to finish his young man's pilgrimage from Hall to Hall. It is part of the training, you know, singing in front of different mourners, learning
all
the ways of the land. But he had not gone on along his route. Instead he had doubled back and told the queen herself what had happened in the Hall. It had taken him three days to get an audience with her, and a day for her to make up her mind. But at last she had said to him, “Bring me this Gray Wanderer, that I may see her for myself.” And that, of course, was how I was named.

So I was brought before her—the queen—from whose own body would spring the next rulers. Only she was girl-barren. Her many men plowed her, but there was no harvest. She had no girl children to grieve for her, only boys. And she did not know then that her bearing days were over and that her sister's girls would rule after her, to the great tragedy of our world. For those queens invited in the strangers, who brought with them the rule of men. But none of us knew all that then, and she asked to see me out of simple curiosity.

I dressed, as was appropriate to my age and clan, in a simple long gray gown pricked through with red and black and green embroidery. I had done it myself, the trillium twined around the boughs with a sprinkling of elderberries along the hem. And my hair was plaited and pinned up on my head, a crown as simple as the queen's was ornate. I was never any great beauty, but pride in bearing can make the difference. I held my head high.

She saw me and smiled. I was so young, she told me later, and so serious, she could not help it.

“Come, child,” she said, leaning forward and holding out her hand.

I did not know any better and took it, oblivious to the mutterings around me. Then I leaned forward and whispered so that she alone could hear it. “Do not fear the dark, my lady, for I am sent to light your way.”

It was not the speech I had practiced with my mother, nor yet the one I had made up along the way. But when I saw her, with the grief of all those girl-barren years sitting above her eyes, I knew why I had come. So I spoke those words, not for the applause of the court but for her alone. And because I did it that way, she knew I was speaking the truth.

She bade me sit by her feet. I was never to leave.

She asked to see my grief poems, and I took the first of the Gray Wanderer ones from the basket. They are in the museum now where only the scholars can read them, but once they had been set out for anyone to see.

She read them with growing interest and called the priestess to her.

“A child can lead the way,” the priestess said cryptically. They always speak thus, I have found, leaving a leader many paths to choose from. Grievers and priestesses have this in common, I think, though the latter would claim true knowledge and infallibility, while I can only speak in symbols what I feel here, here in the heart.

The queen nodded and turned to me. “And can you make me another threnody? Now. Now, while I watch so that I can see that you made these without the promptings of your elders?”

“I have no one to grieve for, my queen,” I said.

She smiled.

In those days, remember, I was young and from a small village and a minor Hall. I thought it was a pitying smile. I know better now. It was a smile of power.

Three days later word came that my grandmother had died. I had much to grieve for then. And though I was not allowed to go home to do my grieving, the queen herself set me up at a table in a major Hall, and on that stage, surrounded by sophisticated mourners, I began my public life. I wrote thirteen threnodies in the seven days and composed a master lament. My grief was fed by homesickness, and I had those hardened mourners weeping within a day. The queen herself had to take to bed out of grief for my grandmother.

The queen called the best grievers in the land to teach me in relays after the Seven was up. And within the year I knew as much as they of the history of mourning, the structure of threnodies, and the composition of the dirge. I learned the queen's birth lines to twice the twenty-one names, and the lines of her sisters as well. And once I had a prince as a lover, though I never bore a babe.

But there is a question in your eyes, child. Do not be afraid to ask. Wait, let me ask it for you. Did I regret the years of service to my queen when I learned she had had my grandmother slain? Child, you have lived too long under the influence of the strangers. One does not question a queen. My grandmother's lines were long, and full of royal mourners; her dying was short and without pain. Would that we could all start our journey that way.

It was proclaimed, then, that a Master Griever of the queen's own choosing, not a birthright griever, could mourn her and hers. It was the first change in a time full of change. Thus it was that I served the queen and her sisters' children after, both the girls and now these weak, puling boy kings. It does not matter to the griever. We have always mourned for men and women alike, for do not we all have to take those final steps into the dark cave? But, oh, the land mourns and has become as barren as my first queen. For who can tell which man is father when all men sow the same? Yet a woman in her time of ripening is each as different as a skillfully wrought dirge.

I know not if the land dies because of the kings or because of the strangers. They would have us wound the earth with our dead, and many follow them. But what does the earth want with our husks? And why set them down into a dark cave forever? Rather we must put them out above the earth, turning the dead eyes up toward the light.

Things change too quickly, my child. But remember, you promised me that you would set my husk out on the pyre and pylons we built together, hand on hand. Outside this cave, far from the strangers and their bright, short ways.

Here, I have set down a threnody of my own. The first Gray Wanderer I have composed in many years, and the last. I want you to start my mourning today with it. I know, I know. Such was never done before, that a griever should grieve for herself. But I have no child of my womb, no girl to call the lines, and even though you are my own chosen one, it is not the same. Besides, was the Gray Wanderer ever the same? Even in my dying I must be different.

Bring me the last meal now, and the cup of sleep, for the pain is great today and my head swirls with darkness. It is time. And you will make them remember me, will you not?

Say it. Say it. Do not cry. Crying does not become a griever.

And may your lines of grieving be long.

Now, paint your eyelids, but lightly. Draw a cross on the darkened thumbnails. Pinch your cheeks. Good. And may your time of dying be short, too. Now go.

Cards of Grief

You 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 some in the Halls of Grief could bring in lines of mourners by the power of their singing, and others by the eloquence of their mouths, 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 still can call mourners with the power in my fingertips. Oh, I try to sing as I draw, in that strange, high, fluting voice that one critic likened to “a slightly demented turtledove.” But I have always known it is the pictures, not the singing, that bring mourners to our table.

That was how she found me, you know, singing and drawing at a minor, minor Hall for one of my dying 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 and had never played at any Hall games, having no brothers or sisters, only pigs. Once, though, I had made up a threnody of sow lines. I think I could recall it still—if I tried.

No matter. The irony is that I can remember the look of my favorite sow's face, but the 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) 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 cities and city folk, and we copied our dirges from the voice boxes the new men had brought. Many of my first drawings were tracings of tracings. How could I, a pigkeeper, know otherwise?

But she saw me at a Hall so minor that both pillars and capitals were barren of carvings, though there was an ill-conceived painting of a weeping woman decorating one wall. Its only value was its age. Paint flaked off it like colorful scabs. The arms were stiff, the pose awkward. I know that now.

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

My mother and her sisters did not want to let me go. It was not love that bound us, but greed. I worked hard, and the pigs would suffer from my going. Besides, I had become quite a success as a griever in our little town. They could not see beyond our sties to the outside world.