Tales of Wonder

by Jane Yolen

  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.

  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 u
p 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.”