Cards of Grief

by Jane Yolen

  We walked up stairs that were hollowed by years of marchers and entered the Hall. Inside, the clans had already set up their tables and Mother threaded her way through the chaos to our usual stand with an ease born of long experience. Under the banner proclaiming our colors and the sign of the millstone was a kidney-shaped table. It was littered with the memoria of our dying ones. We had had three diers that year, counting Great-grandmother now in our attic. I can still recite the birth lines of the other two: Cassa-Cania, of Chriss-Cania, of Cassua-Cania, of Camma-Cania was the one. Peri-Pania, of Perri-Pania, of Persa-Pania, of Parsis-Pania was the other. And of course, in my own direct line I can still go back the twenty-one requisite names. We had no gap in that line, the Lania, of which I am still, though it sometimes makes me laugh at myself, inordinately proud. I am really the last of the Lania. No one will grieve for me properly, no sister of the family, no blood child, and sometimes it troubles me that this is so, my own tiny sisters having gone before me when I was too young to grieve for them and my brothers unable to carry on the line.

  The daughters of Cassa-Cania and Peri-Pania were already there, having no attic grieven of their own and no new grievers to prepare for their first Hall. They, poor ones, had born only boys. And of course my own little sisters had gone in one of the winter sicknesses, their tiny mouths stretched wide in the smile of death, their eyelids closed under the carved funerary gems. Though I had not officially grieved for them, I had certainly practiced grief in my games with the boys.

  Our table was piled high with pictographs of their dyings, for of course that was before the strangers had come down from the sky with their strange cam’ras that captured life impressions on a small page. And since Cassa-Cania’s daughters were known for their fine hand, there were many ornately lettered lamentation plaques on the table. But for all its wealth of memoria, the table appeared disordered to me and that disturbed me greatly.

  I spoke in an undertone to my mother. “May I be allowed to arrange Great-grandmother’s part?”

  At first she shook her head and her dark graying hair fell loose of its crown, cascading down over her shoulders like the weeping women of the column. But it was simply that she did not understand my distress at the disorder, taking my request as a display of adolescent eagerness. However, I was still thought to be too young to do more than watch and listen—and learn. I had yet to be apprenticed to a griever, to one of the older cousins. I had, for all my reputed genius, only a meager background, the pretendings of a child with children (and brothers at that). I knew no history, could recite none of the prime tales, and could only mouth a smattering of the lesser songs and stories of the People. So I was sent away while the older women worked; I was sent off to look at the other tables in the Hall, to discover for myself the many stages and presentations of Grief.

  Alas, the other tables were as disordered as our own, for as I have said, we were only a very Minor Hall and the grievers there were unsophisticated in their arrangements. One or two had a rough feeling I have since tried to replicate in my own work. Touching the old country grief has, I think, given me my greatest successes.

  To think of it, walking in a Hall before the days of the strangers from the sky, walking in it for the very first time. The sound of the mourners lining up in the galleries, waiting for the doors to open. Some of them actually wailed their distress, though in the Major Halls that rarely happens anymore, except on great occasions of state—an exiled princess, the assassination of a prince, a fallen Queen. Most of the time the older princes gossip rather than weep, and the younger ones are too ready to make an impression on the Queen.

  But that Minor Hall was not a place of Queens or princes. Grief actually walked there. I could feel it start in my belly and creep up into my throat. Only that I was inside and not beyond the doors kept me from wailing, too, for inside the grievers moved silently, setting up the stalls. I remember one old woman lovingly polishing a hoe, the symbol of the farmer her dying granduncle had been. She stood under the sign of a grainfield and she rocked back and forth beneath it as if the wind that tossed the grain on her sign tossed her as well. There is another I remember: a woman with ten black ribbons in her hair, placing a harp with a broken string beside a lamentation plaque that read: One last song, one final touch. I have always liked the simplicity of that line, though the broken string was a bit overdone.

  Then the doors were flung open and the mourners came in. In the first crush I lost sight of our own table and was pushed up against the wall. If I had been smaller, I might have panicked, but the one great gift of body that I had was height. I was at least as tall at thirteen as an adult, as tall as the smallest of the princes even then.

  Soon the crowds sorted themselves and I could see how the lines made a kind of pattern. There were long lines by the tables that gave away garlands and crying cloths, though the longest by far was in front of the harper’s stall where a live singer—a princeling on his mission year—recalled in song all that had been great in the harper’s life. He used the old songs, of course, and set the facts in the open measures of the songs with such facility and with such a good sense of rhythm that it was never apparent what was old and what was interpolated.

  I learned two things that day, before ever apprenticing: to please the crowd and draw a line is easy, but to keep the lines coming back again and again is not. Once the garlands were gone and the cloths given away, once the singer stopped for a draught of wine, the line of mourners broke apart and formed again elsewhere. And none of the mourners remembered the grieven one’s name for longer than that day, though some remembered the names of the grievers. There is no immortality in that.

  By noon I had toured the entire Hall, carrying with me a wilted garland and three cloths embroidered with names of grieven ones whose deeds I no longer recalled. And I came back again to the place I had begun, the stall of my own clan under the millstone, piled high with disordered memoria.

  “Let me take a turn while you eat. It will be a slow time, now, while the funeral meats are set out,” I told my aunts and my mother, my grandmother having gone home to tend to mill business and to prepare her mother’s last meal. They thought I could do no harm then, when most mourners were off eating or doing their home chores. It was neither planting nor harvesting time, so there would be an afternoon grieving in the Hall, but that would not be for a while. They left me at the table.

  I busied myself at once, rearranging the overwrought items in a new way so that the whole picture was one of restraint. And then I sat down and composed a threnody, the first of the ones recognizable in my so-called Gray Wanderer period, because for the first time the figure of the cloaked soul-traveler appeared. The words seemed to tumble into my head, the stanzas and chorus forming as if on a slate. In fact the poem wrote itself, and quickly. In later years I was to force myself to slow down, for I have always had a facility that, at times, betrays me.

  You know the poem, of course: “The lines of her worn and gray cloak…” You are nodding, child. Does it seem strange to you that someone real wrote a song that you have known all your life? Well, I wrote it as if in a fever that day. It all seemed to fit. I never thought that I would be called the Gray Wanderer myself—I, who have never wandered very far and whose life has never seemed exceptionally gray. Of course the scholars insist that “the lines of her worn and gray cloak” refer to the lines of mourning. I did not mean that, just that the cloak fell from her shoulders in comfortable, familiar folds. That is how I saw the Gray Wanderer that day in the eye of my mind. Perhaps it was my great-grandmother I was seeing, bent over a bit but still strong despite the thing that ate away at her. But never mind. Scholars seem to know more about such things than we grievers do.

  You are smiling. You have heard me say all this before. Do I, in my age and illness, repeat myself endlessly? Well, what else is there to do, lying here in the darkness, but retrace the steps of light? Here I throw no shadows and that is how it should be. But once my shadow—the shadow of the Gr
ay Wanderer—covered the entire land. I guess there is a certain pride in that, and a certain immortality.

  I remember I had just finished the threnody in my head and was tracing out the words onto a tablet. It was slow going. I had not the grace of my aunts’ hands and each letter had to be painstakingly drawn. You have such hand’s grace, child, and that is one of the reasons—though not the only one—why I kept you past your training. No, do not blush. 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 are the easy strangers’ ways, the machines from their great ships that multiply letters. Hold on to the best of the old ways, child. Pass them 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 and it was a youth just past that blush of boyhood, when the skin still had a lambent glow yet is covered with soft down that has not yet coarsened into a beard. It was the singer, the princeling. Before, I had concentrated on his singing, which had been very lovely. Close by, I was overcome by his beauty. He was tall, of course, and his bones more finely drawn than any of our Lands men. And he had a quick though infrequent smile, not the slow vanishing slits of mouth and teeth that my brothers and their friends used.

  “I would have liked them,” he said in his low, ripe voice. He nodded at the memoria to my great-grandmother and great-great-aunts.

  It is the ritual opening, to be sure, 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 thousand thousand times by grievers, he knew my own sincerity in them.

  “They would have grown by your friendship.”

  I scraped the linen free of the mistake and finished the threnody while he watched. I blushed under his scrutiny. My face was always a slate on which my emotions were writ too large, and I have carefully schooled myself against such displays. I pulled the linen free of its stretcher. The linen curled up at the edges just a bit, which was what I had hoped. It meant a reader had to flatten it by hand and in 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, already changed, had been trained since birth. He was to be a member of the Queen’s Consort and she had only the best. In his mouth the words I had written took on an even more palpable sense of grief. A fine singer can make a song, you know.

  Soon we were surrounded by the other table watchers. He knew how to project his voice, he was a prince after all, and the others caught phrases that beckoned them, drew them in.

  And that was how my mother and my great-aunts found us when they returned, with a long line of mourners standing under the millstone sign. All the other stalls were empty, even of watchers. The mourners were saying with him, as he repeated the threnody yet one more time, the chorus that 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 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 my brothers had set out her husk on the pyre and pylons for the birds of prey.

  The next seven days, as true grievers, 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. Such long, loyal lines. My mother said there had never been such lines in our Minor Hall except when the singer Verina died who had been born in the town next but one to ours and whose relatives numbered in the hundreds in the countryside. My grandmother disagreed, mentioning a painter whose name I had never heard of and whose lines, she claimed, had been longer. But then my mother and grandmother always found things to disagree about. They agreed, though, that the longest lines had been for the last Queen, though that had been well before my mother’s time and when my grandmother had been but a girl.

  I wrote three more Gray Wanderer threnodies and one thirty-two-verse dirge which the harper prince 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 from our clan, though, by tradition, there should have been a year between my first entrance into a Hall and any formal apprenticeship. But the elders had come to her as soon as the Seven was over. They even spoke in front of me, which was unheard-of at that time.

  “She must be trained now, while the grace of tongue is still with her,” said one. She was a hen-keeper by trade who had lost her own voice young and still mourned it.

  My mother agreed.

  By habit, my grandmother disagreed. “There is no one here worthy of our Linni,” she argued.

  “Do you not have some long connection on the coast?” asked another Elder. She was unfamiliar to me, though the white streak in her hair proclaimed her of Nadia’s line.

  “We do not have the means,” my mother began.

  “We will borrow if needs be,” my grandmother said. As she was now head of the Lania, I knew it would be so.

  They argued it out over and over as we walked home. I felt the injustice of my mother’s stand, though in my heart I did not want to impoverish them for my poetry’s sake. They ignored me and no one asked me what I wished. And what did I wish? For some magic to descend upon us all and make us wealthy or take me away somewhere, so that I could do nothing but make my poems in peace.

  That very day there came a knock on the door. Ah, I see you are ahead of me. Have I told this before? It was the singer, B’oremos, the prince 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. I had hoped that he would stay awhile but I had only my words to hold him. In those early days, knowing the pull of the plump and lovely Lands girls on the princes, I did not value my own talents enough. I knew he would be there only a short while at best. I did not want to be the only girl in our village who had been slighted by a prince. Of course he had already paid me a great deal of attention, but that was part of his training, singing for different mourners, setting their threnodies to tunes. I had hoped he might stay over with us and instead he had left precipitously. But he had not gone on along his route, though, forgetting me for some saucy pigkeeper’s daughter. Instead he had doubled back and told the Queen herself what had happened in our Hall. It had taken 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 should have sprung the next rulers. Only she was girl-barren. Her many princes plowed her, but there was no harvest. She had no girl children to grieve her, only boys. She did not know when I came to her that her bearing days were already over and that her sister’s son would rule after her.

  But we did not know all that would transpire then. The Queen asked to see me out of simple curiosity and because the news was brought by a beautiful young man.

  I dressed, as was appropriate to my age and clan, in a long gray homespun gown pricked through with red and black and green embroidery. I had done it myself, the trillis twined around the boughs and a sprinkling of mourning berries along the hem. My mother called it fine, my grandmother complained of the stitchery.

  My hair was plaited and pinned upon my head. My grandmother thought it silly to travel that
way, my mother said it was best to have it off my neck. I thought them both crazed to argue about my looks. I had never been any great beauty, but a great gawking girl a head taller than the rest.

  They agreed on one thing, though.

  “Stand tall,” my mother said, pulling at the sides of my dress.

  “Pride in bearing can make the difference,” added my grandmother, fussing with my hair.

  I assumed they began quarreling again as soon as I left, and to tell the truth for many long years I missed the sound of their banter. It was never quarreling in anger, but a kind of conversation between the two of them, statement and response, as predictable and satisfying as an antiphonal poem.

  Because they had asked it of me, I held my head high, though I took the braids down as soon as we were out of sight. It was too heavy for the long trip piled up that way.

  What happened along the road I forget, though I know I wanted B’oremos to turn and talk to me. But he was intent on finding the quickest way there.

  And when we arrived at the great city of L’Lal’dome, with the twin towers marking the place like gigantic stone arrows, I was suddenly too frightened and too homesick to react. So I kept to the silence that B’oremos had begun.

  When the Queen saw me, she smiled. I was so young, she told me later, and so serious she could not help but smile at me. She smiled as most Royals do, more lips than teeth, but widely.

  “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, and that marked the beginning of our strange friendship. 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 my grandmother had made me promise to recite. Nor was it the one I had made up along the way as I traipsed behind B’oremos hoping he would turn and speak to me. But when I saw the Queen with the grief of all those girl-barren years sitting above her eyes, I knew why I had come. B’oremos was just a pretty thing, a toy forgot. It was to serve this Queen and our land that I was there. So I spoke those words to her; not for the applause of the court or to turn B’oremos’s head, but for the Queen alone. And because I did it that way, she knew I was speaking the truth.