Cards of Grief

by Jane Yolen

  She bade me sit at her feet, perched on the lowest cushion of Queenship. I thought I would never leave.

  Then she asked to see my grief poems and I took the first of the Gray Wanderer ones from the carry-basket. They are in the Queen’s Hall now, behind locked doors, where only the scholars can read them, but once they had been set out for everyone to see.

  She read them with growing interest and called up the white-robed priestesses to her.

  “A child of Lands shall lead the way,” the priestess said cryptically, rubbing her hands along the sides of her robe. They always speak thus, I have found, leaving a leader many paths to choose from. Grievers and priestesses have this elliptical speech in common, I think, though the priestesses 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 said what I then believed. “I have no one to grieve for, my Queen.”

  She smiled.

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

  Several days later word came that my grandmother had died and I had much to grieve for then. I wondered what my mother would do without someone to argue with, whether she would become a silent husk herself. But I was not allowed to go home to do my grieving or to offer myself as the other tongue to my mother’s lost duet. No, the Queen herself set me up at a table in a Major Hall and on that stage, surrounded by the sophisticated mourners of the court, I began my public life. I wrote thirteen threnodies in the seven days and composed a master lament, though I should not have had the skill. My grief was fed by homesickness and by the image of my mother struck dumb by grief.

  Grief was the gag that silenced her,

  She never sang again.

  That was really about my mother, and it turned out to be true.

  I had those hardened mourners weeping within a day. The Queen herself had to take to bed out of grief for my grandmother, though the strangest thing was that I had never realized before how much the old woman had meant to me.

  The Queen called the best grievers in the land to teach me in relays after the Seven was up. 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 cousins as well. I held in my mouth and mind the first of the hundred prime tales and was already beginning on their branches. What I learned I did not forget. And when I had Mastery conferred on me, I stood in the Room of Instruction with the other apprentices and had the tale of the Seven Grievers given to me. All this, which usually takes half a lifetime, I learned in a year.

  And for a night I had a prince as a lover, though I never bore him a babe.

  But I see a question in your eyes, child. Do not be afraid to ask. Wait, let me ask it for you. Did I regret my years of service to the Queen when I learned that she had had my grandmother slain? Child, you have lived all your life with the knowledge of the strangers from the sky. You are one of the changed grievers. We did not question a Queen. She did what she did for the good of our land. I do what I do for the good of my art. 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 by the Queen, and approved by the priestesses, that a Master Griever of the Queen’s own choosing—though she be not a birth-rite griever—could mourn the Queen and hers. It was a first change in what would become a time full of change. Thus it was that I served the Queen and her sister’s son after. Who is mourned does not matter to the Master Griever; we mourn for men and women alike. But I see now that it is, in the end, the land that mourns. I fear it will become as barren as my 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 will die because of the King or the strangers. Tall and broad they are, easy to admire and touch. They show us wonders, their tongues invent tales, they are a people without tears. Do not trust them unless you see them cry. It is the one thing beyond their magics.

  Their magics are easy and magic, like art, should be tough, should make demands. They give and give until we are caught in the net of their giving. And what do they ask in return? It seems a simple enough demand: that we talk to them that they may capture our words with their machines. The Queen has ruled and the priestess agrees that this does not violate the prophesies. The machines do not script the words but capture the voice. Yet is it not said in the first prime tale that to hold in the mouth is to remember? A machine has no mouth. A machine has no heart. We are nothing if we forget our own tales.

  Things change too quickly for me, my child. But remember what you promised. You said you would set out my husk on the pyre and pylons we built together, hand on hand, outside this cave, so far away from the palace and the troubled streets of L’Lal’dome. I should not be too heavy for you to lift—now.

  Here, listen, I have made up 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 with it. It begins:

  Gray is my color and my name,

  Fame is the morning’s mourning…

  My voice falters. You sing it. I know, I know you have not the tidiest voice in the land. It is little like the voice of a bird that has sucked the juice of too many sun-warmed berries. But, Grenna, I want you to say this for me. Oh, I know such is not done, that a griever grieve for herself. But I have no child of my womb, no girl to call the lines.

  But what of Linnet?

  She is a child of the sky, none of ours. I, I am the last of the Lania, though once I had different hopes. And even though you are my chosen one, it is not the same, no matter what the Queen once proclaimed. I am ever drawn back to the old ways, away from the sky-farers’ lovely lies. Even in my dying I must be the Gray Wanderer. Say the words:

  Gray is my color and my name,

  Fame is the morning’s mourning…

  Bring me my last meal now and the Cup of Sleep. I will rest for a moment. The pain is great today and my head swirls with darkness. You will make them remember me, will you not? The threnody is written down, but once you have it, destroy the writing. To hold it in the mouth is to remember. You will make them remember me? Say it. Say it. Do not cry. Crying does not become the griever.

  May your time of dying be short.

  Good. And may your own lines of grieving be long. Now paint your eyelids for me, but lightly. Pinch your cheeks for color. You will?

  I will.

  Good. And may your time of dying be short, too. Now, my beloved only child, go.

  Tape 3: THE SINGER OF DIRGES

  Place: Palace of the King, Apartment of King

  Time: King’s Time 1, First Patriarchy; labtime 2137.5 + A.D.

  Speaker: the King, called B’oremos, also called the Singer of Dirges to Anthropologist Aaron Spenser

  Permission: King’s own

  SHE NEVER BELIEVED IN her own beauty, but it was that which first drew me to her. In that small and terrible Hall, with the lines of mourners weeping over the most ordinary of griefs, she caught the eye. Even before I read her words and knew them for the lost words of all my songs, even before that I could not help but be drawn to her.

  She was tall, like a Royal, and had a natural willowy grace beneath the artifices she had adopted for her first public grieving. Never awkward in public, she seemed rather unaware of the eyes on her. I liked that. However I never liked those painted nails, the ones with the crosses scratched into the coloring. They always looked like dead nails to me, of a corpse long lying on the pylon after
the birds have eaten the softer parts. Of course my fellow Royals took them up with a fervor they often reserved for such grotesqueries. It is to Gray’s credit, though, that she found those passions amusing and gave up the carvings of her nails long before the rest. Perhaps she did it because I found it distasteful and told her so. I would like to think that she did something because of me, though as a man of that time I was only on the periphery of her thoughts.

  I had gone to that Hall because it was part of my training. Young men of the Royals have ceremonial duties and my fingers had early found music in the unlikeliest strings. So I was taught to play ten different instruments, from the plecta to the harmonus, and sent—like all male Royals—to practice my youthful skills before audiences in rural Halls. It was an odious mission, though I was always successful. (It is foolish being humble about one’s gifts.) I loved to draw folk to me with the power in my voice and the music in my hands, and I must admit that I had a pretty face then, though one might not guess it by looking at me now. A pretty face is common enough coin among Royals. Besides, without my musical gift could I have discovered Gray, who was to become the light that guided me and who—in the end—was the reason for the Cup of Sleep I ever keep at my hand?

  But I digress and you grow distracted. You have always been more interested in our customs than in my reveries, more taken by what I represent than in who I long to be. I had best return to the mission year so as to make you understand what it was to be a Royal.

  I had been months on the road and learned nothing there. There is nothing to be learned from common folk. I simply sang again and again the old songs which those country grievers never tired of, slipping in the name of a grieven one, relying on the common rhymes. It is a trick of which I am only lately ashamed.

  Each stop at a small Hall of Grief, with the unimaginative weeping caryatids and the banal deckings of trillis and dark berries and green boughs, the traditional trappings, brought me success. Each success brought me enormous suppers and pretty plump girls to warm my bed. And as I was young and just trying on my brief manhood, I accepted such offerings as my Royal and artistic due. I would not admit to myself that pretty girls can be stamped out of a mold as coins, and that one can tire of them equally. It was years before I realized that, as a young prince, my services were in demand to plow the fertile country fields for the occasional harvest of Royals. They used me—and I enjoyed the usage, never wondering to what end I was employed. I was foolish, perhaps, to think it all my own doing.

  And then I entered that small Hall of Grief, scarcely distinguished from others before it. It was in the Middle Lands, where pigs and people shared houses and nothing new had been thought or written or sung since the rule of the first Queens. The coast, where we Royals cluster, is bathed by mutable waters which—so it is said—accounts for the fact that the citizens of L’Lal’dome are so amenable to change. Did we not first invite you sky-farers in?

  Invite?

  Let us not quarrel like women over words, friend.

  It was not a quarrel, but a question.

  You sound like our seers, though I know you are not as seedless as they.

  But about your mission year?

  Yes, that year. To the Middle Lands at the last. Of course I had earlier toured through the Rocks or Homelands (though why they are called that I have always wondered, since I, certainly, have never felt at home there). Rocks live in an inhospitable domain and so they and the Moons folk who also dwell there revel in hardy inventions. And many are the people of Arcs and Bow who move to the mountains to practice their skills. In the mountain caves the hardy members of Rocks wrest precarious livings from the precipices and cliff faces. All those folk look at the world aslant, living so long in the dark or dangling at the end of a rope. However it does make their girls all the wilder and their Halls more interesting. Their weeping statues cry real gems.

  But the people of the Middle are fat and contented, wallowing in their complacencies as their pigs in mud.

  Did I say I hated my mission year? I hated being there, in Lands, at the end of my journeying, and I counted the days until I had sung in every Lands Hall and could be gone.

  And then I saw her and everything was changed for me. Slim where the others were plump, bony where they were rounded, she was Royal sown, of that there was no doubt. Her long blue-black hair had been braided so tightly the skin by her eyes was stretched, giving her the startled look of a young creature in flight. The sticky berries plaited into her hair seemed a warning that she was not to be touched without consequences. She was, in fact, the only girl at that Hall I did not caress. The dying trillis caught ’round the plait only emphasized her fragility, though I was to learn later that she could be as tough and as unmovable and as unforgiving as any Queen.

  I had been asked to sing under the sign of a local harper, I think it was. He had died a scant month or two before and they were still eager to grieve for him. I trotted out some of the great old songs to begin with, songs that had always brought tears to the Royals: “Dirge for the Dying Sun,” “The Waters of L’Lal’ladia,” and “Threnody for a Princess Dying Young.” That was to get their attention, to draw the crowds in. Then I sang several improvised lyrics in the old style, weaving in the harper’s name and the few honest facts about his life I had gleaned from his mourning kin. Of course when I stopped for a draught of wine—that unrefined inferior grape residue they passed off as drinkable there—the crowds began to wander away. Lands folk are easy to please but have short memories. That is why making love to their girls brings no lasting pleasure.

  When the lines for the harper had dissipated—and I was glad to have them go, as it meant shortening my stay—and I had been praised sufficiently by the harper’s folk for the moment or two of immortality I had brought to him, I left. My duty done, I could wander the aisles seeing if—once again—I would learn nothing from the grievers in a Lands Hall.

  The crush of signs—complacent pig, contented cow, befuddled hen, rolling millstone, upright pitchfork, leaning harp—replicated the crush of mourners who touched shoulders without really touching grief. So shallow were their concerns they cried equally at the old banalities of a teller who borrowed a hoary tale as at the tears of a young griever sobbing about her sister dead only a day. Imagine not being able to distinguish art from artifice. The ordinariness of the Hall abused my senses, and besides, I was becoming hungry. I started toward the door and was already calculating where my next stop would be, an even smaller Hall marked on the map as Pig-ton after its main inhabitants, one supposed, when I saw her.

  She was sitting and writing, but even sitting she seemed tall. And the combination of fragility and strength flowed from her in waves. She was bent over a tablet shaping the words with her mouth first before writing them down. The table around her was uncluttered, which distinguished it immediately from the others. I had to stop and look at it.

  Without thinking, I muttered the first of the ritual words, gesturing at the memoria so artfully placed. “I would have liked them.”

  She looked up and her eyes, that amber opalescence of the finest gemstones that marked her further as Royal sown, stared into mine. Unlike the weak blue eyes of the common grievers, hers did not shimmer with unshed tears and it was thus I saw, for the first time, her inner strength. She shed tears, but only when deeply moved.

  Her voice was low, slow, so different from the high giggling inanities of the other girls. She said simply, “They would have grown by your friendship.” It took me a moment to remember that was the ordinary rote of grieving, the ritual response to my own ritual words.

  Then she looked down again at the linen on which she had been writing, not coyly in order to keep me by her side, but because she had something more important to do than gaze into the desire-filled eyes of a princeling. She pulled the linen free of the stretcher, a trick of her own devising, and I was forced to put my hand out to flatten the cloth so as to read what she had scripted.

  It would not have mattered at
that moment if what she had written was as banal as the rest of the Hall. I was caught up in her differences and would have read them into anything she wrote. She was as unlikely a Lands woman as I had ever met. She could have been a Queen. That is heresy, I know. But I am King now. Anything I say is true.

  But what I read on that linen was as startling as she, a perfect little piece of poetry that could not possibly have been written by a mere Middle girl. It was simple, unsophisticated, direct. The words were mostly one syllable, the images spare. It even gained power read aloud, for its sounds were as strong and steady and unflinching as funerary drums.

  First I only spoke the poem over and over. Then I began to sing it, improvising tunes that were, in the beginning, too ornate a setting for the words, too derivative of the classical melodies. At last the words began to dictate a series of melodic phrases, the melodies constricted to a single modal tune. It was unforgettable, with a chorus that was soon ringing through the Hall.

  I have never since written such a fine song, though I have constructed thousands of them, many to Gray’s own words; but it is enough that I wrote the one.

  Do you want to continue?

  Of course. I will take just a sip of wine. Old age dries the tongue.

  I could not stay, of course. And the rest of my mission to Pigton and beyond were forgot. All those minor Minor Halls would have to do without my singing and my sowing. Besides, there were other Royals on their way—L’eoninanos and G’al’ladinos were some weeks behind me, the one a poet and the other possessor of a fine magical hand. They would draw the crowds and the girls with equal ease. But I could not stay because the hope of the mission year, beyond learning about our people—or from them, a forlorn hope—was the charge: Reap the Harvest. For we Royals sow often though we gather a meager crop. Once in many years there is a prodigy like Gray, though more often it is that a year of gazing at sheep makes a single ewe attractive. But I could not chance it. I had to return to L’Lal’dome.