Cards of Grief

by Jane Yolen

  But I will do it one more time. One final time. I will tell the Prime Pack. Forgive me if the telling is one whose parts you have heard before. This time I will tell it with infinite care, for there are 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. For myself. For A’ron and Linnet and the rest. The story, the story must be told till the end.

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

  I will listen and see, Grenna. I will turn off the box and hold the memory in my ears and in my mouth.

  Good, Dot’der’tsee. That is how it should be.

  Here are the Seven Grievers.

  One is for Lands as I am from Lands, for all those who work the soil. We were here before all the rest and we will remain when all the rest are forgotten. Lands wears the brown tunic and trews of my family and rides a white sow.

  Two is for Moon, for those who count the season’s turning, seers and priestess who speak the prophesies and carry rood and orb.

  Three is for Arcs and Bow, who hunt the forests and fields.

  Four is for Waters and all who plow there.

  Five is for Rocks, who scrape the mountain’s face and craft gems from the stone.

  Six is for Stars, who script our poems, whose memories are short, who study and forget.

  Seven, the Queen’s Own, the tall Royals. They came from the sea, twinned, to rule us.

  Seven Grievers who were touched by my Master’s words.

  And from those Seven, now come these. Queen of Shadows to rule them. Singer of Dirges to betray them. The Cup of Sleep to change them. The Man Without Tears to watch them change. The Gray Wanderer, who speaks of them all till she enters the Cave of No Light.

  That was how I told them then, in a singsong voice dripping with tears. That first thirteen were known as the Cards of Dark, for all the faces on the original pack were dark, since I drew them in my grief. The thirteen cards added later by the gamesters were called Cards of Light, and all the figures grin, their whitened faces set in a rictus, a parody of all we hold sacred.

  Here, you can see the difference even in this pack. In my drawing of the Man Without Tears, he wears a landing suit and holds his hands outstretched by his side, the light streaming through a teardrop in each palm. But his face cannot be seen, obscured as it is by the bubble of his headgear. Yet in the gamesters’ thirteen, he wears a different uniform, in blue, with stars and bars on the shoulders. He has a beard. And though his hands are still outstretched, with the light reflecting through the palm, his face is drawn as plain as any griever’s and he smiles. It is a painful, sad grimace.

  You can see the difference also in the Queen of Shadows. In my pack, she is dressed in red and black and her picture is a dark portrait of the Queen who had been on the throne when Gray was master of them all. But the packs today are no-faced and every-faced, the features as bland as the mash one feeds a child. There is no meaning there. My Queen wore a real face, narrow, feral, devious, hungry, sad. But the Card looked back to an even older tale. You know it? The Queen mourning her dead chief consort went into the Cave at the Center of the World. She wore a red dress and a black cloak and carried a bag of her most precious jewels to buy back his release from Death. In those days Death was thought to live in a great stone palace in the world’s center surrounded by circles of unmourned folk who had to grieve for themselves. Death was not satisfied with a Royal touch, seeing that, in the end, Death could touch and be touched by any and by all.

  The Queen followed the winding, twisting cave for miles, learning to see in the dark land with a night sight as keen as any Common Griever. Many long nights passed and at last she stopped by a pool and knelt down to drink. She saw, first, the dartings of phosphorescent fish, as numerous as stars. Then she saw, staring up from the pool, her own reflection with its shining night eyes, big and luminous. She did not recognize herself, so changed was she by her journey; but thought it a Queen from the night sky, fallen from the stars. She so desired the image that she stayed by the poolside, weeping her precious gems into it, begging the jewel-eyed woman to come to her.

  After thirteen days of weeping, her grief for her consort was forgot and her gems were all gone. She returned home empty-handed, babbling of the Queen who fell from the sky. Her eyes remained wide and dark-seeing, a visionary and a seeress who spoke in riddles and read signs in the stars and was never again quite sane. She was called the Queen of Shadows.

  You do not understand the other Cards in the deck? The Singer of Dirges is, of course, named after B’oremos when he was on his mission year. He brought my Master her fame but betrayed her three times. That is why on the Card he wears three faces. And so the Singer Card within the deck helps the other Cards move in three ways through the pattern, up or down, side to side, or on a diagonal through time.

  And the Cup? It is the changer. If it precedes a Card, it changes the Card and its pattern. If it follows a Card, it does no harm. The only Card it cannot change is the Cave.

  When I first told the rota, I only told it bare of all this. “One is for Lands…” I said. But over the years I have considered the rest and that is what I tell you now.

  So now I know the Cards as well as you do, but still I do not know why you made them.

  To help me grieve, sky-farer. To remember Gray.

  I think there is more.

  What more can there be? The Cards are my grief. Oh, now they are used by all the People as a game, telling the future, retelling the past. They make common what was singular. They have taken what was mine and made it….

  Their own. Perhaps that is because we are each a Card in the Cards of Grief. We feel your Cards, even when we know it not, here, here in the heart. You are yourself like the Singer, helping others move within the pattern, pointing the way.

  Then you and yours, sky woman, are what? Like Cups of Sleep you have dealt death to our old ways. You observe us, change us, go away. Gray knew this but was powerless to stop it. So am I. So I point the way for Linnet and the children with her on the Council; I point and they lead the way? Is that what you mean?

  Then I will tell you a secret, Dot’der’tsee, a secret I have shared with no one, not even my A’ron. Would you know it?

  I would if you would tell it to me.

  I tell it to you because A’ron, before he died, confessed to me that his people would come down one more time and, when they saw what was happening, would go away and never return. That is why I show it to you now.

  The bottom of the box that A’ron carved is a false bottom. And if you slide it, thus, there are two last Cards I have never shown, for they are not Cards of Grief at all. I made them the year after Gray’s death. One Card is called the Laughing Man, the other the Child of Earth and Sky.

  They are—quite beautiful. And I would know them both, anywhere. The man, with the child in each arm, the blond hair and that lopsided grin. It is Aaron.

  Those are our children, a boy and a girl, a wonder rarely seen in our world. Twins. Is it any wonder that A’ron is laughing?

  No wonder.

  And the Child of Earth and Sky—

  You do not have to tell me. A year older, but still the same. She is little Linnet, my godchild.

  She rules now, with a Council of children, though they are no longer young, with B’oremos to advise them. So many changes. Gray warned us of them. And the prophesies, too, warned that if we forsake grief, our world will die. But A’ron promised me it did not have to be so. I believed him. He was a man who did not lie.

  No, he did not lie.

  Your eyes fill up again, Dot’der’tsee. Perhaps you are trying to grieve for A’ron. I would help you if I could, but my tears dried up with his death. And my laughter. There is only a hard bitter core, like a Lumin kernel, inside. A’ron did not lie, ever. But he did not tell me the truth about loving,
either. Never did he say that to love makes dying difficult.

  Perhaps he wanted to learn your way, not teach his own. He had long carried a piece of angry wisdom within him. It said, “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” When he came here, when he loved you, I think he believed that he had found a place that death could not really touch. He loved you for it.

  But I do not understand. We die.

  You die. You grieve. But you are not really touched by death. At least that is what Aaron wanted to believe. He was always such a romantic boy.

  He loved you, Dot’der’tsee. We called our girl Mairi for you.

  I know. We have—ways of knowing.

  Then you knew of A’ron’s dying?

  Yes.

  But you did not come down to grieve?

  It was not the time.

  He knew that, though I think he hoped….

  He was old. And I—I would not have been changed by time. It would not have been—right—for me to come then. It would have been against our vows.

  He knew that. He left you a message.

  May I see it?

  You must listen. He did not write it down. The message is this: Linnet is the bridge, the child of earth and sky. She speaks two languages, she knows two times, she sings all songs. Trust her. She remembers you, Dot’der’tsee; she does not forget.

  So Linnet is the final Card, hidden until now? A Card of Joy. Even though he knew it not, she is the Card up Aaron’s sleeve. No wonder he laughs in your picture. Oh, Aaron Spenser, you died young, as I remember you. I am far older than you would believe.

  I am glad that I showed the Cards to you.

  Not so glad as I. I would embrace you, Grenna.

  I would be embraced.

  So much telling. My mouth is dry. Hand me that Cup, the one on the table.

  The black one? It is a lovely thing.

  Yes, isn’t it. The engravings are quite old. It belonged to Gray’s family. B’oremos knew of it, don’t ask me how, and gave it to me when the twins were born. We named the boy after him and he was so pleased he almost laughed. I need to moisten my tongue. There, that is good.

  What does the writing mean? It is in a script I do not know.

  It means “Here is the Cup. Take it willingly. May your time of dying be short.”

  Do not look so startled. I know what I do. And now you know, too. But Dot’der’tsee, you have studied our culture so many years. Have you not learned it well? There is no penalty here for giving a peaceful death. I am ready and I have confessed. My words are in your box. Oh, I know you turned it off, but I know also that there is a box here in this cave. A’ron told me, which is why I chose to die here. I would have spoken all this to the walls if you had not arrived.

  My children know what it is I do and they are satisfied that I die in peace. Who do you think got the Lumin for me? My dying will be short.

  But you can do something for me, something that will not violate your vows. When you grieve for A’ron, grieve for me as well. Grieve for all of us in this quiet, changing land. You owe us that immortality at least.

  Good, I see tears again in your eyes. And these are spilling down, a refreshing rain of them.

  Will you stay with me and hold my hand and wipe the tears for A’ron that are pooling in my eyes? I thank you for them, Dot’der’tsee. I understand now that I needed to grieve with someone; I could not grieve for him alone. He belonged to both of us—you and me, your world and mine.

  Now I feel the long sleep coming on me. The time of my dying will be short. I hope that my lines of mourning will be very long, for I would stay with my beloved Gray Wanderer and the Laughing Man in the Cave that is beyond all of your stars.

  A Note from the Author

  Cards of Grief was my first novel for adults, and my only science fiction novel, although it feels a lot like fantasy. I have often thought about writing more stories featuring the Anthropologist’s Guild and Dr. Z (who is based on a friend of mine named Mary Frances Zambreno, who was writing her doctorate at the time I was writing Cards of Grief, and who is now officially Dr. Z, a college professor in Chicago), but have never found the right story.

  Why a story about grief? My father, Will Yolen, was living with us at the time—“us” being me, my husband, and our three teenagers. Dad had advanced Parkinson’s disease and round-the-clock nurses; he was dying by inches. The book was written at the end of his long illness, so grief—mine and my children’s—was a lot on my mind, along with other, conflicting emotions as my father, charming and narcissistic, was not an easy man to live with.

  Like many of my novels, this one began as a short story. Well, two short stories, actually. And then … it evolved.

  Jane Yolen

  A Personal History by Jane Yolen

  I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

  We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

  When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

  I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

  And I am still writing.

  I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

  The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called Once Upon a Time.

  These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including Not All Princesses Dress in Pink and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like Wild Wings and Color Me a Rhyme.

  And I am still writing.

  Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern M
iss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!

  Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

  And yes—I am still writing.

  At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.

  Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)

  Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.

  Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book Owl Moon in 2011.

  Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.

  Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.

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