Cards of Grief Read Online Free PDF

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
    S HE 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