Cards of Grief Read Online Free PDF Page B

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