Cards of Grief (18 page)

I did as D’oremos advised, and when I returned he had fruits and wines set out for us and we spent a long and joyous night. In that way he bound me to him, with bonds even tighter than before, but he was a fine adviser and I learned much of Queenship from him over the years.

But the birth?

Yes, the birth. You want to know of birth, not death. But they are so intertwined. Patience, A’ron, is the prerogative—

Of Royalty. Yes, I know. Everything is the prerogative of Royalty. Just tell me of the birth.

For five more months Gray lived in the cave tended by Mar-keshan. And once a week I went riding in the hills on the Queen’s white horse, smelling the windstrife and picking trillis. I brought a saddlebag of fruits and sweets and other things to tempt Gray’s appetite, though she wanted nothing but the food that Mar-keshan gathered for her. He had tamed a wild she-goat for the milk. They lived like father and daughter, if you can imagine it.

I can imagine it.

And then one day when I was there, her pains began and so I stayed. She did not cry out, not once, though I saw the passage of the child inside ripple her belly like waves upon the sea.

“Do you know what to do, Mar-keshan?” I asked, suddenly afraid.

“I am a man of Waters,” he said. “And children come out riding a wave. Do not fear, my lord.”

So I stopped being afraid. Instead I mixed up a potion of wine and a single Lumin, the one left over, the one I had never given Gray, the one I kept with me in a silken purse strung ’round my neck.

“Drink,” I said to her during the quiet time between waves. “This will soothe the passage.”

So, trusting me, she drank. And when she started to fade, she forgave me again with her eyes.

The child was born and she never woke to see it. It came, as Mar-keshan said, riding a wave. Its skin was blue until Mar-keshan hit its back with his palm. Then it cried and turned pink and white. And when he cleaned it of its strange frothy covering, I saw what I had feared. The babe was a girl and she had golden hair.

“Then you must take her,” Mar-keshan said.

I nodded. He had been with me so long, he knew my mind.

“What will you tell Gray?”

Mar-keshan did not hesitate. “When she wakes, I will tell her that she had a boy child and it was born dead and that all this happened days ago and the body is long broken apart on the pyre. She will accept it.”

“Queen’s truth,” I said.

“Queen’s truth,” he answered, but there were tears of grief in his eyes. “She is a beautiful child.”

But whether he meant the child I bore in my arms or the one who slept lulled by Lumin in the straw, I did not know.

And
…

I brought the child back and into the palace by the secret way. The Queen held her for a moment and touched her yellow hair, then gave her to me.

“Tell them the child is mine and that I want none of her.”

So I did. And you know the rest.

Place
: Cave #27

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

Speaker
: Aaron Spenser to Captain James Macdonald, USS
Venture

Permission
: Directed transmission

S
IR, I AM PRESUMING
that you will hear this, as I know this cave, which you call Cave #27 and we call home, is under preset voice-activated status. I am alone now, which is why I am able to speak this way. The women are out and I pled a small fever, which is somewhat true. So they have left me to pick some healing berries for a tisane.

I want to set the record straight. I have not
gone native
in the old sense. And I have not—Dr. Z, please note—gone against the teachings of Anthro Guild. I will not bring to my people anything beyond their own discovering or change their essential character. And please tell Dr. Z I remember the three things she warned me about. First, I am not being a romantic about the L’Lal’lorians but I
am
in love. Second, I hope I am no longer the adolescent twit she accused me of being. I think this whole experience has caused me to grow up. And third, this
is
my job: raising my child, loving my woman, fitting into my adopted world.

You must already know that I brought my child down. I suspect Dr. Z discovered it first, since she is Linnet’s godmother. But rest easy. Linnet thrives down here. She loves her two mothers and has already learned the language with that casual ease only a small child can achieve. I will not let her forget Standard English, though, that I promise you. She is, after all, the child who is to lead the way, and the way leads straight to the stars. It has already been prophesied, you know, so this is no kind of contamination.

When B’oremos and I first rode up to the cave, I didn’t know what to expect. I had been told Linni was old and I knew that because of the Hulanlocke Rotational Device the five years I had spent in the lab had been fifty here. Yet there was a tall, handsome young woman standing outside the cave working on a scaffolding of branches. Her long, dark hair was caught up in a braided crown and she was frowning with the hard work.

“Linni!” I cried out to her before B’oremos could stop me.

She looked up and in that instant I knew I was mistaken. She had a slightly lower forehead and a wider mouth than Linni ever had, though she was beautiful in much the same way.

There was a movement by the cave’s mouth and an old woman, leaning on a stick, moved forward into the light. Her hair was still as black as a young girl’s and the gold of her eyes unmistakable, but her skin had darkened and cracked with a fine webbing of lines. She looked like a familiar painting dimmed and crackled with time.

I leaped from the steed and went over to her. I was terrified, I’ll admit. Standing before her, I took her hand in mine and put it, fingers outspread, palm over my heart.

“You…have not aged,” she said, her voice still melodic and low.

“You…” I began, thinking to lie to her.

She placed her hand on my mouth. “Do not try to make me believe what cannot be believed,” she said. “I am done with that.”

“I have a long truth to tell you,” I said. “It is full of betrayals, but none of my own.”

B’oremos shifted uneasily in his saddle.

“I am past betraying,” Linni said, her eyes brimmed about with tears. “Three times is enough for any woman.” She looked past me at B’oremos.

“There
was
a child,” he said quickly. “But I did only what the Queen ordered.”

“I knew there was a child,” said Linni, “for I carried her under my heart. And for all that you told me it was a boy, born twisted and dead, I did not believe you, though it was the Queen herself who ordered it believed.”

“Then why…?” B’oremos got down from his mount and came to us. I turned slightly so that I was side by side with her and we stood together against him.

“Because before all, I am the Queen’s Own Griever,” she said, “and the first betrayal was my own.”

I picked up her hand again, feeling the fine traceries of age like a raised map beneath my fingers. “The child lives.”

“Lives!” It was a breath, a respiration filled with joy.

“She has lived these years up in the sky with me, so she is but five years old.”

“Tell me of her.”

I paused. “She is a golden child. A child of earth and sky. She sings like a little bird and her name is Linnet. She is always happy.”

“A child!” This time it was the dark-haired girl who spoke. “But Gray, you never told me, not in all this time.”

Gray left my side and went to her and put her arms around her as a mother does with a beloved daughter. “I have and have not a child,” she said. Then, as if making up her mind, she turned to me. “Would you bring the little one here?”

“She is already in the silver tower. I brought her down, though I did it secretly.”

Gray turned back to the girl. “Listen well and hold these words in your mouth and heart, for there will be a time when you will have to say them to our people. For my sake, this child is yours. And for the child’s sake, too.”

The girl nodded silently, though not speaking cost her an effort.

“I would stay here with Linnet,” I said. “I am her father.”

B’oremos cleared his throat. “You will need the King’s permission,” he said.

“King?” the girl spoke sharply.

“The Queen is dead?” said Linni, softly.

“Yes.”

“Then I must go and grieve for her.”

“Gray, you are not well,” the girl protested.

Linni stood tall and tossed away her stick. “I am the Queen’s Own Griever. Take me to her.”

B’oremos picked her up with great gentleness and put her onto his horse, leaped up behind her, and they rode off. My horse shied at their going and it was fully a minute before I could calm it down enough to mount it.

I extended my hand to the girl. “Are you coming?”

“What? To mourn that unfeeling, quarrelsome old woman?” she asked. “I’d sooner eat Lumin.”

I laughed at her words and she had the grace to blush, but she did not recall them. In the end she came, riding behind me, not because the Queen needed mourners for her lines but because Gray needed someone to clothe her and wrap her ankles and rub her brow and brew her the tisanes that eased the aching in her bones. And because she was curious about the child.

The girl’s name, I found out on that wild ride down the mountainside, was Grenna. She was a pig-keeper’s only daughter with a wild talent for art and she was Linni’s personal apprentice. “I am the Gray Wanderer’s child,” she said with bitter pride in her voice, as if challenging me to deny her. She was twenty-one with a strange, attractive voice that caught every once in a while like a rag on a nail, tearing. She was angry, courageous, loyal to a fault, tender, sharp-tongued, anarchic, and funny. In many ways she was a combination of us and L’Lal’lor. We had already changed her—and her contemporaries—in our own image, you see. We hadn’t meant it to happen, it just did. But Grenna had lived with the Gray Wanderer and so there was much of the old ways built into her thinking as well. I couldn’t help but love her—for who she was and who she was becoming, and because she seemed a bridge between Linni and me.

We picked up Linnet from the tower where she’d been sleeping, a rag doll Dr. Z had made clutched in her arms. Then we walked into the city. Grenna let Linnet ride on her shoulders, which endeared her to both of us at once. And that is how we entered the Hall of Grief, a family already, mourners who had no tears to shed for the dusty husk of a Queen.

Gray was on the stage, still in the coarse dress she had been wearing in the cave. A young prince sat at her feet, strumming a brightly colored plecta. Gray’s voice was smooth and strong, but the poems she spoke about the Queen did not move me. The boy’s fingers stumbled several times. I noticed that particularly because I was used to the tapes of the young B’oremos playing the same tune. The plecta the boy was using was a bit tinny in the higher registers and the drone string buzzed.

The mourners moved dutifully in long serpentine lines that seemed to have no beginning and no end, and the world mourned the full Seven for the last of their Queens. And though I was not moved, I was comforted by the familiarity, the lightness of it all. I felt—no, I
knew
I had come home.

Linnet, of course, was bored by the second hour in the Hall of Grief and I took her back to the palace, where she ran happily through the mazed halls and the fully flowered courtyards. Her golden hair, just a shade darker than mine had been at that age, seemed to gather in all the light of the L’Lal’lorian day, and many were the servants who, after attending the grieving, came to watch her play. I found myself thinking that old Mar-keshan would have loved her, the child who had come into his arms riding a wave. If I was sad about anything in that seven days of mourning, it was that he was not there to see her.

After the Seven, Gray helped crown B’oremos, but it was a quiet, even desultory, affair. No one had much heart for it. Gray was exhausted, even with Grenna’s constant fussing over her. The priestess was totally confused by my appearance and overwhelmed by Linnet’s. And B’oremos wanted the ceremony done as quickly as possible because, as he put it, “Such ceremony reminds us of change. I wish my people to remember only that Kings have always been.”

So Gray, Grenna, Linnet, and I went back up to the cave, where I hoped we might all get to know one another. And we had a few short months of it, like a happy summer vacation. Linnet came to call Gray Mama One, and Grenna Mama Two. It was an idyll.

And then Gray died. It was not
un
expected, I suppose. She and Grenna had been building her pylon the day I had arrived. But
I
had not expected it, though I do not know what magic I had hoped for. I mourned for a very long time, my own kind of mourning. Grenna was surprised that I could shed tears. And Linnet mourned as a child does, tearful one minute, then suddenly laughing and dancing away to pick flowers.

Grenna has adopted Linnet as her own, of course, and not only because Gray wished it. We live together—not as man and wife, because they do not have that concept here and I will not introduce it to them. But I have taught her what
love
is and she treasures the word.

And I have sown well. In a few months Grenna will bear our child and I will
not
be forced into a second betrayal, so do not seek to bring me back.

Can you understand, sir, what I have done? Not contaminated a world but adopted one. If it is a bit changed by me—well, I have been a lot changed by it. I will continue to keep a careful record of songs and stories and customs, which I will be happy to pass on when the next anthro visit is due, in five years labtime. But I will not return to the ship; in fact, I have sent the silver tower back to you on autopilot. L’Lal’lor is my home now.

And when I die, I would be set out on pyre and pylon and be mourned by our children, because somewhere, in a Cave, I truly believe, the Gray Wanderer waits to welcome me by her side. And though I never loved her as I now do my Grenna, I know the three of us will be together as it has been prophesied we shall be.