Free Tales of Wonder by Jane Yolen Page A

to the slow metronome of the funerary drums, my heart skipped before.
    The Hall was even larger inside than I had dreamed. Great massive pillars with fluted columns and carved capitals held up the roof. I had seen the building from afar—for who had not?—but had never been close enough to distinguish the carvings. They were appropriate to the Hall, weeping women with their long hair caught up in fanciful waterfalls. You laugh. Only in the countryside could such banal motifs still be seen. It was a very minor Hall, to be sure. But to my eyes then it was magnificent, each marble weeper a monument to grief. I drank it all in, eager to be a part.
    Inside the clans had already set up their tables, and Mother and Grandmother threaded their way through the chaos to our usual stand with an ease born of long experience. Under the banner proclaiming our colors—we had always been the Queen’s own, even in our little backwater—was a kidney-shaped table. It was littered with the memoria of our dying ones. We had three that year, a small number, counting Great-grandmother in our attic. I can still recite the birth lines of the other two: Cassania, of Cassapina, of Cassuella, of Cassamerra was the one. Peripia, of Perrifona, of Persivalia, of Perdonia was the other. And of course, in my own direct line, I can still go back the twenty-one requisite names. We have no gap in the line, of which I am still—though it sometimes makes me laugh at myself—inordinately proud. I am the last, as you know. No one grieves for me, no sister of the family, no blood griever, and sometimes it still bothers me that this is so, my own sisters having gone before when I was too young to grieve for them.
    The daughters of Cassania and Peripia were already there, having no attic grieven of their own and no new grievers to prepare for their first Hall. They had borne only boys. And my own sisters had gone in one of the winter sicknesses, leaving me the only hope of our clan. Our table was piled high with pictographs, for this was before we had learned to capture life impressions with the photobox of the strangers. Changes come too quickly now that even boys are taught to grieve.
    Since Cassania’s daughters were known for their fine hand, there were many ornately lettered lamentation plaques on the table. But the table, for all its wealth of memoria, was disordered, and that disturbed me greatly.
    I spoke in an undertone to my mother. “May I be allowed to arrange Great-grandmother’s part?”
    She did not understand my distress at the disorder, taking my request as a display of eagerness. But I was still too young to do more than look. I had yet to apprentice to a griever, to one of my older aunts. I had only a meager background, the pretendings of a child among children, and brothers at that.
    So I was sent away while the older women worked, sent off to look at the other tables in the Hall, to discover for myself the many stages and presentations of Grief.
    The other tables were as disordered as our own for, as I have said, we were only a minor Hall, and the grievers there unsophisticated in their arrangements. One or two had a rough feeling that I have since tried to replicate in my own work. Touching that old country grief has, I think, often given me my greatest successes.
    To think of it, walking in a Hall before the days of the strangers for the first time. The sound of the mourners lining up in the galleries, waiting for the doors to open. Some of them actually wailed their distress, though in the major Halls that rarely happens anymore. Except on great occasions of state: an exiled priestess, the assassination of a princess, a fallen queen.
    Inside the Hall, the grievers moved silently, setting up their tables and stalls. I remember one old woman lovingly polishing a spear, the symbol of the warrior her dying great-uncle had been. And another placing a harp with a broken string beneath the lamentation: One last