Free Tales of Wonder by Jane Yolen Page B

song, one final touch . I have always liked the simplicity of that line, though the broken string was a bit overdone.
    And then the doors were flung open, and the mourners came in. In the first crush, I lost sight of our own table, and was flung up against the wall. But soon the crowds sorted themselves, and I could see how the lines made a kind of pattern. There were long lines by the tables that gave away garlands and crying towels, though the longest by far was in front of the harper’s stall, where a live singer recalled in song all that had been great in the harper’s life.
    I learned two things that day, before ever apprenticing: that to please the crowd and draw a line is easy, but to keep the lines coming back again and again and again is not. Once the garlands were gone and the towels all given away, once the singer stopped for a draught of wine, the line of mourners broke apart and formed again somewhere else. And none of the mourners remembered the grieven one’s name for longer than that day, though some remembered the names of the grievers. There is no immortality in that.
    By noon I had toured the entire Hall, carrying with me a wilted garland and three towels embroidered with names of grieven ones whose deeds I no longer recalled. And I came back again to the place where I had begun, the stall of my own clan, piled high with memoria.
    â€œLet me take a turn while you eat. It will be a slow time, now, while the funeral meats are set out,” I told my aunts and my mother, my grandmother having gone home to get her mother’s last meal. And because they thought I could do no harm then, the left me by myself at the table.
    I busied myself at once, rearranging the overwrought items in a new way so that the whole picture was one of restraint. And then I sat down and composed a threnody, the first of the ones in my so-called “Gray Wanderer” period because for the first time the figure of the cloaked soul-traveler appeared. I wrote quickly, much faster than I was to work in later years, the words tumbling over themselves. I have always had a facility which, at times, betrays me.
    You know the poem, of course: The lines of her worn and gray cloak …, which scholars insist refer to the lines of mourning. I did not mean that, just that the cloak fell from her shoulders in comfortable, familiar folds. But never mind. The scholars seem to know more about such things than we grievers do. You smile. You have heard me say all this before. Do I, in my age, repeat myself endlessly? Well, what else is there to do, lying in darkness, but retrace the steps of light? Here I throw no shadows. But once my shadow—the shadow of the Gray Wanderer—covered the entire land.
    I had just finished the writing of the threnody and was tracing out the words onto a tablet, and it was slow going. I had not the grace of my aunts’ hands, and each letter was painstakingly drawn. You have such grace, and that is one of the reasons why I kept you past your training. No, do not blush, child, you know it is true. Do not confuse humility with self-denial. You have an old hand grafted onto a young arm. Not for you the easy, strangers’ ways, the machines that multiply machine-drawn letters. Hold to it. Pass it on.
    Yes, I drew the words slowly, and my hand faltered on a phrase. Oh, the phrase was fine, but the lettering was traitor to its truth. I was casting around for a scraper when I realized that someone was standing over me. I looked up. It was a youth just past that blush of boyhood, when the skin still has a lambent glow yet is covered with soft down that has not yet coarsened into beard.
    â€œI would have liked them,” he said, nodding at the memoria to my great-grandmother and great-great-aunts.
    It is the ritual opening, of course, the mildest approach to an unknown grieven one. But somehow I sensed it was sincerely meant, and though I answered with the words that have been spoken already a