father to dreaming and to vengeful Orestes fell to the peasants in the time of the Rending fell in the vanguard of his glittering armies and over his lapsing eye wheeled constellations the scale of Hiddukel riding west to the garrisoned city.
It is there that the edge of history ends: the rest is a song that followed on song the story involved in its own devising tied in devolving circles until truth was a word in the bardic night and the husk of event was a dim mathematics lost in the matrix of stars.
III
But this is the story as Arion told it,
Arion Corvus, Branchala's bard the singer of mysteries light on the wing string of the harp.
Unhoused by the Rending, traveling west, his map a memory of hearth and castle, unhoused, he sounded forever the hymns of comet and fire perpetual sounded the Time of the Rending, betrayals and uprisings spanning the breadth of the harper's hand, and history rode on the harp incanting the implausible music of breath.
His was the song I remember, his song and my mother's retelling.
O sing the ravens perpetually wronged to the ears of my children,
O sing to them, Arion Stormcrow:
Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:
Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight of the night of betrayals
Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,
The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.
Forever and ever the villages burn in his passage,
And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies
That harried him back to the keep of the castle
Where Pyrrhus the Firebringer canceled the world
Beneath the denial of battlements,
Where he died amid stone with his covering armies.
For seventeen years the country of Caergoth
Has burned and burned with his effacing hand,
A barren of shires and hamlets,
And Firebringer history hangs on the path of his name.
IV
Look around you, my son for the fire in Arion's singing:
For where in this country, in forgotten Caergoth, where does a single village burn?
Where does a peasant suffer and starve by the fire of your father?
Somewhere to the east before a white arras, gilded with laurel and gold adulation, the bard sings a lie in a listening house, and Caergoth burns in the world's imagining, while the bard holds something back from his singing, something resembling the truth.
But let not the breath of the fire touch your father,
Orestes, my son, my arm in the dwindling world, my own truth my prophecy, soothed the effacing mother, and darkly and silently
Orestes listened, the deadly harp poised in his hand circuitous.
And the word turned to deed and the song to a journey by night, and the listening years to a cloak and a borrowed name, as the boy matured in his mother's word, and the harp strings droned in the facing wind as he rode out alone, seeking Arion.
V
High on the battlements of Vingaard Keep as the wind plunged over the snow-covered walls,
Orestes perched in a dark cloak huddled, the window below him gabled in light, and he muttered and listened, his honored impatience grown loud at the song of the bard by the fire.
Melodiously, Arion sang of the world's beginning, the shape of us all retrieved by the hands of the gods from chaos, the oceans inscribing the dream of the plains, the sun and the moons appointing the country with light and the passage of summer to winter, the bright land's corners lovely with trees, the leaves quick with life with nations of kestrel with immaculate navies of doves, with the first plainsong of the summer sparrow and the song from the bard sustaining it all, breathing the phase of the moon's awakening, singing the births and the deaths of the heroes, all of it rising to the ears of Orestes.
And rising beyond him it peopled the winter stars with a light that hovered and stilled above him, as nightly in song the old constellations resumed their imagined shapes, breathing the fire of the first creation over the years to the time that the song descends in a rain of light today on your shoulder with a frail incandescence of music and memory and the last fading green of a garden that never and always invented itself.
For the bard's song is a distant belief, a belief in the shape of distance.
All the while as the singing arose from the hearth and the hall, alone in the suffering wind, Orestes crouched and listened slowly, reluctantly beginning to sing, his dreams of murder quiet in the rapture of harp strings.
VI
Hieronymo he called himself,
Hieronymo when down from the battlements he came, supplanted and nameless entering the hall in the wake of the wind and darkness.
Arion dreamt by the fire, and his words were a low, shaping melody: the tongue of the flame inclined in the hall of his breath and the heart of the burning was a map in the eye of Orestes, who crouched by the hearth and offered his harp to his father's slanderer, smiling and smiling his villainous rubric,
Teach me your singing, Arion, he said, adopting the voice and the eye of imagined Hieronymo deep in disguises, and none in the court knew Alecto's son -
Teach me your singing, memorable bard,
The light in the heart of winter,
Singer of origins, framer of history,
Drive my dead thoughts over the winter plains
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
Old Arion smiled at the boy's supplication at the fracture of coals, at the bright hearth's flutter at the nothing that swirled at the heart of the fire: for something had passed in his distant imagining, dark as a wing on the snow-settled battlements, a step on a grave he could only imagine there in the warmth of the keep where the thoughts were of song and of music and memory, where something still darker was enjoining the bard to take on the lad who knelt in the firelight.
Some things, he said,
The poet brings forth.
