In the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies.
They carried him back to the keep of the castle
Where Pyrrhus the Lightbringer canceled the world
Beneath the denial of battlements,
Where he died amid stone with his hovering armies.
For seventeen years the country of Caergoth
Has turned and turned in his embracing hand,
A garden of shires and hamlets,
And Lightbringer history hangs on the path of his name.
X
His duty dispatched and the old bard murdered,
Orestes returned toward rescued Caergoth, skirting the foothills, and long were his thoughts as he passed over Southlund, the Garnet Mountains red like a memory of blood in the distance:
There is no law,
Orestes murmured, his hand on the harp strings,
No rule unwritten
That your father's slanderer
Cannot instruct you,
That the man you murder
Your heart cannot honor,
Even as your hand
Concocts the poison.
The landscape ahead was diminished and natural, no thing unforeseen sprang from the heavens, the waters were channeled and empty of miracles.
So this is history,
Orestes considered,
So this is history
Now I can understand
as the road lay before him uninherited,
heirless cut off from its making and silenced by blood.
At the borders of Southlund the smoke was rising,
the Arm of Caergoth harbored incessant fire:
Orestes rode swiftly through billows of prophecy,
the stride of his horse confirming the dead words of Arion.
The cavalry plundering the burgeoning fields,
leveling villages, approaching invulnerable Caergoth,
heeded little the ride of a boy in their column cloaked in the night and in helpless mourning.
A bard, some said, or a bard's apprentice returned to his homeland burning and desolate.
The captain of cavalry turned to the weeping boy and addressed him as soldier as fellow and brother:
Sooner or later, sing you this,
Bard or bard's apprentice.
For the voice of the harper
The musician, the piper
Shall no longer be heard
In the arm of Caergoth,
Long kept from the fire
By the song of a poet
Who said she was burning already:
For a fresh fabled country
Is the nest of invasions,
The quarry of cavalry,
Ripe for the sword and the fire.
Orestes rode forth and the captain continued, turning his pale horse as a star tumbled down from the fixed dream of heaven:
For the bard's song, they tell me,
Is a distant belief
In the shape of distance.
For Caergoth was burning
When she said in her heart,
'I am Queen, not a widow
And sorrow is far from me,
Elusive as thought
Or the changes of memory.'
Sooner or later, sing you this.
And he vanished in histories of rumor and smoke, and sooner or later, a bard will sing this, in beleaguered castles abandoned to night and the cough of the raven.
Sooner or later, someone will sing of Orestes the bard, for some things the poet brings forth and fashions, and others the poet holds back: for words and the silence between them commingle, defining each other in spaces of holiness. and through them the story ascends and spirals, descends on itself and circles through time through effacing event and continuing vengeance down to the time
I am telling and telling you this.
MARK OF THE FLAME, MARK OF THE WORD
It began when I was fourteen, the burning, in the winter that the fires resurged on the peninsula.
I awoke with a whirling outcry, my face awash in fire, the blankets scattering from the bed. The dogs raced from the cottage, stumbling, howling in outrage. Mother was beside me in an instant, wrapped in her own blanket, her pale hair disheveled, her eyes terror stricken.
The burning spread down my neck and back, the pain brilliant and scoring, and I clutched at her hand, her shoulders, and shrieked again. Mother winced and fumbled silently, her thick fingers pressing hard, too hard, against my scarred lips.
And then we were racing through the forest night.
The freezing rain lanced like needles against the hissing scars on my neck and face.
We moved over slick and glittering snow, through juniper and Aeterna, and my breath misted and crystalized on the heaped furs, and the dogs in the traces grumbled and yapped.
Then it was light, and I lay in a dry, vaulted cavern on a hard pallet.
Above me the druidess L'Indasha Yman rustled, draped in dried leaves and holly bobs like a pageant of late autumn. She was young for medicine, young even for divining, and I was struck by her dark eyes and auburn hair
