Orestes. The finding will save your life and make the past .
. . unchangeable.”
I thanked her for her healing and her oracle, and she
gave me one last gift – her knowledge.
“Although now you may regret your blood,” she said,
“remember that you are the son of a bard. There is power in
all words, and in yours especially.”
It was just more puzzlement.
We climbed, Mother and I, into the sled, moving
quickly over thick ice on our way back to the cottage.
Mother slept, and I guided the dogs and looked into the
cloudless skies, where Solinari and Lunitari tilted across the
heavens. Between them somewhere rode the black abscess
of Nuitari, though I could not see it.
The black moon was like the past: an absence waiting to
be filled. And looking on the skies, the four big dogs
grumbling and snorting as they drew us within sight of the
cottage, I began to understand my scars and my inheritance.
*****
Frantically, as I gathered my clothing in the cottage,
Mother told me more: that my grandfather, Pyrrhus Alecto
was no villain. He had kept the Solamnic Oath, had fallen in
the Seventh Rebellion of Caergoth, in the two hundred and
fiftieth year since the Cataclysm. She showed me the oldest
poem, the one that Arion had taken and transformed. The
old parchment was eloquent. I read it aloud:
“Lord Pyrrhus Alecto
light of the coast
arm of Caergoth
father to dreaming
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.
“And that was all?” I asked. “All of this trouble over a
poem?” I hated poetry.
I gave voice to her answer as she held forth rapidly, as
the words slipped from her fingers into my breath and
voice. “No, Trugon, not over that, over the other one.”
She did not know the words of the other poem. She had
not even seen or heard it. It was the poem of trouble, she
insisted, crouching nervously by the door of our cottage. It
was the poem that Father . . .
“Changed?”
She nodded, moving toward Father’s old strongbox.
“Then Father lied as well as betrayed?”
Mother shook her head, brushed her hair back. She
opened the strongbox.
I knew what was inside. Three books, a penny whistle,
a damaged harp. I had never asked to see them. I hated
poetry.
Mother held up one of the books.
It was the story of the times since the Rending, since
the world had opened under Istar. The work of the bard
Arion, it was, but more. It was his words and the words of
others before him: remote names like Gwion and Henricus
and Naso, out of the time when Solamnia was in confusion.
The book was battered, its leather spine scratched and
cracked. As Mother held it out to me, it opened by nature to
a page near its end, as though use and care had trained it to
fall at the same spot, to the same lines.
She gestured that the lines were in Father’s hand.
Indeed, the whole book was in Father’s hand, for neither
Arion nor any of the bards before him had written down
their songs and tales, preferring to pass them on to a
listening apprentice, storing their songs in the long
dreaming vaults of their memories. But Father thought he
was heirless and alone, and had written them all – every
poem and song and lay, from the edicts to the first shaking
of the city, down through the dark years unto this time. A
dozen lines or so of one verse he had worried over,
scratched out, revised, and replaced, only to go back to the
first version, to his first choice of wording.
I mouthed the lines, then read them aloud:
“DOWN IN THE ARM OF CAERGOTH HE RODE:
PYRRHUS ALECTO, THE KNIGHT ON THE NIGHT OF BETRAYALS.
WHEN A FIREBRAND OF BURNING HAD CLOUDED THE
STRAITS OF HYLO.
LIKE OIL ON WATER, HE SOOTHED THE IGNITED COUNTRY.
FOREVER AND EVER THE VILLAGES LEARN HIS PASSAGE