from mirrors and smoke
and history’s hearsay
twines and repeats,
and the wavering country,
Solamnia, muses and listens.
OUT ON THE PLAINS, ORESTES,
the woman is saying, OUT AMONG FIRES
WHICH THE BARD’S VOICE IGNITED
IN RUMOR AND CALUMNY,
THERE THEY ARE BURNING YOUR FATHER,
HIS NAME AND OUR BLOOD
FOREVER FROM CAERGOTH
TO HARBORING KALAMAN
AND OUT IN THE DYING
BAYS OF THE NORTH:
ALL FOR A WORD, MY SON,
A WORD MASKED AS HISTORY
SHIELDING A NEST OF ADDERS.
WITH WORDS ARE WE POISONED,
ORESTES, MY SON, she repeats
in the fragmenting darkness,
the firelight fixed
on her hair, on the ivory
glove of her hand
and the tilted goblet.
And always Orestes listened
and practiced his harp
for the journey approaching,
and the world contracted,
fierce and impermeable,
caged in the wheeling words
of his mother, caged
in a custom of deaths.
II
Three things are lost
in the long night of words:
history’s edge
the heart’s long appeasement
the eye of the prophet.
But the story born
of impossible fragments
is this: that Lord Pyrrhus Alecto
light of the coast
arm of Caergoth
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,