the ear. And since the handwriting in my letter no doubt
will surprise you, I must tell you one thing more, that in this
room sits a nurse, attentive and kind, who writes down the
long words, the longer thoughts from brother to brother. Her
voice is soft, muffled. Harder to hear than the sound of the
birds or the crickets. I can only imagine she has turned
away from me as she writes down what I have to say to you.
She asks me to continue, her voice louder now. As I
have said, she is kind. She is attentive.
I wish that when I was younger I had paid more
attention to bird song. My nurse has told me that the birds in
the evening sing the names of those who will die in the
night. I have no itch for prophecy, but I suppose that the
song is subtle, that perhaps different birds sing at different
times of the day, or that perhaps there is even a language
among them – a sort of call and response, some quarrels I
might understand had I listened earlier and more intently. It
would be good to eavesdrop – something to pass the time in
what the surgeons insist on calling THIS HOUSE OF
PEACE AND HEALING. But it is the land now that is
peaceful and healed, the hospital haunted with battle and
pain and uneven memory.
Because that story you have heard about the blind is only
true in part, that when sight goes, the other senses …
sharpen? Intensify? Bayard, if this world were all poetry
and justice and balance, and beauty no accident – if things
took place because they were more beautiful or poetic or
just – then the myths regarding the blind would be physical
law: what war hath taken away, nature restoreth, or a
similar poetry. But it is not like that. What you do in the
blackness is pay more attention, and if cardinals and finches
and larks all sound the same to you, it reminds you only that
long ago there were some things you neglected.
But you cannot blame yourself for the oversights of
childhood and of study, because any tale that is entirely and
unarguably true, whether of blindness or of birds or of
battle, or of something purely noble in any of these things,
is the wildest tale of all, for none of these are purely
understood until we sink into darkness, until we rise on thin
and delicate wings, or until we carry a lance while the fire
descends.
Our mother says you are “eager” for news of the siege,
for accounts of heroism and high adventure, that you
practice your swordplay in the parlor, much to her ill ease
and at the mortal peril of her heirloom vases and silver.
That you sing of “returning souls to Huma’s breast” as your
sword dances carelessly near cabinet or candle.
The words of the chant are “Return THIS soul to
Huma’s breast,” Bayard. To be spoken over the fallen body
of a comrade, not over the phantom draconians you fight
amidst Mother’s porcelain. The chant is more individual,
more personal than you have imagined. But you were not
there at the siege.
Do you know that sometimes the darkness seems more
penetrable? That it shifts from a uniform blackness to a
muddy or even rust-colored brown? Or it seems to shift to
those colors I believe I still remember. Then, perhaps, it is
only from the monotony of dark that I imagine the colors
arising. Perhaps even dead eyes play tricks, as the living eye
plays over the white on white of a blizzard and begins out
of boredom or dazzlement to see impossible reds and greens
in a snowfall.
For the snow, pure white on white and over white, began
to fall as we were on the road to the tower, as we heard the
footmen grumble about Now SNOW ON TOP OF
EVERYTHING ELSE, Sir Heros grumbling back to me,
NOW GRUMBLING ON TOP OF SNOW, as I set his
helmet and sword in front of me on the saddle so that the
blanket I had wrapped about my shoulders would cover