There came a day when my mother put away the canvas and ink and said she was too tired to write any more for a while. There came a day when she asked me to tell a story, but shivered and dozed through it, not hearing it, only hearing my voice. “Don’t stop,” she said, when, thinking I was only making her more wretched, I tried to let my voice die away so she could sleep. “Don’t stop.”
At the edge of the desert you think it may be wide. You think it could take a month, maybe, to cross it. And two months go by, and three, and four, every day a step farther into the dust.
Rab and Sosso were kind and strong, but when Melle grew too weak to look after herself at all, Canoc told them that he would see to her needs. He did so with the most delicate patience, caring for her, lifting her, cleaning her, soothing her, trying to keep her warm. For two months he scarcely left the tower room. Coaly and I were there most of the day, if only to keep him silent company. At night he kept vigil alone.
He fell asleep sometimes in the daytime, beside her on the narrow bed; weak as she was, she would whisper, “Lie down, love. You must be tired. Keep me warm. Come under the shawl with me.” And he would lie beside her, holding her close to him, and I would listen to their breathing.
May came. One morning I sat in the window seat, feeling the sunlight on my hands; I smelled the fragrances of spring, and heard the sound of the light wind moving in young leaves. Canoc lifted Melle so Sosso could change the sheet. She weighed so little now, he could pick her up in his arms like a little child. She cried out sharply. I did not know then what had happened. Her bones had grown so fragile that when he lifted her, they broke; her collarbone and thighbone snapped like sticks.
He set her down on the bed. She had fainted. Sosso hurried out to fetch help. It was the only time in all those months that Canoc gave way. He crouched down at the bedside and wept, loudly, gasping with a terrible sound, hiding his face in the sheets. I huddled in the window seat, hearing him.
They came with some idea of tying splints to her limbs to keep them in place, but he would not let them touch her.
The next day I was out at the gate of the courtyard, letting Coaly have a run, when Rab called me. Coaly came as quickly as I did. We went up to the tower room. Mother was lying among pillows, her old brown shawl about her shoulders; I felt it under my hand when I went to kiss her. Her hand and cheek were icy cold, but she returned my kiss.
“Orrec,” she whispered. “I want to see your eyes.” And when she felt me resist, “You can’t hurt me now, love,” she whispered.
I still hesitated.
“Go on,” Canoc said, across the bed from me, his voice quiet, as it always was in this room.
So I tugged the blindfold down and pulled the two pads away from my eyes, and tried to open my eyes. At first I thought I could not. I had to push up the lids with my fingers, and when I did, I saw nothing but a flashing, lancing, painful dazzle, a jumble, a chaos of light.
Then my eyes remembered their skill, and I saw my mother’s face.
“There, there,” she said, “that’s right.” Her eyes looked up into mine out of the little sunken ruin of her face and body, the tangle of black hair. “That’s right,” she said again quite strongly. “You keep this for me.” She opened her hand. Her opal and the silver chain lay in it. She could not lift her hand to give it to me. I took it and put the chain over my head. “Ennu, hear and be here,” she murmured. Then she closed her eyes.
I looked up at my father. His face was hard and set. He nodded very slightly.
I kissed my mother’s cheek again, and put the pads over my eyes, and pulled up my blindfold.
Coaly tugged slightly at the leash, and I let her lead me out of the room.
That day a little after sunset my mother died.
GRIEVING, LIKE BEING blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. How you bear it is up to you. Or so it seems to me. Maybe in saying so I’m ungrateful to Gry, and to the people of the house and domain, my companions, without whom I might not have carried my burden through the dark year.
So I call it in my mind: the dark year.
To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.
Canoc and I were not companions in our grief. We could not be. However untimely and cruel my loss, I had lost only what time must take and can replace. For him there was no replacement; the sweetness of his life was gone.
Because he was left solitary, and because he blamed himself, his sorrow was hard, and angry, and found no relief.
After Melle’s death some of the people of the domain went in fear of Canoc as well as me. I had the wild gift, and now what might not he do in his bitter grief? We were the descendants of Caddard. And we had legitimate cause for anger. Every soul in Caspromant believed as a certainty that Ogge Drum had killed Melle Aulitta. She died a year and a day after the night we left Drummant. There was no need of the story she had told me and I had told Gry of that last night there, the whispering and the cold. We had told it to no one; I never knew whether she told it to Canoc. All he or anyone needed to know was that she had gone to Drummant a beautiful and radiant woman, and had come back ill, to lose the child she carried, and waste away, and die.
Canoc was a strong man, but the last months had taken a hard toll on both his body and mind. He was worn out. For the first halfmonth he slept a great deal—in her room, in the bed where he had held her as she died. He spent hours alone there. Rab and Sosso and the others were afraid for him and afraid of him. They used me as go-between. “Just slip up there, will you, and make sure the brantor’s not needing anything,” the women would say, and Alloc or one of the other men would say, “Just go up and ask the brantor does he want the horse to have bran or oats?”—for old Greylag was off his feed, and they were concerned about him. Coaly and I would go up the curving stone stairs to the tower room, and I would get up my nerve and knock. Sometimes he answered, sometimes not. When he did open the door, his voice was cold and flat. “Tell them no,” he would say, or, “Tell Alloc to use his wits,” and he would close the door again.
I dreaded to come where I was not wanted, but I had no physical fear of him. I knew he would never use his power against me, as Melle had known I would never use mine against her.
When I realised that, when I thought of it that way, a shock ran through me. This was no mere belief, it was knowledge. I knew he would not hurt me. I knew I would not have hurt her. So I could have taken off my blindfold, when I was with her. I could have seen her, all that last year. I could have cared for her, been useful to her, read to her, as well as telling my foolish stories. I could have seen her dear face not that once, but all year, all year long!
That idea brought me not tears, but a surge of anger that must have been something like what my father was feeling—a dry fury of impotent regret.
There was no one to punish for it but myself, or him.
On the night she died I had clung to him, and he had held me against him, my head on his chest. Since then he had scarcely touched me, and spoken very little to me; he had shut himself up in her room and held aloof. He wants his grief all to himself, I thought with a bitter heart.