The Song of Andiene by Elisa Blaisdell Page B

came did not write on lanara petals that rot and fail, but carved their words into the stones. With much study, they can be understood, and we learn what this land truly is.”
    “What do you mean? The land is what it is.”
    “Look up at the sky. What do you see?”
    “The starweb, not the purest, but well formed. Soon it will be winter.”
    The grizane spoke without anger. “You fool, describe what you see. As you would to one who had never gazed at the sky.”
    “I see narrow streaks of light, weaving a pattern of light across the sky,” Ilbran said carefully. “They change from night to night, so gradually that you can scarcely see the difference. In the course of a month, they will change from a black sky, to witches-hair cobwebs, to regular patterns, like lace, or netting. And now they are like lace, but poorly made lace, not fit to sell.”
    “Have you wondered why the webbing disappears in summer, and there are only dim spots of light shining in the sky? Why the patterns are finest and most complex in dead of winter? Why the patterns change from month to month, and year to year?”
    “That is the way things are.”
    The grizane sighed, and seemed to change the subject. “Have you never questioned the meaning of the Law of the Land? ‘We will not sow, we will not plant, we will not set one stone atop another?’ Have you ever wondered why they read ‘the measure of a man’ when every child is born, and when it is named?”
    Ilbran shook his head. “It is the Law.”
    “What do you think became of the people who came before your kind?”
    “The evil in the world rose up and overwhelmed them.”
    “Not quite so,” the grizane said. “Some of them became the evil in the world, or at least a part of it. The forests are their prisons. We bound them there with strait and heavy bonds. But what begins the changing, we do not know, nor do we know why it begins. The houses you live in were built before we ever entered the land, and we entered the land while your kin were wandering in some distant world. Time after time, people have come, like waves that roll up onto the beach and sink into the dry sand. We are what is left of one wave, no children, man and woman become the same, doomed to live out our long, long lives watching the patterns of the stars, dying one by one.
    “Then there were other people,” he whispered. Ilbran was not even sure if he was speaking to be heard, or only talking to himself. “One race came into the land when the forces of changing ran highest. Their children failed and were gone, a weak stock. They left no mark on the land.”
    Ilbran struggled to understand. “So of all who came into the land, who prospered? The forest folk only?”
    “The forest folk, and your own kind, the Rejiseja. They have lived in the land for a thousand years, as proud and foolish as when they first entered.”
    A note of pride came into the grizane’s own voice. “That is our doing. We taught you the Law, how you should live on the land, but not of it. You glean the grain that the wind has sown. You live in houses built by other men’s hands. You do not bury your dead deep in the earth, but lay them on the high rocks for the golden ones to devour. In every way, you live on the surface of things, and so you have lived but have not been changed.”
    Ilbran shook his head. As the grizane spoke, the things he had known all his life seemed to fall into place to form a greater pattern. Then the pattern dissolved and was lost. He was left only with a great sense of weary time, a thousand years—and who knew how long before that? He was overwhelmed by visions of people fair and dark, bright embroidered clothes and sober gray robes, group by group marching into the world, one by one washed away by the tide, like a child’s castle built in the sand.
    “These riddles are beyond me,” he said.
    “It does not matter,” the grizane said. “I spoke for myself. It has been long since I dealt with men. But if