The Seven Widows

This is the opening passage of an as-yet unfinished novella set in the milieu of The Spiral Arm. It may have appeared before, pre-stroke. There was some interest in it.

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Faint beneath the crimson sky twilight bells do peal

Midst ruins where their echoes tone:

We were real. We were real. We were real. 

As once they were, when life enfleshed these bones

And they fared forth to find what stars conceal.

– Méarana Harper, Bailéad an Domhain Terra.

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There is a song for this, a goltraí, but the lament may not be the obvious one.  When there are the seekers and the sought, sorrow can lie on either end.  A quest may succeed or fail, and who can say which is the greater tragedy?  

But as always when some go out and some come back, there are ambiguities in the accounts.  Sorrow can lie. Blame the ancient god Schrödinger. For that which is not observed at first hand has a certain uncertainty to it.  Some lids are more easily lifted than others. 

How to weave a song from such disparate threads?  Not all men, apprehending the same impressions, will comprehend the same essence, for what is so elusive as a fact?  It may be that only those who say nothing tell no lies. 

In the end, what can the singer do but extemporize? 

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An Brollach

The best place to begin a song, so it is said, is at the beginning; but the beginning is often a coda to a song more ancient still.  Once upon a time (as the seanachies say) a secret had been locked away, and so well hidden had it been that in time not only the secret, but the very hiding of it had been lost.  The hiders had not intended this.  They had only wanted a breathing space during which to ponder certain discomfiting truths.  But history caught them short.  They had not considered that they might not be there.  So bones piled on bones beneath the grass, cities fell and new ones rose, ashes blew in the wind, and names that once did grip the heart in ice faded into fables.  

Can there be forgotten memories?  Perhaps those are the happier kind.  The harper and the scarred man came to Terra of the Ages in search of them.  Of all the worlds of all the Spiral Arm, Terra groans thickest with memories.  They are layered on the ground like geological strata, and in consequence, the oldest of them have hardened into shale.  But sometimes from shale one may squeeze a drop or two. 

The city of Prizga, on the western marge of the Northern Mark, sits atop a long, narrow ridge whose blunt tip overlooks the gorge of the River Qornja.  The river drains a bowl valley rich with farms and after the plunge through the gorge snakes westward across a broad scrubland toward a delta twelve miles distant.  Lazarus species roam this plain: go-beeshon and go-camels and the like.  Spanning the gorge, a long, graceful bridge supported entirely by gravity grids hangs faerie-like in the air.  On the air approach from the drop-shuttle, one catches sight of the white wall to the north: the ice that grinds whole continents down and tramples memories beneath its feet. 

Prizga is a bustling city that squats upon an anciently urban site.  Beneath the modern city lies the broken plasteel and metaloceramic of earlier settlements, and beneath those, fragments of concrete block, broken marble, and the rusty stains of iron rebar.  And beneath even that, pieces of wood that scholars feel had once been shaped as boards. 

The ancient Miwellion was dedicated by a minor descendant to a major ancestor who in his day had brought the entire Northern Mark under his rule.  Built in a style known locally as Late Imperial and elsewhere not at all, it sported great fluted columns and floating roofs beneath which were housed the Archives of Zãddigah-Terra.  

Before even the Commonwealth of Suns, the Audorithadesh Ympriales had risen from the ashes of the Gran Publicamericana and, under their Brethidiendy Miwell II, had at long last gone out to the stars.  His proud visage had once adorned a mountainside in the company of leaders older still until the ice had slouched south and engulfed it; and his name survives only in the title of an old library-museum in downtown Prizga.  In that manner, the kings who would never be forgotten slip from the memory of men.