The reign of Istar

II

The language of wind is one tongue only, pronounced in the movement of cloud and water, voiced in the rattle of leaves in the breath between waiting and memory, it stalks elusive as light and promise.

The language of wind is the vanishing year preserved in recollection, and always it yearns for a season the heart might have been in its wild anointing.

And the wind is always your heartbeat, is breathing remote as the impassive stars, and it moves from arrival to leaving, leaving you one song only:

Oh, that was the language of wind,

you say, and what does it mean

To the leaves and the water,

always, what does it mean?

So it found me the first time at the banks of Thon-Thalas, at the last edge of river, after the ministries of inkwell and tutor, after the damaged heirloom of days, when the long thoughts burrow and the childhood dances on dark effacements of memory, losing the self in the dance.

I remembered too much, unabled for the sword and buckler, for spellbook and moon, for altar and incense, for the birds' veiled grammar and the seasons' alembic, and always the river was telling me telling me

Come, Astralas, come to the waters:

I am the last home, it was saying,

The refuge of dreams

And the sleep of reason.

Come to midcurrent, Astralas.

I shall carry you past your failures.

Come to midcurrent and open your arms

As you fall into spindrift,

To movement, to light on the water,

To water itself, enraptured and lost

As the whole world vanishes.

And always the river spoke like this, always the dark current lulling the heart and the mind into that undertow where the homelands shift behind you and fade, and you think they have vanished in the necessity of rivers, in the battlements of forest, so that if you return to recover your path you are lost in the maze of leaf and inevitable current, of fore and aft, of the homelands always receding.

So spoke the river, and darkly I hearkened, suspended in darkness, in the heart's surrender.

A boat for the passage

I began to fashion, hides stripped in the lime pits sealed with tallow and stitched by the tendon of flax as the awl and the needle passed through and over the supple and skeletal wood:

The sails bellied forth in carnivorous winds, and in dark, in surrender, the ship moved rudderless, launched on insensible currents, borne to the South where the Courrain covers the edge of the world.

And borne to the South

I lay on the deck, and the boat was a cradle, a bride's bed, a gray catafalque carried into the night, it was strong wine and medicine, sleep past remembrance and past restoration, and as I lay down in the veinwork of halyards

I decided to rise up no longer.

And the date of my death was my embarkation.