Green by Jay Lake EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Jay Lake
- Language: English
- Genre: Gaslamp Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Memory
THE FIRST thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox,
Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. His back was before me as we
walked along a dusty road. All things were dusty in the country of my birth,
unless they were flooded. A ditch yawned at each side to beckon me toward
play. The fields beyond were drained of water and filled with stubble,
though I could not now say which of the harvest seasons it was.
Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was
merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world. I did
not have many words. Even so, I knew that my grandmother was lashed
astride the back of Papa’s patient beast. She was so very still and silent that
day, except for her bells.
Every woman of our village is given a silk at birth, or at least the finest
cloth a family can afford. The length of the bolt is said to foretell the length
of her life, though I’ve never known that a money-lender’s sister wrapped
in twelve yards of silk lived longer than a decently fed farmwife with a
short measure hanging on her sewing frame. The first skill a girl-child
learns is to sew a small bell to her silk each day so that when she marries,
she will dance with the music of four thousand bells. Every day she sews so
that when she dies, her soul will be carried out of this life on the music of
twenty-five-thousand bells. The poorest use seed pods or shells, but still
these stand as a marker of the moments in our lives.
My silk is long lost now, as are my several attempts since to replace it.
Be patient: I will explain how this came to be. Before that, I wish to explain
how I came to be. If you do not understand this day, earliest in my memory
like the first bird that ever grew feathers and threw itself from the limb of a
tree, then you will understand nothing of me and all that has graced and
cursed my life in the years since.
The ox Endurance bore a burden of sound that day. His wooden bell
clopped in time to his steps. The thousands of bells on my grandmother’s
silk rang like the first rainfall upon the roof of our hut after the long seasons
of the sun. Later in my youth, before I returned to Selistan to see the truth of
my beginnings for myself, I would revisit this memory and think that
perhaps what I heard was her soul rising up from the scorching stones of
this world to embrace the cool shadows of the next.
That day, the bells I heard seemed to be tears shed by the tulpas in
celebration of her passage.
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