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. If a song is a new one, it carries
to still farther regions by word of mouth, from bard to bard,
from orator to folksinger to storyteller to bard again.
It is a tangled process, and the words change sometimes
in the telling, no matter how we try to rightly remember.
The old lines from Arion's song I heard in Solamnia as
THE PRAYER OF MATHERI
MERCIFUL GRAMMAR OF THOUGHT
I had heard in the small town of Solace as
THE PRAYERS OF MATHERI
MERCY, GRANDMOTHER OF THOUGHT
and the southern lines made me laugh, distorted like
gossip in their passage across the straits.
For I had the book with me, and within it (he truth
unchangeable. As I traveled, I knew I would come to a
place when I would hear those scratched and worried lines
of my father's - the lines about Pyrrhus Alecto, about
Lightbringer and history and glory - but I would hear them
in a different version.
And I would know at last what Pyrrhus Orestes had
altered.
*****
Across the Straits of Schallsea I once stowed away on
a ferry. The enraged ferryman discovered me under a pile
of badger hides, and he threatened to throw me overboard
for evading his fee. He relented when he pushed back my
hood and saw the scars from the burning.
"Firebringer," he snarled. "Only my fear of Branchala, of
the curse upon bard-slayers, stays my hand from your
murder." I cherished his greeting. It was the first of many
such conversations.
Over the grain fields of Abanasinia I wandered, in a
journey from summer to summer and threat to threat
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