The cataclysm

VI

Hieronymo he called himself,

Hieronymo when down from the battlements he came, supplanted and nameless entering the hall in the wake of the wind and darkness.

Arion dreamt by the fire, and his words were a low, shaping melody: the tongue of the flame inclined in the hall of his breath and the heart of the burning was a map in the eye of Orestes, who crouched by the hearth and offered his harp to his father's slanderer, smiling and smiling his villainous rubric,

Teach me your singing, Arion, he said, adopting the voice and the eye of imagined Hieronymo deep in disguises, and none in the court knew Alecto's son -

Teach me your singing, memorable bard,

The light in the heart of winter,

Singer of origins, framer of history,

Drive my dead thoughts over the winter plains

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

Old Arion smiled at the boy's supplication at the fracture of coals, at the bright hearth's flutter at the nothing that swirled at the heart of the fire: for something had passed in his distant imagining, dark as a wing on the snow-settled battlements, a step on a grave he could only imagine there in the warmth of the keep where the thoughts were of song and of music and memory, where something still darker was enjoining the bard to take on the lad who knelt in the firelight.

Some things, he said,

The poet brings forth.

Others the poet holds back:

For words and the silence

Defining each other

In spaces of holiness.

Softly the old hand rose and descended, the harp-handling fingers at rest on the brow of the bold and mysterious boy.

The apprenticeship was sealed in Orestes's bravado, the name of HIERONYMO fixed to the terms of indenture, all in the luck of an hour, and depth of a season, but somewhere within it a darker invention that sprawled in the depths of the heart and the dwindling earth.