PROLOGUE
The shadow which the light of Starland casts
Across the land in these our latter days
By the blazing splendor of our past
Is long and dark, for such is the common fate:
That lesser things should follow after great,
Till Time should fill the measure of all things
And make an end of peasant, priest, and king.
But now to speak of kings I would assay,
Who live beneath the shadow of their deeds,
And for a little while the courses stay
Of hurtling years, and Time's unsated greed.
Or, if I cannot that Tyrant's march impede,
The feeble standard of revolt to raise
And sing (while I can sing) of ancient days.
For after Sencan set his shining town
Upon the Sacred Hill of Orusen,
Then Ranhor, wise in lore, was later crowned,
And Nanalon his son ruled after him.
He it was whose grief among all men
Was most: three sons he lost of peerless worth
Upon the misty moorlands of the North.
Thoranrai the queen thereafter ruled
And she, in splendour shining as the dawn,
Set upon her brow the flaming jewel
Which Sencan's banner long ago had born.
Then Fanhal, who his wrathful sword had drawn
Against the slayers of her kin, she wed
And led with solemn joy unto her bed.
And afterwards, the issue of their love:
A second Fanhal, a Sencan come again.
Grave and glad and clad in diamond-dust
He ruled o'er the happy sons of men.
But Orkon brooded blackly on revenge
And stirred the hungry things within the Deep,
And roused the horned host from deathless sleep.
A plague of creeping things and poisoned tides
He spawned from where, entombed among the rocks,
The larval forms of ancient monsters cried
For flesh of men, while on their malice gnawed.
Such sweets he gave, and from those bloodstained grots
With glutted greed they went under wine-dark waves
To breed and feed in dark and sunless caves.
Great and globe-eyed monsters, long of tooth,
Scrape the slimy depths and curse the Day.
They pull down mighty forests for their food,
And breed and feed in ecstasies of hate.
The poisoned tides, like crooked fingers shaped,
Retract and grasp with the waning of the Moon
And trace the cancerous litany of doom.
And on the moor a Vulture circles high
And croaks a song of dead men's bones and spleens.
He laughs to watch the hapless mortals fight,
And sacrifices to his altar bring.
There the blood runs down like ragged wings
On stones no song of love can ever cleanse
Until the Making Song is sung again.
And in the cities Lanenomen built,
When first he fled from Heaven's awful wrath,
The Nalshbori, neath banners sable-gilt,
Have launched their fleet of tall and bronze-beaked craft.
The Ravens hear the war-drums and are glad;
The Red Fangs follow in a hungry swarm;
And all moves swiftly onward now to war.
But on the throne of Sencan, Fanhal reigns.
He, mindful of the feuds of Sencan's line,
Has pondered long the slavery and pains
His uncles suffered, wasting in the mines.
Of that same Fanhal, robed in silver fine
Upon the throne of Heaven's chosen kings,
My lords, I crave indulgence now to sing.
CANTO I: The King resolves to go to war.
Above the throne of Fanhal, statues twain
Are raised to lift the starry dome of night:
One the first to use that mighty name;
And one his Queen, beloved Thoranrai.
Each forever etched in marble white
Extend their hands to lift a jeweled bowl
Which rains a crown of liquid stars below.
This crown of light alone the King adorns,
Who will no other diadem allow
His raven hair to grace, which all unshorn
Is plated round his high and starry brow.
But his eyes are ever brighter than his crown,
For like the solemn stars above they dance,
Nor may the darkness check his searching glance.
And nigh the throne, in a chair of cedar carved
Reiran sits, with diamonds in her hair
Which sparkle neath the gold and azure scarf
That framed her sober loveliness so rare.
Seldom speaks the Queen, but many prayers
And songs of love and solemn joy she makes,
And these the Children sing on holy days.
Grave and glad the mighty Fanhal reigned,
For glad but sober were his native moods;
But now a line of trouble mars his face
Which on the cares of kingdom darkly broods.
Three supplicants the monarch now salute,
And place their empty hands upon his knees.
The first, a farmer, opens with his plea:
"My king, may Heaven help your throne endure,
I am humble farmer of the North.
I grind the winter corn for spirits pure,
And shelter it from creatures on the moors.
But men of late must shut and bar their doors,
For horn-helmed monsters hunt us for their thralls
And do not fear to come within our walls.
"Then too, a bloody vulture darkly flies
Above our towns, and calls to desperate men.
They, hearing Death's own promise in his cries,
Have followed him into the withered fens.
From thence, when drums are heard, with fell intent
They come to carry off again some wight
To sacrifice amid the grove at night.
"Nine of birds and beasts and sons of men
They hang about their groves which drip with gore;
Nine of birds and beasts and fish that swim
They gut, and paint their blood upon our doors.
And in the stony forest sound the horns
Of Orkon's host, the Nalshbori in arms
Who yielded long ago to Orkon's charms."
The second supplicant was from the South,
Where golden sunlight bathes a ragged coast
Of many craggy islands. There the prows
Of merchant ships with spices in their holds
Go sailing on where rivers run with gold.
The sailor's face was marred by many lines
And madness lurking wild in his eyes.
"O King, may Heaven grant you length of days,
To you is given from on high to hear
The prayers of those who suffer fear or pain.
Of pain my cup is empty now, but tears
Fill it brimming daily o'er with fear.
But though I weep, my friends I may not mourn.
A curse upon the day that I was born!
"Our ship was caught in a sea of poisoned weeds
Which crept on leafy fingers up our keel.
While we lay, becalmed upon the Deep
A stream of blood-black water there congealed,
And bloated fish in crazy patterns reeled.
'Twas then a choking fog brought on the night
And cut us off from Heaven's starry light.
"Seven days we wandered on the Deep
And plied or oars; no sight of moon or star
To guide our way, till there remained no strength
Of arm to row, nor hope in any heart.
Then faces pale were leering in the dark,
And now and then a cry would rend the air
And some companion vanish unawares.
"Seven days, and only five remained
Of those of us who left the sunny South.
Seven days, or seventy, insane
We raved and gnawed our limbs with thirsty mouths.
Then the weeds were heavy on the prow;
They squeezed, and split, and pulled the vessel down
And in the poisoned tide the sailors drowned.
"I alone of all that crew survived--
Set adrift and clinging to a spar
Until from sun and salt I nearly died.
At last, with half-blind eyes and throat all parched
I washed upon a rocky island's shore.
From there, a passing merchant heard my plea,
And so I come to sing my woe to thee."
The Deep Man watched the king with glinting eyes
While trouble gathered, storm-like, on his brow.
In otter's skins, against the freezing tide
The man was clad; and on his back a bow
Was slung, carved from creatures deep below
The sea, and now with heavy voice he speaks,
A voice as sad and somber as the deep:
"Wicked things with many glowing lamps,
Like barrow fires flick'ring in the Deep,
Stalk among the rank and fetid plants
Which choke the deepest trenches of the Sea.
Those creatures do not worship any king
Except the gnawing hunger of their gut
Which sends them forth its endless greed to glut.
"And they upon the flesh of mortal men
More often come to take their fill of late.
They have even dared the light of Dawn
Which Orkon taught them long ago to hate.
Upon the Njeitbori such monsters prey:
Huge and quid-eyed monsters, many-toothed,
And the long and lean and saw-mouthed barracuth.
"Keralu I was before my kin,
Who lived with me upon the restless waves,
Went down into the twilit waters grim,
Denied the proper solace of a grave.
My wife--my little ones--I could not save--
For seven weeks they circled round our barge
While, floating on the depths, we slowly starved.
"Seven times we sortied in the Deep
With spear-tips carved from monstrous whales of old.
But the monsters drove us back in wild retreat
To wait, becalmed and starving, in our boats.
our dead we could not give unto the foam,
Or send their bodies back into the womb
Of Mother Sea, which is at last our tomb.
"At last I set my coracle adrift
And laid as dead--as more than half I was--
And passed through bitter tides to storm-washed cliffs
And left the corpses of the ones I loved.
So I have come to learn if the King is just:
The oath of Sencan, made in ancient days,
Let Sencan's heir remember and repay."
Then sorrow rests on Fanhal's noble brow,
And sitting near, the Queen gives out a sigh
For all the suffering her foresight shows:
For the many brave and beautiful who'll die.
"Sencan's heir will not his oaths deny,
Nor wait to meet this evil on his shore;
Let sound the horns--for Fanhal goes to war."
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