And rising beyond him it peopled the winter stars with a light that hovered and stilled above him, as nightly in song the old constellations resumed their imagined shapes, breathing the fire of the first creation over the years to the time that the song descends in a rain of light today on your shoulder with a frail incandescence of music and memory and the last fading green of a garden that never and always invented itself.
For the bard's song is a distant belief, a belief in the shape of distance.
All the while as the singing arose from the hearth and the hall, alone in the suffering wind, Orestes crouched and listened slowly, reluctantly beginning to sing, his dreams of murder quiet in the rapture of harp strings.
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.