listening to him practice,

almost the only time that boy held still;

the boy now grown into a king.

Thought of the boy’s younger brother,

fastened to him like a shadow;

a shadow who had squirmed

when Faolan practiced fingerwork.

That shadow now covered in wolf skins,

heaped with gold rings, swords, daggers,

a silver torc, a linden shield.

At midnight, the beating of drums.

Donal got up with help from King Xau.

He raised a silver urn.

“To Connol. Who died for me. Who—”

Donal stopped, shook his head.

Tears ran down his face.

He drank from the urn,

handed it to Fergus.

“To Connol,” said Fergus.

“My commander and my friend.

Who died with sword in hand,

his brother’s shield.”

One by one, they drank to Connol.

When Faolan’s turn came,

he stood as straight

as his back would allow.

“To Connol, Prince of Innis,

who loved a marching tune.”

Faolan drank deep,

laid his harp on top of Connol.

WIDOW

Carrying Prince Connol’s shrouded body

down to the moonlit harbor,

the fishermen and the soldiers sang.

Mei, waiting in the largest fishing boat,

neither wailed nor wept for her husband.

Softly the men sang Connol’s dirge

as they positioned his body

in a wicker coracle within the large boat.

Mei, pregnant, queasy, gagged on the smell

of myrrh, mackerel, decay.

Six men rowed her to sea,

singing the dirge in time to the stroke,

the fleet of fishing boats following.

Mei blinked away sea spray,

not tears. She hadn’t loved Connol.

The men rowed, their voices rising

the further out they went,

the song echoed from the other boats.

Mei had scorned Connol as a barbarian:

insolent, insulting, insufferable.

The men stopped. Stopped singing.

Stopped rowing.

One man handed Mei a flaming torch.

Slowly Connol’s patience, his kindness,

had crept in upon Mei.

Wind, water against the hull. No voices.

The men lowered the coracle

into the waves and rowed clear.

Mei tossed the torch down on Connol.

The flame caught on his shroud.

All the men on all the boats

turned then to Mei,

and she sang, clear-voiced,

not the funeral dirge, but a lullaby,

not in Connol’s language, but her own,

while the fire burnt out.

HARMOUTH

King Xau came to the ruins of Harmouth

with the corpse of Prince Connol,

his sister’s husband;

came to comfort his sister

and bring her home,

but Mei declined,

declined though she could not articulate

her reasons, reasons as incomplete

as the child in her belly;

stayed on in the burnt border-town

though it meant living among barbarians;

birthed her son in the five-room stone house

of her short, strained marriage;

noticed only then,

in the colorless days of illness

following that birth,

the barbarians waiting, openhanded, patient,

offering friendship.

Turned her shame and their friendship

to a purpose, founded a school:

taught Meqingese to fishermen

and fishermen’s wives, and sailors,

soldiers, traders, craftsmen.

Never did return to Meqing but that once

when Xau could not come to her,