Ash on the Tongue

An Asheni gravesinger's spoken account of what it is to carry the Sundering in the body — the ash in the skin, the names held past their season — set down by her granddaughter.

You ask me when. That is the settler question, my love, and you did not get it from me — when the ash came down, when the sky went to soot, as though it were a market day someone could have written on a slate. I will tell you what I know instead, which is not when. It is what it tastes like on a west wind in the dry months, when the old ash off the barrens gets up and travels, and it settles on every tongue the same, settler and Asheni both, and only one of us knows what we are actually swallowing. You have my eyes. Everyone says it kindly, as though eyes were a gift and not a ledger. Ember in the iris, ash in the skin — that is not a saying, granddaughter, not the way the settlers mean it when they call us hard folk or old blood. It is a description. Hold your palm to a coal-bed some evening and feel what it does not do to you that it would do to anyone else, and then tell me that is only a manner of speaking. What I am, and what you are becoming whether you have noticed it in yourself yet or not, is not a people who remember a bad day. I have sat across from settler scholars who wanted the day, the hour, a name for whatever it was that broke, and I gave them nothing, and they wrote in their little books that the Asheni will not speak of it, as if silence were only stubbornness. It is not stubbornness. I do not have a day to give them. I have a body. The wound is not a story I was told; it is a thing I was born carrying, the way you carry your mother's chin whether or not anyone ever tells you whose it is. Ask a settler when their grandfather's grief happened and watch them try to answer in a date. It cannot be done. Grief is not a date. Neither is this. Here is a thing I do that no settler priest does, and I want you to understand it before you are the one doing it, because one day you will be, whether you have said yes to it in your own heart yet or not: I hold names. Not remember them — hold them, the way you would hold a coal that is not yet safe to bank, in a cloth, at arm's length, until it is. A name goes into the ash and it stays with me, spoken by no one, not even by the ones who loved the mouth it belonged to, until I judge the grief has cooled enough to let the name back into the world without it burning whoever says it next. I have held names for a season. I have held names for eleven years. I am holding one right now that I am not going to say to you, and you are not going to ask me its owner, because you already know better than to ask me that — which is the first sign you were always going to be the one I taught this to. There was a woman two hearths from mine, Ashwake stock, whose son drowned in the flood year. Her husband wanted the name spoken over the grave that very week, the settler way, quick and done. I told him no. Not out of cruelty — because a grief that fast does not cool a name, it only silences it, and a silenced name curdles instead of banking, and comes back on the house wrong, in dreams, in fevers, in children born strange. He did not forgive me for eleven years. I held the boy's name the whole time, and when the father finally came to my hearth and asked, not demanded, asked, I gave it back to him, and he wept in a way I do not think that man had wept since he was younger than you are now. That is the work. Not comfort. Timing. It does something to you, holding them. I will tell you the truth of it since no one else will: my hands are cooler than they ought to be for a woman my age, and have been for forty years, since the first name I ever held past its season because a family could not agree to let their dead go. A gravesinger's hands are always a little banked. You will feel it start in yours, and you are not to be afraid of it. It is the coal doing its work in you the way it is meant to. Your grandmother's grandmother told it to me this way, and I am only passing it along in worse words than hers: a fire that is only a flame is nothing, it is a show, it eats and it is gone by morning. What matters is the coal banked under the ash, the one that carries the heat through the dark hours you did not think you would survive. That is what we are — the whole Asheni people, settled and wandering both, House and clan — banked coal from a fire that had a very bad night, a very long time ago, one none of us were there for and all of us are still keeping. You do not ask a coal when the wood it came from burned. You ask whether it is still warm. Put your hand near me. I am still warm. That is the only answer I have ever been able to give anybody, settler or kin, and it is the only one that has ever been true. So. When you ask me when, understand that I am not refusing you. I am telling you that the wound does not live in a when. It lives here, under the ash of my skin, in the coal of my hands, in the names I am carrying that are not mine to spend, and one day it will live in you the same way, whether it arrives gently or all at once, the way it is arriving in this room right now, with you finally old enough to be told and me finally tired enough to say it. Ash does not remember a fire. Ash is what the fire leaves so the next one can be lit from something. Be the ash a while yet, granddaughter. Your turn at the coal is coming. [i]She held that name four more years, and released it the week before she died. I do not yet know how to hold the ones she left me.[/i]

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