The verse spoken after all the dances, which
often includes an invitation to the audience
to indicate if they wish to see more.
DOBZAH HAD BEGUN TO FOLD away her writing materials. I asked her if she wanted to add any words herself. But she shook her head, and her eyes are heavy. I must recollect she is no longer young. I wonder if she will write that down?
Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah
See, I have written it!
Outside in a darkness like blue velvet, the nightingale sings on, as if all the hurt and happiness of the earth mean nothing, unless her song can render them as they are. Well, she is quite right. What poet can compare with a nightingale?
And I have said enough presently to exhaust myself and my scribe, let alone any who may read it.
My days in Pesh, how I ascended from the status of a slave, and gained the power of a visionary and poetess, and was made great in this, my adopted land, and how my life stole back to me, up out of the darkness, in a chariot brighter than the moon—these things I will not otherwise speak of here, in this, which became at last a book of shade and sorrows. That is another story.
But I will recount a tale I heard in Pesh, long ago, one final anecdote of Oceaxis.
Before the One God of Pesh, the Sun Temple was disgraced. The Pesh entered it and it was changed. Also they went down into Night’s Precinct.
Five men—the Sun’s number, by strange coincidence—glimpsed there a monstrous creature, part bird and part dwarf which, when they went after it, scuttled away.
The men pursued. Then, in the black, with most of the torches out, they began to see that, before the bird-dwarf there danced along two small pale things—which they took at first for littler birds. Abruptly though there was a torch alight, and then they saw what ran there were two small white child’s feet—having no body attached to them. These seemed to lead the dwarf on.
The Peshans had gone down under this temple of idolators prepared for sorcery, and they did not shun it when it came.
But presently the passage they were in revealed its ending, where was a wall of stone. Here a young woman stood, beautiful, they said, with long dark hair and sable garments, and midnight jewels around her throat. And she, opening her cloak, beckoned both the little feet and the hideous dwarf into its refuge.
Accordingly the feet skipped in under the robe, at once, and the creature was folded to her side, as if by a black crow’s wing.
Then the woman opened the cloak again, and nothing was there.
Daunted now, the men of Pesh had come to a halt. They said the woman smiled. Such boldness, in women, they did not care for, but she was like a queen. Then she spoke. This is what she said: “Tomorrow I shall be younger than I am tonight.” And she vanished like a star at Sunrise.
| Alcos emai: | So it is. |
| Sharash J’lum: | So it is, through God’s will. |
Down all the centuries.
And all things alter:
Still the nightingale sings.
But … it is another nightingale.