(no subject)

[ka_mai]

Dear Master Allgood,

Well, I suppose it isn't "Master" anymore, but "Mister."

It's been so long since I last saw you. It's been years, say true. It must have been nineteen years since I saw you last. How you've grown. How well you've done. You've become the man I always knew the boy would be. Truly, such as the sons of Gilead are all. And, though I only saw you at great distance today, I knew it was you. And I knew in that instant that you were now as I always knew you would be. I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.

Certainly, you look better now than you did when last I saw you. I won't deny that. You were beaten and ruined then, adorned then in blood that was your own and your kinsmen's and your foe's. But here you are, standing tall and proud and laughing. (Was it always your idea that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?)

I was sorry to hear about the wound that nearly took your eye. One need such a loss to happen only once. Well, in most cases, such a thing can only happen once. How fortunate, then, that you, even in such unusual circumstances as yours, were not made to endure such a loss twice. The loss of a father, the loss of a homeland, the loss of an eye--such are the sufferings of some. And such pains and sufferings one could hardly wish on another.

Don't look so sullen there by the Serpent's Head. Really, you look nigh broken-hearted slumped over your ale like that, say true. But a face like yours is made for brightness and laughter. I know this well. You are the last of the true. The last of the true. So chin up, buck up, and drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee There is yet more. There is yet so much more.

This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance, in fact.

The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event, the history of all is not the history of each, nor indeed the sum of those histories, and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know, he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.

An event, a ceremony. The orchestration thereof. The overture carries certain marks of decisiveness. It includes the slaying of a large bear. The evening's progress will not appear strange or unusual even to those who question the rightness of the events so ordered.

A ceremony, then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree, and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. The feeling in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend towards?

Bear with me. Look about you when next you grace the Serpent's Head. Pick a man, any man. See him. Look on him. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. He is sullen. Yet his complaint that man's life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That's the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail? To whom is he talking, man? Can't you see him?

A man seeks his own destiny and no other. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.

Drink up. The world moves on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding paths are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

You say you have been everywhere. That this is just one more place. I ask you: did you post witnesses? To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you'd quit them?

Where is yesterday? Where is Thomas and Jamie and where is Aileen? Where is Sheemie whom you left to the mercies of Farson in the outlands and where is Randolph whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where is Roland? Where is Robert, your father? Where are the ladies, oh, the fair and tender ladies, with whom you danced when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the kingdom you'd elected to defend? And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?

I tell you this: as war becomes more dishonored and its nobility called into question, those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer. And can you guess who that might be?

I tell you this too: only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

Hear me man: there is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name.

One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.

Bears that dance, bears that don't.

Affectionately and with love always--