Book of a Thousand Days

by Shannon Hale

“High, high, a bird on a cloud,”

“Tell her a secret that makes her sigh.”

“How does that work? I mean, the songs sing about birds and secrets and sighing, not about healing, nothing like the conjuring words of the shamans.” “What the words say doesn’t matter. The sound of the words and the sound of the tune together speak a language that the body can understand... or so I’ve been told by my maid. The body wants to be whole, and when you sing the right sounds, you’re reminding it how to heal itself.”

“The air is so clear, it shivers,” he said. “All the stars are out, every one, even the babies. It’s so bright with stars, the blacks of the sky look a dark, dark blue.”

put one hand on her belly and one on her back, and sang the song for bitter sorrow, the one that goes, “Darker river, blacker river, faster river, pulling me.”

While he was still close enough to hear, I sang the song for stone hearts, the one with the bristling tune that goes, “Chick tight in a shell, wings up and away.”

I lay beside her and sang the lulling song for comfort, the one that goes, “Trails of poppy, poppy, poppy,” but a song of healing can’t help if the person won’t will it. Right now, I guess, she needs to be terrified.

The song for unknown ailments is a wail. High the notes stretch, my throat stretching with them, the tune reaching up and up like a wounded bird’s call, “Rain rips as it falls, it tears as it falls!”

I laid her out on the open steppes under the Eternal Blue Sky, with her feet pointed at the Sacred Mountain so her soul would know which way to walk. I sat with her another day and night. I told her stories about our life together so her soul could remember who she was, then I sang her the parting songs. The songs that tell her spirit that she’s ready to go, that it’s all right, that she can leave me now and walk up the Sacred Mountain and back down again into the Ancestors’ Realm. In cities, singing the soul out of the body is a shaman’s work, but we muckers had to learn those songs ourselves, with no shaman around for miles. I guess singing the parting songs to my mama was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I would’ve rather had her ghost haunting my every footstep than be alone. But I felt proud after I did it. And now she’ll be waiting in the Ancestors’ Realm, ready to sing me in.

sang into his huge ear the song to ease parting, the one that goes, “Roads go straight and roads go on, my heart moves like the sun.”

I wonder, does he ever think of us? Does he remember? Has he snapped a pine needle just to smell it?

“The songs nudge things to be what they really are—a healthy body, a heart as calm as a baby’s in the womb.”

“Easy, slow and easy, all is well.”

I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky. I prayed

Poor little lost lamb, poor thin and wind-tossed thing.

I’ll not find a better man than you, not on the steppes, not in any city or in all the wilds of the Eight Realms. You’re better than seven years of food. You’re better than windows. You’re even better than the sky.