Standing by the rudder, watching the city burn, the smoky pillars of destruction lifted high into a black and starless sky—and my heart grew cold, then. I did not feel it. I felt nothing ever again. The old man who steered our course, silent as the grave, had pulled his old, brown cloak tight about his rounded frame. His bowed head and the hood, and only his beard, its greyish bristles poking out, visible, it has all become itself a sacred image to me, a touchstone of meaning amid the series of outrageous absurdities which have since accounted for a life.
Here, this old man was Charon, and as I contemplate my own end, I see him coming for me out of the silent eternity of darkness, which is the unknown. He shall steal me away from this body, which is no less besieged than was that great city, and I shall be no less dead than I am deadened now.
I have lived the vast majority of my life as a ghost, a thing out of place, a memory which can only be helped by prayer. A prince once, and the orphaned king of nothing; a prop for foreign countries who themselves are the faces of faceless bankers. I smile. I meet with presidents. I give speeches. I have no hope.
I once sailed away with my mother as all that we loved was consumed. My father, just ashes and memories now, has more rest than she who must rest as a perpetual guest in a land not her own, must lie in a borrowed grave.
My hairs have turned grey, and I am weary. I have done the best I knew to do; it was not enough to keep our people from becoming slaves, spread out and sold and lost. Perhaps it is best to forget and be forgotten, but my heart is frozen on that lake, its surface like blood reflecting the red of the inferno we fled. I feel I am standing again by the rudder, and the silent pilot, bowed by our shared sorrow, I half think has finally broken his silence.
Age and memory play tricks. Did he speak, or is it merely my senility seeking comfort? I do not remember remembering this before, a whisper:
“Stones may fall and cities burn, but the story goes on, if it’s true.”
Tale Told 