1Zarathustra lived to be old. The tellers say he took to wife Hvovi of the house of Hvogva, and that his youngest daughter Pouruchista was given in marriage with a song he made for her, which is still sung. They say he died in his seventy-seventh year. Some say he was struck down by a raider from the north while he stood at prayer before the fire. All agree that he left no writing.
2His people had no letters. In the river cities men had been pressing words into clay for a hundred lifetimes, but the clay had not come up onto the high plains. So his songs were kept in the only place there was. They were kept in the mouth, and handed from mouth to mouth, and the ones who did this were trained to it from childhood.
3Now hear of one of them. She is imagined, for the names of those who carried the songs are lost. But someone carried them. That is certain, for they arrived.
4Some lifetimes after the old man's death, there was a house of fire in the east country where the seventeen songs were taught. The teacher in that day was a blind man named Asmo. He had nine pupils. The youngest was a girl named Zari, a weaver's orphan, whom he had taken in because she could say back anything she heard once.
5The teaching was hard and plain. Asmo sang a line. The pupils sang it back. If one sound was wrong, a long one sung short, a breath in the wrong place, he struck the floor with his stick and they began again. Many of the words were already old and strange; the speech of the people had moved on, and the songs had not been let move with it.
6"Why may we not say it the new way?" Zari asked him once. "Everyone says the word the new way now. It means the same."
7"Today it means the same," said Asmo. "You change it, a little, to make it easy. Your pupil changes it a little more. In ten lifetimes it is a different song, and each one who changed it meant well. Then a man comes and asks, what did he say? And no one alive can tell him. We do not own these words, girl. We are the cord they are knotted on. A cord does not have opinions."
8There was a custom in that house which Zari hated. Two pupils were set back to back and made to sing the same song, each alone, and a third listened for where they parted. If they parted, both were wrong until it was found which. No pupil was ever trusted alone. "One mouth can drift," said Asmo. "Two can check."
9By her fifteenth year she had all seventeen. She was the only one of the nine who did.
10In the autumn of that year the riders came down from the north. They were hungry men on fast horses, in a dry year, and the house of fire had a full granary. It was over in a morning. Zari had been sent to the stream to wash wool. She heard it, and hid in the reeds with her face in the mud.
11When she came back the roof was burning. Old Asmo lay in the doorway, and the pupils were where they had run to. She went from one to another. She said their names. Not one of them answered. They had sung back to back with her since she was six years old.
12The great fire of that house had been burning on its stone since before her teacher's teacher. She dug a coal out from under the fallen thatch with a potsherd and put it in a cooking pot with ash. She took a bag of barley the riders had spilled. Then she stood in the smoke and understood what she was.
13She was fifteen years old. She was the only place on the earth where the seventeen songs were whole.
14If she caught a fever, they were gone. If she fell in a river, they were gone. And there was no second mouth to sing against. No one could ever again say to her, you have that sound wrong.
15She went west, because the riders had gone east. She walked along the feet of the mountains, from one water to the next. She sang as she walked. She sang all seventeen through each day in their order, aloud, for fear that a line would slip out of her while she slept and she would not know it was gone.
16The barley lasted twelve days. After that she begged and was hungry. The winter was coming down from the peaks behind her.
17In the first snow she came to the hall of a chief named Bavri. He was a kavi of the old kind, with a new wish to seem better than he was. He had heard that the great lords of the south now followed the teaching of the Wise Lord, and that it had become a fine thing to have it in one's house.
18When he learned what the ragged girl carried, he was very glad. He set her by his own fire and fed her meat.
19On the fourth night he sent the others out.
20"You will winter here," he said. "You will have a room, and a woman to serve you, and a place at my table as long as you live. You will teach the songs to my sons. I will build a house for the fire. All this I will do gladly."
21She waited. She had been hungry long enough to know that there was more.
22"There is a place in the songs," said Bavri, "where the prophet names those who stood by him. Vishtaspa. Frashaostra. Jamaspa. Maidyoimanha of his own blood. Now, my father's father's father was a man named Thrita. He lived in those days and in those lands. Who is to say that he did not stand with the prophet also? It is very likely that he did. I ask that when you teach my sons, the name of Thrita be sung there with the others. One name, among the others."
23"It is not in the song," said Zari.
24"Who knows what is in the song?" said Bavri gently. "You do. Only you. You told me so yourself. If you sing it with Thrita, then that is the song. My sons will learn it so, and their sons. In a hundred years it will be as true as any of the rest."
25She said nothing.
26"Think, child. You are one girl with a cough coming on. Go out of my door and you will be dead in a drift before the new moon, and all seventeen songs will die in the snow with you. Stay, and they live for ever, in a strong house, with a hundred mouths to sing them. I am asking for one name. Is it not better that the songs should live with one small thing added, than die as they are? Your prophet would say so himself. He was a man of sense."
27It was a good argument. She lay awake on his soft sheepskins all that night and went round it and round it.
28He was right that she might die. He was right that no one would know. That was the part that frightened her most. In Asmo's house there had always been the other back against hers and the third one listening. Here there was only Zari. If she put the name in, the song would have it. No one, ever, on the whole earth, could find the join.
29And she thought: the man who made these songs was thrown out of his valley for refusing to say what was wanted. The songs say so. One of them is about a gate that was shut on him in winter, and he could have opened it with a word. If I sing a bought name into his mouth, then every time that line is sung, he is made to do the thing he would not do. And the ones who learn it will think they are hearing him.
30Then she thought a harder thing. If I will put in one name for a winter's bread, I will put in another for the next lord. I will know I am a mouth that can be hired. And after that, when I sing any line, how will I know it myself? There is no one left to check me. There is only whether I can be trusted. If I spend that, the songs are gone already, even if I live to be a hundred and sing every day.
31In the morning she went before Bavri.
32"Lord, I will make you a song," she said. "A new one. I will say in it that Bavri took in a stranger out of the snow and fed her, which is true, and I will say whatever is true of your father's fathers that you can show me. I will put my own name to it: this is the song of Zari the weaver's child. But I will not put a name in his songs that he did not put there."
33Bavri's face closed. "Who wants the song of a weaver's child?"
34"No one, lord. That is why you asked for the other."
35He had her put out of the gate before noon. He was not a murderer; he gave her a loaf.
36She walked until the hall was hidden. That night she made her camp under an overhang of rock in the hills, with a fire of thorn-wood lit from the pot. She ate half the loaf. She sang the seventeen songs through, and when she came to the verses of the names she sang them as Asmo had struck it into her, and she wept, because she was sure now that she had killed them all.
37When she looked up there was someone at the edge of the firelight.
38It was a woman of middle years, leading a mule. She was wrapped against the cold in a traveller's felt, and her face was the kind you forget. She stood where she could be seen and did not come closer until Zari nodded. Then she tied the mule and sat down across the fire.
39She had dried apricots and a little cheese, and she laid them on a flat stone between them. Zari put the other half of the loaf beside them. They ate without talking much. Zari told her, without being asked, what she knew of the road ahead.
40When the food was gone the woman held her hands to the fire for a while. Then she looked across it at Zari, and she asked one thing.
41"What have you left open?"
42Zari did not understand the question. She began to say that she had left nothing, that she had lost everything, her teacher and the house and now her winter's bread. Then she stopped.
43She thought of the verses with the names. The names he had named, and among them a place where one more might have gone, and she had not put it there. She had left it as it was. Anyone who heard those verses from her, and from her pupils, and theirs, would be hearing the thing itself. They could lean their weight on it. They could ask, what did he say? and there would be an answer.
44"A song," she said slowly. "I left a song the way I found it." "I do not know if that is the kind of thing you mean."
45The woman did not say whether it was. She only nodded, as one nods at a child who has got hold of the right end of a thread.
46Zari slept. When she woke it was not yet light. The woman and the mule were gone, and the snow had already filled their tracks.
47She did not die in a drift. On the sixth day, sick and stumbling, she came down into a valley where potters lived. A potter's wife saw a girl fall in the lane and carried her indoors. They put her by the kiln, where it was warm, and she lay there a month.
48When she could stand she began to work for her bread, treading clay. And while she trod she sang, from habit and from fear. The potter's children came to listen, and sang bits of it back to tease her.
49One of them, a boy of seven, sang a whole line back without a fault. She stopped treading.
50She took three children that first year. She was sixteen, and she was harder on them than blind Asmo had ever been on her. She set them back to back. The day two of them sang the first song through, each alone, and did not part by a single breath, she sat down on the clay heap and could not speak. For now there was a second mouth, and a third. If she drifted, they would catch her.
51She lived to be old, and taught many. Her pupils taught others, and carried the songs further west, into the hill country of the Medes and south toward the land of the Persians. No one now can say by what roads the teaching came to those peoples. But it came, and the fires were lit there.
52The songs went on from mouth to mouth for more than a thousand years before anyone set them down in letters. By then the speech in them was so ancient that the priests who sang them could no longer be sure what every word meant. They had kept them anyway, sound for sound, because they had been told not to mend what they did not understand.
53Scholars of our own day have laid those songs beside the other oldest songs of the earth and found them to be what they claim: the true speech of a time long gone, with no later hand to be found in it. The names he named are there: his king, the two brothers, his cousin. There is no Thrita.
54Somewhere in that long cord of mouths there was a first knot that held, when it would have been easy and warm to let it slip. We do not know her name. This book has called her Zari.