Preface to Book 2

The one who keeps the recital set me a task in the year of my Tempering. Som Zigu's journal survives, and a few other records with it. I was to read them against what the lineage teaches: the Cycle, the Forms, and his own lines in the Long Names. Then I was to give one of three answers. That the canon should be revised where the records disagree with it. That it should be read differently, in the light of them. Or that a new book should be written, and the recital set aside for it.

I was sure, when I began, which answer I would give. I will not say which. The entries that follow were written in order, and they show what I thought when I thought it. I have not gone back to make the early ones agree with the late ones. A stance that was taken and then corrected is still a record of the stance.

The journal is not what a novitiate expects. It is short. It lists. It counts. It records names, gear, the weight of an enemy, the order of blows. It stops in the middle of a thing and starts again somewhere else, with nothing between, and whole seasons of it are missing. Where he writes of himself, he writes plainly or not at all. There is no teaching in it. It is the record of a man who wrote things down so that he could use them, and then went to use them.

The recital is not like that. It gives him one line for each thing worth keeping, and every line begins with Who. It was made to be said aloud, by people standing in a line, and it was made after he was gone. It leans toward him. That is what a recital is for.

Of the other records I use little. The druids keep a record of the crew from before his journal begins. It is theirs, not ours, and I cite it once.

I was asked to choose between the journal and the canon. I could not do it, and in the end I did not need to.

This is the answer I gave the elder, and now give you. The canon is not to be revised. Its words are fixed, and they are not wrong because a journal is plainer than they are. Nor is a new book to replace it. A journal cannot be recited, and a lineage that stops reciting forgets faster than one that recites a little too well. But the canon is not to stand alone. The record goes beside it.

So every entry in this book stands in three parts. First, what the journal shows, and only that: what is written, in the order it is written, and where it falls silent, the fact of the silence. Second, what the lineage says: a line of the recital, a verse of the Cycle, a Form, quoted exactly as it is kept. Third, sometimes, my own note. The note is set last because it weighs least. It is a novitiate's question or guess, and some of my guesses are wrong. When a later entry shows me wrong, I say so, by number.

Read the first part to know what happened. Read the second to know what we have made of it. Read the third only if you want to know what it cost to hold the two in one hand. That arrangement is my verdict. Nothing is taken from the canon. Nothing is added to the record. They are set side by side, and the weight between them is left for you to feel.

His recital has no last line. No record says how he died, and none of the lineage's texts claims to. The recital simply stops. I have been asked more than once this year whether I would write the missing line, since I have read more of him than anyone now living. I will not. A line made up to finish the recital would be the one false line in it.

Where the record ends, stand.
Do not step into what you cannot see.

— the Cycle, I.5

Many of the questions I asked along the way are still open. A few the record answered later, and I have marked them where it did. The rest I leave as they are. An open question honestly kept weighs more than an answer I would have had to invent.

I began with a name I had recited since I could stand in the line. I end with a man who wrote down small things and went on. I know him better than I did. I do not know him well. The record does not allow it, and I have stopped asking it to.