Editing Sigil:Numberless Wars (section)

== Songs and Memory ==

The Numberless Wars occupy an important place in the development of Gholibin memory traditions.

Gholibin music was never solely historical. Instruments, rhythm and song accompanied work, travel, celebration and war. Over generations, however, songs increasingly became a means of carrying information that could survive the death of the individual who possessed it.

Names could be fitted to melody. Routes could be remembered through repeated verses. Warnings, battle instructions and accounts of past mistakes could be carried by people who possessed no written archive.

The wars did not create Gholibin music, but they gave memory-song a terrible practical value.

A written archive can burn. A singer can flee.

Much of what the Gholibin know of the Numberless Wars survived because somebody remembered the song.