Songs of Love & Death (48 page)

Zaeli stopped talking, and after all lowered her hand into the water, which was wet and cold, and curiously electric.

She said quietly to the water, “My life was so restricted and dull. Only love made it worth anything, even though he never loved
me
, only
I
loved
him
. But it’s no good, is it, to go on loving somebody dead? Not this way. Being
in
love with the dead. But it doesn’t end. Love, I mean. Life… ends.”

And then the fisherman said, as quietly as she, “Look now, just there. Look. And you’ll see the palace shining under the lake.”

L
IKE A CLIFF
of apricot marble, the great city stood on the plain.

On all sides, hills rose away from it, and to the west, the mountains towered into a sky that was, by day, the color of the iris of the eye in the fan of a peacock, and, by night, the color of that eye’s purple pupil.

The hills, save where palaces and temples occupied them—the overspill of the city with its gardens and planted forests—were bare. The mountains were arid. But the valley plain was rich with trees and shrubs, grasses and grains, fruits and flowers. Water courses coiled through the valley. They formed pools and tiny pleasure lakes, and fountains in glades.

To this idyllic spot, he had brought his bride-to-be.

He gave her a suite of rooms that ran the entire length of his palace, a complex and miniature palace itself, three floors in height and having, it was said, two hundred and seventy windows, each like a long dagger of purest glass. In the topmost floor of the suite was a private garden open to the sky. Vines, and the slenderest
and lightest trees, that bore blue blossoms and golden fruits, surrounded an oval pool where swam blue and silver fish. Here in the evenings the king would visit his betrothed among her maidens, who were all deliriously charmed by him, for he was dark and handsome and gracious. The young woman who was to be his queen, however, came from the paler races beyond the mountains. Her skin was light in tone, and her hair like the gem-resin for which they named her: amber.

Zehrendir the king was very fine, and so was she. They seemed made for each other by higher powers. And certainly, he found himself in love with her from the moment he saw her. But, naturally, Amba was already much included in the life of Zehrendir’s court, and in that way she met often too with his half-brother, Naran. Naran was soon smitten by Amba. While she, who had looked at her intended husband with admiration and liking, but no particular passion, gradually became infatuated by Naran instead.

One night, all caution abandoned, these two, with a small company of Naran’s followers, slipped out in disguise from the palace and the valley, and rode their chariots away across the hills toward the western mountain-wall.

Here then, Amba—who Naran had not stolen at all, or at least only her heart—lived as Naran’s lover under the shelter of the serpent peak Sirrimir, which then had another appearance.

The story that Naran next shot down the third moon by means of arrows and sorcery and vast rage was quite untrue. He had no need to rage, only perhaps to feel guilt. And maybe he had never felt that either. Some alien unknown element caused the moon to crash on the world. Conceivably it was not a moon at all, but some awful voyager off its course, a meteorite or a comet or a piece of other debris from space. Yet strike it did. And then the waters upsurged, as do the waters of a pond when a stone is thrown into it, and drowned the city. But Amba never heard of this, nor Naran. For the mountains too were riven, and in the tumult, both he and she died.

B
ETWEEN THE LOSS
of Amba and the deluge, there had been a space of time, quite long—or not long at all, perhaps merely seeming so to Zehrendir the king. During this intermission the city continued to bloom and prosper, and he himself went about his duties with faultless attention. He regularized laws, performed every ritual, he visited among his people and listened patiently to any who required either his help or his council, doing always his best. And the best of this king was, they said, much better than that of any other man. This was natural to him. He could not lose the knack, though he had lost everything else.

But not even the city, or its people, could comfort him, or make him happy.

Nothing could. One song which later passed into legends about him told how one day he had stood alone in some private room and said aloud to its walls: “My friends are gone.” Amba had offered a sweet friendliness at least instead of her love, and until the day Naran met Amba, Naran also had been a true friend to Zehrendir—they were, in fact, his only real friends. It was not that Zehrendir had come to hate either of them, let alone the city he had created and which, till that time had been like his friend too, thrilling and heartening him with its loveliness. But all these friends were lost to him forever, Amba, Naran, the city also, because it had ceased to mean anything beyond sheer duty. It was as if all of them had died in a single night.

Was the flood then—the drowner, the toppler, the destroyer—to be his friend?

O
NE DAY WAS
left before the moonstrike would throw itself into the earth like a fist, sending up a column of blackness and fire. On this penultimate day, an old woman was brought into the court of Zehrendir.

About the fabulous audience chamber, where the king sat in a white chair, people were going up and down. Late sunlight sprinkled in jewelry clusters, and splashing the coats of six tame tigrelouves, it changed them to the color of Amba’s hair…

The day’s business for now was over. Zehrendir sat, apparently serene, as if deep in thought.
But all I hear
—

All he can hear is the echo of far-off hoofs and wheels retreating, and the single word “loss,” whispered again and again. No one can soothe him. Nothing will ever alter his sadness. This appalling moment, which has already stretched into an eternity, will continue forever unabated.

One of the palace aides approached. Zehrendir dutifully raised his eyes. The man informed his king that a crone had wandered down into the valley. She had said she was gifted with certain magical abilities, and had a message for the king. Now Zehrendir turned his head, and saw an old woman who was as thin as a stick, and muffled from the crown of her head to her skinny feet in veils and scarves. Her eyes could not be seen at all. She looked like a corpse wrapped in garments for its burial or cremation.

Zehrendir had no wish to let her near him, but he felt compassion, for her feet, which, like her hands, were the only things visible of her. They were so old and filthy, and scarred all over, as if, all her days, she had walked barefoot
on them across burning rocks, being struck by scorpions that had never quite killed her.

So he beckoned to her. “Good evening, Mother,” said the king to her.

And then, even through the windings of her scarf, he thought he could see a pair of eyes that, despite her evident age, were bright and piercingly green, just as those of Amba had been. It shocked him, this. And he briefly believed that he had now lost his mind, in addition to all else. But of course, green eyes were not unknown, in the west. Had she walked here all that way?

The old woman nodded; perhaps she read his thoughts. After that, she spoke to him in the most inaudible of voices, which only he, he supposed, could hear.

“
Attend
,” was all she said. The aide had drawn aside, but Zehrendir was well aware that all the court were now always praying anxiously that some supernatural assistance would be sent to heal the king’s dishonor and grief. And that too wounded him, since he wanted happiness for others. Even for Amba and Naran. And this perverse kindness, which he could not help any more than another man could have helped his fury and thirst for revenge, wore him out almost to the same degree as his pain.

The king said to the crone, “Let me ask them to bring you a chair. And some food and drink.”

“My feet are my chairs,” she answered crankily. “I feed on the air. I have nothing; therefore, I have everything. But you,” she said, “have too much, and so are among the poorest in the world.”

“No doubt you’re quite right,” said Zehrendir equably. And he smiled at her, as if she really were his old granny, the one that he had always liked best of his relatives.

When he did this, needless to say, the charm and innocence of his smile showed up, like a lightning flash, every gash that sorrow had carved into his young face. The crone studied this with vast concentration. It transpired that she could see him as no other could. Compared to his hurts, her blighted feet were nothing; they did not trouble themselves, or her. But he was in ribbons and could never mend.

“Attend,” she said again.

Obediently, he waited.

“Lift your head, lord king, and see up there, in the roof above you, how that round mirror is positioned? Yes, exactly there.”

She is insane, poor thing
, he thought.
There’s no mirror of any sort hung in the ceiling.

But when he looked, he saw there was. It hung directly above him, like a
huge drop of water in a bowl, but an upended bowl that did not spill. And as he gazed into it, noting that it seemed to reflect nothing, not even the westering light, it curiously grew quite black, like the blackest glass. Two or three ripples passed across its face.

And then its face held another face, a long distance away, not the king’s face, nor the crone’s—but still, it was one he knew very well.

“Mistakes are made,” said the powdery voice of the crone. “Men and women intuitively look for those they expect to meet on the paths of existence. Sometimes there is no meeting at all. Or worse,
much
worse, a
mistaken
meeting. What can be done about these errors? Look up into the water. Look, and you will see your wife, gazing back at you from above the lake, which is yet to come.”

5

A
S ZAELI DID
as the man told her, as she gazed down into the water, she did not for an instant credit what he had said. Vaguely, it occurred to her that now was the preordained time when he would bash her over the head and then spring on her, or else simply sling her straight over the boat’s side. He might have a lunatic theory that she would be a sacrifice to some lake demon. Or to the ghosts of the drowned king and his people.

But she did not really believe in his violence either. He seemed, rather, mystical, a mage from some uphill village. And he had said he was rich, said it with such modest proud indifference.

The tidal star Sunev, or Sunev-la as he had named it, was now descending between two mountains. Its sidelong light lingered in a vivid mercury trail, interrupted only by the boat’s shadow.

Zaeli thought that the light of the star had dazzled her. Then she saw that the round mirror of gold that had appeared just beyond the vessel, there on the water’s surface, was neither a reflection nor an afterimage. It was really there. It shone up into her face. And staring, suddenly she saw right through it, as if through a lamp-hung tunnel and a medley of luminous lattices and iridescent pillars and lacy, gilded branches, into a golden room.

In the room, which resembled a large golden cave, sat a man who had raised his face to look up at her. His head and shoulders were hooded about by a wave of blue-black hair. He was a man of incredible good-looks, but with strain and torment in his face. It seemed as if he had undergone some recent and unspeakable torture, soon to be repeated.

His image—so familiar and yet so utterly unlike anyone she had ever
known—filled Zaeli with a sense of anguish, and of falling. Although she no longer feared being thrown out of the boat, she was sure that to fall down toward him would be both the most fearful depth and the most sublime apex of all chance.

He appeared, very definitely, to see her in turn. Could he see too that
she
saw
him
?

His eyes were darker than any night.

A whistling note, hardly audible, wavered through the silence. Perhaps it was only in her head. Or perhaps it was a song that tidal eruptive Sunev sang, as it vanished between the mountain peaks.

Zaeli was half aware she had risen to her feet. As she sprang weightlessly forward, kissed the water with her entire body, passed through its upper skin, paraphrasing the motion of the sinking star, she knew only that she was about to die. She was equally glad and mournful at such a mandatory solution.

PART TWO—HISTORY AS WATER

S
HE WAS BORN
again old, and lying on her back in a toffee-brown country under a peacock sky. The sun was just beyond its highest station. A black snake was coiled around her right ankle.

Some faint disturbance in the air gave her the peculiar idea that the life force of the body she now occupied had departed only seconds before her own arrival. The driver had left the driving seat. Now she, Zaeli, was in it.

She sat up cautiously. This body, not formerly her own, was an antique, stiff as warped wood.

None of that, not even the snake, upset her. She was not even surprised. A flood of memories also not her own quivered over the old mind’s sky, like a flight of birds. Though she acknowledged them, she did not really need them, Zaeli thought. It was like glancing hurriedly at a map and list of directions that already she had been briefed on.

She got to her feet. At this, the limber snake uncoiled from her. It slid out of sight into a narrow seam in the ground, and Zaeli wondered if the animal was where the former driver of this human vehicle had taken herself.
The soul must be
, she perhaps foolishly thought,
delighted at such new, flexible freedom.
For with every step the thin and elderly human body took, it creaked and ached.

On these wrecked feet, she must walk down through the hills toward the
city in the valley, and there address a king, showing to him some sorcerous mystery. She would know what to say only when she came into his presence. What must be revealed—and also what must be hidden.