by Beverley, Jo
But then the crone forms her magic mirror in the ceiling, up there amid the jewels.
And even the trapped butterfly of Zaeli notices her own previous young woman’s face, that ten minutes before—or ten months before, or a thousand years in the future—leaned or will lean down, to gaze into the waters of the Lake of Loss.
“It is Amba,” says the king. That is all he says.
The crone sighs. The body and memory and magical power, which are now are all she humanly is, have noted something else. A terrible catastrophe hangs above the city. And her sorcery knows that it is already too late to warn of it. There is no time left—she has been too long upon her journey. To empty the huge metropolis would be impossible; the panic and clamor would themselves slaughter in droves. And still the moon—or the meteorite or the comet or the piece of space debris—will crash down and the flood rise up. She does not even think they would believe her.
Only he is capable of believing her, the king, Zehrendir, and only in one way, since he has seen Amba’s face looking in at him from the mirror.
How still Zehrendir sits in the white chair! He seems less outwardly collected now than static. His head stays tilted up, his eyes wide to meet the eyes of the one he had loved, and whom he had mistaken for one who would love him. It had not occurred to him she was no longer Amba and had never been, but instead was a woman from a future a hundred decades off in the history of the world, when he and his love and the falling moon and the flood are only dim, muddled legends.
The body of the crone steps jerkily forward. It is more of an automaton now, because the consciousness of Zaeli is returning quickly, beating and beating its wings to get through.
Like a sort of wooden puppet badly moved, the crone goes to the king and stares into the night of his eyes. Though young and strong, he is quite dead. She, of all things, can recognize the state.
She sadly speaks a single phrase. “My love,” she says, still in the language of the city, “my Angelo.”
Then the outer shell of her, physical flesh and bone, drops to the floor and lies there, still at last. Not for her the unstoppable cataclysm to come, nor for him. And for the doomed city, there will be one last night of peace—but even this is to be marred. For in another hour, they will learn that their king is dead.
THE FISHERMAN HAD watched the flying bug of the bus cruise by high overhead. Such transports did not make enough noise to disturb the fish. Their lights might even entice a catch to the surface.
He had doubted, this man, that the bus passengers would take any note of him. Soon after, he raised the sail, and the boat, propelled by the vital night breeze, ran along the water, trailing the silver net.
He was very old, the fisherman. Tough still, and never sick, but he had seen so much of life and time, and how they came and went away. He could remember back before the foreigners first traveled here in any numbers, with their sugar-cake hotels and airborne buses. He did not mind them, but sometimes the thought of them tired him. He felt that tiredness tonight. It was not unpleasant. For a while he sat quietly, thinking of his wife, who had been dead now seven years. He missed her, and the son they had lost. But he had never supposed they would not, all three, meet again.
Above, the stars burned fierce as foreign neons, Sunev-la most of all. The moons were pale by comparison. He checked for fish; none had been tempted. His thoughts strayed to the legend of the shattered moon and the realm beneath the lake. He drifted asleep as he mulled the legends over, and in his sleep, without shock or pain, he died.
But his body lay there lifeless for only a few moments before a blade of phosphorescence seemed to sheer up out of the water. It flowed across the idle net. It sank into the body of the fisherman.
In that way, Zehrendir too was born again old, but he was born so under the peacock-purple of the night.
Like Zaeli, he found that to have an elderly body was a startling handicap. But Zehrendir was both a romantic and a pragmatist. He knew that he must utilize what lay to hand. Nor did he lose himself in the fisherman. The fisherman had not been any sort of mage, had not had that special talent and inclination. To inhabit his brain and absorb its memories and contents was an education rather than an obscuration of self.
Nevertheless, Zehrendir proceeded without haste. He tried out the new-old body for its fitness and acumen, and found how well it could reef the sail and employ the oars of the boat. Unlike the fisherman, however, Zehrendir cut a hole in the net. He had accepted that he had been transferred into a place which, from the knowledge left behind in the fisherman’s brain, he knew to be centuries into the future.
At some stage of rowing toward the western shore, Zehrendir also accepted the legendary remnants, which were all the fisherman had known, of the cataclysm. Then he ceased to row. It was both too dark on the lake, and too idiosyncratically lit by moons and tidal star, to see if he wept. But the boat meandered some while, and the fish swam in and out of the broken net, like blue and silver tears.
Eventually, hours on, with Zehrendir its motive force, the old man’s body rowed in to the shore, where glints and splinters of hotel lights zigzagged on the star-pulled tide.
He had known where she would be, the woman whose face he had seen. He had known she would be here beside the lake. He knew she was not Amba—and knew that she was. She was the one that he had mistaken Amba for. Zehrendir, yet a king and a young man inside the swathing of the fisherman’s flesh, felt a surge of ecstatic laughter at this divine and cosmic jest. There was no trepidation in him. It was rather as if a strangler’s cord had been cut from his throat. He had rowed the last of the distance very fast, and the old arms ached and gnawed, but what did he care?
He let go the oars, and stood up, raising his hand in a traditional greeting which had stayed current through time. He spoke in Ameren, since the fisherman had had a good command of it. It was her language. “Good evening,” he said.
“Hello,” she said, like a sleepwalker. “Did you catch many fish?”
He knew that she had not yet seen him within the lake. Time had been bent to another’s will, to the will of something frightening in its power—and yet benign.
“None,” he replied, with the gravity of a riotous joy concealed.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Oh, my beloved, thought Zehrendir the king, be sorry for nothing. For here you are before me, your hair like crimson copper and scarlet amber, your skin like ivory, your eyes the color of a leaf in rain. And somehow now—now you will be mine and I yours. Though I have no knowledge how, or why.
Even her strange foreign dress did not concern him, let alone her youth contrasted to his present old age.
Even the gulf of history and deluge between them.
He showed her the empty net. For Zehrendir, it was all at once the symbol of an endless possibility. “I fish,” he said, “for what the lake may give up from the world beneath.” He did not understand quite what he meant by that. Or he did. For what the lake gave up was himself, and her too. And here the opened net of destiny had captured them both.
Not long after this, he sees her recognize him. Her face fills with such despair and hurt he knows it is her loss of him which has torn her to pieces, and now stands between them.
“Let me take you across the lake … There is a spot where you can see all the way down to the city. I have seen it very often,” he adds, glorying in the cunning of a lie which is also a truth, for truly he has seen the city, in his past.
Then she denies him. He respectfully turns away. This is flirtatious etiquette, like that of a dance. He is aware that she will instantly call him back, and she does.
“How much should I pay you?”
“I am rich,” he tells her. He is. He has nothing now, and so has everything.
She enters the boat and he takes them out on to the mirror of the lake, the black-and-silver coffin-lid drawn over his world and under hers, and which must mean everything—and therefore, is nothing at all.
They are both
by now distracted, abstracted, but they talk about the legend, and then she talks of the trauma in her own past, the past of this present time. As he attends to her, Zehrendir realizes very well what she has confessed to him. She, as he had done, had mistaken another for the one who would love her, the expected one: himself. But the mistake is over, and here and now are only they.
When the golden round of mirror evolves from the water, Zehrendir watches as she gazes into it. It corresponds to the moment, so long ago, when he had looked up and seen her looking back. When their eyes had met.
He does not attempt to bar her flight into the lake. They have already passed each other, in his time, now again in hers, she sinking like the star, he rising like the star, passing through each other, crossing between past and future, then and now, life and death, nullity and love.
As soon as she vanishes, which really does coincide exactly with the vanishing of Sunev between the mountains, the old man’s body lapses back in the casket of the boat. Just as it had those hours earlier.
The vessel swings about mildly again for a while, then, guided by a wind visible only in its firm effect, skims off toward the eastern shore.
7
IN FACT, THE water felt only cool to her.
Which was lucky, as she had discovered herself far out in the lake and swimming strongly, if without any particular urgency. And all this in a sort of half darkness, even though dotted by indefinite lights.
Zaeli stopped swimming. She trod water, and looked around. She could not see the strident glare of the hotels. Above, only one moon loitered, low in the sky. The tidal star had also set; it had been setting, she recalled, when she dropped into the lake.
The currents of the water swirled and furled about her, not causing her any difficulty, more as if trying to persuade her to something …
What had she meant to do? To drown herself? Had she really meant to do that? But they said that, for a good swimmer, it was usually very difficult to drown. It took a lot of self-discipline, and exhaustion.
Zaeli did not feel even slightly tired. In fact, the lake seemed to refresh her.
Then she remembered the boat and the gracious old man, his mostly swathed face and extraordinary eyes. She was certain that he had not pushed or thrown her overboard. Yet he, and the boat, were gone. There was no trace of him.
Had she dreamed him, in some kind of trance, when first she began to swim out from land? Surely not. In her prison of despair, she had never dreamed such things, only of Angelo, his words, his death on the beach.
Very curiously too, Zaeli thought, she did not feel despair, not now. Despair had been her constant and only companion—where was it? It was almost annoying that it was gone.
The last moon turned to a dense purple and seemed to dissolve into the night.
Zaeli’s memory flipped like a leaping fish. She saw the country below the lake: the brown hills, the tigress purring in the dust at her old and distorted feet; the groves and gardens, and the high gates of the palace. She saw herself as then she had been, clothed in the carapace of the old woman. And then the form of her lover, face and body, hair and eyes, a young king in that country, and she heard his voice, known to her, dark and beautiful—
A hill seemed to have risen, just then when she was not looking, over there across the lake. It was blacker than the sky and had blotted up the stars. But in a few moments, every star in the galaxies instead flamed out all through it.
Stupefied, she asked herself if this was the western shoreline, the neon lights of the hotels. But such ignorance passed.
HE RECOGNIZED THE night.
In itself, this was a bizarre realization, for, after all, why should the night, which he had known since infancy, be unrecognizable in the first place?
Yet it was as if he had come a vast way through alien landscapes and unaccustomed scenes, where the moons and stars, even the darkness itself, had other shapes and natures …
And now he knew at last where he was, and the sky and the dark were his familiar associates. Which too was quite at odds with the fact he still did not grasp what place it was where now he found himself.
The darkness grew, for the second moon was setting. The other two must already be down.
By starlight, then, he went on walking—it seemed he must—along the slope of a great hill, and glanced sometimes to his right at the huge, inchoately flickering body of water that lay below, and unfolded itself to the western horizon. He could just make out the mountains beyond. One of them was not as he remembered. It now resembled a serpent risen on its coils.
Probably Zehrendir had walked for a couple of miles before he began to sense that the appalling pain of loss no longer dragged on him. Once a weight of lead, his heart was nearly weightless. And so he paused, and cast about in his thoughts after Amba, actually searching for the misery and hurt which were all she had left him of herself. They had become his familiars too, his constant companions. Where had they taken themselves? Then he saw again, in retrospect, an old woman who had said to him, “Attend.” And a mirror floating through shadow to night, to show him the face of Amba. And after this, he beheld himself as a fisherman, clad in the body of the dead. And he played over in his mind the music of his meeting with the other woman, there on the farther shore. The woman who was not Amba, but was Amba. She for whom Amba had been, by him, mistaken.
Memory showed how she had slid into the lake and disappeared like the setting star. In his former time, that star had never existed, but here he had known and named it, just as he had come to know, and might have named, everything. He considered again the deluge, and the city. But he did not weep, not now.
Just then, from the hilltop, light blazed out like a funeral pyre, brighter than a sun.
Part-blinded, he stared at it. So many miracles had happened, one more was only a commonplace. In any event, the fire dimmed, and then faded altogether. Following which, there was left only the night to walk through, toward the summit of the hill.
ABOVE THE WATER, the night was hot. Zaeli shook her hair and kicked off her soaking shoes. Her clothes were torn, and clung to her.
The landmass was dark again now. It was not the mainland shore. Some island perhaps?
Something had risen in the east. It cast her shadow in front of her. At first, she took the glowing round for a belated flybus, but it was not moving. Its light guided her up the slope, and began to chalk in a phantom architecture above her. It was a ruin, large and complex, strung over with what must be a tangle of vines.
She thought, He said, one region of the city rises from the lake—
They were not vines but water weeds that roped through the colonnades, twisted in the lattices. A soft-water shell shone like a pearl in the corner of a glassless window slender as a dagger. A tall man stood on the other side.
FOR A WHILE, having reached the ruined building, Zehrendir paced about in it. A quiet, almost reverential tinkling and dripping of spent waters filled it. In spots, he identified features, still recognizable, that he had seen often: a statue of a maiden with an urn, an arch of elephs, an avenue where gold studs, green now as limes, had been set into the stone.
This palace was, or had been, his—long, long before.
When the third moon, tiny as the tidal star, had flown high in the east, he saw through a narrow window the figure of a woman, standing out on the hill.
8
SPENT WATERS TRICKLING and tinkling, and vines that are water weeds, and green gold, and substance passed into ruin, and a risen moon, lighting the way like a lamp.
Both of them, standing in the echoing hall, speak at once.
“You,” she says.
“You,” he says.
They hesitate. And attempt a second introduction.
“I—” she says.
“I—” he says.
Then they become silent again, and wait there with some yards of stone and iridescent shade between them.
Each knows the other completely. Returned into their own young bo
dies, the stress and marvel of this is terrifying. And since she has learned to speak his language, and he hers, he is speaking her language and she is speaking his language, even inside their heads.
Then he speaks to her in his own tongue, which she understands. She will answer him in hers, and he will understand that.
“You are not Amba. I know this.”
“I’m not Amba. And you—are not Angelo.”
“My name is Zehrendir.”
“Zaeli,” she says, “my name is Zaeli.”
They look at each other, have never looked anywhere else.
The water trickles like silver, like history or time, trickles away through the stone fingers of the columns. The little moon burns like a gold mirror through the broken roof.
In its spotlight, he laughs suddenly. She knows his laugh, although never until now has she heard it. Which makes her laugh in turn. Her laugh is Amba’s, it is the laugh Amba never gave him, and which now Zaeli does.
It is simple to cross the space. The moon is already doing it—Look—it’s easy—do you see? They cross the space. Their hands touch. They swim together as if beneath deep water, until every surface of their flesh and hair, their lips, is magnetized to contact. They breathe each other like oxygen. They are each other’s air and earth, water and fire. And some other element too, which is profoundly nameless. They are each other’s world.
Endless slips of time and place. Their bodies lie together on carved beds clouded by silk, or on mattresses lying bare as a bone on a concrete floor. Or on velvet grasses, or on tussocky sands weaponed with shingle. In baths of marble and blue cascade, and shower cubicles in rented rooms with geometric signs on the sensible plastic curtaining.
The feast of this single lovemaking takes in all the uncountable meetings they have missed, been cheated of. Flesh to flesh, whirling through diamonds and thunders, like the leap and fall of suns, the traveling of planets. The true world goes out in the explosive flame, and the little last moon dissolves like an ember.
Then they are lying in the foundation of the dead palace, in utter blackness, and total peace.
