by James Dorr
They helped him, of course, but it was early August, and the ground was baked hard. One foot they dug, then a foot-and-a-half, but by then the nascent moon had already sunk west toward the Old City, glimmering blue with its flickering corpse-lights, while, to the east, dimly, the first glow of pre-dawn was already starting to make its appearance.
So Towli called halt then, but had the men and women of his crew bring him thick canvas to make a tent with to cover Olann’s corpse. He had them make it large enough to shelter him too, so he might sit alone by her body protected beneath its shade, guarding the woman whose love he had known too late. Whose love for him he still did not understand, save that he loved her too, and, perhaps, somehow, she sensing that, she had seen something within him worthy of being joined to her beauty.
Except it was too late, because, even then, Olann had been dying. And so he would sit, having had his crew members bring him a ratpick—a long, curved-tined implement that he would use to rake the occasional daytime scavengers, those grown immune to the blistering of summer’s sun, off the bier’s still flower-covered burden—and pray to her gods as well as those of the Tombs, for what, he did not know. That she rest safely.
That she rest peacefully until the next night when his crew could finish the digging of her own tomb, and she be buried.
Except days were long in the height of summer and Towli, as well as his crew, had worked hard that previous night. There were few of even the hardiest rats abroad in the sunlight—and even fewer of the new, armadillo-like creatures that lately had come to scavenge the Tombs as well—and so he was hard pressed to stay awake, even at the side of his beloved. Indeed, he knew himself he had dozed off at least two or three times, once when he had wakened to the sound of claws scraping and, only just in time, had caught a graveyard lizard between his pick’s cruel tines, hurling it back into the sunlight where it belonged.
And once more he dozed, too, in spite of the fact he already knew his vigil was ending from the lengthening of gravestone shadows. This time he dozed too long.
• • •
He dreamed of Olann, clad not in her chador but transparent river silks, striding alone through between-tomb passages, but always glancing, fearful, behind her. But then in his dream she must have seen him, because she ran toward him, hair flying now in the wind. But now, behind her, he thought he saw shadows.
Shadows and blue lights.
And this time she spoke to him. “Beware!” she shouted. Her voice now began to be drowned out by loud bells. “Towli, beware,” she screamed—she spoke his name this time. “Towli, the ghouls. Beware!”
At that he woke to the sound of real bells chiming. Bells at the west wall—twilight had risen, and almost full dark now—calling the guards forth.
He hesitated. He stood up, alone, still watching by Olann’s corpse, his crew not appeared yet. Of course they would not have—they would be running to join the guards too, he knew, warding off an attack in force. Even now the Old City’s ghouls would be attempting to breach the walls, and he knew he should join the Tombs’ defenders.
But he hesitated. Ghouls were clever. And, as he attempted to make up his mind—to join the guards or else to stay here, by the side of his love—he saw, flitting between two distant gravestones, the hint of a shadow.
It was just as he had dreamed—more shadows rising now, circling the gravesite prepared for his river queen, a chieftain’s daughter. Ghouls feared the boat-gypsies out on the river, but not when they lay on shore. Not when they lay still, like other corpses, like Olann’s corpse laid now among its offerings. Then, because of their fear for the living, ghouls hated the rivermen.
And ghouls were clever. The west wall attack, Towli realized now as he searched for a weapon, had been a diversion.
And now they were on him, screaming, gnashing their long pointed teeth, they charged up the hill to the unfinished gravesite. But, if he did not have a weapon as such, Towli did have his ratpick, long and stout-handled, its tines sharp and pointed too. He swung it wide, once, twice, letting the weight of its head swing free, smashing the first of the ghouls to reach him back into their fellows.
“Guards!” he shouted, calling for help as a second wave reached him, this time a band that had circled off to his right. These he smashed back too.
Panting, he stood at the ready as he saw the ghouls pausing, some of them starting to eat their own fallen. Just as he knew they would eat his corpse too, if they could kill him, as well as Olann’s—if not, indeed, do even worse things to hers due to the enmity they bore for her kind.
He shouted again, his voice rising in panic, to the guards at the distant wall—too distant, he feared, for it to be likely that they would hear him. To warn them that the Tombs had already been infiltrated! Then he swung again as a new wave of ghouls attacked, sometimes thrusting this time, pushing ghouls back, sometimes swinging the pick low to trip them. Sometimes fencing—thrusting forward, then raking sideways, feeling tines bite flesh. Blood splash on his wrists and arms. Actually starting to force his attackers back down the hillside.
And then he saw her. Olann, dressed again in her river silks, standing beside him, gripping a billhook of the sort rivermen used to cut sea-plants that trapped their boats in their coils. “Towli,” she whispered. “Beloved—behind you!”
He swung and thrust, seeing now shadows behind him. As Olann warned him—she, now disappeared, the vision, he knew, only that of a tomb-wraith. A heat-caused illusion.
Except that the shadows she had warned him of were real enough, more ghouls who had somehow circled above him. Again he thrust and feinted and slashed, this time feeling his own blood splash forth as well, as, through their sheer numbers, they pressed themselves over him. Still struggling, pushing back, now he attempted to fight them with his bare hands, not caring for himself. Using his body instead as a shield—a shield he cared nothing for save that it only still keep them from Olann’s corpse.
Then hearing more voices—familiar ones, he thought, as the weight of foul-smelling bodies, the sharpness of crooked teeth, raked and pummeled him ….
• • •
He woke hours later, hearing, distantly, the sound of repeated splashes as bodies of ghouls—both dead and still living—were cast from the walls down into the river. “Towli,” a voice said, “one of our stragglers, a late-riser, heard you. She warned others of us so, as soon as we could, we sent a detachment of guards to help you. But we were too late, Towli … ”
Weakly, he interrupted the guard captain who sat beside him. “Olann—the river corpse—did they take her?”
The captain shook his head. “No, she is undefiled. You did your duty. But Towli, you yourself have been wounded. Grievously wounded. We’ve tried our best, but I’m afraid that we can’t save you.”
Towli gestured for the captain to help him sit up too, feeling his wounds now. “How long do I have?” he asked.
The captain shook his head. “Maybe a few days. Enough to see your charge’s corpse buried. Then, if wish, to select your own spot in the guardians’ section.”
Towli nodded. Yes. The tomb-guardians’ section beyond the hill, deep within the inner part of the necropolis where not even the boldest of ghouls dare enter. He nodded again, this time toward the place where Olann still lay, untouched: “I would have her there with me.”
But the captain shook his head. “You know that can’t be. The inner section is reserved ground, for Tombs people only.”
“My father’s body is there,” Towli said. “As is my grandfather’s—and he was a riverman.”
“Yes, he was, Towli. But he was married into our people with his father-in-law to-be’s blessing, making him one of us.”
Towli understood all too well. It was their custom, from time unremembered, just as the rivermen had their customs too. Still, he protested. “The ghouls will be back,” he said. “Even after she is buried. They’ll try to dig her up.”
“Yes,” the guard answered. “Of course, we will do our
best. But, as you say, the ghouls will try … ”
Then Towli recalled, from his studies of the boat-gypsies’ customs—and what the attendant had said to him at the landing plaza above the stairs. About choosing what would be best for Olann.
“Captain,” he said. “You see the offerings the rivermen left for her. They will provide much, even a sending-off by her own customs—customs disused now since trees have become rare and wood is expensive, but not so expensive these offerings won’t cover it. What I would have then is a boat constructed out of coffin-wood, large enough for two. Have it filled with tallow and lantern oil, and a bed for two people to sit on. Do you understand me?”
The captain nodded. “It will be done, Towli. Before the next night’s ending.”
• • •
And Towli dreamed once more, of both him and Olann, not knowing which were dreams and what was waking thought. But he did see himself and Olann lying side by side on a silk-cushioned bed the next night after, the moon half-descended red-golden in the west, pushed from the quay at the River Gate’s landing. He looked up and saw a sail filling with night-breeze, pulling them southward, then down, in the water, he saw his reflection:
He saw his face, not deformed! Not dark and blistered as some rivermen’s were, but as smooth as Olann’s, as soft-lipped and round and pale. And he saw her face then, too, gazing beside his.
“It is time, Towli,” he heard her whisper as, looking behind them they saw the bright colors of the receding lights of the New City, with its arched causeway that led to the Tombs. Then, to the west as they drifted faster, their sail pulling hard in the full river wind, they watched the blue, flickering lights of Old City’s ghoul-caves as they swept past them and Olann whispered: “They’re beautiful, too, Towli, in their way, aren’t they?”
He nodded. Yes, they were—even the ghoul-lights. Even the red of the sinking moon as he reached for the boat’s lantern, hanging from its pole. Then he kissed Olann.
And she kissed him back as, together, their hands broke the lantern in two, spilling its flame to light the tallow that filled their funeral boat, sending their souls in a gout of red smoke—as red as the crimson of Olann’s hair!—to beg the blessing of that of the river-daughter’s father.
THE BEAUTIFUL CORPSE
There is a saying in the New City: If happiness cannot be bought with money, then what is the point of it?
• • •
IT IS RARE THAT a living man visits the Tombs, especially to stay before his time. We who live here, we are born to our work. For us, the grave tenders, this our necropolis, walled as it is and further protected by the great river from both the New City and—especially—the ghoul-ridden, blue-lighted ruins of the Old City, it is our existence, our reason, our being. It is where we share the underground warrens with those who dwell there by right, guarding them from others who might disturb them in their slumbers. It is where we ply our own crafts by moon’s glow, after the actinic rays of a dying sun, grown huge in agedness, have once more passed safely over our tomb-roofs.
But for one from the New City …
He came at twilight, scarcely even that while there was yet a sliver of sun above the horizon, walking—walking, not riding the corpse train, or even a roofed cart that some use to journey in when they seek solitude—striding apart from the six who accompanied him. He was dressed as a man of substance, his flowing day chador belying the burliness of the form it concealed in its rich folds, wearing also a broad-brimmed sunhat, and, as befitted one who was wealthy, a finely wrought silver mask over that small part of flesh that was still exposed. Gloves, too, he wore, bejeweled and spangled, protecting delicate, ringed, white fingers from the river air which, in its season, can be corrosive, while over his feet, the tips of which could be seen as he came nearer, tap-tapping the causeway above the water’s course with a stout cane as bejeweled as his gloves were, he had wrapped thick swaddlings of lizard-skin leather.
In short, a wonder we thought he was then, we who for whatever reasons we might have had had risen early. I simply because I live within the wall itself, close by the River Gate, yet not too far from the tower-flanked Bridge Gate—the main gate guarding the causeway’s end that corpses and offerings are generally brought to, for it is the New City’s dead that we serve chiefly. I, with the others, woke to the commotion, this wonder now jangling the gatehouse bell-pulls not slowly and softly, once for each corpse he might have brought with him, but—against all custom—loudly. Raucously.
I joined the others, the sleepy-eyed gate guards, the diggers, the haulers, the stone-crafters, even a few embalmers, as, slowly, the gate opened, letting him pass through. He with his six friends.
And there—a new wonder!
We had been preoccupied, we who had watched from the earliest moments, with the lone man himself. We had noted his richness of dress, perhaps greedily thinking of the profusion of offerings one like him might proffer for his deceased, when the time came for those to be brought with him. You see, we still thought, even as we drank in the carefully worked, yet hideous moldings of his face mask, that he approached the Tombs on ordinary business, perhaps to pre-select a gravesite, a restful spot for one dear, but dying. Perhaps to arrange for a special marker, an angel, a bird-bearer, possibly even a small mausoleum with roof-carved bones or clouds or sprinkled stars.
But now we saw that each one of his friends—his servants—his bearers—had with him a basket. And, as with one motion they had set them down and shivvied their lids off, we saw that each basket was brimful with gold coins.
“I have brought money,” the New City man said through his mask’s mouth-hole.
We stood dumbfounded. We do not see coins, even brass ones, that often. Even among those from the New City. The offerings brought to us were usually of beads or flowers, or jewelry or handiworks, sometimes things that we might eat to supplement our normal tomb-fare of ratmeat and fungi, of puddle-grown greens and shadow-planted underground fruit. But true-gold coins—there was a tale of how, once, a river queen had had such coins brought with her for her honor, to build her a wooden boat fit for a sky-journey—but here were coins enough to fill six baskets!
“Yes,” I answered, I the first to speak as the man’s eyes, through their mask-holes, bore on me only.
“Good,” he answered. He motioned me to him.
“You are the one they call the Curator?” he asked me then. “I seek knowledge from you.”
I nodded. Yes. “I am a curator. I keep the artifacts that pertain to some of the most ancient of our charges.” I motioned with my head to the plots that lay beyond us, ascending in long rows up the hill to the Tombs’ very center, crowned by the Emperor’s pyramid grave-house—the step-sided mausoleum that legend, at least, ascribes to one who was a ruler. I motioned again to the tombs that surrounded it, some of them tower-formed, some smaller pyramids, others temple-like, columned and cross-windowed. “But artifacts,” I continued, “and knowledge, matter and soul, these things sometimes may be confused.”
The man was silent. He simply motioned for those that accompanied him to lift their baskets, then for me to lead him. To take him with me to my hollowed wall, beneath the ground where my tomb-treasures lay, separated by stone from the river that lapped below us.
And there it was that he took off his chador.
• • •
I said he was hideous—that is, that his mask was. I tell you now, as he took it off too, that its details reflected perfectly the flesh and bone realness of the face beneath it! And, if he was hideous, so too his bearers, his servants, his friends. He told me they were his friends.
And, as he said later, also his bodyguards.
“A man like me,” he said. “One, like I, wealthy, such a man may gain enemies, don’t you think?”
I nodded. The heat outside was rising—it was day already, so long had we conversed by then, I showing, he gazing at my exhibits—but here in my wall-home, hard by the river, the air was still cool enough for conversati
on.
“Possibly,” I said.
“But what of friends?” he asked. “As you see, I am not easy to look on. Oh, yes, I know—the twist of greed on my lips, the glint of avarice gnarling not only the cast of my eyes, but the curve of my cheekbones. The permanent sneer I have—the tics and twitchings. Not to mince words, I am ugly, am I not?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Outwardly anyway. But is it not what is inside that matters?”
The man chuckled then and, as he smiled so, his face softened somewhat, though only a little. “My name is Gombar,” he said. “And you? You are a philosopher?”
I shook my head. “No. I am only what you have been told already. I am a curator.”
He laughed out loud then. “But back to my original question, as we can see, I am not a handsome man. Nor am I mannerly, suave and polite, as some of my station are. Nor, do I think, can I be said to be particularly clever. And yet I do have friends. All of us wealthy do. Why is that do you think?”
I might have laughed with him, seeing where his conversation was leading. “Money may buy friends for a time,” I answered. “Everyone knows that. It is the poor person who has to earn them, to be industrious or to be charming, to offer to help people as he is able or else to be witty. But let me ask you this: How well do such friends last? How loyal might they be if some other comes along who has more gold than you?”
The man—Gombar—shrugged. “A question I asked myself long and hard in my youth. Back then, you see, I was not so ugly, although my face was even then beginning to take on a certain … character. But even then, too, I found the answer. I simply saw to it that I amassed more money than any else in the New City.”
I laughed then myself. “And you said before that you were not clever! But now—were you happy?”
Gombar laughed again, but, this, a bitter laugh. “Yes, I would say so. At least for a time. You see, I thought happiness lay in friendship then and, as I say, of friends I had many. Of course I had other things as well, the finest of food and drink, entertainments, women when I desired and, when I wished it, those other than women. Adventure. Excitement. The things money can buy … ”
