by James Dorr
Both knowing now why they had been outcasts, the one self-imposed, the other unwillingly.
But both, now, knowing.
• • •
Three nights they lay there, or so it has been said, before the storm quieted enough for them to go out. And afterward, Flute moved to Harp’s mausoleum, spending her days now with Harp in her arms. And Harp, in turn, loving Flute. While evenings they would emerge to play duets, taking their stand not on top of the Pyramid, nor to the west slope and their mausoleum-home, but on the Pyramid’s broad, eastern plaza, surrounded by obelisks, where Flute could still see the water she craved, and Harp could feel safe with the stone spires around her, soaring above like the New City’s towers.
• • •
And this was something new.
• • •
Playing together, they syncopated, their melodies weaving. Trading crescendos. Their rhythms augmenting. Once they even played back a summer storm—it was an evening of the Goldsmelters’ Moon, late in the summer when rain fronts gather and lightning crackles—and thunder boomed out its own cadence behind them. But Harp answered back, strumming rhythm for rhythm, while Flute wailed and countered, screeching a melody over the lightning’s flash. And the storm held back, until they were finished.
Then laughing, frolicking, they with the rest of us ran for shelter, just ahead of the rain’s acid boiling, clapping hats to their heads, broad-brimmed hats as we all wore in summer’s rain when we could not escape. Raven-haired, silver—tangling in the wind. Then gasping, laughing still, they rolled and clutched in each other’s arms, sweat-sheened bodies embraced together, the tan-gold and pearl-white, in their mausoleum. One made for the other.
Playing each other like flesh-formed instruments. That night and others, when they had completed their more public concerts, and during the days too, adding their own heat to that of the sun outside. Making of that an even sweeter music than that which they gave us in evenings’ gloom, beneath the moonlight. Their bodies still passion-sheened, still lusting, always, but fingers now dancing the holes of a bone-formed flute, gently caressing the oiled hair of harp-strings in lieu of each other’s hair. In lieu of soft-formed thighs, sweet breasts, sweet clefts below. Yet dancing nonetheless, speaking their love to us.
Playing to us desire: That of twin-souls at last coming together, playing, each to the other, orchestrations yet higher than those we could listen to. We, with ears alone.
Until Flute sickened. The spring that followed, that rose to summer, again on a Lovers’ Moon only just waxing, Flute, whose constitution was delicate from always breathing the river’s vapors, as all river-people’s were—always breathing its poisons from birth on—whose smooth, white skin, continually sheltered, had been more sensitive to the sun’s deadly flare, yet who still had rushed out in its midst to lead Harp to safety, grew listless and weary. And, as the moon reached to its full, Flute’s own life faded—as river-tides ebb in the heat of summer.
And Harp played no music now. Not as she realized, not just that her musician-lover had left her, but that this death came from the very sun’s-poison that Flute had willingly let flood her body on that night of rescue, even though she and Harp were rivals.
Had hated each other.
At least had been rivals then, though now, at last, had discovered their true passion, only to have it wrenched suddenly from them—from Harp at least—before it had scarcely had time to flower.
But this much Harp could do: She called us together. She asked us for jewelry, both river-shell jewels as Flute’s people cherished and earth-stones as we wore, to heap on Flute’s corpse where it lay in shade outside their mausoleum for preparation for final entombment. She added to these her own, that she had earned from us, tearing her hair out as well to heap on it, and begged us for flowers, and beads, and incense, perhaps recalling the tales of another river-chief’s daughter who, it was said, had had these things and more—even real coins of brass and gold!—to aid her soul’s-journey. And, of that which she asked, we gave her willingly.
But there was one thing we could not do for Harp, as we found out later. That was to protect her.
• • •
A night, two nights, Flute’s corpse lay, shaded, guarded in daytime by those of my trade under thick, cloth tent-tops to keep the sun from us, while Harp helped the gravediggers select a tomb-site. We kept the rats from it, the lizards and corpse-beetles, while Harp assisted in the haggling with the embalmers, the monument-cutters and inscription carvers, the epitaph-poets and remembrance-composers. And all the time we wept, too, even as Harp did, if not so deeply.
But then on the third night a cry went up: “Ghouls! Ghouls on the west wall! Ghouls to the south as well!”
And we responded. The ghouls had found out somehow, who it was who had died. Possibly some of the rats had told them, ghouls knowing how to listen as well as such as I, but, far more likely, they used the skills of the Necromancers who live among them. And that had brought them forth, risking all now to make a direct assault on our Tomb-ground, because the ghouls hate and fear gypsy-boat sailors.
It is among them, some say, an ancient superstition, some adding that it goes to a time when the world was in turmoil and the day-sun just beginning to grow large, to turn to deadliness, when the rivers themselves teemed with corpses which, so the ghouls had hoped, the river-people might drag to shore for them, to use for their own delight. But which the boat-chiefs flatly refused them, thus starting a new war—or so some tell us.
Be that as it may, the ghouls knew a river-chief’s daughter lay dead among us. And they would despoil her.
And we would prevent this.
So, screaming ourselves, we raced through tomb-alleys, snatching up weapons, ratpicks and sharpened spades, swords and stout, iron-ringed shafts, to west and south where blue mist congregated. The blued-gas glow of telltale ghoul-lamps! Leaving Harp, shivering and frightened as she was, to continue alone in her mourning. To finger, perhaps, the now-disused strings of her rib-curved harp, which she still continued to have with her always, or maybe to touch the hard bone of Flute’s instrument, clutched as it still was in her lover’s dead hands.
We cared not. We fought ghouls! It was our duty. We pressed back against their sea of blue lights, as if to fight back the river’s own waters.
And yet they rolled over us, so great were they in their frenzied numbers, forcing us backward. Some few stopping to eat their own dead—so fiercely did we fight—as was the ghouls’ way, but others still pushing us.
Until we heard a note. A tone sounding.
A short riff of music.
“Halt!” a voice shouted—a soft, woman’s voice. A voice steeped in sorrow. And, inexplicably, all of us halted. Both Tombs-people and ghouls.
“Let me speak,” Harp said, for it was Harp—we had been forced back that far, to the mausoleum before which Flute’s body lay, Harp alone standing now between it and the ghoul-horde.
“Let me play, rather,” she said to the ghouls alone, we, at her nodding, parting to let them hear. “Let me tell you of her, so as to dissuade you. Her whose flesh you would eat. Her, who in death you would dishonor, if only in that way to scorn her people.”
She played another note. Another riff. Her hands at first trembling, just as her body did, in fear of those that stood, waiting, before her. In fear of dreams she had had. Yet now, as her fingers plucked the silk hair-strings, growing stronger. More sure in their music.
And now she strummed loudly, her right hand holding a firm, rhythmic bass, as strong and yet yielding as Flute’s body had been once, her left now playing crescendos over it, tinkling, treble, as Flute’s light fingers had once danced, tap-tapping the softness of her own flesh. When they had made love. And, over all, playing the love she still held for Flute, and Flute’s for her when once they had come to know each other.
And, even before that, Flute’s sacrifice for her—the courage of a river-daughter who ventured out into the sun’s reflected glare, to s
hare her cleft in the rock with a stranger. A stranger who hated her—just as the ghouls did. And yet found love there, also, sharing it freely until her body quit, succumbing, finally, to that light’s poison.
And she played the tunes, now, that Flute had taught her: The wild, river rhythms, yet muted in Harp’s own way, interwoven with New City melodies. The sad, plaintive wailings, yet coupled with New City order and hopefulness. Twined, as their love had been, one to another in souls’ completeness.
A love that transcended death.
And so she played—and all of us listened—until her fingers were shattered and blood-stained, their flesh tearing off in shreds on her harp’s strings. Oiling its oiled-hair with a finer substance. As, still, she played on, bone-tips now plucking hair-strings, grating on sound-board until she could play no more.
Until, at last, sighing, she placed the harp at her feet.
And, for a moment, no one made a motion.
Then one of the ghouls spoke, a leader among them: “You have, my lady, made your point well. Of your love for this corpse that lies dead before us. Yet we are what we are, every one of us here. These guards who would stop us, were we not so many. Even you, musician, who were you still able would play more to halt us—yet cannot halt nature.”
The ghoul-chief paused, then pointed to Flute’s still form:
“She is our prey, lady.”
Harp shook her head. Kneeling, she shook her head, letting her long, torn hair whisk around her like river waves in a summer’s sudden squall. She who, with Flute, had once halted a summer storm.
“No,” she answered. She lay at full length on the corpse of her lover, then looked up again at the ghouls who, by now, were circling around it. Seeing us clutch at our weapons as well, but stopping us with a gesture of her hand.
She kissed Flute’s corpse once, then laid her harp on it, on top of the bone flute, as she once more stood to face the ghouls alone. “If it is your nature, then, that you must have your prey, then take my body. In fair exchange, ghoul-chief—a song, which you have had, in exchange for a wish. Flute’s corpse to lie where it is, unmolested, in exchange for a life.”
This time the ghouls’ leader shook his head. “For us to eat those who live is not permitted … ”
Harp shouted then, throwing her arms wide: “You have my permission!”
And, nodding his acquiescence, the ghoul-chief rushed her, he with his fellows, cutting, biting, stripping her flesh from her bones as she once had dreamed—as she once had so feared—taking her where she stood, still alive. Screaming. The ghouls’ own whistling shouts drowning her dying cries. While we stood, helpless, it having been her last wish—and, thus, a wish that must be respected.
Until they finished and let her bones clatter, as white as Flute’s instrument, leaving that corpse untouched. As was their bargain.
• • •
All that was left, besides bone, of Harp’s corpse was the heft of her grief-torn hair. That and her finger-tips, bleeding and shredded, which the ghouls left also, after, their grim meal done, they had departed. While we, we took these things and laid them in a box, placing the still intact harp on her ribcage, curved bone to curved bones, and carried it, with Flute’s corpse, up the hillside.
We took them both, against all custom, to our necropolis’s most ancient grave-ground, specially guarded, which was reserved for our own Tombs-dead, and taboo for all others. It was against custom, but here in the Tombs, of all places, we value love.
And what Harp had done for the one she loved, even if neither had been born among us, demanded, at the least, this much exception: That we entomb the two together, in a stone palace that looked on the river—the river that always had been so a part of Flute—yet was itself surrounded by others, a city of tombs, where Harp whose roots had been of the New City might find comfort also.
And there we left them, the things they had valued in life around them, their jewelry, their instruments. The other death-offerings Harp had so pleaded from us for her friend’s corpse—the flowers and tokens. And most important of all, with each other, the one’s body shattered, the other still whole, but both lying together, arms wrapped around trim torsos. Just as they had in life.
And so they lie still, few of us going there, rather preferring to leave them to their souls’-ease, save for one night a year, that of the first of the New Lovers’ Moon, when, somehow, we feel we have been invited. Some of us say, then, that they can hear music ….
And I know this to be true.
I, a ratcatcher, catch snippets of gossip, some even from rats themselves, they with the sharpest ears of us all and grown wise in the passing years since that sun’s-flaring. And so I know this well:
That these, which assemble in silence among us, come to listen also.
II.
LIFE, DEATH, AND LOVE IN THE WORLD OF THE “TOMBS”
The city had once lived, blazing with light. The books all described this. The Ghoul-Poet sat in the midst of a heap of them, pages torn, rotting, spread out all about him. This was a library, the pride of New City, or rather a square that had faced the library, that had received this avalanche of thought—words embossed on parchment—that cascaded down when the library burst, its walls weakened by age. It was a treasure trove, this mountain of dreams and abstracts, histories and myths. Some true, some perhaps not.
The Poet’s head was filled, too, until he felt it might burst.
Yet he continued on, reading. Devouring. Another poetic thought, that one might eat words. The abstracts behind them.
The legends he picked out, the themes repeated in tale after tale, history after history. The power of love. The joinings together. And yet of death also—there was even, here, a legend about ghouls! And of a great storm, but how both human- and ghoul-kind survived it. And of the great world beyond even the river that separated New City from the Tombs, there where all New Cityers strove, in time, to go.
It was not so easy, this being a Poet.
THE LOVER OF DEAD FLESH
It is said that love has the strength to erase life’s differences; those of status, of riches, or high birth. But what of the difference between death and life itself?
• • •
HE WAS A CONJUROR, they say—not a Necromancer, a trafficker with ghouls—but one who begged by performing tricks in the squares of the New City when evening fell, and the lights sparkled on like blazing fireflies. But he did not perform his feats in the best-lighted plazas, but rather sought shadowed ones, dim and obscure in the city’s poorest parts, because, even if good in his heart, Angar had never been overly clever. His tricks were all old ones, well-worn in archaicness, ones that too great an illumination could all too readily make known the secrets of, and so he shunned the city’s bright, glowing globes, rich in their colors of sapphire and emerald, of topaz and ruby, seeking instead obscure corners and alleys where he could perform to the flicker of torchlight.
Thus Angar was always poor, because a beggar who offered his wonders to only those themselves impoverished could never become rich.
But beauty, sometimes, might not gain wealth either, even in New City where such was valued. This Angar discovered when, walking one twilight with his assistant, the gimp-legged Barak who still looked well enough in her silvered tights and spangles to strut on a stage, to climb suddenly-stiffened ropes to Angar’s flute-play, to float on the air, to be sawn and dismembered within a basket only to re-emerge whole, if still limping, he saw such a vision.
He and his assistant, laden with props, the ropes and instruments, baskets and toothed saws, were still in their chadors, the thick-clothed day-garments protecting them from an over-hot, swollen sun even beneath the New City’s awnings—those shading the streets in its wealthier sectors—seeking a place to set up for their night-show when they passed a small park they had not been to before, one in a poor section, but where two roads crossed that led to shops that sold playthings for the rich and, hence, well-lighted. Thus it was not for them, but
, Barak suffering a stone in her shoe, they paused for a moment. They watched as another, chadored as they were beneath the just setting sun, placed an alms basket before a small stage, and then, on its top, a mechanical construct for playing music, a thing that could be wound and offer back tinkling tunes, such as the impecunious danced to on nights of festival. Angar for one moment, curious now, thought to reach for his flute that he might perform with it, whatever it might play, until he remembered his own skills were feeble, that he had once thought he might be a musician except that his fingers were too stiff for such work, his breath too shallow, and so all he could do was play the tune that caused ropes to stiffen, that others might climb them.
And Barak plucked at his sleeve—“Angar,” she whispered, “we should be going. My shoe is all right now”—but curiosity made him still linger. And then more than just that.
The music had started. The sun was completely down. People were gathering, not many to be sure as most on the roads were hurrying to other assignations, but men of some wealth by the style of their chadors, some even with masks of ivory or silver. Some, by their jewelry, of even more wealth than that.
So Angar whispered back, “One moment more, Barak. I wish to see what will happen next.”
And what did happen then some even now dispute: Whether love seized Angar’s heart all at once, or, as love will sometimes, it wormed its way slowly in, building in strength as the heat of that spring, as night followed night, gave way to summer’s searing. But even at that first glimpse, no one will deny that Angar stood transfixed, despite Barak’s sleeve-plucking, as the dancer, mounted upon the stage, slowly let drop the folds of her chador.
Thus Angar watched as shoulders as pale as the full moon revealed themselves, peeking, as sometimes the moon itself will through clouds, out of a tangle of wild, midnight hair, crowning a head of unspeakable beauty. And, as the robe slipped down, then breasts, themselves as moons, pearls strained against a translucency of sheer silk let themselves now be known—yet not entirely known—shadowing under the rounds of their fullness the yielding-yet-firmness of a dancer’s belly, its subtle-curved flat now swelling to perfect hips, as the robe sank farther, now sliding over the triangled dark that peeped between as hips merged to soft-fleshed thighs. Throbbing somewhat now as the music started.
