by James Dorr
“Ipanema,” he called. “You must see this!”
She strode out to join him. She looked again first at him, still unclothed, absent-mindedly toweling his waist and the fronts of his thighs. But then he pointed, the towel dropping.
“Ipanema,” he said again, “look.”
She moved beside him to see where he pointed. “Yes, Partimar?” she said.
He leaned to her and tongued her ear gently. “The street below,” he said. “The main street that leads to the causeway, that even now should be crowded with corpse carts bringing the dead across to the Tombs, those that have not survived the day”—even now he spoke like a scholar, explaining things, putting them into their context—“instead, see those shadows?”
She leaned across the balcony’s raised lip, straining to see down. She noted, on other balconies just like hers, couples and sometimes small groups staring downward too.
She squinted to see past the flash of neon, the bright, burning glare of the New City’s colored lights, turned on each night at the first hour of dusk to rival the day-sun in brilliance, if not heat. She gazed past the frames of the now-folded awnings, rolled out again each dawn to shade the city’s ways for those who must be out, even if swaddled in day-masks and chadors. She stared, her eyes straining.
She saw—first a motion. Not just below, but east, approaching the causeway. A shadow. A blackness.
“Ghouls?” she wondered.
“Not ghouls,” he answered her. “Ghouls carry corpse-lights, their blue flames flickering, even when otherwise empty handed. But these –”
She nodded. “Yes, these are but shadows. Or, rather, are something that travels in shadowness.”
He leaned and kissed her throat. “We could go down and see.”
She nodded. “Yes.” It would be a distraction. “We must be chadored and day-masked as well, though, and sunhatted too even if it’s just early night. Even if we go down just for a little. There may, you understand, be people on the street I would not wish to see.”
“Of course,” he answered. He, a scholar, would know as well as she that women of her class might have more than just one single lover. It was what made what he hinted so hard for her. Nevertheless, it was required by etiquette, at least until such commitments were made, that one still pretend. That one not overtly thrust one lover, as it were, under another’s nose.
Thus one disguised oneself.
One could of course afterwards invite old lovers into one’s home, with one’s husband’s approval, to compare with him the ones one did not choose. To flatter him thus that way. Also perhaps, as a favor to old lovers, to find them new women that they might pair with now—never as beautiful as oneself, to be sure, but still attractive ones. Ones they might love with pride.
She bowed her head as he chose a day-mask of neutral design, made of beaten silver, and helped her fasten it over her face. She shrugged on her chador, not bothering to put on anything underneath other than those few wisps that she’d already found, while he chose his own mask, unadorned also and of a bronze color. They wore matching sunhats as they then descended through crowded stair-tubes, breathing their neighbors’ perfumes with their own, to an upper-street level, feeling the heat as they left the building, but feeling the breeze from the river as well.
Pushing through the crowds—it was as if everyone had had the same idea, even if, looking up, she still saw faces that gazed down from balconies dozens of floors above.
“Partimar,” she whispered, “will we be safe here?”
“We must hold hands, Ipanema,” he whispered back, “so that we cannot be separated. Then we’ll be safe enough.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
They found a spot on a bridge that crossed the street, one made for foot-traffic and not vehicles, where there was space to watch. While the shadowed mass approached, now just a few blocks away, breaking up into parts.
Ipanema saw what it was first.
“Partimar,” she said, gripping his hand hard, “it looks like animals! Hundreds of animals—thousands maybe. Big ones, Partimar!”
He put an arm around her shoulder. Even now, the first of them had come near enough to recognize that they were not all of one kind, but of varying species. Some, she recalled now from reading in books, were surely enemies to others nearest them, some shaped as great cats while others seemed more as prey, some cloven-hoofed, some horned, yet all pressed side by side.
The first of these thundered beneath their footbridge.
“Ipanema,” he said above their noise, “these are southern beasts, from the great, grass plains to the east of the river that border the desert.” They watched as others came, some more lizard-like now, some plated as six-legged armadillos and huge enough to scrape their bridge’s bottom—she wrapped her own arms around his waist and hugged herself to him until the shaking stopped—some shaped as tortoises yet with long legs, and fast. Some shaped as insects.
“And desert beasts, too,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered.
And others came, birds then—great vultures and monstrous shrikes. Owl-forms and juggers, running on long, crabbed legs, as if too tired to fly. Carrion birds, hawks and crows. Scaled birds and wingless birds, yet with sharp, razored beaks, shrieking into the sounds of the others, of lowings and snarlings, roarings and high, sharp barks. Squealings and harsh scrapings—lobster-like creatures, adapted to land-dwelling. And snakes and beetles.
They watched as the first spilled past onto the causeway. They pushed their own way to their footbridge’s other side to see more closely. She shuddered against him as he tried to comfort her: “Think of it just as their z’étoile, Ipanema. Their star of fate, that they run toward the Tombs this way.”
She shivered harder, her body pressed to his. “But it is the Tombs, or at least the bridge to the Tombs that they are on. And they are no more than beasts—why would they go there? And now you speak of their having les z’étoiles, as if they were persons, humans like you and me. You are a scholar—do animals have souls?”
“Some say they do, Ipanema,” he answered. “Perhaps not a psyche as you and I have, that makes of us distinct, self-conscious beings—our individuality, if you will—but surely they have such a thing as a destiny. They may transmigrate, yes, into new bodies when they at last die, so that that much is lost to them. That spiritual ‘glue’ that holds all together. But there is an animus—that which moves them now. That for which, perhaps, they now seek final rest. Or maybe they have come to us as a warning–”
There was a silence. A sudden silence among the watchers as those on the footbridge, the walkways below them, the ledges up above, all ceased their conversing. Below, on the causeway, the vanguard of the animals had stopped, dead, in its center—then, turning abruptly north, plunged through the causeway rail.
Those behind followed, a stream of beasts now diving into the river below, swimming against its stream, striving further north. To who knew what ultimate destination?
And once again there were sounds. Splashings. Laughter. Talk. Roars and grunts, squeals and screeches.
“Perhaps they are warning us, Ipanema”—he had to shout in her ear to be heard—“that something terrible has happened south of us. Maybe the ocean is boiling over–”
The first of the animals were floating back now, already succumbed to the built-up poisons of the river’s water. The birds were among the first, they perhaps least suited of all for swimming.
She interrupted him: “Take me home, Partimar.”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. Holding her hand firmly he led her back across the footbridge, over the broad street that led to the causeway, remnants of the animal mass still coursing westward toward the river. Some of the smaller, more familiar ones were with them now as well, rats and weasels, but not all the rats, of course—rats were indigenous to the New City too. Spiders and centipedes, large ones as well as small.
He took her home as she had asked, seeing her safely to her apartment. He left her there, ret
urning himself to his own dwelling farther to the east in the New City, promising to call on her the next night.
She thought of him then, the sight of him standing alone on her balcony, just as she stood now. She gazed, her eyes straining, at the bloated corpses—more of them now, nearly choking the river as they floated back to the south they had come from. She watched the whole night through, and felt sorry for them. These the true innocents. But what she saw in her mind was Partimar, his towel dropping, pointing down toward the street below, and she thought that that part of him certainly was not dull.
She remembered then his remarks about souls, and if animals had them, and wondered if these souls had finally found peace; but what she thought was that, as a scholar, what he owned was knowledge. And, yes, it was pedantic sometimes: He praised her beauty—it was true he loved her—but often by way of metaphors. Similes. Figures of speech like that. Flattering, yet long-winded. Often he likened her beauty to that of those women of legend, the Oolans, the Chandras, the Tashiks, the Trinities, even that one named The Beautiful Corpse. Those known to have been great seductresses of their time.
But weren’t all such now dust?
She made up her mind then. She remembered one more thing Partimar had said, that maybe the animals had come as a warning. That something portentous had, perhaps, occurred down the river.
She couldn’t quite grasp it, but there seemed now to her to be in such learning as his, somehow, a kind of protection.
MIASMA
In the heat of day dreams rise like fog from the river. Such often can haunt one.
• • •
HE WAS A THIEF. A thief and a young boy. He lacked a name. These three go together in the New City often—among its poor, that is. And there are poor aplenty on the New City’s streets and broad boulevards, even in day when a poisoned, enlarged sun beats hot on the awnings that protect its byways, and wealthy, especially, cringe cool in their darkened homes. Even when heat mists rise, miasmic, from the great river that separates the New City’s living-kind from the Tombs to the west, shrouding its dockyards. But poor lack all luxury.
Poor, instead, scrabble and scrounge through cramped alleys, seeking both sustenance and shade in daylight, and in the night labor to improve their stations. So it was with Trina.
She was the boy’s sister.
She was, too, a jongleur, an entertainer, a dancer and singer and teller of stories—most of these latter false. Who, after all, wishes to hear true stories, when nights are long and steeped in days’ heat’s afterglow, under a curdled moon? When, in the New City, even love sometimes paled?
But it was that she found love. Or so she thought she had.
• • •
Trina, however, was said to be dead now. Her lover and husband, a man named Ramadas—a foreigner by his name, yet one who claimed some wealth—forbade a funeral. He said to the boy’s parents, “As you know, when I wedded your eldest child, I stooped below my rank. I did not mind this as she was beautiful, but there could be problems should the word travel home, back to where I am from. There could be repercussions, you understand. I could be held in shame.”
Trina’s mother did not understand: “Our daughter is dead,” she said.
“True,” Ramadas said, “and I have so arranged that she is on the corpse cart already, or nearly so anyway, that, even as we speak, she will be conveyed to the Tombs, across the North Causeway. I have bought already a simple grave for her, a pauper’s grave, yes, but one all for herself—a better thing than you alone could provide her. She will have a headstone that says, simply, ‘Trina.’ As I have explained, my name cannot be linked with hers, nor can it be listed in the Tombs’s records. It is for that reason that I have paid the death-gift anonymously, so my part in it will not be discovered, as yours must not either.”
Her father nodded—men understood these things, when women and boys did not. This boy especially, for he had known something that even his mother was not to find out. He had promised Trina.
He had been scrounging one twilit evening within an alley behind a brothel, one of a number some blocks off the river where merchants and foreigners often had recourse, those from the south, fish-wholesalers largely and sellers of sex-slaves, who gathered at such places to complete their dealings. There, as the boy searched through a courtyard’s detritus, who should have emerged from the ramshackle building’s half-rotted back entrance but his sister, Trina?
He shouted her name. She, still in her all-encompassing day-chador raised finger to lips, however, to shush him.
“But it is you,” he said. “I recognize you, lithe-curved and seductive—I am not so young I cannot understand that—beneath your robe’s thick, sunlight-warding folds. Without your day-mask, I can see your dark lips and eyes. Why should I not speak?”
She started to weep. “I am disgraced,” she said. “I married, you know, above my station, hoping to help us all. But when Ramadas had used me sufficiently to satisfy his lusts, he had me placed here where I entertain others. I do not mean telling tales, yet in a way I do, pretending sometimes that I am things I am not. A river princess, perhaps, or a Tombswoman. Other things, sometimes—I do have that talent. The gifts, you see, that he sends to our parents, that augment father’s pay as a night-laborer, mother’s at piecework, are from coins that I have earned.”
She knelt before him and loosened her chador, showing him, gleaming, a locket within the shadow between her breasts. She lifted it out and placed it in his hand.
“This is yours,” she said, “when you have earned a name. When you have grown, at least.” She showed it to him, its heavy, gilded brass studded with cut-jewels, red in the setting sun, taking it back and turning it over to show him its hidden catch, and inside its opening the miniature portrait that she had had made from such earnings that she had kept.
She placed it back in the darkness from where it came, fastening her robe again. “I fear,” she said, “that I will not be here long—those used as I am often do not reach old age, or so some have told me.” She smiled then, a wistful smile. “But you must promise me: If something should happen, that you will claim this from my grave offering as that which I have given to you already—you may tell father and mother both then why. That you will keep it and, thereby, remember me.”
He had promised, yes. He had not completely comprehended, not everything that she said, though some he did guess. That Trina was dishonored. And now that she was dead, or so her foreigner-husband maintained, he who had had her sold into a place where such peddlers took their ease between their merchantings, he knew as well that not all was right with it. Not even in that last.
He had heard rumors—street-urchins have prickly ears—of places far away from the New City, south near the ocean, where women were sent to who did too well in this commerce of merchants. Women who otherwise might be seen, and perhaps, in time, recognized. Who might become witnesses, thus, to their downfall—to shame even more those who had first betrayed them. But who still had value and, thus, must not just die.
And he now glimpsed, too, on the chest of Ramadas half-hidden by cloth folds, even as that latter “mourned” with his parents, his sister’s locket.
• • •
It would not do, the boy realized, to make a claim here and now that the locket was his. Ramadas would simply deny it. But the boy knew, too, what the pendant signified, in that even foreigners recognized that what the deceased had owned was theirs to keep. That what was not given willingly by the dead was, therefore, cursed if others should steal it.
But, moreover, this was in fact his. Trina had willed it, that it go to him if “something should happen,” whether it be Trina’s death or some other thing—that did not matter—that it should be his to wear so, in that way, her memory at least should live.
That much he had vowed to her.
And that he might, also, using the portrait within it to guide him, in time perhaps find her.
So he bided his time. He waited. Four long nights and
days his parents mourned, Ramadas “weeping” his own tears beside theirs, while the boy sneaked out those nights to find his friends. He had them promise him to do a favor. Thus, on the fifth night, when Ramadas finally left the cramped tenement his “gifts” from Trina had helped maintain, small shadows emerged from the garbage-reek of alleys and courtyards to dog his footsteps. Small mouths later whispered where he had gone to, the places and errands, the words he had said to others he spoke to. Of whispers at docksides, and chadored packages, moaning as if drugged, passed on into planked holds.
Of pale moonlight’s glint on coins.
The boy, too, followed, his shadow joining the others as they converged on the old North Causeway—where paupers’ bodies passed—hearing more whispers as one of the corpse-train masters agreed that, if asked, he should say that some several nights past he had carried a woman’s form. That the grave gifts with it had been even more than what Ramadas had claimed them to be to the decedent’s parents.
For one could be modest—or at the least pretend to be so. Just in case someone asked, though no one would, of course. Still it was best for one in a position like that of Ramadas to make certain all of one’s tracks were covered.
And “Trina,” alone, was a common enough name to find on a tomb-stone.
It was then the children struck, the boy himself well skilled as a pickpocket, just as the corpse train was starting off on its journey for that night, just as Ramadas was turning back to his home. With shouts and whistles the youths were upon him, biting and scratching.
The corpse train halted—the cry went up: “Ghouls! Ghouls here in the city!”
“Attacking a paupers’ train?”
In the confusion a hand reached up, thrusting, to slip the locket and chain off Ramadas’s neck. Clutching it, the hand’s owner hoping that, in the noise, his “late” sister’s husband would not have noticed.
But rich people scrounge too. They clutch at and grasp things as desperately as the poor, only in their case with the laws on their side. Ramadas did notice.
