by James Dorr
“Not ghouls, but thieves!” he yelled. “Children of beggars—they steal now what they cannot wheedle from us through honest panhandling!”
More calls rose up as, relieved it was not ghouls—despoilers of corpses instead of the living—the corpse-train master ordered his tumbrels to start off once more, crossing the Causeway, a young boy hidden beneath one’s covering, among its stacked cargo.
Tomb guards approached them, confused by the turmoil. The shouts of “Stop, thief!” and “Call out the night watch!” echoing now on both sides of the river. Sounds vying with smells as mist rose from the river. They lifted the carts’ covers, glancing beneath them as, on one’s opposite side, the boy dropped down and, crouching, ducking beneath the carts’ high axles, made his way forward.
The guards still distracted, he slipped through the open gate, into the Tombs proper just as, behind him, a lone voice shouted:
“They’ve stolen a locket!”
• • •
So the boy hid, for wealthy people clutch onto their own even more resolutely than those born to poverty. That is why they are rich. Three nights the search went on, both in the New City, those parts at the river’s edge, and in the Tombs itself, not because the locket was so valued—some of its jewels, yes, may have been semiprecious, but still not that costly, not what a woman like Trina could not have skimmed out of her “earnings”—but simply on principle for, should the rich let their things be stolen, then where would the stopping be? What would be taken next?
The boy concealed himself during the days in a chink at the base of the wall on the Tombs’s east side, facing the river. He could in this manner follow the progress of the search for him, not during the daytime itself, of course, for even those lured by the rich to work for them with promises of high pay must draw the line when the sun’s actinic rays shine at their fiercest—even when decked out in chadors and day-masks and broad-brimmed, shading hats—but in the waning and waxing twilight times when, on the one hand, he would so know if it were safe to sleep, and then on the other to skulk out in darkness to filch food and water.
He was almost caught once, but his would-be catcher, a curator of the Tombs, peered at his face, then laughed and let him go. “You are the boy they seek?” the curator asked. “I thought at first you might have been a ghoul, one of their spies, perhaps, those who would desecrate the new-dead we are pledged to protect. Who would eat their rotting flesh, digging them from their graves. But for what I understand you are accused of—stealing a locket? That which you wear even now?—that is not Tombs-business, even if we make some pretense of helping. The rich, after all, are our clients as well. But mind you be careful … ”
The boy scurried, quickly, back to his riverside tomb-wall crevice, burrowing himself in even more deeply lest others had seen him too. It had become for him an obsession, to hold on to the locket—perhaps even more than that of Ramadas to try to recover it. Thus to escape with it. It, after all, was his sister’s remembrance, that whatever had happened she would still be alive, at least in some fashion.
At least in his own mind.
Feeling ill, somewhat, from breathing the river’s stench as it swirled downward in relative coolness, that night he rested, as well as the next day.
Then one night the cry went up: “Ghouls on all sides of us!” He had seen, perhaps as well as any, the first of what happened from his creviced vantage point. A corpse train, bedecked with gifts, crossed the Main Causeway—not the half-ruined North one where the cadavers of poor people traveled, where Trina would have passed had she been truly dead. And such a train, full laden with sleek, fat bodies that had in their own lives eaten well, was, to the ghouls’s eyes, a prize too tempting to be ignored this night, regardless of other searches within the Tombs.
Whistling, their blue corpse-lights pricking the darkness, the first wave of ghouls attacked from the riverside, nearly on top of the boy where he cowered, climbing from stretched-skin boats onto the Causeway, while others attempted to scale the walls themselves. This just as the corpse train had passed through the Tombs’s main gate, the heavy portcullis not yet dropped behind it, propped still-open now by the poles and halberds the ghouls had carried.
Guards struck back with their own sticks, heavy iron-shod clubs that broke through thick hides and bone, while the ghouls snarled, biting, raking back with their claws. Back and forth both sides fought.
Both sides shouting. Splashes as, now and then, ghoul or guard or both hurtled down into the river’s black water.
The fighting raged onward, away from the boy now–
He had an idea.
He found a ghoul lantern half-broken below him, but still flickering, fitfully. Stinking of methane gas. But in its light he saw, also, a log-like shape, coffin-sized, floating alone in the river.
He scrambled down to the water’s edge and fished the canoe in, one of the ghouls’s boats, bone-framed and human-skinned, but nevertheless his means to flee the Tombs. Playing its rope out and making it fast beneath a stone, he returned to his chink and brought out his secreted stores.
Loading the coffin-boat, he pushed it from the shore, stretching out in it so no one would see him, his head hidden by its sides. Only when he was in the river’s center did he sit up and search for its paddle, finding it, finally, hoping to steer the craft.
His tries were pitiful—the current was too strong!—he just set it spinning amidst a kaleidoscope of whirling colors, the New City’s neon-bright purples and reds and aquamarines and golds, then to the west the Tombs’s more muted fungal greens, both overlaid by blue pinpricks of ghoul-lights. But fewer now than the boy had recalled seeing.
He heard the shouts still, too, but more muted now as his boat drifted farther past, its spinning, taking its own time, slowing. Seemingly slowing.
He lay down once more at full length in the boat’s bottom, marveling that it was just of a coffin’s size—that is, an adult’s size, leaving him room therefore for his things too, his stolen flasks and wrapped rat-meat and bread, plus the equipment of the ghoul-boat as well, the paddle which he had already found, its props and day-awning.
He set up the awning, figuring out how to stretch the hoops under it. Making of it in a way his boat-coffin’s lid. Noting behind him even the New City’s glow disappearing, then, peering ahead, just the blackness of water. Smelling the smells, of the canoe especially—a rancidness to it over and above that of the river, this more of rotted flesh, while the water itself stank of who knew what? Mixtures of everything. Seeing the river, too, even with the moon’s light blazing over it, seeming to stretch out forever on either side.
He clutched the locket tight in his left hand and, dizzy from his success, dreamed of his sister.
• • •
He heard a cry! His sister’s voice crying? He came awake, startled, and stared out to sunlight.
He squinted. He had no day-mask to protect him. He had barely a chador—he crouched in such shade the canoe’s awning offered.
But over him flew birds, great flocks of white marsh-birds, long legged and ungainly-winged, yet flapping northward, to where he had come from, and eastward toward the sun. He looked out, gingerly, around the edge of his awning, to look toward the east as well, and saw what seemed an ocean of grassland, but rising, far distantly, to sand-brown mountains—the Great Desert he had heard people speak of at times, merchants who traveled the land-roads up from the sea.
That made him wonder: That meant there would be a sea. That this adventure that, will he or nill he, he had set out for himself would have an ending. And that it would be south—to where Trina might be.
There was, after all, nothing more that he could do, not just then anyhow. The current, if anything, was even swifter here. He drank a bit of the filtered water he had brought in his flasks, but only a little. Only a mouthful. He knew it must last him. He sat in the boat’s shade and opened the locket, its hinges already stiff in the moist river air, and gazed at his sister’s face.
; Once more he dreamed of her, and of another too. This second one he could not place, a woman, more willowy, yet in her own way beautiful also. Perhaps even more beautiful than Trina had been—he found himself confused. A woman dressed in bright silks and transparent gauze.
He saw her mouth moving, but then she shook her head. As if to say, “Not yet.”
And over all he heard the cawing of birds, black birds now with the coming of evening, sharp-beaked crows and jackdaws. Most of these were carrion birds, he knew, ghouls of the air almost. He shrank beneath the tent of his boat’s awning. Yet he knew, too—he had heard the gossip—that there were lands far from the New City where people, through respect, left their dead exposed on tops of platforms for such birds to eat them.
He ate a small bit himself, a rat-forelimb and drumstick, knowing that he must conserve his food as well as his water. A morsel of bread.
He watched as the river glowed red in the sun’s setting, then was amazed at the depth of blackness that presaged a waning moon. Each night, from now on, the blackness would lengthen before the moon’s rising. Each night the moon, when it did rise, would shine more dimly until it, finally, spidery and crescent-thin, would offer no light at all. Or, if it did give light, would have it drowned in the sear of a dawning sun, east washing out the west, just as the New City’s lights overpowered the Tombs’s.
And, over both, the mist.
He noticed it this night, how the mist rose and swirled in the remaining heat, then condensed, stinging his skin when he stuck his hand out in it, falling back into the river as night cooled it. Almost hissing. Then, the next morning, as sun baked the water, steaming off, more thickly, choking him as it spread out around his boat. Lingering, drifting, until almost noon when, rising higher above the broad water, its muting effect gave way to full light’s harshness. All yellows and shadows, all blacks and cruel glows so bright eyes could not fix on them. Brights with no color.
And then, as the sun sank away from its zenith, affording at last some relief, the river’s banks opened to bleached greens, to grasslands still, but lower and more diverse. While, over all, the death-smell of his boat blended in with the river’s more ancient odors, swirling about him, as, exhausted by the heat, he slept and dreamed again.
This time the strange woman, only, appeared to him, walking as if on the river’s surface, pale-fleshed through deep blue-green almost transparent silk. Her long, cascading hair colored blood-crimson.
“I am Olann,” she said—he knew the name somehow. Or at least he thought he did. He recognized her now as a riverwoman, a boat-gypsy princess, possibly someone from one of the legends jongleurs strived to retell—perhaps Trina could have said what she portended. Perhaps he had “met” her, then, once in some dress-up game such as his sister had been skilled at playing, seeing in Trina’s own flesh the soft curves of thighs pressing through high-slit skirts, white through gauze-thinness. Breasts cooled in the river-breeze swirling between them, below and around them, shadowed beneath through an equally translucent waist-deep cut bodice.
She leaned, her lips pursing as if to kiss him. A sweetness on her lips, as crimson as her hair. Gracefully, quietly, wearing no chador, her face naked to the sun, yet her skin so pale—as pale as death nearly. As pale as the moon.
“I have come to warn you,” she said, “to not absorb overly much of the river’s air. Stay crouched low in your boat and, above all else, avoid breathing deeply.”
To not breathe, he thought. But how could one avoid its miasma of heat and fog, swirling again even now as she warned him? Until all he saw was the red of her hair and lips?
Then even that was gone, lost in the scarlet sun, it itself lost as, suddenly, darkened shapes rose all about him. Black, flapping wings, some as wide as his boat was long. The birds of death-bringing, death-waiting, and death-taking, the lammergeiers, and vultures, and buzzards. The juggers, and hawks, and owls. Night-birds and day-birds both, and also insects, thin, fragile mosquito-shapes, and, on the water itself, long-legged skaters. These chittering, the birds calling—deafening in their noise.
Then deeper blackness ….
• • •
He woke to a maze of river and swamp, the sun once more fading toward evening’s darkness—he had slept then, at least, through a whole night and day! He had lost sense of time—but this time the river glowed dimly itself with its own phosphorescence. His eyes slowly adjusted. He tried to hold his breath, as the dream-wraith had warned, or so failing that to take breaths as shallowly as he was able, as the now-familiar evening mist coalesced, swirling about him, not blotting out all sight, but muting edges. Making all seem hazy.
Far in the distance he saw what seemed like lights—some city perhaps, beyond the river’s edge.
His body felt weak. He ate sparingly of his food and water, chewing slowly, then fingered the locket around his neck, noting a roughness to its back as if corrosion had already begun to add its own layers of thickness to it.
He watched as the night darkened, as some of the fog cleared, though never quite all of it. Then, with a start, he realized his boat had slowed. Peering to right—to west—he discovered that he had left the river’s main current where, even as he watched, the water’s brightness broke up into patches that swept away to the south.
But to his left, the east, there was a city, a city of even greater brightness than the New City’s, and, ever so slowly he was drifting to it. Around him there was swamp. He knew that much by the smell, a rich, loamy odor of organic rot—not sharp, like the river’s smell, but almost sweet-scented. Almost attractive.
Now, all about him, there were flying, tiny lights, gnat-lights where—how many nights ago?—there had been great black birds. He gasped in wonder. And, over the side, deep in the water he saw even brighter than the water’s brightness the rich neon flashing of tiny octopi—yellows and greens and blues—vying with reds as centipedes swam, also, under the surface. With silvers of watersnakes.
While still, to east, he saw even more lights, great pulsing balloon-lights of vast, gas-filled fireflies drifting between glowing organic towers, twisted and wind-shivering, purples and reds and golds everywhere washed with green. A faerie city! Of light and dark greens both, bobbing, star-like, against the black sky of night—towers and spindles, twisting and throbbing. Blues and turquoises, much like the blue corpse-lights that marked the Old City, but tens of times brighter.
A wonder city!
His boat had stopped. Snagged! He stood up, desperately, gasping for more air as, beneath the water, some huge frog-like creature let loose gaseous bubbles, bursting as soon as they reached the surface. Blending with such tendrils as were left of the mist.
And the sounds! Croakings and gruntings of reptiles. Chirpings of insects. Barkings and screechings. Here and there whirring sounds as fast-winged dragonflies swept past invisibly, propelled by glass-clear wings.
He must go to it.
He reached for his paddle. Reversing it, using its blade as a handle, he pushed it beneath the bayou’s surface, down into the water, down into the mud below. Drawing more bubbles forth.
Filling his lungs, he heaved, poling his boat forward. Again. Again. Pushing east, toward the swamp-city. Feeling its frail keel scrape–
And he had broken free!
Spinning now, his boat swept into an eddy, at the bayou’s mercy. Picking up speed—he held onto the sides now, crouching within the hold, remembering too late the river-wraith’s warning. Trying again to lessen his breathing.
As swamp fought with river.
And his spinning quickened as the current took his boat, pulling it back into the river’s center, beginning to straighten it as it coursed downstream, down toward the ocean. As the moon’s sliver rose.
As the air cleared somewhat, losing its swamp-smells. An almost fresh breeze came up, out of the west, out of mountains and deserts, perhaps, far away from the great river’s poisons. A dry wind, almost, even though it was still night …
But it was to
o late—he had already breathed in too much of the water’s pollution. Too much of the heat-mist that washed from the river, even as, now, the pre-dawn began bleaching out the night’s colors.
And, eyes closed, in his head he relived the beauty, the wonder he had seen. A beauty not that of a Trina, or even that of an Olann, a dream-wraith, a will-o’-the-wisp charm, a legend, but rather a beauty more pure, more immediate, a deeper, more fundamental beauty. Of whirlpools and sinkholes, of eddying currents.
The miasma had him.
He drifted on, to the south, as the dawn mist rose, and all again became gray, this time not lifting. Not giving way to the noon-sun’s brightness.
He saw as he ate the last of his rations a city within the fog, this also to the east, though he saw also, above him, a high-arched bridge. This was the Port City of buildings constructed from warped, silvered driftwood, some many stories high. Of dull-glowing lanterns that reeked of fish oil, and towers of glistening, always-moist, sculpted mud. Mud that seemed almost to flow in the dampness.
He scarcely noticed as his canoe drifted past, coffin-lid open now—there was no sun to burn, but rather only a lightness above the mist. A lesser grayness. And the water was gray, too, perhaps a bit darker—and smelling now of salt and fish with its other smells. Churning and roiling far in the distance where sky met with water.
He drifted on past, again sleeping, again dreaming, into the river estuary and into the ocean, pulling out with the tide. Again the odors changed, this time with new reeks from other, more distant streams, all of which mixed, at last, into the ocean.
And there was a thump then. A helmeted man came up under the frail boat, with air-tank and protective suit and spear-gun, and turned the craft over.
Screaming, the boy fell out.
Then, in the mist, a vast, three-hulled shape loomed forth.
• • •
“He is caught, fair and square.” The boy woke to a man’s voice.
“Aye. Bambizin caught him. He was just coming up with a fresh catch of bloodlets when, wham, he hit something. He saw the boy swimming.”
