by James Dorr
The boy felt a rocking, much like his canoe’s motion but slower, deeper, a rocking that made him ill.
Everything smelled of salt.
“Then we must name him our own ‘Little Fish,’ eh?”
And so he had a name, Little Fish, or, in the more formal French, le Petit Poisson. He had earned it because he had sailed to the ocean and been rescued there by a boat of fishing men. They put him to simple work, mending nets, sharpening spears, and in time vowed to teach him the fishers’ trade.
When they came into shore, they took him with them too, spending the days, he drinking soft seaweed drinks, they drinking berry wine. Teaching him there, too, the things he would need to know.
Once he amused them—they had passed a brothel and, not knowing why, he had felt an urge to go in. “Hah, Petit Poisson is man enough now, eh! But this is a costly one,” Bambizin had said.
“Too dear for men like us,” another one had said. “This one imports its whores. Exotic women from cities in the north.”
“They say one of them is a river princess!”
“Or at least so she says.”
All of the men laughed, and Petit Poisson joined them. He didn’t talk much, usually, though—his mind had been injured and he mostly babbled. The men understood this.
There was one more thing, too, the fishers indulged: Petit Poisson had been found with a locket around his neck, which he would never let anyone touch, even when Vobul, who was clever with his hands, offered to clean it. To fix its catch which one could see was corroded shut. But when anyone asked if the locket meant something special to him, he would say he did not know.
ENTR’ACTE
So much of history, so many wrong turnings. This was the Poet’s challenge: To sift through the myths to discover the truth beneath.
MARA’S ROOM
When love is gone, what is there to replace it?
• • •
“THERE WAS A TIME, even before the time of the Emperor, he whose pyramid rises above the green fungal-lit Tombs, west, across the great river, a beacon to corpse carts that traverse its causeway, even before the sun reddened and sickened and started upon its inexorable swelling until at last it will surely explode—and what shall we do then?—there was, as I say, once a time of beginnings … ”
The speaker’s full name was Maracanda, she whose rasping voice the children now listened to. But, as small children of all ranks and places will, shortening what their tongues cannot wrap themselves around, they called her “Mara.” She was an odd one, who wore a chador and broad-brimmed sunhat and even a day-mask even when it was no longer daytime, but rather the safer darktime of night that shaded all who might walk outdoors from the sun’s poisoned rays, and even though where she spoke from was not outside, but rather within the New City’s library. It was a comfortable, not-too-large room, with a platform and settee across from its entrance—a soft-cushioned, plush couch upon which Mara rested while those who would hear her tales sat, cross-legged on the floor, on a thick, brightly-patterned rug showing a sunburst in yellows and purple-reds. It was a dimly-lit, intimate kind of room, located away from the library’s central floors, more in a basement-like, off-the-main-path corner.
It was in here that the children were gathered, as part of their schooling, snug among tapestries that lined the room’s walls, depicting scenes of the outside world’s troubles.
“But I thought you were supposed to tell us about the ghouls?” one of the children interrupted. It was a thin girl named Glenorann, a part-rivergirl by the sound of her name, one descended, perhaps, from a boat-gypsy mother—such liaisons, after all, were not unknown. One white-skinned and dark-haired.
John, who sat and listened next to her, did not like this girl.
But Mara did not mind. She nodded, her day-mask glinting a dull, unemotional silver in the room’s subdued glow. “I will,” she said, “speak in time of the death-eaters. It is, I know, what you have come to hear me say.” She gestured then toward one of the tapestries showing the bridge from the neon-lit New City shore to the Tombs, choked with the first of an evening’s corpse-traffic, with horn-hided raiders attacking the coffin-carts, blue ghoul-lights twinkling, pulling their cargoes loose, half-masked themselves by steam rising above the still day-heated, black water.
Glenorann giggled and nodded back. “Yes!” she answered.
“It is,” Mara went on, “what your teachers have sent you here for, to learn these things from me. Each new year, more children. Just as last year it was your class-elders who, as you have now, agreed not to tell what they learned to those below them, lest those who are littler be frightened too easily.
“But now you are old enough–”
Glenorann clapped her hands. “Yes,” she said again.
“Yet,” Mara went on, “how can you learn what ghouls are if you do not know how they came to be? What the origins of the ghouls are, that is?”
Another child spoke up: “Is it not true that their hideous features and hard, twisted bodies come from their living so much out of doors? That is, in the ruins of what’s left of the Old City, sheltering as best they can in shacks and cellars, in tunnels and under slabs—even in daytime when heat drives us indoors despite the awnings and breezeways and canopies that shade our own streets for those who must walk abroad?”
“Yes,” Mara answered. “That is at least part of it—that the day-sun’s mutating heat has so changed them outwardly. At least in theory. Thus here in the New City there are broad awnings above the more prominent, better streets, in the wealthier sectors, and strong, stout-roofed buildings that shelter all from the sun. Just as, within the Tombs west of the river, the mausoleums and crypts and grave-vaults protect the living as well as their charges, keeping them safe from the dangers outdoors, at least until nightfall. And then, when the ghouls next come … ”
Mara once more gestured toward the tapestries, this time to one that pictured such an attack’s aftermath: Ghouls eating other ghouls—those killed by Tombs-guards, gore dribbling from their mouths. Others silently shrieking as who knew what dragged them, flailing within its dark waters, beneath the river’s decay-slicked surface. But others, too, triumphing, blue corpse-lights flickering as singly and in groups they carried their prey off, an arm here, a leg joint there, here perhaps a whole, still-rotting torso, winding their ways home across the broad river in makeshift, skin-stretched canoes—watchful for boat-gypsies who were their enemies!—or south along the shore, back to the Old City’s tumble-down passages. Feasting now, huddled beneath collapsed arches and half-toppled house-roofs. Dancing then, rutting, partying in the ruins, while, half-hidden within the shadows’ blackness, three of their Necromancers conversed, perhaps plotting the next night’s raid.
Even Glenorann shuddered at this, slightly. While the boy who had asked the previous question—his name was Wolrar, John thought he recalled, and he didn’t have much to do with people like John, the more common people of the New City—raised his hand again. “What of the Necromancers?” he asked. “Will you tell us about them too?”
Mara rose, stretching, her motion accompanied by the muted jangling that jewelry might make beneath a woman’s chador—a common enough sound heard in the New City by those that dared venture out during the day-hours, perhaps having found no other time suited for some assignation, thus pairing where they might be seen as it were, yet privately also, for all else were indoors—then settled herself once more, comfortably on her couch. “They are the leaders of ghoul-kind,” she said, “or at least their advisors. So the ghouls honor them. They are the ghouls’ protectors and law-givers. Some say they even predate the ghouls themselves, being the leaders of those who became the ghouls—helping to make the death-eaters what they are now. Others deny this, saying the ghouls freely chose what they wished to be, and only then sought those they deemed best fitted to lead them thus ghoul-ward.
“Possibly both are right.
“But it does not matter—they are what they are now. While wha
t I have to say concerns the distant past, even before the great space armada took some away from the Earth entirely, escaping the sun’s disease, even before the war that came after, that settled the question of what those left truly were. That is, in their own hearts. That defined that ghouls were ghouls and would be so forever, free to develop themselves in their ghoul-hood. That said riverpeople should stick to the river, adapting as well in the ways that were best for them. Fisherfolk to the sea. Tombspeople to the Tombs, guards and embalmers, diggers and stone-carvers, caring for those deceased placed in their charge. New-Cityers to New City—just as you who are its next generation sit here in New City now.”
John scowled at Glenorann—not all these, he thought, remained entirely separate. There were some of half-blood, a father perhaps this, a mother of that descent. Riverwomen, especially, bred laxly—those of the boat-gypsies. That was what John’s father said. Even within the New City itself, foreigners teemed its streets.
Mara continued: “What I speak of, though, is the time of seed planting—its reaping you see now. I speak of the war before the war that defined the conflicts, creating the differences that, despite the striving of many, the later war just confirmed.
“That which ‘made’ ghouls ghouls—they were already ghouls. Do you see what I mean?”
Glenorann looked puzzled, as others of the children did too, but then she smiled at Wolrar. A fetching, girl-smile. And then John understood. She, Glenorann, was a part of the river—and she always would be. As her family—part of it anyway—always was. It was within her, the way she acted, the way she would act even to one like Wolrar who was not of her kind.
While Wolrar, in his turn …
Mara continued: “And so what I speak of is an ancient time when there were many peoples, but only one race of man. These were divided by chance into nations, by beliefs and temperaments, each choosing where to live, most of them staying with others like them of course, but moving freely.
“They sometimes spoke different tongues, just as we have our own ‘high’ and ‘low’ speeches, and various patois, but these were based chiefly on people’s locations.”
Now John was lost too—it didn’t make sense to him. That people spoke differently simply because they lived in different places? But then how would they understand each other?
Or did they even try?
Mara continued: “Finally—and this is the crux—there was a war. There had been wars before, between these ‘nations’ of like-living peoples, but generally ones with beginnings and endings, and pacts and agreements. If one later on abrogated a treaty, then they made a new one, or fought again until one or the other side agreed to the changes. It was tragic, yes, but at least there were endings—and peace between such wars.
“But then something different came: There was to be a war of a new nature, a new kind of conflict to stamp out all enemies, spearheaded by the greatest of these peoples, aimed against evil. Evil itself, that is. Some at first questioned the wisdom of such strife, for how could a nation, however powerful, defeat an abstract? A denotation? But it was then said, as well, that those who balked at joining this effort would thus, themselves, denote themselves as against the good.
“As a result, most nations allied themselves more or less to the cause, though as the war dragged on—for there are always new enemies to be fought if one looks hard enough—and as the first nation, full in its hubris, more and more compromised its own principles, that which in others’ eyes had been its goodness, to help root out those it saw as still against it, much of their zeal slackened. Yet, paradoxically, the more these, its allies, weakened, so the more powerful the first nation became.
“There was no shifting of sides in this, mind you. No grasping of evil—for all claimed to be for good. All so believed themselves. Rather, it was more of an isolation as the great nation itself shunned its allies’ suggestions. And this bred resentments, some of which still persist.
“But, at the end of it, even those who might once have truly hated the greatest of these nations grew too exhausted to do any more harm. And, as for the winners—the ones who had, first of them all, proclaimed the war—for so they were in that way victorious, though having consumed all they had, and more, on it, they were themselves the most exhausted of all.”
“And as for their allies?” It was John who asked this.
“They had no allies,” Mara replied. “None that were left to them. They were the pariahs now—haven’t you listened?
“That was the point, you see. That what they had done, they did to themselves. For virtue in principle, yes, of course. That was why they had fought. But it was fighting itself that took over, that for its own sake became larger than what they at first had hoped to gain, not just for their own good but for the entire world–”
“I see that,” John persisted. “And yet it was the ghouls who were defeated. Or rather those who you say were to become the ancestors of the ghouls. That is what we are to learn here, is it not?”
Maracanda rose, one more time, from her couch. This time to her full height. “No,” she answered. She whipped off her day-mask and opened her chador to show her true self, and the children ran, screaming. Not seeing the thick chains that tethered her fast to the platform she spoke from. Her voice shouting after them:
“It was we ghouls who won!”
But they had already fled from the room, shrieking, streaming through corridors, up and down stairs through the library’s main floors and out to the streets beyond. Vowing they would indeed not tell those younger the true thing that they had learned. Let them learn for themselves! It was in this way the New City’s elders assured that the children would grow up to fear those lands outside its bright-lighted confines of safety, and rather always to shun to wander, unless in huddled, well guarded groups, into the ghoul-countries of Old City and beyond.
IV.
THE FUTURE BECOMES NEAR
Love was one constant. The legends were of love, that sometimes surpassed death. But ghouls could love as well—at least one of the histories had spoken of that too.
The Poet himself had once loved a young ghoul-wife, scale skinned and glistening-haired, had romped with her through the great necropolis across the river, picking with her what was left of the corpses there. Those that had already not been devoured by quicker, bolder ghouls, after the Tombs had fallen in its time, its own tenders dying, following those of the New City it served. Dying, some thought, of a new kind of plague brought about by the ever more searing climate, striking first from the south. Engendered, some said, perhaps from something exposed under the ocean.
The boat-gypsies may have been first to be stricken—they and the fishers. But they had not spread it.
It came of its own accord.
Others, too, had survived, but weakened. Fewer.
And even ghouls died at last, including the one who might have loved him back except, fearing refusal, he had not asked until it was too late.
And yet the legends were not of these times, but of times long before, when it had been just starting. The lesser plagues first. The misgivings. The omens.
CITY ON FIRE
Do not ask Love whence comes its strength sometimes to exceed human bounds.
• • •
IT WAS AT THE Western gate of the Tombs that I, a grave digger, had congregated. It was a scant-used gate, facing as it did through its tall portcullis the flickering blue lights of Old City’s ghoul-kind, that city itself once thriving and tenanted, but in these latter-day times all in ruin. Unlike the New City, its spires stretching to the sky, blazing bright, yellow, bronze, purple and azure, across the great river to east through the Main Gate, through which, nightly, corpses come. Carried on high-wheeled carts.
This is our Tombs-life, the caring for that dead, the deceased of New City, guarding them from the ghouls that beset all of us—they eating, of course, only of those already dead yet still housed in their flesh—these as I say the ghouls of the Old City who would steal the de
ad from us. We for whom duty is helping the dead to rest. We dig for them their crypts under the earth’s surface, better so to protect them from a swelling sun, reddened and poison-rayed, that sears through the daytime hours forcing us, also, the living to burrow in tomb-ways beside the dead.
Yet it was night now in the Month of Goldsmelters, the hottest one of a year hotter than all years past when the full moon itself shimmered more gold than white, and, I have said, I was at the west gate-opening. With me were guards as well and, too, a curator, for there had been a thing sighted in Old City.
“What?” was the cry raised up. “Is it a tomb-wraith? A cluster of tomb-wraiths—a will-o-the-wisp sight to fool us, the gate guards? A straining of vision against a still-red west sky?”
I looked with the others. The sky was still red, though the sun was already down more than an hour perhaps. The moon had already risen behind us sufficiently that we could see our own shadows, stretched and elongated down the broad highway, itself ruined and pock-marked, that split through Old City. We saw to the south crumbled buildings and parklands—what may have been parklands—leprous in night-light, bespeckled by ghouls’ movings. To north, construction, as even our own walls were pushed out farther, expanding the Tombs as, always they must expand, as always more are dead.
It is our job, our fate, our z’étoile as we say—destiny of our souls that we tend to these dead. But this was not dead, the shades we saw now.
A silhouetting–
“It cannot be tomb-wraiths,” a new voice now shouted. This was the curator’s, who had been summoned to watch with us. “See, behind the figures! They cast their own shadows.”
“Aye, ghosts don’t cast shadows,” a second voice added. “Nor either do tomb-wraiths that are but illusions, brief madnesses caused by heat.”
