Tombs

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by James Dorr


  “But then what are they?”

  This last a voice that I knew all too well was that of Pilleta who had perhaps been called forth with the curator. She was but newly a part of our company, she an emigré from the New City—there are some who tire of the ways of its wealth-seekers—here in the Tombs apprenticed to become a carver of images on stone. She who had been once, so she said, a sculptress.

  But more of that later.

  She too with us, as I say, as we inspected safe from our cragged walls’ heights, that which approached us. For we could all see now it was a procession, bedraggled and weary, seeking to enter the gate to our tomb-grounds. Perhaps thence to pass through the Tombs to the river, the gates on the river side, carrying on east across the long causeway to New City, there perhaps to settle. Or do what?—to be enslaved, maybe, or sold to lands south where the river flows, where, it is said, in seasons as hot as this even the sea boils?

  Or so say the rumors, not that we believe them. I mean to say that the ocean itself boils—except perhaps for a light steaming off at noon, just as the river here, as it streams past us, will mist at dusk and dawn as heat and coolness, such coolness as night might bring, intermix briefly. But we do hear histories of the other part of that, that in their quest for ever more riches sometimes New Cityers will sell those they should better love into servitude, especially those, like Pilleta, whose beauty is greater than such wealth they may possess themselves. Not that she had not wealth.

  But, again, strangers, who now were within shouting distance of our entrance, trudging in ragged clothes, some scorched and dirty, but young, too, and with beauty—were these not vulnerable? This I think Pilleta asked first from where we still just watched.

  “It is not for us to say,” came a guard’s answer—this one of the many armed men and women who were now augmenting us, lest this procession be yet some new ghouls’ trick.

  The curator nodded too—this an historian of the Tombs, and a wise man as well. One who knew precedent, and who knew what lay beyond the Tombs’ confines, farther than even the bounds of Old City which stretched west and north and south, this last extending to both the river’s sides curving below the enclave of New City, but west especially along the ruined highway to desert lands beyond.

  And beyond even that.

  “It is no ghouls’ pretext,” the curator said at last. “Rather, these people look to me like refugees. Fleeing, most likely, from some great disaster. Look to the ghoul-lights, how they have shied away—the ghouls themselves know, you see. Note how they have parted to let these pass safely through, not just from respect—nor even the law that constrains ghouls against molesting the living—but as if they fear them.

  “As if these bring bad luck.”

  Several of us nodded. We knew the ghouls were superstitious. But then some of us were too.

  “We need not fear them,” the curator went on. “Rather we should, for charity’s sake, help them in their desire. They are not foolish. They know the risks that they take. Those who wish to pass through must be allowed it—they know what they will find. Those who might wish, instead, to seek new lives here”—and here he paused and smiled at Pilleta, she smooth-skinned and pale, her flesh straining, lush-curved, against the thin gossamer silk of her night-vestments, her hair crimson as fire itself blazing beneath the moon—“as some of us here, especially, know as well, must be allowed that and offered employment.”

  “And those that are dead, or dying at least,” I said, “be given burial.”

  The curator nodded again. “It is so,” he said. Then he gestured to the gate-keepers, the guards and the pullers. “It is time now,” he said.

  I joined these also, glancing down once again at the strangers, the refugees, bringers of fortune for ill or good, then at Pilleta who, as one who had once at least known some wealth, who even in the Tombs where we cared not for such social distinctions was still an artisan and, in that way, not expected to roughen her hands through such labor, I pulled with the others, raising the great gate. Straining and scraping against its stone gate-posts. I saw as Pilleta cringed, first at the shriek of stone against metal as we heaved the gate high, then at the shower of sparks, red as her thick curled hair, as it crashed firmly against the top of its tracks. As those beneath streamed through.

  Then at the crash as, the refugees inside, we let the gate down again, then made to climb ourselves down the gate-towers’ winding, granite steps, following Pilleta, the curator, others who had raced before us. The guards with their weapons. Only to hear the curator shout: “Wait!”

  Already down below us the questioning, the answers, had started. And with these, the weeping: “City on fire!” a woman’s voice shrieked first. “We left it behind us.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” another cried out. As if to ask the wind—for we could not tell him. “Who would cause such a disaster, such pain?”

  Above the moon rose higher, shimmering still in the fore-night’s blistering for it was not yet midnight. But midnight came nearer.

  “Rats in the streets. There were rats, and crows above!” another screamed. Others joined her as well. “Graves in our own tomb-fields burst open from the heat. Carrion birds circled over us in the smoke, until even they were driven from us by flame.”

  I could not help it—I glanced at Pilleta’s hair, she with the chorus of questioners below me, I and others still manning the towers’ peaks. I then looked out where the curator had pointed through the portcullis when he had shouted.

  “Wait,” I echoed. “I see now. Another comes!”

  “No!” those below me cried.

  “We were the only ones. We in the suburbs—the center city was completely engulfed!”

  “Nevertheless,” I shouted down to them, “there is another. She is still some time away. She trudges that slowly. And yet she does come here.”

  By then some of those who entered below had been conducted, already, eastward. To take their chance on the New City’s charity. Others, a few, talked to the guard captain who had drawn them to him, his eye on recruitment.

  The curator called back up. “This new one who comes. Can you describe her to us?”

  “She is as pale-skinned as Pilleta,” I answered. “As lithe and as finely-fleshed.” Pilleta who, I may as well now admit, I had loved from the time she first came here, passing along the causeway with the corpse carts, having bribed the corpse-train master to let her ride with him, through the Tombs’ eastern gate. Gazing with wonder at mausolea, at statues, at tomb-sculpture, eyes passing upward as all strangers’ do to the great Emperor’s Pyramid in the Tombs’ center. The Old Section on its hill. But who would not have me, she being an artist—at least soon to be one as soon as her term of indenture was ended. And I but a digger. Who turned her face from me whenever I smiled at her, that much at least of the New City’s biases still, no doubt, part of her.

  Old habits do not die.

  But, as I say, I called down to the curator: “She is as beautiful, almost, as Pilleta, soft-curved at hip and breast, skin peeping through the vents slit in her garments, sheer silk as they may be, the vee of her bodice and rents in her skirts’ sides to let in the night breeze. To cool her flesh as it might. She wears no all-encompassing chador to protect her from the sun and so must have traveled only by darkness, her hair blending well with it for, as Pilleta’s is scarlet and fire-curled, so hers is as black as ash, charred from fire’s embers, and as straight as wind-blown smoke–”

  “Enough!” the curator said. “Is she here yet?”

  “Before the gate?” I asked. “Some minutes more hike from it. And in her hands, I can see now, she clutches a small chest or casket.”

  “And the ghouls?”

  “I do not see them,” I answered. “No. Wait. I do see the blue flash of one of their lanterns, but deep in the shadows of a crumbling archway. And moving away from her.”

  “More superstition,” the curator said. “They fear her luck most of all.”

  “And w
e do not?” one next to me called down.

  The curator seemed to gaze first at Pilleta, perhaps to judge this new woman from her beauty, but then up at me again. “Open the gate,” he said. “Then come and join us. There is here some mystery and you, like Pilleta, are not an unlearned person. Despite your calling—all tasks here are valued. And I would know more of this.”

  Once more the metal gate shrieked against cut-stone grooves as I and those gate guards still up on the parapets heaved at its pulley ropes. Inching it upward.

  As she ducked and scurried through. I rushing down as well to where the curator already greeted her.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  She curtsied deeply, disclosing the shadowed cleft within her gown’s opening, her globe-like breasts gleaming up white in the moonlight. Standing next to Pilleta, she seemed almost her twin.

  “S-Sonamani,” she answered quietly.

  “And where are you from?” he asked.

  “From a great city many days’ journey to west,” she said. “It is named Kalicut—but it is no more.”

  “So I have heard,” the curator said. “But you must describe now what has happened to it.”

  She nodded, weeping, as I and the others offered her more room, finding a bench she could rest on as she spoke. Thanking us, she sat down.

  “Know this,” she said, “that Kalicut was as great as your New City whose glowing lights we have followed from afar, risking even the savage desert ghouls who, unlike your city ones here, eat all meat that they can find, dead or living. We—those before me—I—my lover—there was no place else to go, unless it be here, our own corpse-yards having been destroyed as well. But we have read in our libraries of the Tombs, and your New City too.”

  “Yes?” the curator said.

  “And of Old City. But you must understand this, too, sir. That Kalicut is—was—far more ancient than even these ghoul-ruins your New City abandoned to the death-eaters when, banding together, its founders erected it. As such Kalicut was not built up of metal or stone, save for perhaps a few major foundations, those buildings that formed its innermost quarter, but rather of wood.

  “It was built in a jungle, across the great desert, you see, at a time when timber was plentiful. Although the desert itself, too, is ancient. And so Kalicut was built of wood on an island in a river delta, although the river through the millennia has dried as well into first a streamlet, and then to a trickle, until it now lies—and has so lain for centuries steep-bluffed beneath us—a dust-dry wadi, a channel for rainwater which in these last decades has not come either.

  “Which never will come as the sun grows hotter.

  “It ends with the heat, you see.

  “Oh, we did have water, from wells we dug deeper with each new century, great wind-pumps drawing it up to our fountains, our pools and lavers. But only to ground-level or just above that, while, through more centuries, our towers, our chief buildings grew ever higher. Our spires, our minarets. Our places of worship. Our mercantile structures, our great leaders’ houses, still built of wood, you understand, since the weight must be kept light the taller one built them. With great windowed arches, and roofs made from plant-fronds, to dry in the hot sun.

  “And rain never came, even in what had once been a monsoon season.

  “And so the sun-dryness, at first just at steeples’ tops, traveled through the years ever downward, by creepings and increments, just as we drew water for our needs upward. It was thus a balance, but one of extremes, perhaps. Nevertheless, it had been thus for decades, for centuries, for more years, the heights growing sun-baked, ever more bleached and dry, the lower more moist, perhaps, but drying too.

  “The day-sun yet more swollen with, so it appeared sometimes, each new dawn’s rising.”

  She paused then, weeping, lifting the box she held on her lap and placing it on the ground beside her. The moon rose higher, at last over-topping entirely the Pyramid that stood behind us, perhaps by now nearly two-thirds to its zenith. Its beams shining white on the bench all around her.

  “Until it grew too dry?” the curator prompted.

  She nodded. “Even the wells, the wood copings surrounding them—the fencing, you see, so that children would not fall in as they were playing in Kalicut’s public squares—grew brittle to the touch. When water splashed on them, well-posts emitted steam. That was how dry even the ground beneath us had grown!”

  Then she stood, bending first to pick the chest up again, I watching as her dress gaped before me—I could not help it—as the breeze shifted, bearing an odor of smoke about her. Even as the curator frowned. As Pilleta frowned at him.

  Sonamani ignored all three of us as she wept harder, clutching the casket beneath the rounds of her breasts, forcing them up higher over her gown’s opening. Pilleta glared now, looking more beautiful. I could not help it—the two, both beautiful, one weeping. One enraged, glaring at me now.

  “Sonamani,” I said, hoping only to change what was happening—I did not understand it—than for information. “What do you have in that box?”

  Sonamani shrieked, weeping more loudly. The curator rushed to her.

  “Sonamani,” he said, “forgive us. I know it is hard for you. I have a question as well, however, that I would ask you. Remember please that I am a scientist.”

  “I understand, sir,” she said, trying to halt her tears. Answering between sighs.

  “This growing heat, then. Our New City’s scientists often debate this—is it a case of the sun actually growing larger over the past millennia or, as some maintain, just seeming to do so as the Earth itself slowly, inexorably spirals in to it? I understand that Kalicut was famed for its astronomers–”

  Sonamani laughed. Bitterly. Sharply.

  “I do not know, sir,” she said. “I am no scientist and, as for our astronomers, they are all dead. They perished with their observatories.”

  “I understand,” the curator said.

  Sonamani nodded, quelling her tears at last. “So did we all perish, save those few you have helped already. Kalicut had become, as I say, all dry. Too dry to go on.

  “The fire started—fires started, for there were more than one—up on Kalicut’s highest towers, those with their roofs most parched. I know some blamed arsonists, but it was not that—it was, rather, as if the city’s soul had dried. Withered in tiredness, just as, some say, the animate part of people’s souls dry with age until they crumble, releasing the psyche, that part that contains one’s will. I am no theosopher either, you understand. I do not know the secrets of one’s z’étoile, one’s star of kismet that tells the paths one will take, even if one knows it not in his psyche. Even if not one’s will. I know this only–”

  She now gazed down to the box, holding it out to me.

  “This was my lover. My all. My good shepherd. A man named Absom”—and here she gave the curator a strange glance—“who was a scientist. This casket is where I have gathered his ashes.

  “And you are a digger?”

  She looked me full in the eyes, hers with a haunting power. A power that might compel one, if she should will it. Except that she would not—somehow I knew that. Her eyes softened, rather, gazing still into mine, deep-set, dark, gleaming from all the tears they had shed.

  Sparkling up into mine.

  “Take it,” the curator whispered.

  I nodded. I took the box from her. Pilleta glared angrily—still I did not know why. What it was that might connect them together.

  “Absom,” she said, “died shielding my life with his. He was the most handsome of all in Kalicut, the strongest and smartest, and yet, too, the gentlest. He was not the richest, yet his family had money enough for comfort. We were to be married—these things, you understand, are arranged for us. I mean, about marriage.

  “My bride-price had been paid. Our house chosen for us, a bungalow near Kalicut’s very center, where its spires rose highest. A place shaded by the few trees that still grew there.

  “It wa
s a pretty house, one of the oldest. One that had a basement.

  “This was important.

  “Absom and I, as I say, were to be married at the first newness of the Moon of Hungers, that follows this month and precedes Fulfillment’s Moon—this was, you see, to have been an omen. To bring our souls good luck, entwined in our bodies as they entwined each other. But, then, there was the fire.

  “This, then, was our fate. That we were together when the fires started, on all the highest towers of the city. For no other cause than heat and dryness, a spontaneity—they say, you have heard, that the oceans boil up too, near the equator? At this time of summer. And so it was with us, except that this boiling was of smoke and ashes, of flame all around us.

  “We were, as it happened, near the house bought for us, so we fled inside. And down to its cellar, still somewhat cool in the ground. And there we concealed ourselves, able to see a bit out its air-vents, the slit windows that it had at the tops of its walls—walls made of real stone, and so that protected us—as the fire whirlwinded all about us. The rushing. The people’s screams. All of this we could hear, yet could do nothing.

  “Except this I did do, as, hearing above us—as elsewhere it seemed the fire might be dying down, as we had been huddled there some days—the lapping of flame finally on our wood ceiling. As I looked up, my Absom having made me comfortable beneath his own body, so to protect me still, and saw the fire’s glow reaching to us between the boards, I uttered this vow: That come what may I would see that my lover was properly buried.

  “And so I have brought him here.”

  There was a near silence as even Pilleta wept, quietly, trying her best not to show it. As even the curator and I wept, openly. Then Pilleta glared at me once again, flushed with raging heat.

  Reddened eyes meeting mine.

  I glanced at the box I held, I having taken it, amidst the soft clanking of my digging implements. I tried to smile, then realized that was exactly the wrong thing for me to do.

  I looked at where Sonamani still faced me, and tried to meet her eyes.

 

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