by James Dorr
“I-I will dig a fine grave,” I told her. “The curator willing, I will dig it deep in the Tombs’ oldest part, nearly at the base of the Emperor’s Pyramid itself, but facing westward back toward Kalicut, your own lost city, for that is where you had dwelt. Where you would have lived on, had your destinies been so impelled to allow it. And others will help me, and we will provide grave goods to see him comfortably into his next life. I’ll beg if I must for them, tools and clothing, the instruments of his trade. Flowers and even coins—just say what’s needed–”
Sonamani bowed her head, then looked up and smiled.
Then she burst in a whirlwind of ashes and smoke—the odor I had smelled when she had bent toward me. Smoke and a faint perfume. Just as the firestorm had around their basement hideaway, so she, herself, whirled around Absom’s casket that I held now in my arms.
Then, finally, settled—a pile of dust on the bench where she, before, had sat.
The curator cleared his throat. “There are tales,” he said, “of loves that were that strong. I suspected it myself, as the moon rose and shone white around her, and I saw no darkness. But sheer will of soul, they say, can be enough sometimes. Sometimes to take what’s left of one’s corpse, that burned in the fire as well, but to make it persist as if not dead, to take on the form it had had before, and to carry on until its business was completed.”
He turned to me, then. “We will gather these ashes, too, and you will dig that grave wider than you had planned. And, yes, it will face to the west as you promised. We will intermix them, her ashes and his, and add to the grave goods jewelry and gold coins—for Sonamani will need these too—and build above their grave a monument.”
He turned now to Pilleta. “And you will carve it. You know what she looked like, and as for Absom, you have his description, strong yet gentle, intelligent, handsome. The handsomest man in all of Kalicut and when you’re done, she nothing less than its most beautiful woman, and they in each other’s arms, he on top guarding her body with his, as they did in that cellar. She on the bottom. You understand?”
Pilleta blushed. “Yes.”
He looked at her closely then, much as Sonamani had looked at him when she had first told us of Absom and given to me the chest of his remains. “There is one more thing, Pilleta, that you must do. Do you understand what she meant when she spoke of z’étoile and of her and Absom’s souls entwined? How that even was true in a marriage that was arranged—that in a sense it just proved what was fated. ‘Even if one knew it not in one’s psyche,’ is that how she put it?”
Pilleta nodded. “Yes.”
“There are things, Pilleta,” he said, “that are clear to others, even if not known to those they may most affect. Things that even Sonamani saw, though her mind, rightly, was on other matters. Do you understand now?”
Pilleta nodded, then blushed more deeply as, eyes seeking mine, she whirled suddenly and kissed me.
THE ICE MAIDEN
Is not the power of art derived from its service to love?
• • •
IT WAS ON A night of the Moon of Land’s Starving, far from the sultriest time of the year yet one hotter than most, that I and others were at the River Gate out on the quay below the great Causeway on which come the corpse carts. There it was I who first spotted a gypsy boat tacking against the wind, seeking to land. “Hoy!” I shouted. The others with me, two guards and a gravedigger, whirled to join me to catch its cast bow line, illuminated in turn by its lanterns as its helmsman wrestled to bring in the stern too. I catching its aft line then, dogging it down to one of our stone pier’s cut-granite cleats.
“Hoy!” I again called, this time to the princess who now appeared—it is always the boat’s princess, wife to its captain or, sometimes, his daughter who among the river folk speak with us landsmen—though chadored in thick cloth from head to toe as if it were still day, the swollen sun’s poisoned rays still baking river and land alike. That which forces we of the Tombs to shelter underground at first light’s dawning in mausolea and brick-lined catacombs. They of the boats beneath planked, awninged decks, leaving only the hardiest of them, alone, to work the sails above.
“Hoy, Gravesman,” she called back, her voice pleasant and silvery as delicate bells, as she stretched forth a white-skinned hand for my assistance in stepping to shore. Her ankle-bells jangling, too, as, getting used to the unmotion of the pier, she shrugged her chador off, passing it back to a crewman behind her. “You are the leader here?” she asked me, smiling.
“We are in the Tombs,” I said. “We have no leaders as in the New City across the river, no Mayor nor Council, to tell us what we must do. We work as pleases us, each with our own skills. Nor are we as the ghouls of Old City, accepting our law from Necromancers–”
“Speak not of ghouls,” she said, cutting me off, facing me now in only her river silks, all but transparent. In bright blues and greens and purples and golds as some river folk wear them, the white of her thighs peering out through her slit skirts, the shadow beneath her breasts under a waxed moon’s light contrasting within the deep-plunging vee of her gossamer bodice. Her hair, too, as black as a midnight with no moon, contrasting against her flesh, tumbling, straight—no curls in this hair from braiding for deck work, unlike riverwomen of commoner station—to gently caress the rounds of her buttocks. The graceful swell of her hips.
“I mean no insult by this,” she continued. “You know we love not the ghouls. Yet I would speak with one of your Tombs’ spokesmen, one to whom we might deliver a cargo.”
A cargo, I thought. And here, to the Tombs? It is true, at times, that we have received river gypsies’ corpses, but always upon some special occasion. They honor their dead, chiefly, by river burial. And, as she just said, there is enmity between the boat-sailors and the ghouls, putting their corpses at special risk should they bury them in the earth—not that New City dead aren’t at risk also, or even our own, for, after all, ghouls eat the flesh of all dead people.
That is why we have guards—one of whom now spoke up.
“Tam is an artist,” he said, pointing to me. “He is respected among our kind, although, as he said, we have no hierarchy—no honoring of one trade above another. Though artists are rare, I mean those of real talent, not common like we guards. The point is, however, that all work is needed, that of those like me to help avoid our charges’ despoilment, those like him to honor their resting places through carvings and statues, reliefs and inscriptions, so those who still live might know who it is they visit, when they have come here. So those who protect them will know who they defend.”
“I understand, yes,” the princess answered. “As on the river it is my husband-captain’s duty to see our craft safe from the water’s dangers, to steer it and guide it to its destination. Our crewmembers’ tasks to set its sails and keep them filled with the wind. As it is mine, as cargo-mistress, to see to it that its goods are delivered, those we carry at peril beneath our decks, as I strive to do now–”
She smiled then and laughed gently, as I, catching her point, laughed with her.
I thanked the guardsman. “Good lady,” I said, “it is as my friend tells you. I am a carver, an artist, an inscriber of tombs. If it is a corpse you bring—and what otherwise might one bring here, save one that is deceased and, with it, its grave offerings?—it may be that I shall design its head-stone.”
I bowed to her then in the old-fashioned manner—she was, to be sure, a river princess, and as she implied an already-coupled one as well, but I, unattached to any at that time, wished still not to make a poor impression.
“I can, though,” I said, “help see to your cargo. Tell me what it is, and I will find the one best equipped to do it proper honor. A gate guard, a digger, as we have here. An artist, as I am. A poet, if it be that words should be required for an inscribing. Perhaps a curator … ”
She laughed again. “Perhaps you will do, Tam.” She did not tell me her name in turn—that is not the way of river princesses.
“Yet what we bring is not a corpse, exactly.”
I bowed again as she signaled to those who waited on her ship’s deck, then nodded as they brought a draped form up from its hold.
“Perhaps,” she said, “your friends can help carry … ”
I gestured to them and they sprang to help take what still seemed the wrapped shape of a corpse from the sailors, then, with them, carry it up the angled stairs to the plaza above the river wall.
It seemed a corpse, human-sized and black-chadored. Its face covered over.
I had them lay it down on a stone bench, then sent one off to fetch a curator.
I bowed once more. “My lady,” I said, “he who I have summoned is one of our scholars. A scientist, as it were, and an historian. Thus, if it is a riddle you’ve brought us … ”
She smiled, her lips blood-red. A smile of seduction—river princesses cannot help what they are. She meant no hope for me, although, moving nearer, she let her hand touch mine.
“Tam,” she said, “we shall see what it is and perhaps your curator, then, can tell us.”
She breathed a musk-like perfume. Her body’s heat, so near, exuded with it its own sweat-sheened sweetness.
I turned toward the draped form—it seemed cool by contrast. Although it was still covered—not warm, as corpses are, left above ground while their graves are prepared for them, blotting heat from the air. Soaking its energy as if, in that way, what remained of one once living sought yet to fill some space left by its soul’s passing. Thus to be once more whole.
“Tam,” a new voice said.
I looked up. The curator had arrived.
“Tam,” he said again—he was an old man as most curators are, after years of study, yet not so old that he didn’t bow also to the river princess, lower than even I had when I first met her—“Tam, what is this mystery?”
“We have not looked yet,” I said. “We wished to wait for you.”
“Perhaps that is wise,” he said.
He took the river princess’s hand from me, then gestured to the guards. “Let us see now,” he said.
Carefully, slowly, the two pier guards who had been with me since the gypsy boat’s first landing, unwrapped the chador from the form within it. Freeing it to the air, stark in the moonlight that flooded the plaza, while, one to each side, the two boat-sailors who had helped with it waited.
I heard a gasp behind me—a crowd had gathered! I glanced around once, to be sure that they still all stood back respectfully.
Several had brought torches to help our viewing.
I heard the princess’s bell-like voice speak again, to the curator as she bent with him over the naked form of a young woman.
More beautiful even than the river princess!
Together they touched it—I saw the flesh spring back as soon as their hands lifted. Not as a corpse’s flesh.
“It is the way we received her,” the princess said. “As you can feel, she is cold to the touch. As if she were buried, long beneath the ground, or were submerged at the river’s bottom. And yet the flesh is uncorrupted.”
The curator leaned closer in his inspection, moving his hands over firm, round-tipped breasts, to the flat of its belly. The thatch beneath that—her hair was a light red, almost a pink below, more a light, bright scarlet above where it fell from her head to cascade past her shoulders, or would had she been standing, framing a pearl-white skin, paler almost than the river princess’s. Over soft, supple thighs.
He brought his head down and sniffed.
“She is no mummy,” the curator said.
The princess nodded. “Nor is she newly dead, though, on the river the new-dead are sometimes cool. When the life leaves them. Yet she has been this way since we first received her, not breathing, as you can see. Not moving, or, if she does, so subtly that none can detect it. With no sign of pulse and yet, as you see also, no indication of pooling of blood within her body. No lividness underneath.”
“Stiffening?” the curator asked.
The princess shook her head. “Nor has she been embalmed,” she said, “as far as we can tell.” She smiled again. “You, though, are the experts there.”
“Yes,” the curator said. “We will make tests, of course. Yet, as you say, she seems not to be embalmed.”
“She is from the north,” the boat-princess said. “Far to the north where the river branches—a rumor that I had heard. You know we must seek our cargoes out, it is the job of us boat-captains’ wives. We haggle for prices, we choose destinations–”
“I understand,” the curator said.
“So it was,” the princess continued, “that we sailed a winding course into a land of forests and high cliffs. Some of the wood straight wood—we shall go back some day, perhaps, for timber. But this time we sailed on.
“Beyond that we found a plain, one filled with flowers. We stopped there again on our voyage back, thinking what we then had was still no more than a corpse meant for burying, thus one we might use the flowers for to keep fresh. You see our reasoning. The flowers, though, are since faded while what you see here–”
“I understand,” the curator said again.
“Yes,” she said. “And so, beyond that, we came eventually to a city. A city we did not know. A small, stunted city, as cities go—somewhat like the mud and driftwood towns one comes to when one sails south to the ocean, that fisher-folk dwell in. But this was to the north, where mountains were again, deep within jagged, precipitous peaks that slant right to the river’s edge, wind whistling between them, the air itself taking on almost a coolness of its own after dark, hours after midnight before the next dawn’s rise. A coolness almost as she brings within her flesh—as you have felt yourself.”
The curator nodded, lifting his hands again from their inspection.
“As I say, it was a city not as the New City here, or even the Old City, once great and powerful despite being now in ruins, but rather one of all stone towers and barrows. Almost a tomb-city, from one’s first glance at it—or almost a ghoul-city, as caves were dwelt in too. Yet not as ghoul-caves, with their telltale blue glows of burnt-off corpse gases, but one of living folk just as you and I.
“There we landed. We had a small cargo to ship to a man there, a wealthy jewel-miner. Again this is something we may remember, when a time comes for future cargoes. But he had for us, this time, a thing quite different.
“It was what you see here. He said he had found it in one of his new mines. A new, artificial cave he drilled beneath the earth, vast distances down, to seek veins of rubies and emeralds and diamonds. Some of these we took, too, on commission. But this thing he said he found when his drill burst into a natural cavern, a crystal-lined grotto that had waited there sealed for untold millennia. These jewel-miners have ways of telling rocks’ ages. And within this grotto he found what he thought a corpse.
“Yet, as you see here”—the princess smiled once again—“a corpse quite well preserved.”
“I see. Yes,” the curator said, both listening and making more observations. Inspecting the figure’s legs, noting they could be bent, then would stay in that shape. Thus she could be made to sit up, or else remain reclining.
“He thought he might use it,” the princess went on. “You know what I mean—he was a middle aged man, still young enough, but one who had lost his wife. He told me this later when he desired me, until he realized I was not unmarried. But that is not important.
“What is is this: That when he came to fully understand that it was not a corpse, but appeared not to be living either, his men grew afraid. He became fearful also. That is what I had sensed, I believe, in a dream or a feeling, that led me to the cargo to take to him—crates from a city five days’ sail above here of mining equipment—a cargo not lucrative, all things considering, yet who knows what new adventures shall bring?—in any event, as I say, that brought our boat far to the north to him. And to take from him this thing he now thought cursed.
“He gave us grave offerings, to
bring to the Tombs with it. In case it was dead, you see—or, rather, she was dead. As if my boat had become in that way a water borne corpse train. And I, as your train masters who come from New City across your causeways, to haggle for grave space.
“We taking our portion, of course, as your masters do.”
“Of course,” the curator said.
“And, of course, also, should you have a cargo … ”
They both laughed at this, a small, wry chuckle, the curator and the river princess. One must always show respect, both of the deceased and the—well, neither knew quite what this one was. But, if one were living, one must earn one’s way through life.
“I will show you,” the princess said, “when the time is appropriate, what we have brought for her. When you have decided what should be done.”
“Yes,” the curator said. “Yet what we have is a new thing, is it not? One that is of value for its own sake, that people will wish to see. To see and to study. There are some places, you know, where you would have been paid to deliver this—asked to sell it.”
The princess nodded. “As in the New City, across the river … ”
“As in the New City.”
“And yet we have honor, do we not, curator?”
Both laughed again. I saw their point. This was a new thing, and one that had value. Yet it was a thing that deserved respect also, and possibly more than that. As the curator and boat-princess talked on—the Tombs would accept the corpse, if that was what it was, as a donation, the princess to decide the goods to go with it. What clothes, what jewelry, or would it be better to bury it naked as it had come from the ground? Not to presume for it.
That is, if it was dead ….
As I say, as they talked, I, too, inspected the form for myself, touching with my own hands the curve of its hips, the arch of its back and the rounds of its buttocks. The swelling of breasts. Feeling the coolness, unnatural, of its soft flesh.
Kissing its yielding lips. As would others among us, later, and others as well from New City and elsewhere. From curiosity in part, as well as for love—in my case for love foremost, I will admit it. In her way she was as soft, as seductive, as even the river princess herself. Indeed, even more so.
