by James Dorr
I had been unpaired long!
But in her way, also, as unattainable. Especially to one as I, one without riches—as are nearly worshiped within the New City, as is the way of the world all about us—though I was an artist.
But one thing there was as well: We all knew legends. Of times, millennia past, before the sun’s reddening, before even winters began to become hot, when people still walked outside, unchadored, during the daytimes. Seeking the sun’s rays.
We knew there were legends, of “sleeping beauties,” of young women cursed—as the miner, eventually, thought this one might be—by what passed for Necromancers in those times. And how, sometimes, merely a kiss might revive them.
I could not be blamed if I, myself, had tried.
• • •
So it was that the Ice Maiden came to the Tombs. That was the name the princess gave when the curator asked her:
“It is the name the jewel-miner gave me. I questioned him myself, of course. Though we both realized, as soon as I asked, he had no way of knowing. She was, as you see, as naked as daylight—she wore no locket that might have told who she was. Not even clothing to hint of her station.
“He even took me into the cave myself, I in my turn nearly blinded by darkness, half-choked by the torches’ stench. Yet I could see enough to tell that any grave-good that might have been with her, some couch she had lain on, some cushion or keepsake—she had no jewels either, even if, in a way, she was to become surrounded by precious stones—anything she possessed long since had turned to dust.
“A hundred thousand years, perhaps, the jewel-miner said she might have been lying there.” The princess smiled again, licking her lips with the coral of her tongue. Moistening her small, white teeth. “Though jewel-miners, like us all, sometimes have penchants for exaggerating things. And, yet, she is ancient, her time going back before even the river had taken its present course. Before the mountains rose up around her … ”
And that was the point. It was why we kissed her. I, furtively, that one time. Then, later, others—and more than kissing her—after the river princess had left us.
Some chafed her cold, white hands. Others massaged her. All trying, you see, to breathe life back into her. Just as in legends—in ancient-world fairy tales.
And yet we never knew …
For my own part, the curator instructed me to begin the building of a tomb, one above ground. A mausoleum.
We chose a spot overlooking the river, but not in the richest of sections of the Tombs, but rather nearer the gate she’d come in through. Not quite in the charity section either, but rather higher up, a spot with a view, and where it could be seen as well from the New City, where she might rest. Its sides open to such breeze as might waft through it, until it might be determined that she was dead.
And only then to be walled and sealed.
It was a tomb to be trimmed with marble, with delicate carvings, reliefs that depicted her. One of the princess as well, to be sure, her river-silks blowing—another of her boat. The Ice Maiden’s coming.
One of her, supine, on the river-gate bench. The curator’s inspection.
With even a shadow of me in the background.
It was in that way to tell the story of one who might lie within, should she be truly dead. When she should be dead.
It was in this way I showed my love for her.
I abstracted mountains—I had only the river princess’s description, never having seen mountains myself. I limned the journey the princess took to inspect her bier, showing the horror a boat-woman must have felt under the earth herself, she a creature of water and air. Who would not be bound to earth even when she was dead.
But then the horror, so much more, of this one, who had been trapped there for ten thousand years or more. Peaceful, yet still alive.
If, indeed, she did live.
And, of course, I carved jewels, representations of rubies and diamonds, reflecting the real ones the princess decided should be her grave gifts—either living or not alive. Were not they hers by right? After all, when whatever had happened, the mountains risen, volcanoes spewed, earthquakes shaken—however long ago—had not the Ice Maiden then been engulfed in jewels?
Then one more scene, a month after she came to us:
That’s when the ghouls attacked!
• • •
It was an evening when breezes were warming, when mist had thickened over the river, only beginning to flow away in the wind. That’s when the cry came: “Ghouls! Ghouls to north of us!”
It was unusual. The Old City’s ruins were mainly to west and south, discounting those east across the river, below the New City. Thus, ghouls of the Old City rarely attacked from north.
Nevertheless, here they were, streaming across the wall, blue ghoul-lights flickering. Whistling in triumph as, surprised, the wall guards fell back before them. Ghouls rarely came from the north. Slashing with sharpened claws as others rallied, I among them, to push them back to where they had come from. But there were too many.
They overran the tomb of the Ice Maiden, she lying on its bier, as she had been since we first had moved her there. We tried to push them back, rallying once again.
Then a voice called out: “Halt!”
This was a ghoul’s voice. The voice of their chieftain.
“Something is wrong here!” the ghouls’ leader shouted. “This corpse is not dead. It is a living woman—and yet it lies in a tomb. Yet it does not move–”
It was time enough for us. More guards had arrived, and helped by the confusion among the ghouls themselves, we were now able to force the death-eaters back, beyond the Tombs’ north wall. Finally we rested, guards talking among themselves.
“You heard the ghouls’ chief?”
“He said she is not dead. Ghouls, by their own law, cannot eat the living—that is why they stopped.”
“You mean we didn’t beat them?”
“Oh, no, we beat them too, but it was like now they had no motivation. They no longer wanted her—it was her they apparently came for—but when they discovered that she was still living why should they keep fighting?”
Why indeed—and the ghouls were experts in who lived and who was dead.
Still there were murmurs: “Then why is she in a tomb?”
• • •
The curator tried to solve the mystery. Of her flesh’s coolness. “The soul,” he explained, “is a complex thing, a thing of more than a single aspect. Its z’étoile, over all—its ‘star of guidance’—in some ways determines its other parts’ workings. Its will, its psyche, those things that make it unique, that is, the person whose soul it is part of. For the body, also, is part of a person.
“Its animus—that which inhabits the flesh and gives to it motion. And halts its corruption. These are other portions as well, all held together in delicate balance. When one is living, held, too, with the body.”
“And when one is dead?” a listener questioned.
“And when one dies, that balance is broken. A ‘glue,’ if you like, has released its hold on these parts, letting all go their ways—some all at once, some lingering for some time. Some leaving, perhaps, never, as in those cases the Ancients called ‘hauntings’ in legends that have come down over the ages. Yet this is no ghost-soul–”
“It is no illusion?”
“It is no illusion. Her flesh is solid—you have felt it for yourself. And, moreover, its coolness is proof as well. For, you must realize, she is very ancient. If not hundreds, as the jewel-miner claimed, she has lain sealed for at least tens of centuries. Cut off from the Earth and its air and its light from before the Emperor’s time, and from before that. Before the migration. Before the sun’s first signs of reddening and heating, of swellings and poisons—and even before that.
“Our own bodies, you see, have slowly mutated, subtly changed over the generations to cope with the increased heat that we must live with. Each new birth more able than its parents to survive—though even then there h
ave been limitations. And will be yet more to come. In daytime, for instance, the light is still too poisoned to live long under without our chadors, our sunhats and day-masks.
“And even then we crave shade … ”
Even then we crave shade—I, of all, knew this. I who had spent my day hours, scarcely sleeping, when she had first come, helping guard her body. Even with its coolness, natural to it as the curator now explained, residual to it from when she had been more truly alive, tens of thousands of years past. Somehow the delicate balance that was her soul sealing that coolness in, just as she had been so long sealed, herself, in her cave of jewels. Her z’étoile, her “star of fate,” somehow determining it.
And was it then my z’étoile that I should love her?
For love her I did, as my carvings reflected—continue to demonstrate, for even now I am not finished with them. And even in daytime, exhausted as I was from working throughout the night, I continued to sit by her marbled bier, shaded by the roof I had built over her, helping with others to keep rats and bugs from her. Predators from her corpse—until we realized that these, too, avoided her, just as the ghouls had after they had learned. Even death-beetles, who are not fastidious, left her to lie in rest.
As if she only slept.
Her body a-sheen with perspiration during the day’s heat, just as a bottle shaded within a crypt sweats when brought out to light. I washed it with my own hands, making myself her personal carer, the rounds of her buttocks, the slight grooving under the bulbousness of her breasts. She did not lie flat, you see, but propped with pillows is if just reclining. The coolness between her thighs—even in daylight.
I brushed her hair, softly curled, pink-gleaming in the sun’s first light of morning, re-arranging it around her shoulders. Behind her supple arms. These I crossed on her chest, above her navel. Cleaning that latter, too, with my own fingers, delicately brushing dust from her soft belly, the dimples above her hips.
These others let me do, seeing my love for her. Some, for that, pitied me!
All this I carved as well—all this her history, and if I was then a part of her life as well, then that I showed also. And others who loved her, who came from New City.
Because there was gossip—especially after the ghouls had disdained her. The corpse-cart men carried it—the corpse-train masters, their pullers, their own guards. Much like riverwomen, it was the business of corpse-train masters to give and get gossip, to pass and receive news. It was their endeavor to know who were dying. The wealth of their families. What might be received for a carrying-over, what grave gifts might be wanted, what share retained by them.
What mourners to be gathered—what gifts to find there too.
But this was different. This was true gossip, of one who was not dead. Or, at least, refused to die.
And people came, men chiefly, from the New City, to see this new wonder. They did, as the curator and the boat-princess had predicted, bring with them offerings, to see to the Ice Maiden’s mourning if needed, but, before they left, often tried to revive her.
At the very least, to feel her flesh’s coolness. To know it with their own hands.
Some women came as well.
And then the next day, her body having re-absorbed moisture from night’s early misting, from river fogs in the dawn, once more I cleaned the Ice Maiden’s perfect form, tracing out with dampened sponges the hand-paths that others had left on her taut skin. Making all pure, again.
This could not all last forever, of course. The curator measured it first—the slightest, almost imperceptible warming. I asked him about this, if she would indeed warm.
“Yes,” he answered, “but gradually. Slowly. Perhaps taking as much as a thousand more years, as she would have anyway given enough time, even within her cave. And what will happen then, I do not know—whether this heating will revive her, make of her again a fully living woman. Or whether it will become too great a shock to her, to the precarious balance she maintains between death and life now–”
“And if she should warm more quickly?” I asked.
“I do not know,” he said.
And yet we all hoped she would be revived, and not too slowly either. Whether by gradually absorbing the air’s heat or some other force on her—I had myself, that one time, tried to kiss her. As in the old stories, to bring her back that way.
• • •
Then something new happened.
I first heard the rumor from a train master—a corpse-train master I sometimes shared gossip with. “Tam,” he said, “there is a woman in the New City whose name is Caldera. A very rich woman. She offered me a bribe last night to bring her here to the Tombs, with her servants, but not with a corpse. To bring her here herself.”
I nodded. “Yes?”
“I asked her why. Ostensibly it is to visit her father’s grave, to pay respect to him. She will bring gifts for that too. But her real reason is to see the Ice Maiden.”
“So?” I asked. “That is, mostly men come to see her beauty—you know that, Train Master, as well as I do. But some women come as well. Some are fellow artists, they see in her a subject for painting, or sculpture, or poetry. Some are driven by curiosity–”
“Yes,” the train master said. “But you should know this as well—that Caldera is unmarried. It is rumored of her that she is still searching for one who she might love, and who might return love to her in equal kind. She has had many men–”
“Yes?” I prompted.
“Yet none, thus far, have been satisfactory.”
“I see,” I said. And yet what was the harm of it? Others came to love the Ice Maiden too, just as I did myself. My own love purer, perhaps, than some of theirs, but what would be the harm? As for her being a woman, well that seemed no real problem either—there were legends, after all, of women lovers. Of Flute and Harp, the musicians who myth had it even were able to control the weather. Of one named Melantha who once sought to build a man, but ending up finding that no man could please her.
But I had been warned, and so, the next evening, I was not surprised when Caldera appeared, her day chador around her, another chadored, veiled figure behind her.
“You are Tam?” she asked me.
I bowed. “Yes,” I answered.
“Good,” she said. “The train driver told me that you would meet me here. You know what I require?”
I nodded. “Yes.” I took her up the hill by the river that we had built the Ice Maiden’s tomb on. I had arranged it with the curator that no one else would be there—that Caldera could do as she wished alone. Though others might watch.
She turned to the figure that she had brought with her: “What do you think?” she asked.
I heard a snarl. The first pushed its hood back—it was the ghoul chieftain, the one who had attacked before when the Ice Maiden had first come! That had been turned away.
“What is this trick?” it hissed. “This is no corpse here. I’ve seen it before, and there is no death-stink on it. It is a living thing—one I may not touch!”
“Thank you,” Caldera said, nodding to others who had followed after her. “You may take this ghoul back to its home in the Old City. Give it a gift there. It has told me what I wished to find out.”
She turned to me again. “You must understand,” she said, “that most rumors one hears turn out to be untrue. One cannot be too careful.”
She turned to the Ice Maiden, then, and opened her chador thrusting it toward me. I took it in my hands.
She stood there gazing on ice-white beauty, she completely nude now as well—I nearly dropped the burden she’d handed me! She was as beautiful—almost more beautiful—almost as if the Ice Maiden’s twin. Yet her opposite also!
Or not quite her opposite!
I tried to think—I, an artist—how I might describe it. Her hair a bronze-color, brash like the daytime sun high in late afternoon, contrasting as she bent over the Ice Maiden with that one’s delicate dawn-pink, long, gentle curls. Her hair cut, straight, off
half-way below shoulder-length. That way displaying the curve of her lower back, the slimness of waist, the swell of her buttocks and thighs as she mounted the Ice Maiden’s supine form.
The scarlet of her lips as she kissed, mouth to mouth.
She turned to me once more, her eyes flashing jade fire, her skin golden tan on the Ice Maiden’s silver sheen. “It is a woman, I think,
who can do this best.”
As I saw, then, the Ice Maiden’s eyes open!
I cannot describe it. I mean, not the love-making—one has seen that before. Not just the interplay of gold and pearl-white limbs, hair copper and ruby-pink. Lips red and scarlet. One has seen all this, or else can imagine it.
But the Ice Maiden’s face—shock and then ecstasy! As if wrenched from a sleep, as if a dream come true. What she had awaited ten thousand and more years to–
A shout behind me: “Tam, watch yourself! Get back!”
The curator’s voice—I felt hands on my shoulder. Pulling me, I transfixed. Not able yet to move.
“Tam!”
Then I realized. The screaming. The moans. The flame!
“It is a thing the Ancients spoke of,” the curator whispered. “A rare thing to be sure: A body spontaneously combusting.
“It is what I feared–”
• • •
Or was it just that? A body too suddenly overheated.
Or did I glimpse something else, a thing of soul as well? Of that moment when all was transcended—the soul burst apart, but in rhapsody. Not just death.
That which I still try to render in marble. Oh, yes, I still work on—the tomb is not finished.
Caldera helped us—she had, herself, survived, though it took her some minutes to wake from her own trance. She swept with her own hands the Ice Maiden’s ashes into a neat pile, then motioned to me to give her the day-mask she’d handed to me to hold with her chador.
“So she will remember,” she said, placing it, face down, on top of the ashes. “You must put a stone on this—now. So nothing will be blown away in the dawn wind with the sun’s rising, you understand me?”
