by James Dorr
We climbed the stepped pyramid up to its flat top with its angel statue. We sat at the statue’s feet, he always facing south.
“It is where she would come from, my Avril,” he said. “She would fly in from the south, were she to follow me. Had she attempted to follow me in the storm.”
Then he would weep again, gazing up, sometimes, at the winged statue, comparing its angel wings to those of she who he loved. While I wept, seeing him, I who had loved no one up until this time. Who had been afraid. Hugging him, comforting when he would let me.
Had with my life done nothing!
But one night a cry came up. “Gypsy boat!” was the call. “One of their women ascends the river stairs.”
“It is a boat princess!”
“How can you tell—she is still in her chador?”
“By her bearing. Can’t you see?”
In an instant the curator had me called, both me and Avion who sulked in my tomb-tunnel. Thus we three met her upon the plaza above the River Gate, she and her servants. One bearing a flat basket.
“We have found this,” she said. By her voice alone, both strong and gentle, soft and yet commanding, she was a princess—there was no doubt of that. Possibly even one who was unmarried, who ruled her boat by herself.
She pushed her hood back, and gestured to the man holding the basket.
Slowly he lifted its wicker lid, in the shape of a coffin and nearly a coffin’s length. Inside was a bone—several bones, connected. Curved. Articulated. And from these some feathers, perhaps five or six only, but under the torchlight of the plaza we saw they were moon-white.
“It is some vast bird’s wing,” the woman said, crimson lips parting against her skin’s own white. Her eyes black as midnight.
Avion stepped forward.
“It is Avril’s wing!” he shrieked. “See! See those black spottings! Singed as my own wings were, from the sun on that dawn.
“Then she did follow me!”
The river princess doffed her chador, revealing raven hair, as black as her eyes were. She handed it back to a second servant, then knelt, her silks rustling, semi-transparent, bright and trimmed with gold as riverwomen of high status wore them, slit deep at front and thigh.
She knelt by Avion’s side as he fell, sobbing.
“We found it to north, caught on a snag within the river. As if that whose it was overflew the New City, dazzled, perhaps, by the lights of its towers. It is an easy thing—to lose one’s night vision.”
“Yes.” Avion wept harder.
“We knew not what it was, but we heard gossip. I would emphasize that it was in the water, that therefore its owner died quickly, without pain. Or almost without pain—the river’s toxins cause numbness to come quickly.
“It is a danger we who sail it know well.
“We found no more of it. Things lost in the water are taken quickly. River-snakes. Insects. It is eat or be eaten, as is the world, is it not?”
Avion nodded.
She leaned and she kissed him. She put her arms around him and hugged his head to her breasts, soft and full and round. Burying her own in his feathered hair. Then she rose gracefully, ankle bells jingling, and signed for her chador to be returned to her, concealing again her lithe thighs, her supple waist. Hiding her own hair.
“Know me only as ‘Ana,’” she said, as she turned to leave. “Remember me by that name.”
Ana, or “no-name”—all river princesses’ names end with -an sounds!
Yet she was remembered.
• • •
It was shortly after that Avion died, despite all we could do for him. “It is a matter of metabolism,” the curator explained. “Just as he grew quickly—that is how he was made—so he died quickly. Especially without his mate.”
“Yes,” I said, weeping.
“But he died joyful. The bone Ana brought him—it showed him the love Avril held for him to the last.”
“Yes,” I admitted. It showed the love of his kind. And so we had helped him, when Ana had left, to replace the bone in its wicker casket, and fill flowers and perfumes and incense around it—to drive off the poisons—and add to it mirrors and wide-toothed combs that might have been useful in preening feathers, as if his lost mate were still among the living. We buried it all in a tomb by the south wall, but high enough to command a view of the sky. As if she waited for Avion to fly to her.
And so, when the time came, we added a new grave, a widening of the first, for the winged man who came plunging from the sky. But one more thing happened.
Ana returned to us.
As before there were shouts—river gypsies do burial by water, so rarely do they come here. This time, however, she came with more servants, and baskets of flowers, and beads, and brass coins.
“For grave gifts,” she said, as she stood, her hair blowing in the full wind of dusk. Sheer, scarlet silks pressing over her rounded thighs, softly curved breasts and hips. Slim-waisted, slender. “For both him and Avril.”
Crimson lips still parted.
“Yes,” the curator said. “Yet I would question you.”
Smiling, she nodded.
“What were those bones?” he said.
“A lammergeier’s, I think. A great vulture’s—they live to the north. It was of the right size.”
“I inspected the feathers,” the curator said. “Those few that were with it. I saw the streaked, black markings Avion noted and saw they were natural. Not burn marks at all.”
Ana nodded. “Yes. But they are nearly white.”
“Why?” the curator asked.
“It gave him happiness, did it not?” Ana asked. “More than you were able.” At that I thought I could feel her eyes burn me! “That is, given she was dead—the wind of the storm, after all, was a land wind. We heard the whole story, that this was a nightfall storm. We know the weather, we who sail the river—as do, if they’re willing to realize it, those who fly—that winds at night blow to south, out to the ocean. And so, too, she must have been blown back south herself, to perish, finally, alone on the sea. Whether she spurned his love—whether she yearned for it. This way I gave him cause to think the latter.
“A thing he could live for, as well as to die for.”
The curator smiled. “Yes. Yet you have still not answered.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Why ‘Ana,’ the princess, should do this for him? Who she never knew? Never met until then?” she said.
“Why she brings gifts now?”
The curator nodded.
“I am a riverwoman,” she said. “A river gypsy—you know what they say of us. That we are mutations, perhaps, ourselves. That we are unnatural.
“You know what they say of us princesses’ morals.
“That we are apart, that we stand aloof from others. You know these things they say.”
“Yes,” the curator said.
“In short, we had this in common, Avion and me. And Avril also. Our skin. Our color. Our slimness. Our short lives—we riverwomen, especially, die early. It’s part of our myth.”
“Your beauty as well,” the curator said, bowing. “I think I see your point.”
“Yes,” Ana said. “That we are outsiders, Avril and Avion and me. We are not of your kind, or at least we’re so treated. The one to be kept, exiled, on their island. We to ply the river, viewed with suspicion whenever we come ashore. But on the river, as Avion wished, his kind will be remembered.”
The curator thanked her. “I understand,” he said. And with her permission he called an artist, to sketch her quickly before she left us, that her portrait also would be on the tomb, carved in marble below a rising, winged Avion and Avril, her name beneath her for all river gypsies, simply as “Ana.”
Then, nodding, she turned to him, whispering in his ear, and I strained to hear them. Pointing to where I stood, holding my own tears back—I who could never have loved him as he would wish:
“Yes,” the curator said, “his name will be t
here too.”
V.
APPROACHES TOWARD RECONCILIATION
There was a saying, a tale told to children, even of ghoul-kind, the kind of tale meant to be forgotten when one had grown older: That when a soul is born, a star appears in the heavens. This is its soul-star, its hope, its star of destiny—and it never will fade so long as that soul remains alive.
The Ghoul-Poet remembered. He, too, had been told this.
And now he wondered. Of souls. Of destinies. Psyches and z’étoiles, though ghouls’ minds weren’t good at such abstract concepts. The humans, the ghouls, the river gypsies, all were, of course, humans to some extent. Even the mutants, the natural ones as well as the artificial. The ones that had been made. Were not these souls human also, at base?
And all the legends: Love coursed through the legends, the greater and lesser, of woman and man. Of ghoul. Of gypsy. And yet death was there as well. Overshadowing. Death that outlasted love–
Or did these loves truly transcend death, finally?
He looked above him. With the glare of the New City no longer masking them, he saw the sky was filled with stars.
RAISING THE DEAD
Love, like hope, sometimes soars farther than one can reach.
• • •
SHE HAD THE SMELL of death about her. This we could tell as soon as we saw her, a scent unnatural even here in the Tombs where death surrounds us. We care for the dead here, the dead of New City across the great river; we guard them from those of the ghoul-haunted Old City to west and south of us, blue corpse-lights flickering under a steaming moon, who would despoil them.
But she was still living.
And other things, too, seemed odd about this woman who walked the causeway, from east, to approach us, and pulled the bell-pull once. She wore her black, all-encompassing day-chador although it was still night, her sunhat and day-mask—the mask, we could see, of a beautiful woman. At least we assumed its shaped features were her own, protecting those underneath from the sun’s searing rays should she not find shelter by the dawn’s rising.
Of course we would shelter her, even as we ourselves descend to tomb-tunnels, crypts, and mausolea, to rest with our charges from daylight’s actinic glare. Knowing the dead, you see—we who live with them.
It is our vocation.
And so it was I, Philac, one of the gate guards, who asked, as we let her in: “What brings you here, lady? And why alone like this, and not with the corpse trains that ply our bridge nightly, the last just departed to seek, perhaps, one more load.
“Do you come here to mourn?”
She nodded—then shook her head. “I do not know,” she said. “I come to seek a tomb. That is, a new grave.”
“For one just deceased, then? I understand, yes.” I motioned for one of the other guards to run, to fetch a curator—one who had knowledge of Tomb-lore both past and now—because the fact was I did not understand her. Why had she not dealt with a corpse-train master, whose duty it was to make such arrangements, for digging, for grave gifts, locations, and carvings? The myriad details that accompany a burying.
I then had her come with me into our guards’ quarters, seeing to east the first signs of the sun’s ascent, bloated and poisoned—each new summer hotter than that which preceded it—and saw, as she walked, although limping and tired, that she carried herself as a person of quality. One who had riches.
She spoke with the accent of one who was used to wealth.
And, yet, she walked alone—a practice dangerous for one such as her, especially a lady. Ghouls had been active within the Old City. We saw them from our walls. More active lately than for many weeks now, as if they planned something—a major attack on us?—or otherwise engaged in some great project. Not this night, mind you, but nights just before.
Just two nights past we had seen, as if a star, a light rise from the south—from within the ghoul-lands, reflected as well in the river’s black water. A trick to distract us?
But that was the past, and this night all had seemed calm. I bade her, thus, to take off her travel garb, but she declined to.
I offered her berry wine, fermented from bushes that grow in shadow, to north of tomb-structures. In hollows where mist collects.
“How may I address you, my lady?” I asked her.
Her day-mask still on, she said: “I am Delphinion. As I say, I have come to seek a grave plot. I have come some distance–”
A clatter, then. The curator had arrived!
“Go on,” he said for me, he, too, in day-gear, as he found himself a chair facing across from her.
“As I say, my name is Delphinion. I have been married—my husband was Rhodrar, a man of standing within the New City. A friend of its mayor.”
The curator nodded.
“And I, too, have standing, not just from my marriage. My father was rich as well, and I his only child. He is among those here—I have been to his grave. I have made offerings, as has been proper.”
The curator nodded again. “And now?” he said.
“Ah,” Delphinion said. She loosed her chador below her mask’s neck-piece, to show, within the cleft between her breasts, a flash of diamonds. Of rubies and gold fittings.
“There is more,” she added, “about my person, as you shall see soon enough. All that I wear may be considered a funeral donation.”
“And grave goods as well … ?”
She shrugged, fastening her front again.
“I see,” the curator said. “Then, for your husband … ”
Delphinion nodded. “We were not long married, Rhodrar and I, but for all that we loved each other deeply. Perhaps all the more so. It was, as you scholars say, our z’étoile—our fate-star to do such. It has been explained to me by another, if not a curator of the Tombs like yourself, a scholar nonetheless.
“One from the Old City.”
I and my fellow guards shrank back somewhat at that. Several, instinctively, grasped for their ratpicks, some for their iron-shod staffs—from the ruins to the south?
“Ah,” the curator sighed.
“Yes,” she said. “I have been among the ghouls. I have consulted a Necromancer, one of those who rule them.
“I needed a favor—and, as you’ve seen, I could pay.”
“Go on,” the curator said.
“Rhodrar died just last week. Suddenly. In the day, when we were sleeping. A weak heart, perhaps, or some sickness inherited—there is a legend his family had some river blood in its ancestry, that of the boat-gypsies who die young also. I do not know what caused it.
“But I knew this—that I loved him deeply.
“It was not fair, you understand, that he should die so soon, with us scarcely married. Not even a month by then. I told his parents this when they would have me arrange for his funeral—that I would not give Rhodrar up quite so quickly.
“Instead, I would save him.
“You see, I knew some things taught me by my father, things not every girl learns. About the Old City. Of science and theosophy. Of the parts of the soul–”
“Of the z’étoile, yes,” the curator broke in. “You already mentioned it—that which determines the destinies of us all, but only broadly. You must understand that. It does not force us to paths, but, at most, shows us ways–”
Delphinion answered: “And other soul-parts too, though. Psyche and animus. The first of these which gives form to one’s will—making one who one is. And the second which gives motion. The former which hovers about one’s body, sometimes for weeks and more, until it can be sure that it is truly dead. For one may not be, you know.
“Thus there are Walkings—’ghosts’ as they have sometimes been called by the Ancients. And, sometimes, more than that.
“Corpses re-vitalized.”
“Yes,” the curator said. “But now you speak of myths. Of ancient stories. Of Gombar and his corpse-bride, the Emperor’s daughter, dead three thousand years or more–”
“Brought back by love’s power,” Delphin
ion said.
“And that of science also,” the curator answered. “And other tales as well. But the point is, these are legends. Stories of olden days, when people braved the sun without their flesh blistering. When mutations were still rare. Not like our modern times, when neon searchlights course from the New City. When waste lands surround all. When–”
“Be that as it may be,” Delphinion continued. “Old times or modern times—love has not changed so much. And my love, especially, had yet to be satisfied.
“So I sought one who would—who could save my husband. Yes, a Necromancer. I knew the limits of New City’s scientists. So, Rhodrar’s corpse on my back, already stiffening, I sought relief to the south, passing the plaza where the New City’s poor leave their own dead, sometimes, in that way to appease the ghouls. Clothed as I am clothed now. Crossing the dry stream that marks the border between us and ghoul-lands.
“I passed the ruin-portals, into the Old City, ghoul-lights now surrounding me. Flickering blue corpse-flames.
“I heard the whispers: ‘Why comes she, thus, here?’ ‘Does she bring an offering?’ ‘It cannot be for us—see how well she is dressed. She and the corpse also.’ ‘But, if not for us, who?’
“’Who,’ indeed!
“Thus, at last, they—just as you here have done—fetched one who might know, or who at least might understand the right questions to be asked: Not so much ‘who?’ as ‘why?’
“Or, perhaps, this time ‘how?’
“I was on strange ground: I knew not the answers. Trembling, I waited as one cloaked in shadow approached me, mincingly. Black, indefined—as if clouds of an acid-storm, such as we have in fall. Drifting, you see, that way.
“Not walking, as a man.
“Hooded. Chadored. No face within that hood—only more blackness when, then, the ground shook with voice.
“‘m I what you seek, child? A Necromancer?’
“I nodded, dumbly.
“‘Then come,’ he motioned. I say it was he, although I do not really know that. A ‘he’ or a ‘she’—or ‘it.’ Nor do I know his name. I do not think they have names, such as you and me.
