Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  The greatest of all the Emperors of Necromancy is, of course, Nagash, the Supreme Lord of Death and the architect of the Great Awakening. He resides now in Nagashizzar, the Cursed Pit, but he was born in Khemri, the most splendid of the ancient cities of Nehekhara, where he raised the Tomb Kings from their long sleep to serve as his disciples in the Great Crusade Against the Living.

  The Tomb Kings are more numerous and more various than the living probably imagine, and the fiefdoms they have established within the barren circle whose circumference the Marshes of Madness, the Black Tower and the city of Quatar are just as numerous and just as various. There is no denying that the greater number of them are not at all philosophically inclined, and by no means intellectually blessed, but there are a few Tomb Kings who take a greater interest than their fellows in matters philosophical, and there is one among them who takes such matters seriously enough to ask questions which are deemed slightly heretical by the majority of his peers. He is the Lord of the Necropolis of Zelebzel, and his name is Cimejez.

  Cimejez is by no means an unviolent creature, and he has certainly played his part in the Great Crusade. Because Zelebzel is located in the far west of the Land of the Dead, in the desert borderlands which separate that land from Araby, his armies have abundant opportunities to meet their counterparts. It is by no means unknown for the rulers of Araby to raise armies with which to mount crusades of their own, and Zelebzel has borne the brunt of more than one such incursion. Nagash has never had any cause to complain about the zeal with which Cimejez has conducted his own expeditions or repelled those sent against him. This undoubtedly helps to explain why the Supreme Lord of Death has always been tolerant of the occasional eccentricities of his follower—but it must also be the case that Nagash approves, if only slightly, of Cimejez’s attempts to build better bridges between the worlds of Life and Death.

  One of Cimejez’s eccentricities is the taking of prisoners, which armies of the dead are usually disinclined to do. The dead have little need of living slaves, and no interest at all in sexual congress with the living, so there is no obvious reason for Lords of Death to make captives of their adversaries. Cimejez makes an exception because he is a philosopher, and likes to debate philosophy with the living—although it is, admittedly, rare that he can find one among a hundred randomly-accumulated prisoners who is capable, despite his terror, of taking part in a half-way competent argument. Imagine his delight, therefore, when he returned from one of his raids into territory held by Araby with a famous vizier named Amaimon, who had been travelling in a diplomatic camel-train from one emirate to another, charged with a mission of the utmost delicacy.

  Cimejez took some delight in displaying to his unwilling visitor the treasures of Zelebzel, which had been accumulated by the best-informed tomb-robbers in history. He had decorated sarcophagi by the score, statues and paintings by the hundred, and thousands of gem-encrusted objects moulded in gold, silver and brass. It was another of the Tomb King’s eccentricities to accumulate such useless objects, which most of the Lords of Death disdained to possess on the grounds that they had risen far above such worldly concerns.

  “Is there a museum to match this in all the world?” Cimejez asked Amaimon, grinning his rictus smile. “Has any living man a collection to rival its grandeur?”

  “I have not seen or heard of one,” Amaimon told him. “But I think the living take more pleasure in the works of art they possess.”

  “Why, certainly,” said Cimejez. “Pleasure is a prerogative of the living, which is greatly over-rated by them. Do you not think, though, that there is a certain perversity in taking pleasure in such things as gems, statues and painted images? Do you not think that the dead have a purer and more refined notion of their quality and value?”

  “Purer and more refined?” Amaimon echoed. “Well, perhaps—in the sense that skeletons are purer for the lack of flesh, and wraiths more refined for the lack of substance. Gems are inert, and I suppose there is a certain crucial lack of activity in statues and paintings too—but look at that marble statue of a dancing-girl. I will believe, if you demand it of me, that your kind might have a better appreciation of its whiteness and its stillness, but I cannot believe that you can appreciate the significance of its pose, or the impression it gives of graceful movement. Yes, it is a single moment of frozen time, like death itself; but captured in that moment is the exuberant flow of life with which its human model was gifted. As a bleached white thing yourself, Lord Cimejez, you might feel a particular kinship with the statue’s marble substance, but only a living man can see the dance that has crystallized within it.”

  “Do you think that the dead do not understand dancing?” Cimejez replied, astonished. “I can assure you that we do. Indeed, I can assure you that my kind are the only ones who understand the true nature and artistry of the dance.”

  Had Amaimon been a less well-travelled man he might not have understood the import of this statement, but he had been sent far and wide as an emissary of more than one emir. He had even visited the Empire, and therefore knew of the fashion within the Empire for depicting the Totentanz or Dance of Death, in which death appears in the symbolic form of a skeleton—a skeleton not unlike Lord Cimejez of Zelebzel, in fact—leading a train of dancers, each one holding the hand of the next.

  The point of this representation, Amaimon knew, was to stress the common cause of all humanity against the ravages of fate, by including in the train a wide range of social types: men and women; young and old; rich and poor; knights and priests; merchants and soldiers; scholars and serving-maids. It had not previously occurred to Amaimon that there might actually be dancing in the Land of the Dead—who, after all, would be led away in a Totentanz in such a place as Zelebzel?—but he wondered now whether the image might have some representational value above and beyond the merely symbolic?

  On the other hand, it was quite possible that Cimejez was talking about something far more like the kind of dancing that the living enjoyed. In either case, Amaimon thought, surely the Lord of Death had to be wrong about the superiority of the dead, whether as dancers or as connoisseurs of the art.

  “I refuse to believe that the dead can dance as well as the living,” Amaimon said to the Tomb King. “They have neither the grace nor the ability to generate the artistic meanings of which a human dancer is capable. I would stake my life on it.”

  “Your life has already been staked and lost,” Cimejez pointed out, “but I do not mind a contest to settle the manner and timing of its delivery.”

  “Alas,” said Amaimon, “I have no champion to carry forward my cause. There was no dancing-girl among the prisoners your soldiers took, although there were a few musicians.”

  “Must it be a girl?” asked Cimejez.

  “I think so,” the vizier replied.

  “Then you must tell me where to find the one you want. I shall send an army to fetch her.”

  Amaimon had not expected this, and he certainly did not want to be the cause of yet another army of the dead descending upon a town in Araby, so he thought hard and fast about what to do next. Eventually, he said: “That will not be necessary. Fortunately, I have a certain skill in magic, which I have always been loath to use because I have seen what the exercise of magic tends to do to the faces and souls of men. Given that my life is already forfeit to you, I see no harm in making an exception. I am prepared to bring this very statue to life for an hour, in order that the artistry that went into its making may be liberated in performance. Have you a champion here to set against her?”

  “Oh yes,” said Cimejez. “There is not another Lord of Death who could say so, but I have a champion of that kind.”

  “But how are we to judge the result?” Amaimon said, dubiously. “Can you provide an impartial jury?”

  “That will not be easy,” Cimejez admitted. “We might achieve neutrality by taking an equal number of living humans from among the prisoners seized with you and dead ones from among the ranks of my soldiers, but what
if a deciding vote were needed? We would need at least one juror with a foot in each camp, so to speak—and if we had one such, we could probably dispense with the rest. Since you have been generous enough to use your own magic to give my statue an hour of life, however, I ought to match your offer by using some of mine, so this is what I propose. Will you accept your own champion as the judge, if I make provision to give her the choice between life and death when your hour expires? If I can offer her a choice between a continuation of the life that you have restored to her, or the opportunity to become a dancer of the same kind as the rival against which she has been pitted, will you accept her decision as an indubitable judgment of superiority?”

  Amaimon thought about this offer for a moment or two, but it seemed to him that he would have the advantage, so he agreed. “And what am I to stake, given that my fate is already in your hands?” he asked.

  “That is easy enough,” Cimejez said. “Should you win, I will let the dancer go, so that the life she has reclaimed can be spent among her own kind. Should you lose, you will become my vizier, and serve me—both before and after your death—as cleverly and as loyally as you have served any living emir.”

  Amaimon thought about that too, but again it seemed to be a very good bargain, given that he was already lost. He was already among the dead, and would soon be dead himself, so what else could he hope for but a position of honour and privilege among the dead?

  “You are very generous, my Lord,” he said. “I am glad to accept.”

  “The dead do not reckon generosity in quite the same terms as the living,” Cimejez told him, “but it is good that you are satisfied. If you will work your magic while I summon my court, we can begin the contest as soon as you are ready.”

  The dancing girl’s name was Celome. She told Amaimon, when his metamorphic magic had reincarnated her in place of the statue whose model she had been, and her initial shock had waned somewhat, that she had danced in the court of King Luvah of Chemosh, in the long-gone days when Nehekhara had been an empire of the living, before its fertile fields had turned to arid desert.

  Celome had never been taught to dance; hers was a spontaneous act born of inspiration and nurtured by a natural process of growth. She had danced because dancing was the most natural expression of her vitality, and had danced well enough to win the favour of a king who was known throughout ancient Nehekhara as a true connoisseur of that art.

  Amaimon was delighted to hear all this. He explained to Celome that she must take part in a competition against a dancer representing the world of the dead—which some called the world of the undead—but that Celome herself would have the privilege of judging the winner.

  “I have heard that serpentine lamias are fine dancers,” she said, dubiously. “I heard, too, that one of King Luvah’s courtiers was visited in his dreams by a dancing succubus which charmed the vital fluids from his body. But the real risk is that I might be matched against a wraith who was a famous dancer while she was alive and is now even lighter on her feet.”

  “That is a possibility,” Amaimon conceded, “but the whole point of the wager is to pit the dance of life against the dance of death. I do not think that Cimejez will pick a champion on the grounds that he or she pleased a human audience while alive. You might be surprised by the nature of your rival—but you will be the judge. You have only to desire to continue to be yourself, to live in Araby as you once lived in Chemosh.”

  “I cannot imagine wishing anything different,” Celome told him. “I am a dancer through and through; it is what I am.”

  “Good,” said Amaimon.

  He was not so pleased by the musicians who had been captured along with him, whose skills were very ordinary indeed and made worse by their abject terror at their predicament, but Celome thought they would be adequate to her needs. She picked out a zither-player, a cymbalist and a drummer, and Amaimon tried to impress upon them the importance of their task.

  “Let us show these reanimated corpses what it means to be alive,” he said to the four of them, as they made ready to take the floor. “Let us demonstrate our love of life. If you can dance as I believe you can, Celome, you might remind them what they have lost, and reintroduce these paradoxical beings to the bittersweetness of honest regret. That is my hope, at least.”

  “Mine too,” she said, “if there is life to be won.” She had found a costume in one of the treasure-chests in Cimejez’s museum, which seemed to her appropriate to her purpose. The instrumentalists swore that they would do their best to assist her.

  Cimejez had assembled a huge audience for the contest, which he distributed around the great hall of his palace. All the living prisoners recently taken by his army were brought from their cells, and all the soldiers which had taken part in the campaign against them were there too, along with the Lord of Death’s ministers, household servants and junior sorcerers.

  “You are the challenger,” Cimejez said to Amaimon. “Your champion must take the first turn.”

  “Go to it,” said Amaimon to Celome. “Make the dead ashamed of their condition, and remind them what it was to be alive.”

  And that is what Celome did. She threw herself into the arena and performed the legendary Dance of the Seven Veils.

  The vulgar, who have only heard rumour of it, mistakenly think of the Dance of the Seven Veils as a mere striptease, but it is far more than that, for each of the seven veils has its own symbolism and each ritual removal is part of a progress from misery to ecstasy. Each garment represents a curse; as each one is discarded, the dancer advances towards a uniquely joyous kind of freedom.

  The zither-player, the cymbalist and the drummer had all played the music of the Dance of the Seven Veils before, albeit for performances of a slightly less exalted and terrifying nature. They contrived to get the notes in the right order, and Celome communicated some of her own inspiration to them, so that they improved markedly as the performance progressed.

  The first curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, is hunger—which, for the purpose of the dance, includes and subsumes thirst. The first phase of Celome’s interpretation was, therefore, the embodiment in body-language of that most fundamental of appetites which shapes the successful quest of the new-born infant for a mother’s milk and a mother’s love.

  The second curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, is cold, so the second phase of Celome’s version was the embodiment in movement of the need for clothing and shelter and of its eventual achievement.

  The third curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, is disease—which, for the purpose of the Dance of the Seven Veils, also embraces injury—so the third phase of Celome’s performance comprised a symbolic celebration of the power of the body to heal itself, and the wisdom of physicians.

  The fourth curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, is loneliness, so the fourth phase of Celome’s mime was a hymn of praise to society and amity, and the productive rewards of co-operative labour.

  The fifth curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, is loss, so the fifth phase of Celome’s rendition was a demonstration of the agony of grief, which gave way by degrees to the triumph of resolution and the recognition of all the legacies which the dead convey to the living.

  The sixth curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, is childlessness, so the sixth phase—the longest so far—of Celome’s extravaganza was a celebration of sexual love, marriage and parenthood.

  Amaimon watched all these phases with the critical eye of a connoisseur, and found little to criticise. It was easy enough to see that Celome had not been trained in the conventional devices of Arabic dancing, but it was equally obvious that her spontaneity and exuberance made up for the omission. She was authentically gifted, and her appeal to the emotions of her audience was no less powerful because it lacked a certain refinement and sophistication. Whate
ver imperfection remained in the playing of her accompanists was easily ignored; the dancer was the only centre of attention, the sole contestant. The living members of the audience followed her with their eyes, utterly captivated by her every movement.

  On the other hand, Amaimon could see that the dead were quite unimpressed. Many of the skeletons, most of the zombies and all of the ghouls in the crowd had two good eyes, while the wraiths had more glittering stares than their inhabiting souls could ever have manifested in the flesh. They could all see well enough what Celome was doing, and even the notorious stupidity of death could not have prevented them from understanding the greater part of it—but Amaimon could see that they were unresponsive. They must have been reminded of life, but seemingly not in any way that made them regret its loss. They did not seem to care at all.

  Perhaps, Amaimon thought, that was because they could not care—but he was reluctant to believe it. Dead or not, they had been raised to action, subjected to motive force. Given that they had the capacity to respond to motive force, they ought to have the capacity to respond to the art of the dance. The problem was to reach and activate that potential.

  There was still one phase of the dance to be completed, and Amaimon knew that whatever hope he had rested on that—but he suspected that the final phase might seem a trifle offensive to the audience gathered in the palace of Zelebzel, because the final curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven Veils, was death itself: not the death of others, as per the fifth curse, but the death of the individual. The final act of Celome’s drama was supposed to consist of a heroic defence of creative achievement and a defiant statement of the fact that although a body and mind might be annihilated, the legacy of their attainments could not.

  Celome did as well as anyone in her situation could have done. The last and longest phase of the dancing-girl’s masterpiece was a celebration of dancing itself, its joy and its meaning; its consummation and climax was the removal of the final veil, and the revelation of the human being beneath, utterly triumphant over every single one of the many indignities which cruel fate had heaped upon her kind. Even her accompanists excelled themselves.