Songs of Love and Death

Part-blinded, he stared at it. So many miracles had happened, one more was only a commonplace. In any event, the fire dimmed, and then faded altogether. Following which, there was left only the night to walk through, toward the summit of the hill.

ABOVE THE WATER, the night was hot. Zaeli shook her hair and kicked off her soaking shoes. Her clothes were torn, and clung to her.

The landmass was dark again now. It was not the mainland shore. Some island perhaps?

Something had risen in the east. It cast her shadow in front of her. At first, she took the glowing round for a belated flybus, but it was not moving. Its light guided her up the slope, and began to chalk in a phantom architecture above her. It was a ruin, large and complex, strung over with what must be a tangle of vines.

She thought, He said, one region of the city rises from the lake—

They were not vines but water weeds that roped through the colonnades, twisted in the lattices. A soft- water shell shone like a pearl in the corner of a glassless window slender as a dagger. A tall man stood on the other side.

FOR A WHILE, having reached the ruined building, Zehrendir paced about in it. A quiet, almost reverential tinkling and dripping of spent waters filled it. In spots, he identified features, still recognizable, that he had seen often: a statue of a maiden with an urn, an arch of elephs, an avenue where gold studs, green now as limes, had been set into the stone.

This palace was, or had been, his—long, long before.

When the third moon, tiny as the tidal star, had flown high in the east, he saw through a narrow window the figure of a woman, standing out on the hill.

8

SPENT WATERS TRICKLING and tinkling, and vines that are water weeds, and green gold, and substance passed into ruin, and a risen moon, lighting the way like a lamp.

Both of them, standing in the echoing hall, speak at once.

“You,” she says.

“You,” he says.

They hesitate. And attempt a second introduction.

“I—” she says.

“I—” he says.

Then they become silent again, and wait there with some yards of stone and iridescent shade between them.

Each knows the other completely. Returned into their own young bodies, the stress and marvel of this is terrifying. And since she has learned to speak his language, and he hers, he is speaking her language and she is speaking his language, even inside their heads.

Then he speaks to her in his own tongue, which she understands. She will answer him in hers, and he will understand that.

“You are not Amba. I know this.”

“I’m not Amba. And you—are not Angelo.”

“My name is Zehrendir.”

“Zaeli,” she says, “my name is Zaeli.”

They look at each other, have never looked anywhere else.

The water trickles like silver, like history or time, trickles away through the stone fingers of the columns. The little moon burns like a gold mirror through the broken roof.

In its spotlight, he laughs suddenly. She knows his laugh, although never until now has she heard it. Which makes her laugh in turn. Her laugh is Amba’s, it is the laugh Amba never gave him, and which now Zaeli does.

It is simple to cross the space. The moon is already doing it—Look—it’s easy—do you see? They cross the space. Their hands touch. They swim together as if beneath deep water, until every surface of their flesh and hair, their lips, is magnetized to contact. They breathe each other like oxygen. They are each other’s air and earth, water and fire. And some other element too, which is profoundly nameless. They are each other’s world.

Endless slips of time and place. Their bodies lie together on carved beds clouded by silk, or on mattresses lying bare as a bone on a concrete floor. Or on velvet grasses, or on tussocky sands weaponed with shingle. In baths of marble and blue cascade, and shower cubicles in rented rooms with geometric signs on the sensible plastic curtaining.

The feast of this single lovemaking takes in all the uncountable meetings they have missed, been cheated of. Flesh to flesh, whirling through diamonds and thunders, like the leap and fall of suns, the traveling of planets. The true world goes out in the explosive flame, and the little last moon dissolves like an ember.

Then they are lying in the foundation of the dead palace, in utter blackness, and total peace.

But where now? Where next can they go? His world is ended, hers has never begun. They are together, yes. Yet—

For how long?

9

A COUPLE OF hours before morning, some of the tourists who came to the lake on the flybus were still wide-awake. Four of them were wandering along the shore, from which by then the tide had drawn the water off to almost a quarter of a mile. Another, staving off an impending hangover, leaned at an open window high in his lake- facing hotel room, drinking an iced mineral water and stuffing himself with deep breaths. Various others were due to be awakened. Certain of the hotel staff too had stayed deliberately unsleeping and watchful. There were always a few who kept this vigil, either inadvertently or with forethought. Frequently, nothing happened.

Tonight, it did.

To start with, the effect was subtle. A dilute sheen appeared far out, as if another moon were up, or some premature prelude to the dawn. It was not in the sky, however. And as the radiance gradually intensified, morphing from platinum to ormolu and so to a nearly radioactive gold, no one could mistake that the sun, if such it was, was rising deep down inside the vast body of the lake.

The light then sped up, and soon reached a savage climax. This maintained itself. Everything else caught and flared up in its gleam, the shores, the hills, the scattered ruins. Even the distant mountains took on a metallic blush, as they did at sunrise. Only the hotels dulled to insignificance.

The lake was itself by then a composite incandescent marigold, and from it, though the dazzle made them rather hard to define, outcrops of brilliance had seemed to rise up from the water. They resembled buildings of ancient design, sumptuous, with windows that flashed off their own daggered highlights.

Down on the lake-emptied shore, the four astounded tourists heard faint sounds of voices, perhaps of singing and music, a rolling noise of wheels, and once, a catlike purring, too large and close to be possible. The older woman in the party was afterward always sure she had seen a chariot from legend dart through just under the water. The two younger men found a fishing boat that was lying on the pebbles, and tried to row it out over the effulgent firefly soup of the lake. But the light confused them completely. They rowed in a circle and careered, defeated but giggling, back to the beach.

Up in his window, the drunken man was cured by astonishment, and a slight worry that he had gone mad. Not had a glimpse into another dimension, where the deluge had never occurred, and the city lived forever—decidedly not.

As for those who had watched on purpose, they too were thrilled by fear and amazement. But they did not