Songs of Love and Death

address a king, showing to him some sorcerous mystery. She would know what to say only when she came into his presence. What must be revealed—and also what must be hidden.

The body of the old woman, dead of ordinary old age for a handful of minutes, then reanimated by Zaeli’s consciousness, started gamely out upon this trek. Zaeli, it was already unfussily absorbing. Gentle as sleep, it soon tidied away her personality behind its own. It would tell her how to place the crablike feet for safety and speed, how to search recesses of the barren land for little wisps of sustenance or water. It would find her shade in which to rest. It knew the route and the rules, and all about the king. And, indeed, it knew the real story of Amba and Naran too, for one dusk many days before, it had watched them fly by in a blaze of chariots, cloaks, and amber-copper hair.

Nothing pursues or hunts the crone as she journeys, always descending, with the mountains at her back. Once a wild tigrelouve pads out on to the track. Then the crone, a talented magician in life, speaks to it a soft mantra. And, of course, speaks it in her own language, so in a way, Zaeli speaks it too. The tigrelouve responds by purring and rolling in the dust like a house cat.

If any of Zaeli’s personal awareness remains—and surely there must be some atom left, however repressed—it, like the tigress, is subsumed. She is hypnotized.

So they walk as one to the city, drink from a well and pluck a fruit from a tree to refresh themselves, and go through gates of marble and bronze, and up an avenue paved with flat stones of thirty colors and guarded either side by rearing mythic beasts sculpted from basalt-souci. In a porch of the palace, the old woman confronts a guard, a servant, a steward. But the king’s people have always had, at the king’s behest, a liberal admittance policy. Without undue delay, an aide leads her through the late-afternoon halls, and so to the audience chamber. Here the tame tigresses pay her no attention. But the king says to her, in his dark and musical voice, “Good evening, Mother.”

“Attend,” she tells him. “I have nothing, therefore everything. You are among the poorest in the world.”

“No doubt, quite right,” he answers.

She sees his beauty with her own compassion, as an undead dead wisewoman will, she being already beyond life. And deep within, Zaeli stirs for an agitated instant, a butterfly in the web of her cocoon which will not, quite yet, release her.

But then the crone forms her magic mirror in the ceiling, up there amid the jewels.

And even the trapped butterfly of Zaeli notices her own previous young woman’s face, that ten minutes—or ten months before, or a thousand years in the future—leaned or will lean down, to gaze into the waters of the Lake of Loss.

“It is Amba,” says the king.

That is all he says.

The crone sighs. The body and memory and magical power, which are now are all she humanly is, have noted something else. A terrible catastrophe hangs above the city. And her sorcery knows that it is already too late to warn of it. There is no time left—she has been too long upon her journey. To empty the huge metropolis would be impossible; the panic and clamor would themselves slaughter in droves. And still the moon—or the meteorite or the comet or the piece of space debris—will crash down and the flood rise up. She does not even think they would believe her.

Only he is capable of believing her, the king, Zehrendir, and only in one way, since he has seen Amba’s face looking in at him from the mirror.

How still Zehrendir sits in the white chair! He seems less outwardly collected now than static. His head stays tilted up, his eyes wide to meet the eyes of the one he had loved, and whom he had mistaken for one who would love him. It had not occurred to him she was no longer Amba and had never been, but instead was a woman from a future a hundred decades off in the history of the world, when he and his love and the falling moon and the flood are only dim, muddled legends.

The body of the crone steps jerkily forward. It is more of an automaton now, because the consciousness of Zaeli is returning quickly, beating and beating its wings to get through.

Like a sort of wooden puppet badly moved, the crone goes to the king and stares into the night of his eyes. Though young and strong, he is quite dead. She, of all things, can recognize the state.

She sadly speaks a single phrase. “My love,” she says, still in the language of the city, “my Angelo.”

Then the outer shell of her, physical flesh and bone, drops to the floor and lies there, still at last. Not for her the unstoppable cataclysm to come, nor for him. And for the doomed city, there will be one last night of peace —but even this is to be marred. For in another hour, they will learn that their king is dead.

THE FISHERMAN HAD watched the flying bug of the bus cruise by high overhead. Such transports did not make enough noise to disturb the fish. Their lights might even entice a catch to the surface.

He had doubted, this man, that the bus passengers would take any note of him. Soon after, he raised the sail, and the boat, propelled by the vital night breeze, ran along the water, trailing the silver net.

He was very old, the fisherman. Tough still, and never sick, but he had seen so much of life and time, and how they came and went away. He could remember back before the foreigners first traveled here in any numbers, with their sugar-cake hotels and airborne buses. He did not mind them, but sometimes the thought of them tired him. He felt that tiredness tonight. It was not unpleasant. For a while he sat quietly, thinking of his wife, who had been dead now seven years. He missed her, and the son they had lost. But he had never supposed they would not, all three, meet again.

Above, the stars burned fierce as foreign neons, Sunev-la most of all. The moons were pale by comparison. He checked for fish, none had been tempted. His thoughts strayed to the legend of the shattered moon and the realm beneath the lake. He drifted asleep as he mulled the legends over, and in his sleep, without shock or pain, he died.

But his body lay there lifeless for only a few moments before a blade of phosphorescence seemed to sheer up out of the water. It flowed across the idle net. It sank into the body of the fisherman.

In that way, Zehrendir too was born again old, but he was born so under the peacock-purple of the night.

Like Zaeli, he found that to have an elderly body was a startling handicap. But Zehrendir was both a romantic and a pragmatist. He knew that he must utilize what lay to hand. Nor did he lose himself in the fisherman. The fisherman had not been any sort of mage, had not had that special talent and inclination. To inhabit his brain and absorb its memories and contents was an education rather than an obscuration of self.

Nevertheless, Zehrendir proceeded without haste. He tried out the new-old body for its fitness and acumen, and found how well it could reef the sail and employ the oars of the boat. Unlike the fisherman however, Zehrendir cut a hole in the net. He had accepted that he had been transferred into a place which, from the knowledge left behind in the fisherman’s brain, he knew to be centuries into the future.

At some stage of rowing toward the western shore, Zehrendir also accepted the legendary remnants, which were all the fisherman had known, of the cataclysm. Then he ceased to row. It was both too dark on the lake, and too idiosyncratically lit by moons and tidal star, to see if he wept. But the boat meandered some while, and the fish swam in and out of the broken net, like blue and silver tears.

Eventually, hours on, with Zehrendir its motive force, the old man’s body rowed in to the shore, where glints and splinters of hotel lights zigzagged on the star-pulled tide.

He had known where she would be, the woman whose face he had seen. He had known she would be here beside the lake. He knew she was not Amba—and knew that she was. She was the one that he had mistaken Amba for. Zehrendir, yet a king and a young man inside the swathing of the fisherman’s flesh, felt a surge of ecstatic laughter at this divine and cosmic jest. There was no trepidation in him. It was rather as if a strangler’s cord had been cut from his throat. He had rowed the last of the distance very fast, and the old arms ached and gnawed, but what did he care?

He let go the oars, and stood up, raising his hand in a traditional greeting which had stayed current through time. He spoke in Ameren, since the fisherman had had a good command of it. It was her language. “Good evening,” he said.

“Hello,” she said, like a sleepwalker. “Did you catch many fish?”

He knew that she had not yet seen him within the lake. Time had been bent to another’s will, to the will of