Under/Above the Water
PART ONE—TIME AND TIDE
GOING TO THE lake. Either in her head, or in the soft, hovering drone of the flybus, she heard this refrain, repeating over and over.
Zaeli refused to look around. All these people smiling at or talking to each other, or reading guide books, or gazing earnestly, hungrily, from the windows at the exquisite ghosts of ruins littered all over the tawny folds and featherings of landscape.
All she can see behind her eyes, whether closed or open, is Angelo. All she can hear, apart from the tinnitus of the
No one can help her. She is a fool to have listened to the relentlessly caring advice which, eventually, has brought her here, into such a different environment, across so many miles and through so much time. And tomorrow it will bring her to shores of the second lake, that lies waiting in those palace-scattered, ancient hills the colors of tobacco, sand, and turquoise.
THERE WAS A halt around midday at a picturesque roadhouse, a copy of palatial architecture done small, and perched on a high terrace. The view was spectacular.
Below lay forests now. The vastly tall and slender trees, with their smoky foliage, were alight with the fiery flickerings of indigenous parrots and
Everyone kept saying how sensational it all was. And it was. There was a lot of discussion of legends, and questioning of the guides. That far-off peak, shaped rather like an uprisen serpent, was that Mt. Sirrimir, where the mythic Prince Naran had shot his arrows up into the third moon, killed it, and brought it crashing down—dead—onto the land?
And how long before they reached the lake to which they were going? Would they be there by sunset?
Naturally. Of course.
The Lake of Loss, that was its name.
Zaeli felt a sudden hot rage, perhaps fresh camouflage for the never-ending pain.
But she gave no outward sign. She leaned on the railing and gazed miles away over the trees. An intermittent upland wind lifted strands of her hair and blew it across her green eyes. The hair was coppery red. She brushed it away with her hand and the hair seemed alien to her, and then the hand did too, and when she rested it again on the rail it lay there, her hand, pale and slim, like a separate object she had set down, which could now scurry off on its own.
Going to the lake. It would not matter. It, like her hair and her hand, and herself, and everything, could mean nothing. She would simply have visited and seen a bit of water, and listened obediently to the local legends. And then she could catch the returning flybus and go back. Back to the place called home. Home, where the heart was not.
“It will have done you good.”
Someone really was speaking to her now, and Zaeli glanced at them distractedly. It was time to move on. To the Lake of Loss.
THE BUS GLIDED smoothly out between the hills just as a crimson solar disc dropped among the mountains. The upper air turned purple, and beneath it, as if held in an enormous bowl, a purple mirror copied every shade and aspect of the sky. It showed how darkness came, too, with the rising on it of a pair of lavender moons, and the tidal star Sunev, pinned in the east like a boiling diamond.
Every person on the bus stared downward now into the mirror of the lake, as they crossed above it, and saw the spangle of their own lighted passing.
But that was all. Reflections, and night: surface. The depths were not revealed.
Staring also, Zaeli told herself that the lake was made only of solid glass. Nothing was below the surface. Nothing was in it. Neither living, nor dead.
WHEN THE GOLDEN bug cruised by above, heading toward the farther shore, the fisherman looked up at it a moment. Such vehicles made very little noise, and sometimes their lights enticed the fish to rise.
He doubted, this fisherman, that the passengers would notice him, or his little wooden insect of a boat, tucked in as they still were against the eastern beach. But soon the sail was up. Propelled by a night wind, the boat ghosted off through the water, breaking the mirrored star and moons with her silver net
FROM THE HOTELS by the lakeshore came a loud and mingled noise. Many diverse musics played and many unmatched voices, human and mechanical, were raised. The multitude of windows and entrances glowed, sending twisted corkscrews of brightness down into the water, trailing away like glowworms into the hills. The largest remaining area of the ruined city stood up there. But it had left its markers too all down the shore, and all about the groups of elegant contemporary hotels, thousand-year-old columns rose, as well as broken stairs or walls or lattices. No hotel garden did not possess at least one fragment of the ruins. Adjacently, ancient trees lifted. Lit lanterns delicately swayed in the low wind from the lake.
Zaeli had walked down to and then about a mile along the pebble-cluttered beach. At this time of year, the