Songs of Love & Death

lake was tidal. Its ripples had lapped up as far as they would climb tonight. In an hour, perhaps, it would begin a melodious retreat.

Though lights still glinted at the water’s edge, the hotel complex seemed a long way off. The omnipresence of the ruins had grown dominant.

Inevitably so. For once the greater part of the city had been here—there, down there, beneath the lake itself.

She had stayed in the hotel for dinner, and then a lecture on the legends of the city. The guides gave this, with the assistance of a recreationist docudrama shown on two wide screens.

Then the rest of the party, and the guides, went smugly off to the bar. I don’t belong with these others, she had thought, I never have or will—Zaeli had found a door and stepped out into the night.

For a while, she stood at the water’s brink. Overhead, all the stars had burst their shells. Blazing Sunev was now halfway over to the west, pulling at the lake as it went. One moon had hidden behind the other.

Something was moving, out on the water.

Zaeli looked to see what it was. A fishing boat, its sail now furled, a man rowing strongly in to shore. He was a local, obviously, and would not be like the efficient, and probably falsely friendly, staff who worked in the hotels. An indigenous man, oldish, yet toughened, wound in a tight-belted robe, his lower face swathed in the masking scarf that men affected here more often than women.

Zaeli decided that she had better leave the beach, go back to the hotel—her proper place, a sort of zoo built to contain the foreigners, where the local people could be amused by them but not have to put up with them too much.

Abruptly, she felt sullen. She had begun to feel a little better. Not happy, not secure, but less stifled out here, alone, listening to the pulse of the water. But now her mood had darkened again. She should go back—

But just then the boat, surprising her slightly with its abrupt fleetness, nosed in on the shingle. The man stood up and raised one hand in a traditionally courteous greeting. “Good evening,” he said. He spoke Ameren, but almost everybody did, and it would be a facet of his courtesy to extend the foreign woman’s language to her.

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

“None,” he answered gravely. He had a deep and musical voice, well-pitched and calm.

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah no,” he said. And oddly, from the creasing movement of the scarf, she saw that he smiled. “I never even try now.”

Zaeli said nothing. He was an eccentric, or he did not speak Ameren as well as he thought. Or she had misheard him.

But then, he drew up one end of the net his boat had trailed. It was empty. He told her, “I fish for other things. What the lake may give up from the world beneath.”

He must mean the drowned city.

“Is it really there?” she asked. “The city?” How childish I sound. Presumably it was, or something was. And did everyone here believe the legend? How, when Prince Naran had cloven and brought down the third moon, waters under the earth had erupted to meet it, and, falling back, covered the metropolis, leaving only its outer suburbs along the hills above the water.

But the fisherman simply looked at her. He had dark eyes, blacker than the sky, they seemed. And she thought of Angelo. His face, his body, his life were entirely there before her, standing between her and the fisherman, and between her and all things. It was always worse when it came like this, the memory, the despair, after some brief and so very hard-won interval of respite.

The fisherman was watching her. He would not be blind to the alteration of her face. He might think she was ill, consigned to die in a few months, or that she had recently lost a child, or a parent, or a lover. That something loved beyond reason had, without reason, been wrenched away from her.

She said, “Well, I must go—”

And he spoke over her immediately. “Let me take you across the lake in my boat. There is a special spot where you can see down into the water, all the way to the city. I have seen it very often, and in the past I have sometimes shown others, visitors like yourself.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I must—”

“That is up to you.” And he made again a most respectful, almost a courtly, gesture, one now that indicated his departure, and turned to leave.

She thought. He might take me out on the lake and drown me. Is that what I’m scared of? Or rape and drown me? What do I care? What does anything matter? Angelo won’t come back out of the water, not this water, not the way he came back then. Not like that—

“Wait!” she called.

The fisherman paused.

“How much should I pay you?” she said.

Then he turned again and the scarf creased again for his smile.

“No payment. I am rich. Please, the boat is ready. Let us go.”

“BECAUSE OF THE star, do you see,” he said, as they drifted over the water. “Sunev-la, who draws the tide. The star is only present for a month twice a year, but at those seasons the tide may flow strangely, near the center of the lake. Have they told you of this?”

“They told me the legend,” she answered. She did not watch him, but gazed down into the black glass of the lake. She resisted the urge to trail her hand in the water. He did not row now, nor had he reset the sail. Somehow the water itself—or the tide, or the star—drew the boat forward. And therefore helped to retain for Zaeli the illusion that the fluid of the lake was solid glass—or polished obsidian—the ripples a fake. Impenetrable. She could swim, of course. But she had not done so since that evening long ago and far away.

He said, “One region of the city rises from the lake, that is the legend. Not all of the city, by no means. It is the palace of the king, they say, that rises. Did they tell you his name? He was called Zehrendir, and Naran was his brother. But there was no longer a bond between them, for they had quarreled over a woman. She was betrothed to Zehrendir but, or so the legend says, Naran stole her.”

“Oh, yes,” said Zaeli, absently.

She could see nothing in the water but darkness. And a faint reflection of her own paleness, and the pallor of the fisherman’s clothing: two ghosts.

“When the moon fell, the waters covered the city, and Amba—this was her name, the woman both Naran and Zehrendir had wanted—knowing her deserted betrothed had drowned, concealed herself in a high cave of the mountains. There she stayed, and although a streamlet ran through the cave, she would drink none of it. She died of thirst, because the king had died of too much water. So they say.”

Zaeli raised her eyes after all and stared at him. What was it in his voice? But the laval silver star was now behind his head, and she found it difficult to make out his already mostly hidden face.

For a bitter moment, tears pushed at her eyes, wanting to pour into them and through. But she had not been able to cry during the past four years, and could not now. Another kind of thirst, maybe.

Instead, words flowed out of her mouth and she listened in astonished shock as she told him, the unknown fisherman: “I was in love once, when I was young. He was… he used to be unhappy. I didn’t—I never got to know him well—he scarcely saw me—I didn’t know him well enough to know why he was so unhappy. He never allowed me near enough. But I think it was—as much in his mind as in his life. And one afternoon I met him in the dreary place where we both worked, and he started to talk to me, only I could barely hear him, and I had to keep asking him what he had said, and then he said ‘I hate them.’ And I said who—was it the people he worked with? And he said ‘I hate my friends. I hate them. I hate my friends.’ And then he walked away.”

Her voice was low and intense. “They say you can’t love someone you don’t know. But you can. Oh, you can. I wondered if I was included in his hatred, but then, we had never even been friends. That evening I went to the lake—there was a lake there, too. I went because I had to go somewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking of him or what he’d said—the sort of thing a child says, but he was twenty-three. And when I got to the beach it was getting dark and there were a lot of extra lights, and a medical vehicle. And he—his name was Angelo—was lying on the ground