Songs of Love & Death

When he did this, needless to say, the charm and innocence of his smile showed up, like a lightning flash, every gash that sorrow had carved into his young face. The crone studied this with vast concentration. It transpired that she could see him as no other could. Compared to his hurts, her blighted feet were nothing; they did not trouble themselves, or her. But he was in ribbons and could never mend.

“Attend,” she said again.

Obediently, he waited.

“Lift your head, lord king, and see up there, in the roof above you, how that round mirror is positioned? Yes, exactly there.”

She is insane, poor thing, he thought. There’s no mirror of any sort hung in the ceiling.

But when he looked, he saw there was. It hung directly above him, like a huge drop of water in a bowl, but an upended bowl that did not spill. And as he gazed into it, noting that it seemed to reflect nothing, not even the westering light, it curiously grew quite black, like the blackest glass. Two or three ripples passed across its face.

And then its face held another face, a long distance away, not the king’s face, nor the crone’s—but still, it was one he knew very well.

“Mistakes are made,” said the powdery voice of the crone. “Men and women intuitively look for those they expect to meet on the paths of existence. Sometimes there is no meeting at all. Or worse, much worse, a mistaken meeting. What can be done about these errors? Look up into the water. Look, and you will see your wife, gazing back at you from above the lake, which is yet to come.”

5

AS ZAELI DID as the man told her, as she gazed down into the water, she did not for an instant credit what he had said. Vaguely, it occurred to her that now was the preordained time when he would bash her over the head and then spring on her, or else simply sling her straight over the boat’s side. He might have a lunatic theory that she would be a sacrifice to some lake demon. Or to the ghosts of the drowned king and his people.

But she did not really believe in his violence either. He seemed, rather, mystical, a mage from some uphill village. And he had said he was rich, said it with such modest proud indifference.

The tidal star Sunev, or Sunev-la as he had named it, was now descending between two mountains. Its sidelong light lingered in a vivid mercury trail, interrupted only by the boat’s shadow.

Zaeli thought that the light of the star had dazzled her. Then she saw that the round mirror of gold that had appeared just beyond the vessel, there on the water’s surface, was neither a reflection nor an afterimage. It was really there. It shone up into her face. And staring, suddenly she saw right through it, as if through a lamp-hung tunnel and a medley of luminous lattices and iridescent pillars and lacy, gilded branches, into a golden room.

In the room, which resembled a large golden cave, sat a man who had raised his face to look up at her. His head and shoulders were hooded about by a wave of blue-black hair. He was a man of incredible good-looks, but with strain and torment in his face. It seemed as if he had undergone some recent and unspeakable torture, soon to be repeated.

His image—so familiar and yet so utterly unlike anyone she had ever known—filled Zaeli with a sense of anguish, and of falling. Although she no longer feared being thrown out of the boat, she was sure that to fall down toward him would be both the most fearful depth and the most sublime apex of all chance.

He appeared, very definitely, to see her in turn. Could he see too that she saw him?

His eyes were darker than any night.

A whistling note, hardly audible, wavered through the silence. Perhaps it was only in her head. Or perhaps it was a song that tidal eruptive Sunev sang, as it vanished between the mountain peaks.

Zaeli was half aware she had risen to her feet. As she sprang weightlessly forward, kissed the water with her entire body, passed through its upper skin, paraphrasing the motion of the sinking star, she knew only that she was about to die. She was equally glad and mournful at such a mandatory solution.

PART TWO—HISTORY AS WATER

6

SHE WAS BORN again old, and lying on her back in a toffee-brown country under a peacock sky. The sun was just beyond its highest station. A black snake was coiled around her right ankle.

Some faint disturbance in the air gave her the peculiar idea that the life force of the body she now occupied had departed only seconds before her own arrival. The driver had left the driving seat. Now she, Zaeli, was in it.

She sat up cautiously. This body, not formerly her own, was an antique, stiff as warped wood.

None of that, not even the snake, upset her. She was not even surprised. A flood of memories also not her own quivered over the old mind’s sky, like a flight of birds. Though she acknowledged them, she did not really need them, Zaeli thought. It was like glancing hurriedly at a map and list of directions that already she had been briefed on.

She got to her feet. At this, the limber snake uncoiled from her. It slid out of sight into a narrow seam in the ground, and Zaeli wondered if the animal was where the former driver of this human vehicle had taken herself. The soul must be, she perhaps foolishly thought, delighted at such new, flexible freedom. For with every step the thin and elderly human body took, it creaked and ached.

On these wrecked feet, she must walk down through the hills toward the city in the valley, and there 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