Songs of Love & Death

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 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.”