Songs of Love & Death

“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 and they were trying to revive him. He had swum out and then—no, not suicide. He had a heart attack, they said, even though he was so young. Someone had seen and got him in to shore. But he died. He died on the beach in front of me. I saw him, just before they put him into the medicare. His eyes were open. They were dark as this lake, this one, not the one where he died. His eyes were darker—or less dark—than yours. I can’t decide. Isn’t that odd?”

Zaeli stopped talking, and after all lowered her hand into the water, which was wet and cold, and curiously electric.