Songs of Love & Death

She said quietly to the water, “My life was so restricted and dull. Only love made it worth anything, even though he never loved me, only I loved him. But it’s no good, is it, to go on loving somebody dead? Not this way. Being in love with the dead. But it doesn’t end. Love, I mean. Life… ends.”

And then the fisherman said, as quietly as she, “Look now, just there. Look. And you’ll see the palace shining under the lake.”

3

LIKE A CLIFF of apricot marble, the great city stood on the plain.

On all sides, hills rose away from it, and to the west, the mountains towered into a sky that was, by day, the color of the iris of the eye in the fan of a peacock, and, by night, the color of that eye’s purple pupil.

The hills, save where palaces and temples occupied them—the overspill of the city with its gardens and planted forests—were bare. The mountains were arid. But the valley plain was rich with trees and shrubs, grasses and grains, fruits and flowers. Water courses coiled through the valley. They formed pools and tiny pleasure lakes, and fountains in glades.

To this idyllic spot, he had brought his bride-to-be.

He gave her a suite of rooms that ran the entire length of his palace, a complex and miniature palace itself, three floors in height and having, it was said, two hundred and seventy windows, each like a long dagger of purest glass. In the topmost floor of the suite was a private garden open to the sky. Vines, and the slenderest and lightest trees, that bore blue blossoms and golden fruits, surrounded an oval pool where swam blue and silver fish. Here in the evenings the king would visit his betrothed among her maidens, who were all deliriously charmed by him, for he was dark and handsome and gracious. The young woman who was to be his queen, however, came from the paler races beyond the mountains. Her skin was light in tone, and her hair like the gem-resin for which they named her: amber.

Zehrendir the king was very fine, and so was she. They seemed made for each other by higher powers. And certainly, he found himself in love with her from the moment he saw her. But, naturally, Amba was already much included in the life of Zehrendir’s court, and in that way she met often too with his half-brother, Naran. Naran was soon smitten by Amba. While she, who had looked at her intended husband with admiration and liking, but no particular passion, gradually became infatuated by Naran instead.

One night, all caution abandoned, these two, with a small company of Naran’s followers, slipped out in disguise from the palace and the valley, and rode their chariots away across the hills toward the western mountain-wall.

Here then, Amba—who Naran had not stolen at all, or at least only her heart—lived as Naran’s lover under the shelter of the serpent peak Sirrimir, which then had another appearance.

The story that Naran next shot down the third moon by means of arrows and sorcery and vast rage was quite untrue. He had no need to rage, only perhaps to feel guilt. And maybe he had never felt that either. Some alien unknown element caused the moon to crash on the world. Conceivably it was not a moon at all, but some awful voyager off its course, a meteorite or a comet or a piece of other debris from space. Yet strike it did. And then the waters upsurged, as do the waters of a pond when a stone is thrown into it, and drowned the city. But Amba never heard of this, nor Naran. For the mountains too were riven, and in the tumult, both he and she died.

BETWEEN THE LOSS of Amba and the deluge, there had been a space of time, quite long—or not long at all, perhaps merely seeming so to Zehrendir the king. During this intermission the city continued to bloom and prosper, and he himself went about his duties with faultless attention. He regularized laws, performed every ritual, he visited among his people and listened patiently to any who required either his help or his council, doing always his best. And the best of this king was, they said, much better than that of any other man. This was natural to him. He could not lose the knack, though he had lost everything else.

But not even the city, or its people, could comfort him, or make him happy.

Nothing could. One song which later passed into legends about him told how one day he had stood alone in some private room and said aloud to its walls: “My friends are gone.” Amba had offered a sweet friendliness at least instead of her love, and until the day Naran met Amba, Naran also had been a true friend to Zehrendir—they were, in fact, his only real friends. It was not that Zehrendir had come to hate either of them, let alone the city he had created and which, till that time had been like his friend too, thrilling and heartening him with its loveliness. But all these friends were lost to him forever, Amba, Naran, the city also, because it had ceased to mean anything beyond sheer duty. It was as if all of them had died in a single night.