Songs of Love & Death

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 ten months before, or a thousand years in the future—leaned or will lean down, to gaze into the waters of the Lake of Loss.

“It is Amba,” says the king.

That is all he says.

The crone sighs. The body and memory and magical power, which are now are all she humanly is, have noted something else. A terrible catastrophe hangs above the city. And her sorcery knows that it is already too late to warn of it. There is no time left—she has been too long upon her journey. To empty the huge metropolis would be impossible; the panic and clamor would themselves slaughter in droves. And still the moon—or the meteorite or the comet or the piece of space debris—will crash down and the flood rise up. She does not even think they would believe her.

Only he is capable of believing her, the king, Zehrendir, and only in one way, since he has seen Amba’s face looking in at him from the mirror.

How still Zehrendir sits in the white chair! He seems less outwardly collected now than static. His head stays tilted up, his eyes wide to meet the eyes of the one he had loved, and whom he had mistaken for one who would love him. It had not occurred to him she was no longer Amba and had never been, but instead was a woman from a future a hundred decades off in the history of the world, when he and his love and the falling moon and the flood are only dim, muddled legends.

The body of the crone steps jerkily forward. It is more of an automaton now, because the consciousness of Zaeli is returning quickly, beating and beating its wings to get through.

Like a sort of wooden puppet badly moved, the crone goes to the king and stares into the night of his eyes. Though young and strong, he is quite dead. She, of all things, can recognize the state.

She sadly speaks a single phrase. “My love,” she says, still in the language of the city, “my Angelo.”

Then the outer shell of her, physical flesh and bone, drops to the floor and lies there, still at last. Not for her the unstoppable cataclysm to come, nor for him. And for the doomed city, there will be one last night of peace—but even this is to be marred. For in another hour, they will learn that their king is dead.

THE FISHERMAN HAD watched the flying bug of the bus cruise by high overhead. Such transports did not make enough noise to disturb the fish. Their lights might even entice a catch to the surface.

He had doubted, this man, that the bus passengers would take any note of him. Soon after, he raised the sail, and the boat, propelled by the vital night breeze, ran along the water, trailing the silver net.

He was very old, the fisherman. Tough still, and never sick, but he had seen so much of life and time, and how they came and went away. He could remember back before the foreigners first traveled here in any numbers, with their sugar-cake hotels and airborne buses. He did not mind them, but sometimes the thought of them tired him. He felt that tiredness tonight. It was not unpleasant. For a while he sat quietly, thinking of his wife, who had been dead now seven years. He missed her, and the son they had lost. But he had never supposed they would not, all three, meet again.