Songs of Love & Death

Above, the stars burned fierce as foreign neons, Sunev-la most of all. The moons were pale by comparison. He checked for fish, none had been tempted. His thoughts strayed to the legend of the shattered moon and the realm beneath the lake. He drifted asleep as he mulled the legends over, and in his sleep, without shock or pain, he died.

But his body lay there lifeless for only a few moments before a blade of phosphorescence seemed to sheer up out of the water. It flowed across the idle net. It sank into the body of the fisherman.

In that way, Zehrendir too was born again old, but he was born so under the peacock-purple of the night.

Like Zaeli, he found that to have an elderly body was a startling handicap. But Zehrendir was both a romantic and a pragmatist. He knew that he must utilize what lay to hand. Nor did he lose himself in the fisherman. The fisherman had not been any sort of mage, had not had that special talent and inclination. To inhabit his brain and absorb its memories and contents was an education rather than an obscuration of self.

Nevertheless, Zehrendir proceeded without haste. He tried out the new-old body for its fitness and acumen, and found how well it could reef the sail and employ the oars of the boat. Unlike the fisherman however, Zehrendir cut a hole in the net. He had accepted that he had been transferred into a place which, from the knowledge left behind in the fisherman’s brain, he knew to be centuries into the future.

At some stage of rowing toward the western shore, Zehrendir also accepted the legendary remnants, which were all the fisherman had known, of the cataclysm. Then he ceased to row. It was both too dark on the lake, and too idiosyncratically lit by moons and tidal star, to see if he wept. But the boat meandered some while, and the fish swam in and out of the broken net, like blue and silver tears.

Eventually, hours on, with Zehrendir its motive force, the old man’s body rowed in to the shore, where glints and splinters of hotel lights zigzagged on the star-pulled tide.

He had known where she would be, the woman whose face he had seen. He had known she would be here beside the lake. He knew she was not Amba—and knew that she was. She was the one that he had mistaken Amba for. Zehrendir, yet a king and a young man inside the swathing of the fisherman’s flesh, felt a surge of ecstatic laughter at this divine and cosmic jest. There was no trepidation in him. It was rather as if a strangler’s cord had been cut from his throat. He had rowed the last of the distance very fast, and the old arms ached and gnawed, but what did he care?

He let go the oars, and stood up, raising his hand in a traditional greeting which had stayed current through time. He spoke in Ameren, since the fisherman had had a good command of it. It was her language. “Good evening,” he said.

“Hello,” she said, like a sleepwalker. “Did you catch many fish?”

He knew that she had not yet seen him within the lake. Time had been bent to another’s will, to the will of something frightening in its power—and yet benign.

“None,” he replied, with the gravity of a riotous joy concealed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Oh, my beloved, thought Zehrendir the king, be sorry for nothing. For here you are before me, your hair like crimson copper and scarlet amber, your skin like ivory, your eyes the color of a leaf in rain. And somehow now—now you will be mine and I yours. Though I have no knowledge how, or why.

Even her strange foreign dress did not concern him, let alone her youth contrasted to his present old age.

Even the gulf of history and deluge between them.

He showed her the empty net. For Zehrendir, it was all at once the symbol of an endless possibility. “I fish,” he said, “for what the lake may give up from the world beneath.” He did not understand quite what he meant by that. Or he did. For what the lake gave up was himself, and her too. And here the opened net of destiny had captured them both.

Not long after this, he sees her recognize him. Her face fills with such despair and hurt he knows it is her loss of him which has torn her to pieces, and now stands between them.

“Let me take you across the lake. … There is a spot where you can see all the way down to the city. I have seen it very often,” he adds, glorying in the cunning of a lie which is also a truth, for truly he has seen the city, in his past.

Then she denies him. He respectfully turns away. This is flirtatious etiquette, like that of a dance. He is aware that she will instantly call him back, and she does.

“How much should I pay you?”

“I am rich,” he tells her. He is. He has nothing now, and so has everything.