Songs of Love & Death

She enters the boat and he takes them out on to the mirror of the lake, the black-and-silver coffin-lid drawn over his world and under hers, and which must mean everything—and therefore, is nothing at all.

They are both by now distracted, abstracted, but they talk about the legend, and then she talks of the trauma in her own past, the past of this present time. As he attends to her, Zehrendir realizes very well what she has confessed to him. She, as he had done, had mistaken another for the one who would love her, the expected one: himself. But the mistake is over, and here and now are only they.

When the golden round of mirror evolves from the water, Zehrendir watches as she gazes into it. It corresponds to the moment, so long ago, when he had looked up and seen her looking back. When their eyes had met.

He does not attempt to bar her flight into the lake. They have already passed each other, in his time, now again in hers, she sinking like the star, he rising like the star, passing through each other, crossing between past and future, then and now, life and death, nullity and love.

As soon as she vanishes, which really does coincide exactly with the vanishing of Sunev between the mountains, the old man’s body lapses back in the casket of the boat. Just as it had those hours earlier.

The vessel swings about mildly again for a while, then, guided by a wind visible only in its firm effect, skims off toward the eastern shore.

7

In FACT, THE water felt only cool to her.

Which was lucky, as she had discovered herself far out in the lake and swimming strongly, if without any particular urgency. And all this in a sort of half darkness, even though dotted by indefinite lights.

Zaeli stopped swimming. She trod water, and looked around. She could not see the strident glare of the hotels. Above, only one moon loitered, low in the sky. The tidal star had also set; it had been setting, she recalled, when she dropped into the lake.

The currents of the water swirled and furled about her, not causing her any difficulty, more as if trying to persuade her to something…

What had she meant to do? To drown herself? Had she really meant to do that? But they said that, for a good swimmer, it was usually very difficult to drown. It took a lot of self-discipline, and exhaustion.

Zaeli did not feel even slightly tired. In fact, the lake seemed to refresh her.

Then she remembered the boat and the gracious old man, his mostly swathed face and extraordinary eyes. She was certain that he had not pushed or thrown her overboard. Yet he, and the boat, were gone. There was no trace of him.

Had she dreamed him, in some kind of trance, when first she began to swim out from land? Surely not. In her prison of despair, she had never dreamed such things, only of Angelo, his words, his death on the beach.

Very curiously too, Zaeli thought, she did not feel despair, not now. Despair had been her constant and only companion—where was it? It was almost annoying that it was gone.

The last moon turned to a dense purple and seemed to dissolve into the night.

Zaeli’s memory flipped like a leaping fish. She saw the country below the lake: the brown hills, the tigress purring in the dust at her old and distorted feet; the groves and gardens, and the high gates of the palace. She saw herself as then she had been, clothed in the carapace of the old woman. And then the form of her lover, face and body, hair and eyes, a young king in that country, and she heard his voice, known to her, dark and beautiful—

A hill seemed to have risen, just then when she was not looking, over there across the lake. It was blacker than the sky and had blotted up the stars. But in a few moments, every star in the galaxies instead flamed out all through it.

Stupefied, she asked herself if this were the western shoreline, the neon lights of the hotels. But such ignorance passed.

HE RECOGNIZED THE night.

In itself, this was a bizarre realization, for, after all, why should the night, which he had known since infancy, be unrecognizable in the first place?

Yet it was as if he had come a vast way through alien landscapes and unaccustomed scenes, where the moons and stars, even the darkness itself, had other shapes and natures…

And now he knew at last where he was, and the sky and the dark were his familiar associates. Which too was quite at odds with the fact he still did not grasp what place it was where now he found himself.

The darkness grew, for the second moon was setting. The other two must already be down.

By starlight, then, he went on walking—it seemed he must—along the slope of a great hill, and glanced sometimes to his right at the huge, inchoately flickering body of water that lay below, and unfolded itself to the western horizon. He could just make out the mountains beyond. One of them was not as he remembered. It now resembled a serpent risen on its coils.