Songs of Love & Death

8Probably Zehrendir had walked for a couple of miles before he began to sense that the appalling pain of loss no longer dragged on him. Once a weight of lead, his heart was nearly weightless. And so he paused, and cast about in his thoughts after Amba, actually searching for the misery and hurt which were all she had left him of herself. They had become his familiars too, his constant companions. Where had they taken themselves? Then he saw again, in retrospect, an old woman who had said to him, “Attend.” And a mirror floating through shadow to night, to show him the face of Amba. And after this, he beheld himself as a fisherman, clad in the body of the dead. And he played over in his mind the music of his meeting with the other woman, there on the farther shore. The woman who was not Amba, but was Amba. She for whom Amba had been, by him, mistaken.

Memory showed how she had slid into the lake and disappeared like the setting star. In his former time, that star had never existed, but here he had known and named it, just as he had come to know, and might have named, everything. He considered again the deluge, and the city. But he did not weep, not now.

Just then, from the hilltop, light blazed out like a funeral pyre, brighter than a sun.

Part-blinded, he stared at it. So many miracles had happened, one more was only a commonplace. In any event, the fire dimmed, and then faded altogether. Following which, there was left only the night to walk through, toward the summit of the hill.

ABOVE THE WATER, the night was hot. Zaeli shook her hair and kicked off her soaking shoes. Her clothes were torn, and clung to her.

The landmass was dark again now. It was not the mainland shore. Some island perhaps?

Something had risen in the east. It cast her shadow in front of her. At first, she took the glowing round for a belated flybus, but it was not moving. Its light guided her up the slope, and began to chalk in a phantom architecture above her. It was a ruin, large and complex, strung over with what must be a tangle of vines.

She thought, He said, one region of the city rises from the lake—

They were not vines but water weeds that roped through the colonnades, twisted in the lattices. A soft-water shell shone like a pearl in the corner of a glassless window slender as a dagger. A tall man stood on the other side.

FOR A WHILE, having reached the ruined building, Zehrendir paced about in it. A quiet, almost reverential tinkling and dripping of spent waters filled it. In spots, he identified features, still recognizable, that he had seen often: a statue of a maiden with an urn, an arch of elephs, an avenue where gold studs, green now as limes, had been set into the stone.

This palace was, or had been, his—long, long before.

When the third moon, tiny as the tidal star, had flown high in the east, he saw through a narrow window the figure of a woman, standing out on the hill.

8

SPENT WATERS TRICKLING and tinkling, and vines that are water weeds, and green gold, and substance passed into ruin, and a risen moon, lighting the way like a lamp.

Both of them, standing in the echoing hall, speak at once.

“You,” she says.

“You,” he says.

They hesitate. And attempt a second introduction.

“I—” she says.

“I—” he says.

Then they become silent again, and wait there with some yards of stone and iridescent shade between them.

Each knows the other completely. Returned into their own young bodies, the stress and marvel of this is terrifying. And since she has learned to speak his language, and he hers, he is speaking her language and she is speaking his language, even inside their heads.

Then he speaks to her in his own tongue, which she understands. She will answer him in hers, and he will understand that.

“You are not Amba. I know this.”

“I’m not Amba. And you—are not Angelo.”

“My name is Zehrendir.”

“Zaeli,” she says, “my name is Zaeli.”

They look at each other, have never looked anywhere else.

The water trickles like silver, like history or time, trickles away through the stone fingers of the columns. The little moon burns like a gold mirror through the broken roof.

In its spotlight, he laughs suddenly. She knows his laugh, although never until now has she heard it. Which makes her laugh in turn. Her laugh is Amba’s, it is the laugh Amba never gave him, and which now Zaeli does.

It is simple to cross the space. The moon is already doing it—Look—it’s easy—do you see? They cross the space. Their hands touch. They swim together as if beneath deep water, until every surface of their flesh and hair, their lips, is magnetized to contact. They breathe each other like oxygen. They are each other’s air and earth, water and fire. And some other element too, which is profoundly nameless. They are each other’s world.