Songs of Love & Death

Endless slips of time and place. Their bodies lie together on carved beds clouded by silk, or on mattresses lying bare as a bone on a concrete floor. Or on velvet grasses, or on tussocky sands weaponed with shingle. In baths of marble and blue cascade, and shower cubicles in rented rooms with geometric signs on the sensible plastic curtaining.

The feast of this single lovemaking takes in all the uncountable meetings they have missed, been cheated of. Flesh to flesh, whirling through diamonds and thunders, like the leap and fall of suns, the traveling of planets. The true world goes out in the explosive flame, and the little last moon dissolves like an ember.

Then they are lying in the foundation of the dead palace, in utter blackness, and total peace.

But where now? Where next can they go? His world is ended, hers has never begun. They are together, yes. Yet—

For how long?

9

A COUPLE OF hours before morning, some of the tourists who came to the lake on the flybus were still wide-awake. Four of them were wandering along the shore, from which by then the tide had drawn the water off to almost a quarter of a mile. Another, staving off an impending hangover, leaned at an open window high in his lake-facing hotel room, drinking an iced mineral water and stuffing himself with deep breaths. Various others were due to be awakened. Certain of the hotel staff too had stayed deliberately unsleeping and watchful. There were always a few who kept this vigil, either inadvertently or with forethought. Frequently, nothing happened.

Tonight, it did.

To start with, the effect was subtle. A dilute sheen appeared far out, as if another moon were up, or some premature prelude to the dawn. It was not in the sky, however. And as the radiance gradually intensified, morphing from platinum to ormolu and so to a nearly radioactive gold, no one could mistake that the sun, if such it was, was rising deep down inside the vast body of the lake.

The light then sped up, and soon reached a savage climax. This maintained itself. Everything else caught and flared up in its gleam, the shores, the hills, the scattered ruins. Even the distant mountains took on a metallic blush, as they did at sunrise. Only the hotels dulled to insignificance.

The lake was itself by then a composite incandescent marigold, and from it, though the dazzle made them rather hard to define, outcrops of brilliance had seemed to rise up from the water. They resembled buildings of ancient design, sumptuous, with windows that flashed off their own daggered highlights.

Down on the lake-emptied shore, the four astounded tourists heard faint sounds of voices, perhaps of singing and music, a rolling noise of wheels, and once, a catlike purring, too large and close to be possible. The older woman in the party was afterward always sure she had seen a chariot from legend dart through just under the water. The two younger men found a fishing boat that was lying on the pebbles, and tried to row it out over the effulgent firefly soup of the lake. But the light confused them completely. They rowed in a circle and careered, defeated but giggling, back to the beach.

Up in his window, the drunken man was cured by astonishment, and a slight worry that he had gone mad. Not had a glimpse into another dimension, where the deluge had never occurred, and the city lived forever—decidedly not.

As for those who had watched on purpose, they too were thrilled by fear and amazement. But they did not think that they had lost their minds.

....

THE SHOW, AS some of the visitors later referred to it, lasted about twenty minutes by the clocks of the hotels. About thirteen by any accurate and consulted wristwatch.

When finally the light went away, which it did very quickly, merely fluttering and going out like an ordinary candle, or—as someone said—as if an electric connection had fused, there was only absolute blackness briefly muddled with afterimages. And then the east began to kindle legitimately for morning.

By the breakfast hour, almost everybody, apart from the specific watchers, had become or been convinced that the glow in the lake was all a clever trick, put on by the area sponsors. They joked about it all day, and for days and months and years after. They told people back home that they too really should go to see the lake below Sirrimir, the lake with the legend, and look out for this fantastic performance that was laid on for your last night.

But the guides, they professed to have slept all through the event. They always did. They always would.

Meanwhile, the body of the young, red-haired woman was not discovered until it washed up on the noon tide. It seemed that she had gone for a swim, and though so young, her heart had stopped. She had not drowned. 10

“PERHAPS YOU MIGHT care for some kvah, madame, sir?”

“Oh yes, thank you,” he replied, before he knew quite what he said, or where he was. “For both of us, please.”

The attentive voice that had called through the door acquiesced and went away.