Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-crossed Love

1

GOING TO THE lake. Either in her head, or in the soft, hovering drone of the flybus, she heard this refrain, repeating over and over. Going to the lake—was someone singing it?

Zaeli refused to look around. All these people smiling at or talking to each other, or reading guide books, or gazing earnestly, hungrily, from the windows at the exquisite ghosts of ruins littered all over the tawny folds and featherings of landscape.

But all I can see—

All she can see behind her eyes, whether closed or open, is Angelo. All she can hear, apart from the tinnitus of the Going to the lake refrain, is his voice, dark and beautiful; what it said that evening four years ago, when they were, both of them, twenty-three years old. There in that far distant, ultramodern city that lay along the shores of that other lake. And then, of course, in sequence, she will see the other lake too, the first lake, glimmering in the darkness, and all the spiteful lights of the people hurriedly gathered there. How can it still stab into her like this? She must have reseen it, reheard it all so many times now, hundreds, thousands. Sometimes she also dreams it. The pain never eases. It never can.

No one can help her. She is a fool to have listened to the relentlessly caring advice which, eventually, has brought her here, into such a different environment, across so many miles and through so much time. And tomorrow it will bring her to shores of the second lake, that lies waiting in those palace-scattered, ancient hills the colors of tobacco, sand, and turquoise.

THERE WAS A halt around midday at a picturesque roadhouse, a copy of palatial architecture done small, and perched on a high terrace. The view was spectacular.

Below lay forests now. The vastly tall and slender trees, with their smoky foliage, were alight with the fiery flickerings of indigenous parrots and fonds-oiseaux. At the horizon, the mountains had appeared, melting out of the blue-green sky.

Everyone kept saying how sensational it all was. And it was. There was a lot of discussion of legends, and questioning of the guides. That far-off peak, shaped rather like an uprisen serpent, was that Mt. Sirrimir, where the mythic Prince Naran had shot his arrows up into the third moon, killed it, and brought it crashing down—dead—onto the land?

And how long before they reached the lake to which they were going? Would they be there by sunset?

Naturally. Of course.

The Lake of Loss, that was its name.

Zaeli felt a sudden hot rage, perhaps fresh camouflage for the never-ending pain.

But she gave no outward sign. She leaned on the railing and gazed miles away over the trees. An intermittent upland wind lifted strands of her hair and blew it across her green eyes. The hair was coppery red. She brushed it away with her hand and the hair seemed alien to her, and then the hand did too, and when she rested it again on the rail it lay there, her hand, pale and slim, like a separate object she had set down, which could now scurry off on its own.

Going to the lake. It would not matter. It, like her hair and her hand, and herself, and everything, could mean nothing. She would simply have visited and seen a bit of water, and listened obediently to the local legends. And then she could catch the returning flybus and go back. Back to the place called home. Home, where the heart was not.

You see, I did what you suggested. Another lake. I tried my best.

“It will have done you good.”

Yes, thank you, she would answer, politely.

Someone really was speaking to her now, and Zaeli glanced at them distractedly. It was time to move on. To the Lake of Loss.

THE BUS GLIDED smoothly out between the hills just as a crimson solar disc dropped among the mountains. The upper air turned purple, and beneath it, as if held in an enormous bowl, a purple mirror copied every shade and aspect of the sky. It showed how darkness came, too, with the rising on it of a pair of lavender moons, and the tidal star Sunev, pinned in the east like a boiling diamond.

Every person on the bus stared downward now into the mirror of the lake, as they crossed above it, and saw the spangle of their own lighted passing.

But that was all. Reflections, and night: surface. The depths were not revealed.

Staring also, Zaeli told herself that the lake was made only of solid glass. Nothing was below the surface. Nothing was in it. Neither living, nor dead.

WHEN THE GOLDEN bug cruised by above, heading toward the farther shore, the fisherman looked up at it a moment. Such vehicles made very little noise, and sometimes their lights enticed the fish to rise.

He doubted, this fisherman, that the passengers would notice him, or his little wooden insect of a boat, tucked in as they still were against the eastern beach. But soon the sail was up. Propelled by a night wind, the boat ghosted off through the water, breaking the mirrored star and moons with her silver net.

2

FROM THE HOTELS by the lakeshore came a loud and mingled noise. Many diverse musics played and many unmatched voices, human and mechanical, were raised. The multitude of windows and entrances glowed, sending twisted corkscrews of brightness down into the water, trailing away like glowworms into the hills. The largest remaining area of the ruined city stood up there. But it had left its markers too all down the shore, and all about the groups of elegant contemporary hotels, thousand-year-old columns rose, as well as broken stairs or walls or lattices. No hotel garden did not possess at least one fragment of the ruins. Adjacently, ancient trees lifted. Lit lanterns delicately swayed in the low wind from the lake.

Zaeli had walked down to and then about a mile along the pebble-cluttered beach. At this time of year, the lake was tidal. Its ripples had lapped up as far as they would climb tonight. In an hour, perhaps, it would begin a melodious retreat.

Though lights still glinted at the water’s edge, the hotel complex seemed a long way off. The omnipresence of the ruins had grown dominant.

Inevitably so. For once the greater part of the city had been here—there, down there, beneath the lake itself.

She had stayed in the hotel for dinner, and then a lecture on the legends of the city. The guides gave this, with the assistance of a recreationist docudrama shown on two wide screens.

Then the rest of the party, and the guides, went smugly off to the bar. I don’t belong with these others, she had thought, I never have or will—Zaeli had found a door and stepped out into the night.

For a while, she stood at the water’s brink. Overhead, all the stars had burst their shells. Blazing Sunev was now halfway over to the west, pulling at the lake as it went. One moon had hidden behind the other.

Something was moving, out on the water.

Zaeli looked to see what it was. A fishing boat, its sail now furled, a man rowing strongly in to shore. He was a local, obviously, and would not be like the efficient, and probably falsely friendly, staff who worked in the hotels. An indigenous man, oldish, yet toughened, wound in a tight-belted robe, his lower face swathed in the masking scarf that men affected here more often than women.

Zaeli decided that she had better leave the beach, go back to the hotel—her proper place, a sort of zoo built to contain the foreigners, where the local people could be amused by them but not have to put up with them too much.

Abruptly, she felt sullen. She had begun to feel a little better. Not happy, not secure, but less stifled out here, alone, listening to the pulse of the water. But now her mood had darkened again. She should go back—

But just then the boat, surprising her slightly with its abrupt fleetness, nosed in on the shingle. The man stood up and raised one hand in a traditionally courteous greeting. “Good evening,” he said. He spoke Ameren, but almost everybody did, and it would be a facet of his courtesy to extend the foreign woman’s language to her.

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

“None,” he answered gravely. He had a deep and musical voice, well-pitched and calm.

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah no,” he said. And oddly, from the creasing movement of the scarf, she saw that he smiled. “I never even try now.”

Zaeli said nothing. He was an eccentric, or he did not speak Ameren as well as he thought. Or she had misheard him.

But then, he drew up one end of the net his boat had trailed. It was empty. He told her, “I fish for other things. What the lake may give up from the world beneath.”

He must mean the drowned city.

“Is it really there?” she asked. “The city?” How childish I sound. Presumably it was, or something was. And did everyone here believe the legend? How, when Prince Naran had cloven and brought down the third moon, waters under the earth had erupted to meet it, and, falling back, covered the metropolis, leaving only its outer suburbs along the hills above the water.

But the fisherman simply looked at her. He had dark eyes, blacker than the sky, they seemed. And she thought of Angelo. His face, his body, his life were entirely there before her, standing between her and the fisherman, and between her and all things. It was always worse when it came like this, the memory, the despair, after some brief and so very hard-won interval of respite.

The fisherman was watching her. He would not be blind to the alteration of her face. He might think she was ill, consigned to die in a few months, or that she had recently lost a child, or a parent, or a lover. That something loved beyond reason had, without reason, been wrenched away from her.

She said, “Well, I must go—”

And he spoke over her immediately. “Let me take you across the lake in my boat. There is a special spot where you can see down into the water, all the way to the city. I have seen it very often, and in the past I have sometimes shown others, visitors like yourself.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I must—”

“That is up to you.” And he made again a most respectful, almost a courtly, gesture, one now that indicated his departure, and turned to leave.

She thought. He might take me out on the lake and drown me. Is that what I’m scared of? Or rape and drown me? What do I care? What does anything matter? Angelo won’t come back out of the water, not this water, not the way he came back then. Not like that—

“Wait!” she called.

The fisherman paused.

“How much should I pay you?” she said.

Then he turned again and the scarf creased again for his smile.

“No payment. I am rich. Please, the boat is ready. Let us go.”

“BECAUSE OF THE star, do you see,” he said, as they drifted over the water. “Sunev-la, who draws the tide. The star is only present for a month twice a year, but at those seasons the tide may flow strangely, near the center of the lake. Have they told you of this?”

“They told me the legend,” she answered. She did not watch him, but gazed down into the black glass of the lake. She resisted the urge to trail her hand in the water. He did not row now, nor had he reset the sail. Somehow the water itself—or the tide, or the star—drew the boat forward. And therefore helped to retain for Zaeli the illusion that the fluid of the lake was solid glass—or polished obsidian—the ripples a fake. Impenetrable. She could swim, of course. But she had not done so since that evening long ago and far away.

He said, “One region of the city rises from the lake, that is the legend. Not all of the city, by no means. It is the palace of the king, they say, that rises. Did they tell you his name? He was called Zehrendir, and Naran was his brother. But there was no longer a bond between them, for they had quarreled over a woman. She was betrothed to Zehrendir but, or so the legend says, Naran stole her.”

“Oh, yes,” said Zaeli, absently.

She could see nothing in the water but darkness. And a faint reflection of her own paleness, and the pallor of the fisherman’s clothing: two ghosts.

“When the moon fell, the waters covered the city, and Amba—this was her name, the woman both Naran and Zehrendir had wanted—knowing her deserted betrothed had drowned, concealed herself in a high cave of the mountains. There she stayed, and although a streamlet ran through the cave, she would drink none of it. She died of thirst, because the king had died of too much water. So they say.”

Zaeli raised her eyes after all and stared at him. What was it in his voice? But the laval silver star was now behind his head, and she found it difficult to make out his already mostly hidden face.

For a bitter moment, tears pushed at her eyes, wanting to pour into them and through. But she had not been able to cry during the past four years, and could not now. Another kind of thirst, maybe.

Instead, words flowed out of her mouth and she listened in astonished shock as she told him, the unknown fisherman: “I was in love once, when I was young. He was… he used to be unhappy. I didn’t—I never got to know him well—he scarcely saw me—I didn’t know him well enough to know why he was so unhappy. He never allowed me near enough. But I think it was—as much in his mind as in his life. And one afternoon I met him in the dreary place where we both worked, and he started to talk to me, only I could barely hear him, and I had to keep asking him what he had said, and then he said ‘I hate them.’ And I said who—was it the people he worked with? And he said ‘I hate my friends. I hate them. I hate my friends.’ And then he walked away.”

Her voice was low and intense. “They say you can’t love someone you don’t know. But you can. Oh, you can. I wondered if I was included in his hatred, but then, we had never even been friends. That evening I went to the lake—there was a lake there, too. I went because I had to go somewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking of him or what he’d said—the sort of thing a child says, but he was twenty-three. And when I got to the beach it was getting dark and there were a lot of extra lights, and a medical vehicle. And he—his name was Angelo—was lying on the ground and they were trying to revive him. He had swum out and then—no, not suicide. He had a heart attack, they said, even though he was so young. Someone had seen and got him in to shore. But he died. He died on the beach in front of me. I saw him, just before they put him into the medicare. His eyes were open. They were dark as this lake, this one, not the one where he died. His eyes were darker—or less dark—than yours. I can’t decide. Isn’t that odd?”

Zaeli stopped talking, and after all lowered her hand into the water, which was wet and cold, and curiously electric.

She said quietly to the water, “My life was so restricted and dull. Only love made it worth anything, even though he never loved me, only I loved him. But it’s no good, is it, to go on loving somebody dead? Not this way. Being in love with the dead. But it doesn’t end. Love, I mean. Life… ends.”

And then the fisherman said, as quietly as she, “Look now, just there. Look. And you’ll see the palace shining under the lake.”

3

LIKE A CLIFF of apricot marble, the great city stood on the plain.

On all sides, hills rose away from it, and to the west, the mountains towered into a sky that was, by day, the color of the iris of the eye in the fan of a peacock, and, by night, the color of that eye’s purple pupil.

The hills, save where palaces and temples occupied them—the overspill of the city with its gardens and planted forests—were bare. The mountains were arid. But the valley plain was rich with trees and shrubs, grasses and grains, fruits and flowers. Water courses coiled through the valley. They formed pools and tiny pleasure lakes, and fountains in glades.

To this idyllic spot, he had brought his bride-to-be.

He gave her a suite of rooms that ran the entire length of his palace, a complex and miniature palace itself, three floors in height and having, it was said, two hundred and seventy windows, each like a long dagger of purest glass. In the topmost floor of the suite was a private garden open to the sky. Vines, and the slenderest and lightest trees, that bore blue blossoms and golden fruits, surrounded an oval pool where swam blue and silver fish. Here in the evenings the king would visit his betrothed among her maidens, who were all deliriously charmed by him, for he was dark and handsome and gracious. The young woman who was to be his queen, however, came from the paler races beyond the mountains. Her skin was light in tone, and her hair like the gem-resin for which they named her: amber.

Zehrendir the king was very fine, and so was she. They seemed made for each other by higher powers. And certainly, he found himself in love with her from the moment he saw her. But, naturally, Amba was already much included in the life of Zehrendir’s court, and in that way she met often too with his half-brother, Naran. Naran was soon smitten by Amba. While she, who had looked at her intended husband with admiration and liking, but no particular passion, gradually became infatuated by Naran instead.

One night, all caution abandoned, these two, with a small company of Naran’s followers, slipped out in disguise from the palace and the valley, and rode their chariots away across the hills toward the western mountain-wall.

Here then, Amba—who Naran had not stolen at all, or at least only her heart—lived as Naran’s lover under the shelter of the serpent peak Sirrimir, which then had another appearance.

The story that Naran next shot down the third moon by means of arrows and sorcery and vast rage was quite untrue. He had no need to rage, only perhaps to feel guilt. And maybe he had never felt that either. Some alien unknown element caused the moon to crash on the world. Conceivably it was not a moon at all, but some awful voyager off its course, a meteorite or a comet or a piece of other debris from space. Yet strike it did. And then the waters upsurged, as do the waters of a pond when a stone is thrown into it, and drowned the city. But Amba never heard of this, nor Naran. For the mountains too were riven, and in the tumult, both he and she died.

BETWEEN THE LOSS of Amba and the deluge, there had been a space of time, quite long—or not long at all, perhaps merely seeming so to Zehrendir the king. During this intermission the city continued to bloom and prosper, and he himself went about his duties with faultless attention. He regularized laws, performed every ritual, he visited among his people and listened patiently to any who required either his help or his council, doing always his best. And the best of this king was, they said, much better than that of any other man. This was natural to him. He could not lose the knack, though he had lost everything else.

But not even the city, or its people, could comfort him, or make him happy.

Nothing could. One song which later passed into legends about him told how one day he had stood alone in some private room and said aloud to its walls: “My friends are gone.” Amba had offered a sweet friendliness at least instead of her love, and until the day Naran met Amba, Naran also had been a true friend to Zehrendir—they were, in fact, his only real friends. It was not that Zehrendir had come to hate either of them, let alone the city he had created and which, till that time had been like his friend too, thrilling and heartening him with its loveliness. But all these friends were lost to him forever, Amba, Naran, the city also, because it had ceased to mean anything beyond sheer duty. It was as if all of them had died in a single night.

Was the flood then—the drowner, the toppler, the destroyer—to be his friend?

4

ONE DAY WAS left before the moonstrike would throw itself into the earth like a fist, sending up a column of blackness and fire. On this penultimate day, an old woman was brought into the court of Zehrendir.

About the fabulous audience chamber, where the king sat in a white chair, people were going up and down. Late sunlight sprinkled in jewelry clusters, and splashing the coats of six tame tigrelouves, it changed them to the color of Amba’s hair…

The day’s business for now was over. Zehrendir sat, apparently serene, as if deep in thought. But all I hear—

All he can hear is the echo of far-off hoofs and wheels retreating, and the single word “loss,” whispered again and again. No one can soothe him. Nothing will ever alter his sadness. This appalling moment, which has already stretched into an eternity, will continue forever unabated.

One of the palace aides approached. Zehrendir dutifully raised his eyes. The man informed his king that a crone had wandered down into the valley. She had said she was gifted with certain magical abilities, and had a message for the king. Now Zehrendir turned his head, and saw an old woman who was as thin as a stick, and muffled from the crown of her head to her skinny feet in veils and scarves. Her eyes could not be seen at all. She looked like a corpse wrapped in garments for its burial or cremation.

Zehrendir had no wish to let her near him, but he felt compassion, for her feet, which, like her hands, were the only things visible of her. They were so old and filthy, and scarred all over, as if, all her days, she had walked barefoot on them across burning rocks, being struck by scorpions that had never quite killed her.

So he beckoned to her. “Good evening, Mother,” said the king to her.

And then, even through the windings of her scarf, he thought he could see a pair of eyes that, despite her evident age, were bright and piercingly green, just as those of Amba had been. It shocked him, this. And he briefly believed that he had now lost his mind, in addition to all else. But of course, green eyes were not unknown, in the west. Had she walked here all that way?

The old woman nodded; perhaps she read his thoughts. After that, she spoke to him in the most inaudible of voices, which only he, he supposed, could hear.

“Attend,” was all she said. The aide had drawn aside, but Zehrendir was well aware that all the court were now always praying anxiously that some supernatural assistance would be sent to heal the king’s dishonor and grief. And that too wounded him, since he wanted happiness for others. Even for Amba and Naran. And this perverse kindness, which he could not help any more than another man could have helped his fury and thirst for revenge, wore him out almost to the same degree as his pain.

The king said to the crone, “Let me ask them to bring you a chair. And some food and drink.”

“My feet are my chairs,” she answered crankily. “I feed on the air. I have nothing; therefore, I have everything. But you,” she said, “have too much, and so are among the poorest in the world.”

“No doubt you’re quite right,” said Zehrendir equably. And he smiled at her, as if she really were his old granny, the one that he had always liked best of his relatives.

When he did this, needless to say, the charm and innocence of his smile showed up, like a lightning flash, every gash that sorrow had carved into his young face. The crone studied this with vast concentration. It transpired that she could see him as no other could. Compared to his hurts, her blighted feet were nothing; they did not trouble themselves, or her. But he was in ribbons and could never mend.

“Attend,” she said again.

Obediently, he waited.

“Lift your head, lord king, and see up there, in the roof above you, how that round mirror is positioned? Yes, exactly there.”

She is insane, poor thing, he thought. There’s no mirror of any sort hung in the ceiling.

But when he looked, he saw there was. It hung directly above him, like a huge drop of water in a bowl, but an upended bowl that did not spill. And as he gazed into it, noting that it seemed to reflect nothing, not even the westering light, it curiously grew quite black, like the blackest glass. Two or three ripples passed across its face.

And then its face held another face, a long distance away, not the king’s face, nor the crone’s—but still, it was one he knew very well.

“Mistakes are made,” said the powdery voice of the crone. “Men and women intuitively look for those they expect to meet on the paths of existence. Sometimes there is no meeting at all. Or worse, much worse, a mistaken meeting. What can be done about these errors? Look up into the water. Look, and you will see your wife, gazing back at you from above the lake, which is yet to come.”

5

AS ZAELI DID as the man told her, as she gazed down into the water, she did not for an instant credit what he had said. Vaguely, it occurred to her that now was the preordained time when he would bash her over the head and then spring on her, or else simply sling her straight over the boat’s side. He might have a lunatic theory that she would be a sacrifice to some lake demon. Or to the ghosts of the drowned king and his people.

But she did not really believe in his violence either. He seemed, rather, mystical, a mage from some uphill village. And he had said he was rich, said it with such modest proud indifference.

The tidal star Sunev, or Sunev-la as he had named it, was now descending between two mountains. Its sidelong light lingered in a vivid mercury trail, interrupted only by the boat’s shadow.

Zaeli thought that the light of the star had dazzled her. Then she saw that the round mirror of gold that had appeared just beyond the vessel, there on the water’s surface, was neither a reflection nor an afterimage. It was really there. It shone up into her face. And staring, suddenly she saw right through it, as if through a lamp-hung tunnel and a medley of luminous lattices and iridescent pillars and lacy, gilded branches, into a golden room.

In the room, which resembled a large golden cave, sat a man who had raised his face to look up at her. His head and shoulders were hooded about by a wave of blue-black hair. He was a man of incredible good-looks, but with strain and torment in his face. It seemed as if he had undergone some recent and unspeakable torture, soon to be repeated.

His image—so familiar and yet so utterly unlike anyone she had ever known—filled Zaeli with a sense of anguish, and of falling. Although she no longer feared being thrown out of the boat, she was sure that to fall down toward him would be both the most fearful depth and the most sublime apex of all chance.

He appeared, very definitely, to see her in turn. Could he see too that she saw him?

His eyes were darker than any night.

A whistling note, hardly audible, wavered through the silence. Perhaps it was only in her head. Or perhaps it was a song that tidal eruptive Sunev sang, as it vanished between the mountain peaks.

Zaeli was half aware she had risen to her feet. As she sprang weightlessly forward, kissed the water with her entire body, passed through its upper skin, paraphrasing the motion of the sinking star, she knew only that she was about to die. She was equally glad and mournful at such a mandatory solution.

6

SHE WAS BORN again old, and lying on her back in a toffee-brown country under a peacock sky. The sun was just beyond its highest station. A black snake was coiled around her right ankle.

Some faint disturbance in the air gave her the peculiar idea that the life force of the body she now occupied had departed only seconds before her own arrival. The driver had left the driving seat. Now she, Zaeli, was in it.

She sat up cautiously. This body, not formerly her own, was an antique, stiff as warped wood.

None of that, not even the snake, upset her. She was not even surprised. A flood of memories also not her own quivered over the old mind’s sky, like a flight of birds. Though she acknowledged them, she did not really need them, Zaeli thought. It was like glancing hurriedly at a map and list of directions that already she had been briefed on.

She got to her feet. At this, the limber snake uncoiled from her. It slid out of sight into a narrow seam in the ground, and Zaeli wondered if the animal was where the former driver of this human vehicle had taken herself. The soul must be, she perhaps foolishly thought, delighted at such new, flexible freedom. For with every step the thin and elderly human body took, it creaked and ached.

On these wrecked feet, she must walk down through the hills toward the city in the valley, and there address a king, showing to him some sorcerous mystery. She would know what to say only when she came into his presence. What must be revealed—and also what must be hidden.

The body of the old woman, dead of ordinary old age for a handful of minutes, then reanimated by Zaeli’s consciousness, started gamely out upon this trek. Zaeli, it was already unfussily absorbing. Gentle as sleep, it soon tidied away her personality behind its own. It would tell her how to place the crablike feet for safety and speed, how to search recesses of the barren land for little wisps of sustenance or water. It would find her shade in which to rest. It knew the route and the rules, and all about the king. And, indeed, it knew the real story of Amba and Naran too, for one dusk many days before, it had watched them fly by in a blaze of chariots, cloaks, and amber-copper hair.

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.

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.

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.

Probably 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.

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.

Then he turned and looked at her, his new wife, just waking from slumbering beside him in the overland sleeper, as the pullcar rattled gruntingly southward.

Outside, the woods were thinning to wide blue fields, while overhead, the blue-pink sky was prettily decorated by birds.

He knew now where he was, just as he knew the language. For a moment he studied her, too, making certain that she, as he, was not entirely bemused.

But she only kneeled up by the window and said, “The sky is always that color. Am I right, Zeh?”

“Yes, Zaeli.”

“How do we know?” she inquired, but then she looked at him, and they moved into each other’s arms, and were, to each other, the flawless completion of all known havens, lands, and states. One exquisite constant in an ever-dismantling chaos.

Over there, some clothes of an inventive cut awaited them. And some luggage lay in its cubby that he, and she too, instinctively recognized. Just as they did the quaint trees and the blue-blossoming fields and the sky like a painting on china. But only as if they had been briefed on such things a few minutes before arrival.

None of this would matter anyway. They knew each other.

“We speak this language now, it seems,” he said, smiling.

“I suppose it will seem less odd quite soon,” she sagely assured him.

“Or more so?”

“Zeh, is kvah coffee? I think it is.”

“Or milk. Or beer…”

They ceased to talk about the kvah.

They had met only recently, and were soon married, in some city to the north.

The train rattled on the hard rails, real as all reality.

It was carrying them home, to her tall old house by the blue and ever-tidal lake. With every second, they remembered more—and forgot more, too. Already they had almost forgotten their former lives, those other things they had lost, since both heart and mind had been refilled to the brim. They were changing smoothly into those people that now they were. This now was the reality, and everything else, any other lives, quite likely some sort of dream. This was real: two lovers going homeward to a lakeshore, while behind the painted china sky, the stars crossed unseen.