What is love, if it will not find a way … ?
• • •
IT WAS THE BREAKING hour of a night of the full moon—a Lovers’ Moon, some say—that Towli first saw her. There had been a shout from the River Gate, even before the first sliver of moonrise, and that had aroused him with the others, the men and women who lived in the Tombs. Ghouls, was the first thought. Necromancers and robbers of graves—eaters of the dead —who might have circled round from the west, from the marbled wall that protected the Tombs from the ruins of Old City where, even by then, the first sparkles of blue lights were starting to be seen?
But the River Gate, too, was guarded. And even ghouls shunned the heat of daylight, even at twilight, especially as, as the years progressed and the sun waxed larger in the sky, the days grew ever hotter.
No, ghouls, like tomb-dwellers, spent the hours of the actinic sun beneath the ground’s surface—or else, in the Tombs, in mausoleums shared with the most ancient of those that lay there protected by thick stone, or, in the New City, within the confines of tall, ever-lighted buildings or, if upon its streets, sheltered at least beneath brightly striped awnings. And New Citymen used the broad-arched causeway that led to the Bridge Gate to bring in their dead, leaving their offering coins at the gatehouse, then gently jangling the bell-pulls they found there, once for each corpse they had stacked on the tumbrel.
No, this was the River Gate—east and below the New City causeway, practically lapping the dark water’s edge. And rarely used now, especially in summer. And then he saw her.
He, like the others, the ones of his digging crew, had arrived first at the angled, stone staircase that hugged the thick outer wall of their tomb-city. He, a historian during his spare hours, approached the guards first.
“What is it?” he called out, his words nearly lost in the harsh scraping sound of the iron river grating below them being raised.
“Gypsy boat, sir,” the nearest guard answered. “Late for the season.”
Late indeed, Towli thought. During the summer the river was low and stank of accumulations of poisons—the by-blows of magic such as the ghouls used, and others as well. Such boats as were left that plied the broad stream between the Tombs and the New City’s commerce were usually gone north before the end of spring. Even now, though, he could see the shadowed form with its single, pole-hung bow lantern approaching the landing.
And then, a gentler scrape as it was pulled in, guards making its side-lines fast to the dock’s stone cleats.
“Excuse me, sir,” the guard said as he rushed back down to join them, his stout metal-ringed staff held at the ready in case it was some trick.
And then Towli saw her, still cloaked in the rich, dark folds of her day chador, with only the tips of her fingers and the depths of her eyes visible in the already star-spotted twilight. She saw him as well as she mincingly climbed the steep granite steps, her attendants behind her bearing heaped baskets of incense and precious beads, panniers of flowers and chests of etched brass coins.
“Are you the leader here?” she asked him when she had reached the landing at the top and stood before him. Her voice tinkled, bell-like, as if purest silver.
He bowed in the old way, as he had learned from his books of history. “No, my lady,” he answered politely, struggling as he did to leave off his gawking. “Here in the Tombs we have no leaders. Only ourselves who tend the dead because we are born to it, following custom.”
“I see,” she said simply. “But you are a guide, then?”
He bowed again, lower than the first time. “I can be that, yes,” he said—but then his voice caught. She had shaken her hood back by now and he, who had been himself the son of a son of a riverman married into the Tombs, who even now feared to look in mirrors for what he might find there—who knew more than most from his forebears’ memory the deformations that constant exposure to the river’s vapors could cause, the blackened skin, the contorted, torn flesh—saw now … a heat vision!
He thought it a heat vision. Hair of the darkest red cascading from her head as river water. Framing a face of the purest white ivory, of fine carven features. Lips vying with her hair in their rich crimson ….
Lips that still spoke to him: “I am a riverman’s daughter,” she said. “That of a chief among the boat-sailors. Do you understand me?”
“I—I think so,” he stammered.
She nodded, her chador slipping a tiny distance more to reveal a perfect, rounded white shoulder. “My father died when I was scarcely more than an infant,” she continued, “on a sea to the south. I have been told that his corpse was brought here, and, now that I am of age myself, the time has come that I make an offering on his grave.”
And now she smiled, a smile of springtime, of summer’s heat muted by winter’s whiteness. She gestured behind her, to her waiting servants, and spoke once more: “As you can see, I can pay well to do this.”
Towli nodded too, not quite a bow this time, but one of business. One must think of business. Yet ….
He shook that thought from him. This was a noble lady, he thought, even if one of gypsies. One whose attendants clearly kept her well protected from the river’s poisons. And yet—she was so pale.
But duty was duty. He gestured to some of those who had gathered to stand behind him to help her servants with their heavy baskets. He, a historian, knew of a grave where a riverman lay, an unusual monument for the Tombs insofar as those who plied the river generally cast their dead into its waters. Unless, of course, the bodies were those of chiefs, worthy of more respect—though even then, he dimly remembered, there were other ways as well. Other methods of honoring.
But it was not for him to question. He nodded once more, smiling back at the woman, not daring to trust his voice to speak again, and led her forward.
• • •
So passed June, and its Moon of Lovers, Towli tending the river chief’s grave himself, not just because of the largess of offerings, but also because he wanted to for himself. And as he did so he often remembered how she had finally left, scarcely having uttered another word herself after that first businesslike conversation.
The moon had almost completed its course when she had finally returned to her gypsy boat with her attendants, gesturing for her men to push it again from the shore. She had then turned away, watching the river as the craft was caught in its current, south past the Tombs, before going herself to her cabin below decks and, just before she had disappeared, he had shouted a warning.
“Beware the ghouls if you sail to the south,” he had called to her. “You’ll pass through their city.” And she had turned once more, her voice again tinkling as if with the sound of silver bells: “We of the river fear not ghouls, Towli”—she had learned his name while they searched out her father’s grave, although he had not heard her own name spoken, either by her or by any of the servants with her. “Rather we fear the river’s own creatures rending our flesh from us, even as we do theirs. As for the ghouls themselves, however, they maintain their own superstitions, one of which holds that our boats are bad luck, and so they avoid us. At least on the river.”
Then she was gone, and her boat soon after, lost in the rising mist of the pre-dawn. Yet he had stayed there on the top landing plaza until the sun had almost risen, chancing its red-copper brightness against his skin, before he had finally retreated himself to his underground home that he shared with the dead from past generations.
And in the coolness of marbled corridors he found he could not sleep, at least not at first. So he searched out his history books, studying times when the world was new, before poisons and vapors had desiccated it, heating its air, polluting its waters. Before the sun grew huge. When people walked outdoors by day as well as in darkness, not fearing its brightness. And some sailed the river even for pleasure.
He read farther on about how some who had fished the river’s waters had in time adapted to the world’s changes, placing first canopies, then thick-roofed cabins over their boats’ decks—insulators in which were packed cargo, protecting further the dimness of their holds. Even as those of the Tombs had adapted, descendants of sextons and priests and gravediggers coming to live themselves in the underground caves they created, just as the New City dwellers built their structures ever higher, with awnings and covered bridges between them to ward off the sun’s rays. How even the ghouls, the outcasts of old—become scavengers, destitute, forced to seek out such livings as they might from others’ refuse—had, as the centuries progressed, made their own grisly adaptation.
He read, fascinated, as the nights passed from the Moon of Lovers to Ratcatchers’ Moon and the days grew hotter with July’s sweltering, of the customs the river people then took on, their funeral arrangements by land or by water, their rituals and beliefs, and, as he read on, a dark implication began to take form concerning the riverman’s daughter’s offering.
And it was then that she entered his dreams.
• • •
He knew from his readings into her culture that, among the rivermen, dreams were warnings. Portents of evil—but sometimes of good, too. The first time he dreamed of her she was within her boat, shaded and cool in its underdeck cabin, surrounded by cushions and sheer silken tapestries, shot with golden thread.
She was disrobing, her daytime chador already cast from her, and he saw what he had known already from only one glimpse of an ivory shoulder. That she was beautiful.
Under that chador she wore bright silks in the river fashion, clinging to limbs that were well-formed and perfect. He saw her waist, slim and firm, hips round and soft-curved, hair tumbling over the fall of her back and the spread of her buttocks, glowing blood red in the cabin lantern’s dim phosphorescence, and he knew another thing. One more thing that he had suspected already.
And that was: he loved her.
Yet night finally came and, with it, the time to wake, and so she left him. The Bridge Gate’s bell-pulls were already jangling, a new load of dead from the New City causeway, and he had his duties. There was ground to be cleared off, new graves to be started. New earth to be broken, baked hard in the summer’s heat.
And one plot also he kept his eye on, as, searching, he found locations for other graves. Because, as he knew, dreams could be portents.
The second time, then, when the night’s work was over, he dreamed that she loved him. That she had picked carefully among all the men who had stood at the landing above the river when her boat had docked there, and chosen him alone. That she had studied him, side-glancing with her eyes, as he had conducted her through the tomb-yards, seeking her father’s grave. That she had watched him despite his life-long aversion to mirrors for fear of what he might see, and learned his name purposely.
This he had not known but, dreaming, he wondered if deep down perhaps he had. If, perhaps, only he had feared to admit it—to even hope it. And now he knew her name, too, even though she had had yet to speak a single word, neither in this dream nor the one before it.
Her name was Olann.
And yet, when he woke this time, wending his way through his nighttime duties, digging the graves deeper for the last night’s cargo, smoothing their bottom planes, helping his crew to lower in the caskets, to spread the bright petals of flower and leaf offerings, to light the incense and post the ghoul-guards, he feared the moon’s setting and what would then become the next morning’s dream-time.
Because dreams were warnings.
And Olann had yet to speak—to speak the words that would confirm their love. Or he to answer.
And when, finally, within his marbled tomb-home, sleep forced itself on him and, will it or nill it, the hour for dreams came, he dreamed what he feared the most. What he knew he would dream because he had read of the rivermen’s beliefs and rituals, and knew what it meant for the time to come for a daughter to make offering over her father’s corpse.
He dreamed now of his fear before, when they had first met, when he had first glimpsed her face and her shoulder, that her skin was too pale. He dreamed now of her cabin-lamp’s phosphorescence turned low by her servants, of her form lying supine alone on its pillow bed. Of her lips forming–
No, forming no word now because this dream was one of incense and solemn chantings, of black-waxed candles. Of river fevers, swift in a morning’s heat. Poisons and mists that not even silken screens always protected from.
And when he woke he knew that which he had known as well, before he had even slept.
Olann, this night, was dead.
• • •
It was some nights later, at the first sliver of what would become the Goldsmelters’ Moon—the low, dull moon of August—that the river’s watchers first spied the boat coming. Towli was up the instant he heard their call, but, even then, by the time he had reached the upper landing, mute attendants were already carrying their burden up the angled, stone stairs, laden with jewels and flowers and true-gold coins. Others followed with incense and lanterns, and yet more offerings, fish from the river, and bones and glass necklaces, aromatic seaweeds and water krill. Small bells and silken cloths, draperies and sandalwood.
All of them halted when their procession had reached the stone plaza Towli waited on. The leader among the attendants bowed once, a single time only, but that was enough to signal the others to lower their burdens, the litter with Olann’s corpse covered with offerings, the full, heaped baskets the others bore up as well, silently at his feet.
Then the lead attendant spoke, glaring full at Towli’s face: “You will do her honor,” he said. “As you can see, we have paid well that you shall do this, to choose from the customs of both your and our people to find the best for her.”
Towli bowed back—never in his life had he seen such a profusion of offerings for a single burial!—but the lead attendant and all the others had already turned to descend the narrow steps back to the river’s edge. Blinking tears, Towli watched as the riverboat pushed back to mid-stream, then, raising its sails, tacked painfully north upriver, leaving, he knew, the Tombs forever.
He blinked back his tears again, then called his fellows, assigning the strongest of them to lift what the river-chief’s daughter’s attendants had left them. He pointed upward, up toward the broad streets and twisted alleys that led to the grave of Olann’s father, and upward from that, too, to the plot he had already selected. He had them carry her up to a hill looking north to the New City with its bright night-lights of red—like her hair’s red—and yellow and purple, green and turquoise, reflecting off the great river’s surface. And, starting to dig the new grave with his own hands, he had them put her down.
They helped him, of course, but it was early August, and the ground was baked hard. One foot they dug, then a foot-and-a-half, but by then the nascent moon had already sunk west toward the Old City, glimmering blue with its flickering corpse-lights, while, to the east, dimly, the first glow of pre-dawn was already starting to make its appearance.
So Towli called halt then, but had the men and women of his crew bring him thick canvas to make a tent with to cover Olann’s corpse. He had them make it large enough to shelter him too, so he might sit alone by her body protected beneath its shade, guarding the woman whose love he had known too late. Whose love for him he still did not understand, save that he loved her too, and, perhaps, somehow, she sensing that, she had seen something within him worthy of being joined to her beauty.
Except it was too late, because, even then, Olann had been dying. And so he would sit, having had his crew members bring him a ratpick—a long, curved-tined implement that he would use to rake the occasional daytime scavengers, those grown immune to the blistering of summer’s sun, off the bier’s still flower-covered burden—and pray to her gods as well as those of the Tombs, for what, he did not know. That she rest safely.
That she rest peacefully until the next night when his crew could finish the digging of her own tomb, and she be buried.
Except days were long in the height of summer and Towli, as well as his crew, had worked hard that previous night. There were few of even the hardiest rats abroad in the sunlight—and even fewer of the new, armadillo-like creatures that lately had come to scavenge the Tombs as well—and so he was hard pressed to stay awake, even at the side of his beloved. Indeed, he knew himself he had dozed off at least two or three times, once when he had wakened to the sound of claws scraping and, only just in time, had caught a graveyard lizard between his pick’s cruel tines, hurling it back into the sunlight where it belonged.
And once more he dozed, too, in spite of the fact he already knew his vigil was ending from the lengthening of gravestone shadows. This time he dozed too long.
• • •
He dreamed of Olann, clad not in her chador but transparent river silks, striding alone through between-tomb passages, but always glancing, fearful, behind her. But then in his dream she must have seen him, because she ran toward him, hair flying now in the wind. But now, behind her, he thought he saw shadows.
Shadows and blue lights.
And this time she spoke to him. “Beware!” she shouted. Her voice now began to be drowned out by loud bells. “Towli, beware,” she screamed—she spoke his name this time. “Towli, the ghouls. Beware!”
At that he woke to the sound of real bells chiming. Bells at the west wall—twilight had risen, and almost full dark now—calling the guards forth.
He hesitated. He stood up, alone, still watching by Olann’s corpse, his crew not appeared yet. Of course they would not have—they would be running to join the guards too, he knew, warding off an attack in force. Even now the Old City’s ghouls would be attempting to breach the walls, and he knew he should join the Tombs’ defenders.
But he hesitated. Ghouls were clever. And, as he attempted to make up his mind—to join the guards or else to stay here, by the side of his love—he saw, flitting between two distant gravestones, the hint of a shadow.
It was just as he had dreamed—more shadows rising now, circling the gravesite prepared for his river queen, a chieftain’s daughter. Ghouls feared the boat-gypsies out on the river, but not when they lay on shore. Not when they lay still, like other corpses, like Olann’s corpse laid now among its offerings. Then, because of their fear for the living, ghouls hated the rivermen.
And ghouls were clever. The west wall attack, Towli realized now as he searched for a weapon, had been a diversion.
And now they were on him, screaming, gnashing their long pointed teeth, they charged up the hill to the unfinished gravesite. But, if he did not have a weapon as such, Towli did have his ratpick, long and stout-handled, its tines sharp and pointed too. He swung it wide, once, twice, letting the weight of its head swing free, smashing the first of the ghouls to reach him back into their fellows.
“Guards!” he shouted, calling for help as a second wave reached him, this time a band that had circled off to his right. These he smashed back too.
Panting, he stood at the ready as he saw the ghouls pausing, some of them starting to eat their own fallen. Just as he knew they would eat his corpse too, if they could kill him, as well as Olann’s—if not, indeed, do even worse things to hers due to the enmity they bore for her kind.
He shouted again, his voice rising in panic, to the guards at the distant wall—too distant, he feared, for it to be likely that they would hear him. To warn them that the Tombs had already been infiltrated! Then he swung again as a new wave of ghouls attacked, sometimes thrusting this time, pushing ghouls back, sometimes swinging the pick low to trip them. Sometimes fencing—thrusting forward, then raking sideways, feeling tines bite flesh. Blood splash on his wrists and arms. Actually starting to force his attackers back down the hillside.
And then he saw her. Olann, dressed again in her river silks, standing beside him, gripping a billhook of the sort rivermen used to cut sea-plants that trapped their boats in their coils. “Towli,” she whispered. “Beloved—behind you!”
He swung and thrust, seeing now shadows behind him. As Olann warned him—she, now disappeared, the vision, he knew, only that of a tomb-wraith. A heat-caused illusion.
Except that the shadows she had warned him of were real enough, more ghouls who had somehow circled above him. Again he thrust and feinted and slashed, this time feeling his own blood splash forth as well, as, through their sheer numbers, they pressed themselves over him. Still struggling, pushing back, now he attempted to fight them with his bare hands, not caring for himself. Using his body instead as a shield—a shield he cared nothing for save that it only still keep them from Olann’s corpse.
Then hearing more voices—familiar ones, he thought, as the weight of foul-smelling bodies, the sharpness of crooked teeth, raked and pummeled him ….
• • •
He woke hours later, hearing, distantly, the sound of repeated splashes as bodies of ghouls—both dead and still living—were cast from the walls down into the river. “Towli,” a voice said, “one of our stragglers, a late-riser, heard you. She warned others of us so, as soon as we could, we sent a detachment of guards to help you. But we were too late, Towli … ”
Weakly, he interrupted the guard captain who sat beside him. “Olann—the river corpse—did they take her?”
The captain shook his head. “No, she is undefiled. You did your duty. But Towli, you yourself have been wounded. Grievously wounded. We’ve tried our best, but I’m afraid that we can’t save you.”
Towli gestured for the captain to help him sit up too, feeling his wounds now. “How long do I have?” he asked.
The captain shook his head. “Maybe a few days. Enough to see your charge’s corpse buried. Then, if wish, to select your own spot in the guardians’ section.”
Towli nodded. Yes. The tomb-guardians’ section beyond the hill, deep within the inner part of the necropolis where not even the boldest of ghouls dare enter. He nodded again, this time toward the place where Olann still lay, untouched: “I would have her there with me.”
But the captain shook his head. “You know that can’t be. The inner section is reserved ground, for Tombs people only.”
“My father’s body is there,” Towli said. “As is my grandfather’s—and he was a riverman.”
“Yes, he was, Towli. But he was married into our people with his father-in-law to-be’s blessing, making him one of us.”
Towli understood all too well. It was their custom, from time unremembered, just as the rivermen had their customs too. Still, he protested. “The ghouls will be back,” he said. “Even after she is buried. They’ll try to dig her up.”
“Yes,” the guard answered. “Of course, we will do our best. But, as you say, the ghouls will try … ”
Then Towli recalled, from his studies of the boat-gypsies’ customs—and what the attendant had said to him at the landing plaza above the stairs. About choosing what would be best for Olann.
“Captain,” he said. “You see the offerings the rivermen left for her. They will provide much, even a sending-off by her own customs—customs disused now since trees have become rare and wood is expensive, but not so expensive these offerings won’t cover it. What I would have then is a boat constructed out of coffin-wood, large enough for two. Have it filled with tallow and lantern oil, and a bed for two people to sit on. Do you understand me?”
The captain nodded. “It will be done, Towli. Before the next night’s ending.”
• • •
And Towli dreamed once more, of both him and Olann, not knowing which were dreams and what was waking thought. But he did see himself and Olann lying side by side on a silk-cushioned bed the next night after, the moon half-descended red-golden in the west, pushed from the quay at the River Gate’s landing. He looked up and saw a sail filling with night-breeze, pulling them southward, then down, in the water, he saw his reflection:
He saw his face, not deformed! Not dark and blistered as some rivermen’s were, but as smooth as Olann’s, as soft-lipped and round and pale. And he saw her face then, too, gazing beside his.
“It is time, Towli,” he heard her whisper as, looking behind them they saw the bright colors of the receding lights of the New City, with its arched causeway that led to the Tombs. Then, to the west as they drifted faster, their sail pulling hard in the full river wind, they watched the blue, flickering lights of Old City’s ghoul-caves as they swept past them and Olann whispered: “They’re beautiful, too, Towli, in their way, aren’t they?”
He nodded. Yes, they were—even the ghoul-lights. Even the red of the sinking moon as he reached for the boat’s lantern, hanging from its pole. Then he kissed Olann.
And she kissed him back as, together, their hands broke the lantern in two, spilling its flame to light the tallow that filled their funeral boat, sending their souls in a gout of red smoke—as red as the crimson of Olann’s hair!—to beg the blessing of that of the river-daughter’s father.