It is better to have reached high for love, even if doomed to fail.
• • •
DOWN IT CAME! DOWN! Falling out of the sky.
I a rat gatherer, a catcher of men’s dinners, saw this with my eyes. A whistling, a falling, a whirling of feathers as if burned by the sun’s rise. It, high in the sky, above the horizon, would be first to be blasted by those sweltering, poisoned rays, is that not fact enough? While we, of the Tombs, would be scampering, fleeing the first pre-dawn shimmer.
We, the ground dwellers, to flee underearth, to crypt-ways and tunnels, to join with the corpses our job is to care for.
But this—I called to it—it was man-shaped and fine-formed, slender and long-legged with two feathered wings arching out of its shoulders. “Hoy!” I called.
“Man-bird!”
It lay still, unanswering. Huddled and crumpled.
I put down my catch-cord—the rats were especially clever this almost-dawn, and I had caught few. I ran to where this thing lay, thinking it must be dead.
I reached my ratpick out, prodding it gently. I listened.
Was that a moan?
Gently, gingerly, I approached nearer, seeing its smooth skin glow pink in the sun’s first rays. There would not be much time.
Trembling, I placed my mouth over its parted lips, blowing new, fresh air in. Sucking the bad air out.
Quickly I gathered it—he!—in my arms, leaving my pick, my nets, my cord behind. Later I could don my all-encompassing chador, my day-mask, my sunhat, and venture forth into the full day’s heat, retrieving these if I must. Now, though, straining, I ran with him, carrying him chest-against-shoulder, half-draped down across my back, wings rustling behind in the wind of my dash, into the shelter I lived in alone. That is, alone of those living, I being not married—but sharing with dead, of course.
That is life in the Tombs, this vast necropolis that serves the New City across the causeway, only now dimming its lights for the coming day when all seek shelter. Even the ghouls that surround us as well, that seek nightly to breach our walls, blue ghoul-lights sparkling—they of the Old City to west and south of us.
That is life made simple, that every being escape in some way the sun, poisoned and swollen, grown hotter with each new year. And that we, especially, take care of the dead as well, sharing with them the mausolea, the vaults and the catacombs that riddle our Tomb-land that ever expands on the great river’s west shore, encroaching into its stream.
To east the New City—ghoul-lands south of it too.
But as I say, I brought this winged-thing to shelter, this man that dropped on me, or nearly on my head. Missing the pyramid on our Tombs’ central hill by but a hair’s-breadth.
Or perhaps a feather’s width.
That bouncing, tumbling, came to rest near enough to where I had crouched, seeking entrance to rats’ burrows, striving to trap some before they, too, fled the sun. So now I strived, in my own marbled tunnel-room, to save this winged man’s life.
• • •
In leisure I could examine this thing, you see, ascertaining that what I had thought skin—when first I had seen it still some paces from me—was in fact a fine down, a white plumage or, perhaps, fur. In form it was a man, youthful in figure with still-round, soft muscles except, of course, on its back—these angled, ropy, with strength to support its wings.
After all, it did fly.
Still I had trouble—it was, of course, a man—I could see its maleness though, in that region, its feathers were thickened, still white as a riverboy’s skin, however, as were its hair and beard. Or head- and chin-feathers—as I say their softness made it hard to tell save where they thickened out onto his wings proper.
“His” I can say now—I had trouble then, you see. Quite knowing what this was.
What I might wish, too, I who was yet un-mated. Who had indeed loved none, having feared, thus far, to make such commitment. To be so encumbered.
But still, I examined it, ascertaining that it was albino—its down alone protecting it from the sun, but not enough this time. Beneath, the skin was pink, in some places cracking.
His lips and eyes red, too: I forced these lips open. I poured in a rat-broth, thick and nourishing, steeped from my yet-unsold catch from the prior night, a night altogether of better fortune as ratcatching was concerned.
But what had I caught now?
There was no answering it. Fitfully, it—he—slept, after his feeding. I said he was naked? I suppose that, to fly, one could not carry weight, even of clothing. I cleaned him as needed.
At first hint of evening, at the east’s first darkening, a showing of pin-pricks of stars beyond New City just before that locale’s myriads of lights flashed on, yellow and purple, blue, red, green, and orange. And west and south ghoul-lanterns, though this was not dead yet, this winged man I had found. No feasts for ghouls here yet. As I say, at first dark I sought a curator, a man learned in Tombs-lore—and other science as well.
That’s when the winged man spoke!
• • •
Had I, before, frightened him? I, stouter than he was, sturdier, taller, my skin rough and hairless—except, that is, for my head and, beneath, that too although I wore clothing. A breech clout and soft boots, even within my home.
Or was it, rather, his strength had just then returned. That is, when I came back, trailing an elderly man behind me, his robes rustling in the breeze.
He, too, white-bearded.
In any event, the winged man now sat up!
The curator nodded. “A good sign,” he said to me. Then to the winged man: “Do you speak our language?”
“I am named Avion,” the winged man replied, not quite in our language, but a trader patois that was like it, but accented. Some words were broken, as if not remembered well.
“I am named Avion,” the winged man repeated. “I seek my mate, Avril.”
The curator nodded. “We will help you if we can. But you must tell us first: Where have you come from?”
“I am,” the winged man said, “a new kind of being. That is what was told to me—to me and Avril who was made to be my mate. The female of my kind, so there might yet be more. And, thus, remember … ”
“Yes?” the curator said.
“That which we are. Others, too, but not like me—or, rather, made as I and Avril were made, but to have other functions. Some sleek, and clawed to climb. Some with great arms to swing, tree-to-tree, gathering fruit, food for our masters. Some armored, with leathery skin, these to defend them should enemies attempt to take over our island.
“For it was an island where Avril and I were made, so it was told me. I who saw part of it, but I was yet a boy. Scarcely a few months old—but we grow fast, we who lived on the island, for that is how we were made. Taken as infants, as it might be, and cut, and grafted, and sewn, and made. In my case, as a winged man—with man’s brain and thoughts. The same as you two here.
“And, so, like our masters.”
“You mean those who ‘made’ you?” the curator prompted.
And so the winged man explained. “Yes,” he said. He described an island, far south in the ocean, an ocean where water boiled up in the summer noons, to join with the island’s own volcanic steamings.
An ocean where boats were used only part of the year.
Here, the winged man explained, their “masters” made them from animal and man parts, experimenting—grafting and budding, as if they were plants, not beasts. Parts of man added on, to make them, thus, human, or so their masters hoped.
Not just mutations, as those in the mainland’s laboratories have sometimes created, which all look down on. For they are unnatural. Yet who some crave, also—there is a legend of a woman who was partly rat as well, thus being desired both for her beauty and for her rat-nature, until she had to be destroyed. For rats do bad things too.
While these were more basic, not manipulated, but rather assembled. A man and his wings, you see, bird and man matched to grow one to the other. “We grow quickly,” he explained. “I am as old as a human of nearly thirty, in terms of maturity, yet have been living for less than five of your years. Avril for only three—that is why I do not know if she loves me, for what would she know of love? Even if she was created to be mine.”
He went on to say how the men-beasts rose up, finally, against their masters. For all that had been accomplished was done with pain—and there is only so much even beasts can stand. He was a small boy then, not a part of the fight, and so it is some of this he knew by hearsay. That some of their masters fled, taking their boats with them, but perished in the sea.
And left their science behind.
“That was our chance, then,” Avion continued. “My friends went on with me, I standing the pain of more advanced graftings, for I understood now. And Avril was made, as an infant, by using what had been learned from me. For it was for the advancement of learning that our masters had done the things they had done to us. Or at least that was the way it had started—some of the masters who stayed with us told us this, those who’d been left behind. Wounded or dying.
“And summers were hotter now. Even the winters were not safe for sailing, so near to the Earth’s most hot parts was our island. At least not by us who, even should we be able to build new boats, were not skilled sailors.
“Nor could fish-men survive—that was a thing our masters had learned too.
“And so it was Avril and I were our island’s hope, as soon as Avril was three of your years old, or, in terms of maturity, in perhaps her teens. Old enough physically that we could marry, could we leave the island.
“It was to be our wedding flight, when we finally launched ourselves. We were to cross the sea, bringing word, thus, of us. Of those we left behind, not for their rescue—they were resigned, and happy enough as well, with what they had themselves. Willing to live their lives. But to make sure those lives—with what had caused them to be—would be known of beyond our own shores.
“It was a religion, almost, you must understand. That which made lives worthwhile was that they be remembered. Remembered through progeny, if not their own, then, beyond our island’s shores, that of Avril and me.
“And yet we flew on, Avril and me, under scudding, clouded skies—those left on the island had chosen the season well, as one where the day-sun would not shine too strongly, to sizzle us as we flew—for more nights than we knew to count, and through the days also. For there was no place to land. We knew how to navigate, some bird-thing left in us, and we learned wind-currents. The art of gliding.
“Yet we tired as the nights lengthened to weeks—and still no sign of land. Although we now saw birds—real birds—fly out to us, at dawn and dusk-times. They must come from somewhere!
“I called to Avril: ‘Have heart!’ But she was silent.
“It was then I doubted. I had assumed, you understand, that she would love me. It was what I had been told, as surely she was too—yet we had not met, ever, until our launching.
“We had not told this thing of love to each other!
“And now, when I tried—well, perhaps it was tiredness. We had enough to do just to keep flying.
“But, still, she would not answer.
“We lived on insects we caught on the wing, huge, slow, buzzing creatures, not so much for nourishment as for their moisture. And now the sun did shine, at brief times in day hours through rents in the clouds, and stars sometimes in the night. The former was dangerous, it stiffened our skin beneath our feathers.
“I called again to Avril: ‘Fly underneath me! When the sun shines on us, take advantage of my shadow!’
“She did not hear me. Or else did not listen.
“And then came the storm.”
Avion fell silent for some moments, as if not wishing to recollect what happened next to them. Yet knowing that he must.
“It was at day’s end,” he finally said. “The light was behind us and to our left, but above us were dense clouds. Fast, roiling clouds. And below us small birds fled north, as if to dive under them.
“’Look, Avril!’ I shouted.
“Something! A smudge of gray—darker than clouds’ dark!
“But then it was on us—the storm in its full force. Tossing us. Throwing us, as I, gesturing, struggled upward. Fighting to rise above the worst of its swirling winds.
“Calling to Avril—to keep together!
“And then it was over.
“Then I was over land. As swiftly as the storm had come up, it ended. I looked around me—we can see in night, you know. I searched for Avril. But I could not find her!
“I crisscrossed. I flew in widening circles. I called with what strength I had left, but heard nothing but smaller birds answer.
“I found your river—the one that flows past here—to use as a landmark and flew ever north. Searching each of its banks, all this from the air, of course. With the storm over, the moon now was shining, making me grateful that I could see farther.
“Yet still saw not Avril.
“I saw swamps and deserts, and now vast, low-flying birds, some as large as I. These at the very first, then again near the dawn. Following the river I saw specks tacking, boats I assumed them, with sails and awnings for shade in the day hours. But at night with lanterns—I saw them, thus, moving.
“And then, my eyes dazzled by more light than I should see, yet squinting, straining. Weeping, protecting them, just as my skin, somewhat, is shielded by my down from rain and sunlight, I saw, beneath me, lights nearly as bright as day. Bright and many-colored.
“Might these have attracted her?”
The curator broke in. “The lights of New City!”
Avion nodded. “The lights to the east, yes. That side of the wide river. I saw the bridges, swooped low across one of them. I saw the torch-lit carts moving, their loads heaped high.
“I smelled the corpses.”
“The corpse trains, yes!” I exclaimed. There had been one last one crossing the causeway when I had seen what I saw, plummeting from the sky. One last load of new dead come for entombment—it is what we do here.
A straggler of sorts, with the dawn just then rising.
“And that was it,” Avion said. “I felt the sun again—blistering, burning. No clouds in this sky now. The whole night flown through, searching. I could fly no longer … ”
“Yes,” the curator said.
• • •
The winged man slept while we inspected him. Rather, the curator did an inspection, feeling his arms and legs, supple yet slim, muscled almost with girls’ muscles—except, of course, his back. Flesh smooth and rounded, almost as women’s flesh.
“See,” the curator said, “how the wingtips are singed. This from his day-flying, even with clouds the sun’s heat was sufficient.” I looked. I sniffed—one could still smell a hint of burn.
“Yet it protects him, directing the heat outward … ”
Thus the curator went on, as if lecturing. This curators do, saying, if asked, that this cataloging aloud of new wonders strengthens their memories.
For it is the job of curators to learn things, as well as remember things learned already.
“See how the skin, beneath the down, where it is not burned by the sun is almost white. As pale as the skin of a river princess … ”
And we were to meet one—a river princess. A noblewoman among the boat-gypsies whose craft the winged man had seen. One whose skin was pale for riverwomen are always sickly, breathing the mists that rise from the water. Are always beautiful, burning in life brightly. But die young also.
Thus just like Avion. He said he grew quickly and, so, would die soon too.
But, meantime, there was Avril.
Word was sent out—the curator did this. Rumors of winged women, driven, perhaps, to shelter by the storm. Landing in fields, perhaps, from exhaustion, or possibly even the streets of New City. Perhaps the Old City—the ghouls would not eat her! It was the law of ghouls, not to eat living flesh.
Swampmen, desertmen. Fishers by the sea. Quarrymen far to north. Any, all, who might have seen a winged woman.
Yet no one came forth with her.
Meanwhile the winged man, I could see, was dying.
I had nursed him back to health, with the curator’s aid. I had him eating, now, solid rat-flesh the same as any man. Pungent, black mushrooms grown in our own tomb-cellars. White, pale, soft pears grown in hollows below our walls.
“White, as Avril’s wings were white,” he said. Sighing. And, yet, still eating them.
He spoke very little, and then only of Avril. On clear nights I took him to our tomb-land’s center, he still too weak to fly, to the vast hill with its plazas and pyramid, under which latter an Emperor is said to lie.
We climbed the stepped pyramid up to its flat top with its angel statue. We sat at the statue’s feet, he always facing south.
“It is where she would come from, my Avril,” he said. “She would fly in from the south, were she to follow me. Had she attempted to follow me in the storm.”
Then he would weep again, gazing up, sometimes, at the winged statue, comparing its angel wings to those of she who he loved. While I wept, seeing him, I who had loved no one up until this time. Who had been afraid. Hugging him, comforting when he would let me.
Had with my life done nothing!
But one night a cry came up. “Gypsy boat!” was the call. “One of their women ascends the river stairs.”
“It is a boat princess!”
“How can you tell—she is still in her chador?”
“By her bearing. Can’t you see?”
In an instant the curator had me called, both me and Avion who sulked in my tomb-tunnel. Thus we three met her upon the plaza above the River Gate, she and her servants. One bearing a flat basket.
“We have found this,” she said. By her voice alone, both strong and gentle, soft and yet commanding, she was a princess—there was no doubt of that. Possibly even one who was unmarried, who ruled her boat by herself.
She pushed her hood back, and gestured to the man holding the basket.
Slowly he lifted its wicker lid, in the shape of a coffin and nearly a coffin’s length. Inside was a bone—several bones, connected. Curved. Articulated. And from these some feathers, perhaps five or six only, but under the torchlight of the plaza we saw they were moon-white.
“It is some vast bird’s wing,” the woman said, crimson lips parting against her skin’s own white. Her eyes black as midnight.
Avion stepped forward.
“It is Avril’s wing!” he shrieked. “See! See those black spottings! Singed as my own wings were, from the sun on that dawn.
“Then she did follow me!”
The river princess doffed her chador, revealing raven hair, as black as her eyes were. She handed it back to a second servant, then knelt, her silks rustling, semi-transparent, bright and trimmed with gold as riverwomen of high status wore them, slit deep at front and thigh.
She knelt by Avion’s side as he fell, sobbing.
“We found it to north, caught on a snag within the river. As if that whose it was overflew the New City, dazzled, perhaps, by the lights of its towers. It is an easy thing—to lose one’s night vision.”
“Yes.” Avion wept harder.
“We knew not what it was, but we heard gossip. I would emphasize that it was in the water, that therefore its owner died quickly, without pain. Or almost without pain—the river’s toxins cause numbness to come quickly.
“It is a danger we who sail it know well.
“We found no more of it. Things lost in the water are taken quickly. River-snakes. Insects. It is eat or be eaten, as is the world, is it not?”
Avion nodded.
She leaned and she kissed him. She put her arms around him and hugged his head to her breasts, soft and full and round. Burying her own in his feathered hair. Then she rose gracefully, ankle bells jingling, and signed for her chador to be returned to her, concealing again her lithe thighs, her supple waist. Hiding her own hair.
“Know me only as ‘Ana,’” she said, as she turned to leave. “Remember me by that name.”
Ana, or “no-name”—all river princesses’ names end with -an sounds!
Yet she was remembered.
• • •
It was shortly after that Avion died, despite all we could do for him. “It is a matter of metabolism,” the curator explained. “Just as he grew quickly—that is how he was made—so he died quickly. Especially without his mate.”
“Yes,” I said, weeping.
“But he died joyful. The bone Ana brought him—it showed him the love Avril held for him to the last.”
“Yes,” I admitted. It showed the love of his kind. And so we had helped him, when Ana had left, to replace the bone in its wicker casket, and fill flowers and perfumes and incense around it—to drive off the poisons—and add to it mirrors and wide-toothed combs that might have been useful in preening feathers, as if his lost mate were still among the living. We buried it all in a tomb by the south wall, but high enough to command a view of the sky. As if she waited for Avion to fly to her.
And so, when the time came, we added a new grave, a widening of the first, for the winged man who came plunging from the sky. But one more thing happened.
Ana returned to us.
As before there were shouts—river gypsies do burial by water, so rarely do they come here. This time, however, she came with more servants, and baskets of flowers, and beads, and brass coins.
“For grave gifts,” she said, as she stood, her hair blowing in the full wind of dusk. Sheer, scarlet silks pressing over her rounded thighs, softly curved breasts and hips. Slim-waisted, slender. “For both him and Avril.”
Crimson lips still parted.
“Yes,” the curator said. “Yet I would question you.”
Smiling, she nodded.
“What were those bones?” he said.
“A lammergeier’s, I think. A great vulture’s—they live to the north. It was of the right size.”
“I inspected the feathers,” the curator said. “Those few that were with it. I saw the streaked, black markings Avion noted and saw they were natural. Not burn marks at all.”
Ana nodded. “Yes. But they are nearly white.”
“Why?” the curator asked.
“It gave him happiness, did it not?” Ana asked. “More than you were able.” At that I thought I could feel her eyes burn me! “That is, given she was dead—the wind of the storm, after all, was a land wind. We heard the whole story, that this was a nightfall storm. We know the weather, we who sail the river—as do, if they’re willing to realize it, those who fly—that winds at night blow to south, out to the ocean. And so, too, she must have been blown back south herself, to perish, finally, alone on the sea. Whether she spurned his love—whether she yearned for it. This way I gave him cause to think the latter.
“A thing he could live for, as well as to die for.”
The curator smiled. “Yes. Yet you have still not answered.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Why ‘Ana,’ the princess, should do this for him? Who she never knew? Never met until then?” she said.
“Why she brings gifts now?”
The curator nodded.
“I am a riverwoman,” she said. “A river gypsy—you know what they say of us. That we are mutations, perhaps, ourselves. That we are unnatural.
“You know what they say of us princesses’ morals.
“That we are apart, that we stand aloof from others. You know these things they say.”
“Yes,” the curator said.
“In short, we had this in common, Avion and me. And Avril also. Our skin. Our color. Our slimness. Our short lives—we riverwomen, especially, die early. It’s part of our myth.”
“Your beauty as well,” the curator said, bowing. “I think I see your point.”
“Yes,” Ana said. “That we are outsiders, Avril and Avion and me. We are not of your kind, or at least we’re so treated. The one to be kept, exiled, on their island. We to ply the river, viewed with suspicion whenever we come ashore. But on the river, as Avion wished, his kind will be remembered.”
The curator thanked her. “I understand,” he said. And with her permission he called an artist, to sketch her quickly before she left us, that her portrait also would be on the tomb, carved in marble below a rising, winged Avion and Avril, her name beneath her for all river gypsies, simply as “Ana.”
Then, nodding, she turned to him, whispering in his ear, and I strained to hear them. Pointing to where I stood, holding my own tears back—I who could never have loved him as he would wish:
“Yes,” the curator said, “his name will be there too.”