Love, some say, is as a rare blossom, short-lived but beautiful.
• • •
“THERE IS A LEGEND,” the woman told me. Her name was Salanann and she was a princess among the boat-gypsies, the mistress of her own ship, her husband having been killed, I gathered, in some kind of battle. There were pirates in those days.
“This,” she went on, “is of a certain flower, not of a type usually brought here to the Tombs, for remembrance by those whom a corpse had been dear to, but rather a rare, hidden, parasitic plant—an orchid that feeds on the life-sap of its host tree—that takes in memories as well as nourishment. That is, it recalls those who finally pluck it, and, so the legend says, thus the dead, too, that it might be entombed with will remember also.”
She gazed at the coffin-sized cask she had had brought, her servants heaving it up from the river gate to where it stood now, safe on a plaza that overlooked the east wall. Beyond, the lights of the New City blazed bright, rivaling the day-sun now only hours set—its heat driving all indoors or under boats’ decks, or tents of sail-canvas, or in mausolea or crypts where we lived here attending the dead, allowing us only to re-emerge after dusk—and reflected as well on Salanann’s pale flesh, barely concealed by the gauze garments that she wore. So wore all such gypsies. Blue, spangled with gold, her hair long, flowing to her hips, black as her coal-dark eyes, contrasting with her lips’ blood-crimson lushness.
Lips that she moistened now with her tongue’s darting tip as she continued.
“My husband is in this, preserved in brandy from berries that grow to north, far up the river. A part of our cargo we’ve sacrificed for him. I would have you keep it here, safe until I return.
“Then we shall take it back.”
I shook my head. “I do not understand. I am a curator here in the Tombs. I preside over records—the names of the buried—the stories of lives they had once led—not corpses in barrels. I mean you no disrespect, but what am I to do?”
She smiled. On an impulse she reached up and kissed me, her silken robes rustling. Her soft, white breasts pressed, for that moment, against me.
Her strong thighs against my own.
“My husband, Barcal, was of the river,” she said, pushing back again, “just as I am also. Our lives are filled with dangers, at best, the poisons of river mists, riptides and currents, of shoals and swamps and snags. Even, sometimes, robbers, though it breaks custom. Our cares are of details, ladings, cargoes. Of schedules and port fees. And when death concerns us too–”
She smiled once more, wistfully. “Where, then, is love to be?”
Now she turned, businesslike. “So it is I charge you. I seek this flower, so that he will remember.”
She motioned to her crew, to follow her downward, back to where her vessel lay chafing against the cut-stone pier. Silhouetted against the New City’s lights, purples and auburns, yellows and greens and golds. Dimly, far to the south downriver, the blue sparks of ghoul-lights.
She gazed, herself, downriver.
“It is where this flower is found,” she said. “And upon our return you, too, shall have a story.”
• • •
So then it was that I left the Tombs, I, Salanann who record this tale now, the offspring of admirals, steerer of my own craft: Leaving the corpse of my love behind me, a promise as well to the Tombs’ curator, a man of respect who would wait to hear, should we not perish, the tale of my quest.
And something else as well.
And, yes, I did kiss him too, in that such might give him a thing to recall, should I not return. For this, my tale, is chiefly of memory—of memory and legend, for how do these differ save, perhaps, in their distance in time from the tale teller? Of lore of a strange plant that grew to south of us, and eastward through a great swamp—this a rare plant indeed, a type of orchid that thrived on the tallest trees, sinking its roots in the crevices of their bark. Thus a true parasite, not a mere compagnon that might cling to its host-tree as moss on a stone, but ask nothing else from it.
This plant was different.
Lore held that it stole sights, impressions, and memories, as other blooms might store smells. In this was its value. True-orchidlike, it possessed aerial roots as well, hanging from its high perch, trapping what flew below. What swung on vines from trees neighboring its own host—so gaining world-views from the eyes of monkeys, the feel of the wind in the membranes of flying squirrels, insects, and eagles. All these brought together.
But mostly that last memory.
My plant-quarry knew greed. For which of us does not?
And I had once seen one, although dead and dried by then, for, as all flowers, this, my bloom, was delicate. Just as we, too, who ply the river—and who should know more than we, we who deal in flowers often, common blooms, granted, conveying them as cargo down to the Tombs. Most flower-fields are to north, where there are meadows as well as forests, where blooms run as riot as the lights of New City. We fill our holds with these.
We convey these down, as I write here, to the Tombs’ docks, or else to New City, or numerous other towns both down and upriver. We follow funerals—our agents in such places tell us when those of wealth seem to be sickly. Thus providing customers of those they may leave behind. And also weddings, and birth-celebrations, these too provide business, along with the harder goods our boats’ holds swell with. Diamonds, tools, timber, fine-crafted gifts, artworks, all such things we carry, we who they call gypsies.
Yet who beg us as monarchs when they have needs: “Please find me a ton of iron to feed my factories.” Iron, which is perishable on the river, corroded by water’s mists! Or, “Bring me produce, but only the freshest.” Or, “Fish from the ocean port, fine ascaris-flesh, bloodlet, and stickback,” the sea far to south of here, and this not always the safest of journeys. Ghouls line the riversides, shouting their hate of us. The estuary itself may be choked with mud.
Also there are exiles, those cast out from us for cheating on commerce. Or otherwise outlawed, banished from river trade—told to live, now, on land.
Sometimes these still find vessels. Sometimes they steal from us.
But, as I say, this time we sought a flower, a single plant only, my crew and I. One I had seen once dead. One only I might pluck, wherever it might be found, thus to assure it stole memories of me alone when roots caressed me, mistaking me for some prey. As we so hugged our two life-forms together, I offering it of mine to give to my husband, to snatch the bloom to my boat, racing it upriver so that, unspoiled, it might be Barcal’s grave gift.
In memory of me, you see.
Thus I looked back once as, clearing the Tombs’ stone quay, we tacked to mid-river on our foresail only, allowing the current then to turn us southward. And then, at my order, we raised the huge mainsail, I gripping the tiller, as was once my husband’s task.
I seeing to it the stern lantern had been lit, that and the bow light too.
Thus we made quick time, now passing the Old City’s ghoul-lands to left and right, sparkling with corpse-lights, blue, twinkling more distantly as we were carried past.
Our wake sizzled with curses, for there is enmity between us and ghoul-kind. Threats hurled at us also from their Necromancers.
I am a simple woman who write this. I know little of what lies beyond the river’s banks, little, that is, of the world and its peoples, save those that I deal with. I know winds and currents, presagings of weather. That is enough for us.
I know too of love’s pull.
But, as I say, I am not a learned woman. No spinner of fine tales I. Rather I put down these words as they come to me, all a-jumble, so filling my ship’s-log. To share with the Tombs’ curator as he should wish, he to recast them if he is so minded. To smooth them and make them sing.
I, I go to this work mostly by day, as we heave into coves or tie up in backwaters, as, it being nearly summer already we hesitate to sail out in full sunlight. Even with deck-awnings.
We huddle in shadows.
And so we sleep, fitfully, with only a bare watch set above our hatches. One climbing the masthead, bedecked in a thick chador, sunhat, and day-mask, much like Tombs-folk wear as well under the sun’s glare—the light itself poisoned to cause blains and lesions to flesh unprotected. Swaddled as it were above the river, his or her eyes peeling. Until, again, night would come, this our second night coursing downriver. The wind in our sails, hot, as if from the great desert some tell me lies to west. Unrelieved, blistering.
But to the east there were grasslands—the waxing moon showed them a stark black and silver with land birds rising. Grain-eaters and insect-hawks. These were chaperones to us in our voyage.
Then daybreak again and a bend in the river afforded a sand island, topped with scrub bushes that we could tie in behind. Here the watch fished for fresh food the next evening, in twos and threes, from the deck. Cleaning them carefully to purge out the river’s taint.
The next night we spied a boat, larger than ours, tacking upriver with grain loaded in her hold. Her captain told me as we hailed through speaking horns, he a large, brawny man—tempting to one as me! Save, of course, for obligations I carry.
And so I saluted him, as he did me, as we passed through the glow of our mutual running lights, he smiling invitingly as—I could see this!—his eyes passed over my body.
Sadly I shook my head. He was unmarried, he would not have looked at me thus were it otherwise.
Sometimes we widows re-marry ourselves, of course, but for me it is not so to be fated.
Therefore instead we exchanged names and courses, I calling out questions to him of currents, of whether more boats sailed below on the river. It being late in the spring, most vessels had voyaged north already.
He said he had seen only one at some distance. It was in the twilight, the river well misted—and not in night’s clearness.
He could not describe it.
That next morning we could find no place to anchor until nearly noon, and so had to unfurl our full course of awnings, erecting a near city of tents above our deck. Our men stripped to breech clouts under their shade, our few women also. And I at the helm as well, bare to the hips, my hair piled and pinned on my head.
Others, their hair braided, but we who rule the boats cherish ours’ straightness.
Then, a new night falling, finally we came to that which we sought—to our port a slow, meandering stream. A maze of openings, of islets and stooped trees. A bayou that led through a swamp.
And here a city, too, of glowing gases, great membranous plants that inflated, then breathed them out. Huge, floating insects and, underneath, shining fish and serpents also.
We had to breathe lightly—the air was unhealthy.
We had to use lead-lines to measure the channel, then add poles to sail power as we sought the deepest parts. Cutting through marsh-scum.
But finally we broke through, or rather we pushed to a lake of clear water, into a grove of small, twisted cypresses, these growing larger, taller as we plied east. Some rising out of the water itself, their roots stretching, platform-like—as if themselves islands within the bayou—bark heavy and deeply scored, leaves blotting out the sun that rose that morning.
So now we forged onward, unmindful of time keeping. Protected as well by foliage as night’s darkness, cypress and mangrove, green and deep-shadowed, such light as came through to us speckled and mottled. As if we sailed through a cave.
This the fifth day? The sixth? Vapors from river mists confused our minds at times.
Colors surrounded us. Songbirds and flowers—bright crimsons and emeralds—as if we sailed now through a cavern of jewels. The smell of rot filled our lungs.
Birdcalls assailed us.
Then one of the men called out, he stationed at the mainmast’s top, in a basket affixed there for such observations. “To starboard! The tree with a canker halfway up its main trunk. That one, with the shaggy bark.
“Under its topmost branch I see roots dangling!”
I looked up. We all looked. Dim, under the shadows, we saw—yes—the aerial roots of an orchid! We saw, yes, the great limb the flower clung to, the blossom itself still lost in the dark above. But the limb reachable from our boat’s mast tip.
Or almost so, anyway.
I scrambled up the shrouds, two men assisting me. One with a grapple, a stout line attached to it.
Once. Twice. Three times he flung it up, pronged hook and hemp painter. Three times it fell back. And then on the fourth—it held!
I in my breech clout alone, I scrambled up. Hand by hand, hand by foot, hair loose and flowing. Yes, I nearly fell once, it did not matter. A sail-fitter’s knife clenched firmly between my teeth.
For it must be I who pried the bloom from its home, whose memory it gripped instead as I, another line tossed to me from the mast, bagged it and lowered it to the waiting lookout. I, high in the firmament, as if a hawk, or bat, gazing below to the world I belonged in. I, caught in a cloud of green, insects surrounding me, small birds, small lizards. In bright blues and yellows, reds, spangled golds, purples, as bright as the lights of New City itself, as seen from our boats’ decks! I, a riverwoman, become a sky creature!
I nearly fell, so consumed was I by wonder!
Except a voice—“Salanann!”—over and over, broke finally through the racket of screeches and chirpings surrounding me. The heady smell from the flower I’d uprooted, combined with earth and mud smells from the swamp below. Acrid smells also and shrieks as a sharp-billed bird skewered a vast beetle, larger than my hand!
Gasping, I gripped the limb. “I hear you! Yes,” I said. “Have you the orchid safely secured below?”
“Aye,” I heard echoed back.
“Try not to touch it, or let its roots grasp your arms. No more, that is, than you must,” I continued. It had come to me by now that what I saw here—what I felt in my sky-home here—was not just from my sensing, but memories reciprocally gained from the orchid. Albeit fleeting ones.
Mine, though, it would hold fast.
Just as, I soon found out, lowering myself finally back down the grapple-line, shaking its hook free, I found the orchid had made a new home for itself on the deck below, its grasping roots burrowing into a hatch cover, halfway open to air out the main hold. Its aerial roots dangling free into the hold itself.
“So be it,” I murmured. “There are fore and aft hatches—let it have the center one. There is no cargo below for it to displace.”
We had sailed empty, though on our trip back we would fill our decks with more common flowers, and swamp plants that healers use, so that our journey would not be without profit. That is how life is when one sails the river.
These southern flowers, indeed, were rare to those used to the northern ones—those the ones more prized because they keep better, especially in summer. Near-summer as it was. Yet there were towns on the banks of the river as we returned back north, some, granted, in side-inlets, tributaries, but towns nonetheless.
And where there are towns, there are living people. And where living, dying—we sold our flowers.
We sold our roots and herbs, thus to help stave off death for those who had illnesses. For that goes with life too.
We, of the river, may know this above all.
Our hold once more lightened, save for its center hatch, we tacked again by night, anchoring by day’s light, using the winds that blow crosswise from west and north. Westerlies mostly. Making good time, we thought, back to the Tombs to retrieve what we had left there.
When, perhaps still two nights below the southernmost tendrils of the Old City, a dark boat approached us. It was just past dusk with mist still on the river, we had only resumed our sailing out from a rock-littered island surrounded by snags, when it broke into clear air flooded with moonlight.
It was an outlaw boat—one we had met before!
One whose crew we had fought, far to the north of here. With spears and arrows—fish-probes and rat-lances—oars and boat hooks to prevent them from boarding us.
Whose captain’s lance had struck my husband before we escaped from them, causing his death wound.
“Hold off!” I shouted across the water. I brandished a boat hook, gleaming in moonlight as the mist thinned further.
Yet it still bore down on us.
I saw to my crew’s arming, then returned to the helm. Looking at telltales above on the mainmast shrouds, to know at the soonest should there be a shift in wind—something that might let us beat around them, they coming from upstream. To let us outsail them.
When, suddenly, a new boat broke from an inlet, upstream from both of us.
A large boat. A grain boat. A boat we knew also.
The pirate vessel was nearly upon us when this new craft hailed us: “May we help you, Salanann?”
My bachelor captain, who had so admired me on our journey down-stream—his cargo now sold and risking the summer heat to seek one more loading!
“Aye!” I called back, when the outlaw boat’s skipper saw he was outnumbered. He signed for his helmsman to turn away from us.
And I saw my moment.
“Prepare to jibe!” I called, watching my crew abandon their weapons, taking their stations at the fore and main sheets. I pulled us to starboard.
I crouched as the wind took us, passing across our stern, driving us onto the pirate that now, in desperation, tried to escape us.
I laughed as they, dropping their own weapons in surprise, braced helplessly while our bow pressed, fast, onto them. Ramming their stern as I pulled us hard over!
Our sails whipped across our deck as we heeled around, foresail first—the wind pulling us faster—then the great mainsail as, quickly, I called again, “Ready about!,” thus bringing us all the way into a full circle. So disengaging us.
Back on our upstream course, I looked behind me. We’d sheered her helm clean off, springing her rudderpost—out of control, the pirate was taking on water already when she came up on a snag. Ripping her bottom out.
“Salanann!” I heard to port, as my grain-captain, having gone past to keep wide of our turning, had now come about to sail upriver by our side. At least for that moment, before he would turn back to go on his business.
“Should we try to rescue some?” he called through his speaking horn. Smiling as he did so.
Sadly I smiled back. I shook my head slowly—“It is because of that boat I am a widow.”
He understood me. We are a cruel people, we of the river. Had it even not been for the grudge I held, still we would have turned into the wind, as we did, watching only as the river’s water flooded that other’s hold, sickening and poisoning even those who could swim. Watching silently as river serpents fed, as owls and king-vultures swooped down to claim their share.
Hearing the screams of men. Both men and women.
We said no more of it, exchanging once more our news. Courses and cargoes. He perhaps tarrying as, finally, we parted. Hoping perhaps to salvage the wreck for wood.
While I had my crew set our course back to north, to return to the Tombs.
• • •
She stopped, and here I, the Tombs’ curator, resume Salanann’s story, she graciously giving to me its ending. Of how, in the light of a past-full Lovers’ Moon—it now well into summer—one of the river guards called out warning:
“A boat! A gypsy boat approaches, as if to tie to our quay. But strangely burdened!”
Another took it up: “A heap of something on its deck in its center. Of roots and a flower.”
I called down: “Let it dock.”
I, from the wall, had glimpsed it as well. I already knew it was Salanann’s vessel.
I took more guards with me, in case help was needed, as I raced down the angled stairs to reach the water’s edge, just as the boat’s side scraped up against the pier. I watched as its crew scrambled, lowering its two great gaffs, folding its sails in, as others, on the dock already, made fast its gangplank.
Then, thus attended, Salanann came ashore, her silken robes fluttering. Revealing pale, white flesh, more sallow now than before.
She coughed slightly, but then smiled: “Curator, it is I. You know for what I come.”
I nodded. “Yes.” I had already dispatched a pair of men to fetch the barrel that she had left. They and her crewmembers took it aboard the boat.
She nodded, gesturing for me to join her as she boarded after it.
“You are not well,” I said, as we stood watching as her crew placed the cask onto the hatch cover that her prize clung to, roots shrinking back almost as if it knew to make room for it. Its flower hovering over as if it, too, watched—as if, somehow, it approved.
“Aye,” she answered. “The journey. The bad air. We river folk, as you know, are susceptible to such things.
“But I am not dead yet.”
She took my hand in hers, then pressed both of them onto the skin of her belly.
“I will have a daughter first,” she said, then kissed me on the cheek. “A new life to be started—Barcal’s child and mine. When she is of age, she will come to visit you. She will have been instructed to by those who raise her.
“It is then you will tell her of the love that we had for each other, my husband and me, and what I have done here that it be remembered. That Barcal may drink of this orchid’s knowledge, and so be prepared to greet me when we join next.”
She coughed again, as two of her crew unloaded a chest of brass coins on the pier. “Grave gifts?” I asked her.
She shook her head, no. “It is a donation. It is for the favor you have done me already, and one more I’ll ask you, a keeper of records. When I will die, finally, my men will bring me here, so that you may be witness. I’ll need, then, a canoe—one of the sort that ghouls use will suffice me, or anything that will float. In this you will have placed my body, then let it drift free into the river’s current.”
I nodded. “Of course,” I said.
Then, at her gesture, one of her crew took a boarding axe and broached the barrel’s top, drawing out the brandy Barcal’s corpse was preserved in into a flagon. This he passed around to the other crew members. Then, a second he passed to Salanann.
She drank from it deeply, then offered it to me. “We of the river are not wasteful,” she explained.
Then she had her men stave in the barrel’s sides, freeing her husband’s corpse. Laying it out at full length on the hatch cover, the orchid at its feet.
“To love,” she called out as her crew drank again. Then I. Then she. I reeling by now from the drink’s heavy fumes. She smiled at me, then nodded toward the gangplank.
Her men cast the boat’s lines free as I scrambled back on shore, waving as they heaved the great foresail back up, making its halyards fast. Guiding the boat to the river’s center.
Then, as I watched, they lifted the hatch cover, lowering it carefully over the side, raft-like, into the water. Orchid and corpse now entwined together. As Salanann gave orders to hoist the main gaff, then tacked her boat back and forth, holding its place as the raft drifted downriver. Until, at last, it had disappeared south on its way to the ocean.
And, turning a last time to let her boat’s sails fill, she tacked, herself, to the north.