The Immortal City

by May Peterson

  “Mm.” He tapped at a plate while chewing. “I am surprised to find fish of this quality—or quantity—in a distant mountain city.”

  I looked out over the slope, where ice peeked from the other side. “The ocean isn’t far off, and consider. We’re a mountain full of bird-souls who can easily soar off and go fishing. That, and the different flocks bring all manner of food in from other lands. One way to have plums and strawberries in winter.”

  He poured himself more and filled my glass. “Is that what you usually spend your time doing, when you’re not healing people? Catching fish or fetching berries?”

  That provoked quite an amusing image, I had to admit. The wine was warming and clear, with the faintest metallic tang reminiscent of tea. “I am sorry to tell you that no, my day-to-day is neither quite so interesting nor so useful. I try to make sure pilgrims and thrill-seekers—such as yourself—are in good shape. No point selling your memories if the blood loss kills you. But there have been months go by that hardly needed me to raise a wing. My other duties include lying around, writing bad poetry, and bothering Tamueji.”

  His expression grew astonishingly still, as if I’d said something with unexpected significance. “Tamueji?”

  I waved a hand in front of my face. “Oh, she’s just another merchant who makes a killing in Serenity. Sells intelligence, though, not amnesia. I may have given you the impression that I am more important to this city than I really am, is my point.”

  “Ah.” A rosiness was rising in his cheeks. “But bad poetry, though. That sounds important, actually. I suppose the idea is that the other poets in Serenity all have something to compare themselves to, then.”

  I chuckled. “I never said I shared my bad poetry. You should probably get a little more in your stomach before you drink much more of that.”

  He glanced at the second bottle, half-empty. “I have a liver made of cast iron. Does it bother you that you can’t get drunk yourself?”

  “Ha. A little. Can’t drown anything in a bottle.” He was the one who looked uninhibited from drink already, but it was I who seemed so exposed. I still had the vague sense he could read my mind. “But I suppose not having much to remember, there aren’t many troubles to drown.”

  I knew as soon as I’d said it that it wasn’t convincing. But he didn’t question it. “I imagine that’s the appeal of selling your memories. Heavier purse, lighter troubles.”

  “Like I said... I think there’s too much you risk losing in the process, heavy purse or no.”

  “Right.” His brow rose. “So you’d take your troubles back, then?”

  There was almost an echo of Tamueji in his voice. I frowned. “Yes. It’s odd. As long as I’ve lived in this city, I’ve seen many people come here to shed memories they didn’t want. I suppose it’s always taken for granted that they must have a good reason for forgetting. But I would take my troubles back in an instant if it meant I got myself back too.”

  A wistfulness rose in my tone involuntarily, and once again his fixed gaze seemed to pervade through me. Maybe Tamueji had been right. Maybe I was blessed to be free of my past, and Hei would have longed for a freedom like that.

  But Hei exuded sympathy, as if he was reminded of something he wanted back. “I heard what you said earlier. I wouldn’t risk Umber cleaning me out of more than I bargained for either. But even then, aren’t you still yourself? Losing your memory doesn’t mean you stop being you.”

  “Doesn’t it?” I stared down into the rose-colored glass of my wine bottle. “Maybe the Ari I was believed totally different things than I do. What if he had a purpose I can’t remember? He might have had friends, family, lovers, all who mattered to him and informed everything he did. What are we, if we aren’t made up of those things? I have none of it left. Maybe I am still a real person, but I’m not the same person he was.”

  Two stories, two characters, two sides of the mountain. How could I say I was that person, when I had no idea what effect he’d had on me?

  Hei slid fingers across the table and, again with an unexpected gentleness, stroked the back of my hand. “I’m sorry, Ari. I didn’t mean to... I don’t know.”

  I turned up to his eyes, searching their black depths for a reflection of me. “I don’t mean to scare you. But if you’re here to forget something, I’m only asking you to be sure. Be sure it’s something you don’t want to be a part of you anymore.”

  His brow wrinkled, and for a moment the sympathy welling from him was more like sadness.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not here to forget. Definitely not that.”

  I nodded. Somehow, that relieved me more than it had any business doing. “Good.”

  “For the record, I would like to know the other Ari.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “But I like this one. I like this one a great deal.”

  Ornery indeed. “I hope I deserve that. Listen, when I said I wanted to avoid another scene with Kadzuhikhan...what I should have said was that I wanted you to feel sure you are safe. Because that matters much more to me. If I’m overstepping, I hope you tell me so. But if I can be of any help to you in this city, I will be.”

  Now his flush seemed more pronounced, more from emotion than drink. “You do deserve it.”

  “You might want to reserve judgment on that.”

  “Ari, you’ve been willing to be a friend to me since the moment you first saw me in this city. Do you know how scary it was to come here, knowing that I had no one waiting for me?”

  I didn’t have to imagine very hard. “You strike me as exceptionally brave. And not just because you leapt from a statue.”

  A wicked grin flamed into view. “I have people I remember, but it was still terrifying leaving them behind. You said something a moment ago, about who we are if not the parts of our lives that define us. It seems to me that losing the friends, family, and lovers might be the real tragedy there. I think I could take not remembering, as long as I still had people to belong to. I don’t think I could take losing love.”

  He returned attention to the food as the next course came. But I was still chewing on his words.

  Yes. I raised a glass to toast with him, but my mouth was so dry I could barely swallow.

  That was what I missed the most, without knowing what I missed. The people who had filled the other Ari’s life, if he had had anybody. And he must have had someone, for me to be found after my death. There must be someone who remembered the me I had been, somewhere in a world that was no longer real to me.

  The warmth of Hei’s touch was the ghost of warm weather, suffused with the love that had once been mine. That was what I wanted back. More than anything in the world.

  * * *

  Not everyone found Serenity as empty and lonely as I did. Hei’s observation shook something in me. When I thought of the people who seemed to find some happiness here, including in their amnesia, they all had one thing in common—they had others in their lives, or afterlives. They could never be really empty, because the people around them filled them back up. Maybe some folks here sold their lives over and over, but experienced a new meaningful life each time, never sensing the lack.

  I’d once asked Tamueji why she hadn’t sold off some of her many years of memory. Surely after so long as a crow-soul, she had some things even she no longer wished to remember.

  Her response had been the deepest laugh I’d ever heard from her. “My trade is in knowledge. Half a century of memory is worth a lot in my business, all by itself. You might be surprised how much a bad memory is worth to others. It comes with the territory. Some things I wish I’d never seen, but in seeing them I have knowledge that pays for itself ten times over. A city of amnesiacs can always use someone who remembers.”

  A simple answer, but also a somewhat sad one. As far as I could tell, Umber was one of the only living-again here that rivaled or exceeded Tamueji in age, and that wasn’t very g
ood company. Unparalleled knowledge must be its own form of isolation, just as amnesia was for me.

  Tamueji waxed poetic at times about what she’d seen in the city. That since death was a form of birth here, like mortal birth it always connected you to someone. Being born meant, hopefully, having parents, maybe siblings. Dying and coming to Serenity led to a different kind of connection. Ghosts tended to form ecosystems of souls as they settled into local haunting patterns, shared fetters, common griefs. Some streets were nothing but effusive hives of vibrant ghosts, joining around their own ethereal brand of needs. A very haunted area of the city might be like a town unto itself, concerned with the ghostly politics of singing or object possession or storytelling instead of flesh-and-blood concerns like food and shelter. Ghost merchants gathered prominence in some nooks of Serenity, selling song lyrics or baubles that would be particularly interesting to haunt, in exchange for favors or fame.

  So too the moon-souls tended to find each other by our common animal spirits, creating flocks and packs and clowders. Flying moon-souls had to share airways, so naturally we ended up rubbing against each other. I knew very few dove-souls, but I also had a weird craving for both connection and privacy. I ached to get away from the invasive eye of Serenity and its sleepless commerce. I also wished I had anything resembling a community of my own.

  Strange, because community was as inevitable as death in Serenity, the two things that seemed always the same. A unifying force pervaded the cold streets, deeper and stronger than common animal spirits. It was the shared reality of the world we’d all come from, remembered or not. Just as mountains far away shaped the wind, some things we all seemed unable to forget, no matter how deeply Umber drank.

  I had done what many fresh amnesiacs did—looked for anyone who seemed like me. It moved me that we all shared this impulse, as if even in longing to forget, some piece of us was desperate to remember.

  Ari was an Ashaic name, and Serenity had Ashaic communities, just as it had many others. We had ghost language teachers, de facto neighborhoods filled with communal houses and busy air markets. Tamueji was an expert in trading knowledge, but not the only one, and knowledge was one of the first resources I sought out. Weren’t memories simply knowledge? From speech to history, knowledge seemed one of the most elemental ties between us.

  I was looking for a very specific form of knowledge: where I might have come from.

  One of my other not-quite-friends was Midouan. She was also Ashaic, and proudly identified as so. She ran an eatery in one of the sunside street markets, much more acquainted with the diurnal crowds because of her mortality. She was a round, large, and comely woman with a tranquil aura about her. She’d tie her black hair up with flowers and sit at her table, slicing sweet potatoes or boiling rice and chattering with her clientele—sleepy, tea-loving regulars that favored a slow and easy pace as much as she did.

  There was a time when I’d often roost by her service counter and while away the late evening hours in conversation with her as she made ready for the night rush and the next day. Having a stall that served both day and night crowds was a common method for shops up here, and I imagined it made for an interesting life.

  “Unfortunately I’m not sure where you’d start looking to trace your mortal origins,” Midouan had offered one night. I crouched behind her counter, having shaped my wings away to avoid getting feathers in her kitchen. She poured us both some milk tea and pulled out buckets of oysters for me to help her shuck, freshly brought in from the fishing flock’s haul. “Ashaic heritage doesn’t mean you lived in Ashaë. Just as Zangenjai folk have made home all over the world, so our people walk many lands. Or fly, in your case. I did happen to live in Ashaë, for a long time I think. But I know that from direct memory.”

  Her point wasn’t difficult to swallow, even if it hadn’t occurred to me immediately. Serenity had a diverse population, and likely no two people had had precisely the same journey here. I could tell from mere logic not everyone who looked like me—dark brown complexion, black hair, facial features that reminded me of my own—had to share a heritage with me, just as not all those who identified as Portian were white-skinned and blond. But it was nonetheless true that no one in Serenity appeared totally without a sense of connection to some piece of the outer world. Some of that must be because we weren’t all amnesiac. But one way or another, forgotten memory appeared to take up a great deal of space.

  “So you do remember some of your life before Serenity?”

  She paused, wiped her hands before sitting. “I must have asked for some memories to stay, because there they are, plain as day. I lived in a beautiful city. Óuglai, by the sea. It had a massive temple, filling the skyline. Silver decorated its outsides, so the sun off the sea and off the temple seemed to be talking to each other. What a sight to greet me every day. I think I might have been a cook there too, but that’s just a hunch.”

  Her face glowed with such fond peace as she recanted this, her distance from that life struck me as catastrophically tragic. “Any idea why you gave it up? I can’t figure why I would have wanted my reason for forgetting to be forgotten too.”

  Her lips twisted in amusement. “We may have forgotten in the ordinary way, you know. I recall something, but only feelings, not facts. That I had lost a great deal, and wanted to start again. Start again I certainly did, whatever else I accomplished. One thing I am certain of, though. I practiced Sabyoë then, as I do now.”

  That detail was so provocatively specific it almost felt like a clue to my search. I perked up from the oysters. “Your religion?”

  “Not a religion by everyone’s definition, but yes. Part of me will never forget it.”

  “I don’t understand. If you don’t have clear memories of what you used to believe, how do you know you followed Sabyoë?” I knew next to nothing about the mystical tradition myself, merely that some books had called it such.

  “Because it isn’t about beliefs. Don’t mistake me, there are certainly teachings of Sabyoë. But if everyone forgot those teachings, eventually someone would teach them again, because they flow from a truth anyone can see. We need merely pay attention.”

  I chuckled. “So it’s more like Sabyoë has observations?”

  Her smile was so bright it shone. “In a way that’s the point. Knowledge can be power, but knowledge also gets in the way. It comes down to this: as much as we may believe we live in our heads, we don’t. Life is experienced in the body, in the whole self and the actions we live, beyond our ideas and our beliefs. I learned that in my bones, and my bones did not forget. Sell my memory as I may, after a while my bones taught me the lesson again. The truth is happening now, and it has very little to do with what I know in my head.”

  I wanted to absorb this insight with quiet enjoyment, but it felt so startlingly relevant to my situation that I couldn’t help but feel a bit flattened. “Hm. I may be in trouble, then. What I’ve learned about myself is that I am very attached to my knowledge. Memory is knowledge, and I greatly want to find a way to get my memory back.”

  She picked up a shucked oyster, squinted, and tossed it into a pot. “Memory is more than knowledge, though.”

  I frowned. “How so?”

  Her shrug was eloquent. “I think memory is how your life has affected you. Knowledge is part of it, but think about how a familiar smell can make you feel, while you may not even recall why. Painful memories are like wounds—isn’t that why we sell them? But some of the mark of them is in our bones forever. Those marks will keep teaching us a lesson, whether we know it intellectually or not. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

  The mountains we couldn’t see. I set down my oyster bucket, chewing on her casual lyricism. “It does. Maybe that’s why I want them back.”

  She raised her cup to me. “It may be a touch selfish, but if you ever regain them, I hope to see you here again all the same. I like a bit of company before night rush, somet
imes.”

  I clinked my cup to hers. “If I ever find a way to restore memory, do you think you’d want yours back?”

  Midouan appeared to consider for a few moments. “Honestly? I don’t know. Would have to decide when it happens.”

  Something was so wryly perfect about that, we both shook with laughter. A customer came to the counter, drawing her away, and I went back to my oysters.

  Now, her face swam across my mind. I may never get the chance to help her decide her answer.

  But her troubling insight curled through me, as if it’d waited for Hei to enter my life to reemerge.

  One thing was clear. I may not know who Hei was, or why I already felt so drawn to him. But he was affecting me, making a mark in my bones. That alone was filling me back up, even if I never grasped the lesson it represented. I was ready to feel full again.

  I asked Hei back to my home.

  The idea seemed to excite him. Showing me a packed bag, he said with a wink that he’d come prepared.

  The moon was waxing, but not yet gibbous. And for now, the shimmery sliver that showed from this point of the night-streets provided an atmospheric contrast to the chemical lights around us. I felt for a strong enough wind, and opened my arms to Hei. Without hesitating, he pressed himself to me. Under the shadows of the abandoned building, the streets were empty except for sounds. His body heat painting a trail across my consciousness. I took Hei gently into my arms—something that was beginning to feel very natural.

  He held so tightly as I flew, arms firm around my neck. When I glimpsed at his face, his eyes were open, taking in the swirl of Serenity under us. He didn’t seem afraid anymore. Maybe for him, like for me, riding the air reminded him that even the deepest places breathed.

  I gained my tower in minutes, scanning for signs of visitors—or intruders. I perched with care on the ledge that fed into my door. It allowed me to hold Hei in both arms and part the entrance panels with my wings, moving him securely inside before his feet touched the floor. Cool, linen-scented air wrapped me in familiarity. It was like waking up after a surreal dream to the sensations of my bed; I could almost believe my treacherous encounter with Kadzuhikhan might fade into the shadows.