Tombs

by James Dorr

  And as for the Beautiful Corpse and Gombar, I think her lips moved “Yes!” at that last moment, just before her soul could no longer endure the strain of being forced to decide. She did love his money—of that there is no doubt. The things it would buy her.

  She was, after all, an Emperor’s daughter.

  But as for her loving him over all else, even more greatly than she did his money, well, one must consider this in addition: That possibly she, ancient in nights lying shaded within her tomb, came at last to believe that perhaps she might need love more even than Gombar. Though, even if then “yes,” that was still a question he should, above all things, have never asked her.

  And then there is one more thing too, one more question they pose in the New City, and that is this one: If such a true love as theirs seems to have proved itself to have been can be purchased with mere gold? And too, in the end, was Gombar truly happy?

  The two, I think, are bound one to the other. As souls are to living flesh. And what I think is this:

  That had it not been for the money he brought with him, the six full baskets of golden coins, it is a certainty he and the Beautiful Corpse would have never met.

  FLUTE AND HARP

  There are places in the Tombs that many do not wish to wander too near to, even those of us who care for the dead. We, the crypt-keepers, the resident living, avoid these not out of apprehension—that some tomb-wraith or other night-vision beneath a blistering moon might disturb our peregrinations—but rather for respect of the stories told of those who lie within.

  • • •

  RATCATCHERS KNOW THINGS. WE ply our trade everywhere, even beyond the Tombs, for even in the glistening New City is not the rat still the poor man’s supper? And there are many poor in the New City, and elsewhere across the land—even the Old City, where ghouls hold traffic with Necromancers. There some eat the rat too, or so I have been told.

  It is the Universal, the rat is: Loved by all, though some feign distaste for it. Yet what I say here has not to do with rats, but of another thing loved as well, by most who will listen, both of the Old and the New and the Tomb-Cities, both north and west and south on the great river, and that thing is music.

  And of that there were two who I had met once, who each, later on, gave their all for the other.

  • • •

  It was Harp I met first. I do not know if she had any other name—she would not tell me—but only that it was an early evening during the time of the Moon of Tempests that I first saw her. There had been rain during the day just ended, a hard, caustic rain that had sizzled from a sky just begun baking with summer’s portended heat, and thus I had come out, nets and ratpicks at the ready, at first hint of darkness. I still wore my chador, that garment which we donned against the sun’s scalding rays even at last twilight, even when black clouds still scudded across a sky that was sinking by then to its own star-pricked blackness, for, as I have said, the hour was still early. But that which I sought would be early as well this night.

  Because, you see, one must think like a rat if one is to catch them. We, the two-legged dwellers, lived with the dead we protected within their tombs, sheltered ourselves by marble roof-slabs, by deep, brick-lined tunnels from the actinic day, and from the acid that rained from the clouds as well. This latter, rather, we caught in great filter-nets strung from the tomb-tops, channeling the flow of it downward through mesh-sided funnels to underground cisterns where, boiled and settled, re-filtered and made pure, we then could even bathe in it or drink it. But, as for my furry prey, their lairs were shallow. Their tunnels, their warrens, more prone to flooding.

  And thus it was, at first dark, rats would stream upward, to regain the surface. Shaking the moisture from their gray-velvet sides, swishing their naked tails.

  Preening and primping.

  And so I, now laying my chador aside as to free my limbs for more vigorous action, would spring to their hole-portals, raking them outward. Would trap them in meshes of burlap or hemp, casting my nets thus filled hard onto carved stones, to granite remembrances. Then, reaching down, I would wring sinewed necks, winding a single bight about each of them of the stout catch-cord that hung from my shoulders.

  And so, thump, thump, thumping against my back as I continued onward, my prey and I wandered amid the tomb-valleys, where water would run to. I always alert, my ratpick at the ready, thrusting, raking back each new small shadow.

  So I nearly did not hear the sound of thrumming.

  • • •

  It was Harp, as I say. The moon was rising, already a waning moon—gibbous still, though, and the clouds now departed—already atop the Emperor’s Pyramid, that great stone vault with its angel-formed pinnacle that crowned our tomb-land’s ancient center, its compass-rose, as it were, despite the centuries of its walls’ expansions, and I saw what I at first took to be, perhaps, a will-o’-the-wisp. A heat-caused vision. A vision and sounding.

  I saw her seated, naked at first I thought, on the west hill-slope on the roof of a small mausoleum that had been deserted, I knew, for some decades. Ratcatchers know these things. I saw her gazing, as if at the angel now silhouetted against the moon’s brightness, strumming an instrument cradled against her chest. I heard the notes she strummed, plaintive and misery-soaked. Hungered and wanting.

  And I saw her beauty.

  Rat-like, I skulked myself from shadowed tomb-side to mist-filled alley, keeping to darkness as not to disturb her. Drinking her music’s sound. Prick-eared, I listened. And rat-eyed, beady, I gazed on her sweat-sheened skin, now turned golden in the moon’s rising, sheathed, I saw now, in thin, white, silken garments, slit at the sides and stretched taut across her breasts, nearly transparent.

  And I saw her harp as well, carved from the bones of an arched, human ribcage, strung with what looked like hair. Gleaming in moonlight. And her own hair, also, as white as her instrument, as white as the robes that encased her body—such parts as they did encase—tumbling in silver waves about her torso. Her slim waist and soft, curved hips as, her song finished, she stood abruptly.

  I must have gasped then—a sudden intake of breath—because, before I could stand as well, she had whirled to face me.

  “What are you?” she demanded, clutching her harp in front of her body, as if to protect herself.

  “I, my lady?” I bowed as I spoke so, and turned briefly to the side so she could view my wares. “I?” I said once more. “I am but a ratcatcher, a humble purveyor of meat for men’s suppers.” Then hastily added, recalling the hunger I had heard within her song:

  “And women’s also.”

  I saw her nose wrinkle as if to show some disgust, as if she were one who was not used to rat-meat. Except she smiled also, and this gesture showed relief.

  “Then not a ghoul?” she said. “Not one who would eat me?”

  I could not help it. I laughed when she said that. “Ghouls do not eat the living,” I said between chortles. “It is not a thing allowed—neither here in the Tombs nor elsewhere, since time beyond memory.”

  “And yet I have feared it,” she said. “I have dreamed it.”

  “You are not of us, then? Not of the Tombs?” I asked. “Not one who would know, at first hand as we do, what ghouls will do to those that are dead should we fail to build our walls ever stronger, to increase our vigilance … ?”

  “No,” she cut me off. “I am of the New City, sneaked in with the mourners when last night’s corpse train crossed over the causeway. When morning came I hid here–” She gestured downward, swinging her harp wide, at the mausoleum.

  “Yet,” I said, “your instrument, lady … ?”

  She nodded. “My father bought this for me years ago, from one of your artisans.” She showed it to me, the carvings of its frame, its stringing, yes, of some ancient woman’s hair, braided in strands and treated with oil to counter its brittleness. “It was expensive.”

  “And yet he afforded it,” I said. “You must then be wealthy. And yet … you have come h
ere.”

  I left unasked that which I most wanted to know, the why of her being here. There were others, true, some of legends, not born of the Tombs but who had come here still living to stay. The richest of rich, a man named Gombar. Another, a woman, who had been named Trinity and who was cast out, and yet, the story went, whose bones were laid in the Pyramid itself, displacing those that were already there. But these were just legends—while this one who stood before me was alive now.

  She nodded. “Yes. I have come to the Tombs of my own accord because, though we were wealthy—though I could have all I asked, lessons in music, jewelry, clothing—there was something, and I still know not what it is, that no one in the New City could give me.”

  She blushed as she went on: “I was to be married … ”

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  She shook her head, shaking the white of her hair down in cascades, rippling in shining streams. “That was not it either,” she said. She changed the subject. She gazed at my catch-cord.

  “You said people eat those?”

  I nodded myself then. I knew she was hungry, that she had not eaten since at least the last evening. “Yes,” I answered. I followed her into her mausoleum-home and showed her how best to cook the rat, taking spices I had from my own pack to show how best to spice it. I took my knife showing her how to cut it, in tender filets, and how best to eat it.

  Then finally she nodded, filled. “I cannot pay you. My father is wealthy, but that which is mine—save only this harp which I will never part with—is across the river.”

  “I know,” I said—I knew also then that her name here would be Harp. “It is the way of the wealthy to not pay, unless they are forced to. That is how they get rich. And yet, my lady, you have paid already.”

  She looked puzzled then so I quickly added. “Your music, lady. You have performed for me and it was beautiful, just as you are yourself. And I have friends who would wish to hear you play, if you are willing, who would bring you food in exchange for their listening, and other comforts.”

  And so it happened that in the weeks’ waning of that Moon of Tempests, Harp played for the Tombs and once more became wealthy.

  • • •

  But it was at the new moon, the dark that presages the Moon of Lovers and summer heat’s rising, that one more thing happened. It had been a time of solar flares, and strange portendings—some that even mutated the rats themselves, as I found out later, some of them anyway, making them smarter, harder to catch, cleverer, and, somehow, more appreciative—when a cry came from the River Gate, below the arched causeway that Harp had arrived on.

  “A boat!” was the cry. “A gypsy boat coming!” And I ran with the others down the cut granite stairs, down to the river quay, such catch as I had a-thump on my back as I rushed to be first on the level landing, since rivermen, also, buy rat when it’s offered them.

  But this boat did not stop. Rather, it veered away, its crewmen only dropping a bundle off onto the stone pier.

  A bundle that moved and groaned.

  I was first reaching it, Harp just behind me—Harp, who I might have wished to be my lover, should she have accepted me, but, rather, had become somewhat my daughter, bejeweled now in cut stone and golden trinkets the color of her own skin, glinting in torchlight, the moon being new. Her gossamer-white garments swishing around her.

  And so it was I who stooped, seeing the bundle still wrapped in a day chador, slowly unwinding it. Helping it to its feet.

  Others stood back now: Revealed was a woman, her skin as white as the pearls of the river, with hair black as midnight! A twin, almost, to Harp in youth and beauty, save for their coloring—both slim and lithe-bodied, long-legged and trim-waisted, yet lushly curved of breast and hip and with soft, rounded shoulders and delicate thighs. And hair, while straight where Harp’s was loosely curled, cascading, too, nearly down to the cleft of strong, supple buttocks.

  She stood and she stretched, stepping over the chador that now lay discarded and saying not a word while Harp and I both inspected the garments she had worn beneath it, again almost Harp’s twins. Sheer and diaphanous, slit for limb-movement and letting the soft summer air cool the flesh within, except, as all river-daughters did, where Harp preferred silks as pale as the moon’s glow, she favored brightness. A crimson blood-color, as red as the paints of her finger- and toe-nails, the color of daylight’s sun, and the bruise of her lips, just as Harp’s lips were a scarlet as well, contrasting with jewelry—not earth-stone as Harp wore, of emeralds and topaz—but amber and shell beads.

  And on her back—Harp saw it first, before I did! Before I realized what it was I did see.

  On her back this riverwoman had slung a hollowed bone of some great sea-creature, carved and finger-holed. Bleached and banded, as white as Harp’s hair, as white as her own skin, and mouth-holed for playing.

  Harp hated her at the sight.

  But I, I questioned. A river-chieftain’s daughter I knew she was from the paleness of her skin, always pampered below-decks in day’s light, not even risking the sun in a chador, and her hair’s straightness that showed it had never been braided for deck-work, even in nighttime. But what had brought her here, if then a chief’s daughter?

  She would not answer me, I but a ratcatcher. But I heard gossip—we ratcatchers have a way of knowing such things—of what she told the head of the quay-guards when that man asked her. That she had been disowned by her father because she had refused the hand of a greater chief’s son.

  • • •

  And so she was called Flute among we Tombs-people because she had given the guard no other name, even when he had asked. Perhaps she had no other name, her father no doubt having taken that back from her as well when she had fallen into his disfavor. Leaving her only the instrument she now played, skirling, wildly, atop the Pyramid when she would stand there, a twin to the angel that stood beside her.

  While Harp would play below, down on her western slope, down below her mausoleum-home, while Flute, by contrast, always faced east. To the river she still must have loved in her heart, even if not a chief’s son.

  And so it happened that both became favored among the Tombs-people through the near-magicalness of their talents, Harp with the sedateness of classical measures, her right hand fingering over the ground, her left answering back in tinkling arpeggios, bold glissandi, while Flute, more untutored, played natural, wild rhythms of rivers’ enchantment, of gypsy-toned rhapsodies skirling the night sky. And yet they would have nothing to do with each other, Harp during the daytime retreating, alone, to her mausoleum. Flute going to who knew where? One does not ask such things of a river-chieftain’s daughter.

  And suitors they had too, not mere ratcatchers such as I was, but their pick of the best of the Tombsmen, guard-chiefs, embalmers, artists and artisans, wealthy and honored. People who gave them jewels—yet they refused them.

  And both seemed searching—for something. They knew not what.

  Until another month passed. Two months. A quarter and then a half of a year until it was winter, a time of thin snows, of occasional ice at night melting in day’s heat, a good time for rat-catching, when the sun flared again.

  This time there was scarcely any warning. It happened at night, but a night of the full moon, the Moon of Land’s Starving, and death reflected off the moon itself. Neither had played that night—they did not play all nights—and Harp had been wandering by the River Wall, east of her normal haunts, when the cry came up.

  Ghouls, was her first thought—whatever I told her, she could not shake that fear. The fear that had come to her once in a dream, and so had the power of a possible omen. But where could she run to?

  She was far from her home, while all about her—this I heard later—people with more wisdom of the true danger ran scurrying, hastening to their own tunnels. Little knowing that Harp was lost. All alone.

  I was, myself, well underground by then too—all this I heard later.

  When strong, white hands grasp
ed her, one circling around her waist, clutching its slimness. “Hurry!” a voice whispered, one seldom heard to speak—even by guard-chiefs.

  And so, unyielding, Harp let the river-daughter lead her down to a chink in the stone of the boat-gate, a cleft in the granite just over the water. Just large enough to fit the two of them, but deep enough to protect them from the glare.

  As each in the other’s arms they huddled.

  I heard these things, as I say, although much later. We ratcatchers learn things, and rats, that live in the chinks of rocks as well, have eyes to see with, and ears to hear with.

  And mouths to speak with—these rats grown clever.

  And so I know now how Harp must have shuddered. “I thought it was ghouls,” she said.

  And how Flute had laughed then, but reassuringly, her soft voice tinkling like miniature bells as she hugged Harp closer. “Then you should avoid me,” she said, “because ghouls and my people have enmity. They would destroy me, if they were able. It is a superstition of theirs that in times past our boats have brought ill luck.”

  “But you have saved me,” Harp whispered back to Flute, as their bodies rubbed one on the other, so narrow was the chink that they lay in. With room enough only to thrust their instruments farther below them, to keep them from being crushed. “While I, I admit it, I hated you at first—because in you I could see a rival. But later because I thought you disliked us, your standoffish ways, you’re not even speaking when you could avoid it. Not even to my ratcatcher companion when he had only asked who you were.”

  “It is the way,” Flute said, “of we river-people, not to speak much even to one another but rather to listen to the water’s flowing, the creak of boats’ timbers, the flap of wind on our sails. These things we must do, lest we wreck and be drowned … ”

  And Harp shuddered again, deliciously rubbing against Flute’s body. Her hands finding room even in the chink’s narrowness to wrap around Flute’s lithe thighs, as Flute’s hands, in turn, found just space enough to stroke Harp’s soft breasts. As scarlet lips met lips.