Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54 Page 8

  FANTASY

  Sah-Harah

  Gheorghe Săsărman

  (Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

  Lord Knowshire could scarcely contain his emotion. Before him, only a few miles away, gleaming bright in the sunlight, were the red walls of Sah-Harah. In that moment, he forgot the tragic vicissitudes of his journey, forgot the unhappy fate of his companions and the faithlessness of his guides, forgot all but the marvelous sight that lay at last before his eyes. For years he had dreamed of it, repeating the passages from Abu-Abbas engraved in his memory and comparing the Coptic inscriptions of Abydos with the papyrus, two millennia older, discovered in the nameless tomb at Deir-el-Bahari and never fully understood till now. He had followed his destiny here. He allowed himself a moment to savor the long-sought triumph, for he had paid dearly for it. Then, hoisting onto his back the knapsack containing all that was left of the expedition supplies, he set off resolutely toward the gleaming granite walls that sent him from afar a final, irresistible challenge.

  The circular shape of the city became ever more apparent as he came nearer. He visually estimated the diameter as not less than two miles. The city presented to the visitor a forbidding exterior wall, sixty or seventy feet high, of polished, perfectly fitted stone blocks, an even surface without hollows or projections. It appeared to be a single colossal building: a cylinder with a slightly rounded lid. As his lordship came close, that lid or cap was hidden by the loom of the wall.

  He came right up to the wall and set his palm on the red, sun-heated stone. Then he set off along it, seeking an entrance. He judged that he had gone about a quarter of the circumference when at last he came on an opening, very high, very narrow—so narrow that only an unusually thin person could venture to enter it. There he halted, slipping his pack off, and considered what to do.

  The entrance—he could not bring himself to call it a doorway—was appallingly plain. An opening. A dark crack in the lower third of the featureless wall. Nothing frightening, nothing intended to give warning or strike terror into one who sought entry, no trace of bolts, bars, sphinxes, or chimera. And yet, standing outside this entrance, the intrepid Lord Knowshire felt a most disagreeable sensation, a shudder that ran clear through his body, head to foot. But it was too late to turn back now. The moment’s hesitation past, he stepped across the invisible threshold.

  Though famous for his thinness, and still leaner now after the long days of trekking in the heat of the desert, even he could go forward only by sidling along, his chin tucked into his shoulder, dragging his pack behind him by the strap. Contrary to his expectations and the usual mythologies, he came to no trapdoors, no hidden devices set to destroy the wiliest and most cautious transgressor. Quite the opposite: The tight squeeze of the entrance soon opened out into a corridor, not very wide, to be sure, but easy enough to walk in. Light came from high up; the air was breathable; the floor lay on a scarcely perceptible rising grade; the walls were featureless; and the passage had a slight, constant curve to the left, a curve evidently following the shape of the outer wall.

  After walking some hours, his lordship realized that the corridor was not circular, for if it had been, he would almost certainly have come back round to the entrance or a place he had already passed. The passageway led steadily onward, turning always very slightly to the left. Unmistakably, he was tracing a slow, gigantic spiral, the end of which he could not foresee, since he could not precisely determine the curvature, not knowing the thickness of the walls, and thus could not know if the spiral extended all the way to the center of the colossal edifice or would end before that. All he could do was go on, following the constant slight curve to the left.

  Nightfall is very brief in that latitude. All light in the corridor came from the sky, so when his lordship found himself in gloom and shadow, he had just time to look at his watch and set down his pack before it grew pitch dark. For hours he had heard no sound but his own footsteps amplified by echo. Now he listened hard, but in vain; not the slightest sound came to his ears. In the changeless quiet of the night, his breathing and the slow rhythm of his heartbeat were the only signs of life. He closed his eyes. The image of the corridor, rocking a little to the cadence of his steps, rose before him and would not leave him. Then, worn out by fatigue and the effort to keep calm, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  The night passed without event. Yet for the first time since he set off on this expedition, he woke with a vivid sense of the relentless passage of time. Once again he went through the limited contents of his pack: binoculars, a map, a broken compass, a journal in which he had made no entries for a long time, a book from which he had never been parted, some cartridges for the revolver at his belt, a canteen half full of stale water, biscuits, chocolate, a few tins of meat, a knife … and that was all. The food could be made to last several days. The water, maybe three. Not a reassuring assessment.

  He set off again. He had to go on. For a moment he thought he had started out in the wrong direction, but that was impossible; the passage led on, curving slightly to the left; everything was as it should be.

  The problem with this easy walking was only now becoming clear. A day passed, two days; well before a week had passed, he was suffering from hunger and above all from thirst. His steps were less steady, his vision dimmed. The slight curve of the corridor began to obsess him. He could not sleep. He walked on even at night. Despite that utter darkness, the image of the changeless passage ahead was so deeply printed on his retina that it never left him, and he followed it all night. He walked on, not stopping, no longer knowing night from day, not counting the days, his mind fixed on the corridor’s end, persisting in envisioning the unforeseeable. He shuddered with rage, fearing that he had got turned round, knowing he would die of thirst long before he reached his goal, terrified at the thought that his legs would give out, that he would fall down and crawl a while and die before he ever came to the end of the horrible corridor …

  He staggered, fell. His knees hurt very much. Only then did he realize he had been walking in complete darkness. He reached out toward the wall for support. His groping fingers touched bones: a skeleton. He struggled to his feet. Must go on. He knew that if he stayed there to rest, he would never get up again. He went on, more cautiously. After a while there was some light, and he saw other skeletons. In a moment of clear-mindedness, he realized that the radius of the circle within which he moved had greatly decreased; the leftward curve of the corridor was much more marked. It could not be much farther to the center. He breathed with difficulty. His tongue was swollen, his belly cramped with hunger-pangs. He decided to get rid of the backpack he had carried so far, useless to him now. He took off his shoes, then his clothes, one by one. The sense of fatality, of the irreversible, that he had waked to that first morning now filled his whole being.

  When he stepped out naked into the round central chamber of the Nummultian city Sah-Harah, Lord Knowshire was at the end of his strength. He leaned against the wall, and before letting himself slip slowly to the floor, managed to take one look clear around the room. What he saw would have awed anyone: twelve massive golden thrones set around the wall, in which sat twelve bejeweled ivory statues of Osiris. The alabaster wall was carved in bas-relief, a great frieze of scenes from the Book of the Dead, broken by panels of hieroglyphs. In the center of the chamber, among bronze tables set with bowls and baskets filled with honey, wheat, wine, and dates, stood a magnificent silver sarcophagus. The lid was propped open on two cedar-wood poles. Next to it, on a chair that looked very simple amid the pomp of all the rest, some purple garments were laid.

  Spellbound, his lordship stood up straight and walked forward as if floating on the air. He no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst, or was no longer aware of them. He had entirely forgotten what had brought him to this place. As if sleepwalking, he approached the sarcophagus and, paying no heed to the opulent feast laid out on the tables, looked inside to make sure the coffin was empty. He moved slowly, with calm, hieratic g
estures, as if carrying out a sacred rite. He took up the purple robes and put them on. Then, with great care not to bring the lid down, he slipped into the sarcophagus and stretched himself out, smiling a little. His death was a slow, quiet crossing of the boundary between the two worlds, as if no boundary existed.

  He was dead. The rotten cedar-wood props shattered, spraying a fine dust all around, and the heavy lid of the sarcophagus came down with a mighty crash. On its upper surface was the carven image of Lord Knowshire’s face, transfigured by an ineffable smile. It had been waiting there four thousand years for this reunion.

  © English Translation © 2013 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  Originally published in Squaring the Circle (Aqueduct Press).

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born on April 9, 1941, in Bucharest, Romania, Gheorghe Săsărman spent his childhood and attended high school in Cluj, Transylvania’s capital-city. He studied architecture in Bucharest and after graduation was employed as a journalist, authoring articles on architecture and popular science. In 1978, he received his Ph.D. in the theory of architecture with the dissertation Function, Space, Architecture (later published as an essay). Săsărman made his debut as a writer in 1962, when he won the first prize at a SF short-story contest organized for seven East-European countries. His first book, The Oracle (1969), grouped texts previously published in periodicals. His best-known work, Squaring the Circle (1975), clashed with the communist censorship, which cut out one quarter of its contents; also published in France (1994) and Spain (2010), this book is to be edited by Aqueduct Press, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent translation. A story in the volume Chimera (1979), “Algernon’s Escape”—whose title paraphrases that of Daniel Keyes’s famous novel—brought the author the Europa Award at the Eurocon V Convention (1980). The novel 2000 (1982) was published in German in Munich, as Die Enklaven der Zeit (1986). After 1989, he resumed publishing fiction in his native country: the novels The Hemlock Cup (1994), South vs. North (2001), The Unparallelled Adventures of Anton Retegan and of His Secret Police File (2011), as well as the short-story collection Visions (2007). His play Deus ex Machina was staged in Munich (2005) and Bucharest (2006-2009). Săsărman has published short stories and novellas in magazines, anthologies, and collective volumes in Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Japan. In 2012, he was awarded the “Ion Hobana” Opera Omnia Prize by the Bucharest branch of the Writers’ Union and the Romanian Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

  A Flock of Grief

  Kat Howard

  The woman’s dress was perfectly correct. Indeed, it, and she, would have been utterly unremarkable, were it not for the bird perched upon her shoulder, black-feathered, eyes with the seasick luminosity of moonstones.

  “Vulgar,” Sofie said to me under her breath. “Why go out in society at all, if you are going to appear like that? No one wishes to have a party disturbed by such reminders of grief and mortality. It’s an insult to the hostess.”

  “Indeed,” I said, and thought of the bird I had caged before coming out to do the expected thing, and dance at a party. While I would rather dance than not, the expectation weighed.

  “At least they are seeing her out,” Sofie said, and tipped her head in the direction of the mourning woman, who was being gently directed towards the door. “I really don’t know why she came at all.”

  One sees them, every so often, those who have chosen to grieve in a manner they call natural, who do not take advantage of the alternatives. Pale-faced, shadow-eyed, the bird of grief perched upon their shoulder. As if carrying such a thing around, where everyone else can see, and is forced to interact with its presence, is in any way natural or respectful.

  “Have you retained your Mourner yet?” Sofie asked, and tucked her hand in my elbow to lead me across the floor. “I can give you the name of the girl I used when dear Papa died.”

  “That would be most kind,” I said.

  We both stepped around the feathers that had fallen to the floor.

  • • • •

  The birds gather wherever there has been a death. Black birds, with eyes of pale, moonstone white. They are there for the soul of the person who has died, and they are there to embody the grief of those who are required to mourn.

  It was an appalling thing, to be chosen as a mourner, to feel the tiny claws of the bird’s talons clutch at your skin. Mourning meant isolation from society, the need to drape oneself in heavy, black clothing. Neither to dance, nor even to listen to music, nor to eat foods of particular richness or flavor. To become like unto one of the dead oneself.

  Horrible.

  And there is no choice, not once the birds are there. One cannot mourn, unless there is a bird, and once the bird has chosen a mourner, one has no alternative but to either accept the burden, or to hire a Mourner to do so instead. Personal feelings play no role. Such a thing would be flashy, inappropriate. Vulgar.

  • • • •

  The bird of my grief was born from the death of my husband. It had not been a wanted marriage, nor had it been a happy one, but what was done was done, and when he died, it was necessary that the proper forms were followed. I was the relict, the widow, and therefore, I must be in mourning.

  I must be, though any mourning I had done had been for myself, and on the day of our wedding.

  Thankfully, his death had not only freed me from his tyranny, it had also rendered unto me a great deal of material wealth. Using some of that wealth to hire a Mourner was a pleasure.

  I handed the caged bird to the girl. “Do whatever it is that is required, and then send the bill to my residence.”

  “That’s not quite how the ritual works, Mrs.—”

  “Do not speak his name. I am not that, and will never be again. You may address me as Sibila.”

  “Sibila,” she said, and opened the cage door. The bird emerged to perch on her finger, its death-pale eyes fixed on me. “I will bear your grief. But you must be the one to speak its name and place it in me.”

  I sighed, feeling the heavy woolen layers of black I wore, black I could not cast off until this nonsense was completed, compress my chest as I did. “Very well. By all means, let us do the thing properly.”

  “Follow me, please, Mrs.—Sibila.”

  The girl held aside a curtain of thick, black velvet. I followed her through the doorway and down a corridor, in far less good repair than the front of her shop had been. The wooden floor was stained and warped, the paper on the walls dingy and peeling at the edges. It was a sad place, and I wished the girl would walk faster, rather than forcing us to linger in it.

  The bird flew from her hand to land again on my shoulder, feathers dropping in its wake. I shuddered at the prick of its talons.

  The girl opened a door, then locked it behind us. “Forgive me, but the ritual requires that I disrobe.”

  “Do whatever is necessary.” Sofie had told me there were things I might find strange, that I should simply accept them, and it would soon be over.

  The girl stepped behind a black enameled screen, and I could hear the rustle and sigh of fabric. The room was hung with birdcages, from the ornate and filigreed to one so plain it hardly seemed that it would hold its shape were a bird actually to be placed in it. All of them were empty, all of them were closed. There was a low chaise, and next to it, a table. On the top, an assortment of silver knives, spread out like a fan.

  When the girl stepped out from behind the screen, I could see what her clothing had obscured: She was covered with thin scars.

  She lay down on the chaise. “Choose a knife, name your grief, and make your cut.”

  “Name my grief?”

  “You must say what it is I am to mourn.”

  “My husband has died, and I am required to mourn his passing.”

  Her eyes went the same luminescent white of the bird’s. “Name your grief truly.”

  But I did not. I balanced my right hand just abo
ve the girl’s breasts, and cut the flesh between them.

  As I did, I felt my own skin part, my own blood drip hot, and nearly fumbled the knife in my startlement. I pressed my hand against my chest, but there was nothing there. A phantom.

  The bird flew from my shoulder to the girl’s chest, and then, beak first, entered the wound there. I felt something pull and tear inside me, felt the drag of feathers against the inside of my skin.

  Then, nothing, and it was wonderful to feel so.

  The girl was breathing heavily, and tears fell from her eyes, eyes that were dark, as they had been before. The bird was gone, the incision in her chest nothing more than a thin, pink line, distinguishable only by its freshness from the other scars she wore.

  “Are we finished, then?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she wheezed.

  “Then I shall see myself out.”

  “Sibila.”

  “What?”

  “The knife.”

  I looked down. It was still in my hand, the blood on the blade darkening to near black, clutched so tightly my skin wore the shape of the handle. “Of course.” I set it back upon the table, and left, glad to have the entire disgusting business behind me.

  • • • •

  Except, it seemed, it was not.

  My grief opened, a thin red line on my chest that wept into a teardrop. Out of it climbed a black bird.

  The bird flew across the room, and battered itself against the window, trying to get out. I pressed my fingers to the edges of the wound in my chest. If I pressed hard enough, I could feel pain. It was discomfiting, unpleasant.

  The bird crashed against the window once more, hard enough that a crack feathered across the glass. Hard enough that the bird fell to the floor in a heap of feathers.

  Unsightly. I rang a bell to have it taken care of.

  The bird of my grief was dead, its corpse carried away, but there remained a hole in my chest where it had flown out. When I looked in the mirror, I could see the white cage of my bones.