The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
began to see ghosts among the reeds, sitting up in the mud as I passed, beseeching me to take them aboard my funeral boat so they might go properly into the final land. They were no more than wisps of smoke, suggestions of shapes glimpsed from the corner of the eye. When I looked directly at any one of them, I could not see it.
Some called out in languages I had never heard before. Only a few spoke of places and people I had known. I was afraid of these few. I did not want them to recognize me. I lay back down in the bottom of my boat and put the coins back over my eyes. I slept fitfully after a while and dreamed of my father. He paced back and forth on the surface of the black water, his trailing robe sending ripples as he walked, his face contorted with rage. Once he stopped and seemed to shake me furiously, saying, “No, my son, no. This is not what I wanted for you. I command you. I forbid you.…because I love you still. Go back to Reedland. Go!”
But, in my dream, I only answered, “Father, I will go if you let me take Hamakina back with me.”
He made no answer but continued to rage and pace, too furious even to ask if I loved him.
I awoke from my dream to the faint sound of singing like many voices carried on the wind from far away. I sat up once more, put the coins in my bag, and saw a vast trireme bearing down on me, its sail bellied full, its oars thrashing the water into foam.
Yet it was an insubstantial thing like the ghosts in the reeds, a shape of smoke. The voices of the oarsmen were muted, the throbbing of the pace-setter’s drum like the failing thunder of a distant, dying storm. The stars shone through the hull and sail, and the foam of the oars was a phantom thing, the water around me still black and smooth and silent.
This was a wonder, but no mystery, for the Great River co-exists with the River of the Dead, for all that they flow in different directions. Sometimes the rivermen fleetingly glimpse the traffic of the dark current, faint shapes in the night. When they do, they reckon it a bad omen and make sacrifices to soothe the anger of whatever god might have been offended.
Now I, on the River of the Dead, saw the living as phantoms. The trireme loomed up, and then my boat passed through it. For a moment I was among the oarsmen and I could smell the reek of their laborings. Then a richly-furnished cabin swam around me. A great lord feasted, surrounded by his followers. I think it was the Satrap of Reedland himself. One lady of his company paused, cup in hand. Our eyes met. She looked more startled than afraid. She poured out a little of her wine, as if to make a libation to me.
Then the trireme was gone, and I lay back again, the coins on my eyes, my father’s sword clutched against my chest.
I slept once more and dreamt once more, but my dream was only a confusion, shapes in the darkness, and sounds I could not make out. I awoke parched and famished, and took another sip from my water bottle, and ate a little of the food in the leather bag.
It was as I ate that I realized that the river was no longer flowing. The boat lay absolutely motionless in the middle of a black, endless, dead marsh beneath the grey stars. Even the evatim and the ghosts were gone.
I was truly afraid. I thought I would be left there forever. No, somehow I was certain of it. Somehow the Devouring God had tricked me, and the Land of the Dead would not accept me while I yet lived.
I forced down one last bite of bread, then closed the bag and called out, half sobbing: “Sybil! Help me! I’ve lost my way!”
And the sky began to lighten. I saw not merely reeds, but huge trees rising out of the marsh, stark and barren like ruined stone pillars.
Some of the stars began to fade. I thought the Moon was rising—how strange that I should be able to see the Moon here!—but instead the face of the Sybil drifted into the sky, pale and round and huge as the full Moon. She gazed down on me for a time in silence and I was afraid to speak to her. Then her face rippled, as a reflection does when a pebble is dropped into a still pool, and she was gone, but her voice came rattling through the reeds.
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you have called on me foolishly and have wasted one summoning. You are near to your goal and could have found your own way. Nevertheless, if you think you need a guide, reach down into the water and draw one up.”
“Into the water?” I said. For an instant I was terrified that I had wasted a second summoning with that question. But the Sybil did not reply.
I reached down into the frigid water, wary of lurking evatim. I groped around, swinging my arm from side to side, my fingers outstretched. For an instant I lay there, half out of the boat, wondering if this were another of the Sybil’s riddles. Then the water suddenly stirred, as if something were rising, and my fingers closed on something stringy and slippery like an underwater weed, and I pulled.
A hand broke the surface, then another. I let go of what I had been holding and scrambled back. The hands caught hold of the side of the boat and the boat rocked beneath the weight of that which climbed aboard. There was a sudden, overwelming stench of decay, or rotted flesh. Long, muddy hair fell across a face that was more bone than anything else.
I screamed then, and kept on screaming when the thing opened its eyes and began to speak and I knew that it was my mother.
“Sekenre—”
I covered my face with my hands and merely sobbed, trying to remember her as she had been once, so very long ago.
“Sekenre—” She took hold of my wrists and gently drew my hands away from my face. Her touch was as cold as the Sybil’s kiss.
I turned from her.
“Mother, I did not expect—” I could not say more, and broke into tears again.
“Son, I did not expect to see you in this place either. Truly, it is a terrible thing.”
She pulled me forward and I did not resist, until I lay with my face in her lap, my cheek against her wet, muddy gown, while she gently stroked my forehead with a bony finger. I told her all that had happened then, of Father’s own death, and his return for Hamakina.
“I am your father’s sin, returning to him at last,” she said.
“Did he—?”
“Murder me? Yes, he did. But that is the least part of his offense. He has sinned more against you, Sekenre, and also against the gods.”
“I don’t think he meant to do wrong,” I said. “He says he loves me still.”
“He probably does. Nevertheless, he has done great wrong.”
“Mother, what shall I do?”
Her cold, sharp finger drew a circle around the mark on my forehead.
“It is time for us to resume our journey. The boat has served its purpose now. You must leave it.”
I looked at the black water with ever-increasing dread.
“I don’t understand. Are we to…swim?”
“No, beloved son. We are to walk. Get out of the boat now, and walk.”
I slipped one leg over the side, one foot in the frigid water. I looked back at her uncertainly.
“Go on. Do you doubt this one small miracle, after all you have seen?”
“Mother, I—”
“Go on.”
I obeyed her and stood upon the water. It felt like cold glass beneath my feet. Then she stood next to me, and the boat drifted slowly away. I turned to watch it go, but she took me by the hand and led me in a different direction.
Her touch was like the Sybil’s, a touch of living, frigid iron.
The channel widened, and the evatim were waiting for us. Here the water flowed almost swiftly, making silent waves and eddies and whirlpools behind the dead trees. Many ghosts waded in the shallows, but they did not call out to us. They merely stood there, turning as we passed. One of them was a man in full, gleaming armor, holding his severed head in his hands.
Then