Tales of the Old World (127 page)

Cimejez is by no means an unviolent creature, and he has certainly played his
part in the Great Crusade. Because Zelebzel is located in the far west of the
Land of the Dead, in the desert borderlands which separate that land from Araby,
his armies have abundant opportunities to meet their counterparts. It is by no
means unknown for the rulers of Araby to raise armies with which to mount
crusades of their own, and Zelebzel has borne the brunt of more than one such
incursion. Nagash has never had any cause to complain about the zeal with which
Cimejez has conducted his own expeditions or repelled those sent against him.
This undoubtedly helps to explain why the Supreme Lord of Death has always been
tolerant of the occasional eccentricities of his follower—but it must also be
the case that Nagash approves, if only slightly, of Cimejez’s attempts to build
better bridges between the worlds of Life and Death.

One of Cimejez’s eccentricities is the taking of prisoners, which armies of
the dead are usually disinclined to do. The dead have little need of living
slaves, and no interest at all in sexual congress with the living, so there is
no obvious reason for Lords of Death to make captives of their adversaries.
Cimejez makes an exception because he is a philosopher, and likes to debate
philosophy with the living—although it is, admittedly, rare that he can find
one among a hundred randomly-accumulated prisoners who is capable, despite his
terror, of taking part in a half-way competent argument. Imagine his delight,
therefore, when he returned from one of his raids into territory held by Araby
with a famous vizier named Amaimon, who had been travelling in a diplomatic
camel-train from one emirate to another, charged with a mission of the utmost
delicacy.

Cimejez took some delight in displaying to his unwilling visitor the
treasures of Zelebzel, which had been accumulated by the best-informed
tomb-robbers in history. He had decorated sarcophagi by the score, statues and
paintings by the hundred, and thousands of gem-encrusted objects moulded in
gold, silver and brass. It was another of the Tomb King’s eccentricities to
accumulate such useless objects, which most of the Lords of Death disdained to
possess on the grounds that they had risen far above such worldly concerns.

“Is there a museum to match this in all the world?” Cimejez asked Amaimon,
grinning his rictus smile. “Has any living man a collection to rival its
grandeur?”

“I have not seen or heard of one,” Amaimon told him. “But I think the living
take more pleasure in the works of art they possess.”

“Why, certainly,” said Cimejez. “Pleasure is a prerogative of the living,
which is greatly over-rated by them. Do you not think, though, that there is a
certain perversity in taking pleasure in such things as gems, statues and
painted images? Do you not think that the dead have a purer and more refined
notion of their quality and value?”

“Purer and more refined?” Amaimon echoed. “Well, perhaps—in the sense that
skeletons are purer for the lack of flesh, and wraiths more refined for the lack
of substance. Gems are inert, and I suppose there is a certain crucial lack of
activity in statues and paintings too—but look at that marble statue of a
dancing-girl. I will believe, if you demand it of me, that your kind might have
a better appreciation of its whiteness and its stillness, but I cannot believe
that you can appreciate the significance of its pose, or the impression it gives
of graceful movement. Yes, it is a single moment of frozen time, like death
itself; but captured in that moment is the exuberant flow of life with which its
human model was gifted. As a bleached white thing yourself, Lord Cimejez, you
might feel a particular kinship with the statue’s marble substance, but only a
living man can see the dance that has crystallized within it.”

“Do you think that the dead do not understand dancing?” Cimejez replied,
astonished. “I can assure you that we do. Indeed, I can assure you that my kind
are the only ones who understand the true nature and artistry of the dance.”

Had Amaimon been a less well-travelled man he might not have understood the
import of this statement, but he had been sent far and wide as an emissary of
more than one emir. He had even visited the Empire, and therefore knew of the
fashion within the Empire for depicting the Totentanz or Dance of Death, in
which death appears in the symbolic form of a skeleton—a skeleton not unlike
Lord Cimejez of Zelebzel, in fact—leading a train of dancers, each one holding
the hand of the next.

The point of this representation, Amaimon knew, was to stress the common
cause of all humanity against the ravages of fate, by including in the train a
wide range of social types: men and women; young and old; rich and poor; knights
and priests; merchants and soldiers; scholars and serving-maids. It had not
previously occurred to Amaimon that there might actually be dancing in the Land
of the Dead—who, after all, would be led away in a Totentanz in such a place
as Zelebzel?—but he wondered now whether the image might have some
representational value above and beyond the merely symbolic?

On the other hand, it was quite possible that Cimejez was talking about
something far more like the kind of dancing that the living enjoyed. In either
case, Amaimon thought, surely the Lord of Death had to be wrong about the
superiority of the dead, whether as dancers or as connoisseurs of the art.

“I refuse to believe that the dead can dance as well as the living,” Amaimon
said to the Tomb King. “They have neither the grace nor the ability to generate
the artistic meanings of which a human dancer is capable. I would stake my life
on it.”

“Your life has already been staked and lost,” Cimejez pointed out, “but
I do not mind a contest to settle the manner and timing of its delivery.”

“Alas,” said Amaimon, “I have no champion to carry forward my cause. There
was no dancing-girl among the prisoners your soldiers took, although there were
a few musicians.”

“Must it be a girl?” asked Cimejez.

“I think so,” the vizier replied.

“Then you must tell me where to find the one you want. I shall send an army
to fetch her.”

Amaimon had not expected this, and he certainly did not want to be the cause
of yet another army of the dead descending upon a town in Araby, so he thought
hard and fast about what to do next. Eventually, he said: “That will not be
necessary. Fortunately, I have a certain skill in magic, which I have always
been loath to use because I have seen what the exercise of magic tends to do to
the faces and souls of men. Given that my life is already forfeit to you, I see
no harm in making an exception. I am prepared to bring this very statue to life
for an hour, in order that the artistry that went into its making may be
liberated in performance. Have you a champion here to set against her?”

“Oh yes,” said Cimejez. “There is not another Lord of Death who could say so,
but I have a champion of that kind.”

“But how are we to judge the result?” Amaimon said, dubiously. “Can you
provide an impartial jury?”

“That will not be easy,” Cimejez admitted. “We might achieve neutrality by
taking an equal number of living humans from among the prisoners seized with you
and dead ones from among the ranks of my soldiers, but what if a deciding vote
were needed? We would need at least one juror with a foot in each camp, so to
speak—and if we had one such, we could probably dispense with the rest. Since
you have been generous enough to use your own magic to give my statue an hour of
life, however, I ought to match your offer by using some of mine, so this is
what I propose. Will you accept your own champion as the judge, if I make
provision to give her the choice between life and death when your hour expires?
If I can offer her a choice between a continuation of the life that you have
restored to her, or the opportunity to become a dancer of the same kind as the
rival against which she has been pitted, will you accept her decision as an
indubitable judgment of superiority?”

Amaimon thought about this offer for a moment or two, but it seemed to him
that he would have the advantage, so he agreed. “And what am I to stake, given
that my fate is already in your hands?” he asked.

“That is easy enough,” Cimejez said. “Should you win, I will let the dancer
go, so that the life she has reclaimed can be spent among her own kind. Should
you lose, you will become my vizier, and serve me—both before and after your
death—as cleverly and as loyally as you have served any living emir.”

Amaimon thought about that too, but again it seemed to be a very good
bargain, given that he was already lost. He was already among the dead, and
would soon be dead himself, so what else could he hope for but a position of
honour and privilege among the dead?

“You are very generous, my Lord,” he said. “I am glad to accept.”

“The dead do not reckon generosity in quite the same terms as the living,”
Cimejez told him, “but it is good that you are satisfied. If you will work your
magic while I summon my court, we can begin the contest as soon as you are
ready.”

The dancing girl’s name was Celome. She told Amaimon, when his metamorphic
magic had reincarnated her in place of the statue whose model she had been, and
her initial shock had waned somewhat, that she had danced in the court of King
Luvah of Chemosh, in the long-gone days when Nehekhara had been an empire of the
living, before its fertile fields had turned to arid desert.

Celome had never been taught to dance; hers was a spontaneous act born of
inspiration and nurtured by a natural process of growth. She had danced because
dancing was the most natural expression of her vitality, and had danced well
enough to win the favour of a king who was known throughout ancient Nehekhara as
a true connoisseur of that art.

Amaimon was delighted to hear all this. He explained to Celome that she must
take part in a competition against a dancer representing the world of the dead—which some called the world of the undead—but that Celome herself would have
the privilege of judging the winner.

“I have heard that serpentine lamias are fine dancers,” she said, dubiously.
“I heard, too, that one of King Luvah’s courtiers was visited in his dreams by a
dancing succubus which charmed the vital fluids from his body. But the real risk
is that I might be matched against a wraith who was a famous dancer while she
was alive and is now even lighter on her feet.”

“That is a possibility,” Amaimon conceded, “
but
the whole point of the
wager is to pit the dance of life against the dance of death. I do not think
that Cimejez will pick a champion on the grounds that he or she pleased a human
audience while alive. You might be surprised by the nature of your rival—but
you will be the judge. You have only to desire to continue to be yourself, to
live in Araby as you once lived in Chemosh.”

“I cannot imagine wishing anything different,” Celome told him. “I am a
dancer through and through; it is what I am.”

“Good,” said Amaimon.

He was not so pleased by the musicians who had been captured along with him,
whose skills were very ordinary indeed and made worse by their abject terror at
their predicament, but Celome thought they would be adequate to her needs. She
picked out a zither-player, a cymbalist and a drummer, and Amaimon tried to
impress upon them the importance of their task.

“Let us show these reanimated corpses what it means to be alive,” he said to
the four of them, as they made ready to take the floor. “Let us demonstrate our
love of life. If you can dance as I believe you can, Celome, you might remind
them what they have lost, and reintroduce these paradoxical beings to the
bittersweetness of honest regret. That is my hope, at least.”

“Mine too,” she said, “if there is life to be won.” She had found a costume
in one of the treasure-chests in Cimejez’s museum, which seemed to her
appropriate to her purpose. The instrumentalists swore that they would do their
best to assist her.

Cimejez had assembled a huge audience for the contest, which he distributed
around the great hall of his palace. All the living prisoners recently taken by
his army were brought from their cells, and all the soldiers which had taken
part in the campaign against them were there too, along with the Lord of Death’s
ministers, household servants and junior sorcerers.

“You are the challenger,” Cimejez said to Amaimon. “Your champion must take
the first turn.”

“Go to it,” said Amaimon to Celome. “Make the dead ashamed of their
condition, and remind them what it was to be alive.”

And that is what Celome did. She threw herself into the arena and performed
the legendary Dance of the Seven Veils.

The vulgar, who have only heard rumour of it, mistakenly think of the Dance
of the Seven Veils as a mere striptease, but it is far more than that, for each
of the seven veils has its own symbolism and each ritual removal is part of a
progress from misery to ecstasy. Each garment represents a curse; as each one is
discarded, the dancer advances towards a uniquely joyous kind of freedom.

The zither-player, the cymbalist and the drummer had all played the music of
the Dance of the Seven Veils before, albeit for performances of a slightly less
exalted and terrifying nature. They contrived to get the notes in the right
order, and Celome communicated some of her own inspiration to them, so that they
improved markedly as the performance progressed.

The first curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils, is hunger—which, for the purpose of the dance, includes and subsumes
thirst. The first phase of Celome’s interpretation was, therefore, the
embodiment in body-language of that most fundamental of appetites which shapes
the successful quest of the new-born infant for a mother’s milk and a mother’s
love.