Tales of the Old World (128 page)

The second curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils, is cold, so the second phase of Celome’s version was the embodiment in
movement of the need for clothing and shelter and of its eventual achievement.

The third curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils, is disease—which, for the purpose of the Dance of the Seven Veils, also
embraces injury—so the third phase of Celome’s performance comprised a
symbolic celebration of the power of the body to heal itself, and the wisdom of
physicians.

The fourth curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils, is loneliness, so the fourth phase of Celome’s mime was a hymn of praise
to society and amity, and the productive rewards of co-operative labour.

The fifth curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils, is loss, so the fifth phase of Celome’s rendition was a demonstration of
the agony of grief, which gave way by degrees to the triumph of resolution and
the recognition of all the legacies which the dead convey to the living.

The sixth curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils, is childlessness, so the sixth phase—the longest so far—of Celome’s
extravaganza was a celebration of sexual love, marriage and parenthood.

Amaimon watched all these phases with the critical eye of a connoisseur, and
found little to criticise. It was easy enough to see that Celome had not been
trained in the conventional devices of Arabic dancing, but it was equally
obvious that her spontaneity and exuberance made up for the omission. She was
authentically gifted, and her appeal to the emotions of her audience was no less
powerful because it lacked a certain refinement and sophistication. Whatever
imperfection remained in the playing of her accompanists was easily ignored; the
dancer was the only centre of attention, the sole contestant. The living members
of the audience followed her with their eyes, utterly captivated by her every
movement.

On the other hand, Amaimon could see that the dead were quite unimpressed.
Many of the skeletons, most of the zombies and all of the ghouls in the crowd
had two good eyes, while the wraiths had more glittering stares than their
inhabiting souls could ever have manifested in the flesh. They could all see
well enough what Celome was doing, and even the notorious stupidity of death
could not have prevented them from understanding the greater part of it—but
Amaimon could see that they were unresponsive. They must have been reminded of
life, but seemingly not in any way that made them regret its loss. They did not
seem to care at all.

Perhaps, Amaimon thought, that was because they could not care—but he was
reluctant to believe it. Dead or not, they had been raised to action, subjected
to motive force. Given that they had the capacity to respond to motive force,
they ought to have the capacity to respond to the art of the dance. The problem
was to reach and activate that potential.

There was still one phase of the dance to be completed, and Amaimon knew that
whatever hope he had rested on that—but he suspected that the final phase
might seem a trifle offensive to the audience gathered in the palace of
Zelebzel, because the final curse afflicting human life, according to the Dance
of the Seven Veils, was death itself: not the death of others, as per the fifth
curse, but the death of the individual. The final act of Celome’s drama was
supposed to consist of a heroic defence of creative achievement and a defiant
statement of the fact that although a body and mind might be annihilated, the
legacy of their attainments could not.

Celome did as well as anyone in her situation could have done. The last and
longest phase of the dancing-girl’s masterpiece was a celebration of dancing
itself, its joy and its meaning; its consummation and climax was the removal of
the final veil, and the revelation of the human being beneath, utterly
triumphant over every single one of the many indignities which cruel fate had
heaped upon her kind. Even her accompanists excelled themselves.

When Celome fell still at last the captive prisoners, all of whom were
already in tears, burst into a storm of applause and acclamation—but the dead
remained silent. They did not seem to be bored, but neither were they in the
least appreciative.

But that does not matter, Amaimon told himself. For they are not the judges
who will decide this matter. Celome is the judge, and there was not one among
the living observers who enjoyed watching her performance one tenth as much as
she enjoyed giving it.

When Celome looked up and met Amaimon’s eye he saw that she was pleased with
what she had done, and was reassured. Cimejez beckoned to her, then indicated
that she should take the empty seat beside Amaimon. The vizier briefly took her
hand in his, and squeezed it slightly before releasing it again, by way of
congratulation.

Then Cimejez’s champion took the floor.

Celome’s rival was, as Amaimon had half-expected, exactly the kind of figure
depicted in the art of the Empire: the leader of the Totentanz. He was a
skeleton, but not any ordinary skeleton. He was an imperious skeleton, with an
eyeless face and perfect teeth set in the permanent smile of the long-dead. He
wore a jet-black cape with a hood, and he carried a scythe.

The zither-player, the cymbalist and the drummer had already retired to join
the other captives. Their place was taken by a single drummer, also a skeleton
attired in a monkish robe—but when he began to caress his instrument with his
slender fingers the rhythm he sounded was more signal than dance-beat. Amaimon
recognised it as a chamade: the summons used by exhausted armies to call for
truce and negotiation.

There were no veils in this performance, no curses and no alleviations. It
had only one phase, and even that had no hint of a crescendo.

It occurred to Amaimon, as he watched the skeleton move to the rhythm of the
chamade, that he had never been able to make out what kind of dance the
Totentanz was. Like the statue of Celome, the carved images of the dance that he
had seen in Altdorf and Marienburg had been frozen moments decanted from an
unfolding process, but while his human eyes had read an implicit flow and surge
into the statue he had been unable to do likewise for the leader of the
Totentanz. Now, for the first time ever, he was able to see the evolution and
revolution of the Dance of Death, and to understand not merely where it led but
how and why.

There were no phases in the Dance of Death because death had no phases. There
were no curses in the dance of death because death was devoid of afflictions.
There were no veils in the Dance of Death because death could neither deceive
nor conceal its essence. There were neither triumphs nor celebrations in the
Dance of Death, because death was all triumph, and had no need of any
celebration. The Dance of Death was slow, and painstakingly measured, and
eternal. The Dance of Death was an inexorable and inescapable summons, whose
promise was more truce than release. That summons, addressed by the exhausted to
the exhausted, gathered in everyone and everything… except the dead.

Life, according to the symbolism of the black-clad figure’s awesomely patient
and painstakingly measured steps, was a struggle against fate. It had its
victories—which were, admittedly, the only victories conceivable. In death, by
contrast, there was no struggle; there were no victories, because none was
needed. That was the meaning of the chamade, and the meaning of the dance it
accompanied.

Amaimon realised, before the skeleton had made a single circuit of the arena,
that he could not win his wager. He could not win because his opponent did not
need to win; he had to lose because he was the only one who could lose.

Amaimon realised, without needing to feel the slackness of her hand in his,
that Celome would come to understand this too. She had not been able to imagine
wanting to be anything other than she was, because that was all she had ever
been before she was a statue; she was a dancer through and through. But the
failure was in her imagination; she had never seen, imagined or understood the
Totentanz. She was watching it now, and she understood exactly how its rhythm
intruded itself into the human eye, ear and mind, like a possessive daemon
banishing all rival thought and sensation.

Amaimon’s fellow prisoners had stopped cheering, but they were joining in the
dance.

Soon enough, even Celome was dancing again—but not, this time, the Dance of
the Seven Veils.

Now the scythe came into play. As the column of figures wound around and
around, doubling back on itself again and again, the scythe offered its blade to
the dancing mortals. Hand-in-hand as they were, they could offer no resistance
to its seeking blade, but they did not flinch or turn away as it sliced through
their flesh and drained them dry of blood. The flesh began to melt from their
bones soon enough, as if the dull music of the signal-drum were a fire of sorts,
and their whited bones a kind of ash.

Celome made no more effort to avoid her fate than the zither-player, the
cymbalist or the drummer, who seemed to be a little more appreciative of the
rhythm to which they danced than the unmusical majority of their erstwhile
companions.

“That is what the dead have to offer the living,” Cimejez whispered in
Amaimon’s ear. “That is what might be attained, if only the living would try
harder to understand the nature of the Great Crusade.”

Amaimon was the only living person present who was able to resist the summons
of the chamade. He stayed where he was, in his seat beside Cimejez the Tomb King—but the only reason for that was that the careful Lord of Death had rested a
bony hand upon his own, forbidding him to move. The pressure was gentle, but it
was irresistible. Amaimon was the only living man who was ever privileged to see
and hear the Totentanz without being required to join it—and for that reason,
he became the only living man in the world who understood the strategy and the
objectives of the Great Crusade.

The most remarkable thing about the continuing dance was the reaction of the
remainder of the crowd to the performance they were watching. They did not
applaud, nor did they sway in time to the rhythm. They remained utterly silent—not bored, but not appreciative either. They had been reanimated to serve as
warriors in the Great Crusade Against the Living; they had been given armour,
and weapons, and a cause—but the motive force that impelled them to take up
arms against the living was nothing like the motives that forced the living to
act. Their motive force was like the Totentanz itself, to which they made no
evident response because they had no need.

The dead had no need to follow the paces of the dance, or even to approve of
them, for the dance was merely a reflection of their nature, like a shadow
carelessly cast upon the ground.

“You ought to let me go now,” Amaimon said to Cimejez. “I have seen all I
need to see. I admit that I have lost. I will serve as your vizier—but you
should let me go, so that I might join my peers in the Totentanz.”

“Oh no,” said Cimejez, amicably. “That would not do at all—for then you
would be merely one of us, instead of a traitor to the living. The dead have a
tendency to become stupid, even when they are recalled by a necromancer as
expert as myself. You’ll pay out your bargain in blood, sweat and tears, but
you’ll do it as I require and command.”

So Amaimon stayed where he was, and watched the dance. It seemed to go on
forever, but when it was over he had lost far less time than it took a human to
be born, let alone to die.

In the long
,
hard years of servitude that followed, Amaimon discovered
that the first curse afflicting human life is indeed hunger—which, for
accounting purposes, might be taken to include and subsume thirst. He
discovered, too, the scrupulous accuracy of the estimated hierarchy of needs
that had ranked cold the second, disease and injury the third, loneliness the
fourth, loss the fifth and childlessness the sixth. He suffered all of these
afflictions in their fullest measure, but he was not allowed to die. He helped
bring death to hundreds of thousands of the living, and he helped bring the
greater number of those he had betrayed into the ranks of Cimejez’s army, but he
was not allowed the kind of release he devoutly desired, nor any other kind.

Amaimon never forgot that the final curse afflicting human life is the
inevitability of death itself, at least according to the Dance of the Seven
Veils—but he could find little comfort in the recollection, even though the
final phase of Celome’s performance was etched so deeply in his memory as to be
replayed over and over again in his restless dreams.

He still knew that the sum and climax of his existence, like that of any
human being, was supposed to consist of a heroic defence of creative
achievement, and of the ultimate inability of annihilation to cancel out the
produce of a busy lifetime. Alas, that knowledge had become worthless to him as
soon as he had seen a single round of the Totentanz—and worthless it remained
to Amaimon the Vizier of Zelebzel, if not to those Lords of Death whose one and
only purpose is to raise armies of skeletons, zombies, wraiths and ghouls to
fight against the living.

Professor Gerhardt Kleinhoffer, Lector in Magical Arts at the University of
Nuln, looked down at the pentagram and the triple-ringed circle his younger
companion had just drawn in chalk upon the floor.

“Lothar,” he said nervously, “surely this is blasphemy?”

Across the chamber, Lothar von Diehl ran bony fingers through his dark beard
and paused to give the appearance of reflective thought before replying.