What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

drownings

This happened and it didn’t happen:

A man threw a key into a fire. Yes, there are people who do such things. This one was trying to cure a fever. He probably wouldn’t have done it if he’d had his head on straight, but it’s not easy to think clearly when rent is due and there isn’t enough money to pay it, and one who relies on you falls ill for want of nourishment but you have to leave him to walk around looking for work to do. Then even when you find some there still isn’t enough money for both food and shelter, and the worry never stops for a moment. Somehow it would be easier to go home to the one who relies on you if they greeted you with anger, or even disappointment. But returning to someone who has made their own feeble but noticeable attempts to make the place a little nicer while you were gone, someone who only says “Oh, never mind” and speaks of tomorrow as they turn their trusting gaze upon you… it was really too much, as if tomorrow was up to him, or any of us…

—

THERE’S THAT difficulty with delirium too: You see it raging in another person’s eyes and then it flickers out. That’s the most dangerous moment; it’s impossible to see something that’s so swiftly and suddenly swallowed you whole. Arkady’s debts were so numerous that when he found himself being beaten up by strangers he no longer bothered to ask who they were or why they were hitting him — he just assumed it was something to do with his repayments. Instead of putting up much of a fight he concentrated on limiting damage to his internal organs. A friend of a friend of his knew a woman who bought people’s organs in advance of their death. This woman bought your organs and then made your death relatively nice for you, an accident when you least expected it, a surprise release from life. Once that was taken care of she paid the agreed sum in full, cash in the hands of a person of your choice. Arkady felt his heart and lungs throughout the day — they felt hardy enough, so he had a Plan Z. Why go straight to Z, though?

—

THROWING THE KEY into the fire was the first step of this man’s fever-born plan. The second step involved the kidnapping of a girl he had seen around. He felt no ill will toward this girl, and this was in itself unusual, since his desperation had begun to direct him to linger on the street wishing misfortune upon everyone he saw. That lady’s maid hurrying out of the jeweler’s shop — he wished she would lose some item of great value to her mistress, so that he might find it and sell it. Yes, let the lady’s maid face every punishment for her carelessness, he wouldn’t spare a single thought for her. As he passed the grand café on his city’s main boulevard he wished a dapper waiter carrying a breakfast tray would slip and fall so that he could retrieve the trampled bread rolls. And how would it be if this time the waiter had slipped and fallen one time too many and was dismissed? Even better — then I can replace him.

—

THE GIRL he planned to kidnap happened to be a tyrant’s daughter. Hardly anybody disliked her; she was tall and vague… exceedingly vague. Her tendency toward the impersonal led to conversations that ended with both parties walking away thinking: “Well, that didn’t go very well.” If you mentioned that you weren’t having the best day she might tell you about certain trees that drank from clouds when they couldn’t find enough moisture in the ground beneath them. She was known as Eirini the Second or Eirini the Fair, since she had a flair for the judicious distribution of cake, praise, blame, and other sources of strife. In terms of facial features she didn’t really look like anybody else in her family. In fact she resembled a man her mother had secretly loved for years, a man her mother had never so much as spoken to until the day the tyrant decided to have his wife Eirini the First stoned for adultery. He did give her a chance, one chance. He asked her to explain why his eyesight kept telling him that his daughter was in fact the child of another man, but the woman only answered that there was no explanation.

—

THE MAN EIRINI the First loved heard about the resemblance between himself and the child and came down to the palace to try to stop the execution. He swore to the tyrant that he and Eirini the First were as good as strangers, but the tyrant waved him away and signaled his executioners to prepare themselves, at which point the man Eirini the Fair resembled ran into the center of the amphitheatre where Eirini the First stood alone with her arms forming a meager shield for her face and chest. The man Eirini the Fair resembled stood before her with his back to the executioners and the tyrant and told her to look at him, just to keep looking only at him, and that it would be all right. It seemed he intended to protect her from the stones until he couldn’t anymore. This was intolerable to the tyrant; he could not allow these two to exit together. There was also a sense of having just witnessed the first words they’d ever said to each other. The tyrant feared a man who had no qualms about involving himself in a matter such as this, so instead of going ahead with the execution he had his wife returned to the palace.

—

AS FOR THE MAN Eirini resembled, he asked to see the child just once — he’d never been more curious about anybody in his life, he said — but his request was denied and the tyrant had him drowned, as had been the case with all other enemies of the tyrant’s state. All any citizen had to say was, “The last king was better,” and somehow or other Eirini’s father got to hear of it and then you were drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country, far from even the most remote farmhouse. The air was noxious where the drowned were. The water took their bones and muscle tissue but bubbles of skin rose from the depths, none of them frail, some ready for flight, brazen leather balloons. Houses throughout the country stood empty because the tyrant had eliminated their inhabitants; the swamp of bone and weights and plasma also had house keys mixed into it, since many had been drowned fully clothed along with the contents of their pockets. Eirini the Fair was aware of the keys. She visited the marshlands as often as she dared, crossing narrow stone bridges with a lantern in her hand. She went there to thank the man she resembled for what he had done, but he couldn’t be separated from the rest of the drowned; Eirini the Fair swung her lantern around her in a circle and when her tears met the water they told their own meaning as they flowed from eye socket to eye socket.

Among those the tyrant hadn’t had drowned yet there was a great eagerness to be rid of him, and Arkady knew that if he went through with his plan to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter he would not be without support. The tyrant had started off as an ordinary king, no better or worse than any other, until it had occurred to him to test the extent of his power. And once he found out how much power he really had, he took steps to maintain it. A ration system was in place, not because resources were scarce or because it was necessary to conserve them, but because the tyrant wished to covertly observe the black market and see what exchanges people were willing and able to make. Not just goods, but time… How much time could his subjects bear to spend queuing for butter? What about medicine? This was the sort of thing that made life for his subjects harder than life was for citizens of neighboring countries.

—

EIRINI THE FAIR was sure that her father was detested. He was a man who only laughed when he was about to give some command that was going to cause widespread panic. She didn’t doubt that if anybody saw a way to annoy her father by harming her, they might well do it. But she was well guarded, and it escaped her notice that she was being intensely observed by the kind of person who would melt a key.

—

THE TYRANT had orphaned him, had had Arkady’s mother and father drowned in the middle of the night, so that the boy woke up in an empty house wondering why nobody was there to give him breakfast. Young Arkady prepared his own breakfast that day and continued to do so until there was no more food, and then he went out onto the street and stayed there, leaving the front door open in case anybody else had a use for his family home.

Two companions crossed his path — the first was Giacomo, the one who came to depend upon him. Arkady had happened to overhear a grocer trying to make Giacomo pay three times the going rate for a bar of soap. “I know this soap looks just like all the rest, but it’ll actually get you thrice as clean…” Giacomo was cheerfully scraping coins together when Arkady intervened, inquiring whether the grocer was enjoying his existence as a piece of garbage, whether it was a way of life the grocer felt he could recommend. Giacomo was not a person who knew what a lie was or why anybody would tell one; his mind worked at a different speed than usual. Not slower, exactly, but it did take him a long time to learn some things, especially practicalities regarding people. Light felt like levitation to Giacomo, and darkness was like damnation. How had he lived so long without being torn apart by one or the other? He was so troublesome, taking things that then had to be paid for, paying for things that shouldn’t have cost anything; he taught Arkady patience, looking at him with wonder and saying: “Arkady is good.” It was Giacomo who was good. His ability to give the benefit of the doubt never faltered. The swindlers didn’t mean it, the jeerers didn’t mean it, and those who would stamp on a child’s hand to make her let go of a banknote she had been given, those people didn’t mean it either.

Their other companion was a vizsla puppy, now a deep gold — colored dog, who began to follow Arkady and Giacomo one day and would not be shooed away, no matter how fierce an expression Arkady assumed. Since Giacomo’s alphabet and numerical coordination were unique to him, it was rare for him to be gainfully employed, so the dog merely represented an additional mouth for Arkady to feed. But the vizsla’s persistence and tail-wagging served him well, as did his way of behaving as if he had once been a gentleman and might yet regain that state. The vizsla waited for Giacomo and Arkady to help themselves to portions of whatever meals they were able to get before he took his own share, though sometimes Giacomo pressed the dog to begin, in which case he took the smallest portion and not a bite more. Giacomo named him Leporello. On occasions of his own choosing Leporello turned backflips and earned coins from passersby. And yet he couldn’t be persuaded to perform on demand; no, he would give looks that asked Arkady to perceive the distinction between artist and mere entertainer.

—

THE THREE of them settled in a building at the edge of the city. The view from the building’s windows was an unexpectedly nice one, covering miles and miles of marshland so that the mass of drowned flesh looked like water, just muddy water, if not wholly pure then becoming so as it teemed toward the ocean.

—

ONE DAY WHILE ARKADY was out working one of his three jobs Giacomo came home from a long walk, stopped on the wrong floor of their building, and accidentally opened the door to a flat that wasn’t the one he shared with Arkady and Leporello. The tenant wasn’t at home, so Giacomo could have seen or taken anything he wished. But what he sought was a view from a new window, and that was all he took. Ten minutes looking out to sea. And he soon discovered that the same key opened every door in the building; their landlord counted on it not occurring to any of the tenants to try opening doors other than their own. When Giacomo told Arkady of his discovery, Arkady was all for having their locks changed. They could be murdered in their beds! They could be robbed at any time! It was bad enough that they lived under the rule of a tyrant who was slowly but surely squeezing the life out of everybody, but now their neighbors could get at them too…

Giacomo just laughed and pulled Arkady into one of the flats that stood empty between tenants on a floor higher than theirs; Leporello came too, and barked at the moonlight as it washed over their faces. Their fellow tenants continued to identify their doorways with care, and were too busy and too tired to go anywhere but home.

—

HAVING SECURED Giacomo’s assurance that he’d be very, very careful with these trespasses of his, and Leporello’s assurance that he’d help Giacomo keep his word, Arkady’s worries were lessened for a time. One of his jobs was assisting the tyrant’s physician, who did not choose to be known by her true name — or perhaps was yet to discover it — and went by the nickname Lokum. Like the confection she left traces of herself about anybody she came into contact with — sweetness, fragrance. “Ah, so you have been with her…”

Lokum kept the tyrant in perfect health, and perfectly lovesick too. Like the tyrant’s wife, Lokum had no lovers: Anybody who seemed likely to win her favor was immediately drowned. Arkady swept and mopped Lokum’s chambers, and he fetched and carried covered baskets for her, and he also acted as her test subject — this was his favorite job because all he was required to do was sit on a stool and eat different-colored pieces of lokum that the physician had treated with various concoctions. He was also required to describe in detail what he felt happening in his body a few minutes after the consumption of each cube, and some of the morsels broke his cells wide open and made it all but impossible to find words and say them, though for the most part accurate description was no great task for him, and it paid more than his other two decidedly more mundane jobs. “Open your mouth,” she’d say, and then she placed a scented cube on his tongue. He’d warned himself not to behave like everybody else who came within ten paces of her, but once as the lokum melted away he found himself murmuring to her: I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair. Her usual response was flat dismissal — she all but pointed to the door and said, “Please handle your feelings over there,” but this time she took one end of the scarf she wore and wrapped it around his neck, drawing him closer and closer until her face was just a blur. “Listen, listen,” she said. “People have been drowned for saying much less.”

Arkady could make no retort to that. She was only telling the truth. He thought that was the end of the matter, but as he was leaving she told him not to come back. She said jealousy lent people uncanny powers of detection, and that it was better not to be so close within the tyrant’s reach if he wanted to go on living. He protested — without the wages she paid him, he, Giacomo, and Leporello could hardly keep afloat — but she shook her head and motioned to him to be quiet, mouthed, For your own good, scattered a trayful of lokum on the floor, shouted, “That’s enough clumsiness from you” loudly enough for the guards just outside the door to hear, and sent him on his way, flinging the tray after him to complete the dismissal scene.

He didn’t like that, of course, Lokum’s taking it upon herself to decide what was for his own good. He could drown if he wanted to. In the weeks that followed that unfillable gap in his funds drowned him anyway — unpaid bills and nobody willing to employ him without speaking to Lokum, who refused to show him any favor. Giacomo and Leporello spoke less and stared out of the windows more. Arkady knew that they weren’t getting enough to eat but Giacomo wasn’t the sort to complain and Leporello dared not. Giacomo’s fever didn’t take hold until Arkady missed three rent payments in a row and the trio were evicted from the building with the views that Giacomo was so fond of. Arkady was able to find them a room, a small one with a small grate for cooking. It was a basement room, and Giacomo seemed crushed by the floors above them. He wouldn’t go out. He asked where the door was and searched the walls with his hands. Leporello led him to the door of the room but he said, “That’s not it,” and stayed in the corner with his hands reverently wrapped around a relic, the key to their previous flat: “The key to where we really live, Arkady…” How Arkady hated to hear him talk like that.

—

GIACOMO AND LEPORELLO had stolen the key between them, Leporello putting on a full acrobatic display and then standing on his back legs to proffer a genteel paw to the landlord while Giacomo made a getaway with the key. In his head Giacomo pieced together all those views of the same expanse. Sometimes he tried to describe the whole of what he saw to Arkady, but his fever made a nonsense of it all. Arkady took the key from Giacomo to put an end to his ramblings, and he threw the key into the fire to put an end to the longing that raged through his body and vexed his brain. “This is where we really live, Giacomo, here in a basement with a door you say you cannot find.”

—

THEN ARKADY turned his back on Leporello’s growling and Giacomo’s sobs as he tried to snatch the key back from the grate. He fell asleep with the intention of kidnapping Eirini the Fair in the morning. The palace watchwords hadn’t changed; he had checked. He would be glib and swift and resolute and have the girl at his mercy before she or anyone grasped the situation. He would demand that the tyrant take his damn foot off the nation’s neck and let everybody breathe. Money too, he’d ask for a lot of that. Enough for medicine and wholesome meat broth and a proper bed and all the sea breeze his friends could wish for.

—

HE DREAMED of the key writhing in the fire, and he dreamed of faces coughing out smoke amidst the flames, each face opening up into another like the petals of a many-layered sunflower, and he was woken by police officers. They shone light into his eyes and pummeled him and ordered him to confess now while they were still being nice. Confess to what? The officers laughed at his confusion. Confess to what, he was asking, when the building he’d been evicted from had burned to the ground overnight and he’d been the one who’d set the fire. Almost half the inhabitants had been out working their night jobs, but everybody else had been at home, and there were nine who hadn’t escaped in time. So there were nine deaths on his head. Arkady maintained that he’d set no fire, that he hadn’t killed anybody, but he knew that he’d been full to the brim with ill will and still was, and he thought of the burning key and he wasn’t sure… he believed he would have remembered going out to the edge of the city, and yet he wasn’t sure… he asked who had seen him set the fire, but nobody would tell him. Giacomo and Leporello were so quiet that Arkady feared the worst, but when he got a chance to look at them he saw that one of the policemen had somehow got a muzzle and leash on Leporello and was making gestures that indicated all would be well as long as Giacomo stayed where he was. After a few more denials from Arkady his friends were removed from the room: Giacomo asked why and was told that his friend had killed people and wouldn’t admit it, so he was going to have to be talked to until he admitted it. At this Giacomo turned to Arkady and asked: “But how could Arkady do this, when he is so good?” Arkady forgot that his words could be taken as a confession, and asked his friend to understand that he hadn’t meant to do it. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know—Giacomo nodded at those words and said: “Yes, I understand.” Satisfied with Arkady’s self-incrimination, the officer holding Leporello allowed the dog to stand on his hind legs and pat Arkady’s cheek and then his own face; he repeated this a few times as a way of reassuring Arkady that he would be by Giacomo’s side until the truth came out. Leporello seemed confident that the truth would come out very soon, and Arkady remembered the vizsla puppy he’d tried to drive away and was glad he’d failed at that.

—

THOUGH ARKADY BROKE down and confessed after being shown photographs of the five men and four women who’d died in the fire, his confession was never entirely satisfactory. He got the timing and exact location of the fire he’d set wrong, and his statement had to be supplemented with information from his former landlord, who identified him as the culprit before a jury, pointing at Arkady as he described the clothing the police had found him wearing the morning they arrested him. The inconsistencies in Arkady’s account troubled the authorities enough to imprison him in a cell reserved for “the craziest bastards,” the ones who had no inkling of what deeds they might be capable of doing until they suddenly did them.

—

ARKADY’S MEALS were brought to him, and his cell had an adjoining washroom that he kept clean himself. He no longer had to do long strings of mental arithmetic, shaving figures off the allowance for food as he went along — after a few days his mind cleared, he stopped imagining that Giacomo and Leporello were staring mournfully from the neighboring cell, and he could have been happy if he hadn’t been facing imprisonment for deaths he dearly wished he could be sure he hadn’t caused. His cell was impregnable, wound round with a complex system of triggers and alarms. Unless the main lock was opened with the key that had been made for it, he couldn’t come out of that cell alive.

—

THE TYRANT held the key to Arkady’s cell, and liked to visit him in there and taunt him with weather reports. He hadn’t been interested in the crimes of the other crazy bastards who’d once inhabited this cell, so they’d been drowned. But as somebody who had by his own admission dispatched people and then gone straight to sleep afterward, Arkady was the only other person within reach that the tyrant felt he had a meaningful connection with. Arkady barely acknowledged his questions, but unwittingly gained the affections of the guards by asking a variant of the question “Shouldn’t you be staying here in this cell with me, you piece of shit?” each time the tyrant said his farewells for the day. As per tyrannical command the guards withheld Arkady’s meals as punishment for his impudence, but they didn’t starve him as long they could have. One night Arkady even heard one of the guards express doubt about his guilt. The guard began to talk about buildings with doors that could all be opened with the same key. He’d heard something about those keys, he said, but the other guard didn’t let him finish. “When are you going to stop telling old wives’ tales, that’s what I want to know… anyway no landlord would run his place that way.”

—

LOKUM AGREED to marry the tyrant on the condition that there would be no more drownings, and he sent Eirini the First and Eirini the Fair across the border and into a neighboring country so that he could begin his new life free of their awkward presence. After a long absence, the tyrant appeared before Arkady to tell him this news, and to inform him that he’d lost the key to Arkady’s cell. The key couldn’t be recut either, since he’d had the only man with the requisite expertise drowned a few years back. Lokum had a point about the drownings being counterproductive, the tyrant realized. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Maybe it’ll turn up again one of these days. But if you think about it you were going to be here for life anyhow.”

“No problem,” Arkady said. And since it was looking as if this was the last time the tyrant was going to visit him, he added casually: “Give my regards to Lokum.”

The tyrant looked over at the prison guards, to check whether they had seen and heard what he’d just seen and heard. “Did he just lick his lips?” he asked, in shock. The guards claimed they couldn’t confirm this, as they’d been scanning the surrounding area for possible threats.

—

“HMMM… SPRING the lock so that the cell kills him,” the tyrant ordered as he left. The guards unanimously decided to sleep on this order; it wasn’t unheard of for the tyrant to rethink his decisions. The following day the tyrant still hadn’t sent word, so the guards decided to sleep on it another night, and another, until they were able to admit to themselves and to each other that they just weren’t going to follow orders this time. Their first step toward rebellion, finding out that disobedience didn’t immediately bring about the end of the world… the prison guards cautiously went into dialogue with their counterparts at the palace and at border crossings, and a quiet, steady exodus began.

—

THE NEIGHBORING countries welcomed the escapees, and with them the opportunity to remove the tyrant’s power at the same time as playing a prank on him by helping to empty out his territory. If the tyrant noticed that the streets were quieter than usual, he simply said to himself: “Huh, I suppose I really did have a lot of these people drowned, didn’t I…” It probably wouldn’t have helped him one way or the other to notice that as the living people left, the marshland stretched out farther and farther, slowly pulling houses and cinemas, greengrocers, restaurants, and concert halls down into the water. If you looked down into the swamps (which he never did) it was possible to see people untangling their limbs and hair, courteously handing each other body parts and keys, resuming residence in their homes, working out what crops they might raise and which forms of energy they could harness.

—

MEANWHILE THE TYRANT was congratulating himself for having dealt with Arkady. He had disliked the way Lokum had begged for Arkady’s life, and cared even less for her expression upon being told her pleas came too late. He didn’t think they’d had a love affair (that lanky pyromaniac could only dream of being worthy of Lokum’s attention), but Lokum’s behavior was too similar to that of the man Eirini the First loved. What was wrong with these people?

—

THE TYRANT set Lokum alight on their wedding day. Thanks to Arkady, fire had risen to the top of his list of elimination methods. He forced her to walk to the end of the longest bridge spanning the marshlands, and he drenched her in petrol and struck a flame. He’d given no real thought to decreasing his own flammability, so the event was referred to as an attempted murder-suicide. “Attempted” because when he tried to run away, the burning woman ran after him, shouting that she’d just that moment discovered something very interesting; he couldn’t kill her, he could never kill her… she took him in her arms and fed him to the fire he’d started. There was still quite a lot of him left when he jumped into the swamp, but the drowned held grudges and heaved him out onto land again, where he lay roasting to death while his bride strolled back toward the city, peeling blackened patches of wedding dress off her as she went. She put on some other clothes and took food to the prison where Arkady sat alone contemplating the large heap of questionable publications the guards had left him on their departure. Before Arkady could thank Lokum for the food (and, he hoped, her company) she said, “Wait a minute,” and ran off again, returning an hour later with his two friends. Leporello shook Arkady’s hand and Giacomo licked his face; this was a joke they’d vowed they’d make the next time they saw Arkady, and they thought it rather a good one. Arkady called out his thanks to Lokum, but she had no intention of staying this time either: “We’ve got to get you out of there,” she said, and left again.

“It’s autumn, isn’t it?” Arkady asked Giacomo. He’d seen that Giacomo’s shoes and Leporello’s feet were soaking wet too, but he wanted to finish eating before he asked about that.

“Yes! How did you know?”

“I don’t know. Could you bring me some leaves? Just a handful…”

Giacomo brought armfuls of multicolored leaves, and Leporello rushed through them like a blizzard so that the richest reds and browns flew in through the prison bars.

“Giacomo?”

“Yes, Arkady?”

“Is it right for me to escape this place? Those people where we used to live—”

“There was a fire and they couldn’t get out. They would have got out if they could, but they couldn’t, and that’s what killed them. If you can escape then you should.”

“But am I to blame?”

Giacomo didn’t say yes or no, but attempted to balance a leaf on the tip of Leporello’s nose.

—

WHAT ABOUT EIRINI the Fair? For months she’d been living quite happily in a big city where most of the people she met were just as vague as she was, if not more so. She ran a small and cozy drinking establishment and passed her days exchanging little-known facts with customers in between attending to the finer details of business management. Her mother had drowned soon after their arrival in the new city: This might have been an accident, but Eirini thought not. The river Danube ran through her new city of residence, and her mother had often said that if she could drown in any river in the world she wished for it to be the Danube, a liquid road that would take her body to the Carpathians and onward until it met the Iskar as it crossed the Balkan mountains, washing her and washing her until she lost all scent of the life she’d lived. Then let the Iskar take her to lie on beds of tiny white flowers in old, old glades, high up on the slopes. Or if she stayed with the Danube, let it draw her along miles and miles of canals to collect pine needles in the Black Forest. As many as her lap could hold…

Thinking of her mother’s words, Eirini the Fair had journeyed farther up the river and given the ashes into its care. Arrivals from her father’s territory frequented her bar and freely cursed the tyrant’s name as they told tales that intrigued her. If what these people were saying was true, then the tyrant’s drownings had come to an end. It was said that her father’s territory was mostly underwater now, that there was no king, no flag, and no soldiers, that there were only cities of the drowned, who looked as if they were having a good time down there. Eirini the Fair heard that one of the only pieces of land yet to be submerged was notable for having a large prison on it. The man who told Eirini this paused for a moment before asking if he could buy her a drink, and she left an even longer pause before accepting. He was handsome but the scent of his cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks. Even so, can’t loan sharks also be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?

“Hi, excuse me, sorry for interrupting,” a glamorous newcomer said, as she took a seat at the bar beside the probable loan shark. “Can we talk in private?”

—

ALL LOKUM wanted to know was what Eirini the Fair had taken with her when she’d left the palace. Eirini had neither the time nor the inclination to provide a list of articles to her father’s plaything. But Lokum rephrased her question to ask if Eirini had taken anything of her father’s while leaving the palace, and then Eirini remembered the key. Just a metal shape on his dressing table, bigger than most keys she’d seen, but still small enough to pocket while she bade her father farewell and hoped she’d managed to inconvenience him one last time.

—

JUST BEFORE she and Lokum reached the prison gates, Eirini the Fair looked over the side of their boat and saw that her mother had found her way to the drowned city that now surrounded the building. She wasn’t alone; there was a man with her, the one Eirini the Fair had never met but wanted to. They both waved, and Eirini the First held up a finger and then wistfully rocked an invisible baby, motions easily interpretable as an appeal for grandchildren. “Lovely,” Eirini the Fair murmured, drawing her head back into the boat and pretending she hadn’t seen that last bit.