I was not there at the beginning of Lietta’s story (I am never there for beginnings) so I will tell it to you as I imagine it. Not from the very start—there is no purpose in going back quite so far. Not all the way to her birth, or to when she first met her sailor, and certainly not all the way to start of my story, which was so long ago no living tree remembers the day. No, I will begin on the morning they found her dead.
It was the day of Lietta’s wedding, when she was to become the third bride of the Prince of Florez. She was pale as alabaster in moonlight, cold as the sea in winter, breathless as the stones of the deepest earth. Her kin wept over her, their maiden girl just fifteen—her sisters wailing, her father’s eyes red, her mother permitting only one single tear before she sent a servant to fetch the priest.
That is how I believe it happened, though I did not see it, and neither did Lietta. But I believe it, and sometimes that is true enough.
The priest arrived, flushed red from running, and bent over her body, and spoke the blessings for the dead. Still Lietta lay, a ship on a windless sea, while he spoke all the holy rites, and beseeched all the gods he knew (which were almost without count) to watch over her soul.
They would not. Whether his gods exist or not, I do not know. Spirits I have seen, and other strange powers, and above them all the Stories which rule godlike over this island, but the gods of mortals have ever hidden themselves from me. This I know: they do not care for the souls of the dead. That task they leave to me.
When the muttering and canting was done, Lietta’s sisters descended upon her, to do her the last honour they could. Her dark hair they gathered up—winding and binding—till they had made a marriage braid of it, as they would have if she were still living, if she was still going to the temple to be bound to the Prince, instead of being laid to rest. Her beautiful wedding dress, white silk flowing, they put on her, and all her best jewelry, her headdress with the peacock feathers and golden fans. Last of all, they placed a painted stone upon each eye, as was the custom since the first people had come to the island, when their dead had been buried in caves and under cairns, entrusted to nameless gods.
Then, then, they put her in a chair and picked it up between them: her four sisters, her servants, her father, her mother. The priest led the way, singing the death-song of the city, and as they carried her through the streets, all the people came out to see, and many of them to follow. They brought her to the burial ground, to that hallowed green place in the city’s heart.
It had been outside the city once. I remember, as I remember the city expanding, swallowing, encircling, till we were fully enveloped.
They held the ceremony on the day of her death, as was the custom. The bodies of the city were not permitted to rot. The beautiful were beautiful even in death. This was—and still is—a country—that loves beauty.
That part I saw, though I did not approach. I watched the mourners gather, first her family and her friends, and then the curious, and then the Prince and his entourage, bringing half the city with them, all speaking and singing and praying in the praise of a girl they never knew.
How easy it is to love the dead. They are always without fault.
Then her sisters bore her down into the crypt, among the dusty sarcophagi of her kin and the carved images of their gods, and they laid her in the place that had been made for her the day she was born. They tried not to look at their own graves, laid out neatly in a row, as they smoothed out her dress, and brushed her hair, and made sure the painted stones were straight. They put the flowers in after her, so many flowers the mourners must have stripped the meadows bare.
Then, with quiet sobs, with the eldest squeezing the youngest’s hand, telling her it was all right even though she knew it wasn’t, they left.
In the world above, the sun slipped from the sky, and the moon rose amongst the stars. It was then that I came, for these journeys are best made by starlight.
I heard my soft tread echo in the shadowed tomb, as I came to her sarcophagus. I breathed upon it, and the stone slid aside, and I looked at her face, pale and beautiful, framed by dark hair and bright flowers, with two painted stones staring like open eyes. She might have been sleeping. About her now I saw the twisting and weaving of a Story, grasping her tight, and heard its hungry whisper.
I shivered from ears to tail. Better that she was dead, perhaps, that she was free of it.
I kissed her, gentle, upon the brow, as I kissed them all.
And she woke, gasping for breath, scattering flowers.
“Bastiano!” she said, her face a dream-touched smile. Then she removed the stones from her sleep-hazed eyes, saw me, and frowned. “Hello. What are you doing here?”
“You are not dead,” I said.
Lietta stared, wide-eyed, her mouth a perfect circle. I saw on her tongue a scrap of scroll, and knew the truth of it at once.
“Magic,” I said. “A spell to make a seeming of death. Broken with a kiss, I suppose.”
“You speak,” she said.
“I would make a poor guide if I could not,” I replied.
“But you’re—you’re—”
I was a cat. A black cat, dark almost as midnight. So many of my kind are. I do not know why, except that it seems to humans that this is the sort of cat that should be watcher of the dead.
“I am your guide,” I said. “Your watcher. As I am watcher of all the dead in this cemetery.”
“Oh,” she said. “But I’m not dead.”
“No,” I replied. “I suppose not.”
“You can leave, then,” she said, settling back into her bed of flowers and closing her eyes. “Bastiano will be here soon enough. And he’ll wake me with a kiss and we’ll go off to our new life together and it’ll be wonderful and perfect.”
“Ah, I see,” I said, for I had seen this Story before. “You are Doomed Lovers. I shall wait then. I will take you soon enough.”
She opened her eyes again. “We’re not doomed. We’re going to run away together and we’re going to be married and everything’s going to be all right.” She rolled onto one side, as if seeking a more comfortable way to lie in her grave. “We’re not doomed.”
You cannot see Stories from the inside, not usually. You only see your life. It’s only after, when they’re done, that you can see the shape, the tropes which snared you.
“It’s better this way,” I said. “You will be remembered. You will be forever young, forever beautiful—”
“It won’t be like that,” she snapped. “What do you know? You’re a cat.”
“I am watcher of the dead,” I said. “I know all their secrets. I walked with them their final steps, to the lands beyond the stars.”
“Well, you don’t know him,” Lietta said. “And you don’t know me. Because we’re not dead. And we’re not going to be. We’re not like those other people, whoever they were.”
“There is an old grave beneath a moonblossom tree,” I said, “where lies a boy who was the Prince’s brother, centuries ago. He is earth now, only earth, but we walked together, and he told me of his love, the beautiful Princess Isadia, who wore golden poppies in her hair. By accident they drank of a love potion and were cursed with love for each other, though she was his brother’s bride. They were found out, in the end, and he was executed. She killed herself. He was buried here, and she in the great crypt of the Princes, but they say the tree that grew over him looks ever towards it, and when the flowers fall from its branches, the wind carries them to her.”
“We didn’t drink of any potion,” she said. “We whispered through cracks in the wall of my father’s gardens. I caught a glimpse of his eye, startlingly gold, perfect in the sunlight. That was potion enough.”
Another example, perhaps, I thought, and she might see the rhythms of narrative, the way the Stories twined about this island.
“I walked with a young man,” I said, “whose friend had fallen for a lady from his rival’s house. Between them he had been the courier of poems and promises. The father of the lady, believing him to be the lover, had slain him, and then his friend had slain the father and been slain himself in the act, and then the lady—”
“She killed herself,” Lietta interrupted. “Yes, yes, I see the pattern.”
“And do you not see your place in it?”
“I’m not like them,” she said. “I’m not a Story. And anyway, I wouldn’t kill myself.”
I smiled, as much as a cat can smile, white and sharp. “Child, you are already in the grave.”
Lietta frowned and picked up one of the flowers, as though noticing it for the first time. “Yes, but I’m not actually dead, am I? I didn’t—I haven’t—”
“Your sisters have wept for you,” I said, because I had seen it, even if she had not. “Your father and mother had buried you. The city has mourned for you. I have come for you. In the eyes of the world, you are already dead.”
“My sisters …” She turned the flower slowly, picking off the petals, letting them fall. “Did they—They’ll be all right, won’t they? They won’t—They’ll be all right.”
“I don’t know. They are living. My business is with the dead.”
“I couldn’t have told them,” she said, and by her tone I knew it wasn’t me she sought to convince. “It was all too quick. And anyway, Missaline could never keep a secret. I couldn’t have told them.”
I said nothing. As I said, it was not my business. If they still wept when they were laid down in this crypt, I would ease their hearts then.
“I told only the magician who wrote the scroll,” Lietta said, “and my maid, who I told to bear word to my love when his ship returns, and tell him to come to me, so he could take me away, and show me all the nations in the world.”
“She will miss him,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“Your maid. She will miss him. She will be delayed or his ship will come in early, and he will hear the news before she can tell him the secret. And he will come here, and find you sleeping and think you did, and slay himself over you. And then you will pick up his dagger—”
“No,” she snapped. “I’ll stay awake, then. I’ll stay awake and tell him.”
“You will fall asleep in the end,” I said. “And then he’ll come. Or else he’ll throw himself into the sea when he hears, and you will wait here for days and he’ll never come, so you will go out and learn the truth and then throw yourself in after him and they’ll say you’re both together, beneath the waters—”
“Why do you keep saying these things? You can’t know what will happen! You can’t know!”
I shook my head. “You’re in a Story. I see it all around you. And Stories are cruel things. They always slay love, because it is a better ending. Because it’s the only way the Story can be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“Of happily ever after. Of love forever, without complication, without arguments, without separation. Love without work. Love without uncertainty. It is the easiest thing in the world to love the dead, and for the dead to love.”
“Is it?”
“Oh, yes. Tragedy ends, you see. Life just goes on and on, until all the magic is gone from it. Until his charms through repetition become irritations that make you grind your teeth to dust, until your poetry turns to bickering over who needs to do the dishes or care for the children, until you wonder if it would have been so bad after all to have stayed here.”
“That isn’t true,” she said, with that brittle certainty of someone who no longer fully believed what they were saying. “It isn’t …” She looked away. “I don’t want it to be that way. I don’t want to die.”
I hesitated. “That isn’t what I expected you to say.”
“Isn’t it?” she asked. “Do people usually want to die?”
“I expected you to say you didn’t want to be parted from him.”
“Oh.” Lietta considered this. “That too, I suppose. Probably.”
She sounded less convinced than a Doomed Lover ought to. Perhaps, I considered, I had misjudged the situation.
“What is it you want?” I asked.
“To be with Bastiano,” Lietta said. “On his ship. Sailing the world.” She sighed, and for the first time I heard the love in it. “To feel the sea air in my face, taste the salt of the waves, and see the gleam of the sun on the endless horizon.” She picked up a clump of flowers and scattered them, let them fall back down upon her. “I remember that first time he took me out on the water. That was when I knew I had to run away. To be with him.”
She added the last part hurriedly. And I saw it now, saw the truth of her.
“You love the sea,” I said.
“I do,” she replied, with that same dream-touched smile. “I would be happy to sail forever, to come to a new place every day …”
I was going to remark that she sounded like she loved sailing more than sailor, but by the look on her face, she’d realized it herself.
Lietta sat up slowly, quietly, the flowers falling away from her. Absent-mindedly she picked through them, stirring the petal sea.
“What if I left?” she asked.
“What?”
“You say I’m in a Story,” she said. “And the Story only ends one way. But what if I left? What if I walked out of here? Out of the Story? What then?”
“You can’t just leave.” But as I said it, I noted that same quality in my voice I’d noted in hers. That brittle certainty.
“Why not?”
I had no answer. I sat mute as any common housecat.
“What will happen?” she demanded. “Because if there’s a way out, if we can both live, if I can see the world, I want to take it.” She looked right at me. “So. What will happen?”
What would happen? I thought of the jealousy of Stories, of how they conspired to keep their characters in their proper roles. I thought of the greed of the graves, how they swallowed life after life. I thought of all those souls I had guided on their ways, of how they had looked back over their shoulders, longingly, at what they left behind.
It couldn’t be as simple as walking away. It couldn’t be. Could it?
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Lietta nodded and rose up from her grave, setting one foot, then the other, on the floor of the crypt. “I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”
“The Story won’t want to let you go,” I said. “It’ll hunt you down.”
“Then I’ll just have to be faster.”
She walked towards the stairs that led up, out of the crypt, into the night. I watched as she passed. She was one of the living, not the dead, and therefore none of my concern.
And yet, I called after her anyway. “Good luck.”
Lietta looked back with a smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile so alive, so pure, so young, so beautiful.
Then she passed, out of the grave, out into the dark, out into the world.
I did not follow. The paths of the living were not mine to walk.
Of what happened after, I can say only those parts which I know.
Hours passed, in the quiet that was typical of these parts. (Some graveyards are not so silent, full of restless ghosts, but I am a good guide and I do not leave my dead to wallow in their tombs.) It was just about dawn, with the first light showing above, when her Bastiano came stumbling down into the crypt. He carried a vial in his hand, with something vicious stinking away inside.
Ah, yes, poison. He, at least, was content to play his part.
He approached her resting place, stepping over fallen petals. I suppose he was handsome, as humans went, though I have never been a good judge of such things. His smell was of the sea, of rope and sweat and oils in his hair.
“Lietta!” he called. “Lietta, my love, I have come to join you!”
What melodrama possesses young lovers, I thought. They perform parts old as the world as though they were the first to ever feel such things.
Then he saw the empty sarcophagus. There were the flowers, there the grave, but his Lietta was nowhere to be seen.
Bastiano dropped the vial. The glass hit hard stone, bounced once, twice, then shattered, and the Story with it. He turned and ran, crying out with that mix of joy, horror, and bewilderment that in mortals can be understood only as religion.
Sure enough, when he returned, still babbling, almost feverous, it was with the priest, who stood dumbfounded, staring at the empty place he had seen filled. I watched from my shadowed place as the Story’s shape changed. I knew what he would say before he said it.
“A miracle,” the priest whispered. “She has been taken up by the gods.”
Bastiano dropped to his knees, his hands raised to the heavens, and spoke great prayers of praise for the benevolence of the gods, for the beauty of his Lietta.
He was the first of her worshippers, but he would not be the last. No, word spread quickly, from Bastiano’s lips, from the priest’s, from her family once they found out. Soon there were curious onlookers everywhere, prying into the tomb, trying to snatch up a flower to keep as a relic, all of them disturbing the quiet of my beautiful graveyard.
They were the living, I thought. There was no place for them here.
I’ve grown used to them since, as her cult grew. Bastiano became a priest and nobody could deny the passion with which he preached, the certainty with which he maintained that his beloved now sat among the gods. Her virtues were extolled: her patience, which I had not noticed in our brief acquaintance; her dutifulness, which I had likewise overlooked; and her great love, which had called her to her early grave, then raised her again.
Ah, I thought, seeing the Story’s revenge as I tried to sleep through one of the loud sermons Bastiano insisted on holding in my graveyard. They made a Doomed Lover of her after all.
Still, it was a novel spin on the Story.
Bastiano is dead too now. He was buried here, in her family crypt. The family could hardly deny him after he made their daughter a god. He was so excited at the thought of seeing her again that I could not bring myself to tell him the truth.
When her family took their places in the crypt, I told them. Her mother did not believe me.
“No,” she said. “You must be mistaken. She was dead. I know she was dead. And if she wasn’t—”
If she wasn’t, I thought, she let you grieve for nothing.
Her father took the news well enough. He just nodded, then sighed.
“It was a mistake, that marriage business,” he said. “I wish I could tell her that. I wish …” He looked at me, beseechingly. “I don’t suppose …”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Ah, well,” he said, “worth a try.”
Most of her sisters were stunned when I told them, though they each came to accept as we walked the death-road together, with the night passing by.
“It does,” the eldest said, with some lingering bitterness, “seem like something she would do.”
Only the youngest sister was entirely unsurprised. She laughed. Actually laughed.
“I knew it,” she said. “I bloody knew it! I knew she wasn’t dead!”
“I assume,” I said, “that you are Missaline.”
She was.
Young Missaline—not so young then, nearing ninety years—was the last of her kin to pass. Oh, there were cousins, nephews, nieces, grand-nephews, grand-nieces, that sort, but none who knew her. I did not bother to enlighten them about their relative’s lack of divinity.
Yet Lietta’s cult remains. The Maiden, they call her, and blushing young girls visit her shrine every day, whispering to her of their loves, of the troubles of their hearts, begging her to intercede on their behalf. She is worshipped more than most of the city’s gods now. Every spring my graveyard is engulfed in flowers, which make me sneeze, but do brighten the place up a bit.
I was not there for the end of Lietta’s story (even though I am usually there for endings) so I will tell it to you as I imagine it.
An old woman died on the shores of a foreign land, peacefully in her sleep. Her room had the most wonderful view of the sea she loved so much. Her children and her grandchildren found her in the morning, just as the sun was rising. They wept over her, and comforted each other in their weeping, telling stories of her life, of all the lands she visited, of all the adventures she had, of how much they loved her and how much she loved them. Then, then, as the sky started to darken again, they gathered together and bore her down to the shore, where they laid her in a boat full of flowers. With tears in her eyes, they pushed her out to sea, watching as she drifted away into the horizon, one last voyage …
That is how I believe it happened, yes, though I did not see it. But I believe it, and sometimes that is true enough.
Content Warnings: mention of suicide