The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [104]
"All right," Vali said. "All right, sweetheart." She stuck her head around the carriage hood. "Driver," she called out, "take us to the necropolis."
"Aye; it's pretty this time of year," the woman called back, and at the next intersection turned the chaise uphill. They clattered through the city, a long uncomfortable journey, with Mona falling into frequent bouts of coughing. In between these she lapsed into a semi-conscious state. Every now and again she would look around glassily and ask, like a child, "Are we nearly there yet?"
"Soon," Vali promised her over and over.
Siegfried wrote it all down in his notebook.
At last they came to the dry Geulah river. Nothing more than a trench filled with vegetation and rubbish, it marked the end of the city proper. It was spanned by an ancient metal bridge that was the only road to the necropolis, which covered the hills on the other side, its tombs and shrines rising from the former riverbank, a dark panorama of monumental stonework stretching to the right and the left as far as visibility reached. Sheol was old, and needed extensive space to accommodate its many generations of dead. Beyond the great cemetery there was only a no man's land of weeds and twisted bushes before the drop over the edge of the Teleute Shelf.
They clattered across the bridge to the end, where the beldam reined the horse in. Gwynn paid the fare while Vali gathered Mona in her arms and lifted her out.
Gwynn spoke to Siegfried, who had climbed out with them. "It might be better for you to go back," he said, "all things considered."
The boy turned up the collar of his coat against the cold, which was stiffer than in the city centre, and tugged on a pair of woollen gloves.
"Sir, I'm not afraid of the dead."
"The dead fear the living...those living who forget them and those who remember them too well. The dead fear truth and untruth, speech and silence." It was Mona who spoke, startling everyone, her grey eyes shining queerly. But she wasn't looking at Siegfried, whose face nonetheless registered a pleased and justified expression.
"Take me to St. Anna Vermicula's tomb," she said. "And I can walk. I'm not a cripple."
She took shaky independent steps when Vali, at her insistence, set her down.
The saint was buried a good half-hour's walk over the hills. Mona, leaning on Vali's arm, set a slow pace for them all.
Many of the greater tombs and monuments were as large as the houses of the living. Elaborate enclosures several tiers high contained stone sarcophagi stacked in rows, of which some lay in helter-skelter collapse and many in the intermediate stages of decline. Stone stairs provided access for those who wished to pay their respects, or who were simply sightseeing. A group of tourists were clustered some distance away, visible by their bobbing lanterns.
The silence of the necropolis was a tangible presence in the air, as if it were not merely an absence of sound but a thing with its own substance. The huge graveyard was entirely without trees, and therefore there were few birds of the night to disturb the quiet. Soft, short-bladed grass grew on the paths, muffling footsteps. The air was cold and very still; the noise of the city was remote. The night sky was marvellously clear, with a three-quarter moon and many bright stars that Vali fancied looked like white candles burning in reproachful memory for all the drowned hours in a person's life.
Mona seemed withdrawn in a world of her own. Gwynn, making a virtue out of a dubious discipline, kept to a place off to the side, where he was as unobtrusive as a veteran butler, and even Siegfried seemed, for the moment at least, to have run out of things both to ask and to write. To her wonder, Vali felt the first touch of an unfurling peace.
St. Anna Vermicula's tomb was a colonnaded mausoleum housing a black marble effigy of the warrior martyr, on the farthest hillside