The Art of Dying

K. J. BISHOP.

MONA SKYE, the duellist and poet of lately tragic fame, lay where her friends had placed her, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking room beneath the Amber Tree cafe.

Illness, allowed to run rampant, had repaid the favour with curious gifts. Fever made her long, austere face beautiful. It reddened her lips and made her grey eyes sparkle like stones. As her lean body wasted towards frailty it had come to exhibit the strange liberal grace of a strong thing weakened and perversely unashamed of its new tenderness. Even her pale hair appeared softer and brighter then before.

The disease turns her into that old cliche, the beautiful and beloved thing that can live only a short while... Vali Jardine could taste her own anger as if it were in the mildly opiated smoke she inhaled through the pipe of the narghile that stood on the carpet between them. Vali Jardine could taste her own anger as if it were in the mildly opiated smoke she inhaled through the pipe of the narghile that stood on the carpet between them.

Anger had been Vali's closest companion since the night, back in summer, of the Sending of Sins, when Mona had drunkenly sworn to let Death catch her at last. She would face the grinning bastard, she said; seduce him by being more ardent than he, so that when the end came she would take him, rather than the opposite. She had made this announcement to discomfited onlookers in the crowd gathered on the bank of the Leopold Canal at Jubilee Point to place paper lanterns in the water and watch them float away down the long dark stream, past the porches of the old slumbering floodlit mansions and the new sleepless factories. The next morning she rejected her medicines, throwing all her tonics and powders out onto the little courtyard below the apartment she and Vali shared.

A male voice came out of the gloom on Mona's other side. "She's asleep." A black damask sleeve reached across the cushions and pale fingers lifted the pipe out of her hand. The man's features were visible as faint mouldings in the shadow under a curtain of long black hair. His name was Gwynn. A sometime adventurer from Falias in the snow-swept north of the world, he and Mona had once been comrades in arms and sweethearts down in the canyon country west of the Teleute Shelf. The love affair had been uncomplicated and brief and their friendship had endured. Parted by circumstances, separate routes had brought them to Sheol, where both had found a new metier playing the city's games of justice.

Gwynn drew on his own pipe and looked from his old inamorata to the woman who was now her lover.

"Why don't you take her somewhere cleaner? Out of the city."

"A suburban cure? Rock beats scissors, boredom beats tragedy?"

"Shouldn't the pastoral be expected to win a battle now and then?"

"In its war with the heroic? The famous restorative power of grass and goats might work, but not against the power of her audience here, I wouldn't think."

"Then don't bring her back to them."

"And where should I take her?"

"Anywhere away from the evil comforts of prison." Gwynn exhaled a stream of smoke and pushed his hair back from his face, revealing pale, greenish, heavily slitted eyes.

Vali snorted. "When will you be packing your bags and leaving, then?"

He laughed lazily. "I tried once, but I got homesick. My soul likes it here entirely too much. But that dear soul there is of a different quality. She was always a runner."

She wanted him to be quiet. "You don't have the right to talk about souls. You only know about bodies, Gwynn."

She supposed that even more than his silence, she wanted a fight, which she wouldn't get.

He laughed again, as if he didn't mind the insult at all, and said, "Well, this body is tired. And so are you, I daresay. I'll get us a cab." Raising himself, he took up his guns and sword from the floor and buckled them on, and took a further minute to impose order on his clothing, lastly pulling on a pair of black kid gloves that he stretched over his fingers with a slightly pedantic air.

Vali watched the back of his damask tailcoat recede into the haze of oily lamp-lit smoke. Almost all of Mona's friends had deserted her, fearing they would catch her illness. No doubt embarrassment had motivated some of them. She wondered whether it was love, loyalty, or something else that kept Gwynn hovering around.

And what about you, whom she rejects along with the rest of the world? Is this only the natural course of love the turning away from the partner and towards solipsism, given a public airing? And should you wear the disgrace?

She addressed her reflection in the narghile's glass belly, as if it had some power which could explain her own soul to her. But the image, distorted by the curve of the glass, showed her no oracle, only a woman in mannish clothes: dark of face, not so young, not unhandsome. The old caste scars on her cheeks didn't show in the dim reflection. Her hair was rolled into the long, tight dreadlocks worn by the military clans of Oran, her homeland in the southeastern tropics. She had kept the style for aesthetic reasons and, also, because she had no wish to discard all of her former self.

It was a common saying that everyone in Sheol was a foreigner. Smells on the wind, Smells on the wind, Mona had called the city's population once, on a day when they sat people-watching in a briefly voguish bar on Arcade Bridge. Mona had called the city's population once, on a day when they sat people-watching in a briefly voguish bar on Arcade Bridge.

Vali found her boots and tugged them on. Her fingers were sluggish fastening buckles and laces. All she had got out of the night's indulgence was torpor without calm.

Over the troubled sound of Mona's breathing, Vali became aware of an irregular noise behind her; a quiet scratching that inspired a mental image of a mouse scuttling over a slate floor. She looked around and saw a reedy, fair-haired teenager perched on the edge of a divan, writing in a notebook. Vali would have taken him for one more poet hunting inspiration in pipe dreams if she had not seen him give her the furtive, inquisitorial look of the gutter-begotten press. Well, she would see for herself the nonsense he was writing.

She rose, advanced, and, glaring, snatched the notebook out of his hand and skimmed the jottings therein. He had written:

Society Report: Mona Skye, the renowned sabreuse, sonneteer and despiser of the world, observed unconscious in a drug den on the notorious Sycamore Street strip. The end appears to be near-ing for the self-destructing heroine.

At the Cutting Edge: Mona Skye's worsening condition has cast a gloom over the demimonde and beyond. Conversations are not sparkling. Beaus and belles inhale sedatives and dress like undertakers. Expect the chic look this winter to be formal, functional and funereal.

Art Update: Is Mona Skye's slow suicide art? Many think so. Despite the resistance of the conservative establishment, public opinion seems to be with the progressive critics who have been claiming that death as performance is the ultimate art form, an art against which there can be no appeal. They may well be right. Watching Mona Skye, one apprehends a strangely exquisite unfurling of energies, an unravelling of reality and the expected. Killer and victim are one, coexisting in a symbiosis of extended intimacy in a performance as unique as an individual life, a condensation of life as a journey toward death that all must undergo, and a logical answer to illogical life.

It was only the usual drivel, but Vali couldn't help taking it personally. She felt the pressure of fury rising inside her like steam in a boiler. Her mind flung up an image of an autopsy where loafing pretentieuses pretentieuses clustered around Mona's body while quaffing aperitifs and gobbling hors d'oeuvres. She rubbed the pommel of the sword at her hip. But words were the only weapons permissible here, and unlike her lover she had little talent in their use. clustered around Mona's body while quaffing aperitifs and gobbling hors d'oeuvres. She rubbed the pommel of the sword at her hip. But words were the only weapons permissible here, and unlike her lover she had little talent in their use.

She said frigidly, "It's in poor taste to serve up a person's suffering as entertainment for the chattering classes."

The boy gave a large twitch, but he attempted no evasion. He was wearing a suit that needed some cleaning and a leather coat that was at least two sizes too big. His hair had the untidy appearance of down on a wet duckling.

"Ma'am," he said, "the last thing I want to do is offend. This city looks to your profession for inspiration in everything, including matters of taste."

Every day she walked past children playing "Chop-Chop" and "Kill 'Um All" on the pavements. Duellists were feted in popular culture. Their images were made into character dolls and reproduced on household items and souvenirs. Wildly fictionalised, lurid stories about their adventures and private lives were printed for an eager public in cheap magazines with titles like Corinthian, Hearts and Blades Corinthian, Hearts and Blades and and Tales from the Theatre of Woe. Tales from the Theatre of Woe. Girls dressed up as Mona, painting their faces white and drawing ornamental trickles of rouge down their lips. Girls dressed up as Mona, painting their faces white and drawing ornamental trickles of rouge down their lips.

This fame had once been Vali's as well. Like Mona and Gwynn, she had employed herself as a professional duellist in the juridical playhouses of the city. However, her beliefs concerning justice had caused her eventually to hang up her mask and withdraw from the milieu of the monomachia. These days she earned a plainer living as a bodyguard and fencing tutor.

Sometimes she saw dolls with her face on sale or collecting dust in secondhand shops. Merchandise featuring Mona's image, on the other hand, was currently riding a wave of popularity.

No one's guiltier of bad taste than she. She's making a shabby exhibition of herself, and I'm accepting a part in it, thought Vali.

"I have a duty to the people," the kid journalist said. "They must have information." He drew himself up, lifting his chin pugnaciously to look Vali in the eye. "The freedom of the press is sacred, ma'am."

Vali looked down at him. "Nothing is sacred," she said flatly. She gave him back the notebook, in which he immediately resumed writing. She had the impression that he was recording the incident which had just occurred.

"Can I quote that? 'Nothing is sacred?'"

She was sorry she had allowed herself to get angry at a magazine hack, of all insignificant people.

"Go ahead," she said wearily.

Gwynn returned then, emerging out of the smoke and shadows. "Our chariot awaits," he said. His gaze took in the pen-wielding youth and he raised a mildly inquiring eyebrow at Vali.

"Let's go," she muttered.

Vali carried Mona. She followed Gwynn up the stairs and out through the back door to the lane behind the cafe. The youth trailed, introducing himself to their backs. His name was Siegfried and he worked for Verbal Nerve Verbal Nerve magazine. Perhaps they read it, or had seen it somewhere? magazine. Perhaps they read it, or had seen it somewhere?

The vehicle waiting in the lane was a rickety hooded chaise harnessed to a skin-and-bones nag whose ill condition was typical of Sheol's cab horses. Vali and Gwynn were too busy seating Mona comfortably inside to notice Siegfried positioning himself to get aboard. When he squeezed himself in next to Vali, she felt herself at a loss. Gwynn ignored him, evidently regarding him as her guest and her problem. Merely telling the kid to leave seemed a weak reaction to his bizarre effrontery, and if he refused to go, what could she do? To forcibly remove him would likely rebound in publicity of the least desirable kind. She could imagine the tabloid headlines Former Hero's Brawl Shame. Former Hero's Brawl Shame. Vali resigned herself to accepting it as yet another strange and uncomfortable situation to be endured, and gathered up her dignity. Vali resigned herself to accepting it as yet another strange and uncomfortable situation to be endured, and gathered up her dignity.

"Magnolia Terrace, river end," she ordered the driver of the chaise, a bent and leathery old woman wearing a battered tricorn and a voluminous cloak.

The beldam cracked her whip and the horse lurched off at a trot, taking them down a lane to the left and into the traffic and crowds that filled Sycamore Street from sidewalk to sidewalk despite it being the middle of a cold autumn night.

It was crowded on the seat under the canvas hood. Vali and Gwynn had twisted sideways to give Mona more room. Siegfried found himself poked by scabbards and gun butts wherever he tried to sit. He abandoned the seat and stood on the footboard, and from there began an impromptu interview. Mona being still unconscious, he questioned the other two.

How many people had they each killed? Did they enjoy their work? In their respective views, what was the duellist's role in society? What did they do in their spare time? How were their homes decorated? What did they think of Mona's dance with death? The youth fired questions and chased answers with relentless zeal, in seeming oblivion to the peril he would be in should one or both of his captive subjects lose patience. Or, if he did understand, he was stimulated by the danger.

Vali responded with monosyllables or morose silence. Gwynn gave their interrogator better satisfaction, responding with answers which, whether true or not, would make good copy. Siegfried filled pages with shorthand notes. Vali suspected Gwynn of slightly enjoying the attention. However, her mood was too grim and grieving to allow her to feel any amusement.

To Vali, their progress took on the confused, uncontrollable quality of a dream. She started feeling that she had slid sideways into an alternative, stupidly surreal existence which was crammed full of details that were irritating, strange and boring all at once. Crowds of late-night shoppers and partygoers surged under green and red silk lanterns hanging on wires across the streets, hurrying as if on missions of great and secret importance. The hag put the whip to the horse, which panted like a demon-beast in front of them, white breath steaming from its nostrils and bones moving like pistons under its skin. Mona's lovely head lolled, saliva pooling in the corners of her mouth.

They passed an open yard where a religious lynch-mob was holding an auto-da-fe. Several thousand faces, screaming in rapturous hysteria, were washed in orange light from the scaffold where a human shape was visible at the centre of a blaze. A procession of hooded penitents started across the road, each pair lashing the shoulders of the pair in front of them, forcing the through-traffic to stop while they passed. The old woman and half a dozen other drivers yelled imprecations, to no effect on the lashers, who kept to their shuffling ritual pace.

The noise woke Mona. Her eyes opened wide and she grabbed Vali's arm. "I'm dying!" she gasped. "I saw it! I saw Death. I've been dreaming. Don't take me to the house, Vali. Take me to the necropolis. I want to die there, where it's quiet." She looked around deliriously. "Where am I? Vali, are you here too?"

Vali stroked Mona's hair, trying to soothe her. "Don't fret," she murmured. "We'll be home soon."

Mona clutched her hand. "No," she rasped fiercely, "I'm dying!" As if to make the point she started coughing. "I want to die in peace. Out in the air, under the stars. Take me there, Vali. Please."

"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 in the oldest section of the necropolis. The edge of the precipice was only a few hundred feet away across the untended land which began where the graves ended at the bottom of the hill. It was a sudden curtailing of the earth, with space and stars beyond.

Vali sat on the weathered steps of the tomb, her arm around Mona. Gwynn had walked a short distance away to smoke. She couldn't see Siegfried. It was possible to imagine that she and Mona were alone in the landscape of marble and weeds.

She fell gradually into a sense of timelessness, of being as still and untroubled as the tombs themselves, as if Time were a woman and she a babe on Time's back, and Time had put her down. She felt the mysterious life, the sense of familiarity with the stars.

Yet does it need us, any more than the seas of the world need ships? Vali wondered this, and answered herself, It never needed us or desired us until it made us, and then we, who are its organ of mind, desired it, and so love was formed and flung.

Mona stirred, bringing Vali back from her reverie. The sick woman was whispering something. Feeling strangely calm and adrift still had the stars moved? Vali bent her head down to listen. Turning around, she called out to Gwynn. He looked up from where he sat cross-legged on a sarcophagus on the ground.

"Mona wants to go down to the edge. I'm taking her. She wants you to come too."

Gwynn ground his cigarette out on the pitted stone, adding the butt to the several already there. He swung down and looked across the ragged land towards the cliff. "Fine with me," he said.

A wind always blustered across the barren margin between the tombs and the drop. That night it was a cold current that seemed to blow straight down off the stars themselves. But the no man's land was, in its own way, a beautiful place. The lonely stunted trees possessed a various, sinewy and surprising kind of grace in their wind-sculpted asymmetries and irregularities. Wildflowers grew among the untidy grasses, and these had the charm of things never cared for or interfered with by anyone. Birds came and went here too: wild geese, finches, nightjars, shrikes who had found ideal nests in the thornbushes onto which they affixed the rodents and smaller birds that were their prey.

Vali with Mona on her arm, and the separate figure of Gwynn, made their way across the delicate and brute ground, their hair and coats whipping in the wind. Siegfried followed several paces behind them, writing again in his notebook. More than once he tripped over rocks and pieces of fallen masonry he had failed to see, but he hardly noticed his barked shins and stubbed toes. His hands were trembling with excitement. He wasn't going to give this article to Verbal Nerve. Verbal Nerve. Better publications would want it. He basked for a moment in the vision of a career reporting on the lives of the rich and dangerous, as one who had been admitted into their world. Realising he was running out of paper, he wrote as minutely as he could. Better publications would want it. He basked for a moment in the vision of a career reporting on the lives of the rich and dangerous, as one who had been admitted into their world. Realising he was running out of paper, he wrote as minutely as he could.

When they were about fifty yards from the edge, Mona insisted that she could walk unaided.

Crossing wasteland, Siegfried jotted. Miss Skye a fragile pilgrim or refugee, Miss Jardine gallant. At the edge long way down.

It was indeed a long way. The escarpment dropped over a kilometre -but it might have been a hundred, for there was nothing to give a sense of scale down to a dead ocean of sand that was dark bluish indigo in the moonlight, on which lay the faintly silver, irregular maculae of salt deposits. Here and there the sand surrounded weathered buttes and chimneys of rock. On the horizon the curve of the planet was clearly visible, an edge beyond the one on which they stood.

Siegfried stood next to Gwynn, close enough that he could smell the man's floral aftershave. He drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He was beginning to feel part of the team now, a companion to heroes. He narrowed his eyes and sucked in his cheeks a little, trying to copy Gwynn's pensive scowl.