A Moirologist's Notes

Frailians place their dead in cliffs, hammering beds for them into the sheer rock face. Inhabitants of Khronos carve their first words and last into headstones; often they're the same. Cimmerians don't mark where anyone is buried; Laudania has signs only to graves. "All paths lead that way," both people said when I asked why. In Wind Hills the only memorials are bodies of water, reflecting heaven, but darker, backwards. In winter the hill dwellers chisel messages into the ice. Fistia's citizens erect temples for themselves and leave their dead under shabby lean-tos, while their neighbors in Magara build palaces for their deceased and live in hovels. In Haun mourners stand with one foot in the grave. On Cyrix Island the grieving cast earth on the casket, mirroring the rice thrown after marriages. Whether they want to throw dirt at death or add a token of their own mortal flesh to a friend's grave, they wouldn't say. At first I thought Xenia's inhabitants covered mirrors in the house of the deceased to shun vanity in the face of death. Then one Xenian told me that mirrors could trap souls trying to depart. But I've learned to distrust the reasons people give. Does vanity remind them of death--what's vanity but fear of dying? And mirrors remind us we're dying all the time. Those who live in Beryl Valley say they wear masks to cemeteries so death won't know who they are, but death knows everyone down to the bone. Maybe the masks are meant to reflect the way death changes us until we can't even recognize our own. Along Wine River people burn remains to give death no circumstance, no caskets to rest in, no bodies to use. Mourners write hopes and prayers on thin strips, tie them to the raft of ashes, and hold one end on the bank until the current snaps the paper; so death takes away some cares and leaves the rest in survivors' hands. They let fire and water each claim part of the dead, because they say we're part flame, part rain. People in our state are obsessed with knowing where bodies lie because they're not sure where souls go. Here, we only care for people after they die. Then we pay to bathe, dress, and shelter them. We hire doctors, write and speak kindly of the dead, provide a good place to rest. Back when they lived on the street, we looked away. We box corpses and cover them with heavy stones, but death is the ultimate escape artist. In our local gazette I read that on the night before the feast of saints, our young raid their ancestors' vaults, pulling the bodies out, hacking skulls off, scattering bones; the peace of the dead disturbs them so they try to shatter it. How few manage to stop dying even for a second. In Tiflos, the place closest to us, people are so afraid of death they won't help the sick, so they always have work for me, but I hate to go. Their only hearse rushes one victim after another, some before they've lost consciousness; twice the driver has run over children. And then there's the business of exhuming all the corpses, to check to make sure they're really dead. Though rich, Tiflins always try to cheat me. They even try to trick death by hiding and live underground, buried alive by their fear of dying. Through my work I've learned to respect death; no one's managed to fool, bribe or frighten it. Nor can any escape it--not in the future, where our deaths lie, nor in the past, which lies dead. In Tiflos nothing is sacred, which means death's all that's sacred, for death is nothing. When someone dies, they rush to burn all testaments to that life. Tiflins use writing mainly for laws and obscenities on toilet stalls. We can run from death out of fear of dying or out of desire for life; how we live depends on which drives us. Most times I walk to and from Tiflos at night, so I don't have to lie there. One can smell the way in the dark; even their earth reeks of bitterness. And the climb up the Sapphire Mountains, though steep, is easier than the descent to Tiflos. …