History prepares us for the death of fathers, but not the death of sons. Our grief is mostly of bewilderment. Twelve years I have sat on this cold, sharp marble, flecked with black and red, and never once felt the hollowness of grief. My wife of twenty years is dead, the only woman I have ever loved, and I have not wept. The man kneeling before me now, whose blood trickles down to the deep furrows above his brow, is a mystery to me.

“My son!” he chokes out. “My son!” He is ready to dash out his brains on the flagstones. The guards, by a two-fingered motion from my own son–sitting beside me–grab hold of his shoulders and keep him from the task.

“Necropolis does not return the dead,” my son says. “We only employ them.”

“What does he look like, your son?” I ask. “How old?”

My son turns and gives me a sharp look. His mouth and eyebrows are very thin, his zygomatic arch very prominent. When he scowls like this, I know he is alive. It is an inheritance from his mother, these features, but this expression I cannot remember of her now, only the death mask, clear and cold as the ice in which I have entombed her.

I have conquered death. Having conquered death, I have conquered grief.

“Only twelve,” says the man.

“All dead are welcome in Necropolis,” my son says, “but none may leave. Your son is not your son.”

“I have seen him walking,” says the man, struggling against the guards, who from the same two-fingered gesture from my son, release him. “I have seen him run, his limbs, the way his fingers move, the patter of his footsteps, the way he runs—dear god, the way he runs!” He begins to weep again; his tears run with his blood.

“What you saw was a body, matter untethered from spirit,” my son says, very quietly, gently, very much with shame. “Whatever made him your son is gone. Whatever remains is in our keeping, for that you sold him to us long ago.”

“I didn’t know,” he says. “If I knew that this was… we needed the money for the grain, for the hard winter. But we have prospered now. I have money now, whatever you ask–” He fumbles in his blue girdle for a ring of sharp-cornered coins. Its weight and clatter is meaningless to me now, a sovereign king, but it summons in me a hunger I have not quite forgotten. I starved once in a foreign land.

“Impossible!” says my son. “An unwelcome precedent and an utterly meaningless gesture. The boy–the body–would cease to reanimate the moment it left Necropolis.”

“Then we will live here. Let us live here with him.” He turns to me. “Honored king, great king!” He rushes forward to grab my ankles. The guards, of perfect obedience, remain precisely where they are. My son, standing and furiously pointing at the man, spots my two fingers raised from the arm of the throne, and sits down, and gives me the same sharp look again.

“Good father,” (I feel I must address him so), “I am the king of the city of the dead. The city of the dead. None of my ten thousand thralls draw the least sweat from their silent toils, nor do they feel pain, nor sleep, nor eat, nor do they speak. Feel their flesh.” One of the guards comes forward at my command and strips its sleeve. Pale and cold its skin, splotched with black rot, like naked sycamores in winter rime. The man will not touch it. He clenches my ankles.

“Great king, honored king, lord of the dead.”

“Lord of the dead,” I say, “but not of Death. Your son I cannot return to you, good father, only that which you gave me: a body.” I can feel my son’s fierce gaze upon me for the lies I tell.

The man looks up at me, a grief more like bewilderment in his eyes, a rage more like defeat. “Give that to me, then,” he says, softly.

“What will you do with it?”

“Give him to me.”

“What will you do with him except bury him?”

“Yes, I will bury him. I’ll bury him! Think of your father, lord of the dead—and yourself, a father too–think of this: all that I saw of him, which you call a body, was my boy.”

“A corpse,” mutters my son.

“So he was when I sold him!”

“What price will you give us?” asks my son.

“Name it.”

“All that you own,” I interject. “Every coin, every coffer, every part of land and cattle and chattel, and every seed and grain in your stores.”

“Father!”

But the man surprises us both with his readiness. “It shall be done,” he says, there is no trace of hesitation in his will. My old bones tremble; I believe I am afraid.

“Enough!” says my son, at last. “Go and take your son. We’ll take no price for him. Live here in Necropolis till you understand what folly you pursue.” The man’s legs buckle under him and on his knees he crawls to kiss my son's feet. My son leaps up onto his throne. “Go!” he says. “Begone!”

When he leaves, my son sinks back slowly, like a winged seed in a dark well.

“I would not have taken his money,” I assure him.

“Not for that lie do I hate you,” he replies.

Then he rises again and commands the next supplicant to enter. More of the usual affair: someone’s arisen dead rotted to the white core, the starch-white of bones showing between the eaten flesh, or one who does not obey anymore, or one that has been broken in pieces like a toy–and I, the toymaker; I, the mender. My thoughts are not with them, but on the will of that man and the memory of my wife in ice, whom I dare not resurrect, though I could steal her back from Death’s demesne, as I could have also that man’s son.

Not for that alone does my son despise me.

My empire is a city. My citizens number only a thousand and each is attended by a dozen dead. My citizens are artists and scholars, goldsmiths, gardeners, poets, and architects.