It was several more hours before Isabel was sure that the smaller minds and mechanisms of the minaret had reached their usual equilibrium, and could be trusted to run themselves. But the world, as she climbed down from her crucifix, was still shrouded. Fog—she had learned the word in her apprenticeship, although she had thought of it as one of those mythical aberrations, like a comet-strike. But here it was. She wandered the misted balconies and gantries. The light here was diffuse, but ablaze. Soon, she guessed, the power she had brought from her sun would burn this moist white world away. But in the west, there was a greater dimness, which was amplified today. Here, the air was almost as chill as it had been before daybreak. Isabel bit her lip and ground her palms. She cursed herself, to have allowed this to come about. What would her old training mistress say! Too late now to attempt to rectify the situation at Mirror 28, with the planes beaded wet and the pistons dripping. She would have to speak to her apprentices this evening, and do her best to pretend sternness. It was what teachers generally did, she had noticed: when they had failed to deal with something, they simply blamed their class. Isabel tried to imagine the scene to the invisible west below. That dancing girl beyond the walls of the Cathedral of the Word would surely find this near-darkness a great inconvenience. The simple, the obvious—the innocent—thing seemed to be to go down and apologise to her.
Isabel descended the many stairways of her minaret. Stepping out into the world outside seemed odd to her now—the ground was so low!—but especially today, when, almost mimicking the effects of her fading sight, everything but her minaret which blazed above her was dim and blotched and silvered. She walked between the fields in the direction of the rosestone walls, and heard but didn’t see the animals grazing. Brushing unthinkingly and near-blindly as now habitually did against things, she followed close to the brambled hedges, and, by the time she felt the dim fiery glow of the wall coming up towards her, her hands and arms were scratched and wet. The stones of the wall were soaked, too. The air here was a damp presence. Conscious that she was entering the dim realm which her own inattention had made, Isabel felt her way along the wall until she came to the door. It looked old and little-used; the kind of door you might find in a story. She didn’t know whether to feel surprise when she turned the cold and slippery iron hoop, and felt it give way.
Now, she was in the outer gardens of the Cathedral of the Word, and fully within the shade of faulty Mirror 28. It was darker here, certainly, but her senses and her sight soon adjusted, and Isabel decided that the effect wasn’t unpleasant, in some indefinable and melancholy way. In this diffuse light, the trees were dark clouds. The pavements were black and shining. Some of the flowers hung closed, or were beaded with silver cobwebs. A few bees buzzed by her, but they seemed clumsy and half-asleep in this half-light as well. Then, of all things, there was a flicker of orange light; a glow which Isabel’s half-ruined eyes refused to believe. But, as she walked towards it, it separated itself into several quivering spheres, bearing with them the smell of smoke, and the slap of bare feet on wet stone.
The open courtyard which Isabel had gazed down on from her minaret was impossible to scale as she stood at the edge of it on this dim and foggy day, although the surrounding pillars which marched off and vanished up into the mist seemed huge, lit by the flicker of the smoking braziers placed between them. Isabel moved forward. The dancer, for a long time, was a sound, a disturbance of the mist. Then, sudden as a ghost, she was there before her.
“Ahlan wa sahlan…” She bowed from parted knees, palms pressed together. She smelled sweetly of sweat and sandalwood. Her hair was long and black and glorious. “And who, pray, are you? And what are you doing here?”
Isabel, flustered in a way which she had not felt in ages, stumbled over her answer. The minaret over the wall…She pointed uselessly into the mist. This dimness—no, not the mist itself, but the lack of proper light…The dancer’s kohled and oval eyes regarded her with what seemed like amusement. The bindi on her brow glittered similarly. Although the dancer was standing still, her shoulders rose and fell from her exertions. Her looped earrings tinked.
“So, you bring light from that tower?”
Isabel, who perhaps still hadn’t made the matter as clear as she should have, nodded in dizzy relief that this strange creature was starting to understand her. “I’m so sorry it’s so dark today. I’ve—I’ve heard your dancing from my tower, and I—thought…I thought that this oversight would be difficult for you.”
“Difficult?” The girl cocked her head sideways like a bird to consider. The flames were still dancing. Their light flicked dark and orange across her arms. “No, I don’t think so. In fact, I quite like it. My name’s Genya, by the way. I’m a beekeeper…” She gave a liquid laugh and stepped forward, back, half-fading. “Although, thanks to you, there are few enough bees today need keeping.”
“Beekeeper—but I thought these were the gardens of the Cathedral of the Word? I thought you were—”
“—Oh, I’m a Librarian as well. Or at least, a most senior apprentice. But some of us must also learn how to keep bees.”
Isabel nodded. “Of course. For the honey…”
Again, Genya laughed. There seemed to be little Isabel could do which didn’t cause her amusement. “Of no! Never for that! We give the honey away to the poor at our main gates on moulid days. We keep bees because they teach us how to find the books. Do you want me to show you?”
Isabel was shown. That first day, the misty gardens were nothing but a puzzle to her. There were flowering bushes which she was told by Genya bore within each their cells whole libraries of information about wars fought and lost. There were stepped crypt-like places beyond creaky iron gates where, through other doors which puffed open once Genya made a gesture, lay bound books of the histories of things which had never happened in this or any other world. They were standing, Genya whispered, reaching up to take down a silvery thing encased in plastic, merely at the furthest shore of the greatest oceans of all possible knowledge. Yet some of these clear, bright, artificially lit catacombs were as big as all but the finest halls of the Dawn Church’s own seats of learning.
“What is that, anyway?”
It was a rainbowed disk. After a small struggle, Genya opened the transparent box which contained it. “I think it contains music.” Isabel had to gasp when Genya placed the fingertips upon the surface, so closely did it resemble a mirror. But Genya’s fingers moved rapidly in a caressing, circling motion. Her eyes closed for a moment. She started humming. “Yes. It is music. An old popular song about fools on hills. It’s lovely. I wish I had the voice like you to sing it.”
“You can hear it from that?”
Genya nodded. “It’s something which is done to us Librarians. To our fingers. See…” She raised them towards Isabel’s gaze. Close to the end, the flesh seemed raw, like fresh scar tissue. “We’re given extra optic nerves. Small magnetic sensors…Processors…Other things…” She snapped the rainbow disk back into its case. “It makes life a lot easier.” She tried to demonstrate the same trick with a brown ribbon of tape, the spool of which instantly took off on its own down the long corridor in which they were standing. She hummed, once they had caught up with it, another tune.
“It’s all part of being a Librarian, having tickly fingers,” Genya announced as she slotted the object back on its shelf. “By the way…” She turned back towards Isabel. “I was under the impression that there was a far worse excruciation for you Dawn-Singers…” Genya leaned forward with a dancer’s gaze, peering as no one ever had into the forgotten shade of Isabel’s eyes. “You’re supposed to be blind, aren’t you? But it’s plain to even the stupidest idiot that you’re not…”
Next dawn, the skies were clear again. Once more, the Floating Ocean was calm and distant and blue. Those in that valley who cared to listen to Isabel’s song might have thought that day that it sounded slightly perfunctory. But ordinary daybreaks such as these were easy sport for Isabel now. She was e
ven getting used to the different feel of the minaret which came from the fault in Mirror 28. Under blue skies which only a connoisseur or an acolyte would have noticed a slight darkening of in the western quadrant, she hurried across the fields towards the rosestone walls of the Cathedral of the Word.
Even though their prosecutors were able to argue the facts convincingly the other way, neither Isabel not Genya ever thought that their acts in those long ago days of Ghezirah’s endless summer amounted to betrayal. They knew that their respective Churches guarded their secrets with all the paranoid dread of the truly powerful, who are left with much to lose and little to gain. They knew, too, of the recent terrors of the War of the Lilies. But their lives had been small. Further up the same rosestone wall, if Isabel had cared to follow it beyond her valley, she would have eventually have found that its fine old blocks was pockmarked with sprays of bullets; further still, the stone itself dissolved into shining heaps of dream-distorted lava, and the gardens still heaved with the burrowing teeth of trapmoles. Yet Nashir had suffered far less in the War of the Lilies than many of Ghezirah’s islands. In the vast lattice of habitation which surrounded Sabil, there were still huge rents and floating swathes of spinning rubble. Seventeen years is little time to recover from a war, but peace and youth and endless summer are heady brews, and lessons doled out in the Church classrooms by the rap of a mistress’s cane sometimes remain forever wrapped in chalkdust and boredom. Day after brilliant day in that backwater of a backwater, Isabel and Genya wandered deeper into the secrets of Cathedral of the Word’s cloisters and gardens. Day after day, they betrayed the secrets of their respective Churches.
The Cathedral and its environs are vast, and the farms and villages and towns and the several cities of Nashir which surround it are mostly there, in one way or another, to serve its needs. Beyond the ridge of the Isabel’s valley, standing at the lip of stepped gardens which went down and down so far that the light grew blue and hazed, they saw a distant sprawl of stone, glass, spires on the rising horizon.
“Is that the Cathedral?”
Not for the first time that day, Genya laughed. “Oh no! It’s just the local Lending Office…” They walked on and down; waterfalls glittering beside them in the distant blaze of, far greater, minaret than Isabel’s. Another day, rising to the surface from the tunnels of a catacomb from which it had seemed they would never escape, Isabel saw yet another great and fine building. Again, she asked the same question. Again, Genya laughed. Still, within those grounds with their wild white follies and statues a shrines to Dewey, Bliss and Ranganathan, there were many compensations.
As their daily journeys grew further, it became necessary to travel by speedier methods if Isabel was to return to her minaret in time to sing in the night. The catacombs of books were too vast for any Librarian to categorise even the most tightly defined subject without access to rapid transport. So, on the silk seats of caleches which buzzed on cushions of buried energy, they swept along corridors. The bookshelves flashed past them, the titles spinning too fast to read, until the spines themselves became indistinguishable and the individual globelights blurred into a single white stripe overhead. Isabel and Genya laughed and whooped as they urged their metal craft into yet greater feats of speed and manoeuvrability. The dusty wisdoms of lost ages cooled their faces.
They rarely saw anyone, and then only as faint figures tending some distant stack of books, or the trails of aircraft like scratches across the blue roof of the Ghezirahan sky. Genya’s training, the dances and the indexing and—for an exercise, the sub-categorising of the lesser tenses of the verb meaning to blink in sixty eight lost languages—came to her through messages even more remote than the tick of Isabel’s modem. Sometimes, the statues spoke to her. Sometimes, the flowers gave off special scents, or the furred leaves of a bush communicated something in their touch to her. But, mostly, Genya learned from her bees.
One day, Isabel succumbed to Genya’s repeated requests and led her to the uppermost reaches of her minaret. Genya laughed as she peered down from the spiralling stairways as they ascended. The drops, she claimed, leaning far across the worn brass handrails, were dizzying. Isabel leaned over as well; she’d never thought to look at her minaret in this way. Seen from the inside, the place was like a huge vertical tunnel, threaded with sunlight and dust and the slow tickings of vast machinery, diminishing down towards seeming infinity.
“Why is it, anyway, that you Dawn-Singers need to be blinded?” Genya asked as they climbed on, her voice by now somewhat breathless.
“I suppose it’s because we become blind soon enough—a kind of mercy. That, and because we have access to such high places. We Dawn-Singers know how to combine lenses…” Isabel paused on a stairs for a moment as a new thought struck her, and Genya bumped into her back. “So perhaps the other Churches are worried about what, looking down, we might see…”
“I’m surprised anyone ever gets to the top of this place without dying of exhaustion. Your apprentices must have legs like trees!” But they did reach the top, and Isabel felt the pride she always felt at her minaret’s gathered heat and power, whilst Genya, when she had recovered, moved quickly from silvery balcony to balcony, exclaiming about the view. Isabel was little used to seeing anything up here, but she saw through her fading eyes many reflected images of her friend, darting mirror to mirror with her pretty silks trailing behind her like flocks of coloured birds. Isabel smiled. She felt happy, and the happiness was different to the happiness she felt each dawn. Chasing the reflections, she finally found the real Genya standing on the gantry above Mirror 28.
“It’s darker here.”
“Yes. This mirror has a fault in it.”
“This must have been where you first saw me…” Genya chuckled. “I thought the light had changed. The colours were suddenly deeper. For a while, it even had the bees confused. Sometimes, the sunlight felt almost cool as I danced though it—more soothing. But I suppose that was your gaze…”
They both stared down at the gardens of the Cathedral of the Word. They looked glorious, although the pillared space where Genya had danced seemed oddly vacant without her. Isabel rubbed her sore eyes as bigger blotches than usual swam before them. She said, “You’ve never told me about that dance.”
“It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“But then, so are many things.”
They stood there for a long time amid the minaret’s shimmering light, far above the green valley and the winding rosestone wall. Today felt different. Perhaps they were growing too old for these trysts. Perhaps things would have to change…The warm wind blew past them. The Floating Ocean glittered. The trees murmured. The river gleamed. Then, with a rising hum like a small machine coming to life, a bee which had risen the thermals to this great height blundered against Isabel’s face. Somehow, it settled there. She felt its spiky legs, then the brush of Genya’s fingers as she lifted the creature away.
“I’ll show you the dance now, if you like.”
“Here? But—”
“—just watch.”
From her cupped hands, Genya laid the insect on the gapped wooden boards. It sat there for a moment in the sunlight, slowly shuffling its wings. It looked stunned. “This one’s a white-tail. Of course, she’s a worker—and a she. They do all the work, just like in Ghezirah. Most likely she’s been sent out this morning as a scout. Many of them never come back, but the ones that do, and if they’ve found some fine new source of nectar, tell the hive about it when they return…” Genya stooped. She rubbed her palms, and held them close to the insect and breathed their scent towards it, making a sound as she did so—a deep-centred hum. She stepped back. “Watch…” The bee preened her antennae and quivered her thorax and shuffled her wings. She wiggled back, and then forwards, her small movements describing jerky figures of eight. “They use your minaret as a signpost…” Genya murmured as the bee continued dancing. Isabel squinted; there was something about its movements which reminded of Genya on the rosestone pavi
ng. “That, and the pull and spin of all Ghezirah. It’s called the waggly dance. Most kinds of social bees do it, and its sacred to our Church as well.”
Isabel chuckled, delighted. “The waggly dance?!”
“Well, there are many longer and more serious names for it.”
“No, no—it’s lovely…Can you tell where’s she been?”
“Over the wall, of course. And she can’t understand why there’s hard ground up here, up where the sun should be. She thinks we’re probably flowers, but no use for nectar-gathering.”
“You can tell all of that?”
“What would be the point, otherwise, in her dancing? It’s the same with us Librarians. Our dance is a ritual we use for signalling where a particular book is to be found.”
Isabel smiled at her friend. The idea of someone dancing to show where a book lay amid the Cathedral of the Word’s maze of tunnels, buildings and catacombs seemed deliciously impractical, and quite typical of Genya. The way they were both standing now, Isabel could see their two figures clearly reflected in Mirror 28’s useless upper convex. She was struck as she always was by Genya’s effortless beauty—and then by her own plainness. Isabel was dull as a shadow, even down to the greyed leather jerkin and shorts she was wearing, her mosey hair which had been cropped with blind efficiency, and then held mostly back by a cracked rubber band. She could, in fact, almost have been Genya’s shade. It was a pleasant thought—the two of them combined in the light which she brought to this valley each day—but at the same time, the reflection bothered Isabel. For a start, Mirror 28 poured darkness instead of light from her minaret. Even its name felt cold and steely, like a premonition…
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 10