It was the heron who gave the sign the dance was done, with a slight inclination of his sleek neck. Then he turned to face the great lake, leant forward, spread wide his wings, and soared away over the water. We watched until he disappeared from view; then turned our gaze to the marks his feet had left upon the sand. Each of us bent down to touch the indentations his long toes made. Then we looked and saw in each other the same bracing joy that follows on an epiphany.
Bird Girl tells us that when she could bear it, she would look into the heron’s fiercely glittering eye. There she seemed to see the whole of time, and the worlds within worlds that are creation, passing through their eternal cycles of doom and splendour. The dance was the miracle, she believes, that made us “darklings” light at last.
We tell each other this story often, oh my daughter, because Bird Girl’s dance with the heron ushered in our time here and married us to this place.
Our new home is a group of sturdy cabins built long ago by prospectors and later used by an artists’ colony. That first night there was a full moon, a dazzling milky white that made the lowly cabins look unearthly, even numinous. There were cabins enough that we each had one of our own. I made a simple bed of dry leaves under the small, square window through which I could see the moon. In the ethereal lunar glow I went over again all I had seen in the grip of the mask’s power: the terrace of stars, my youthful parents, Keats and his nightingale, and the glorious, winged god who emerged from the flawless ivory oval of the Egg.
It was soon thereafter that Chandelier told us all the story of how Eros was contained in the World Egg, begotten by Night and made immaculate and polished by the wind. When the Egg cracked, it was the light of the first dawn. Then the god flew out bearing the seeds of all things, and that was the beginning of our cosmos. So we all have our beginnings in Love. Chandelier’s father told him that this cosmogony belonged to the ancient Greek mystery religion of the Orphics. They cultivated rituals of purification and sought the state of ekstasis — the stepping out of the body we had all experienced when we chanted through the masks.
Part of the mystery for me is whether I shared the thought-image of the World Egg with Chandelier when we performed our ritual chorus, or if it was the sound-box secret of the mask itself gave birth to the vision. But I know with full certainty that you were born of love, Speranza. Of this I have no doubt. Nor does your father.
We are nourished by many stories here in our new home. Bird Girl and Chandelier, in particular, have a great store of myths, tales, and stirring narratives. Every day Chandelier recites from his compendious, unfaltering memory, and Bird Girl writes down a poem, or a chapter of a novel in the massive log books left behind by the mining company. We are building a library here. These days, we each find great solace in our work.
We are all makers of some sort. We are becoming a part of this wild place, with its rock and mighty lake and green and lilac morning skies. We are being knitted into its monumental story.
Out of the clay of the soil, I made sun-baked bricks and built a little house shaped like the dome of Santa Maria del Fiori. The arched doorway and ovoid windows of my dome-shaped home let in a light of incomparable softness. It was here I gave birth to you, my dearest daughter. On the lintel above the door, I wrote in the soft clay “Speranza mi fe.” Hope made me.
This is what I have learned above all on my journey, Speranza: that hope must be added to each day and given shape through our singular acts of faith, and our unfailing attention to truth and beauty.
We add to our hope in many ways. Harry, Outpacer, and Chandelier together managed to resuscitate the ancient generator left by our predecessors. We use it sparingly, in part to operate the short-wave radio they also unearthed, which bears the proud Italian name Marconi. With the help of the radio, Chandelier, who paid close attention to all of his father’s business, has managed to contact “the underground in the air” known as the Arêté. This is the worldwide lifeline network that broadcasts any resurgence of art and ceremony, and the re-emergence of species. We believe the Arêté is still safe from surveillance because the EYE is ignorant of the Morse code Chandelier is using for transmission. In fact, the EYE has probably forgotten that short-wave radio frequencies even exist.
We have sent the Arêté news of the heron. We hear of wonderful things through the air-underground, including the rebirth of birdsong in many places throughout the world. Last week came news of sightings of the robin redbreast and the wren. We have ourselves now witnessed the return to the lake of the eider, the plover, and the tern.
I am greatly blessed as well in your health and beauty, my child, and I find myself often wishing my sister Sophia could see you, and you her. When you are older, I will tell you about Sophia and your grandparents, and the ancestral spirits who kept our family strong through a dark time.
I will teach you too, the stories that nourish the soul of our community: of Harry’s enduring love for breathtaking places that have disappeared from the face of the earth; of Bird Girl’s search for books and of her indomitable mother’s crusade; of your father’s dream of reviving the former splendour of the cinema; of how the garrulous Candace found love most unexpectedly. And why Chandelier’s father created a protective Egg, where his son built up a vast knowledge he now generously shares with us all. In these ways the dream of the World Egg persists, and we feed on the truth of its founding myth as we would on honeycomb and other delicacies I sometimes find on my daily foraging.
These are skills I will also teach you when you are older.
Chandelier has just come to give me news gleaned through the Arêté I never expected to hear. Guido Santarcangelo of the confraternity known as the Rat-Men is seeking the whereabouts of a woman called Lucia, last seen near a stone house in Outland Tract 17 on the day the fireball struck.
“Do you want to reply?” he asks me.
I hold you closer. Your breath is warm on my neck. Your tiny hand grips my finger tightly even though you sleep. I stare out over the massive lake as if searching for a sign while Chandelier waits patiently. I realize that it is time to forgive myself for what I did with Guido. And he will surely want to know that the Outpacer and I have a daughter, with such a name.
“Please tell Guido Santarcangelo that I am well,” I say, “and that I have a daughter, who is healthy and who is named Speranza.”
I hear Chandelier’s foot shift in the sand as he readies himself to speed back.
For the briefest possible moment, I relive my own amazement at Guido’s revealed beauty when he pulled off the hideous rat’s mask. This is our constant work, I realize — casting out the monster in ourselves and striving to be compassionate and selfless, even though we fail again and again and again. We must cast the monster out, over and over, as ceaselessly as the waves surge in toward me where I stand.
Come, Speranza. We will go and watch Chandelier send the message coded in those dots and dashes of sound that always make you laugh in delight. We will ask him to tell us exactly when he is spelling out your name in Morse. We will think of your name speeding along the invisible radio waves of the world; then silently give thanks for everything he rescued from the ruins of his father’s house.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of Chapter Four, “Their Feet,” appeared in The Malahat Review.
I would like to thank Random House, Inc. for permission to reprint lines from Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (Copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens).
In the writing of this book, and throughout the submission process, I was helped by the unfailing encouragement of Susan Tilley, Rhona Goodspeed, Catherine Joyce, Tom and Marilyn Henighan, Jacqueline MacIntyre, and Robert Woodbridge.
I am grateful to Sam Hiyate and Ali McDonald of The Rights Factory for their expert guidance on shaping the novel’s story in its early days.
I would like to express my thanks as well, to Séan Virgo for his empathetic email companionship in the book’s final stages,
and the happy discovery of our shared admiration for Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.
Books I found particularly helpful were Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica; Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination; and Andrew Motion’s biography of John Keats. An article by John Windsor in The Independent on Sunday of May 12, 1996 drew my attention to Thanos Vovolis’s reproductions of the masks used in ancient Greek drama, and his discovery of their “sound-box” potential.
I am deeply indebted to the poet Robert Duncan, whose “Passages 14 — Chords” in Bending the Bow introduced me to the myth of the World Egg.
Wendy MacIntyre lives in Ottawa where she works as a freelance writer and editor. She has published scholarly essays and short fiction in journals in Canada, the United States, and Britain, including in the University of Windsor Review and the Malahat Review. Her novels are Mairi (Oolichan Books), The Applecross Spell (XYZ Publishing), and Apart (Groundwood Books), a young adult novel which was named one of the ten best picks for young adult fiction for 2007 by the Ontario Library Association .
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