The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2

by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  Maggie said nothing, but narrowed her eyes and shrugged ever so slightly.

  “You are bold, my Maggie. Most mortals show a bit more deference when first meeting me, those few who find their way to me at all. Perhaps I should appear as a dragon or a sphinx, something to compell awe or fear. Though seeing you now, I do not think even a dragon would cow you.”

  “I mean not to be impolite,” said Maggie, picking up Isaak, who had wandered in from the garden. “It’s just that I need you, we need you, and it has been a long time since any of us heard from you. And very few of us get much sleep either, down where we live.”

  As if to emphasize the point, Isaak glared at Goddess.

  “Ah, I must concede a point fairly if brusquely spoken,” said Goddess, furrowing her brow. “Having set the mainspring of self-direction within each of you, I am obligated to abide by the results of how you govern yourselves, . . . no matter how coarse or ill-judged I may find those results.”

  Charicules perched on the railing nearest Maggie but did not sing.

  “Goddess, I am not so foolhardy as to pick a quarrel with you, who are the object of my searchings. I need your help. I can fight the okakpu of an owl, but not all his followers too, and at the same time outfit and send a ship into the riddlesome places, and haul a world-island back over those same unlucky roads.”

  Maggie ceased talking when she realized she was being ignored. The Mother was giving her complete attention to a slice of honey-glazed almond cake that now sat on the plate in front of her. No cake or dessert appeared on Maggie’s plate. Isaak walked across the table and sat in front of Goddess, who slowed her chewing.

  “I do not recall giving the same free will to cats,” she said, her mouth half-full. “It seems much has changed since I nodded off and now cats, some cats at least, have grown almost to become people.”

  Maggie feared then she might have stirred the wrath of Goddess, though she did not let her fear show. Isaak sat as still as marble.

  Goddess laughed instead. A slice of cake appeared on Maggie’s plate.

  “Forgive me, children. I am peevish when I wake and easily crossed, mostly because I do not yet understand the state of affairs but hate to admit to my ignorance and my own possible need for assistance. Not befitting divinity, I know, but I must own it.”

  Isaak returned to Maggie’s lap.

  The mood having been softened, Maggie and Goddess talked for hours in the synagogic garden, each learning from the other. Goddess spoke of the Original Song that she and God made together, how they sang themselves into existence, two paired notes in self-aware harmony and mutual rhythm who pierced and overwrote forever the precedent silence. She told of how they sang the angels into being, how the universe was sung from nothingness to house them, how they massed the seraphic choirs to shape a near-infinite variety of other beings.

  “You know the Song, little Maggie, we all do: it is inscribed in the blood and sinews of every single being past, present, and future across all the multitudes of worlds. You hear its aortic bass line right now, the upbeat and the downbeat, the diastolic and the systolic. I am that song, Maggie, and I also hearken to it, both itself and following it at the same time.”

  Goddess recounted the story of the three great rebellions, born less of wickedness (though this was often a consequence) but more from folly and despair. The first angels to rebel wished to un-make themselves, being unwilling and unable to accept self-awareness, and especially desperate to avoid their own immortality. But Goddess and God could not un-make; notes once sung cannot be un-sung. The first rebels have sought fruitlessly to obliterate themselves since their beginning very near to the Beginning—in their ever more inventive and grotesque attempts at their own un-doing, they have caused and will continue to cause great havoc across the universe. The second cohort of rebels enjoyed their consciousness but rejected its musicality; they could not abide being, hearing, and singing the Song for eternity, and have sought to live purely in prose, only to discover over and over again that there is prosody also in prose, as in all things, and thus no escaping metre and harmony. Forever thwarted in their efforts to denude music of melody and flatten all rhythm into static, the second-wave rebels rage against the universe, laying waste and causing pain (the resulting dirges and lamentations being musical only incites these angels to further rage, propelling the cycle forward endlessly). The third flight of rebels loved music but too well, seeking to commandeer it for their own various purposes, and to impose singular, rigid musical regimes where they could. The inherent flexibility of music precluding the permanency of any such regime, each of the rebellious paladins angrily tries to force compliance through punishment and denial.

  “Alas,” said Goddess. “One way or the other, each of the poor rebels craves un-knowing, wants nothing more than to unlearn what the music is, what it offers, what it provides. Some do not realize they can never achieve unlearning, any more than they can detach themselves from their own selves. It is as if your little Isaak’en here furiously went to war—a war of extermination, mind you—with her own tail. Cats sometimes do just that, but the result is always the same: a cat exhausted and perhaps badly mauled but still very much itself. Of course, unlike the cat at war with itself, most of the rebellious ones realize that they cannot achieve their goal, which only makes them more proud, more furious, more desperate. It is a terrible thing to witness. There appears to be no cure, though I have searched, experimented and prayed for one through all the eons.”

  Isaak groomed herself in Maggie’s lap. She avoided her tail.

  Maggie asked about the half-fallen.

  “A sad squadron,” said Goddess. “Dawdlers, indecisive, lingering at the threshold of great deeds, gnawing at the tassels of a grand drapery they are both too scared to pull back and thrust through and too afraid to leave undisturbed. They love the Original Song but pretend otherwise, fearing the scorn of those who rebelled, rather than trusting the praise of those who stayed true. They end up singing carceratory tunes of their own making, songs they despise but are too proud to give up. Much of what humans (and their counterparts on the many other worlds) call ‘evil’ stems from the actions of the half-fallen. Yes, great harm comes from the actions of the various rebels, but a great deal of that is unintentional, damage inflicted unknowingly upon ants by rampaging elephants. The half-fallen, on the other hand, delight in deliberately causing pain to mortals, as a way to make themselves feel important, to divert the effects of their self-loathing onto beings weaker than they are.”

  Goddess yawned.

  “I will be some time waking up in full. Right now, the lovely meal and the foamy yeast-beer are making me especially drowsy—that, and the humming of the bees in the garden. What more can I tell you, young Maggie?”

  “Goddess, I came to ask your help. Chi di. I can imagine that the woes of my little world may not be much for you to consider, being, I suppose, just a few discordant notes in the universal symphony but they loom large for me and many others. I need to sing a new song, an oba ema of sacrifice and repentance.”

  Goddess yawned again. Eyes half-shut, looking at the garden, Goddess did not answer right away.

  “I can only intervene, to the extent I can at all, through you and others like you, Maggie. The music is independent, follows it own course separate from the musician. The composer can revise and abridge, but who is to say that the new version is necessarily better?”

  Maggie began to retort, when Goddess started forward, pointed to a corner of the garden and exclaimed, “Selah! Look, there! Do you see it? Just under the oblong-shaped rhododendron near the tallest fountain.”

  Maggie looked to that spot, shading her eyes. In the shadows under the bush a large bird scratched at the soil. A minute later, it strode out a few feet from the shelter of the shrub, stopped abruptly, raised its crested head and surveyed the garden. Its tail was rapier-like, its plumage dazzling for the moment in the sunshine. Just as suddenly as it had stopped, the pheasant dashed across a bed
of portulacas and vanished into the tangle of roots under a viburnum-bush.

  “An Indigo Pheasant!” said Maggie, turning her head back towards Goddess.

  The Mother did not reply. Like the pheasant, she had disappeared. On the plate in front of Maggie a fresh slice of almond cake lay, wrapped in a linen napkin. On the table beside the plate stretched a freshly killed mouse, still warm.

  Isaak ate the mouse. Maggie took the cake. Joined by Charicules, they descended the pavillion steps and walked down one of the brick lanes leading through the garden back to the door through which they had entered. Maggie stopped only once, looking behind her to confirm that the pavillion was empty and to watch the second hand travelling on the clock perched like a planet atop the pavillion’s peak. The ticking and the tocking of the clock at the centre of the garden matched the pulse of her heart, an elastic marriage of blood and metal, not in the sterile manner of a metronome but as the organic expression of beats shaped to suit the needs of life.

  Saint Macrina greeted them as they entered the hallway.

  “No adjectives are strong enough to describe our emotions, daughter,” said the saint, as they walked back towards the great workroom. “I have never met the Mother; none of us here has. You are our nuncia, our ambassador to Goddess. So, tell me, what is She like?”

  Maggie was somewhat at a loss as how best to answer, so spoke in generalities. She described the garden and its clock with as many details as she could recall, but said little about how Goddess seemed to her. Ambassadors carry the expectations of many upon their shoulders, after all.

  “And God, did the Great Mother speak of Him?”

  Maggie shook her head, able to be completely truthful on that score.

  “Mysteries upon mysteries,” sighed Saint Macrina. “So many rumours and speculations. Some even say He does not exist.”

  “What do you think?” asked Maggie.

  “If there is a Mother, there is a Father,” said Saint Macrina, though in a tone lacking the stern definitiveness with which saints and beatas often express themselves. “I favour most the notion that he is gone on a long journey, seeking a means to repair or remake the Great Song. Or perhaps (as some would have it) He is looking for another universe altogether, believing He hears music not of His or Her making beyond the furthest stars, a muffled melody behind the wainscoting of Heaven. Whatever the case may be, God is not here and He left us no forwarding instructions.”

  They returned to the large workroom, which overflowed with expectant faces. Maggie said as much as she thought prudent and turned the discussion as quickly and as unobtrusively as she could to the purpose of the activities in the workshop.

  “Maggie, we honour you by making a faithful record of your vision,” said Saint Macrina, pointing to the large model on the central workbench and the smaller models and all the related schematics, blueprints, maquettes, tables of offsets, and reams of notations scattered around its base. One of the other saints nudged Saint Macrina, whispered in her ear. “I am reminded that, of course, the copy reflects not only your vision, dearest Maggie, but that of Sally. You see, we too have our little factions here, and who could be surprised? Factions have been with us in this universe almost since the Original Song was composed.”

  Sub-currents of muttering coursed through the lake surrounding Maggie. She weighed making a speech about Sally, about the wish for collaboration and rights of authorship, but quickly decided it was better to avoid the topic of Sally entirely. Her prior impression about the Mother having been tested this very afternoon, Maggie did not relish also calling into question her beliefs about the nature of the saints as well—she’d had enough disillusionment for one day.

  Maggie instead examined the large model. Isaak scrambled into the model itself, sniffing around the mock-ups of the Fulginator and the steam engine.

  “Ingenious solution to the problem of the steam engine couplings, there where you have inserted what I think must be coxa-trochanteral joints,” said Maggie. “I do not think that is Sally’s concept, and I know it is not mine or Mr. Gandy’s, so who else’s thoughts do you capture here? Mr. Bunce’s? But no, he is very smart with the mathematics but not so mechanically minded, so who then?”

  Saint Macrina and several others in the front turned to look into the crowd, which parted to allow two men to come forward. Shyly, they said they were chola bronzesmiths, saints from Tamil-land, and that the joints had been their idea.

  “We are not simply copyists and archivists here, Maggie,” said Saint Macrina. “We are curators and editors, and makers in our own right. We revise and we amend. We add and we pare away. The final model of the Indigo Pheasant shall be the most perfect, most ideal, it can be. See it in your dream-walking, import the improvements into the world below, with our blessings.”

  Maggie would always recall the next hours as some of the happiest of her life. She swapped craftsman’s notes with the assembly, an excited bourse for artisanal ideas. They talked about helicoidal drills, pivot rounders, microtenices, mandrels, dautic fuses, curcurbites, cyclostats and all manner of other specialized tools, some of which they came to realize they would need to invent in order to complete the Selah-Machine. They debated the efficacy of this lathe versus that one and the usefulness of the torquetum to measure eliptics. They reviewed the suites of axes, gimmals and gears (“les engrenages,” as the saint from the little mill-town near Arras insisted on calling them, to the gentle teasing of the others, who reminded her that they had left their old languages behind). They analyzed the value of using sabicu and mottled purple bubinga wood for the cabinetry, the supple, pale yellow antiara wood for Fulginator casements, macassar ebony for the musical components, wood from the nobiron tree for the heavier Fulginator struts. They talked of china clay and lead marcassite, of niobium and terentium. As only those with direct, hands-on knowledge can, they pondered how to achieve goodness of fit, to attain the greatest precision and fault tolerance, to maintain desired levels of strength, ductility and flexibility in their materials.

  The four pillar-clocks, impartial referees, tolled the hour for vespers. As the multitude of labouring saints moved to various chapels for the singing of the divine office, Saint Macrina pulled Maggie aside.

  “Leave us now, daughter, to our cantations of melancholy experience. Return to the middle-earth with our good will and your newfound knowledge. Come back to us when you can. Your greatest challenge is very soon upon you. No matter that you have faced down the Owl once—that was so far the one time only, and he was unprepared for the sudden revelation of your strength. Do not underestimate his guile in your final contest with him. He is old and cunning, subtly poisonous in ways you cannot yet have understood.”

  Isaak arched her back and hissed.

  “You too, little lion!” laughed the saint. “Truly you gratify my eye and my soul, the both of you!”

  They paused in front of the tool-cabinet that would be Maggie’s portal to her room in the house on Mincing Lane.

  “Two more advisements, if I may,” said the saint. “Sally is crucial for success in this endeavour. Remember that.”

  Maggie said nothing, only nodding her head.

  The saint withdrew a hand-mirror from a pocket on her work-apron and said, “Secondly, you need to find poor Jambres—the Cretched Man. He is frantic to find you and Sally and to help, but he cannot penetrate the defenses set by the Owl. So instead you must go to him, in his place of sanctuary.”

  She held the mirror up to Maggie’s gaze. The mirror was misty and did not reflect Maggie’s face. In the mirror, the mist cleared. Maggie could see in the mirror an interior scene, akin to a picture from a book of hours with a figure sitting bent over his books like Saint Jerome in the library.

  “He is beautiful!” she gasped.

  “Cursedly so,” said the saint.

  “I do not mean merely his white shrouding,” said Maggie, scrutinizing the image in the mirror.

  “I did not think you did.”

  Isaak jumpe
d all the way up to Maggie’s shoulder and likewise peered into the mirror. Isaak purred mightily and softly reached out a paw to the surface of the glass.

  “Find him. Go to him,” said Saint Macrina.

  They hugged. Maggie, with Isaak on one shoulder and Charicules on the other, and the linen-wrapped almond cake in one hand, opened the door to the armoire, walked past rows of tools, down the long, swiftly darkening hallway as the saint shut the doors behind them, and eventually found herself in the house with the dolphin door-knocker in the City of London. She ate the cake later that day, but did not find it nearly as delicious as she remembered the first slice being in the garden.

  Sally wept alone in her room, in a wandering hour between midnight and dawn.

  She clutched at her Saint Morgaine’s medallion and she counted the steeples of Hamburg’s churches, to no avail. She prayed to the moon, which yielded no indication of listening, let alone answering.

  She whispered for Tom, and begged Frau Reimer for succour. She dared not call for Uncle Barnabas, much less Sanford.

  Where was Isaak, so often absent of late? Little golden traitor.

  Into a pillow she sobbed.

  “I am come to the ends of spiritual reckoning,” she thought, shuddering. “Oh dear Goddess, help me. I know not what to do.”

  She thought again of Reglum and wept more.

  “Sweet man, how I have wronged you. Even now you would help me, I am sure of it, or at least not turn me away. Yet you above all I cannot confide in.”

  A wind arose, softly fingering the window-panes and sighing over the roof-tiles.

  Sally felt James in her mind, always. But no more so than this past week, with its dawning realization, its panicky denials, its sleepless evaluation of every possible course of action . . . and its lack of a viable solution.

  Another presence seeped into her thoughts, borne it seemed on the mounting wind.