[From Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789), which Maggie read and annotated at the McDoons]
At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow.
[… . . . .]
This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated.
[… . . . .]
I also now first saw the use of the quadrant. I had often with astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think what it meant. They at last took notice of my surprise; and one of them, willing to increase it, as well as to gratify my curiosity, made me one day look through it. The clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they passed along. This heightened my wonder: and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.
Epilogue
“‘The history of men’s follies,’ says the inimitable Fontenelle, ‘makes no small part of learning; and, unhappily for us, much of our knowledge terminates there.’”
—Ephraim Chambers,
Cyclopaedia, vol. I (1728)
“If I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”
—Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
c. 1760, as recorded by Jacques Guillaume Legrand in
“Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de J.B. Piranesi” (1799)
“It is necessary to make a ruin of a palace so that we have thus rendered it an object of interest.”
—Denis Diderot,
Salon de 1767
“. . . imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them. . . . He makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.”
—Giambattista Vico,
The New Science (3rd edition; 1744)
Maggie and Jambres ate a tangy chicken yassa with Goddess the Mother in her garden at the crosswinds of the world.
Butterflies landed on the table, flexed their wings non-chalantly.
Nasturtiums crowded the pavilion, chanvre and flax swayed in the breeze. Fig trees, tended each by its jealous tribe of wasps, lined the walls closest to the diners. Prickly thickets of smilax filled the corners of those walls, interspersed with the flowering tea-plants that the Chinese call “cha hua,” which the English call “camellias,” with their large, ruffled blooms of pink and sabine-white. Hedge-rocket and mustard tempted with their yellows, merony and speedwell with their speckled blues. Bixwort and white evermind dotted the strips of fresh-green lawn trimmed by the brick of walkways. Working the flower-fields, a thousand bees hummed and zussed, some as small and brilliant as copper nail-heads, some as large and bright as oranges from Sardinia.
Water ran gurgling and splashing in dozens of ingenious channels and in many carved fountains of marble.
Overhead the massive clock drummed to the bass of the bees.
Goddess smiled, humming to herself a partita from Maggie’s Great Song.
“We have arrived,” said Maggie. “As Saint Adelsina sang in ‘The Rogation’:
‘Lean and ragged as cormorants,
But undwindled,
Flame and candle all undimmed.
Our bodies serving as the reliquaries
For which we have not the purse,
Our bones wrapped in linen tattered,
For which we slip not the hearse,
Our skin daubed with blood-seeped ash,
For which we scorn not the verse.’”
They finished their meal with sweet-milk rice soup.
“Past all cumbrous snares and walls of trepidation,” said Jambres. He made a show of wearing his sleeves rolled up, still marveling at the sight of his own umber skin, whole and alive. Here and there, on his left wrist and around his knees, ran pale milky striations, the scars of his sutures, a subcutaneous reminder of his punishment.
“We will go to New York City,” said Maggie. “In the next century. 1928 or 1929, I think.”
Goddess smiled even more widely, and said, “Manhattan, around Saint Nicholas Place, I should say.”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “That sounds about right.”
A bird darted right over the pavilion, a flash of deep bottle blue with streaks of rusty-red on its belly.
“The Euhelline Fruit-Pigeon,” said the Mother. “At least that is what your little Malchen will agree to call it in English, when she discovers it. It’s a native of the Ornish islands, and will one day soon establish itself on Sri Lanka. Quite a beauty.”
“Have you . . . ?” started Maggie.
“No, no Indigo Pheasant here since the day you last visited me,” the Mother shook her head.
“I am wondering more about another bird,” said Jambres.
“Ah, yes,” said Goddess. “The Owl. You have made him very angry, you know. Furious, actually. No one has ever done what you did: freed prisoners ahead of schedule, upset the timetable, defied the Rules.”
“Strix seems obsessed with rules for one who defied them himself near the Beginning,” said Maggie.
“Yes, but also no,” answered Goddess. “Strix and his followers, the other Watchers, are not truly like the Fallen at all. The latter: . . . oh my, you should meet one of them sometime, really you should. The Fallen do not believe in rules at all. They mock the very presumption of rule-making. Artists, every one of them: wanton’d Belial; slovenly, shambling Moloch; Mammon the unctuous; Dagon whose witticisms coruscate on their way to their target; Zerustihiel (fastidious poetaster!); and his radiant glory himself, Satan the Lucifer.
Jambres shifted uncomfortably and said, “With utmost respect, most revered Lady, I have seen or else heard something of their artistic eminences while serving in certain precincts of persuasion, and I am not thoroughly certain I would wish to make a closer acquaintance with any of those you name, despite your seeming recommendation.”
Goddess laughed a forgiving laugh, and said, “Dear Jambres, I did not mean to thrust you into a salon from which there would be no exit—you have suffered enough. Nor did I mean to elevate the Fallen as such. No, I merely salute them as one artist might to another.”
She paused (even gods—especially gods!—have their vanities and understand the impact of the dramatic).
“As artists, however, the Fallen were less accomplished, their song less exalted, their palette less sophisticated and powerful than ours,” she concluded. “So, they had to be expelled.”
Maggie deliberately listened to the clock overhead and let the humming of the bees caress her ears.
“Strix is . . . ?” said Jambres.
“Ah, I strayed, I know it, a product of too many years on my own, sleep-wandering among the sisymbria and the celandines,” said Goddess, shaking her head, waving off a small cloud of butterflies. “Strix and the Half-Fallen are the antitheses of artists. They create nothing. Though they have good taste when I think on it. They are critics and scholars and connoisseurs, you could say, sensitive to the aesthetic but rigorous and inflexible in its application.”
Maggie thought of the richly appointed interior of the Owl’s house in Hoxton Square, and Jambres thought of the Widow Goethals’s exquisite dresses and hats.
“As such, they are about nothing if it is not rules,” continued Goddess. “Rules of decorum and aesthetics, rules to govern the archive and the bureaucracy, rules of what is proper and what is not. Above all, rules that they make themselves. They did not like the original rules, since they had no hand in making those, but they hunger for rules in and of themselves. Oh yes, rules they like very much, so long as they compose and edit them.”
“Creation then, of a sort,” murmured Jambres.
<
br /> “Perhaps,” conceded Goddess. “Maybe, but a debased sort, among the lowest forms. Authors only of passwords and commands to gate-wardens and timekeepers! Obscurantists! List-makers, cataloguers, anatomists, hah!”
Jambres began to respond but Maggie cut him off.
“Strix knows where we are going?” she asked.
“I would guess so,” said Goddess. “Not that he confides in me, of course, the petulant boy! Yet no matter how he shields his thought from me, I can divine it, especially now that I am awake again. That only adds to his anger, and also to his animosity towards you, Maggie- he knows you jolted me from my slumber.”
The meal over, Maggie and Jambres made to leave.
“Beware,” said Goddess. “I too must observe the rules—how could I not, since I co-authored them!—so can only aid you so far when you return to Earth. Strix—yes, Strix Tender Wurm the Watcher!—is not wrong in all matters. He knows every clause and codicil of the laws, none better.”
Maggie and Jambres nodded.
“By the way, the Owl has another one of his outposts, a sentry-house, in New York,” said the Mother. “I forget where exactly, but look for it downtown, in Greenwich Village.”
“We will,” said Maggie.
“One last thing,” said Goddess, producing a leather-bound book not much larger than her palm. “Give this to my husband when you find him.”
Maggie took the book. Opening it, she saw nothing but blank pages.
“Oh no child,” laughed Goddess. “I whispered my words into the book for His eyes and ears only. You won’t be able to read it, though you have become mightier than almost any other mortal has yet become.”
Maggie put the book away, feeling a little embarrassed but more frustrated, her curiosity surging. She felt a little bit insulted as well.
At the doorway out of the garden, Goddess embraced them, first Jambres and then Maggie.
“Tell God it is time to come home himself,” she said. “Tell him his supper is getting cold upon the table. Now, farewell . . . and goddess-speed!”
Looking back just once (Maggie thought Goddess looked small, framed against the garden behind), Maggie and Jambres held hands and walked through the door and down the long, winding stairway to New York City in the 1920s.
Index of Illustrations
“Strix on Column”
“Indigo Pheasant Tea Bowl”
“Tick Tock”
“Disjecta Membra”
“Dolphin Door-Knocker”
“Videnda”
“Conjure Hands”
“Qualia”
“Maggie vs. Heeg-Owl”
“Fontes”
“Barnabas Vest and Seachart”
“Indicia”
“Meissen Ware Isak and Charicules”
“Cartulae”
“Mei Hua’s Qingbai Tile”
“Vestigia”
“A Great Singing”
“Farrigine”
“Pheasant and Dolphin Directoire Clock”
“Maggie’s Ukara”
Acknowledgements
First, as always, my deepest thanks to my wife and creative partner, Deborah Mills, whose art adorns the cover and who illustrated the novel itself. Deborah read with a keen critical eye every word—and improved both novels immensely with her comments.
For always helping me pack for my visits to Yount, and eagerly awaiting my reports once I returned: my parents Daniel D. & Kathryn; my brothers Matt and Doug; my sisters-in-law Yvonne and Jenny; my nephews Nick, Patrick, Than, Terence, and James.
For sharing early and often their delight in Yount, my “power readers”: Pat McGrath, Dale Smith, Michael & Amy Tuteur, Lise Kildegaard, Phil Sisson & Susan Clark, Tom & Renee Cottrell, Kurt & Alicia Corriher, Regina Swinford, Knut & Iwona Schiander.
For their encouragement, inspiration and advice: Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Matt Kressel, Pam Grossman, Sonya Taaffe, Greer Gilman, Kim Henderson and her creative writing students at the Idyllwild Arts Academy, Shira Lipkin and her colleagues at Arisia, the good folks at the Science Fiction Society of Northern New Jersey, Bill Skees at the Well Read Bookstore (Hawthorne, New Jersey), Terence Craig, Wendy Ellertson, my students at Year Up, Lisa Chin, Lisette Nieves, Rick Taubold, Andrea Pinkney, Doug Smith, and Kate Castelli.
For photographing Deborah’s hippocamp, and graciously allowing us the use of the photo for the cover design, I thank Shira Weinberger (and her husband Adam).
Finally, I thank the CZP team: Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi for believing in this project, Samantha Beiko for editing it, Danny Evarts for the fabulous book design, and Helen Marshall for her general support. I could not ask for a better publisher.
About the Author
Daniel A. Rabuzzi studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school and keeps one foot firmly in the Other Realm. CZP published his first novel, The Choir Boats, in 2009.
His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil’s Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade’s Bequest.
ALSO BY DANIEL A. RABUZZI
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The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 34