Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  It was truly giant, towering above us and over us like a mountain of trembling wicker. I saw the tight weave of the branches, the smear of mud between the gaps.

  I had been more than simply reluctant to leave the room, but Catherine Helstone’s brother remained persistent and ruthless in his methods. Deaf to my protests, he had gathered me into his arms, deposited me onto the floor and proceeded to roll my outdoor stockings onto my feet. Despite my squirming and kicking, he persevered.

  “Thank you,” I muttered, quite embarrassed. The childishness that had gripped me earlier had dissipated, leaving behind a thick residue of shame.

  He smiled, and despite a heroic attempt to keep the smugness at bay, I could see it in the corner of his mouth.

  “I wanted to see this,” I said, making a vague gesture towards the whale’s wicker carcass. “But I don’t think I could have… let myself.”

  “You’ve done this before,” he said. “I remember. You cried less this time, but you were just as stubborn. And it was a lot more–”

  “I was a lot younger then!” I said, bristling. “And you promised not to ever bring it up again.”

  Catherine Helstone’s brother laughed, his blue eyes far brighter than they had been for days. “I was referring to all the times you–”

  I gave him a playful punch on the shoulder to hush him. I did not want to be reminded of how he had pulled me from my nest of blankets following the death of Catherine Helstone’s sister. He had to wrestle clothes onto me to get me to the funeral, enduring my tiny fists as I beat them against him. Shame coloured my cheeks at the memory.

  The sea whale heaved again; it was still breathing.

  It was still alive.

  I took another step closer to it.

  Another breath and the whale thrashed against the castle’s unyielding walls.

  Startled, I stumbled back.

  Ground broke around the whale; clods of dirt were sent flying. It showered towards us in a hail of stones. Catherine Helstone’s brother sheltered me, and I allowed him the closeness. I allowed myself to be comforted.

  Whatever it had done before to swim through earth, it could not seem to do it now. The ground clung to it, each sandy grain meaningless but the sum of it overwhelming. The walls stood firm. Wicker scraped wetly against stone. I heard the snapping of wood, and there was a long, mournful moan before the whale settled down again, seemingly resigning itself to its fate.

  “Is it stuck?” I said.

  “That’s what Benjamin said.”

  I heard the bark of Diogenes. It had run on ahead of us with its curious sniffing and had returned. It was covered in dirt and was impatient for us to catch up.

  “It’s dying,” I said, giving the restless dog an idle pat on the head.

  “It’s beached.”

  With each sighing breath, the wicker that made up the skin of the beast creaked and strained to near snapping. A brown, dirty water seeped from the mud that was caked between the weave of the wicker. It oozed out in tiny rivulets, washing away the clinging dirt.

  Circling it, we found its mouth.

  It was impossibly huge, gasping. The creature seemed to be nothing but mouth. The entire mountainside gaped open into a shadowed maw. Long, white blades stretched from the ceiling of its mouth-cave like a row of stalactites. Tangled vine-like threads dangled between the spaces.

  I thought of that altarpiece in the garden chapel, with its blood-red hellmouth from which Christ pulled the souls of the damned. The gaping maw of this whale brought the horrors of that medieval imagination to life. I thought of the pallid, squirming forms of those souls against the red of hell. I thought of that black beast and its thrashing tongue.

  This was that biblical leviathan.

  What other beast could be more vast than this?

  Yet seeing it and feeling its woven branches tremble beneath my touch, I felt a buoyancy within myself. Diminished though it may be by its imminent demise, it was still full of promise. Tantalisingly, a shadow of old restlessness returned.

  “Wonder what sea whale ambergris is like,” I said.

  “Wonder what real ambergris is like.” He smiled and he placed his hand by mine to feel the breath of the dying whale. His fingers brushed against mine and we laced hands together.

  “I suppose we wouldn’t really know the difference.”

  “I’m told it smells expensive.”

  “Which?”

  “Real ambergris. And that it tastes good in negus.”

  I laughed, letting that lightness unfurl inside me. I could feel his heartbeat through his hand.

  “For all I know,” he added. “Sea whale ambergris could smell like cheap wine.”

  “You on Saturday night, then?”

  “You dare defame my character?”

  As we watched, the whale’s breathing – if it could be termed such – grew slower and slower until it finally stopped altogether.

  Seconds and then minutes ticked by and it remained motionless. It no longer heaved as air rushed towards it and away. There was no thrashing, no shudder, no ripple.

  “We should go inside,” I said. A shudder of anticipation scuttled up my spine, fear adding a pleasing keenness to my senses rather than an unbridled terror.

  We parted the curtain of the white, dangling threads. They curled at the touch of the walking stick, wrapping like maypole ribbons around it. Catherine Helstone’s brother held the lantern to the opening, but it was bright inside the whale.

  Stray threads clung wetly to us as we passed through.

  The ground was damp and sloped downward. I hitched up my skirts.

  The salt in the air was unmistakable. I could feel it at the back of my throat and upon my lips even as I licked them. This was the sea.

  The whale was seemingly hollow inside, with wide wooden ribs spanning over us, holding aloft the wicker ceiling. Before us was stretched a beach-like scene unlike anything I had seen before.

  Though full of strange creatures, they were all quite still. Some lurked in the shadows, many more in the water, and others clung to the ceiling and walls. Perhaps they were as surprised by us as we were by them.

  The weave of the vault-like roof let in pinpoints of light and it was covered in gently glowing lichen, spread like frozen fireworks upon a night sky. It gave a sense of stillness to the space, as though this was indeed a stolen moment, a nonexistent heartbeat between seconds stretched out.

  I was holding my breath.

  “Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice,” I said, half to myself.

  “Jonah?”

  “Yes, though I wasn’t…” I was quoting the oft repeated phrase in Roche’s journal. “It just, sort of, came to mind.”

  “I suppose this is a bit like being fish food.” He pushed his hair from his eyes.

  I tried to sound nonchalant as I said, “It’s a phrase in Roche’s journal. It seemed quite taken with Jonah.”

  “You’ve been reading his journal?”

  I nodded. “I know I shouldn’t have and I was told not to, but…”

  That old weariness had returned, but his smile was not a disappointed one.

  “I remember what you said. That this place isn’t a puzzle, but I needed to know why, to know what happened. And then it suddenly didn’t matter anymore. No knowledge could have saved Ariel from the Pale Queen.”

  “Don’t–” he began.

  I shook my head. “I’m not dwelling on it.” I squeezed shut my eyes, trying to arrange the jumble of my thoughts. “All I meant to say was just that Jonah… the whale mattered to the other person writing in Roche’s journal.”

  “Other person?”

  “There was more than one set of handwriting in it.”

  He made an interested noise, tongue against the roof of his mouth. “What did it say?”

  “It was…” I said. “The writer was obsessed with the idea of the whale as fate, that Jonah tried to escape from the sight of God and the will of God, but he cou
ld not. He thought he could flee from God and he disobeyed the command to preach at Nineveh. You remember, I trust?”

  “Yes…” Catherine Helstone’s brother wandered ahead to the edge of the water. He pointed at the human junk that seemed to be abandoned by the waterline. There were bottles, pipes and a pocket watch.

  “So, he doesn’t go to Nineveh like God wanted and so he ends up in the stomach of a great fish. He becomes desperate after three days and finally prays. And since there is nowhere beyond the sight of God, his prayers are heard and he is saved.”

  “Did Roche not want to come to Arcadia?”

  “He did, very much so. So much so that he didn’t even wait for approval from the Missionary Society. But this wasn’t him writing.” I shrugged. “I think.”

  And then, movement.

  Black legs stretched out of the pocket watch. A crustacean was wearing the timepiece as a shell. Its gait seemed unbalanced as it trailed the chain behind it. Its black claws began the work of rolling some shining gold sludge that veined the ground into a ball.

  “So someone else was trying to avoid being in Arcadia?” Jutting out his bottom lip, he huffed his own hair from his eyes. It was getting rather long.

  “Or that this place was where they ended up because they were avoiding a calling to somewhere else. Or maybe the writer wanted to be heard even here. In the belly of hell.”

  “I always took it to be an allegorical place, Jonah’s whale. A state of fallen disobedience. A state of seemingly irredeemable sin.”

  “Or it’s literally a fish.”

  We both laughed at that.

  The light caught on the shimmering cobwebs that were stretched across the wooden beams of the whale. They seemed curated by translucent crabs that scuttled along the threads, clattering their pincers.

  I pointed Catherine Helstone’s brother to the crabs and wondered at what prey they must be catching. The subject of Roche fell by the wayside as we lost ourselves in the exploration.

  We saw the streaks of white salt that clung to the beams and wondered at how much sea there must have been in here before. We pointed at the desiccated husks of sea plants and marvelled at how strange they seemed.

  We gazed into the water. Transparent roses grew at the bottom of it, each illuminated by a pale red light at its heart. Slowly they bloomed, soft petals opening like a mouth until one of the curious fish nosed into one and it snapped shut.

  White, swallow-like fish soared through the water, flapping their wide wings and dipping their forked tails. Their beaks snapped open and shut as they swam. As they passed the roses, one’s beak opened and then opened some more, its entire head spreading like an umbrella into a ravenous maw. It did not eat the rose, however, as it closed again its mouth and kept swimming.

  Gem-like eyes, without iris or pupil, gleamed up at us from between the wooden slats of the ground. They blinked before vanishing.

  Further away I saw specks of light in the water, suspended within it like a shifting constellation. Something black and wormlike snaked through it, and that patch of water was plunged into darkness as the seeming stars were swallowed.

  “Are those words?” asked Catherine Helstone’s brother.

  My eyes followed his hand and I saw the tracery of lines I had thought to be the grain of the wood upon the ribs. Dark blue and very fine, they spread over its surface. Yet they did not spread as I expected; the lines kept tangling into little knots.

  Looking closer, I saw those knots formed sigils. Though the arc of certain ones were not formed by continuous lines, they were unmistakable. I had copied out those meaningless sigils very many times.

  It was Enochian.

  “Yes,” I said. “Those are words. Sort of.”

  “Can you read it?” He placed a hand on the damp wood. “It’s very squiggly…”

  “It’s Enochian. It’s a language, I suppose. I found it in Roche’s journal.”

  “That book is getting more interesting by the minute.”

  “I did say.”

  A rocky outcrop bloomed with blood-red dew before each droplet blinked and disappeared. The water was teeming with red and silver fish, each flitting through the bone-white coral.

  The serpentine tendrils unravelled from the marrow of the seeming bones, and forked tongues waved through the water to catch one of the darting, teardrop fish.

  A pair of strange, pale fishes with enormous eyes lay gasping on the muddy shore. Fragile fins and tails lay spread, the delicate, frilled beauty of it all seeming clumsy out of water.

  “There must have been more water before,” I said, pointing at the fishes.

  “They’re dying,” he said.

  “Everything here is dying.”

  I passed Catherine Helstone’s brother the lantern and crouched down. Gently, I nudged them into the water. Once inside, their fins and tails spread gloriously. Underwater, their sickly pallor became the most translucent of shimmering whites and became as a nimbus around them.

  “This is… I don’t think we could have imagined this,” I said, smiling at the memory of our childhood inventions. All the lands our explorers stumbled through were simply Yorkshire but more so. We were such simple creatures, though I wondered now if my own lack of imagination was a symptom of unreality. Was Catherine Helstone’s brother not always the leader in our games?

  “Rather morbid to think that we can only see inside here because it is dead,” he said.

  “Only a little,” I said. “Though we should write some of this down. Sketch it in words if not pictures.”

  “It’d be like the memoirs of journeys through Gaaldine and Zamorna we used to draw.”

  “Lands we never thought we’d see,” I said, a touch wistful for our old games. “What did we call their leader again?”

  He answered immediately: “The tallest and the bravest of all the tin soldiers is always, always Wellington.”

  “I remember.”

  He was standing very close to me and all at once I was all too aware of him. I forgot why I was fighting so hard to put aside our attraction, forgot all the reasons I gave myself for why I shouldn’t.

  Each memory seemed to lead me inexorably to this point where I was standing before him, slightly too close and far too afraid. I had not wanted to give name to this passion, not wanted to acknowledge it. I could have gone to my grave not knowing why I felt this ache whenever I saw Catherine Helstone’s brother. I could have passed this life blind of my own longing and ignorant to his.

  I could have.

  “So, Jonah,” he said, a wry smile crossing his lips. “What do you make of being stuck in here?”

  “Am I meant to say I’m regretting resisting the inevitable?” I said with a teasing note to my voice.

  He was simply there, too close, too real and too beautiful.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  And not for the first time nor the last, I kissed Catherine Helstone’s brother.

  Chapter 31

  The Words at the Beginning

  In early life, Jacob Roche seems to have distinguished himself by his profanity; and though in his youth he had been the subject of occasional serious impressions, it was not till he was twenty-one years of age that he fully knew the value and love of the Saviour.

  He departed to the Faelands, commonly called Elphane or Arcadia, in 1839, before even the treaties that would become the foundation of the Empire’s relations with Arcadia. His relationship with the Society was consequently strained for much of his life, often acting just beyond the boundaries of their permission. This haphazard attitude was perhaps a reflection of, or even a return to, his earlier days of profanity.

  He established the mission preposterously known as Gethsemane in late 1840. He returned to England in the spring of 1842 and was soon after married to Elizabeth Clay, more often known as Betha to her family. He returned to Arcadia by winter of the same year with his new bride.

  Jacob Roche worked ceaselessly to bring the good faith to the inhabi
tants of Arcadia and forged valuable connections with their ruling classes. He died on 21st of December 1843 under unknown circumstances.

  A collection of his letters is due to be published next year.

  Matthew Worthington Copleston & Margaret Hale, Memorials of Protestant Missionaries, Giving a List of Their Publications and

  Obituary Notices of the Dead

  We returned to my room excited about all the accounts that we would write of wonders we saw within the wicker whale. It seemed an inconceivably huge task to catalogue everything within the whale alone.

  “Do you think the other whales would be the same inside?” I asked.

  “Why would they not be?” He pulled out his sketchbook and began putting pencil to page, trying to record what he had seen.

  “If they are like islands,” I reasoned, as I folded myself into an armchair. I covetously eyed the blankets and the softness of the bed. “And not all islands are the same. Presumably they would have different fish inside them. If we can call them fish.”

  “But they’re not like islands. They must have been built or made. The writing on the beams, it can’t grow that way… Can it?”

  “It is Arcadia,” I said. “Who knows what’s natural here?”

  “But who would build such a thing?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s no stranger than the other things we’ve seen.”

  His tongue stuck out as he tried to concentrate on the arc of the whale taking shape before him. I was curious enough to haul my exhausted body from my seat and hover behind him.

  He came to draw the arching ribs of the beast and as he tried to mimic the shape of the sigils upon them, he said. “The words, the Enochian, you called it.”

  I nodded.

  “Show me.”

  So I did, pulling out all the pages and the journal and the letters I had been working on. I spread them onto the floor, noting how much more space they took up compared to the first time I did this.

  “Understanding Enochian. It was what Roche did before whatever happened to him happened to him,” I said. “I can’t say they aren’t linked. Solving one may mean solving the other.”