Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  “Looking at these doesn’t mean I’m going to try my hand.” His eagerness in leafing through the papers belied his words. There was a brightness in his eyes that I had not seen for some time.

  “So you don’t want to know?”

  “Perhaps, but more importantly, I didn’t think such knowledge could ever be within reach.”

  “You don’t only ever want things you could have.”

  Catherine Helstone’s brother laughed at my teasing, and I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze before assisting him in the navigation of the pages, explaining the less intelligible of my notes.

  “Why was he translating the Bible into this language?” he said, barely looking up from the paper. “This… this Enochian?”

  “There is no greater missionary than the mother tongue. Others have slaved for years, decades sometimes, to translate the Bible into heathen languages. I imagine this is the same.”

  “You think Enochian is Arcadian?”

  “Yes, but also…” I swallowed, suddenly feeling silly. Nervously, I tucked a stray curl from my face. “It’s the tongue of angels. It’s the language the world spoke before the fall of Babel.”

  “So it claims.”

  “There could be truth to it. There could be truth on these pages if only we could read them.”

  “I’m sure they could claim all sorts of things without them being true. Just because something is written down…” Though his words were sceptical, I could tell by the tilt of his head and eagerness in his eyes that Catherine Helstone’s brother was intrigued.

  “At the ball, I spoke with some fae who… well, they didn’t call it anything. They said that their Unbegotten Father and his Misbegotten Son claim it as their own, but it doesn’t only belong to them.”

  “Unbegotten father?” He gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “They taunt you with secrets they don’t know.”

  “But they are titles that ring true, in a way. And those aren’t just toying with me. The glyphs were carved into their skin.” I ran a hand down my own arms, remembering those scars that were engraved upon the skin of the pair of siblings. “It has to mean something to them if they wear it like that. It wasn’t written there for my eyes. If anyone, it was for the Pale Queen to read.”

  “Do you know what it said?”

  “No.”

  “And it’s why you want to read it.”

  “Don’t you?” I said. “And it might even give an idea as to what happened to Roche and how he died. The Salamander said he was trying to learn something, to prove something that should not be proven. Aren’t you curious at all? He died. He has a widow in England to whom we owe this story.” My anxious hands smoothed the pages of my notes and I softened my words to a plea. “It’s not like you’ve anything to do between now and the Pale Queen’s answer. We are just waiting for her to let us into her dominion.”

  The corner of his mouth twisted into a smirk before he leaned over in a kiss. I gave a squeak of surprise but I did not resist, melting into his attentions. He was so tangible.

  “There are other things,” he said as he traced a finger down my jawline.

  And indeed, there were.

  In the days that followed, Catherine Helstone’s brother and I observed the decay and death of the wicker whale. Neither of us could truly claim to be explorer or scientist, but we did what we could to make a record of what we saw. It was indeed like writing the newsletters and journals for our tin soldiers. More than once, we wondered at what our little tin Duke of Wellington would make of this place and if he would remain his steadfast, stoic self in the face of it.

  We returned day after day to the whale and saw its water slowly trickle out and its many inhabitants wilt. The translucent roses desiccated and the fishes floundered. Some of them we tried to preserve in glass bowls, but they soon faded and died once outside of the whale.

  Mr Benjamin tutted, confused at our efforts. “Part of the fish, part of the whole. Can’t just take it out.”

  “It’s part of the fish?”

  “Big fish? Whale?” he said. “It got eaten so is part of. Yesterday breakfast is part of you today, is it not?”

  As always, Mr Benjamin would nod happily at his own logic despite our confused expressions. He was less lost than he had been in the immediate aftermath of the hunt, though his questions about the faith had not diminished. He approached it with the same curiosity and simple logic that he did before, even though there were times he seemed almost distracted.

  None of our drawings or our words seemed able to capture what we saw. However hard we tried to pin down and pin out that squirming moment like a moth upon a specimen board, it would prove elusive.

  “You’ll never make a good naturalist,” I said, looking over his shoulder at his work.

  “The least of my sins, I should think.” He grinned back at me. “And I am repentant, which is, as John reminds us, what matters.”

  “But I demand restitution,” I retorted.

  At night, having run out of observations and pictures, we toiled side by side, leafing through the papers on Enochian, trying to piece together enough of it to start reading the words on the whale’s ribs.

  Despite having each other as distractions, we made far more progress than I had in my time alone. Catherine Helstone’s brother had a better grasp of classical languages than I and was far more familiar with the Latin Bible. He rooted out an early error in my existing word lists that explained much of my frustration.

  We worked late into the night, until the moon swam across the sky and our eyes itched from lack of sleep. No longer uncomfortable with each other’s bodies, we lay curled up against each other like the working dogs used to by the fire.

  He looked over at me and with a lazy, contented smile on his lips, he said, “Cathy–”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said, cutting him short. Panic welled up at back of my throat at that name. “I’m not–”

  “Cathy,” he said again, pressing his face against the curve of my neck. I felt his warm breath upon my skin and giddy pleasure spread from those lips; I calmed. “Let the other be Catherine. And you can be Cathy. You will always be my Cathy and you will always be my sister.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that, and he had the decency to look sheepish.

  “And other things, true,” he said. “But either way, you shouldn’t think of yourself as less real. And I do have to call you something.”

  “I’m not real.”

  “You feel real to me.” His fingers tangled into mine; my hand did not melt into his as I feared. We were as solid as each other.

  I shook my head. “Ariel said that she didn’t feel different when she found out.”

  “But you were there, you grew up with me. I remember you.”

  “She also said that she had memories, vivid memories, from before the swap. They make you with memories, somehow.”

  We were both mute as Catherine Helstone’s brother thought. I wanted to pull away, but we were too entangled.

  He held my hand in his, stroking his thumb down the back of my hand. He did not recoil in horror nor flinch at the appeasing kisses I placed on his forehead.

  “So,” he finally began. “Do you think they swapped you later?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But if it’s possible for Ariel to remember her grandmother despite being swapped after the old woman’s death, then it’s possible that… it’s possible that no memory before I set foot on fae soil is real.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “But I can’t trust my own mind.”

  “I know my sister like I know my own mind. I would know if you–”

  “You thought I was an illusion created by the moors to torment you.”

  “That was my own inability to believe you would be here,” he said. The candlelight gave a fire to his welkin eyes, the pinpoints of reflected light barely wavering. “I had imagined you so many times, it was difficult. I knew I had to leave, I wanted you too much, but the moment I was away,
I would begin to plan again that life we could lead together, how I would hide my passion from you. I would tell myself that I would draw strength from being near you and that self-denial would grow easier with time. I wanted to believe in your presence so I might one day become better than my evil wandering thoughts and my own corrupt heart permitted me to be.”

  I listened to him in silence, each word another weight upon my heavy heart. I couldn’t answer him.

  “So, believe me.” His face was ardently kindled, that oft-hidden ferocity had risen to the surface. “I did not doubt you because you are not who I know you to be. I doubted you because of my own weakness. You are the sister I grew up with, the sister I have loved and love now. And that’s all that matters.”

  “It may be enough for you, but it is not enough for me.”

  He said nothing, for what could be said. The truth was, after all, unassailable.

  Instead, he held me very close. I heard his breathing, felt it against my skin, and I lost myself in the comfort that he offered. For a moment, I wanted to tell him that it was enough for me too and hide from him the truth, but remained mute. The brief pretence was enough. I had been an unwitting lie for more than twenty years; I should not allow myself to be a lie again.

  On the seventh day, we woke to a bonfire outside the castle.

  The last of the sea had finally trickled out of its wicker cage, and the Salamander had set what remained alight. Diogenes whined long and terrified, cowering inconsolably at my feet.

  I studied the note left at our bedside, the terse scrawl informing us that the whale cannot be allowed to decay further and that it must be disposed of.

  “She doesn’t so much write as just burn words into paper, doesn’t she?” I observed.

  In the light of that fire, we mourned the loss of that strange world we glimpsed but did not quite understand and further laboured to record its fleeting image onto paper. Even as I tried to write it all down, my memory was hazy and fragile. I noticed discrepancies between the accounts of Catherine Helstone’s brother and myself.

  Still, for all the weight upon my heart, those may have been my happiest days, lost in our work and in each other.

  Chapter 32

  The March of Seasons

  It is said that the Prussians are working on the Labyrinthus Noctis facility near Schwarzwald, a vast underground railway interchange operated by a clockwork mechanism devised by the inestimable Herr Becker of Vienna. It appears that they have taken as a challenge the now commonly accepted axiom that Arcadia is best reached via ship. The open seas provide ample opportunity for the necessary disorientation, for the strange geography of the Faelands is such that it can only be reached by those who are truly lost. It does not matter where one is lost, be it the moors of Yorkshire or the deserts of Mongolia, but true confusion is vital and therein lies the failure of a great many explorers who have attempted to follow in the footsteps of Captain Cook. Many animals, even seemingly unintelligent beasts of burden, have an extraordinarily good sense of direction.

  The Labyrinthus Noctis possesses, it is said, a unique mechanism, the operation of which is made unpredictable by the use of many ball bearings falling down boards lined with pegs. And as such, the degree of lostness can be varied simply by adjusting their distribution.

  There is currently no evidence that Prussian locomotives have been successful in reaching Arcadia.

  Fitzwilliam Tilney, “On Recent Engineering Advancements”,

  Blackwood’s Magazine, December 1846

  Time passed at Gethsemane, and we continued to wait for the Pale Queen’s response. The swing of the pendulum grew shorter, the days darker and the nights brighter. Even at midnight was the sky a hazy grey.

  Catherine Helstone’s brother and I were in the garden as he had again coaxed me out of my room.

  The skies were streaked with clouds, weakening the already tepid sunlight. The forbidding walls of the castle with their discordant anachronisms were muted by long and hazy shadows.

  The promises of a picnic were interrupted when I noticed a stranger in the garden, holding a paintbrush. He was very tall and ungainly, casting a long, spidery shadow as he made his way across the flowerbeds. A cloak of rags and autumn leaves was draped around his shoulders and it trailed in the grass, leaving a streak of brown and broken grass as he moved. He had to stoop low in order to daub his paintbrush onto each of the flowers.

  “Pardon,” said Mr Benjamin, seeing our approach. “But Salamander terrible with plants. She hates trees, you know. And fruit, very long story, not worth telling. So I called old friend.”

  “Old friend?” said Catherine Helstone’s brother.

  “New friend.” Mr Benjamin winced and glanced anxiously over to what the newcomer was doing to his precious flowers. “I didn’t want to wait until the Markets are about, would be too late then. Either way, seasonal work. Needs doing.”

  The newcomer’s hands moved strangely, unnaturally, possessing the sort of wrongness shared only by scuttling spiders and long-legged mayflies. At the smear of the paintbrush, the flowers visibly drooped. The second stroke was far lighter, touching the edges of the petals, adding brown, desiccated edges to them.

  It was then I noticed why his hands were strange: his fingers each had an extra joint to them.

  Seeing one flowerbed complete, Mr Benjamin pottered over with his gardening shears and began systematically deadheading the newly wilted flowers.

  “What are you doing, Mr Benjamin?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.

  “Gardening,” he said, quite cheerfully. “Flowers grow back better this way.”

  “And your companion?”

  “Time passes, flowers fade. Seasonal work. I said.”

  “What?”

  “Making the seasons happen. Am sure he’ll get to the leaves on the trees next.”

  “Doesn’t that just… happen? It gets colder as the days get shorter and the plants just…”

  “No, not here. Not here,” said Mr Benjamin with a sharp shake of his head. His straw hat dropped off at that, and I retrieved it for him. He toothily smiled his thanks before saying, “Your place maybe, but not here. Things don’t just happen. Flowers don’t just fade, plants don’t just grow. We have to make it happen.”

  “Plants don’t do that here?” I said.

  Mr Benjamin tapped his nose with his dirt-encrusted finger as his brows knitted in thought. “It’s like… it’s like the weather. You have to buy in some rain, and get the wind going and…”

  “Weather doesn’t just happen?”

  The gnome chuckled to himself. “You think food just happens too, don’t you?”

  “I thought the Salamander cooked.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course. Exactly. Weather needs to be brewed and plants grown.”

  “And now you are cutting off the flowers.”

  “Gardening,” he said brightly. “Tidy away the dead flowers, keeps plant healthy.”

  “But,” I said, thoroughly confused by now. “Could you not have them not be faded? I mean to say, if the flowers weren’t wilting, then we’d still have them, surely?”

  “No, no, no. Time passes, flowers fade.” He snipped off another of the dead blooms. “Is how things are meant to be.”

  We left the gnome to his work.

  We had spread before us the various papers of Enochian. Our lists of words were growing, but so were the number of contradictions. I had transcribed the Enochian sigils etched into the ribs of the whale, but we seemed no closer to reading it.

  “Maybe it just says whale repeatedly,” I said in frustration, throwing my pencil to the other side of the room.

  “So it doesn’t forget what it is?” Catherine Helstone’s brother said, pausing in his chewing of the pencil.

  “It’s important to label things,” I retorted. “Names have power, don’t you know.”

  “True, especially when you aren’t sure what has swallowed you. It would give great comfort to me if I could read from
its bones the identity of my devourer.” He pressed his knuckles into his eyes. “Would you please pass me–”

  Anticipating his request, I gave him the tally of repeated words and sigils.

  “Thank you.”

  The pendulum sun was receding into the distance and the purple, cloud-bannered sky was framed by the lattice of the windows. Candlelight suffused the room, dancing overlapping shadows over the pages.

  As he worked, I made a study of his face and form, reading in his features the echo of my own. Though it would be rather more true to say that I was a mocking fae parody of him. Whatever craftsman had made me got my eyes about right and the planes of my cheeks, but we differed in nose and chin. I wondered then if the real Catherine Helstone would look as I did, if she would have her brother’s eyes and her mother’s chin.

  How poor a facsimile was I of her?

  The resemblance between Catherine Helstone’s brother and I had brought me great joy in the past. It was our closeness, our history written upon our flesh. He used to say that he would look in the mirror and see my eyes gaze out at him. I wondered now if he would see her eyes instead of mine and jealousy coiled in my gut.

  I touched my hand to his cheek, and he turned his attention from the papers to me. He gave a preening smile, and I wanted to laugh at his vanity.

  For all that we had the books of our faith before us, he stood between me and every impulse of religion, even as he reached out to me with the promise of intercessory grace, he eclipsed such hopes of heaven.

  I had made an idol of him, and for all my excuses that this was but a return to the childish hero worship I had once had for him, this went deeper. When he clasped his hand around mine in prayer, when I knelt before him, I thought not of God, that Lord of Hosts, nor of Jesus, the Redeemer, but of him, simply and eternally.

  Watching Catherine Helstone’s brother work at the translation, I thought again of Champollion and Cleopatra’s name in the cartouche. On a whim, I unearthed the first page I had found with that first line from John and circled each instance of that unique word for God. Then, I did the same for the passage in Latin and English.