by Paul Park
"Come," said the little woman, beckoning.
She brought Miranda to the house where there was a larger lantern hanging inside the door. And there Miranda got a better look at her, a tiny woman with long arms and a hunched back—she would have seemed deformed except to the others around the tomb. She wore a kerchief on her head, and a homespun dress that covered her completely. But from the hair that grew on her neck and hands, Miranda guessed her entire body was hairy. Only her face was not, and perhaps she had shaved her cheeks, because they seemed scratched and raw. She had a yellow complexion, and her mouth and jaw bulged out. There were ridges of bone around her eyes. Her nose was flat and very small.
Miranda was happy to see her and didn't understand why. Though maybe it was because the woman seemed so glad herself—her lipless mouth smiled widely, revealing big teeth. "The white tyger," she murmured, and Miranda could hear the others whispering the same phrase in the dark. "The white tyger, the white tyger."
Miranda tended to distrust that kind of talk. But there was something charming about it on that quiet night with the warmth of summer in the air. "Ludu," she said over her shoulder. "Come. It's all right." But the girl stayed in the shadows.
Miranda put her hands out and allowed the monkey-faced woman to clasp hold of her thumbs and draw her to the threshold of the house. It was comfortable inside, Miranda saw.
The woman's voice was small and soft. "This was where your aunt lived in the last months of her life. She died in this room."
"Lovely," Miranda whispered.
But the woman didn't hear the sarcasm in her voice, and Miranda hadn't wanted her to hear. There was something in the soft warm air that was making her a little giddy. "Mother Egypt was always kind to us, so you'll be kind. She told us to wait and so we waited. When you wash in this water, all Roumania will be clean."
Even allowing for the magic and enchantment of the night, this was too much. Miranda guessed it was only a matter of time before her nemesis and namesake would be mentioned—"You'll be kind to us," the little woman repeated. "Miranda Brancoveanu gave us this forest as our own. She came here when she marched on Bucharest. That night the world was changing."
"Well, what do you know?" Miranda murmured. She was in a mood where none of these serious things seemed serious. She stepped into the room, which was nevertheless extremely dirty. There were dirty sheets over all the furniture. But there was something familiar about the room, and she was trying to figure out what it was when the woman started to talk again.
"There is a poem about the statue Mother Egypt brought from Prague. This was when you were a child. She told us to touch nothing."
"What statue?"
"In the cave."
Miranda had been walking through the room while the woman spoke. She realized she'd been here before, but when? What had her aunt said? The last memory she'd been permitted to retain when she'd been sent to Massachusetts was Mogosoaia station. It was the place where her aunt had pressed the book into her hand.
Miranda stood in the doorway of the inner room. To her left was a cabinet against the wall, an armoire with the doors pulled open, and she imagined she might find the lamb's wool cap and fox-fur stole that she'd last seen in the salt cave. Against the far wall was her aunt's big bed, and on the wall a rough-hewn crucifix, which she found herself examining as she listened to the poem. It took her a few words to realize that the woman had switched languages from Roumanian to heavily accented English:
Her eyes are shut,
Her breast is cold.
Her limbs are made,
Of solid gold.
Salamagundi.
There is a lock,
There is a key.
Now you recite this
Back to me.
Salamagundi.
Miranda was pleased by the badness of the poem, which suggested another facet to her aunt's character. She laughed—"Tell me again." Because there was something else. The second time around, she realized she had a picture of someone in her mind as she was listening. A woman stood naked, eyes shut, bending over from the waist, her left hand stretched behind her and to the side as if warding something away.
No, not a woman—a statue of a woman. Was it possible she had seen a statue like that, perhaps at the Scythian gold exhibition in the Smithsonian, where there had been a pair of tiger earrings like her tyger beads? No, but she'd imagined it before. She'd pictured it in her mind as she was doing now, and she was standing on the streets of New York City looking at a sign on a house in Greenwich Village, asking her father the meaning of a word that was printed there.
The woman continued in her droning singsong:
If you solve
The mystery
Of these chopped meats,
This cup of tea,
Then bring the answer
Back to me.
Salamagundi!
Once Miranda had asked her father what the word meant, and he'd told her out of his store of useless knowledge. It was a salad of chopped meat and olives, oil and anchovies, and he'd repeated the word, and she'd imagined in her mind's eye the statue of Aphrodite in the cave, her hand stretched back, her fingers spread. Just for a moment, and it had gone away, but she remembered now. "It's the kind of thing people eat in Dickens novels," Stanley had said.
Salamagundi. What was the phrase in her aunt's letter—she would find a key? A key to what? But now it was as if the word really was a long, strange key for a little lock, and all she had to do was hear it for her mind's eye to flutter open a bit more, and she remembered her aunt bringing her into this room— she didn't live here then. She lived in another cottage, but she'd brought Miranda here, and everything was different.
There was no armoire and no bed. But one thing—yes, the crucifix. Two rough pieces of wood with the bark still on them; Miranda stepped across the room and pulled it from the wall. She pressed her thumb into the little groove her aunt had shown her, and twisted her thumbnail the way her aunt had shown her, and slipped out the whittled plug the way her aunt had shown her, and shook the key out into her hand—a long, flat strip of gold with complicated ridges on the upper side.
Her aunt had planted the long word as a mnemonic key, and it had given her the actual key. Fingers trembling, she held up the golden strip. Paying no more attention to the little woman or her awful poem, she rushed through the house again and out into the air. Nor did she look for Ludu, but turned immediately to the cliff face. She stepped into the mouth of the cave, where she smelled a hot sulphurous smell.
The tunnel was lit with two flickering oil lamps set in niches in the rock. Ahead there was a brighter light that shone upon the troubled surface of the pool. And on a rock beside the water on the far side of the cave stood Venus Aphrodite. Even in this world it was ridiculous to think the statue represented Mary Magdalene—though a breastplate, a shield, and a helmet all were gathered at her feet. Mary Magdalene had never been so embarrassingly naked in her life. The goddess stretched out her golden arm. She looked terrified and her eyes were shut.
At first Miranda thought she'd have to step into the pool to reach her, but she didn't want to touch the water. The pool was in a raised rock basin and the statue was on the far side. And there was a way of climbing into the niche that held her. Miranda climbed up the rough steps. And she could see the keyhole in the helmet's empty eye, and she slipped the gold rod into it.
"Ludu!" she cried. "Ludu!" But she was alone. None of the strange women had followed her.
The rod slid into the grooves of the lock, but nothing happened. Hot and out of breath, Miranda lay on the rough steps. Looking around, she could see she was in a circular chamber cut from the living rock. And though the brimming water was different, and the smell was different, and the grain and color of the stone was different, still she recalled with a kind of loathing the salt cave at Insula Calia. She recalled especially the greasy, knotted feeling in her stomach and the taste of salt in her throat.
There was a whirring so
und and the statue started to move. There was a music box hidden in the base. It played a plinky little tune.
The notes reverberated in the vault and on the surface of the pool. Miranda put her head down on the stones, trying to listen, trying to remember—a Gypsy melody, she thought. She wished Ludu were here.
Now she could see the clockwork joints, so cunningly made that they'd seemed solid. Aphrodite was moving now, making a little, jerky dance in rhythm to the music. Her golden eyelids fluttered open, revealing eyes that had been crafted to look human, with a white circle around a gold iris, especially as the cave filled with a new roaring and a new wind, and the lamps glimmered out. Then there was darkness except for the dancing golden statue, which seemed to shine. Light flickered around her like the beads of light around a disco ball, an impression furthered by the music, louder now in the sudden dark. Miranda had her cheek pressed into the rough stone, and when she raised her head she saw the cave had changed.
Light seemed to come not from the statue but from the pool, as if a cold blue lamp were burning underneath the water. And the dimensions of the place were different. Before, chunks of many-colored, pitted rock had swelled and jutted from the roof and walls, but now all that was smoothed away. The texture of the stone had changed. Looking up, Miranda could see now that the entire ceiling above her was covered with painted figures. And they bore no similarity to the crude, daubed images that had decorated the cave along the Hoosick River in the snow. Those were new and these were ancient, cave paintings as beautiful and rich as those in Lasceaux or Altamira, which she'd seen reproduced in National Geographic articles and in textbooks. There were the same burnt colors. There was the same use of contours in the rock to define flesh and muscle. There was the same riot of superimposed images, suggesting they'd been applied at different times over the course of centuries, perhaps millennia. There were no human figures but only animals: horses, bison, cattle, elephants, and rhinoceroses, all pressing against each other in a crowd, except for one place in the vault of the roof where an animal sat on its haunches, a white tyger, without a doubt. And while everything else was chaos and stumbling movement, the tyger itself was quiet, surrounded by a circle of blank space on which a circle of animals pressed in vain. It sat staring down in the center of the vault, its white coat striped with silver, its tail curled around its feet. Its mouth was closed, its massive paws relaxed. There were no teeth or claws. What had Ludu said—bunny-sized! It was the biggest animal there.
The music was gone now but the statue still moved, still scattered beads of light that spread over the vault. Below, the surface of the pool glowed. No heat came from it, no sulphur smell, and the surface of the water was smooth and still. But Miranda could see movement in its depth.
This was the true, transforming water of Aphrodite. Like Insula Calia, this place was a point of contact between two worlds. If Miranda washed in this water, she would step out of the grotto's mouth and find the world had changed.
This had been her aunt's plan all along. Nicola Ceausescu was a conjurer, the Elector of Ratisbon was a conjurer. If she was going to struggle with them to make something better out of the world, then guns and horses would not be her weapons—not her father's pistol and not broken-down old soldiers like Captain Dysart. Nor could she win by taking on the German army. But she would fight with her own weapons in the hidden world.
And it was true—she did have weapons there. Insula Calia had proved that—not just her aunt's weapons, but her own. It was she who had destroyed the vampire, a chain of events that she remembered now.
After her book had been destroyed and she had come into this world, and after she'd been dragged through time into Roumania, and even after Insula Calia she had tried to convince herself that all those magical, unexplainable events were aberrations. It was how she'd managed to stumble forward—first things first. Step by step. The big picture was for morons, as her adoptive father had once said.
It was a strategy that had kept her safe and brought her to this place. Every morning she had tried to wake up fresh as if from a dream. The morning after she had seen her aunt in Insula Calia, she had tried to look forward and not back.
Now she imagined she had come to the end of that kind of journey. She was looking at the big picture now, that was for sure, moron or not. If sometimes on the way she had resisted and refused, it was because it was too threatening to find another reason for the world, another principle of experience that was not the same as Stanley's careful strategy. In this cave, as in the salt cave, was the access to that principle.
Stiff and unsteady, she climbed from her perch next to the statue. She found she was peering over the edge of the stone basin into water that seemed impossibly deep.
Fascinated, frightened, she reached out her hand. Every action now was irreversible. Behind her were the tunnel and the grotto's mouth leading out into the comfortable darkness.
And because it is hard not to look back, she paused now to reconsider. Were these her own weapons after all, and her own choices? Certainly during the moments she had already spent in this new world, when she remembered them later, she had not felt her choices were her own. At Insula Calia, fighting with the vampire and his men, she had not felt she could stop or go the other way. But it was as if some animal nature was driving her forward, something she couldn't quite control.
And maybe instead of learning to control it, she had confused this sensation with another—one that made more sense to resent. For at these uncontrolled moments, in another way she had felt just like this clockwork mannequin, moving to a tune she had not written and scarcely recognized, a tune her aunt had sung over her cradle, or else paid a servant to sing, maybe, years before.
Now she examined her own feelings. For a long time it had been second nature to resist. But she'd always come to the brink eventually, and here she was.
Oh, but this seemed different and irrevocable. She could drown in this pool and never find herself again. Maybe it was all right to take a step away and reassure herself. There was no urgency tonight. And maybe this was not even the right moment. She knew the cave was here. She knew how the key worked. That was the important thing. These decisions could never be made lightly.
And so she turned away, stepped back toward the cave's mouth, where there were people waiting under torchlight—familiar faces, though the small, misshapen women were all gone. But Captain Dysart was there, beckoning her into the night.
As always there was something ridiculous about him, his white hair and white moustache, though just in the time she'd known him he'd exchanged his ragged shirt for fashionable, expensive clothes. Her money had helped him with that—the light shone on his patent-leather boots. She didn't look him in the face, didn't look into his single eye, because she knew he was angry. "What, you must not go away like this. We have been searching and searching. You must understand it is so dangerous—"
He drew her out into the clearing by the grave. Miranda interrupted him. "Where are the women that were here? Where is Ludu Rat-tooth? Did you see her on the way?"
"Pah, that Gypsy! No, there is someone else I think that you must meet."
Maybe a dozen men were in the clearing. They were dressed in policemen's uniforms. The torches shone on silver buttons and high helmets. Their leader stood with his hands behind his back. He was a small man in black street clothes. He didn't smile or acknowledge her. His gray hair was combed back from his forehead, and his moustache was luxuriant and black.
Confused, Miranda looked for Ludu Rat-tooth. Who were these men? She could feel the expression on her face begin to change. And when they saw her new expression they came forward, pretense abandoned.
She forced herself to smile. Smiling, she ducked away from Ernest Dysart. Arm outstretched, fingers splayed, she ran back into the tunnel with the men behind her, knowing if the golden mannequin had come to the end of her dance, then she was trapped. If the cave had changed back, she was trapped.
But there above her was the enormou
s painted tyger in the center of the vault, and there was the statue turning on its base—arm outstretched, fingers splayed—and there was the basin of blue water that Venus Aphrodite had touched, and Mary Magdalene had touched, and Miranda Brancoveanu had touched during the siege of Bucharest the night before she led her raid on Vulcan's barbican. Good enough for them, good enough for her—Miranda put her hands into the pool and slopped the water on her arms and neck and face, and for good measure drank some.
The water in the pool was bitter, acrid, sulphurous, disgusting. And it had no immediate effect. She could hear the racket the police made in the tunnel, the echo of their voices. So maybe she was mistaken after all. "Help," she thought, "Help me," she thought, and this time she meant it.
A Derailment
AT FIRST LIGHT THE Hephaestion came steaming to the town of Chiselet on the edge of the marsh, sixty kilometers southeast of Bucharest. Andromeda woke in the baggage car at the front of the train. She had in her belly a dissatisfied feeling, a queasiness that had nothing to do with the cramped, damp space, the smell of tar and oil and hot metal from the square hole in the floor. For several minutes she lay curled up on her clothes. Nor did she lift her heavy head from off her paws.
But with new eyes and the gray light from the hole, she could see details of the compartment hidden from her the night before. With her new ears she heard the same noises in a different way, softer, muted, and yet more complete. She lay listening to the scrape of the metal wheels, the shuddering rhythm of the ties, and yet she wasn't bothered and deafened by them as before. It was as if her hearing was less sensitive but more acute, and in the space between the larger noises she could now perceive a range of others, the drip of the melting ice, the scurrying of some rodent, and Pieter de Graz's breath as he swayed above her, his hand in the leather strap.