by James Comins
Chapter Six
A Secret
or, You Can Be Our Preacher
Sliding horizontally across the sky, past the reach of the cloud, past the torn-away land to the snowy expanse of glacial ice and snow, the household’s empress flew. After a crunched, painful landing, the empress ran its momentum away and slowed to a stop on the cotton-covered field.
“Move!” barked Brugda from the back. “Child, make your pet move!”
Binnan Darnan caught Lenna’s eye. Their eyebrows were both lowered in frowns. Holding Lenna’s gaze, Binnan Darnan decided something. “This empress has done enough. Surely it has broken something in the fall. You’ve told it what to do and what to do, and it did everything you asked. Now it’s injured its foot. Would you have survived that far a fall, Brugda?”
The old woman glared. “My legs hurt. Almost died. I want to sleep.” Brugda crossed her arms.
“If we aren’t in danger ...” Kaldi began.
“Of course we’re in danger, we’re always in danger. Nothing’s stopping that cloud from following us. Nothing’s keeping us safe except Mother Joukka Pelata and she’s just given up all her magic to create the world around us. We have to travel to another country. We haven’t even a place to sleep tonight and now our only way to get from this glacier to an airport wants to stop in the face of unknown death and danger the size of mountains because it’s hurt its foot. I’m angry and I have nothing in my hands that I can do. All right, Kaldi?”
He lowered his eyes, let out a breath. “We passed a village made of silver on the way here, Binnan Darnan. If the empress will walk us there, we’ll repair it and rest.”
The empress traveled slowly, drearily, creaking forward with a limp. Lenna cried to herself against the low wooden railing. Binnan Darnan defiantly leaned over the front of the wooden portico, whispering comforts to the red and blue machine.
They reached the edge of the mercury forest. The color-reflecting boughs were a mess of upside-down icicles. The flowing branches bent away from the troubled, crystal-eyed face of the empress as it passed. At last they came into sight of the village. Crinkled gingerbread eaves made of tarnished silver appeared through the pointed branches, a crowd of bright buildings shining in the late afternoon. People wearing buckles and ruffles and gowns and patterned tunics walked the narrow corridors of tamped-down snow and black sand that passed for streets. Beside the metal forest and past the village limits was a breathless expanse of ice and black sand, a dreamlike field studded with white-tufted brown hills rising like primal tombs from under the scrinchy layers of dry cottonballs that had fallen in the night. The cotton had disappeared all along the southern faces where the risen crystal glass sun shone. Beyond the wide hilly field rose a massive line of vertical black hexagonal pillars standing like a mountain range.
The empress crept out of the forest into the field and sat amid the silk hills, arching its segmented back as if eager to free itself of its burden. The household filed down the steps, landing shin-deep in chilly cottonballs.
Exhausted, Kaldi wiped a hill clean of snow and lay on the brown embroidered grass, scrubbing his eyes under his octagonal spectacles with a knuckle. Binnan Darnan walked around the empress and began gently lifting each metal footplate.
“Ahh, here’s one,” she muttered. “The carriage bolt has bent. Pity you don’t have a toolkit. They must’ve taken that from you when they stole your springs, oh you poor empress. Only rest and we’ll find you new bolts.”
Brugda and Aitta went to find an inn. Talvi took Binnan Darnan’s order to the town mechanist.
Lenna paced and sulked. It still hurt, being hit. It made her feel worthless and bad and small and very very angry. None of the new memories of life in the big house, none of these magical Changes had changed Brugda. She was a hitter, and Lenna was done with that part of her life. Glimpses of spankings and switchings she had received as a servant girl rose up inside of her. She tried to lay a hand on the mercury trees, wanted to touch them, to feel the realness of the polished metal, to run a finger around her reflection on the branches, but the tree bent away from her as she reached out to it, recoiled, as if she wasn’t wanted. She caught some cold cottonballs that fell as the narrow tree limbs moved, squeaked them and dropped them gently on the cottondrifts below.
They were sisters, weren’t they, she and Brugda? Was this what it felt like to be sisters?
Sisters without blood or love or kindness. Momma had picked two strangers from the whole whole world, two very different people, and had made them both her daughters. She needed their eyes, she said. Lenna wondered whether she and Brugda would grow up to be like Momma Joukka Pelata, turn into quiet pale people, or whether they were completely different from her and completely different from each other and always would be. She wanted to be nothing like Brugda, wanted to push her away, wanted to keep all of Brugda’s badness and meanness out of her life.
Frowning as she paced through the metal forest, Lenna promised herself that she would never say any of the magic spells Brugda had taught her. Promised. It felt dirty and rotten that magic was something Brugda touched, something the old woman knew about. Magic ought to be special, ought to be wonderful, but if Brugda could do magic then it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Fine, she thought. So she was the only other person in the world who Momma Joukka Pelata could find who could see magic. Okay. Maybe that was true, but it wasn’t good enough. Not anymore.
Brugda’s magic killed animals, hurt trees, and when all that hurting wasn’t good enough, when all her magic couldn’t fix things, Brugda hurt Lenna instead. The old woman was ashamed that she was no good at magic. Ha. That was surely it.
A hand landed on her shoulder. It cut into her feelings, jolting her, making her set her thoughts aside unfinished.
“Mistress?” Binnan Darnan said.
“She’s back?” mumbled Lenna.
“Huh?” The tiny girl took Lenna’s hand in both of her own. “Would you speak to me, Mistress?”
What? She was calling her Mistress? Something garbagy caught itself in Lenna’s belly, a twisting feeling. “Don’t call me this. Binnan Darnan, promise you won’t ever call me this again.”
The hands dropped. “Sorry.” Binnan Darnan waited. Lenna scowled at her. “Fine! I’ll never call you anything ever again,” she shouted, running back to the empress, sulking in silence.
Talvi had left. Kaldi slept. Aitta and Brugda were away. Lenna was alone.
Where would she run away to? There was nothing in the whole world she wanted except a place away from here. She’d rather live in a nutshell. The more she talked about it with herself, the worse she felt. Brugda was someone she wanted nothing to do with, not ever again.
She wandered out of the trees and back across the icy field to the mound of grassy earth where Kaldi lay snoring. And past him, out to the pointed hills that led toward the vast black Icelandic plain. She wandered past mound after mound till she came to the last one, furthest from the village, her boots squeaking on the veneer of cotton balls covering last year’s brown silk grass. A little wooden door was set in the hill facing the hexagonal basalt columns, the place furthest away from everything. Like the empress, its paint was flaking off the wood. The door was brown, trimmed in white, with a cross above. She realized with a start that the wood wasn’t the polished wood of crystal-land. Something hidden inside had protected this little hillside church from the Change. There was something old in here, something strange, waiting, a secret crouching in the darkness. She could feel it. She could almost smell it, a magical smell like toasted bread and clouds.
Why resist?
The door didn’t creak as she opened it, although it looked worn and didn’t quite align. She slipped in through a foot of shadow onto a stuttered cobblestone floor. When she drew the door closed behind her, the darkness was nearly complete.
Her first impulse was to hide from Brugda, to hide from everybody, to wait on the wall behind the door and listen until she was sure
everyone had forgotten about her.
No.
She was brave.
The floor was big cobblestones, bulging, almost round and spaced wide. Balancing balancing in her green boots, she went stone-by-stone, just like she had outside Binnan Darnan’s dragon tower. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she found light whispering around the edge of the door frame, a skinny bright rectangle in the dark. A few triangles of light caught the floating dust, the tiny foxfire of the church. Outlines of unadorned pews, simple carved planks of wood, revealed themselves. A partition separated the pulpit of the church from the pews. All was the familiar blue and gold paint and bare wood of Iceland. A plank in front was the altar.
Step, step, silence. Every cobblestone was alike, round and dusty. The Change in the world hadn’t even polished them.
Vacant, barely aware, Lenna stood behind the altar. This was where a preacher had stood, long and long ago. He had talked to the people of the town, recited to them, given out stories. Maybe someone still did. This was what preachers do. But here was an empty little hall.
Lenna spread her arms above her head the same way Joukka Pelata had done in the big house. She imagined a townful of people staring at her. For a tender moment, she felt dozens of pairs of eyes, but it didn’t last.
Magic was here. She could feel it, waiting.
She giggled and pointed with two hands to a blocky, carved candleholder on the wall.
“I command you to light up the room,” she whispered.
A flame appeared, as silent as if it had always flickered there, casting little carven-shaped shadows. A spark, just a dot of orange, jumped improbably to the matching candleholder on the other side of the room. A second flame mirrored the first.
Lenna lit up, too, with a secret smile on her face. Here was something only she could do. No one taught her this. She hurt nothing, no pigs, no trees. The candles lit anyways.
“I’m a preacher,” she whispered to the candles.
From the two opposing flames jumped two opposing figures.
One frowned. One smiled.
They were both young men dressed in sweeping, asymmetric gray robes.
One swept left. One swept right.
Like the flames, the two men were a little brighter than the room around them.
The smiling man crossed his arms. Quietly he spoke, and his voice shook Lenna’s guts and fluttered her head, as if she were only a dream he was having.
“My name is Ljos,” the smiling figure giggled. “This is Indaell, my twin. You can be our preacher.”
The frowning figure’s face was prematurely lined, with furrows in his brow and a Roman nose. He turned his stony countenance to his brother. It seemed to take hours, as if the force of his gaze could pull the world to a stop.
“Child,” spoke the serious, frowning figure, his voice echoing and pushing, resonating between Lenna’s eyes. “Child. You must never listen to my brother. He loves nothing. And he lies.”
The words “What does he lie about?” swam out of Lenna’s mouth like colors in a dream.
“He is not Ljos,” the morose figure intoned. “I am Ljos of light. This is Indaell, my twin. You will preach for only me.”
Across the room the smiling man bent sideways, grinning like a jack-in-the-box. “Bad brother. Naughty brother. Such lies he tells,” the man called Indaell said.
Rapidly both brothers drew flaming swords from their sides. Lenna didn’t remember seeing sheaths. The swords collided between them with a painful clang and disappeared. A shower of sparks lay on the faintly illuminated floor, just for a moment, then faded.
“Who are you?” tipped out of Lenna’s lips.
“Angels,” spoke the frowning figure solemnly. “I am angel of light. We may teach you. I will teach you how to fear my master and to hate liars.”
“I will teach you how to love my master,” said the grinning angel. “I will teach you a trick to know a liar. I will teach you a song to turn a flower into butterflies. You need only ask.”
“I’d like to know a liar,” Lenna said crisply to grinning Indaell.
His smile widened thinly, stretching eerily up to his ears. “Will you let me look out of your eye when I choose?” he whispered. Beside him, Ljos’ mouth crackled with the new Changed fire, triangles held like orange snakes behind his teeth.
It was almost impossible to think in the presence of the angels. It felt as if the weight of sick sleep were hanging down inside her head. Strange, twisted emotions bubbled up inside of her.
“I will let you look out of my sister’s eye,” she said.
As the two figures faded back into the candles, she caught a last glimpse of the smiling man whom she had made a promise with. He was a liar.