by Paul Park
Miranda stepped away into the wet grass.
“What are you doing?” Ludu whispered. “Come back.”
How Miranda missed Andromeda, and Peter, and Captain Raevsky, too! She’d asked Dysart about him, who’d shrugged. “He was Ceausescu’s man and then the widow’s. Who can blame him?” He’d kissed his bunched fingers. “She’s a beauty.”
Now there was a mist over the moon and the whole sky seemed to glow. Miranda walked through the wet grass at the edge of the wood. She was wearing riding boots, trousers, and a white shirt. Around her neck was the locket with her mother’s portrait. Around her left wrist was the bracelet of Miranda Brancoveanu. Thrust into a pocket under her shirt was her father’s gun. She had lied when she had told her aunt that she’d thrown it away. It’s what she’d meant to do, as part of her had meant to throw away her aunt’s new letter and her aunt’s money.
That would have been a mistake. And the letter had told her she must go to Mogosoaia; here she was. And though the letter had begun with orders and directions, it had not gone on like that.
Now the night was beautiful and soft and there was moisture in her hair. From time to time the mist would blow away, revealing blue-cast stars. “What’s that one?” asked Miranda.
Ludu gave a furtive glance back toward the stable. When she spoke, she whispered, “Oh, miss, that is the part of Mircea’s arrow when he killed the black bull. Over there. It’s hidden in the trees.”
“And this one?”
“That is Jupiter. The god himself. See how he glares at us! King Jesus…”
Miranda liked to listen to her talk. And she liked the idea of comfortable old Jupiter among the unfamiliar constellations. On a night like this sometimes Stanley would point the planets out. “Tell me,” she asked, or tried to ask. “Is the planet Jupiter…?”
But she found her Roumanian, fluent in most subjects, contained no word for planet. The French word had been taught her by Mr. Donati, but it meant nothing to Ludu. So she tried to describe what she meant, but got only confusion. “No, miss, it is the god himself.”
But the girl laughed. As they left the proximity of the stable, she seemed happier and more cheerful, and by this time they had reached the corner of the field. A cart track led under the canopy of the wood. “This is the way to Mother Egypt’s tomb,” she said. “That old man told me. That Sfetcu.”
“Let’s go see.”
“But the captain,” protested the girl, meaning Dysart.
“So? We’ll probably meet him on the way.”
Miranda stepped into the center of the track and turned into the wood. She didn’t pause or look back, and presently she was aware of Ludu Rat-tooth following her. The darkness was intense under the trees. But the ruts were easy and the path was clear.
In time they came to a burned-out cottage. There was a clearing and more light. Miranda stood looking at the collapsed and blackened beams, covered now with vines. “Tell me,” she said. “Have you ever seen a white tyger?”
“Miss, no one has seen one. They are very rare.”
“But they exist?”
“Yes. They live in the mountains in the snow. People hunt them for their skin, but they don’t find them. They are very ferocious, very shy. Once my father’s father met a man in Pietrosul who had a skin he was selling in the market. No one could buy it, he was asking so much.”
“How big was it?”
“Oh, they are small!”
“Like this?” Miranda asked, moving her hands three feet apart.
“Half that. Like this.”
“And striped?”
“Very faint. Silver stripes.”
Miranda laughed, and they started walking again along the track into a wood that turned gradually to pines. The land was rising and there were ridges of white rock.
A cool wind came out of the trees. Above them now the mist had blown away. “Tell me,” Miranda said. “I heard this story—how can I say? That people have an animal. Sometimes you can see the animal come out—”
“When they are dead.” Ludu completed the sentence, then put her hand on Miranda’s sleeve. “You shouldn’t talk about this.”
“Why not?”
“It is against the law! Not everyone can see these animals. Witches and conjurers…”
Miranda considered this. “I don’t understand. You remember Insula Calia. What about all that? What would the law say about that?”
Ludu held onto her arm until she shook her off. Then the girl came close, and Miranda could smell the onion on her breath, see the corner of her rat tooth. “But there’s a difference!” she cried. “King Jesus and Queen Mary Magdalene—they can light the fire in the dark. The rest is the devil’s work.”
Miranda smiled. “Where I grew up there was no magic. People were pretending everywhere you looked. Here it’s the opposite.”
She couldn’t tell if Ludu was offended. She didn’t care. So the white tyger was a little guy, wombat-sized, bunny-sized! She felt inexpressibly relieved. No, but ferocious. More like a ferret or a stoat.
Ahead she saw the glimmer of a light. A new ridge of moonlit rock appeared on her left hand, a pitted, undercut surface that soon rose above their heads. Small, spindly conifers grew from the crest of it, visible now the high trees had given out. There were knee-high gorse bushes, and the path through the middle of it led parallel to the cliff. Then the undergrowth subsided as they came around a buttress in the rock, and they saw the lantern and the house and the cave mouth and the tomb.
The lantern was set into a niche in the rock. It shone upon the pale grass. Mother Egypt’s house was built into the cliff nearby, a bark-faced building with a long, low pediment and an overhanging roof. The door was open and a light burned there, too.
This was the house Miranda’s aunt had lived in when she was the warden of the shrine. “Mary’s fountain,” whispered Ludu Rat-tooth. “When Julius Caesar fought against the Dacians, he tracked her to this place. She took off her armor and was washing in the water. He wanted to have her like a dog. But when he saw her, he was too ashamed.”
“Yuck. That’s quite a story.”
Ludu was full of tidbits. “Some Gypsies say he dragged her to the cave, and that was the beginning of the Brancoveanus.” She shrugged. “I like it best the other way.”
“Me, too.” Miranda was more interested in the tomb in the middle of the clearing, in front of the cave mouth. She would have gone to it, only Ludu grabbed her by the wrist. Someone had appeared in the entrance of the house, a tiny huddled figure. The candle she carried illuminated a small round face. Miranda only glimpsed it for a moment before the light flickered and the woman cupped her hand around it. But that moment was enough for her to see a face almost too strange and simian to be ugly. Painted yellow in the candle light, for a moment it seemed almost featureless.
Ludu Rat-tooth still had hold of Miranda’s wrist. “Ah,” she said. “Oh God, miss.” She pulled hard on Miranda’s hand, until Miranda twisted toward her thumb and freed herself. She held her arm up, took a step forward.
“Come back,” whispered the girl.
But the woman with the candle had walked out into the clearing. And now Miranda could see more lights among the trees and four more figures shuffled out of the woods near the cliff face.
“Baron Ceausescu made them wear masks,” breathed Ludu in her ear.
As the lights came together around the tomb, Miranda could see better what it was, a raised mound covered with talismans and knickknacks. The woman from the house was stooping to light candles among them and little oil lamps. By the accumulating glow, Miranda could see photographs, books, and scraps of paper, strands of beads, bouquets, and bundles of dried herbs.
Though she and the girl were hidden in the darkness, the woman now turned to them. Holding her flickering candle, she called out. “Come! Come forward.”
Ludu tried to catch hold of her again, but Miranda stepped away. The girl’s terror fed her sense of calm, but that wasn’t the only
thing. She could smell a perfume of hot oil out of the lamps, and she could see candles glimmering in the woods and in the grotto’s mouth. They almost looked like lightning bugs, and in a moment she was reminded of summer evenings in Berkshire County, standing in the backyard with her father or on Christmas Hill behind the art museum.
“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 for 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 sulfurous 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 were 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 sound 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.