Prospero in Hell

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  From the pearl-gray sky above, a huge whirling funnel of white cloud reached downward, its tip hovering just above the highest point of the majestic thunder peak. The two formed a black and white whirling hourglass, the only stable features in the otherwise ever-changing landscape. Of all the enchanted windows in Prospero’s Mansion, I found this one the most eerie; this fleecy countryside was not in the waking world, but in the Land of Nod, where men wander while they sleep.

  The eyrie itself had marble walls and columns. Marking the eight directions were towering throne of palest stone, each fashioned in the shape of the giant blossom most dear to the Wind whose seat it was. Ariel’s beloved cowslip occupied the southeast, followed by a honeysuckle for Notus in the south, a foxglove for Afer, a snapdragon for Zephyrus in the west, a forsythia for Caurus, a crocus for Boreas in the north, and a rose for Eurus in the east. Between the crocus and the rose, Mab’s daffodil had been pushed back against the wall, leaving deep scratch marks in the marble floor. In its place, a ring of chalk and salt surrounded a simple wooden cot.

  Despite the eeriness of the view, or perhaps because of it, I loved this room. I could sit here gazing at the clouds of dreamland for hours. It always smelled fresh, as if newly washed by recent rain, and the place echoed with music. Today was no exception. Mournful, haunting Oriental tones swept through the chamber, accompanied by an irregular patter, much like rain on a tin roof.

  So close to the realm of dreams was the eyrie that the Aerie Ones were visible to mortal eyes. They appeared as tall, overly thin, androgynous beings with long, slender fingers, billowing hair, and graceful feathered wings. A quartered livery, showing a face with puffed checks juxtaposed with a unicorn, adorned their flowing robes.

  Zephyrus, usually so quick and lively, lay slumped across his snapdragon, his stormy eyes half closed, and his bagpipes abandoned on the floor beside him. Gathered about him were three of the Great Winds. Notus leaned over his wounded comrade, feeding him drops from his pot of honeysuckle nectar. His warm eyes of summer blue, usually so lucid and calm, were clouded with concern. The Southwest Wind, Afer, hovered in the cupola, gazing down with his rain-gray eyes; his pale yellow wings spread throughout the upper portion of the chamber. Eurus floated nearby playing his shakuhachi. His long unbound hair and his robes, both the color of sunrise blush, billowed in time with the Japanese flute.

  The stairs came up in the center of the chamber, the trapdoor having been worked into the windrose design upon the floor. As I stepped from the stairwell and moved across the chamber toward Zephyrus, Ariel came through the trapdoor and closed it behind us. Here in the eyrie, he, too, was visible. He stood some nine feet tall, with enormous arched wings that curled around the columns. A wreath of cowslips crowned his narrow, intelligent face, from which pale blue-gray eyes, the color of early morning, regarded the wounded Zephyrus. A clarinet hung like a weapon from his belt. With Ariel’s arrival, of the eight Great Winds, only the three incarnated Northerlies, Caurus, Boreas, and Mab, were missing.

  I crossed to Zephyrus and lay my flute down beside the snapdragon. As I knelt beside him, my heart leapt into my throat. His long sinuous body was so badly torn that I could not distinguish his limbs from the shreds of his torso and wings. Golden ichor spurted from the long, raked, claw wounds. Where it struck the air, it hardened into chips of amber. They rained down against the stone floor, causing the pitter-patter I had heard. He moaned piteously, a sound reminiscent of the wind blowing among bowing willows.

  Could even the Water of Life heal these wounds? Briefly, I closed my eyes and prayed to my Lady on Zephyrus’s behalf.

  A sense of peace came over me. Looking up again, I ran my fingers lightly over his airy body, speaking soft words of comfort. Slowly and painstakingly, he reached out long sinuous fingers and touched my face and hair. Gentle light taps, like insect’s legs or the touch of a spider’s web, explored my skin. I sang softly in his ear, soothing him.

  “Be of good cheer, Zephyrus. Help is at hand,” I promised gently. The forgotten elf figurine was still clenched in my left hand. I shoved it into the pocket of my cloak and drew out a tiny pear-shaped vial of cut crystal. Within glimmered a pearly liquid.

  As I withdrew the stopper, the sweet scent filled the chamber eliciting a low chorus of ah’s from the Aerie Ones. They watched as if spellbound as a single drop of the shimmering liquid fell upon Zephyrus’s wounds.

  Instantly, the long narrow rents ceased leaking their golden lifeblood and began knitting together; the Water of Life worked its balm far more quickly upon Aerie Ones than it did on bodies of flesh. Yet, after five minutes, only his shoulder and left arm had mended completely, and precious blood still flowed from the rents in his back and legs.

  One drop of Water of Life was always enough to stave off death; his life was no longer in peril. However, if I left him as he was, his recovery might take weeks or even years. He might even remain permanently crippled.

  I held up the half-empty vial, picturing the larger carafe in the chapel, which was also more than half empty, and began the complicated calculations to determine how long the remaining Water would last—given one drop per sibling per year, plus other necessary uses. Once it was gone, I could only obtain more by making the long arduous journey to the Well at the World’s End. Now that Father had retired and turned the company over to me, it was getting harder and harder to spare the year and a day that the journey took.

  From the snapdragon, Zephyrus’s storm-colored eyes watched me, joyful and trusting. With a snort of self-contempt, I abandoned the calculations and pulled out the stopper again. Three more drops, for his back, legs, and right side, and Zephyrus’s body knit itself back together.

  Whole again, Zephyrus lifted his bagpipes and began a rousing march of gratitude. His airy companions raised their instruments and joyfully sang with him.

  I sat with them, listening to their uplifting music and watching the ever-changing cloudscape. In days gone by, I would have picked up my enchanted flute and joined the celebration. Now, two things held me back.

  First, traveling with Mab had made me more aware of how much the Aerie Ones resented the instrument. Second, for all my five-hundred-plus years, I had believed my flute’s virtue to command wind and weather came from the fact that it had been carved from the pine in which the witch Sycorax had once trapped Ariel. Now that Seir had told me otherwise, I felt disinclined to play it.

  The worst part of discovering that the power of my flute came from a demon was the shattering of my illusions. All my life I had loved this instrument, its four feet of pale polished pine, its sound, the way its music transported me beyond my mundane surroundings. In my naïveté, I had imagined that the flute somehow appreciated my affection and returned it. To discover my cherished instrument contained a creature of pure hatred bent upon my destruction broke my heart.

  So I sat in silence, listening.

  As their paean ended, Ariel spoke from where he sat regally upon his marble blossom throne. “Look upon our dwelling, Great Mistress, and have pity. Will not you forgive us the remaining three hundred and fifty years of our promised sentence of servitude and set us free to dwell in the sun-warmed cowslips of the fields, instead of blossoms of cold relentless stone?”

  The other Aerie Ones lowered their instruments and turned their stately faces toward me, regarding me with eyes that reflected the varying moods of the sky.

  Free the Aerie Ones? I considered again what I had learned from the Book of the Sibyl. My Lady could hardly promote a slaver to the ranks of Her highest servants. After all, was She not the Living Embodiment of Free Will? It must have been my participation in the enslavement of the Aerie One race that had kept me from becoming a Sibyl all this time.

  I envisioned the morrow, should I pick up the flute and snap it in two, freeing Ariel, Mab, and all their fellows. If my interpretation of the Book of the Sibyl was correct, it was all I needed to do to achieve my heart’s desire. I saw myself as a Sibyl, with the ivory spiral mark of
my Lady’s favor upon my forehead. I pictured commanding the lightning, absolving bad oaths, and being able to make Water of Life at will—no more trips of a year and a day to the Well at the World’s End.

  If I were a Sibyl, rather than merely a Handmaiden, I would not need to remain a maiden to keep my Lady’s patronage. The laughing elf lord and the dream-kiss we never actually shared danced before my eyes. Flushing, I dismissed him from my thoughts. As Astreus himself put it, elves would no more dally with mortal maids than hawks woo doves. After all these years, I would not be such a fool as to lose my heart to a creature incapable of reciprocating, especially when there was a much more promising candidate for my affections.

  Five hundred years after we were so cruelly parted, Ferdinand and I would at last be free to marry. I saw us in my mind’s eye, standing before the altar in the Duomo of Milan, the same altar where I had waited vainly for him so long ago. Hand in hand, we would pledge our vows, surrounded by the ornate marbled columns and gilded filigree of the magnificent gothic cathedral, which, even today, seven hundred years after it was built, remains the third largest church in the world.

  After that? I could continue to run Prospero, Inc., while Ferdinand taught. He knew so many things of interest to modern scholars: history, Latin, Italian, sword fighting, even sailing. Perhaps, there would be children . . .

  When I first discovered children, I expected soon to be a bride and a mother. I thought them the most precious things in the world. Later, when I realized there would be none for me, I thrust them from my mind. As a Sibyl, with Ferdinand as my husband, there would be nothing to stop us from having a whole parcel of little ones. With luck and my Lady’s blessing, we could even raise them to treat one another more harmoniously than my siblings had. Perhaps he and I would even be blessed with perfect love such as Father had shared with my mother, before she had died giving birth to me.

  A beautiful dream . . . yet, at what price?

  Ariel spoke of pleasant zephyrs and cowslips. But what of Boreas? What of Afer? The storms they brought were no mild summer rains, but typhoons and tempests! Even mild-mannered Caurus had admitted that, were his followers not bound, he could not vouch for mankind’s safety.

  How long would it be before it began: hurricanes sweeping the sky of planes, tornados ripping roofs off schools and hospitals, tempests tossing trailers and flooding towns, cyclones knocking down skyscrapers, and twisters destroying power stations, plunging mankind into darkness?

  True, the other sprits and elementals bound by Prospero, Inc. would still be obliged to carry out their contracts. Oil would be required to burn steadily, so engines would still run. The salamanders among our clients would be still required to keep their volcanoes from erupting, and those areas of ocean whose nymphs we had harnessed would still be constrained from flooding the land . . . so long as we kept our side of the bargain.

  Without our airy servants, however, how could Prospero, Inc. continue to fulfill its contracts? Even if I were willing to allow mundane humans to work on our supernatural contracts, there would still be tasks only a magical creature could do. It would only be a matter of time before we failed to meet one of our delivery dates, and the oreads or the salamanders or the djinn or the oni rebelled.

  Even if mankind could somehow survive the rebellion of the skies, I did not see how we could survive the desertion of the other spirits, the ones whose obedience to Prospero, Inc. contracts maintained the fragile set of conventions we called physics.

  No. The price was too high. The Aerie Ones could not be allowed their freedom, nor I, my dreams of Sibylhood and marriage. Perhaps, one day, if the plan I believed Father to be hatching—to domesticate the Aerie Ones by giving them each a chance to live as a man in a fleshy body—succeeded, they could be released, and we might all achieve our hearts’ desires. Until then, we would, all of us, have to remain at our current posts.

  A cold wind blew across the back of my neck. The trapdoor had opened. On the top step, in the center of the chamber, stood a tall man with a black forked beard. A thigh-length coat of leather covered his immensely wide shoulders and upon his head sat a fur Cossack’s hat. His face was rugged and fierce. His icy blue eyes crackled with an inner fire. He stood, arms crossed and booted feet spread apart, and surveyed the eyrie as if assessing its defensibility.

  “Ah, Boreas,” I smiled at him, thankful for the distraction. Unlike Mab and Caurus, Boreas’s stint in a mortal body had done little to tame him. I suspected this was because, as our company enforcer, he had few dealings with human society.

  “What is our mistress’s wish?” he asked in his Russian accent, pronouncing “what” as “vot.”

  “The djinn have offended me. They wounded our herald, Zephyrus. Such effrontery cannot go unpunished.”

  Around me, the Aerie Ones murmured in approval.

  “I understand,” Boreas’s voice was husky yet rich with wrathful glee. “It shall snow in the desert this day!”

  He turned on his heels to leave. As he began descending the stairs, I called after him. “And Boreas, stay clear of the places where the mortals dwell.”

  Boreas paused and glanced back at me, a rebellious gleam in his icy eyes. By habit, my fingers opened to reach for my flute.

  I stopped.

  It was not just the demon in my flute that gave me pause. After all, I had been playing the Staff of Winds thus long. I would continue to play it whenever it was necessary to keep order, demon or no demon. No, what stopped me was the question, Was it necessary? For, in my mind, I heard again the voice of Caurus speaking from the air above my shoulder, as I had knelt beside his fire-damaged body.

  “We know you love us, Milady . . . and we love you! Why else do you think we work so hard?”

  If Mab hated the flute, Boreas, the North Wind, the most powerful of all airy spirits, could scarcely bear it much love. Now that he wore an earthly body, he, too, might develop abilities, such as Mab’s detective skills, that the flute could not command. If I relied on brute force, the tyrant’s tool, to rule the Aerie Ones, what recourse would I have once the flute was no longer an option?

  I had to find a better way.

  “Boreas, you would not stand by and allow an injury to one of your people to go unavenged, would you?” I asked.

  “Never!” He gave a snort of indignant amusement.

  “Good, but neither can I. The humans are my people. I must protect them. If they are harmed, I must avenge them. I cannot allow you to avenge your people unless you promise not to harm mine. They are not the ones who have offended us.” I paused for a moment, meeting Boreas’s gaze. “Is this not fair?”

  Boreas’s stare was as hard as Arctic ice, but I did not flinch.

  “It is fair,” he admitted grudgingly and began to turn away.

  “Lady, are we to be set free?” Afer called curiously.

  Boreas froze, his eyes burning, as he turned back to hear my answer. I paused, prayed to my Lady for inspiration, and spoke the words that came to me.

  “I cannot free one of you without freeing all of you. Too many of your servants are wild and violent and would hurt my people, whom my duty requires me to defend. But if you eight, the Great Captains of the Wind, will swear an unbreakable vow upon the River Styx that you will keep your followers from doing undue harm to mankind, I will break my flute.” And I lifted it up, horizontally, as if I intended to snap it in two.

  In the hush that followed, my heart raced. Demon or no demon, the voice of my flute still called to me. Could I bear never to hear its song again?

  Ariel’s great wings fluttered in the air, each feather stirring its own eddy. He bowed his head. “From one oath to another? How is that free?”

  “I must protect mankind,” I repeated firmly.

  Boreas stroked his forked beard. “Mistress, you ask the impossible. True, if we happen to be nearby when they misbehave, we can buffet them about, blowing them this way and hither, but beyond that, what hold has one wind upon another? No one can grasp
the wind in his fingers. We cannot bribe each other. What would we offer? We cannot compel each other. How would we cause harm? You might as well ask us to blow the moon from the sky or to douse the flames of the sun.”

  “Very few things are impossible, Boreas, to those who are determined. When you can promise me that mankind’s civilization will be safe, I will release you. Otherwise, you must wait until the appointed time. The matter is now in your hands.”

  Boreas glared defiantly. I gazed back, unperturbed. The other Aerie Ones, their musical instruments still in their hands, hovered about the chamber, watching us intently. Then, Boreas bowed his head, lowering his gaze.

  “Fair enough, Mistress,” he replied and, spinning about, his fur-trimmed leather coattails flying, he charged down the stairs and was gone.

  Tybalt and I spent the rest of the day walking among the dark trees of the enclosed forest where my pet unicorns dwelt. We spoke little. After a time, Tybalt wandered off, enticed by some vole or shrew that had left its trail in the newly fallen snow. Snowfalls in December were somewhat rare this far down the slopes of the Cascades, yet it had already snowed twice this year. I hoped this was a pleasant happenstance and not a sign of yet another Priority Contract going awry.

  Passing through the mansion, I continued down the long drive to the main road, I walked almost to the town; however, I had no desire to talk to people. When the snow-covered tower of the library and the white steeples of the two churches came into view, I turned and walked back the way I had come. Somewhere, car tires spun on snow.

  As I breathed in the cold, piney air, my thoughts turned to my family. It had been surprisingly nice to see my siblings again, like putting on an old garment that was so difficult to don that one forgot how well it fit once one finally went through the effort. We had worked so well together when we were younger, before Father handed out our staffs. It often troubled me that those days were now lost to us.