So there are seas under us?
Who knows?
You know everything!
Not everything, he says, and she gives up. Not that she believes him. He does know, he knows everything, he is just not telling. He is keeping it up his sleeve.
Oh, you and your nonsense! she says.
You do not believe in trees, my Lady, and green fur?
Did I say so? When are they coming?
First the Fire.
But Fire is here now!
This is Fire as a shadow of its true self. But its time is near.
And the beings held in stone, will they come to life? There is a room here –
He throws back his head and laughs long and hard.
I see now, she says, that I am the true Fool –
Patience, my Lady –
– and that you are all talk and this is all a game, she says, flouncing out.
She knows that she was wise to say no more about them when they come to her in her sleep that night of their own accord, tall trees aflame with sunlight, raked with shadow. She sees and she knows them too, from before; knowing that this sight is from before, and not from his words ringing in her head, because these trees have no living leaf that she can see, only tatters, some in flames against the light. In some the shadows make a fine openwork. Here and there is a webbed tree crown or one black sprig, or a line of stalks where bursten seed boxes hang open, or a bushy limb. Like those of the fire, the tree shadows move in and with the trees, movement is their element no less than air. Trees may look like stones, but they are only in suspension until the end of the snow and ice, meanwhile they burn on a low flame in the snowbound woods, shielding a cone of life as if in a cupped hand. I see! This is the fire he means! she thinks in amazement, waking. And there is a before and I was there, was I, in my sleep? But even before her eyes open the trees have faded away.
At least now I know they are coming, she declares.
Who are you, my Fool?
I am the one crack, the fatal flaw in the ice…
The fatal floor in the ice! I have been there! I have seen it!
Impossible, my Lady. You must have dreamt it.
No! I was there! What is fatal?
That is for you to find out.
Just tell me! You must know!
Oh no, my Lady. You must. A silence falls between them. Fire and ice, he says finally, and does a dance, hammering and jabbing at the air, changing sides. Fire and ice are locked in battle. In mortal combat.
Is mortal like fatal?
Very like. And who will win?
Who?
Aha! Now one, now the other.
Forever – ?
– and ever, as far as I know, my Lady.
So it is a game?
So it is. Now I am to harness the beast and go at once to the Master.
Take me with you!
Impossible, my Lady.
Why?
You belong here.
And my Lord does not?
You will have him back in no time. I can take him a message if you wish.
I do wish! She sits back. In no time! You know nothing of time, to say that.
He waits, his bushy eyebrows lifted.
Say that I wish – I wish I might have him and hold him in my arms again.
So be it. He springs up. Is that all?
All. I will stand at the window and watch you cross the line.
What line, my Lady?
You know. Between here and the sky.
The skyline!
The skyline to the other worlds.
Go on.
The clouds and the sun and the moon and the stars. You said –
– Did I?
Why may I not go? He goes freely. You go, you and the beast!
How freely, my Lady, if I have no more say in it than the beast? But there is no crossing the skyline. It runs away as fast as we do, and faster. It keeps its distance, does the skyline.
It plays a marry dance?
All the time, my Lady.
Just as you do, she says, all the time with your talk.
My Lady!
Go away. Leave me alone. You have your orders.
A small sun no more than an amber bead has been shining in the white sky until one morning, falling across her, it blanches and sears her. She recoils into the shadows, but she is unharmed, only alight in some way she has never been before, and in no time she is back with the sun taking hold of her with hot hand, and she helpless to resist. And a day comes when she tilts her head as if the sun were wine, her open mouth catching the last ray of the sinking sun, a ruby goblet, and for the first time she is coated in its naked heat. She stares first over one shoulder and then the other, trying to see what has happened, but there is only the usual incandescence of her silks.
Another day as she is approaching a window pane the sun reaches out and again seizes her, she flares up, red to the core, a mass of watery flesh woven on bone, transfigured. Her shadow is a hem of silk so long that she trips on it. Then she turns, blinded. But when she opens her eyes everything is just as it was. The times of the water and the wine, the marry dance and the lovemaking are long gone and forgotten. There is only the here and now.
When the Fool comes back it is to tell her that their Lord is on his way and has commanded him meanwhile to show her three wonders, one at a time.
And here is the first, my Lady. Shut your eyes, he says, and hold out your hand. Something small and light tickles her palm and she throws it off with a cry of alarm.
What did you do that for? He peers about on the floor, groping. Ah! Here she is. This is a bee.
I know, she says.
Touch her.
She runs a finger along its fur. It tickles softly and leaves a dust on her skin. She stares at her fingertip.
Eggs.
What are they?
Beings create them. But these are flower eggs.
Eggs? What are they?
They are all different. Hold her, he insists, and she does this time.
Are you asleep? Wake up, little one, she whispers, and he laughs his red laugh at her.
My Lady wanted a bee – he hangs his head – but she is not well pleased.
Not so. But my Lord has one just the same in an amber bead.
Just the same, is she? Can you touch her? See the fine wings! With a finger and thumb he lifts up the tip of a wing and, spreading out its glossy segments, flutters it with his breath.
So that is a wing! I see now. This one is free to fly, she says, while the amber one is caught forever.
This one is fast ‘asleep’ now, as you put it, my Lady, because she is caught as in a web between our two worlds of life and death. Now she must go back where she belongs – and he tosses the little glow of her into the fire.
No! screams the bride.
Yes, my Lady, there is no other way. Fire is her element, he says.
He is gone before she can recover from her shock and ask where and what life and death are. The fire flutters softly. The bee is no more. And yet later to the bride in bed asleep the sound the gauzy wings make as she flies is the same sound as the low fire, and somehow nothing surprises her at all about its rise and line of flight in midair or the rough near-and-far sizzle of its song in the sun.
What did you mean the other day, about the eggs on the bee?
I forget, my Lady. Forgive your poor Fool.
Eggs of a flower, you said.
I know. But they were as alive in their way as she was, and as Fire is, my Lady. They were seeds of the fire of life.
She shakes her head and presses her hands to her ears.
Why does nothing you say make any sense?
I am your Fool, he says, and a Fool cannot help himself.
What is a flower?
He bows low. You, for example, my Lady.
No, a flower that has eggs. Will you bring one?
Your wish is my command. That is the second wonder.
She sighs. What is th
e universe, my Fool? Is it like eternity?
Yes and no.
Well? Go on.
All that is. All the worlds in one are the universe. And there are worlds within worlds.
And it can all be unmade.
Can it now?
My Lord said one small thing can undo it. Unless I take care.
He did? Better take care, then!
I will, she says, when I know what to take care of.
Ask the Master when he gets back. He grins, and she makes no answer, unwilling to admit she would never dare. When had she learnt that?
There you are, she cries, and he bows low and presents her with a tiny frilly skirt of red silk on a shiny red base. What is this?
A flower for you from the world of the bee, my Lady, what else?
A flower! In a robe of fire! May I have it?
She holds it up to the firelight, translucent. But he shakes his head. My Lady, it is against the rules. I am simply to show you the wonders.
Unmaking the universe?
In a way. That is its body underneath, where the eggs form, inside the fruit.
The fruit? Is that a secret too?
Everything is, more or less, as you know by now, my Lady. He shrugs and heaves a sigh as he drops the flower in the fire, flaring it up with a sizzle; but this time she bites back her outcry.
And the third wonder will be a whole fruit to share with my Lady.
Now see what a wonder I have for my Lady today, he says, his hands behind his back. Which hand do you want?
She points, and he pops out a wrinkly brown palm. She points again, and again an empty palm. When she is tired of it, and pouts and turns her back, at last he gives into her hands a red half-open ball, gaping, like a mouth, but fiery red, even the embedded rows of its teeth. He prises it in two and holds one half out to her.
She peers down.
So these are eggs too. In each torn surface are lobes crammed with drops that shine up, rubies, in a bed of snow-white flesh. He looks up. He has hooked one of the rubies out and has it jammed between his teeth. One look at her shocked face and a fit of laughter overcomes him, and once again she is laughing out loud, and at this he throws himself backwards on the floor, convulsed, and kicks his legs in the air. Unnerved by his abrupt change of mood, she laughs too, her head thrown back, and again the inside of her mouth glistens red in the firelight.
What are you laughing at? she says when she can speak again and he is still clutching his belly and choking. Her question only provokes further convulsions. She shivers. The fire is low now and the room filling with shade. Once he subsides, wiping his eyes, and she is sure he is all right, she turns to go. But she is shaking.
I beg your pardon, my Lady.
What were you laughing at?
What were you, my Lady?
I?
You! he whoops.
Was I?
He kicks and hugs himself, snorting with laughter. And now you have gone too far.
He is lying back on the floor, dim in the little light that is left. She stares blank with dismay as he melts until there is nothing of him to be seen but a quaking of dark air, a faint pulsing flow of redness, like a log dissolving in the grate, or a palace into thin air until only an ice floor remains.
What are these stones in it? Rubies?
Eggs.
But they are stones!
If stones live. Feel them.
The tip of one finger touched to a glossy surface and snatched away, as if scorched, is enough to make him smile. But not to convince her. She shakes her head.
Alive?
My Lady, alive as Fire is alive. I keep telling you, they are the seeds of life, out of the world of life over and over. And that is the world of Fire.
Bewildered, she presses her hands to her ears. Why does nothing you say make sense? she cries.
I am honoured to be your Fool, my Lady, but I am nobody else’s. I tell you each one of these holds the secret of life.
They are so small, she protests, wondering where and what the secret of her life is, which she cannot for the moment recall.
Have one and see.
She holds out her hand.
No, not your hand, my Lady. Into your mouth it goes.
She shakes her head, lost for words.
Secrets, he insists, are passed by mouth.
At that he picks a seed out of the ball, shimmering red, and jams it between his teeth. Just so, he says, and bites down, licking his red teeth, and takes another seed.
But when she reaches again to pick one out for herself, he pulls his hand back and instead thrusts his face into hers. His tongue prods the bursten seed from his mouth into her mouth open to cry out. The silk of his beard, the probe of his tongue. She pushes him away, stung, riven, ecstatic, clenching down as the seed bursts between her teeth, blood red, filling her throat. The seed is a burn all through her. It has no taste, only a pang she has never known until now, closing her throat, and a breath of ashes. Her face writhing, she spits out and a gob of red mush stains her silken lap. She stares up at him in terror. Can this be a fruit of the land of Fire? A sliver of the fine shell of it is caught in her teeth, and she feels for it with her tongue, staring up all the while as his outline melts, wavering in a gust of wind, his shoulders and shaggy head one torn hem of darkness that blows out loose, enormous as a shadow by firelight, covering her.
True to his word, the Lord and Master is on his way back, although not on the sled drawn by the beast this time but on a white skiff making its way unerringly from the skyline to the nearest thing to a landmark on this globe of meltwater mirroring the starry universe: it is the ice floor at the root of the dome, exposed now, with the latest bride on top, afloat but already as hard as stone in the flow of red that was her robe. But he has a new huddled form in thick furs lying at his feet in the skiff, not as yet awakened. A new husk of ice is forming on the mirror of the water, dulling it, and a new domed palace is rising, sketching itself as faintly as breath in midair, a new creation.
He alights and picks up the fruit the last bride had dropped, his lip curled, turning its mouth, also agape, as hers is, to the half-light until the red hollows are illuminated, along with the embedded seeds. What is its secret? he muses. By what power does it come to pass that they who hold rubies cheap will throw away an eternity for mere pips in a shell? Every one of them has proved fickle in the end. I thought better of her. She outshone them all, the loveliest and most docile from the beginning – so supple and lavish in her loving, so eager to understand and be understood. All the more grievous that even she has failed the test.
Never mind, he sighs over the faint crackle of the new ice, I will not give up hope. With each new bride I have come closer to the peak of perfection I crave. Time is on my side. In the fullness of time, I will have me and hold me a true bride.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Literature Board of the Australia Council for funding two residencies: six weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan, Ireland in 2005; and six months at the Whiting Studio in Rome in 2010–2011.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
The Giramondo Publishing Company is grateful for the support given to its publishing program by Western Sydney University.
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