Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  Out of reluctance, I have failed to mention the most important features of this domestic cataclysm, having to do with the plan of the house and with Vesta. Because it had been designed to narrow down to a single chamber at the living room, the building was soon chopped in twain. This queer state of affairs went unacknowledged by any word from my parents, who resorted first to jumping and later to navigating via ladders laid across the opening and anchored to form bridges. Most of the time, however, they simply stayed in their own preferred regions on either side of the fissure. Although I, too, crawled on the ladders, I never failed to plumb the depths of an intense terror when peering down through the rungs at globes of fire, floating in the smoke.

  Vesta was my mantra on these journeys.

  My father took a certain professional interest in the gaseous exhalations emanating from the gulf and penetrating the two halves of the living room. Seldom did he make the crossing without collection devices—a jumble of beakers, rubber tubing, glass retorts, and other alchemical-looking paraphernalia. I believe this curiosity of his led to a number of the explosions in his laboratories.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, thinking that his scientific knowledge might explain what I could not fathom.

  He emitted a sharp laugh. “Don’t bother me.”

  My mother looked helpless when I asked her in turn. “Your father and I,” she said hesitantly, but got no further.

  A signal event associated with the opening of the chasm was the near-loss of the girl in glass. By the close of the fourth week, she jutted headfirst into the rift. For the first time, I could see her from a fresh angle, but I could no longer stretch out on the box without fear. Neither could I have done so without becoming dizzy and perhaps sickened and confused by the vapors from the pit, for their odor had become more acrid as the days passed. I would crawl as close as possible and lie down, my eyes on her profile. Occasional blossoms of fire rocketed from the depths, falling back harmlessly or landing like a kiss on the glass pane that shielded her face.

  “Vesta, what if you fell?”

  My whisper surprised me, and I was startled by a wish that the floor would crumble and release her. I imagined the box rocketing through the air. I saw a hurled flower, a red comet with a tail of shattered tiles, a queen bee chased by a swarm: kaleidoscopic flights and freedom. I reproached myself. The swirl of images had the nature of a sin embraced, or a blasphemy uttered while praying.

  The days fly, and the years … and yet I know nothing but books and the paths in the courtyard. I am a man, so my grandmother says, now that I am fifteen. On my birthday, she gave me a feather of red and gold, presented to her long ago by the nursery maid. Prince Krakus had snatched it from the wing of a firebird. How did a poor girl manage to obtain such a royal favor, I wonder? I’ll never know, unless the answer’s hidden in the library.

  Stitching in the window seat, my mother has made me black mourning clothes, and when I look at myself in the mirror I am not displeased. The feather makes a dash of red in a buttonhole. Mama is grieving for the future, I suspect, just as she has done for the past. I close my eyes and picture a child, a boy in velvet pants and a white blouse frothy with lace. Back then I saw; I sensed. Yet I only stored what happened in memory. Perhaps I couldn’t bear to consider what anything meant. Perhaps the strife of attempting such a thing would have led to a spontaneous combustion, the invisible aura around my body catching fire and rendering me down to charred bone and teeth.

  Taking up my toy sword, I whip the air.

  Yesterday I ran from room to room, and when I found my mother, I told her the news.

  “I am leaving home to seek my fortune!”

  What else could it be? Long ago she had taught me, reading from the house’s treasure of storybooks, what a man does. He leaves his house and seeks adventure in the wild wideness, with its huts and caves and castles. When Mama laid her head on my shoulder, I could see how small she had grown.

  Today my mother is in hiding and cannot be traced, but tomorrow I will take her hands once more before I run room by room through the world. I know that there will be times when I wonder if my story is not already complete, rather than about to begin. Some days I’ll fear—as I do now—that I was consumed entirely by fire, and that what I’m living now is a kind of afterlife. Perhaps I am a human phoenix, who in a dream was scorched to ash, or reduced to a mere egg waiting to hatch. Perhaps this life is not a real life but only a veil, torn asunder but still covering the face of the living world. So close, so close: Perhaps I have touched it with these fingertips that were once melted in flame and now have not so much as a whorl of maze to differentiate them. When I am fully a man, tested by adventure, I hope to know everything. The books I read in our library have told me that the years are worlds, and the lands, and the past is only a place one cannot reach.

  I wonder what my father will say when he notices that I have gone.

  Will he mutter to my grandmother that they both had a part in my metamorphosis?

  I won’t—can’t bear to—consider my mother’s sorrow.

  And what of Vesta, the perfect child in the glass box, jutting into the abyss, all that was she drawn inward? Long ago I rocked from side to side, sending forth prayers that were like kisses of fire rising from an abyss. Sybil and sibling, Vesta, my idol: I never felt a final conviction that you were dead to me and unreachable, and I still don’t.

  At night when I dream, I see you face to face, though we are severed by a single pane, and I wake to cool drops of grief on my skin. The flame of those dreams is pale as moonshine.

  My sister burns, snowy and purified, her lavender eyelids sealed. She may fall, a star, into the breach. The glass may melt in a lake of fire. I don’t know. I’ve never known how it is with Vesta. She may float down as softly as a snowflake sifting from a cloud. The glow from her face may turn the lake to a moonglade and the salamanders to silver.

  Is she, too, a phoenix? What then, I wonder, will be the manner of her uprising?

  The universe is bigger than anyone ever told me. Sky with its endless manifestations of cloud and spark tells me so. I stand in the courtyard and daydream about the kings and queens and the helping animals and unexpected friends that I will meet along the way. I wonder if I am to go traveling as the prince or as the foolish Hans, and whether gifts will be granted—or will I be chucked like a log into the witch’s fire? Eagles fly overhead, screaming messages from another world. I do not know if their cries spiral from the throats of demons or seraphim.

  In sleep, when I stare into my sister’s open eyes, I realize that their blue is the color of mercy.

  She is my vestal, and I, Blaise, am her fire.

  Daydreaming of my fortune, I hear a voice and am surprised to find it my own, saying, Let Vesta be with me, every furlong and fathom of the way.

  © 2007 Marly Youmans.

  Originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  In 2012, Marly Youmans published three books: a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award (Mercer University Press); The Foliate Head, a collection of formal poetry with “green man” art by major artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales (UK: Stanza Press); and Thaliad, her 11th book, a post-apocalyptic epic in blank verse (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing), also with lavish art by Hicks-Jenkins. She was also on the judging panel for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature in 2012. Forthcoming are several books: Glimmerglass, a novel that includes a pursuit of the muse, failure, renewal, and murderous impulse, and Maze of Blood, a tale inspired by the pulpy life and Texas times of Robert Howard. Currently Marly is polishing a long sequence of poems called The Book of the Red King. Find her at thepalaceat2.blogspot.com.

  Abyssus Abyssum Invocat

  Genevieve Valentine

  The Prince

  Once, a mermaid fell in love with a prince who fell from his ship in a storm; when he had ceased to struggle, the merma
id took his face in her hands, passed her fingertips over the lids of his closed eyes, pressed her mouth against his mouth. Then she delivered him to the surface, where he was safely found.

  But the salt of a man’s lips was sweeter than the salt sea, and the memory of it drove the mermaid nearly mad, until at last she left behind all she knew to find the prince again.

  She gave her voice to the hag in the grotto; the hag gave her a knife and said, “Very well.”

  She swam until her home waters were far behind her, until the prince’s castle was in sight and she could swim no farther; then she lay at the edge of the water, and cut at her flesh until it was cleaved in two.

  She was not allowed to wash her hands clean (she was not allowed to ask anything again, of the sea); when the men found her in the morning, they saw a naked woman holding a knife, up to her elbows in blood.

  They hanged her from the first tree they found, so young that it sagged under her weight.

  It’s grown crooked ever since; I can see it from my window, as I tell you this.

  Miss Warren came to the school the winter the ice broke in filmy crusts across the rocks.

  The rain was coming down in sheets, waves trying to devour the shore, and no one saw her arriving; she was just there, waiting for them in the schoolroom the morning after, as if she’d grown overnight from the boards.

  She looked them over, one by one, as if searching for something, but she must not have found it, because they just studied geography, and she walked among them carefully, and silent as the grave.

  The consensus after class was, it was no wonder young single ladies were now permitted to teach in Cornwall, if they were as plain as Miss Warren.

  (Matthew said nothing—he was already sixteen, and would graduate by summer, what did he care if she was plain for a spring?

  She had paused by his desk a long time, watching him draw from the map, little strings of islands like a necklace of beads. He could feel her gaze on his neck; it never moved, all the time she stood there. Her hands were thin and white, and she held the fingers together, like a dove’s tail.

  There was a hitch when she breathed, as if her lungs were giving out.

  He watched her walk back up to the board, watched the line of her arm all the while she wrote the names of cities on the blackboard, her little white wrist sliding in and out of her sleeve, her hair as colorless and fragile as a sheet of ice.)

  The first story she writes at the start of spring, when the green is creeping back over the rocks wherever the ice scraped it away, and the ospreys wheel over the courtyard of the school.

  She writes it on the ruins of the old stone wall, where she was high above the water and alone but for the ghosts of the oppidum, who had, in the Roman years, looked out onto the ocean and seen serpents in the spray.

  (It’s a relief from the press of anxious boys, their little wars and flares of temper.)

  She gives it to Matthew, a single sheet of paper pressed into his workbook, where he’ll discover it some time from now, turning a page to start a lesson, frowning at it, touching his left lapel as he always does when something has taken him by surprise.

  (She wants him, by then, because he holds very still; because of the way he looks at dead things with an air of sorrow; she wants him because his hair is dark, and gleams like the hair of a drowned man.)

  Matthew waited two weeks for some word from her, but nothing came. She gave lessons as though nothing had happened, and spent Saturdays in the schoolroom reading, and Sundays walking the path that led to the sea, stopping from time to time to turn her profile to the water as if she was looking behind her. But she was too far, and from where he stood at the window, he couldn’t see anything for sure.

  The next week he stayed behind on Saturday, after service, to get her alone.

  (The story wasn’t the sort of thing one brought up to the Schoolmaster.

  It was the sort of thing you read over and over as you pretended to study at night, casting looks out the pitch-black window, as if you could peer past the candlelight and all the way down to the sea.)

  She was reading from an atlas.

  “Sit, if you like,” she said.

  Her voice was metallic at the edges, like a rusted bell, and she didn’t look up to greet him, or use any words of kindness.

  He thought how strange she was, how little she knew of manners or the customs of the school.

  Still, he sat beside her.

  “I found this,” he said, and set the story on the open pages.

  She looked at it. Then she turned a leaf; the paper vanished.

  “Why did you give it to me?”

  “I don’t love you,” she said. “You mustn’t think that. You’ll go mad if you do.”

  She had unfastened the topmost button of her collar, as if she couldn’t breathe; he could see a sliver of shadow under the line of her dress.

  “What did you think of the story?”

  He thought about it.

  (He had drawn the scene twice in his notebook, then burned the pages. They weren’t the sort of thing you left for others to find.)

  “It seems truer than the other stories they tell you,” he said at last.

  She raised an eyebrow, turned another page.

  He said, “And I pitied her, for losing everything in pursuit of love.”

  She looked at him, just for a moment, as if she was surprised. Her eyes were green as glass.

  The pages were a map of the West Indies and the sea that surrounded them. Amidst the roiling waves, someone had drawn a ship, splintering to pieces. Sirens circled the drowning sailors, the water beneath them nearly black. Safely at the edge of the tumult slid the legend, Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.

  He sucked in a breath.

  She looked sad, now; he didn’t know what he had done.

  “The deep calls unto the deep,” she said.

  The translation wasn’t quite right—Millard and some of the other boys would have called her stupid or romantic, if they’d heard her, said it was the reason she taught geography and not Latin.

  But her hair was the color of seafoam, and the lines of her profile were carved out by the last of the daylight, and the words sounded so like a prayer to her that he only nodded yes.

  If he reached out a hand and held the edge of her cuff in two fingers, who else was there to see it; if they sat together until it was full dark, who was there to say?

  The Ship

  Once, a mermaid fell in love with the prow of a ship that fell from a ship in a storm; the mermaid pushed aside the bodies of the dead as she swam, and caught it up in her arms.

  It had hair like her own, blown back, and it had arms like her own flexed in fists, and a face like her own set in a mask of triumph, and from the bottom of her gown bloomed two pointed feet, one on top of the other like the suffering Christ.

  Within each thing on the land, the mermaid thought, there must be such a spirit waiting to be freed, and kissed the wooden lips.

  She gave her voice to the hag in the grotto; the hag gave her a knife and said, “Very well.”

  She cut at her flesh until it was cleaved in two. Then she walked along the beach, the sand a hundred thousand little wounds against her feet, until she came to the first tree she saw, and sank down with weariness.

  The bark came apart in her bloody hands, and beneath it she saw the grain-wood of her beloved, and she began at once to weep for joy, and to kiss its smoothness. And the tree, from her beauty and from its loneliness, bent its branches down to meet her.

  But the mermaid had been careless. Day is ever the enemy of the sea, and as dawn touched the shore, the mermaid was turned into a spray of seafoam; the tree, stained with blood and tears, died of grief, still reaching out for its beloved.

  The tree has been crooked ever since; I can see it from my window, as I tell you this.

  The second story comes in full spring, when the trees are leafing and the birds are roosting in nests that cling to the rocks.

&nbs
p; (She has been back often to the wall, and rested her feet on the bodies of the dead that lie under this ground that is shallow enough to push them through the grass at any moment.

  His was a careful sorrow, in a careful heart, and had to be tended as carefully as a grave.

  She has let a dozen papers be ripped from her hands, until it was the right story.)

  The water at the foot of the cliffs is green, green as the waters of home.

  Since the first story, she has seen Matthew go out walking past the shelter of the school and stand along the path that goes down to the sea, holding perfectly still in a way she can’t stop looking at.

  She doesn’t know how he can do it, with the wind here the way it is.

  Sometimes he frowns; sometimes he closes his eyes.

  His eyes are dark, as dark as if no happiness ever reaches them. She had thought it was a sorrow of his own, before he told her he had sorrowed for a mermaid in a fairy tale.

  (Some stories have been ripped from her hands against her will; some stories will never be right.)

  Matthew had looked for stories a hundred times before the next one came.

  He knew it was the day when her hand trembled as she held it out, her fingers resting an instant too long on the cover, as if she was thinking better of it until the very last.

  As soon as they were dismissed, he turned and took the long way round to mathematics, just so he could hang back alone and read it as fast as he could, his fingers trembling.

  (She never said what the mermaids looked like; for him they all had green eyes and hair the color of seafoam, their white wrists sliding in and out of the waves as they swam.)

  He folded the story shut when he had finished, closed his eyes, pressed it to his chest like a talisman.

  The paper carried a smell of the salted sea, and he breathed deep, felt his fingers ache as though he had torn at a tree.