The Moon and the Sun

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “And here I thought,” Yves said, “that you’d be safely teaching arithmetic.”

  They climbed up the wharf to the quay.

  “I couldn’t remain at Saint-Cyr,” Marie-Josèphe said. “All the instructresses must take the veil.”

  Yves glanced at her, puzzled. “That would suit you.”

  The King’s departure saved her from making a sharp retort; she, and Yves, and all the courtiers bowed as their sovereign climbed into his carriage. It drove away, surrounded by musketeers. The ragged townspeople streamed after the King, cheering, shouting, pleading.

  Marie-Josèphe looked around hopefully for the chevalier de Lorraine, but he climbed into Monsieur’s carriage. The other courtiers hurried to their coaches and horses and clattered after the King.

  Only Count Lucien, several musketeers, the pigeon-keeper, the baggage wagons, and a plain coach remained on the quiet quay.

  The pigeon-keeper hurried to meet his apprentice, who toiled up the dock with the baggage-carriers. The apprentice balanced an awkward load of wicker cages, most of them empty. His master took the cages that still sheltered pigeons.

  “Put the basin there,” Yves said to the sailors. He gestured to the first wagon. “Be gentle—”

  “I want to see—” Marie-Josèphe said.

  The last carriages rattled across the cobblestones.

  Frightened by the clatter and the shouts and the snap of whips, the creature screamed and struggled. Its horrible singing cry cut off Marie-Josèphe’s words and spooked the draft horses so they nearly bolted.

  “Be gentle!” Yves said again.

  Marie-Josèphe leaned toward the basin, trying to see inside. “Now, behave!” she said. The creature shrieked.

  The sailors dropped the basin. The carrying poles and the net fell across it. Water splashed the cobblestones. The sea monster groaned. The sailors ran toward the galleon, nearly knocking down the pigeon-keepers. The apprentice dropped the empty cages. The master, who held live birds in his huge tender hands and let the pigeons perch on his shoulders and head, slipped his pets beneath his shirt for safety.

  “Come back—” Yves called to the sailors. They ignored him. Their compatriots, carrying Yves’ other baggage, abandoned the crates and the luggage and the shrouded figure and fled to their ship.

  Marie-Josèphe did her best not to laugh at Yves’ discomfiture. The wagon drivers had their hands full reining in the horses: they could not help. The musketeers would not, for fetching and carrying was far below their station. And of course Count Lucien could not be expected to help with the baggage.

  Angry and stubborn, Yves tried to lift the basin. He barely raised its corner. Some ragged boys, stragglers from the crowd, rode the quay’s stone wall and jeered.

  “You, boys!”

  Count Lucien’s command stopped their laughter. They jumped to their feet, about to run, but he spoke to them in a friendly tone and threw each a coin.

  “Here’s a sou. Come earn another. Help Father de la Croix load his wagons.”

  The boys jumped from the wall and ran to Yves, ready to do his bidding. They were dirty and ragged and barefoot, fearless in the face of the creature’s moans. The boys might have worked for a bread crust. They lifted the creature into the first wagon, the baggage into the second, and loaded the shrouded figure into the wagon full of ice.

  A specimen for dissection, Marie-Josèphe thought. My clever brother caught one sea monster for the King, and took another for himself.

  “Yves, come ride with me,” Marie-Josèphe said.

  “It’s impossible.” He climbed into the first wagon. “I can’t leave the creature.”

  Disappointed, Marie-Josèphe crossed the quay to the plain coach. The footman opened the door. Count Lucien courteously reached up to her, to help her in. The strength of his hand surprised her. Instead of being short, as she had expected, his fingers were disproportionately long. He wore soft deerskin gloves. She wondered if he would permit her to draw his hands.

  She wondered why he had stayed behind. She felt nervous about talking to him, for he was important and she was not. And, truth to tell, she wondered whether to stoop to his height or stand straight and look down at him. She resolved the question by climbing into the coach.

  “Thank you, M. de Chrétien,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, Mlle de la Croix.”

  “Did you see the sea monster?”

  “I am not much interested in grotesques, Mlle de la Croix. Pardon me, I cannot linger.”

  The heat of embarrassment crept up Marie-Josèphe’s face. She had insulted Count Lucien without meaning to, and she suspected he had insulted her in return.

  The count spoke a word to his grey Arabian. The horse bowed on one knee. Count Lucien clambered into the saddle. The horse lurched to its feet, clumsy for an instant. Carrying its tail like a banner, the Arabian sprang into a gallop to take Count Lucien after his sovereign.

  2

  Sunset spread its light across the park of the chateau of Versailles. The moon, waxing gibbous, approached its zenith. Heading for their stables, the coach horses gained their second wind and plunged through the forest along the hard-packed dirt road.

  Marie-Josèphe leaned her head against the side of the coach. She wished she had gone with Madame, in Monsieur’s crowded carriage. Madame would have all manner of amusing comments about today’s journey. Monsieur and Lorraine would engage in their friendly barbed banter. Chartres might ride beside the carriage and tell Marie-Josèphe about his latest experiment in chemistry, for she was surely the only woman and perhaps the only other person at court who understood what he was talking about. Certainly his wife neither understood nor cared. The Duchess de Chartres did exactly as she pleased. It had not pleased her to come from the Palais Royale in Paris to join His Majesty’s—her father’s—procession.

  If Chartres spoke to Marie-Josèphe then the duke du Maine might, too. And then the King’s grandson Bourgogne and his little brothers would demand their share of paying attention to Marie-Josèphe.

  Maine, like Chartres, was married; Bourgogne was barely a youth, and his brothers were children. Besides, they were all unimaginably above Marie-Josèphe’s station. Their attention to her could come to nothing.

  Nevertheless, Marie-Josèphe enjoyed it.

  Bored and lonely and restless, Marie-Josèphe gazed out into the trees. This far from His Majesty’s residence, the woods grew unconfined. Fallen branches thrust up through underbrush. The fragile swords of ferns drooped into the roadway. Sunset streaked the world with dusty red-gold rays. If she were riding alone she could stop and listen to the forest, to the twilight burst of bird song, to the soft dance of bat wings. Instead, her coach drove into the dusk, its driver and its attendants and even her brother all unaware of the music.

  The underbrush disappeared; the trees grew farther apart; no branches littered the ground. Hunters could ride headlong through this tame groomed forest. Marie-Josèphe imagined riding along a brushstroke of trail, following the King in pursuit of a deer.

  A scream of rage and challenge filled the twilit forest. Marie-Josèphe clutched the door and the edge of her seat. The horses shied and snorted and leaped forward. The carriage lurched. The exhausted animals tried to outrun the terrible noise. The driver shouted and dragged his team into his control.

  The scream of the tiger in His Majesty’s menagerie awoke and aroused all the other exotic animals. The elephant trumpeted. The lion coughed and roared. The aurochs bellowed.

  The sea monster sang a challenge.

  The wild eerie melody quickened Marie-Josèphe’s heart. The shrieking warble was as raw, as erotic, as passionate, as the singing of eagles. The tame forests of Versailles hid the same shadows as the wildest places of Martinique.

  The sea monster cried again. The Menagerie fell silent. The sea monster’s song vanished in a whisper.

  The carriage rumbled around the arm of the Grand Canal. The canal shimmered with ghostly fog; wavelets lapped
against the sides of His Majesty’s fleet of miniature ships. Wheels crunched on the gravel of the Queen’s Road; the baggage wagons turned down the Queen’s Road toward the Fountain of Apollo. Marie-Josèphe’s coach continued toward the chateau of Versailles and its formal gardens.

  “Driver!”

  “Whoa!”

  Marie-Josèphe leaned out the window. The heavy, hot breath of tired horses filled the night. The gardens lay quiet and strange, the fountains still.

  “Follow my brother, if you please.”

  “But, mamselle—”

  “And then you are dismissed for the evening.”

  “Yes, mamselle!” He wheeled the horses around.

  Yves hurried from one wagon to the other, trying to direct two groups of workers at once.

  “You men—take this basin—it’s heavy. Stop—you—don’t touch the ice!”

  Marie-Josèphe opened the carriage door. By the time the footman had climbed wearily down to help her, she was running toward the baggage wagons.

  An enormous tent covered the Fountain of Apollo. Candlelight flickered inside, illuminating the silk walls. The tent glowed, an immense lantern.

  Rows of candles softly lit the way up the hill to the chateau, tracing the edges of le tapis vert, the Green Carpet. The expanse of perfect lawn split the gardens from Apollo’s Fountain to Latona’s, flanked by gravel paths and marble statues of gods and heroes.

  Marie-Josèphe held her skirts above the gravel and hurried to the baggage wagons. The sea monster’s basin and the shroud in the ice divided Yves’ attention.

  “Marie-Josèphe, don’t let them move the specimen till I get back.” Yves tossed his command over his shoulder as if he had never left Martinique to become a Jesuit, as if she were still keeping his house and assisting in his experiments.

  Yves hurried to the tent. Embroidered on the silken curtains, the gold sunburst of the King gazed out impassively. Two musketeers drew the curtains aside.

  “Move the ice carefully,” Marie-Josèphe said to the workers. “Uncover the bundle.”

  “But the Father said—”

  “And now I say.”

  Still the workers hesitated.

  “My brother might forget about this specimen till morning,” Marie-Josèphe said. “You might wait for him all night.”

  In nervous silence they obeyed her, uncovering the shroud with their hands. Shards of chopped ice scattered over the ground. Marie-Josèphe took care that the workers caused no damage. She had helped Yves with his work since she was a little girl and he a boy of twelve, both of them learning Greek and Latin, reading Herodotus—credulous old man!—and Galen, and studying Newton. Yves of course always got first choice of the books, but he never objected when she made off with the Principia , or slept with it beneath her pillow. She grieved for the loss of M. Newton’s book, yearned for another copy, and wondered what he had discovered about light, the planets, and gravity during the past five years.

  The workmen lifted the shrouded figure. Ice scattered onto the path. Marie-Josèphe followed the workmen into the tent. She was anxious to get a clear view of a sea monster, either one that was living or one that was dead.

  The enormous tent covered the Fountain of Apollo and a surrounding circle of dry land. Beneath the tent, an iron cage enclosed the fountain. Inside the new cage, Apollo and his golden chariot and the four horses of the sun rose from the water, bringing dawn, heralded by dolphins, by tritons blowing trumpets.

  Marie-Josèphe thought, Apollo is galloping west to east, in opposition to the sun.

  Three shallow, wide wooden stairs led from the pool’s low stone rim to a wooden platform at water’s level. The tent, the cage, and the stairs and platform had been built for Yves’ convenience, though they spoiled the view of the Dawn Chariot.

  Outside the cage, laboratory equipment stood upon a sturdy floor of polished planks. Two armchairs, several armless chairs, and a row of ottomans faced the laboratory.

  “You may put the specimen on the table,” Marie-Josèphe said to the workers. They did as she directed, grateful to be free of the burden and its sharp odors.

  Tall and spare in his long black cassock, Yves stood in the entrance of the cage. His workers wrestled the basin onto the fountain’s rim.

  “Don’t drop it—lay it down—careful!”

  The sea monster cried and struggled. The basin ground against stone. One of the workers swore aloud; another elbowed him soundly and cast a warning glance toward Yves. Marie-Josèphe giggled behind her hand. Yves was the least likely of priests to notice rough language.

  “Slide it down the stairs. Let water flow in—”

  The basin bumped down the steps and onto the platform. Yves knelt beside it, unwrapping the net that surrounded it. Overcome by her curiosity, Marie-Josèphe hastened to join him. The silk of her underskirt rustled against the polished laboratory floor, with a sound as soft and smooth as if she were crossing the marble of the Hall of Mirrors.

  Before she reached the cage, the tent’s curtains moved aside again. A worker carried a basket of fresh fish and seaweed to the cage, dropped it, and fled. Other workers hauled in ice and a barrel of sawdust.

  Her curiosity thwarted, Marie-Josèphe returned to Yves’ specimen. She wanted to open its shroud, but thought better of revealing the creature to the tired, frightened workmen.

  “You two, cover the bundle with ice, then cover the ice with sawdust. The rest of you, fetch Father de la Croix’s equipment from the wagons.”

  They obeyed, moving the specimen gingerly, for it reeked of preserving spirits and corruption.

  Yves will have to carry out his dissection quickly, Marie-Josèphe said to herself. Or he’ll have nothing left to dissect but rotten meat on a skeleton.

  Marie-Josèphe had grown used to the smell during years of helping her brother with his explorations and experiments. It bothered her not at all. But the workers breathed in short unhappy gasps, occasionally glancing, frightened, toward Yves and the groaning sea monster.

  The workers covered the laboratory table with insulating sawdust.

  “Bring more ice every day,” Marie-Josèphe said. “You understand—it’s very important.”

  One of the workers bowed. “Yes, mamselle, M. de Chrétien has ordered it.”

  “You may retire.”

  They fled the tent, repelled by the dead smell and by the live sea monster’s crying. The melancholy song drew Marie-Josèphe closer. Yves’ workers tilted the basin off the platform. Water trickled into it.

  Marie-Josèphe hurried to the Fountain.

  “Yves, let me see—”

  As Yves loosened the canvas restraints, the grinding and creaking of the water pumps shook the night. The fountain nozzles gurgled, groaned, and gushed water. Apollo’s fountain spouted water in the shape of a fleur-de-lys. At its zenith, the central stream splashed the tent peak. Droplets rained down on Apollo’s chariot, dimpled the pool’s surface, and spattered the sea monster. The creature screamed and thrashed and slapped Yves with its tails. Yves staggered backward.

  “Turn off the fountain!” Yves shouted.

  Snarling, the creature struggled free of the basin. Yves jumped away, evading the sea monster’s teeth and claws and tails. The workers ran to do Yves’ bidding.

  The creature lurched away and tumbled into the water, escaping into its prison in the Fountain of Apollo.

  Marie-Josèphe caught Yves’ arm. A ripple broke against his foot and flowed around the soles of his boots, as if he walked on water. Water soaked the hem of his cassock.

  My brother walks on water, Marie-Josèphe thought with a smile. He ought to be able to keep his clothing dry!

  The fountains spurted high, then gushed half as high, then bubbled in their nozzles. The fleur-de-lys wilted. The creaking of the pumps abruptly ceased. No ripple, not even bubbles, marked the surface of the pool.

  Yves wiped his sleeve across his face. Marie-Josèphe, standing two steps above him, almost reached his height. She laid he
r hand on her brother’s shoulder.

  “You’ve succeeded,” she said.

  “I hope so.”

  Marie-Josèphe leaned forward and peered into the water. A dark shape lay beneath the surface, obscured by the reflections of candlelight.

  “It’s alive now,” Yves said. “How long it will survive…” His worried voice trailed off.

  “It need not live long,” Marie-Josèphe said. “I want to see it—Call it to you!”

  “It won’t come to me. It’s a beast, it doesn’t understand me.”

  “My cat understands,” Marie-Josèphe said. “Didn’t you train it, all those weeks at sea?”

  “I had no time to train it.” Yves scowled. “It wouldn’t eat—I had to force-feed it.” He folded his arms, glaring at the bright water. The sea monster drifted, silent and still. “But I fulfilled His Majesty’s wishes. I’ve done what no one has done in four hundred years. I’ve brought a living sea monster to land.”

  Marie-Josèphe leaned closer to the water, straining to see. The creature was long, and sleek, longer and more slender than the dolphins that cavorted off the beach in Martinique. Its tangled hair swirled around its head.

  “Whoever heard of a fish with hair?” she exclaimed.

  “It’s no fish,” Yves said. “It breathes air. If it doesn’t breathe soon—”

  He crossed the rim of the fountain and stepped to the ground. Marie-Josèphe stayed where she was, gazing at the monster.

  It gazed back at her, its eyes eerily reflecting the light. It extended its arms, its webbed hands.

  Yves’ shadow fell across the sea monster. The creature retreated, closing its golden eyes. Yves clenched his fingers around a goad.

  “I won’t let it drown.”

  He poked the goad at the sea monster, trying to chivvy the creature into motion.

  “Swim, damn you! Surface!”

  Its hair drifted about its face. Its tail flukes quivered. The creature trembled.

  “Stop, you’re scaring it, you’ll hurt it!” Marie-Josèphe knelt on the platform and plunged her hands into the water. “Come to me, you’re safe here.”