by Kai Meyer
He looked at Eft for a few seconds longer, then whirled on his heel and snarled a series of orders to his subordinates, who immediately began to relay the captain’s wishes to the crew through a speaking tube that reached to the farthest corner of the submarine.
Clean up, the command was. Clean and dust. Remove rust and polish. And then, Calvino ordered, the art treasures that had collected in one of the lower cargo areas over the course of the years should be distributed to the walls and the remaining sound glass cabinets. And woe to him who still dared to do anything to them with charcoal or knife tip!
Finally Calvino gave the former mermaid a crooked grin. “What’s your name?”
“Eft.”
He bowed gallantly, overdoing it a little, but his good will was evident. “Rinaldo Bonifacio Sergio Romulus Calvino,” he introduced himself. “Welcome aboard.”
Eft thanked him and then, no longer able to suppress her grin—the captain seemed to be a little frightened by it—she shook his hand and finally went over to the two boys. Serafin and Dario were still standing there with mouths agape, unable to grasp what had just happened.
“How did you do that?” Serafin asked softly as they left the bridge, followed by Calvino’s benevolent gaze at Eft’s backside.
Eft winked at Serafin. “He’s only a man too,” she said with satisfaction, “and I still have the eyes of a mermaid.”
Then she hurried ahead to supervise the work of cleaning up.
They reached Egypt the next day.
Nothing had prepared them for what they saw as the submarine rose to the surface. Ice floes floated on the open sea, hundreds of yards away from land. The closer they came to the white coastline, the more obvious it became that winter had descended on the desert. No one understood what had happened, and Calvino had his men pray three Our Fathers to protect them all from tritons and sea devils.
Serafin, Eft, and the others were just as mystified as the captain and his crew, and even Lalapeya, the silent, secretive Lalapeya, declared without being asked that she had not the least idea what was going on in Egypt. Without doubt, such an outbreak of winter had never happened before. Ice floes along the desert coast, she explained, were about as usual as polar bears dancing on the tips of the pyramids.
Captain Calvino gave the order to measure the thickness of the ice layer at the bank. Barely more than three feet, it was soon reported to him. Calvino growled ill-humoredly to himself and then conferred with Eft on the bridge for a whole hour—as with every conversation between the two, there was a lot of shouting, terrible curses, and finally a yielding captain.
Shortly afterward Calvino had the boat dive, and they ran into the Nile delta beneath the ice sheet. The great river and its tributaries were not deep, and it required some skill to maneuver the boat between the ice and the river bottom. Sometimes they heard sand grinding under the hull, while the fin-shaped upper projections of the boat’s hull scraped along the ice layer. It would be a miracle, raged Calvino, a goddamn miracle if no one noticed them with all this racket.
Most of the time they moved forward at a walking pace, and Serafin began to wonder where they were heading, anyway. The witch’s commission had been to set them down on the coast—and now Calvino was voluntarily taking them farther inland, and furthermore, under conditions that were worse than any of them could have imagined. Eft’s influence on him was amazing.
The interior of the boat was already gleaming in many places. Everywhere there were sailors busy with cloths and sponges and sandpaper, painting and varnishing, tearing up old carpets and replacing them from the resources of the overflowing storage holds. Many of the stowed objects had lain there for decades, some perhaps since the privateering expeditions of the previous owner, long before the beginning of the mummy war. Even Calvino appeared surprised at what came to light, art treasures and magnificent hand-work, such as hadn’t been seen for a long time. He became more and more aware, Eft told Serafin, that he’d been imprisoned for too long in the brass world of the submarine and had forgotten to value the beauties of the upper world. Which of course didn’t keep him from roaring around like a berserker, screaming at his men, and handing out draconian punishments for overlooked dirt streaks and flakes of rust.
Serafin had a vague feeling that Eft liked the pirate captain. Not the way she’d worshipped Arcimboldo, and yet … there was something between the two of them, an absurd love-hate that amused Serafin and at the same time disconcerted him. Was it possible for two people to come closer under such circumstances? Had it been that way with him and Merle? The recognition that they’d spent less time together than Eft and Calvino during the short journey filled his mind. He began to doubt that Merle thought of him as often as he thought of her. Did she miss him? Did he mean anything to her anyway?
A horrible grinding and cracking brought his musings to an abrupt end. It didn’t take long before Calvino bellowed out of the speaking tube and, with a string of oaths, informed them of what had happened.
They were stuck. They had run aground in the pack ice of the Nile and could go neither forward nor backward. The iron fins of the submarine had eaten into the ice cover like a saw blade and plowed a lane for a distance of several dozen yards, then became hopelessly wedged in.
Serafin feared the worst and hurried to the bridge. But there stood Calvino and Eft calmly beside each other in front of the windshield of the boat, looking out into the waters of the Nile beneath the ice layer. The witch’s fire bubbles had remained back at the coast, but the vague light beams that shimmered through the ice were enough to reveal the most important thing. Through the windshield it looked as if the submarine was stuck under the white ceiling of an indistinct hall. Icicles as thick as tree trunks hung down in front of the window.
It turned out that Captain Calvino was by no means as undisciplined in an emergency as Serafin would have expected. He took account of all the facts, conferred with Eft, and then gave the order to open the upper hatches of the boat, so that the passengers could climb out.
Climb out? thought Serafin in horror. Had that really been Eft’s advice? To simply set them down in the middle of this desert of ice?
An hour later Eft and Lalapeya, Serafin and Dario, Tiziano and Aristide stood ready at the hatch, enveloped in the thickest fur clothing that could be found in the pirates’ storage hold. Calvino remembered that the things came from a grounded schooner whose crew he’d annihilated at the beginning of the war. The ship had been on the way to Thule in Greenland, there to load heaven-knew-what in exchange for the warm clothing on board. The jackets, boots, and trousers did not fit any of them—Lalapeya, especially, with her petite body, was at a disadvantage—but they would be enough to protect them from freezing to death. Finally, each put on a shapeless fur cap and slipped both hands into padded mittens. From the weapons room the pirates handed each of them revolvers, ammunition, and knives. Only Lalapeya refused weapons.
Calvino stayed behind with his men to watch the boat and to try to free the top fin from the ice. He thought that it would take many hours, perhaps even days, and the fear of being discovered by the Egyptian sunbarks was clearly written in his face. Although Eft did not ask him to, he promised to wait for three days for a sign of life before he returned to the open sea.
“Where are we going, anyway?” Tiziano morosely said aloud what they’d all wondered a dozen times already.
Eft stood beneath the open hatch that led to the outside. The white circle framed her head like a frozen halo. Her eyes were fixed on Lalapeya, who looked anything but happy in her much-too-large fur clothing. Serafin also inspected the sphinx, and once more he wondered what moved her to keep on accompanying the desperate group. Was it really only hatred for the Empire? The loss of the dead sphinx god who had rested for centuries under the cemetery island of San Michele and whom she had tried in vain to protect from the Empire?
No, thought Serafin, there was something else, something unspoken, which none of them knew anything about. He could feel it
as clearly as if the eyes of the sphinx were saying it to him.
“Lalapeya,” said Eft. Her words sounded almost festive. “I take it you know where we are. Perhaps you’ve known the whole time that the first part of our journey would end here.”
Lalapeya said nothing, and as much as Serafin tried, he still found no answer in her silence. She confirmed nothing, denied nothing.
Eft went on, “Not far from here, in the middle of the Nile delta, is the fortress of the sphinxes. The mermaids have no name for it, but I think there is one. The captain knows this place, and if the onset of winter has done nothing worse than cover everything with snow and ice, it must be two or three miles from here, at most.”
“The Iron Eye sees your living, sees your strivings, sees your dying,” Lalapeya recited, and the words sounded to Serafin like a saying from a distant past. The sphinx had passed entire epochs alone in Venice, but she had not forgotten the culture of her people. “The Iron Eye—that’s the name you’re looking for, Eft. And yes, I can feel it. The closeness of other sphinxes, many in one place. It’s suicide to go there.” But the way she said it, it didn’t sound like a warning but like a confirmation of something that was unavoidable anyway.
“What are we going to do there?” asked Aristide.
“It’s the heart of the Empire,” said Lalapeya instead of Eft. “If there is a spot where one can injure it, it’s there.” She said nothing of a plan, perhaps because there was none. The stronghold of the sphinxes, no one doubted, was impregnable.
Eft shrugged, and Serafin thought again about what she had said to the sea witch: that they had to begin somewhere if they wanted to oppose the Empire. That a victory could also lie in small things. Her words had never been out of Serafin’s head since then.
But what would it help if they all died doing it? It was as if they were going to run against a wall of their own free will in spite of the certainty that they couldn’t even inflict a scratch.
He was just about to give voice to his doubts when he felt Lalapeya gently touch his hand. Without anyone else noticing it, she bent toward his ear and whispered, “Merle is there.”
He stared at her, dumbfounded.
Lalapeya smiled.
Merle? he thought, but he didn’t dare to put the question. If Dario and the others knew of it, they would accuse him of being involved in this business only because he wanted to see Merle again, not because he believed in their higher goal. Good, he thought, they should follow their higher ideals; he, anyway, knew why he was really doing it, and his motives didn’t seem to him any less honorable than theirs. They came out of himself, from his heart.
Lalapeya nodded to him, barely noticeably.
Eft’s voice made them both look up at the hatch. Serafin had the feeling he was perceiving everything blurrily, the surroundings, Eft’s speech, the presence of the others. Suddenly he was burning to climb up to the outside.
Merle is there, he heard the sphinx say again and again, and the words flitted through his head like moths around a candle.
Eft had not stopped speaking, giving instructions for how to manage in snow, but Serafin scarcely listened.
Merle is there.
At last they set out.
BACK TO THE LIGHT
“I CAN FEEL IT. WITH EVERY STEP. EVERY TIME I TAKE A breath.” Junipa kept her voice low so no one except Merle could hear her. “It’s as if there’s something in me … here, in my chest … something that pulls on me and drags me as if I were on a rope.” Her mirror eyes turned to her friend like the signal fire of a lighthouse: silvery light behind glass. “I try to resist it. But I don’t know how long I’ll be able to do it.”
“And you can remember everything that happened in the pyramid?” Merle was holding Junipa’s hand and stroking it gently. They were sitting in the farthest corner of the Czarist spies’ hiding place.
Junipa swallowed. “I know that I tried to stop you. And that we … that we hit each other.” She shook her head in shame. “I am so sorry.”
“You couldn’t help it. It was Burbridge.”
“Not him,” Junipa contradicted. “The Stone Light. Professor Burbridge is just as much under its control as I am—as long as he’s down there, anyway. Then he’s not the scientist he used to be anymore, only Lord Light.”
“And it’s better for you up here?”
Junipa considered for a second before she found the right words. “It feels weaker. Maybe because it’s stone and can’t penetrate the stone of the Earth’s crust. At least not completely. But it isn’t gone. It’s always with me, all the time. And sometimes it hurts quite a lot.”
Merle had seen the scar on Junipa’s chest after they climbed out of Hell, the incision through which Burbridge had had a new heart inserted—a splinter of the Stone Light. It was now reposing, cold and motionless, in her chest cavity, keeping her alive as her real heart had done before, like a glowing, sparkling diamond. It healed her wounds in a very short time and lent her strength when she was exhausted. But it also tried to force her under its control.
When Junipa said that it hurt, she didn’t mean the pain of the operation, the scar. She meant the pressure to betray Merle another time—the fight against herself, the inner strife between her gentle ego and the icy power of the Stone Light.
And as much as the thought pained Merle, she had to be wary of what Junipa did. It was possible that she’d suddenly stab them in the back a second time.
No, not Junipa, Merle thought bitterly. The Stone Light. The fallen Morning Star in the center of Hell. Lucifer.
She was silent for a moment, and then she spoke about a thing that had been on her mind for a long time. “What you said there, in the pyramid …”
“That Burbridge claimed to be your grandfather?”
Merle nodded. “Do you know if that’s true?”
“He said it, anyway.”
Merle looked at the ground. She opened the buttoned pocket of her dress and pulled out the water mirror, stroking the frame with the tips of her fingers. Her other hand felt for the chicken’s foot, now dangling on a cord around her neck, absently playing with the small, sharp claws.
“More soup?” asked a voice behind them.
The two girls turned around. Andrej, the leader of the Czarist spy troop, had sketchily washed the gray color from his face and wore just a part of his mummy armor. He was a tough, grim man, but the presence of the girls brought out a friendliness in him that seemed to amaze his four comrades.
On the other side of the low-ceilinged room, the men were still standing around Vermithrax, their wooden soup bowls in one hand, the other repeatedly stretching toward the obsidian lion’s glowing body.
They didn’t know that he’d plunged into the Stone Light. In contrast to Junipa, it had gained no power over him. Merle found that strange, but so far she hadn’t been able to observe anything disquieting. Since then Vermithrax had been stronger, even a little bigger than before, but aside from his body’s lavalike glow, he had not changed. He was the old, good-natured Vermithrax, who now, despite all his concern for his people and his hatred of Seth, was enjoying the admiring attention the Czarists offered him. He basked in their questions, their timid touching, and the respect in their faces. They’d all heard of the stone lions of Venice, even of the few that were able to fly. But that one of those lions was able to speak like a human and, in addition, radiated light like one of the icons in the churches of their homeland—that was new and fascinating to them.
Junipa refused the soup that Andrej offered them, but Merle let him fill her bowl again. After all the days of nourishing herself on tough dried meat, the thin broth seemed like a delicacy to her.
“You do not have to be afraid.” Andrej misunderstood the fact that they were sitting in a corner, separated from the others. “The sphinxes will not find us here. We have been here almost six months, and so far they have not once noticed that we exist.”
“And you don’t find that strange?” Merle asked.
&nbs
p; Andrej laughed softly. “We have asked ourselves that a thousand times. The sphinxes are an ancient race, known since the beginning of time to be wise and clever. Do they only observe and tolerate us? Do they feed false information to us? Or are they simply indifferent that we are here because we have no chance of sending our knowledge home anyway?”
“I thought you had carrier pigeons?”
“We did indeed. But how many pigeons can one keep in a place like this before someone notices them? The birds were used up after the first weeks, and there was no way of sending us new ones. Therefore we are only collecting—in our heads, not on paper, nothing is written down—and soon we will return to our homeland. Thanks be to the Baba Yaga.”
He gave the girls an encouraging smile, and then he went back to the others. He respected the wish of the two of them to be alone.
“He’s strange, don’t you think?” said Junipa.
“Very nice,” said Merle.
“That too. But so … so understanding. Quite different from what you’d expect from someone who secretly traveled halfway around the world and has been hiding in his enemy’s stronghold for half a year.”
Merle shrugged. “Perhaps his mission has helped him to keep his sanity. He must have seen a lot of bad things.” She indicated the other spies with a somber nod. “All of them.”
Junipa’s eyes wandered from the Czarists over to Seth, who was sitting near the entrance, leaning up against one of the mirror walls. In his bound hands he held a drinking bowl. His ankles were also bound. Had Andrej known who his prisoner really was, he would probably have struck off his head without hesitation. Even if Vermithrax might have agreed thoroughly with that, Merle thought it was wrong. Not because it was unreasonable and quite certainly not because it was undeserved, but she hoped that Seth could still be useful to them. And this time the Flowing Queen shared her opinion.
“Are you going to try it again?” asked Junipa, when she saw Merle’s fingertips moving from the frame of the water mirror over the surface.