CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (25 page)

“The fish are not dancing,” he says. “Now if you must excuse me I must go.”

“I am Hayam,” the woman answers, blocking the door with her foot. “Don’t you remember me, Brother Faris?”

Faris looks closely at the woman. Now he remembers. Her ebony eyes, narrow and bright; and the knitted frown of her forehead. He remembers the way her hand had brushed his as she gave to him the biggest fish.

“I have made something for you,” the woman continues. “May I come in and show you?” Faris nods at the woman and he ushers her quickly in. He is in no mood for visitors but he is curious just the same.

The woman removes a square package she has been hiding behind her back. It is wrapped in brown paper and then secured with jute twine. She hands it to Faris and then looks to the floor.

Inside is a painted canvas; even more colourful than her khimâr. It is of the biggest fish dancing. Dancing high above the fountain. She has caught him in full flight; he is living in the paint.

“It’s just like him,” says Faris, holding the painting out in front. “Thank you my Sister Hayam, I shall hang it in the courtyard.”

The woman lifts her gaze; she is pleased Faris is happy.

“Won’t you join me for some tea? A little thank you for your work.”

“Sorry I cannot. I am already expected elsewhere today.”

Faris is disappointed. “But I would so like to thank you for giving me this gift.”

“Perhaps you can,” Hayam says, nodding her head towards the fountain. “I should like, if I may, to return with my easel and paint all the other fish that live in your fountain. I am a painter as you can see and I delight in painting nature. But of late I have been sad and unable to paint for there has been nothing in nature I have felt inspired to draw. Everything is dying: trees, birds and flowers. These fish are the only things I have seen that have rekindled any sort of desire.”

Faris pauses for a moment and then quietly nods his head. “It is true that I have said that my fish shall dance no more but if they are your one muse then I would be most honoured if you should come.”

* * *

Hayam returns the next morning with her easel and paints. She looks into the fountain. It is sicker than ever. She can barely see the fish; they are slowly choking amongst the weeds.

“Brother Faris,” she says, while rolling two rubber gloves over her jilbâb sleeves. “Would you mind very much if I cleaned your fountain first. I want to paint the dancing fish but I can barely see their golden scales.”

Faris nods his head; feeling the smallest pinprick of reddening shame. “There is a special way to clean it. I will show you how it’s done. As you have seen I have been neglectful. Please accept my apologies.”

“It’s not me you should be apologizing to,” says Hayam, running her gloved finger across the water pool. “It’s the poor fish I feel sorry for, fancy dancing in such squalor.”

“Yes, fancy!” chorus the fish who are listening down below; before breaking out rather boisterously into
The
Hallelujah Chorus
by Handel.

* * *

It takes Faris and Hayam most of the morning to clean the fountain properly. They trim away the strangling weeds and scrape dead algae from the marble walls. They cart away the stagnant water and polish the brass taps until they gleam. Their work is not easy. Their space is confined. Sometimes they brush limbs as they work side by side. Each time it happens and their limbs coincide, the fish feel a charge, a wild current through the water. It makes their tails spin and for a moment they feel giddy; unable to remember anything but the transient flutter of complete joy. This feeling swiftly passes and their grief soon returns but these currents are like nothing the fish have ever felt before.

* * *

At a little after one o’clock the fountain is declared clean and Hayam sets up her easel so she can begin painting once more. The dancing fish are coy at first and hide amongst the reeds. They have never been a painter’s muse before and are not entirely sure what it is they should do. Fortunately Hayam knows exactly how to put the fish at ease and she begins by feeding them bread—not enough to leaden their stomachs but enough to make them surface. Soon the fish are nibbling and growing bolder with each breath; by afternoon they are dancing wildly, more wildly than ever before. They want to delight this painter woman; she makes them want to soar. There is something different about Hayam they have never sensed in a woman before.

By sundown Hayam has finished her first painting and she is ready to return home. Faris wants to admire her work but he is too nervous to be near her. He doesn’t know why he is nervous he just feels it in his bones. Like if he stands too close he will forget how to speak, how to think, how to breathe.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, standing a few feet behind her.

Hayam jumps at his sudden words and drops the paintbrush from her hand. It falls into the fountain; its bristles thick with colour.

The fish watch entranced as the brush drifts to the fountain bottom; leaving a small contrail of vivid colours: orange and yellow; blue, red and green; traces of indigo and of sweet violet too.

It is Faris who retrieves the brush; soaking his tunic to the shoulder. Hayam must be nervous too; to have dropped her brush that way. He feels better for this somehow; knowing she is nervous too.

“Will you come back tomorrow?” he asks handing her the brush.

Hayam nods her head shyly.

They both lower their heads and smile.

* * *

That night as Faris sleeps, his fountain throws a grand storm. Flowers crawl from parched deathbeds to drink its nourishing rain and frogs find their voice again after having been silenced for so long. The rain water is pure again and even sweeter than before. Olive trees have stopped wilting. The rapeseed is turning yellow.

And in Faris Al-Kawthar’s courtyard swim seven orange goldfish who sing jubilant Os as they reel round and round. This time though they are smiling; they are smiling as they sing. For they know when the dawn comes all they will see in the sky is a rainbow of orange and yellow; blue, red and green; traces of indigo and of sweet violet too.

Catherynne M. Valente

“A mirror is an imp that eats light,” the Queen said. “An
imp aligned with the moon, the dark, and women. It is
the nature of silver, both quick and slow. The imp has blue,
veiny wings, and its eyes flash like a cat’s. Its heart has two
parts: one of glass and one of mercury, which are the essential
materials of a mirror. These parts war with one another; the
glass is adamant and the mercury is soft, one cuts and one
absorbs. You can see the results of their war in the mirror itself.
The victory of the glass is in perfect reflection. The victory of the
quicksilver is that the reflection is reversed.”

The Queen closed her knurled, black-gloved hand
around her daughter’s little fingers. She guided the paintbrush
in the child’s grip, its bristles sodden with quicksilver like the
long, braided hair of the moon. Together they made sweeping
strokes over the surface of an oblong sheet of pristine glass.

I.

There is only one mirror. If we can all of us agree on one thing, it is most certainly that. However, from that perfect singularity, our society breaks down into a riot of squabbling angels inspecting the pinhead for minute differences in color, clarity, and metallurgic content. Definite statements of fact, phrased in declarative sentences, draw our wrath and contort it into impenetrable knots of red-faced, sweat-sprung fury. We are a tiresome band.

The essential material of a mirror is glass.
Say you not
, my brother will cry out!
It is silver! It is only that the world has
so poisoned itself that the true substance of the primordial
mirror tarnishes in our foul wind!
My sister will spit at my feet and demand if the first mirrors recorded in Anatolia were not obsidian. Yet another will scoff and extol the virtues of the bronze mirrors of Japan, and call bronze the prime element of the universe. But I am telling this story, and the honor of refracting the angle of the reader’s vision is mine and mine alone. I shall hoard it, and pore over it in the dark.

The essential material of a mirror is glass. Sand, earth, fused self to self: all the world yearns to become a mirror in which the stars might stare. Obsidian, bronze, silver: these things are
reflective
, but they are not mirrors. The first mirror was a marriage of glass and mercury—and no differently from marriages of less pure materials, it shattered.

Ah, but they pound so upon the door of my cell, and demand their sides be told! Have you ever heard of such disagreeable folk? As if this was the first manuscript written from within our hexagonal chambers! As if vellum and gall were so rare as to be hunted across the fields like harts and hares. Leave me be, harridans, ruffians!

One of them enters without permission: Alba the Mercuress, her body wracked by quicksilver into a terrible, alien beauty, as a tree which once bloomed and bore scarlet fruit may, under the influence of winter, gnarl and bend, whiten and warp until it is a bald corkscrew, plashed with red and black where parts of it have died, or given life to some invasive species. So Alba seems to us, we who were spared in the lottery from service in the cinnabar cellars, squeezing the most beautiful of all poisons with a dropper onto perfect glass. She places her ruined, claw-curved hand over mine. Her mouth is so red, swollen and crimson with her peculiar suffering.

* * *

“Sister,” she says, “you must tell all the truth, even the parts which are lies.”

Because she is of my faction, and because she is hideous, I yield.

* * *

“It is my duty as a mother to introduce you to this imp,” the
Queen said. Her black collar shone in the candlelight, high and
forbidding. The child looked up from the newborn mirror, her
face wan and grey, pale as snow, her dark hair lank and limp.

“I’m hungry,” the child whispered.

“Hunger is for beggars and gluttons,” the Queen scoffed.
She extended her ancient, broken hand to the surface of the
mirror, and touched it gently. Out of the silvern surface, a tiny
creature formed, no bigger than a thimble, with delicate, spiky
wings and flashing eyes. It had breasts, furred with frost,
dripping with quicksilver like mother’s milk, and a tail,
shivered already and covered with fractures like crushed ice. It
grinned; its teeth were perfect and straight, mirror-sheened,
reflecting the faces of the old woman and the young woman
thirty-two times. The Queen pressed her finger to her daughter’s
and tilted it upward. The imp slowly, hesitantly slid from one
hand to another like a ladybug passed between children.

II.

There are three schools of thought as to the nature and origin of the original mirror.

The first, and oldest, and therefore the most respectable and first to the dinner table, is that the earth was once a flat disc—there was a kind of truth in the poor, befuddled Church astronomers’ assertions. When the dark was young, the earth was a flat disc. The sunward side was pure glass; the moonward side was mercury. Upon the glassy surface, folk lived in the fashion of Laplanders: they spun fur hoods from the fine glassy reeds that grew beside rivers of lugubrious molten crystal. They rode upon massive, shaggy tigers of quartz whose pale pelts drooped to the limpid steppe. They hunted the hyaline mammoth whose tusks were stained glass of a dozen colors, but the cobalt cows were most highly prized, shaking their prodigious heads at the silver sun. Those were days of innocence, of pellucid joy.

On the mercurial side of the world, another tribe dwelt on an endless sea of quicksilver. They lived in the manner of ancient Hawaiians, on ships of cinnabar, which stone floated still hither and yon upon the silver sea, remnants of some antediluvian birth—for cinnabar is the native rock that gives life to mercury like a scarlet womb, as all men worth their flesh know. With red oars and red hulls they moved through the black winds of the moonward side of the world, spearing the great vitreous whales what moved in silence and long thought within the mercurial tide. In those untroubled days, quicksilver had no poisonous quality, for it did not yet know how to harm.