CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (26 page)

Thus the great Edenic mirror was itself the world, and those who dwelt upon each side could not see one another. But the nature of paradises is to be lost, and it happened that a sunsider called Koh rode so far in his pursuit of a blue mammoth that he came to the edge of the mirror-world and looked over, into depthless space—and into the eyes of Tain, a moonsider who had pursued a glass-boned whale so far that she too reached the extremity of her universe. This would not be a very long story if they did not fall in love, and so they did their duty by narrative, coming together as it is the natural desire of glass and mercury to do, the one flowing over the other, until the end of time. But Tain could not bear the hard, bright land of the sunward side, where light reflected over and over in the great crystal mountains until she was blinded by it. Koh for his part could not bear the liquid moonward side, where no firm land was to be had, save at the center, the pole, where the mercury froze into a jagged peak where only a few brave pioneers made their homesteads in towering whale-rib barracks.

Being young, they could not simply resolve to meet and mate but once a year in the manner of logical agrarian folklore. Instead, Koh, determined to make his home one in which Tain could smile, traveled to his favorite spot, a grove of glassapple trees in which loons keened, low and long. Tain, no less stubborn, sailed to her favorite shallows, determined to find a way to bring up sweet, clear land for her lover. Koh plunged his spear through the crystal earth, and Tain dove into the thick silver water, piercing the seabed with her own cinnabar harpoon at the same moment. They were true lovers: their timing was perfect, and the points of their weapons met precisely, the strength of their blows identical, the places they had chosen lying one on top of the other.

They broke the world between them.

Mercury erupted into glass and glass exploded into mercury. The stars cried out and the perfect disc warped, bending and breaking, shattering over and over, down to its most secret core. It collapsed into an orb (the first school is somewhat non-specific as to the physics of this,) and the glass shivered into a billion grains of sand, and the mercury hid itself away within the stone once more. Thus, all the mirrors of the world are smelted from sand which once belonged to the perfect, unified mirror of the ancestral world. More importantly, every mirror remembers having been a world, and longs to be one again.

In grudging acknowledgment of her contribution to such few pleasant things as this fallen world has to offer—wine, roasted pheasant, tobacco—the silvered side of a mirror is still called the Tain.

* * *

The child trembled.

“I have known this creature all my life, daughter,” the
Queen said. “It binds me to the mirror, but it also binds the
mirror to me. Together, we have accomplished extraordinary
things. Beauty, yes, but also power, for there is no power so
great as the ability to reflect a thing—or a person—back to itself
as it truly is, naked, unvarnished—and just slightly skewed.
Women and mirrors made a bargain in the beginning of the
world. The mirrors eat our light; we use theirs.”

“I don’t want to,” whispered the child.

“You do not have a choice. You are my child. How many
times did I ask the mirror when I would have a daughter, a girl
like me, to love and to punish? The imp promised you to me,
and I promised you to it. I have already told it that it can eat
your heart, like a huntsman devours a deer’s.”

The child shuddered and began to weep. The imp stirred
on her finger. Its voice was like glass grinding to dust.

“Don’t cry,” it said. “In a plane mirror, parallel beams of
light change their direction as a whole, yet remain parallel.”

III.

The second school, which is the second oldest, holds that a thing cannot exist without a maker. Now, you and I may know that that is silly, but very learned men have said it, and their beards are so long that we are required to listen politely while they blather on about clocks or else to cut their beards in their sleep, and they are very light and cunning sleepers.

Thus it is clear, according to their beards, that Abd-al-Qadir, an orphan child who lived deep in the catacombs of Edessa, feasting upon rats and hedgehogs, accomplished a great and monstrous thing in the autumn of ——. Like most orphans, the mind of Abd-al-Qadir was a magpie-mind. Edessa was at that time a vibrant outpost in the silver trade, the long and winding trail that led from the Caucasus to China and back again like a necklace-chain. My brothers are correct at least in that silver was once an immutable metal, like gold. In the world before factories vomited sulfur into the air, silver never did tarnish, but glowed with an unearthly, moon-bright sheen through years stacked end to end. Into the dark skirts of Edessa many silver baubles dropped, and the quick hands of Abd-al-Qadir snatched them all. Earrings and buttons, knives and egg-cups, hair-combs and thimbles, spoons, signet rings, coins, hatpins, brooches, shoes, bells, umbrella-handles, false eyes, false teeth, false noses. Abd-al-Qadir lived in a perpetual rainfall.

In his hovel beneath the city, the child became obsessed with his treasures. It is a sign of his peculiar genius that it seems never to have occurred to the young master that he could have bought himself a house on the highest hill with all that silver. It was not a house he was after, so houses did not exist for him. Instead all his soul bent towards the silver, poring over it in the dark, pressing it to his cheeks, sleeping on a bed of discarded wonders like an infant dragon.

My bearded brothers must, in their canonization of the young Abd-al-Qadir, explain the fact that the archaeological record clearly shows mirrors extant well before the incident in Edessa. Some few of the objects the orphan-saint collected must, in fact, have been hand-mirrors.
Think not on them
, they snort.
They are mere pre-figurations of the great work to come.
A mirror is more than gross reflection.
And if that much is true, it does not mean the rest of their argument must follow. But you see how they argue, and how oppressed we all are by their clumsy, toothsome hippopotamus-logic.

So it came to pass that Abd-al-Qadir grew dissatisfied with his many treasures, and built a great fire in his sub-urban cavern. Day and night he stoked it with rubbish and refuse, and by and by it became hot enough to melt silver. Into a great pot went earrings and buttons, knives and egg-cups, hair-combs and thimbles, spoons, signet rings, coins, hatpins, brooches, shoes, bells, umbrella-handles, false eyes, false teeth, false noses. And not a few hand-mirrors. Abd-al-Qadir stirred his witch’s brew in silence, staring into the shimmering soup. When he judged it complete by some unguessable internal gauge, the child tilted the pot to his lips and drank it down, to the last drop, the silver scalding and burning him, an agony beyond my ability to imagine. My bearded brothers would say he wished to merge with the silver, to become more than flesh, to ascend, an apotheosis of metal and bone.

I think he was a lonely child, and could not bear to be parted from his toys.

It hardly matters, I suppose. From that moment Abd-al-Qadir ceased to be human in any reasonable way. His skin grew hard and sharp, his features smooth. When he finally ventured into the streets of Edessa, the market crowd drew back, and then drew in again to peer into his perfect body, to see themselves reflected in his skin, the boy who had become a mirror. He was feasted and feted at all the fashionable houses; women took him to bed, men took him to tutor, which is much the same thing. He remained placid through all these attentions. He did not eat, nor drink, nor ply his own kisses over attared flesh. He received only, and reflected his lovers back to themselves, as is the nature of a mirror. But with every dove killed for his sake, every grape crushed, every spasm of pleasure spent within him, he grew, and the expanse of his mirror-flesh widened.

When Edessa was besieged—not the famous siege, but one of the many others to which a city steeped in silver is prone—the gargantuan mirror that had once been a child named Abd-al-Qadir set the enemy ranks ablaze when he turned towards the sun. But soldiers are canny, and a mirror is only glass, after all. A shower of arrows shattered the surface of him, his breast and his knees and the smooth depressions that had once been his eyes. In the looting of Edessa, the shards were prized higher than diamonds, and the caravans carried them far across the world. In all the lust for enchanted glass, no one could be expected to notice a small silver skeleton, blackened as if burnt, huddled against the broken walls of the city.

The second school believes that all mirrors extant today are shards of the primordial mirror of Abd-al-Qadir, and must be guarded and protected as one would guard and protect a beloved child. The shards yearn to be brought together once more, to be kissed and feasted and feted, to receive the adoration and plenty of a nation of attentive lovers. Through their beards, they pant with anticipation.

* * *

“I feel sick,” said the child. Her dark hair hung around her
sallow face.

The Queen nodded. “You are becoming a woman.”

The imp danced a little on the child’s finger. “No one can
devise tortures like a mother,” it said. “It will only get worse.”

“I feel as though my ribs are being squeezed by corset
stays drawn too tight,” the little girl whispered.

IV.

The third school, the newest and most avant-garde, holds that the mirror did not originate on this terrestrial sphere at all, but on a planet orbiting the star known as Shedir, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, bathed in the blue light of sixteen moons. These iconoclasts have no beards, and therefore no one listens to them, or sits with them at lunchtime. But we must be understanding of the ridiculous, or else how will they grow up to be the venerable?

It is said among these motley backbenchers that the society of Shedir’s single habitable planet once utilized light as currency. Fishwives with cobalt skin and ice-clung loincloths harvested a certain substance from the bed of the great violet sea known as
aln,
which was much like our glass, yet pliable as a soap bubble. Within orbs of this substance the light of any of the moons could be trapped, or the cool white rays of Shedir, or even candlelight as soon as it left its tower of tallow. The rarer the light, the more valued the orb which contained it. The whole of this strange world was obsessed with light, its capture, its use, its philosophy.
Does light have
a will?
asked the sophists of Shedir, passing among them an aln-goblet of what we might call walnut-wine.
Does it
experience pain?

Unlike the sophists of our own world, and I daresay unlike the sophists of the third school, the thinkers of Shedir were ambitious. They worked for years upon end to build a ship which could travel to the aln-beds, the source of that strange stuff in which light allowed itself to be caught, captured, loved. I suppose they might have asked the fishwives, but if they had I should not have the opportunity to explicate absurd theories of dubious academic merit, so it is all for the best. Their ship was a wonder of trilobite shell, pressurized hydraulic mechanisms of pure gold, and the nacreous swim-bladders of a certain species of marine serpent that once flew the pale skies of Shedir before growing bored with aether and returning to the sea. Stunted, vestigial wings the color of new snow still adorn their black bodies, and the sophists fashioned those hoary, spined wings into passable rudders for their machine.

And so the ship of thinkers descended to the depths while the fishwives stood on the pier in their loincloths, smoking ruefully and taking bets on how many of them would drown. Into the black the ship sped, illuminating the darkness with lanterns in which the captured light of the seventh and greatest of the sixteen moons swam and gurgled. They passed over the oft-harvested and artificially seeded aln-beds, traveling faster and more urgently into the black and frigid sea until they came upon the deepest virgin aln of the uttermost ocean floor. The bed was a vast mirror, the glassy stuff lying against the black rock, and showed the extraordinary ship gliding over its surface in a thousand faceted dimensions. Finally, the doctors of philosophy ventured outside in shimmering suits of oiled, no-longer-flying serpent skin, which kept their extremities warm and did not buckle under the pressure. Stretching out their arms, they touched their fingers to the most secret deposits of aln.

Their hands, so says the third school, passed through the aln-bed and into this world.

At this point in their lectures, most of us make our excuses.
I seem to be out of pickle-relish
, or,
can I freshen
anyone’s tea?

But they are so very earnest, and that is why, despite all, we love the adherents of this school, who believe themselves to be descended from those selfsame philosophers of Shedir, who dragged behind them the whole of the virgin aln-bed, and thus brought mirrors with them into our world, and along with that great submarine mirror, some few fragments of light from a far-off star, seen through miles of violet sea. Thus, they say, every mirror that hangs on a wall or is closed up in a drawer, is descended from the gargantuan aln-mirror of old, just as they are descended from the exiled thinkers—does not their skin look a little blue, they ask, in this light? For as the tain of a mirror does not reflect, they could not pass through again and return home. But the third school retains hope—if but the right angle could be discovered, or the glass of a mirror removed while keeping the mirror itself intact (for in their scrambled cosmology the glass is really the tain and the tain the glass) then they might step through and find themselves in the ice-bamboo forests of Shedir once more, and hear the song of the equatorial winds through the stalks.

They say a little girl by the family name of Liddell managed it once, through a mirror on top of a mantle in her house outside London sometime in 1865. She brought her cat with her. This proof is usually met with thrown bread and protestations that popular fiction is not, in fact, the basis for sound science.