Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (30 page)

The other source I dip into with great regularity is the work of Edgar Allen Poe. Numerous references to him and his stories pepper many of my novels, and
The Stone Mage & the Sea,
from which this story is excerpted, is no exception. “The Butterfly Merchant” relies on the same themes of obsession, murder and guilt as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, which was first published in 1843 and is regarded by many as one of Poe’s most important stories. I admire it for many reasons, and the following sentence is just one of them:

“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.”

I have no doubt that Poe the writer was thinking of more than just murder when he wrote that line.

~ * ~

THE BUTTERFLY MERCHANT

There is a story from the times before the Change about a man who sells butterflies. His name is Polain, and his home is a metal and glass city larger than any built before or since. There are many things to do and see in the city, but the butterflies he breeds are counted among the most beautiful. Buyers come from all around the world to purchase them, confident in the knowledge that every one is unique. For that is Polain’s Guarantee: never once will any of his creatures repeat a pattern. No two sold by him will ever be alike.

At the time of the story, his butterflies inhabit vast glasshouses, with temperature and humidity kept constant by machines the like of which we have long lost. Unnumbered eggs are laid, caterpillars hatch, pupae are woven and butterflies emerge, limp and fragile, into their new world. Yet, for all this activity, Polain’s output has dropped steadily as his fame has grown. The more butterflies he sells, the more difficult it becomes to be absolutely certain that each is a true individual. In order to maintain his guarantee, he keeps a record of every one—detailing the number of spots, the shading and hue of colours, the precise shape of the wings and antennae, and the total mass at maturity. The records are voluminous. After beginning with a humble stall and a small stack of notebooks, he now has three separate rooms full of records next door to the glasshouses, and he employs five clerks to maintain and conduct searches through them. Sometimes it takes more than a day to ascertain that a single promising butterfly is indeed one of a kind. Literally one in a million.

His output may have dropped, but demand has only increased. Butterflies live far shorter lives than their fanciers, and in their world of glass and steel little else of true colour remains. As word spreads that Polain’s handiwork is scarce, it increasingly becomes a sign of prestige that one should possess an example of it. Polain can ask more and more for each creation and people will still buy. As his clientele have become richer and more discerning, his sales have dropped to a handful a month, then a handful a year. Long gone are the days when he would sell butterflies by the jarful on a street corner to anyone who passed.

Yet, strangely, he misses those days. He is as proud of his success as he is tired of the endless checking and re-checking. When the time is right, he plans to retire and go back to breeding butterflies for enjoyment, not profit. One of his competitors can take his place—and good luck to them. No-one will ever be as great as he has been; no butterflies will ever equal his.

~ * ~

The opportunity to retire comes in the form of the queen of a distant and powerful country, due to visit the city in a matter of weeks. He publicly announces his plans with a promise to present her with the last truly unique Polain butterfly in the world. It will be his final masterpiece, and he will devote all his efforts to its creation. The queen will take it home confident in the knowledge that she is carrying a piece of history. Nothing like it will have existed before. That, after all, is his Guarantee.

And so he sets to work, mingling strains in time-proven ways in some glasshouses and cross-breeding new strains in others. Hungry caterpillars devour leaves by the million, swarming in green and brown tides across veritable forests. Thousands of butterflies are born and die with a shiver of wings, their individually inaudible rustlings adding up to a cacophony, deafening the feeders who tend them and the clerks who study them, seeking uniqueness. It is a symphony to Polain’s ears. He will make a butterfly fit for a queen, no matter what it takes. All he needs is one to go in the special bell-shaped jar he had constructed for it.

Just one more.

Yet that simple task turns out not be as simple as he thought. From all the millions he breeds, beautiful though they are, the last unique one eludes him. Too many have matches in the catalogues. Some are beautiful in ways that excite the casual glance, yet are subtly flawed, or do not mate well, or die too young, sickly and weak from in-breeding. As time passes, Polain stays longer and longer in the glasshouses with the feeders and clerks, pacing up and down through the feather-soft fluttering and seeking, always seeking, for the one he knows must come. If it doesn’t, he will be humiliated in front of everyone—the queen, the people of the city, his competitors. He can’t have that.

The deadline approaches, and the fear of failure mounts in him. What if the right butterfly
doesn’t
come in time? What if he has exhausted every possible variety and no new ones remain? What will he do? He cannot use the Change to make the one he wants, since that hasn’t come into the world yet, and he wouldn’t dream of substituting a fake—a butterfly modified in order to present a unique coloration. No matter how clever a forgery it was, it would be revealed under the eager gaze of his competitors. He would be ruined in his finest hour.

All too quickly the appointed time looms. His sleep is filled with nightmares: he is mocked, taunted, jeered at as he arrives at the queen’s reception holding in his hands nothing but a dry and dusty moth.

Then, with just two days to spare, Polain is inspecting the butterflies in one of his auxiliary glasshouses when he spies an empty cocoon with unfamiliar spiral markings. The cocoon is paper-thin and grey in colour, except for the spirals which are soft pink. Polain raises it to his nose and sniffs: it has only recently been vacated. The butterfly that crawled from it can’t be far away.

He searches the branches and ground nearby. If he finds it in time, it will still be hardening its wings, anchoring itself against a stone or a twig to practise fluttering before joining the great throng above. Polain creeps carefully through the enclosure, wary of stepping before he has made absolutely certain that nothing is underfoot. His heart beats a little faster as he thinks:
Maybe this is the one. Maybe at last, at the last minute, my search is over.

When he sees it, perched on a branch with its wings upraised, still soft from birth but beating the air with increasingly sure strokes, he knows. Its colouring is pale green across its abdomen and thorax. Its antennae have an orange hue with yellow highlights and are curled in a tight spiral. Its wings are black, deepening to blue around the edges, with a subtle cross-hatch pattern in silver visible only as the light reflects off them. In the centre of each wing is a single, pure white circle.

Polain has never seen its equal. Backing away, wary of startling it, he calls hoarsely for the butterfly feeders. Sensing his excitement, they come running. One of them has the forethought to bring a silk net. Polain snatches it from her and swoops up the butterfly with a swing more delicate than a gentle breeze.

He cradles the captured butterfly in both hands and takes it to the main enclosure, where a special habitat has been prepared and kept ready. There, the specimen is examined for flaws and signs of ill-health. None are found. It is weighed and its markings are recorded. The clerks dive into the vast bookcases of catalogues, following themes of shape and hue in search of a match. This is the most nerve-wracking time for Polain. All he can do is wait impatiently for word to come that his venture has been in vain. It is too late to breed another with it in the hope that a similar but unique creature will result. And the chances are vanishingly small that another will be born in the one day remaining. It is either this butterfly or none at all.

The night passes sleeplessly. Still no word comes. He joins the clerks at dawn to supervise their work and promises them substantial bonuses if they work without rest until they are satisfied. Midday comes, and the queen’s departure is only hours away. One of the clerks declares in exhaustion that he is sure that, judging by the shape of its wings, the butterfly is unique. Polain sends him home, relieved to a small degree but still anxious. Two hours pass, and another clerk, specialising in abdominal markings, similarly declares satisfaction. She too is dismissed with thanks. The third and fourth clerks—wing markings and head/limb composition— are certain by five o’clock that their work is done. Only then does Polain begin to feel anything like joy. These two clerks are sent home with smiles and a shot of liquor burning in their bellies. Just one remains, an elderly man specialising in the relatively small field of antennae.

With just two hours left, Polain hurries about the business of preparing the butterfly in its presentation jar, dressing himself in his finest suit and composing a short speech of thanks—to the queen, for accepting the gift, and to the people of the city, for buying his butterflies in the past and permitting him the indulgence of his vocation. Without them, he might have been a street-sweeper or postman or something as insignificant. Instead, his name will be known forever as the greatest butterfly breeder who ever lived.

As he puts the finishing touches to his bow-tie and his speech, a soft knock comes from the entrance to his chambers. When he opens the door, he finds the elderly clerk waiting in the hallway outside.

“What?” Polain snaps, angered by the interruption to his train of thought.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Master Polain,” says the clerk, “but I thought you should know immediately. I’ve found a match.”

Polain’s heart freezes. “No, that’s impossible. The others are satisfied, and I myself don’t recall another butterfly like it. How can it be?”

The elderly clerk holds a large book open in both hands. He raises it as he explains: “I too thought I was certain until I happened across an obscure morphology in an old record—one of your own, sir, made before I joined you. A tight, clockwise spiral not dissimilar to the one we have before us.” He indicates the glass-bound butterfly, which flaps its wings innocently. “I followed the record backward, through several generations. The chances were slim that I would find one with not just the same antennae but the same colouring, shape, legs and features—but I did, sir. Here. I’m sorry.”

Polain looks down at the open book with something approaching horror. There, sure enough, is a picture of a butterfly identical in every respect to the one in the jar. A note in his own handwriting refers to its purchaser, a banker from a neighbouring province who had paid a fraction of its true worth many years ago, before Polain’s name had become known. The butterfly may have only lived a day or to in the hands of such an ignorant carer, but it
had
lived. That is the important—and tragic—thing. There is no escaping the fact.

“I’m sorry, sir,” repeats the clerk. “I can’t imagine how you must feel.”

“No,” says Polain. “You can’t.” He takes the book from him and considers smashing it down upon the glass jar and its fragile occupant. Such has his life become. One hour remains until the presentation— until failure and ruin, public humiliation and mockery. Despair fills him.

Or ... need it be so? Polain’s mind seizes a possible solution. Yes, an identical specimen had once existed, but who knew of it? Its owner had been no-one in the butterfly world; such a man would never remember a token bought for a lover or mother so long ago—and even if he did, who would believe him? The chances are exceeding slim that the butterfly itself has been preserved—and if it hasn’t been, there is no evidence at all. The remains would be nothing but dust, worn down by time.

Polain decides to present the second butterfly to the queen anyway—and accept the accolades of the crowd—confident in the knowledge that his deception will go undiscovered.

There is only one problem.

“What are you going to do now, sir?” asks the clerk.

Polain looks at him with cold calculation. The record he can destroy as easily as tearing it from the book and throwing it in the fire. But the clerk knows the truth, and he will not be easily bribed. Money and prestige are not important to him. A man obsessed with antennae associates only with those like him, when he associates at all. He will let the secret out before long. It is inevitable. And who would miss a man with such an obscure fascination?

Polain resolves himself. He has to get rid of the clerk, otherwise his plan, and his life, will come to ruination. It is the only way.

So he does. Polain kills the clerk and goes to the presentation. The queen accepts the butterfly with a gracious smile and the crowd farewells him with a loud cheer—although neither matches his expectation. The queen smiles far wider at the thought of going home, and the crowd cheers more for the fireworks and streamers than him. Even his own heart, he must confess to himself, isn’t really in it. He is already planning how to dispose of the old clerk’s body by burying it in the soil of the various glasshouses.

He leaves behind the gaily-coloured pennants and goes home to finish his work. He dismisses the other clerks and the feeders to prevent his grisly deed being discovered. He burns the treacherous record and catches up on his sleep. Soon, he promises himself, he will be alone with his butterflies. He will be content then. Breeding has always been his first love, not the endless competition and cataloguing. With no need of money, he will be happy for the rest of his life, once the unpleasantness is forgotten.