The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (45 page)

The white skin of Jambres, the Cretched Man, peeled off in blood-tinged traceries, long thin translucent strips that floated into the rigging and out to sea.

He wept, a naked man, brown-skinned, his hair tight-curly, his eyes their original brown. Jambres was the Cretched Man no longer. He shook and his knees almost buckled, but he regained his strength. Fire was in his eye. Billy took off the blue scarf Cook had knit him, and then his own shirt from his back, and gently laid them around Jambres’s shoulders. Tom fetched a coat to cover the rest of Jambres’s nakedness.

Maggie shouted, “Behold! The Owl’s command has miscarried! Jambres has returned to himself, against all hope—a sea-wearied yet proudful spirit has won against a cold heart’s bitter scoring! Selah: he has irrigated the salt-acres with his blood. The springs of the Goddess run in him, our Jambres!”

All the humans roared and cheered.

The Owl and his confederates were furious, yet only briefly nonplussed. Strix boomed louder than the human cheering. With malicious irony, he sang a subtly twisted version of “The Song of Faustus”:

“Surely your instruments mock me:

With cylinders, wheels, cogs, and teeth

You push upon the door,

Deftly you wield a key ingeniously wrought.

Yet still no lock will yield

Its mysteries fraught,

No screws or levers will suffice

To open the portal, not above, not beneath.”

The Owl’s Wild Hunt swarmed tightly around the two ships, singing arias of incarceration, their wings beating a rhythm of submission, of retreat, of denial. Those onboard could barely stand, let alone sing.

Again Maggie shouted from the bow of the
Indigo Pheasant
.

“Strix, wormlet!” she yelled. “We are not daunted, we who have survived the gaunt dwellings between, who have within us the mightiest melody heard since God and Goddess composed the very first notes!”

The half-fallen legions pressed down upon the choir boats, wings like whips and hatchets, eyes like acidulous lamps.

Maggie yelled, “Strix! Hoary hollow worm you are! By our song shall you be thrust through with a dart, and we shall have the government thereof. Goddess has given me leave to tell you that ‘yet once more I shake not the Earth only but also Heaven.’ Beware!”

The circling demi-angels slowed slightly, listening despite themselves, their barbed and brazen tongues slowed.

“You—who once knew seraphic bliss, who long ago half-turned away—you are here congregated for the assassination of hope and the rape of valour,” said Maggie, in a voice that compelled human, animal and angel alike to listen. “
Chi di
, there is yet time for you too! The City of God and Goddess has here and now, on the cope of these waters and the rim of this air, under your creaturely shadows and also ours, conurbated anew.”

The winged hordes listened, as they had not listened to a human more than a half-dozen times before in the entire history of the mortal species. They muted their voices, and made their flight more random.

“By Heaven amerced, thus yourselves paying a heavy penalty,” said Maggie. “But perhaps one day even such as you may be called home, your melancholy exclusion ended.”

The half-angelic chorus fell silent. Around the two ships, the motley hundreds flew on their cold wings, making a sound of rasping wind but otherwise giving no voice, lost each in antediluvian yearning and a secret hope so long submerged the Watchers could scarce give it a proper name. One by one they looked to Strix.

Strix, longest innocent of mercy and most adamant in his cruelty (even when he most injured himself), hoomed and half-sang, “Onward! Do your duty! This one, this little songbird, has no special insight, let alone authority! She paints a vision of freedom and return she has no right to make, and cannot call into reality. Attack, attack!”

Hardened as they were to the dictates of their own fate, most familiar with the portolans of grief and accustomed to the eyeless towers of penitence extracted, the Owl’s army resumed its assault on the choir boats.

“Dorentius!” yelled Maggie. “Now, Dorentius! The Fulginator, Dorentius!”

Dorentius manipulated levers, knobs and rods. The Great Fulginator hoomed in its turn, a series of bass notes that rolled through the sea. The whales echoed it back. The Great Fulginator, amplified by the energy produced by the steam engine, began the Great Song.

“Billy, Billy Sea-Hen!” yelled Maggie. “Let the Sons and Daughters of Asaph sing!”

One hundred and twenty-eight men and women, each wearing an indigo-coloured arm-band, neck kerchief or head-scarf, burst into practised song. They sang the opening recital of the oratorio.

“Mei-Hua!” yelled Maggie. “Afsana! Sally! Malchen!”

The four women sang as one, the first aria.

So the battle was fully engaged. As Milton wrote elsewhere, “such music before was never made.”

The music surged backwards and forwards, inwards and outwards, roundwards and pointwards. The cantata of opening and emancipation held sway for a while, until the Owl rallied a counter-song, a strident tone of closure and locking. So it went, with ripples of theme and counter-theme spreading across Yount and into the Interrugal Lands and other places besides.

Strix flew down until his long tail brushed the bow of the
Indigo Pheasant
. He glared at Maggie, just below him. He exerted all his power. His voice was a gale that buffeted the ships, driving them back almost into the interstitial crevices. The Widow Goethals and all the other warden-spirits hail-sang the weight of lead and copper, the stillness of antimony and the chill of iron onto the ships, beating down those onboard, smothering the human voice.

But Maggie stood as others faltered and fell to their haunches, some weeping, some unable to do more than moan. Charicules flew to her shoulder. Isaak stood between Maggie’s legs, all four paws gripping the deck.

Maggie sang then the main theme from “Saint Macrina’s Dream.” Mei-Hua, Afsana, Malchen and Sally harmonized.

Maggie sang to the theophanous rhythm of the Great Fulginator. Charicules bent and worried the line of that rhythm. (The Fulginator strained, but its casings of china clay withstood the stress, and the blood of James Kidlington lubricated the threads of the vast machine.) Maggie hit the notes designed to open the door, notes founded on the universal calculus of liberation and the geometry of the spirit.

She sang.

She sang forth.

Invected, her notes bore inwards.

Reflected, her notes flew outwards.

With her song, she re-set a part of the universe.

Suddenly, the gilt-edged clock on the mast of the
Indigo Pheasant
moved ahead by seven minutes.

--

--

At that moment, the same thing occurred on clocks everywhere.

Sir John Barrow peered up from his meeting as the ornate clock in the conference room at the East India House on Leadenhall Street chimed out of sequence . . . and leaped ahead seven minutes.

--

--

Two sharp-faced men—“Mr. I.” and “Mr. Z.”—in an unnamed office at Admiralty looked up (most unusually, they were startled) when the ormulu clock flanked by ebony hippocamps did the same.

--

--

Cook and her niece jumped when the clock in the partners’ room in the house on Mincing Lane gonged out of normal reckoning. “Most unnatural that is,” said Cook, eying the clock with great suspicion. “Something’s amiss or I have grown wings for ears.”

--

--

The Termuydens in the Last Cozy House had perhaps some inkling of the cause of their many clocks simultaneously ringing and displaying a time that made no sense.

--

--

The lawyer Sedgewick was bringing tea to his wife in their house near Pineapple Court when he heard the clock go off irregularly. He puzzled over that and was not relieved to learn from many others of their identical experience. “
Fallaces sunt rerum
,” he said to himself. “The appearances of things are deceptive.”

--

--

All over London the rooks fled their bell-towers as the clocks rang at the wrong time. Everyone in the streets looked at the clocks with wonder. Many shouted that the bells presaged the end-time. Panic whispered in ears, anxiety beat a drum in scared bellies. Yet Londoners are nothing if not resilient and they soon resumed their normal rounds. After all, no one had been hurt, and no commercial transactions had been voided as a result, so most people ultimately thought of it as nothing more than a freak episode like sleet falling in July or tulips blooming in December. A few said they were certain the giants on the Guildhall clock had been the cause of all the strangeness, but—as the giants were manifestly still at their stations by the clock—little more could be said on that score.

In one house in London—a wry, half-seen pile just off Hoxton Square, empty of people but full of presence—a long-case clock (with macabre vignettes on its face and sententious proclamations written around its dial) reverberated for nearly an hour and the hands twitched and bucked repeatedly before settling on the new normal time.

--

--

In the House of Design, Saint Macrina waved her hammer and chisel in the air and shouted when the four brass-figured clocks, each one atop a column, each column at one point of the compass, moved ahead together.

--

--

The clock on the column above the garden of the Mother answered to the change more serenely, making a sound like a flute as it advanced the seven minutes. Goddess put down her knife and fork (she was in the pavilion, enjoying a dish of hara masala), laughed heartily and long, and slapped her hands on the table so the cutlery jumped.

“Little daughter has done it,” said Goddess. “And found my husband too, I do believe! Well done, little eagle!”

--

--

(Incredibly far away, the notes Maggie sang chimed from a pocket-watch carried by God, waking him from his self-imposed amnesia. His companions, fellow musicians in a Harlem jazz-loft in 1928, forgave him for the interruption during their jam session. “That’s a cool riff,” said one. “What do you call it, Lennox?” “Man, I don’t know,” said God, holding up his pocket-watch. “But I am just dying to find out.”)

In the seven minutes no longer recorded on the clocks of Yount and Earth (and who knows where else besides?), Maggie’s song changed the world. The Great Fulginator opened the gate, freeing Yount from its abandonment in the interstitial regions. With the delicacy of an oystercatcher prising forth the most valuable pearl in the world and the diligence of a master-chef removing a souffle from the oven, the Great Song as enhanced by the Great Fulginator gently transported Yount . . . back to Earth, from where it had been ripped millennia earlier.

The Owl bellowed his rage in vain. He and his troops dwindled. The Great Song shoved Strix and the other Watchers back through the window sliced in the sky, sent them to ponder their defeat while gnawing bones and viscera atop their timeless pillars.

Seven minutes of blinding light passed, shot through with shafts of utter darkness. There was no sound whatsoever. Music needs silence to exist: point and counterpoint, upbeat and downbeat, inhale and exhale. The Great Song propelled the
Indigo Pheasant
and the
Seek-by-Night
through a corridor shrouded in the Ancient Silence that preceded the First Fugue, with the music as their conveyance and their protection. They carried behind them the entire sub-world of Yount, all its several countries, its archipelagos, its surrounding seas, all its people and buildings, all its flora and fauna, encased in the bubble of its life-giving atmosphere.

Seven minutes after Maggie sang the notes of freedom, Yount slid with barely a wave or surge onto the surface of the Indian Ocean. Hardly a cup fell from a cupboard, scarcely a window was cracked or tile broken, so soft was the arrival of Yount. As if it had never been gone, displacing nothing, Yount re-rooted itself to the sea floor. Yount had returned to its original position, where it sits today: a series of islands stretching from just south of Sri Lanka west towards the Maldives, southwest to the Chagos chain, northeast towards the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and eastwards almost to the coast of Sumatra.

As sound returned (like a mild curtain of rain, and undergirding all a distant hum, like bees plying a meadow), all those on the
Indigo Pheasant
and the
Seek-by-Night
laughed and cried, sang and prayed. They bathed in the warm sunlight washing the choir boats rolling on the swells of a calm Indian Ocean. They dove into the sea to swim with the dolphins. They kissed and made love. They drank and they ate. For that day and night, Heaven held court in the Indian Ocean.

Exhausted, Maggie had to hold on to Jambres through most of the celebration.

The other McDoons similarly said little, spent from their exertions as they were. They sat together, smiling in disbelief and from sheer joy.

Only Barnabas, revived somewhat by a glass of Burgundy and the last of the Mejouffrouw’s gingerbread cookies, could muster more than a sentence or two.

“Beans and bacon, she sang the Owl right out of the sky, she did! Had right at ’im, just like Rodney with the French. Better than! And so did my daughter—if only I could know her better—the bold Afsana! With Tom, who has lost his fingers but found all the courage in the world (he had better, haha, if he is going to keep pace with Afsana!). And our poor, sweet, shattered Sally. I grieve so for her in the middle of all this festivity. Really, what shall we do there, Sanford?”

Sanford put a hand on Barnabas’s shoulder and said only, “As we have ever done, old friend, we will love her until we die. More we cannot do.”

Barnabas paused a very long time before saying, “You are right, of course. Cook will help us there.”

A little later, after another glass of the Burgundy, Barnabas said, “So here we are: Yount collected and brought home. A fairy tale, only more so, because it is real and we are in it. D’you hear, Sanford old friend? We helped make some history. Invented—well,
she
did—a machine that roped a world. Remarkable! If my uncle could just see us now. No, not him, brrrr,
Quatsch
! But my mother, the Belladonna born Brownlee! This is her kind of story entirely. She’d be proud of us all!”