by Sonya Taaffe
Chion rippled like a reflection in stone-struck water; headache thumped into the back of her skull, jolted a sound of pain from her mouth. The walking stick clattered out of his hand. Groping for the wall, her fingers dragged through his pelt-soft hair, and he made a noise that was all protest. Her shoulder hit a heavy fold of tapestry, a chisel-scarred roughness that would take all the room’s lights like snow if she could see it. Beneath dust-choked cloth, Sam felt the stone, ungenerous, reluctant, buckle inward and into itself.
“Sam, don’t—” Darkness that eddied like oil on water, that smelled of flowering decay, dissolution and generation, cut off his words. She was burning cold, her sweat-soaked turtleneck suddenly stiff with congealing salt; she felt herself rising toward the surface of brick and razor shadows like a sleeper from dreams, a swimmer from deep and arctic water. Just before she broke surface, she realized that she was no longer holding Chion’s wrist.
She did not know how to turn, in a place with no directions; how to shout, in a place with no air; she slammed out of the wall onto hands and knees, small pains against the ironworks in her head, onto broad planks that years and bare feet had worn silken, with a grain as fine as wave-settled sand.
Within her reach, arms drawn up tight around his knees and his head bent over them, Chion huddled in his weather-beaten coat. The noises he made might have been tears, or retching. When Sam pulled herself into a crouch, all the small bones in her spine glittered with pain; she knew no stories where travelers to the otherworld threw out their backs, and the thought would have amused her except that Chion raised his head.
His face hurt to see: sickened, shaken, all defenses scattered like the leaves of his hair. Quicksilver, crushed. She said, her voice shrunken by his pain, “Why didn’t you come with me?”
Beneath its tea-brownness, his face had turned a curdled, pale color. The scar stood out like a signature. “I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t—cross over. I can’t even see over. I could stare at that wall until my eyes fell out and I’d see nothing more than marble and curtains. Even Mimiko couldn’t, though Remembrance always swore he could see a kind of track in the air where you’d gone. Peire tried to cast for you, once or twice, to see if we could tell when you’d arrive. She never got anything, just a mess of stalks and stones.” He swallowed audibly. “We couldn’t figure out what you were.”
Words from another reversal: what she should have spoken to him, the man in whose arms she had lost, or laid aside, or shared her virginity. Nineteen years old, and Chion scarcely two years older; Mimiko had found them wrapped in one of his perpetual winter coats, tucked into an arch of ivory-colored stone beneath the sky that dazzled so blue it was almost violet, daystars pricking out a web of greater and lesser lights above the afternoon skyline. The warm air had smelled of cinnamon and snow. Crows black-winged against the brightness. Someone practicing an instrument that sounded like a cello, persistently and inexpertly, somewhere in the great terraced honeycomb of stone. Even under Mimiko’s absentminded, overlapping mockery, Sam had imagined that she might stay there, that way, forever: so much stranger and easier than scholarships and dormitories and phone calls from her father. That year, and ten years after. The only thing ordinary in a world full of arcana.
She was not crying. She did not know why this surprised her. “You never said.” Blankly, as though her brain and tongue had parted ways, “The stories are full of people like you.”
“No.” He was recovered enough to tilt one dark-copper brow at her, weakly. “The stories are full of people like you.”
Walking on the blindside, she had always called it: because no one else ever seemed to notice, the thin places in the world that were like neon and magnets to her less than invisible to everyone else. With both eyes, she had seen him; and never seen him at all.
“Your eyes,” Chion said, dreamily and acidly. “Your hair. If those were the price even to glimpse half a second, half a shadow of somewhere else—suns, I’d pay it in a heartbeat. Less. Are you mad? Your child would be blessed.”
Easy for him to say, who wanted and paid nothing. Who had not found, sluicing off soapsuds in the shower, the birthmark that had tattooed itself around one ankle, dapples as random as watered silk and delicately charcoal-grey; who had not woken from a nap to find that the piercings in his ears had healed over while he slept, and punched them anew with a needle heated over the stove’s gas flame; whose children would think a skyful of scattered suns natural, and never startle at seeing them wink like heat-haze among early-morning skyscrapers. Sam raised one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose hard, halted the gesture to look at the candlelight flicking warm sparks from the band of plain gold on her fourth finger.
“You promised to spoil my wedding,” she said slowly, remembering. “If I married anyone besides you. Years ago you said that, and I was still actually worried, waiting for you to show up. Lucas had to promise he’d personally beat up anyone who stood up in the middle of the ceremony, even if it was his grandmother—you’d like him, I think. So I thought you knew. You swore….”
“I know, I know: oak, ash, thorn, and bone. I know.” Rueful and shyly defiant, a glance across the no longer incalculable space between them, “I boasted.”
“I believed you!”
“Well.” The familiar smile like a lick of flame across his dark face, slowly gathering color and confidence back to itself like the sun kindling in a burning-glass, refractions in a prism. “That will teach you.”
Once she might have kissed him, to take that smile from his face. Now she leaned her head back against the draped wall, immovable as belief, as friable, and laughed. “So,” she said softly, when even her smile had faded, “you can’t stop it.”
“No. I am sorry.” Cross-legged with his back to the rusted clepsydra that had run dry years ago, its tall brass mechanism set with the enameled faces of planets and stars, houses of the heavens and wandering orbits, no zodiac of Sam’s sky, Chion laid his walking stick across his lap and looked her over. Head to foot, the usual differences and the odd; tabulating, and perhaps not caring. Sam returned his scrutiny: her stranger. Not hers. She had never asked what Lucas saw, when he looked at a river, or a sunrise, or her. Perhaps she should look more closely. Perhaps she should ask: and hope that, whatever beautiful monster might look back from her mirror in time, Lucas’ eyes were better than her own.
Chion’s face was quiet, considering. Over her shoulder, as she rose to her feet and began to look again through molecules and void with her eyes as bright as limes, secondhand sight, Sam said, “Just hope that the kid inherits from me. Because this will be sad all round if she never gets to meet her godfather.”
Both, and he had laughed in the same wry surprise. Standing again among frost and bare-branched shadows, Sam thought for a moment that she could still hear him. But she looked back and saw only sunlight, moving like a maze on the unremarkable brick.
NOTES TOWARD THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE LESSER MOLY
This small, rhizomatous perennial draws the most attention with its flower, whose five petals overlap to form a conical whorl up to ten centimeters in diameter. The leaves are simple, lanceolate, and waxy; the sepals are fused into a calyx often indistinguishable from the petals in shade. Coloration varies from butter-white to a snowy translucence, but the most common hues have been compared to milk, quartz, and cumulus cloud. Traditionally, Lesser Moly has been identified through this contrast of pale blossom with tar-black rhizome and roots, but few examples have been harvested in the wild: the plant is most often observed only from the ground up.
**
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Magnoliopsida
Order: Solanales
Family: Solanaceae
Genus: Moly
Species: Moly cretensis sorleii
**
In the half-century since its initial discovery, Lesser Moly has been found only and sporadically on the slo
pes of the Lefka Ori in Crete, where it seems to favor dry forest, natural or man-made groves, and shadowed crevices in the mountain rock. Claims of wild moly on islands of the Aegean archipelago, as well as the Eptanisa and the western coast of Italy, remain unsubstantiated; Lesser Moly in the UK has been successfully hothouse-cultivated since the early 1990’s.
**
So he spoke then, the slayer of Argos, and he gave me the drug
he had pulled from the earth, and showed me its nature.
It was black at the root, but its flower was like milk:
the gods call it moly, and it is harsh for mortal men
to dig up, but the gods can do everything.
—Odyssey, 10.302–306
**
However romantic, it is not inaccurate to claim that the Lesser Moly is perpetually in flower. Late in the autumn, it will produce a single satiny fruit enclosed within a colorless husk, but once the papery husk has withered and the white fruit either fallen or been picked, another flower will bud almost immediately from the calyx. Reports of Lesser Moly in bloom beneath the winter snows on Psiloritis have yet to be properly confirmed.
**
Old and younger Gods are buried or begotten
From uprising to downsetting of thy sun,
Risen from eastward, fallen to westward and forgotten,
And their springs are many, but their end is one.
Divers births of godheads find one death appointed,
As the soul whence each was born makes room for each;
God by God goes out, discrowned and disanointed,
But the soul stands fast that gave them shape and speech.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Last Oracle”
**
Although unconfirmed until 1954, the Lesser Moly was first noted and described by British serviceman and amateur naturalist Eldon Sorley (1915–1989) in the winter of 1942.
He had been deployed with his battalion to Pireás in March of 1941; transferred less than a month later from the shades of Thermopylai to the mazes of Crete. The details of Sorley’s life remain obscure even in his private journals, but shortly into his first few weeks in Heraklion he made the acquaintance of a young Cretan named Andonis Mavromichalis, whom he would later and evocatively describe in his memoir The Telegraph Key and the Atom Bomb (London: Cassell, 1962) as “fleet-footed and wicked as a young Mercury, who could have posed for Phidias…Hellas, full of ghosts that talk and statues that breathe—the present peopled with the past.” Such sketches as survive from this period show more in the way of orange trees, goat-flocks, and olive groves than statuesque young men. Nevertheless, in June of 1941, when Crete fell to the Germans and the majority of British troops were evacuated to Alexandria, Andonis Mavromichalis and his two brothers became partisans in the mountains of Crete—and so did Eldon Sorley.
Nowhere in his official or personal communications from Crete does Sorley mention the plant that he would name, in reverence for its Homeric forerunner, the Lesser Moly. Pages in his journal, however, are filled with delighted and nearly emotional speculation about the dazzlingly white flower he had spotted in the cave-cracked walls of Therissos Gorge. “There is cyclamen springing from the rocks, and anemones like twilight-coloured poppies in the sway of the heat, and oxalis in the dust of the roadside where boots and cart-wheels pass—flowers and rifles—sorcery, the lightning-strike and all is changed. The talisman. It is not that the old gods no longer walk on Parnassus and Ida; rather the gods are rooted and in all places, the leonine stones, the olive-leaves. Genius. Numen. As it was before there were prayers. We are not immortal.”
These last four words, underlined so blackly that the pencil has snapped, stand at the head of a sheet of cheap paper pasted into the last pages of Sorley’s journal: creased with dirt and pencil lead, dog-eared, so often unfolded and refolded that it has begun to tear softly along its origami lines. Here, in his characteristic style, hard and delicate and less photorealistic than memorial, Sorley has meticulously illustrated a flowering plant. For all his interest in the natural world, the solidities of leaf and branch, earth and bone, his gods-in-place, the naturalist was not without a religious education, or at least a spiritual one. Where the cleft limestone trails off into a smudge of graphite, his rapid, capitalized handwriting reads, Noli me tangere.
Andonis Mavromichalis died early in 1943, under circumstances as unspecified and perhaps inevitable as the life of any partisan. Of all the sketches, naturalistic and otherwise, that Eldon Sorley brought with him on his return to London in the late autumn of 1944, one alone may feature him—a dark-haired, solemn-eyed youth face-to-face with his own double, whose traveler’s hat and staff mark him as the wayfarer’s patron, the guide between worlds, Hermes. The god’s hand is outstretched; Mavromichalis appears about to take it, or perhaps take something from him. The other side of the paper contains notes and a half-formed illustration on pomegranates. “We commended his soul,” Sorley wrote of his beloved companion, “to the land that had inherited him—the feuds, the Furies, and the imperishable earth.” He himself died on Crete in the summer of 1989, an old man hiking in the foothills around Chania. His private papers have since passed to his granddaughter and the British Museum; among them were discovered the aforementioned drawings and a small, dirt-stained bundle made from a handkerchief and ancient, frayed twine. Carefully unwrapped, the package disclosed its contents: the mummified fruit-husk, as frail and shaded as rice paper; the dried and wizened pearl of the fruit, still nacreous around its seed; and the broken-off, blackened rhizome, glimpsed out of its native earth for the first time in uncounted centuries. Given a little soil and sunlight, it flowered by morning with the heavy, luminous, inward-spiraling blossoms that mortals have died for, that have brought men safe home, across the sea, out of enchantment, over and over again from the wars.
ANOTHER COMING
death’s angel is my cousin but I never said
he was my favourite relative
—Phyllis Gotlieb, “Doctor Umlaut’s Earthly Kingdom”
Rain was still falling when she stepped off the tracks, walking the old railroad under a sky like newsprint too sodden to read. Down a bank of gravel and clinker, small scraping crunches underfoot as Acacia stepped carefully in the slick weather, the cool slanting mist that clung in her hair and made her skin feel clammy, spongy as something drowned; she could not wipe it off. The air smelled of earth, dark and chill, and faintly of smoke and iron. Freight echoes, from a time when these rails and ties had rattled daily under flatbeds, sleepers, ores and travelers stitching cities together; but the stitches had come out and only steel scars remained behind for Acacia to walk the right of way, a small tight-shouldered figure against the stingy trees, malt-colored hair trailing out of its braid and her eyes a little warmer than the wet bark around her in the cloud-melted light. Her stomach hurt, turned over and in on itself; she put both hands in the pockets of her long coat, Leo’s borrowed oilskin, away from the insistent feeling of something minute and irretrievable—a fleck, a grain, pearl-grit—lodged deep within her flesh. A riddle in nine syllables. She would need several more to explain this.
Here the trains’ cargo had come, where the trees gave onto a yard of scabbed asphalt and the buildings that had stood cold for longer than Acacia had been alive. Some abandoned industry, the shell and skeleton of a steel-driving age: high brick walls and each grid of close-set windows cracked inward or outward, cloudy glass still clinging in the frames like old ice, panes of glaucoma; skylights fallen in around the steel braces, flat stretches of tarry gravel for the remaining roofs and some of the gutters still copper and sallow green. Even the company’s name, high on one time-blackened face of brick, had worn off over the neglected decades; ground to illegible traces of block-lettered paint, replaced by graffiti, ivy, and the amorphous scripts of lichen and acid rain. Acacia had never seen anyone else inside, though sometimes she found the leftovers of trash-barrel fires below the catwalks and flaking presses, the detrit
us of bottles and cans as everpresent as dust or oxidation. Only Quince, or Leo, or herself: footsteps in oil stains and shadow, disturbing a country of obsolescence and rusted memory.
Quince was smoking under the scant overhang of a loose gutter, birch-bleached hair shaved down to pinfeather fuzz and her eyes half-closed against the shapeless, watercolor light. Black raincoat wrapped to her knees, heeled boots strapped and buckled mid-calf, she made an incongruous package among the corroded, autumn-colored wreckage: one foot angled up against the rain-worn bricks, the other planted in weeds and ash-brown grasses; rain dripped past her shoulders and she turned her head slightly at Acacia’s approach, no more movement anywhere than that, no more sound than the wind dividing itself through broken teeth of glass, empty doorways and the spaces where stairs used to be.
“I thought you might have come out here first.” She dropped her other foot to the ground and came forward just enough to meet Acacia: a needless, neighborly gesture. All the bones of her face were exact, fluid, fared into one another as adroitly as joinery or etching, expressions done silverpoint on her pale skin. She moved in a cloud of cloves and old burning, like incense in the matte folds of her coat and her fine, close down of hair where rain glittered now; under the smoke, her skin gave off its own edged musk that made Acacia think, not unpleasantly, of civet cats and other predatory, perfumed creatures. “Every now and then, I’m wrong. But you’ve made me right, now that you’re here yourself—what have you done with Leo?”
