Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  What had he expected to find here, at the very end of his search? A despot? An ensconced Lucifer? A pathetic creature stared up helplessly from the chair. Its mouth was a formless hole, its features lost in the ruin of its face. Candlelight flared as the door splintered. The ships tossed in the cauldron behind him and their breached cargoes swirled in dense choking clouds. The creature was trying to rise but the arms would not support its weight. Septimus plucked the lamp from the wall and held it to the creature’s face. François rocked frantically in his chair. Was this what he had come for? The souls were howling inside him. Outside, the Furies crashed blindly against one another. He had come so far and travelled so long, surely there must be more than this miserable crippled being? But the souls had no doubt. They were baying inside him and even if the match which lit the tinder under Rochelle were struck a hundred leagues distant, this creature’s were the hands behind the fire. This was their betrayer. The creature’s head was turned and its eyes shut tight, for they could not look on Septimus. Still he wavered before the act. The souls grew quieter, then stilled and his mother’s face was formed again. The dark halo ringed her features. The lips moved. Kill him. But it was not enough. The creature before him was not enough. The souls were too many, the balance too heavy. The Rochelais would not find their settlement here. Yes, her words cut across his thoughts. For them too, but most of all for us. For us, my son. He is our betrayer first…. He saw his mother lurching forward, her children already lost to the flames. Now, more than at any time he wanted the empty vaults of the sky, the clear air. Our betrayer first…. But how? How could that be? The creature was whimpering. He weighed the lamp in his hand and looked to the swirling powder-keg outside. You know who he is. His arm came back to send the fatal flame forward, but he did not know. The creature waved its arms and his mother’s face was a flaming prophecy of the explosion already gathering in the antechamber. The candles flew forward as her eyes burned brighter and her lips moved at last in answer to his consuming question. He is your father….

  X-axis to y, the Lemprières are journeying apart, each along his diverging vector, higher into the sky and west over the ocean’s expanding surface. Septimus Praeceps Lemprière recalled the creature in the chamber, the true pseudo-Lemprière, who abandoned his wife and children to the furnace, who forgot the burning detail which blazed a path out of Rochelle that night, who lived to see it return and find him at the labyrinth’s centre, now his grave: François. Septimus saw his father’s body drowned in the rising flood, incinerated in the Furies’ fire, crushed beneath the earth’s dark tonnage as the Beast crumbled and consumed itself beneath the city. His mother’s face faded as a different light eclipsed the fires in her eyes and now there was only sky between himself and the place of settlement. He had wavered between earth and air long enough. The Rochelais stretched away in lines to either side. His wings were decked with departing souls which clung to them and fluttered there, pulling him from side to side and up as though he were the ball of a rising pendulum. The air rushed over him in waves and he flew headlong along shallow speeding curves that climbed with every swing towards the point of stillness at their ends, a swelling polar moment which held, then broke apart and fell gliding along the answering arc. He rose as though the pendulum were being drawn higher with every swing. Lost souls crawled on the surface below and to his ancestors and proxies, the possible versions he had not become, to Lemprière, he gave his thanks and farewells, atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale…. The air lay in sheets which curved and broke as he swung higher and the arcs unfolded in a rising zig-zag, the smile of an alligator, the ascending steps of the ziggurat on whose topmost level there is no god but only yourself, the end, a chain of z’s thrown down from the sky’s platform and offered as a testing ladder to the preterite below.

  Your father…. The familiar voice called inside Lemprière’s head for the last time. The breaches through which the old ghosts had poured were stopped up. The walls were restored and he was safe within them now. Suddenly the boat lurched. She was swinging about and heading toward the coast once more. Lemprière leaned with the yaw and heard the water rush against her sides as the right bearing was taken up and held. The wind blew against them but they still made progress, tacking west into the channel. Juliette had dropped the book as the turn was made and leaned forward now to retrieve it. Her presence was a mystery to him. Waiting on the jetty, he had tried to think how she might appear but no vision had come. She had sprung from nowhere with only the story of Septimus’s intervention to carry her to him. Why had he done that? He remembered their final meeting. In his room, Septimus had blustered and rambled while he, Lemprière, had placed the last elements of the puzzle in place. Lost in his own unfolding mystery he had paid Septimus little mind. A jumbled appeal, something, friends of a sort. But friends? Why that? In a minute he would catch Lemprière as he slumped to the floor and deliver him to the men he had served in secret all along. After that the pretence would be plain. Why should he care for friends? In the wheel-house above him, Captain Radley held the wheel and the Vineeta ploughed on. Juliette had picked up his dictionary and was searching through it. He watched her as the pages turned and his days in the city flashed by. She had returned, but it might not have been so. There were other paths possible through the streets and passages that night, hundreds of routes and axes which only led away from one another. Yet they had met, and Lemprière offered a silent vote of thanks to Septimus. She was beside him, holding up the last page as before, asking the same silent question of the blank page he had left for the final entry. He had known he would remember. As he opened his mouth to speak, Captain Radley signalled once again to the crewman at the mast.

  ‘….,’ answered Lemprière as the boom came over and swept the last word over the side, ‘… it was a surname of Juno, when she presided over marriages.’ The Vineeta swings about and Septimus sees her course double back. From his rising station above, Lemprière and Juliette are casual travellers in the boat which tacks to starboard and port, her wake serrating the ocean’s surface NNE to SSW as the homeward course unfolds. The preterite have become the elect. His own gliding arcs rotate in congruence with the narrow angles of the boat below and their cusps cross and climb the perpendicular whose vertex is Septimus. The pendulum swings and spins and rises. The still moments at the ends of each curve touch the points of a helix which climbs with him and crystallises in the freezing aether to form a rising corridor. Above him, the sky is a darkening eye with a furnace for its pupil. He looks down and sees their craft clinging to the very edge of an ocean. He moves higher with every swing and the ocean shrinks as though the earth is sliding west to east beneath him. The broad Atlantic basin contracts to the Mediterranean, the Middle Sea, where the Vendragon and her crew of captains will enact the last of that vessel’s metamorphoses. He rises higher, nearer towards the sun’s fiery eye and the Middle Sea is become its lesser neighbour, the Euxine, called the Black Sea from its fogs, and the galleys which crawl across its surface are tiny splinters, flecks on the surface of his eye. Headlands, bays and capes all dwindle and disappear into the general coastline. He cannot see the Vineeta now. The fireball draws him higher into the sky and the ocean shrinks again. The Black Sea floods by the Strait of Kerch into its own shallow northern basin, called Temarenda, Mother of Waters, by the Massagetae and Palus Mæotis by the Romans who came after. Here the currents turn counter-clockwise, fed by freshwater jets from the Don, the Yeya and a score of lesser rivers. To the east, fierce July gales carve a labyrinth of sandspits from the Kuban delta lowlands. To the west, the Tongue of Arabat divides it from the putrid marshes and lagoons of the Sivash. The Turks call this place Baluk Deniz, the Sea of Fish, from the sturgeon taken in its waters. Now the fish are gone and Temarenda, the Mother of Waters, has lost her sons to their own purposes which are different to each other’s and to hers. Now this place is called more plainly: by some the Sea of Azov, by others the Sea of Zaback.

 

  Lawrence Norfolk, Lemprière's Dictionary