Chapter Twenty-Nine
Antuniet
Antuniet would have thought sleep impossible but habit drove her to her bed to toss and turn in misery, until a dream overtook her in spite of all precautions. There was in her hand a crystal, a perfect pure gem that drew the eyes of all about her. And while she held that stone, a crowd gathered around her and bowed to her and watched her with adoring, obedient eyes and she knew it was the power of the stone that drew them. And for fear that she would lose it, she swallowed it and felt the edges and corners sharp inside her belly. But then she was alone in the cold and dark with her mother’s voice sounding, “It was an unsuitable friendship. I have put an end to it.” The stone burned inside her and she would have cried out but for that voice, “Remember always: you are a Chazillen. Do not disgrace me.” And so she turned her face itself to stone even as her belly burned and bled until she could bear no more. She screamed but no sound came. And all around her rang the sound of mocking laughter until she came awake with a gasp.
Anna had the day off; that was one small mercy. At least one more day before there would be any need to find explanations. Antuniet lifted the crucible out of the cold furnace and readied it on the bench, undoing the clamps and cracking off the seals. She had prepared the quenching liquor while tending the heat the evening before, so it was only a matter of drizzling it over the hardened matrix to begin the putrefaction. That much could be done without thought or decision. After that, habit took charge. Washing. Food. Checking the progress of the putrefaction. Hours passed. The matrix had grown softer. Draining the quench. Three rinses with twice-distilled water. Upending the crucible onto the work tray and tapping the matrix out. The tapping continued. The front door. She heard the watchman’s footsteps in the corridor, then a gruff, “Mesnera,” the click of the latch and his footsteps receding again.
Antuniet turned toward the doorway, steeling herself. Jeanne looked as though she had been haunted in her sleep as well. She glanced at the emptied crucible and said, “What do we work on today?”
Part of her had longed for that knock, that voice. Part of her had dreaded it. Did Jeanne think they could simply begin again? Was the summer to be repeated? Slow courtship, fleeting moments of joy, then weariness and betrayal and a return to the start? It would be wiser to send Jeanne away before her presence renewed the gnawing hunger. But she kept those thoughts inside, deep in her belly with the stone. If work were the excuse for coming, then work she would have. “The matrix needs to be broken up and the gems cleaned,” she said, turning away from the tray and ostentatiously sorting through her notes from the day before. “The tools are there in the rack. You’ve seen it done. Sort out the green jaspers by size but take extra care with the red ones.”
It took all her will not to look back. She pulled out the list of planned work. She hadn’t meant to begin a new process today but distraction was needed. Something complex enough to fill the brittle stillness. Behind her a chair scraped across the stones and the tink-tink of chisel on stone began. She took out a clean sheet of paper and began copying out the recipe for chrysolite. If she could combine the enhancements to strengthen knowledge and to dispel fantasies and terrors it might be adapted to good use.
There were days when she became so lost in the work that hours passed without noticing. This was not one of those days. The click and tap of the tools could only be drowned out by the recited verses that enhanced the materiae as she measured and mixed. Hunger was only driven away by the other ache. The corner of the room where Jeanne worked was ever in her awareness, tugging at the edges of her vision. When the tapping stopped, the silence echoed with her heartbeat. She paused in beginning to clear away the jars of materiae. Chair legs scraped across the stones, tearing the silence. She felt, rather than saw, Jeanne standing at her side and looked up at last. “What do we have?” Her voice creaked a little from long disuse.
“I think this is all of them,” Jeanne said. “It was hard to clean the small ones completely. Six green, none larger than a pea. Two are something of a muddy brown; you didn’t say what you wanted done with them. Only one true red but it’s the largest.”
Antuniet picked up the crimson stone and held it against the light from the window to check the clarity. No fractures or bubbles. No hazy patches where the fibers were misaligned. It was warm between her fingers and she could feel herself bending to the power it carried: softening, yearning. Her own art betrayed her. She shook off the influence. “There you are,” she said bitterly. “Red jasper to cure pains of the heart and ensure love returned. Pure, perfect, flawless…and utterly false.”
“It isn’t false,” Jeanne countered with quiet intensity. “It was never false, but it’s never pure. That’s where the poets lie to us. We’re all of us impure mixtures and flawed gems.” She snatched the jasper away and held it up. “There are no pure feelings. How can there be honor without the pride in keeping it? What does love mean without the courage to follow it? Bravery without wisdom is folly. Loyalty can’t be only a fishhook on a slender line; it must be a thousand tiny stitches binding one heart to the other.”
With a sudden swift movement she took up one of the empty crucibles from the bench and started scooping minerals into it from the open jars. “There’s love; that’s true.” Five large scoops of the first and the jasper thrust into the midst of it. “But there’s vanity as well.” A spoon from the second. “And jealousy.” A dusting from a smaller jar. “There’s memory of loss and dreams unrealized. There’s fear.” She stirred the powders roughly with one of the small chisels that still lay on the tray. Traces of the colors swirled through the mixture like eddies in the river. “And there’s pain.” With a sudden movement she jabbed the chisel’s tip into her finger and watched the drops of blood well up and fall. “There’s always pain. It doesn’t matter that it’s often by my own hand.” Jeanne thrust the crucible toward her.
Antuniet took it by reflex and Jeanne wrapped cold hands around her own to keep them there. “This is my heart: it is what you see. I don’t know if it will come through the fire. But it’s yours, if you will have it.” Her voice was rough and low. She turned away abruptly and strode out of the room. The clatter of the door latch punctuated her departure.
Antuniet realized her hands were shaking with the strength of her grip on the crucible and she set it down on the workbench as if it were fragile crystal. It hadn’t been an apology—not even an explanation. Only a plea for one more try. Could she bear to go through this again? I needed bread and you offer me a stone!
The two crucibles sat side by side. She should dump out the jumbled mixture and retrieve the jasper. That, at least, was a good day’s work. But still she hesitated. She put little weight on signs and portents. It would never survive the firing—there was no hope of that. She didn’t know which powders had gone into the mix, but certainly not the recipe for jasper. She paused with her fingers gripping the rim of the crucible but the thought of tipping the contents into the rubbish was unbearable.
This is my heart.
She didn’t care for signs and portents. She could discard the ruined mixture and decide later what to do about Jeanne. The firing meant nothing. Either she was willing to forgive or she wasn’t. If the answer were yes, then it wouldn’t matter if the crucible burned to slaggy ruin like so many before. If the answer were no, then not even a perfect diamond would change her mind.
It’s yours, if you will have it.
She feared to rely on signs and portents. What if it failed in the firing? She couldn’t bear either path—couldn’t bear the thought of never again feeling Jeanne’s touch, couldn’t bear to have her heart torn out time after time. She needed an answer. And it seemed a coward’s trick not to try.
She stared at the jars of materiae still ranged along the bench, trying to remember which ones Jeanne had used. The whitesand? Or had it been lime? Some of the hematite, certainly, but how much? What process would bring them all into solution? No, not complete solution, for the jasper must
be accounted for. Ceration, then. Strong waters to soften the jasper’s nature without destroying it. Then in the outer spheres the heat and flux needed to conjoin the minerals into the salamander’s blood, bathing the seed-stone with nourishment. As she measured and poured, the verses of the twinned cibation came to her lips. There was no partner to take the echo, but in her mind she heard the words in Jeanne’s voice. Not Mercury this time. No king to join in the mystic marriage, only the twinned queens. Even as she worked she wondered at herself, as if watching from afar. This was no longer the Great Art but a form of madness.
At last she clamped the lid on tightly, took note of the position of sun and stars and marked the seals as best she could determine. The furnace had been ready for some time. She grasped the crucible in the tongs and cracked the door just enough to slide it in. This time—this one time—give me the sight to find the alignments. The heat made her eyes water as she turned the vessel in place bit by bit, as she had so often seen Margerit do. Was that only the waves of heat or had she seen… She moved it again, trying to follow patterns she wasn’t sure of. And then—just when she despaired of being given a sign—the iridescent fluctus dazzled her eyes in a blinding flare.
Not daring to breathe, she withdrew the tongs and closed the door. Eight hours should be enough. She fed another scoop of coal into the back of the furnace and busied herself with putting things away and cleaning.
Time dragged as slowly now as it had earlier. She only noticed dark had fallen when Mefro Feldin poked her head in at leaving for the day, saying, “Was there anything else you were wanting?”
Antuniet’s stomach growled. An honest pain this time. “Is there anything for supper?”
“If you wanted supper, you should have sent me out before the cookshop closed,” she replied sourly. “There’s a bit of cold pie in the pantry. I thought you’d be going to dinner with your friend like you always do.”
“Never mind, the pie will do.”
She settled in to read after that, timing the adding of coals to every ten pages. Sleep tugged at her and she found herself reading the same page over again. More coals. The book nearly slipped from her hands and she set it aside. More coals.
Dawn streamed through the window and she stretched stiffly…then came upright in a panic. The furnace! How long had she slept? She ran her hands just above the top, then tapped the iron door with a moistened fingertip. Cold. She thought she remembered hearing the midnight bells the last time she tended it. That should have been long enough.
Antuniet pulled the crucible out onto the workbench and took a deep breath before unclamping the lid, prepared for what she would see. The matrix was crusted and lumpy but not the glassy char of complete failure. She waited impatiently through the quenching, then tipped the crucible over and tapped the work gently onto the tiled benchtop. It fell out in a lump, crumbling a bit at the part that had been the bottom. She took up the smallest hammer and chisel and began chipping away at the matrix.
Hours later, what sat revealed was an irregular rounded mass like a baroque pearl, just a little smaller than her thumb. In the main it was the color of blood but there were shadows of other hues inside. The light glinted from a thousand tiny flakes and flaws in the stone and a thread of slag ran deeply through one lobe like a hidden vein. It should have shattered, but in her fingers it felt warm, like a living thing. What might it have been if she’d taken more care? It is what you see. That was her answer. She thought briefly of running through the streets to Jeanne’s house. Of bringing her the heart-stone to show like a child with a toy. A shyness held her back. It was a sign; it needed the proper setting.
The pale autumn sun was reaching toward noon when her brisk steps brought her to Zempol Street. Monterrez’s shop stood shuttered and dark and for a moment she was struck by dismay, until she recalled the day. The law set limits to what business could be done on a Sunday, even in the Jewish district. It set limits on an apprentice’s Sunday hours as well but she often ignored those. Antuniet circled the block to come to the front steps of the residence and rang the bell. Anna answered it and, on seeing her, asked anxiously, “Did you need me today? You should have sent word.”
“No, it’s your father I’ve come to see, if I may. I have a commission for him.”
A few minutes later, Monterrez took the stone from her and examined it with his customary care. “Not your usual work,” he observed with a hint of reproof.
“An experiment. I’d like it set.”
He raised his loupe again and turned it this way and that. “I could get two, maybe three good stones from it. They could be polished but I think they would shatter with faceting. Look there: what catches the light are a hundred tiny flaws. But something could be done. What style of setting did you have in mind?”
“No, no cutting. Leave it just as it is. I’d like to wear it as a pendant. Here.” She touched her breast just under the hollow of her throat. “On a ribbon, I think. I haven’t enough for a chain; there’s been no time for tutoring since summer.”
Monterrez looked up in surprise and calculation. “This will not be on Maisetra Sovitre’s account?”
“No, nor the princess’s. It’s a personal matter.” She drew out her thin purse. “I don’t think I can manage gold, but silver will do.”
He compressed his lips in thought and put his hand over hers. “Maisetra, keep your money.”
“But—”
“The day will come,” he continued quietly, “when I will ask you to make a special jewel for my Anna. That will be the payment for this. Leave the rest to me. It’s a stone of power—” He made it a statement, not a question. “—so I will leave the setting as open as may be. When would you like it finished?”
Tonight! Before dawn, she thought, but that was scarcely reasonable. Tuesday would be the next of Margerit’s lectures. She and Jeanne had planned to attend. She could wear the stone to speak where her voice might fail. “In two days, if it can be done.”
He looked skeptical, but nodded.
On her way home, she heard singing as she passed the small church that served her neighbors. An impulse drew her in. She was careless about attending Mass and made the trek to Saint Mauriz’s when she did, but she needed a place to think where her mind wouldn’t echo in empty spaces. There was space on the last bench. She let the rhythms of the service set her mind adrift.
She had felt how the stone blended the chaotic strands into a whole: the jasper at its core, a trace of sapphire at one edge where the heat must have been stronger, overlying red balas. A trace of cloudiness in one lobe suggesting a vein of moonstone. Only the jasper should have been strong enough for its influence to be felt. It was as if the crystal as a whole lent the focus for each of its parts. No, not as a whole. The different stones had twined and grown together but she could see where the edges met. If not a single larger crystal, then they must reflect and magnify each other in some way. Could that be done more deliberately? She thought of the layered cibations. What if each layer could lend a different property? They would need to be added carefully in order; the heat needed for ruby would destroy lesser stones and the flux for carnelian would ruin peridot entirely unless something like jacinth were interposed. Some pairs she guessed could not be wedded at all. But if each layer could build on the last in some way… And then if it were possible to polish it down to a lenticular cabochon, exposing all the layers at once… Was it possible? Monterrez might know. At least he would try. She could return to the original lists she’d drawn up with Barbara’s help. No need to try to set eight stones, only one eight-layered gem. And all the seed stones were likely in her hands already. Oh Jeanne, you’ve given me the key, she breathed in wonder. Not pure, and yet more powerful for it.
When the service ended, her footsteps home were the lightest she’d known in years.
In the morning the experiments began. The melding of the alternations must be perfect before she risked the good gems. Antuniet laughed suddenly as she explained it all to Anna. “Or
, if not perfect, at least proven. We need to know which stones can be married together, which can be layered even without joining completely. But once I have those formulas and the ordering worked out, the entire set of stones might be finished in three weeks. Soon we’ll have both furnaces to use.”
“But there’s barely six weeks in all until the new year. Will it be enough?” Anna asked.
“It will need to be,” Antuniet replied more soberly.
The next day, Maistir Monterrez came himself to escort Anna home and to deliver the pendant. Antuniet waited until they had left before examining it; it seemed too private a thing.
The stone had been unsuitable to set with bezel or prongs. Instead he had cast a branching of slender threads, like ivy wrapping around a tree trunk. The gold flowed through the hollows and flaws in the stone, filling without concealing. He had followed her idea of suspending it from a ribbon, not to save the cost—for the clasp that closed it behind her neck was surely worth the price of a thin chain—but to keep the eye drawn to the stone itself. When she dressed—the rose gown, it must be the rose gown tonight—she fastened the ribbon carefully and let the stone fall against her skin. She felt it pulse briefly like the blood in her veins and then it was as if it had always lain there.
Antuniet arrived at the salle early. Too early to worry when Jeanne was nowhere in sight and yet she did worry. What if she decided not to come? She edged her way to where Margerit was standing at one side of the room, deep in conversation with a stranger. The woman was elegantly dark, perhaps another one of the French émigrés who had found refuge in Rotenek during the war? But no—though they were speaking in French, she had an accent of Italy, not that of the far Antilles like Mefro Dominique’s.
“Antuniet!” Margerit called on spotting her. “Come, you must meet Maisetra Talarico. She’s come all the way from Rome to discuss mysteries with me.”
The Mystic Marriage Page 39
