Miranda and Caliban

by Jacqueline Carey

  I know, because I did hear him say it yesterday when he did not know I was listening around a corner. Tomorrow, Master did say. On the morrow, you shall assist me in my sanctum.

  That is where it happened.

  Where he punished her.

  I shake my head hard to shake away the thoughts, thoughts of Miranda that are all mixed together; Miranda naked, Miranda in the blue gown … oh, you were so happy this morning, Miranda! But then there is Miranda still and pale and not moving, Miranda almost dead, Miranda waking scared and unknowing, Miranda learning slowly, so slowly, all over again.

  The tide is low and the air smells of salt and briny things that live in the sea. Undines play in the waves beyond where the tide is breaking, but the shoreline is empty. I climb over the rocks with my pail and gather mussels. There are many, many, many of them on the rocks where the sea has gone out, olive-black shells closed tight with hairy little beards. I twist them loose and drop them in the pail filled with seawater one by one, plinkety-plink-plink. It is a thing that should be pleasing to me, a sound that makes singsong sounds echo in my thoughts, but today it is not. This work is suited to my hands, my monster’s hands, rough and ugly with half-healed scrapes on the knuckles and sharp, ragged nails good for prying loose stubborn shells.

  These are not hands that should touch anything so fine as Miranda’s skin, I think to myself; no, Caliban, they are not.

  Oh, but, but, but …

  She did kiss the thumb of this rough right hand once, kissed it so tender when I hurt it. Yes, she did.

  I tear more mussels from the rocks.

  It was the day she did speak to me at last of what happened in Master’s big room, Master’s sanctum. She cried and cried, and I did stroke her hair, her soft golden hair, with these very hands.

  Master almost killed her, and she is with him there now.

  I do not know what to do.

  The more I think upon it, the more my heart becomes angry and hurting inside me. I swing my pail, roaring and shouting, and I splash and stomp through the shallow pools the tide has left, crushing harmless, soft little sea-creatures under my splayed monster’s feet, squelchity-squelch. I think that Ariel will come to mock me, but he is nowhere.

  At last I look toward the high crags behind me. “Oh, Setebos!” I cry. “What am I to do?”

  There is no answer in words, but a quietness comes inside me, and I remember I did make a promise beneath Setebos’s very shadow—long, long years before the sight of Miranda naked, even before Master did hurt her so badly that she almost died—that I would always return for her.

  So I do.

  In the palace, I place the pail full of mussels in the larder and creep up the stairs, creep down the hallway.

  Outside Master’s door, I listen.

  I hear nothing.

  I raise my hand to rap upon the door, then lower it. Today is not like the day when Miranda began to bleed. Today I have no reason to disturb Master at his studies; no, nor Miranda with him.

  Master will be angry, and my flesh flinches at the thought of the punishment he will inflict upon me. I only want to know, to be sure that Miranda has taken no harm. She was frightened to return to this room where she did almost die, where the thing her father called her mother, the thing that Ariel named a homunculus, did die at her careless hand. I know she was.

  And yet I cannot make myself knock upon the door. Angry at my own fearfulness, I retreat.

  Oh, but there are ways and ways.

  Outside, I circle the palace, gazing upward. There is a balcony on the upper story that looks into Master’s big room, his sanctum. A gleaming metal tube sits atop it, pointed at the sky.

  It is not meant to be a place that anyone could reach save from inside Master’s sanctum itself, but I am not anyone. I am Caliban, a misshapen monster with strong bent legs and hunched shoulders meant for climbing, and hard-nailed fingers and toes that can wedge deep into the smallest of cracks, like those between the crumbling old stones of the palace.

  I scale the wall like a lizard, trying not to think about the drop below me, and haul myself onto the balcony on my belly, hiding as best I might beneath the shadow of the bright metal sky-pointing tube. Lifting my head, I peer over the lintel.

  “Oh, la!” an idle voice remarks behind me. “How very intrepid thou art!”

  Ariel.

  I turn my head to glare at him. “Hush!”

  The spirit is half shape, half cloud, drifting wisps coming together and falling apart in endless churning motion. A keen-featured face emerges, a hand touches one finger to its lips. “I am the soul of discretion,” he breathes in a whisper. “Why, when it comes down to the nub of the matter, are we not in this together, thee and I, my fellow servant?”

  I ignore him.

  Mayhap I was a fool to have worried, for it is a peaceable scene. Master’s grey head is bent over his books. He mutters to himself and makes notes on a slate close at hand, sometimes rising to pace the room, clutching at the amulets around his neck. When he does, I duck low and plaster my belly to the balcony.

  Miranda …

  Miranda stands atop something and draws upon the wall with strong colors, making the image of a fierce man’s face with red eyes that glare out at the world. Her face … her face is like the face of a girl in a dream, in the best dream.

  I watch her.

  Girl, yes; and woman, too, and the both of them gone to a place where I cannot follow. My heart and my rod ache alike, the latter stirring beneath my loins against the hard stone of the balcony. A slanting ray of sunlight catches a mirror against the back wall of Master’s sanctum, the round mirror from the pirates’ treasure, now etched all around its outside with letters and symbols. The mirror winks as though it would speak to me, but it is in no language I know.

  There is nothing for me here.

  Retreating, I clamber over the balcony. Down is harder than up, and I must reach wide to find hand- and foot-holds, my weight hanging from my left side while I seek purchase with my right.

  Ariel drifts beside me as I make the careful climb downward. “Dost thou think to protect the lass from him?” he asks in a curious tone. “Her own father?”

  I put my teeth together hard. Clench, that is the word. I know oh, so many words now, and none of them do me a bit of good. “I had to be sure. He did very nearly kill her in that room.”

  “Oh, aye, for disobedience,” Ariel says as though it is nothing. “But the lass has long since learned her lesson, and she is there at her father’s bidding.” He waits for me to drop the last few feet onto the dusty rocks. “The magus has brought her into his laboratorium,” he muses. “Into the very working of his arts. Yet methinks he has not taken her into his confidence. What thinkest thou, fellow servant?”

  “What do you care what I think?” I ask him bitterly. “I am only the poor dumb monster who loves her!”

  “Love!” Ariel’s shifting features go still in astonishment, his eyes flaring crystal-bright. “Thou dost use the word?”

  I stomp away from him across the palace grounds toward the kitchen. “Leave me alone.”

  He follows me nonetheless. “Thou art a fool, tender-hearted monster. Dost think to deny thy baser nature?”

  “I am not ruled by it!” I say in defiance. “No more than any man! No more than Master himself!”

  “Master!” Ariel laughs, but this time the sharp edge of his laughter is not meant for me. “Oh, la!”

  I make my eyes go narrow. “What do you mean?”

  Ariel shrugs his shoulders. “Not all base desires stem from the root of thy manhood,” he says dismissively. “To what end dost thou suppose the magus works?”

  I am weary of his taunting. “Why do you ask me when you know the answer and will not share it?”

  “Why?” Ariel echoes the word. “Why not? Should I pretend to understand mine own whys and wherefores? Indeed, my monstrous friend, I do not.” His hands dance in the air, weaving back and forth, breezes streaming from his fi
ngertips. “While I remain at our master’s beck and call, my whim and will is as the wind, blown hither and thither and yon; no more am I free to say. Wilst tell me thou hast not wondered at our master’s purpose?”

  A monster he has named me and a monster he has shown me to myself, so it is a monster I will be. Opening the larder, I thrust my hand into the pail full of mussels and seawater. Plucking out a mussel, I pry it open with my nails and tear loose the morsel of orange flesh. I pop it into my mouth, poppity-pop, and chew it raw with savage pleasure. I fish out a second mussel, but it is closed hard and tight and will not open, so I thrust it whole into my mouth and crack its shell with my strong back teeth. Sharp shards cut my mouth, but I do not care that it hurts. I chew it anyway, chomp-chomp-chomp, tasting brine and blood. “I wish the wind would blow you away forever!” I say fiercely, spraying bits of shell and bloody seawater.

  Ariel’s eyes have gone cold and dark with no light in them. “There is a storm in the offing, and where it will blow the lot of us, not even I can say. Thou hast wits and will not use them. Methinks thou art a greater fool than I had reckoned.”

  I spit out a mouthful of shards. “I care naught for what you think!”

  “As thou wilt.” Ariel bends at the waist, sweeping one arm behind him; Miranda taught me long ago that is a thing called a bow. It is a thing a man does to show honor and respect to someone, and there is a thing that a girl or a woman does that is called a curtsy, and she showed me that, too. It was a thing I had seen her do to Master many times, but I did not know what it was called. Oh, we did bow and curtsy to each other all one long day, Miranda and I, laughing and laughing.

  But that was many years ago, and there is no honor in Ariel’s bow, only mockery. He goes away and I am alone.

  My mouth is cut and hurting, and there is a taste in it like ashes from the mussel shell. I spit out the last of the shards and think to myself, oh Caliban, you are a foolish monster indeed.

  There is a storm in the offing.

  That Ariel is a tricksy spirit and I do not trust him, no, not for one heartbeat; but he has no love for Master. It may be that in his own tricksy way he was trying to tell me something.

  Or it may be that the spirit only sought a new way to make mock of me.

  But, but, but …

  I think of that day, oh, so long ago, when Master did arrive on the isle with you, Miranda. There was a storm that day, too. I think of Master’s voice and the cold, hard, angry words he did speak across the sea while you were sleeping, sleeping on the sand. I wish I could remember what words Master did say, but that was from before, when words were lost to me.

  I think Ariel did speak truly. Another storm is coming, and I do not know what it will bring.

  Oh, I would protect you, Miranda! You are like sunlight to me. I would protect you from aught that might harm you; yes, and from your own father who seeks to use you for his own ends, whatever they may be.

  If only I could bear to look you in the face.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  MIRANDA

  Papa’s sanctum is a wondrous place.

  I have not forgotten what befell me there, but the more time I spend in his private chamber, the more faint and distant the memory grows; and the more ashamed I feel of the fear it instilled in me.

  I am oh, so enamored of this process of painting! It is quite simply magical. With every stroke of the brush, I learn more and more of what I am about and to what I aspire. When I sleep, I dream of figures passing over me as the spheres of heaven rotate above me, and I seek to memorize the lines and planes of them, and every aspect of their visages that I might render them truly.

  Under Papa’s tutelage, I learn to care for my brushes, cleaning them in the pungent turpentine he has distilled from pine sap and wiping them dry on rags. I learn about the bright pigments which the little gnomes have delved from the deepest and most remote places on the isle and ground to a fine powder: lead white, red cinnabar, azurite blue, yellow ochre, green malachite, brown umber, and carbon black. For each of these elements, there are correspondences; some logical and some unexpected. Cinnabar, for example, from which the vermilion pigment is ground, is also the element from which quicksilver, the living metal itself, is extracted.

  Who could have imagined such a thing? Truly, this isle is filled with magic.

  Papa is generous with praise for my efforts, and I drink it in like a thirsty plant.

  I am careful, always, to touch nothing without permission, but Papa takes pleasure in showing me some of the wondrous apparatuses that aid him in his working. He allows me to peer through the mighty telescope on the balcony that lets him see great distances across the isle, and into, he tells me, the very heavens themselves when the skies are benighted. It seems to me a very work of divinity, but Papa assures me that it is all a matter of lenses and mathematics.

  To be sure, I cannot fathom it.

  A great deal of Papa’s art involves charting the heavens. There is the brass astrolabe with its moving plates that calculates time and distance and oh, ever so much! There is its near cousin the cosmolabe that Papa uses to calculate the angles between heavenly bodies and cast his charts. Many of Papa’s calculations regarding the planets, he records in tables he calls ephemerides. There are pages and pages of these tables, so that he can determine the position of the planets and the aspects of the stars on any given date and time.

  I confess, my mind fair boggles at the complexity of the work that Papa’s art requires.

  And yet I feel the power of it in my bones. When I paint upon the walls of Papa’s sanctum, it seems as though I am at the very center of existence, with the spheres of heaven rotating far above and all around me while the images I render draw down the influences of the seven governors and the crystalline sphere of fixed stars in the firmament beyond them; and beyond that, the Lord God Himself in the Empyrean where nine orders of angels sing His praises. Hours pass without my notice while I am engaged in the process of painting, until I realize my arms are aching from being raised so long and my fingers have become stiff and crabbed.

  Papa says that I am filled with the Spiritus Mundi when I paint, the mystical energy that suffuses the whole of creation.

  I believe it is true.

  Always, I paint at his bidding; and I am content to do so, humbled by the realization that the calculations Papa employs are so very far beyond my ken.

  As the weeks pass, additional figures slowly take place alongside the glowering, crimson-eyed form of the first face of Aries. The first face of Virgo is a young girl holding a curious red globe of fruit called a pomegranate. Papa is in good humor and tells me a tale from the myths of the ancient Greeks about a maiden named Persephone who was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, who sought to make her his bride. After wandering the earth in despair, her mother Demeter learned of her abduction and begged Zeus, the king of the gods, to rescue her and restore her, but because Persephone ate six seeds of a pomegranate fruit, she was bound to spend six months of every year in the underworld with Hades.

  It seems to me that the gods are cruel to women who eat fruit, but that is a thought I keep to myself.

  Thinking to use my own face as a model for Virgo, I seek to steal a glimpse of it in the round mirror which Papa obtained from the hoard of pirates’ treasure that now hangs upon one wall. It is greatly altered as Papa has etched a series of concentric circles of arcane names and symbols upon its bright surface, but there is room enough between them that I can make out my own features.

  Papa rebukes me sharply for it. “Miranda! Leave it be.”

  Stung, I turn away from the mirror. “I was but looking! I did not touch it, Papa, I promise.”

  “’Tis dangerous merely to look.” Finding a length of ragged cloth, he drapes it over the mirror. “But ’tis not your fault,” he adds in a gentler tone. “Of course a young woman such as yourself would be hard-pressed to resist the lure of vanity, and I did not think to forbid you until this moment.”

  A
cross the chamber, the salamander in its nest of fire opens its jewel-red eyes to regard me. In all this time, it has not spoken once, and I have begun to think I imagined it years ago.

  Still, there is something unnerving in its stare.

  Papa forgives me my unwitting trespass. He does not work with chymicals in my presence, but applies himself to his multitude of charts and follows my progress with a keen eye. I paint the initial lineaments of Virgo’s face from memory. Alone in my chamber the next morning, I peek at the hand-mirror that was Caliban’s gift that I might better bequeath Virgo with the likeness of an actual living maiden. Papa praises my work, but if he notes the resemblance, he does not comment on it. I wonder if it is true that it is vanity rather than pragmatism that compelled me to render my own features, and resolve not to do so again. It seems the safer course, even if I must call upon my imagination to render the illustrations in Papa’s book writ large. Although they are finely wrought, they are too small to afford a great deal of detail.

  I should have to do so in any case with the next image that Papa bids me to render, which is the second face of Gemini and an image of which I can barely make sense. Papa translates the description and reads it aloud to me. “It is a man whose face is like an eagle, clad in a coat of leaden mail,” he says. “A linen cloth covers his head, and an iron helm with a silk crown upon it.”

  At his side, I clasp my hands beneath my back and stare at the incomprehensible illustration of a man with a bird’s fierce beaked head crowned with metal and silk. “Is an eagle somewhat like an angry chicken, Papa?”

  “An angry chicken?” Papa laughs, a hearty, full-throated sound such as I have seldom heard from him. “I suppose it is at that, though it is a far nobler bird. It is a bird of prey, akin to the hawks that hunt mice and rabbits in the meadows, Miranda. Surely you have seen those, albeit at a distance.” He returns to the book. “Now, he holds in his hand a bow and arrows. This is a face of oppression, evils—”

  His voice stops and I glance up at him.

  “That is all,” Papa says, and the laughter is gone from his voice.