A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  “No more than I’m allowed to have mine,” grumbled the great-uncle into his moustache while scrunching up his newspaper. “In any case, no one in this family asks me my opinion anymore!”

  Ophelia’s mother put her fists on her enormous hips. “Oh, you two, this is neither the time nor the place!”

  “It’s just that, everything’s going a bit faster than we at first envisaged,” her father broke in, addressing the engaged couple. “The kid’s intimidated, she’ll get over it.”

  Neither Ophelia nor Thorn paid them the slightest attention. They were sizing each other up, she seated in front of her hot chocolate, he from the summit of his absurd height. Ophelia didn’t want to give way to the metallic eyes of this man, but upon reflection, she didn’t think it smart to provoke him. In her situation, the most sensible thing was still to shut up. In any case, she had no choice.

  Head down, she spread butter on another slice of bread for herself. When Thorn sat back on his stool, shrouded in a cloud of smoke, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Get your things ready immediately,” he said, simply. For him, the incident was over. Not for Ophelia. Behind her hair, she vowed to make his life as difficult as he was making hers.

  Thorn’s eyes, gray and cold as the cutting edge of a blade, flashed at her once again. “Ophelia,” he added, without smiling.

  Coming from this sullen mouth, and hardened by the Northern accent, her name seemed to slice the tongue. Sickened, Ophelia folded her napkin and left the table. She slipped quietly upstairs and shut herself in her room. With her back against the door, she didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t cry, but inside she was screaming. The furniture in the room, sensitive to the rage of its owner, began to tremble, as though nervous jitters were running through it.

  Ophelia was rocked by a spectacular sneeze. The spell was instantly broken, the furniture once again perfectly still. Without even passing a comb through her hair, Ophelia pulled on her dreariest dress, a corseted antiquity, gray and austere. She sat on the bed and while pushing her bare feet into her boots, her scarf slithered, slid, and wound itself, like a snake, up to her neck.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “C’min,” mumbled Ophelia, her nose blocked. Her great-­uncle poked his moustache round the half-opened door. “May I, dear girl?”

  She nodded from behind her handkerchief. The uncle’s large shoes cut a path through the confusion of sheets, eiderdowns, and pillows cluttering the carpet. He signaled at a chair to come closer, which it did on the double, and flopped onto it. “My poor child,” he sighed, “that chap, he’s certainly the last husband I wished for you.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to have to be brave. The Doyennes have spoken.”

  “The Doyennes have spoken,” repeated Ophelia. (But they won’t have the last word, she thought to herself, even though she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was hoping by thinking that.)

  Much to Ophelia’s surprise, her great-uncle started laughing. He pointed at the wall mirror. “Do you remember your first passage? We ended up thinking you’d be stuck like that forever, one leg kicking out here, the rest of you writhing in my sister’s mirror! You put us through the longest night of our lives. You weren’t yet thirteen.”

  “I’m still suffering a few aftereffects,” sighed Ophelia, looking at her hands, which, through her broken glasses, appeared splintered.

  Suddenly, her great-uncle returned to looking seriously at her. “Precisely. And yet that still didn’t stop you from trying again and getting stuck again, until you finally got the hang of it. Mirror-travelers are rare in the family, dear girl, and do you know why?”

  Ophelia looked up behind her glasses. She’d never broached the subject with her godfather. And yet everything she knew, she’d learnt from him. “Because it’s a rather particular form of reading?” she suggested.

  Her great-uncle snorted into his moustache and widened his golden eyes under the wings of his eyebrows. “Nothing to do with it! To read an object requires forgetting oneself a little, to leave room for the past of someone else. Traveling through mirrors, that requires facing up to oneself. One has to have guts, y’know, to look oneself straight in the peepers, see oneself as one really is, plunge into one’s own reflection. Those who close their eyes, those who lie to themselves, those who see themselves as better than they are, they could never do it. So, believe me, it’s no run-of-the-mill thing.”

  Ophelia was struck by this unexpected outpouring. She’d always traveled through mirrors in an intuitive way, she didn’t see herself as particularly brave. Her great-uncle then pointed at the old three-colored scarf, scruffy with age, resting lazily across her shoulders.

  “Isn’t that your first golem?”

  “Yes.”

  “The very one that almost deprived us forever of your company.”

  Ophelia concurred, after a time. She sometimes forgot that this scarf, which she always dragged around after her, had once tried to strangle her.

  “And despite that, you never . . . stopped . . . wearing . . . it,” pronounced the great-uncle, punctuating each word with a slap of his thigh.

  “I sense you’re trying to tell me something,” Ophelia said, gently. “Trouble is, I don’t quite understand what.”

  Her great-uncle grunted gruffly. “You don’t cut much of a figure like that, dear girl. You hide behind your hair, behind your glasses, behind your muttering. Of your mother’s whole brood, you’re the one who’s never shed a tear, never howled, and yet I swear, you were definitely the one who got into the most scrapes.”

  “You’re exaggerating, dear uncle.”

  “Since you were born, you’ve never stopped hurting yourself, making mistakes, falling flat on your face, pinching your fingers, getting lost . . . ” he went on, gesticulating wildly. “You can imagine how worried sick we were—for ages we thought that, one day, one of your endless disasters would be the death of you! ‘Calamity Jane,’ that’s what we called you. Now listen carefully to me, dear girl . . . ”

  The great-uncle kneeled, with some pain, at the foot of the bed on which Ophelia had remained slumped, her feet deep in her unlaced boots. He seized her elbows and shook her, as though better to imprint each syllable on her memory. “You have the strongest character in the family, my child. Forget what I said to you last time. Here, before you, I predict that your husband’s will is going to shatter against yours.”

  The Medal

  The cigar-shaped shadow of the airship scudded across fields and rivers like a solitary cloud. Through the curved window, Ophelia scanned the landscape, hoping to see, in the distance, for one last time, the watchtower from which her family were waving scarves. Her head was still spinning. Barely minutes after takeoff, when the airship was negotiating a turn, she’d had to leave the starboard promenade in a panic to find the lavatories. By the time she was back, all she could see of the Valley was a distant stretch of shadow at the foot of the mountain.

  She couldn’t have imagined a more disastrous leave-taking.

  “A girl of the mountains who’s airsick! Your mother’s right, you never miss a chance to make a spectacle of yourself . . . ”

  Ophelia tore her eyes from the viewing window to look around the Map Room, so called due to the planispheres on the wall depicting the fragmented geography of all the arks. At the other end of the room, the bottle-green dress Aunt Rosaline was wearing stood out against the honey-colored plush of the carpets and armchairs. She was studying the cartographic images with a stern eye. It took Ophelia a while to realize that it wasn’t the arks she was scrutinizing like this, but the quality of the printing. An occupational defect: Aunt Rosaline specialized in the restoration of paper.

  She came back to Ophelia with wary, mincing steps, sat in the neighboring chair, and nibbled with her horsey teeth at the biscuits they’d been served. Feeling nauseous, Op
helia looked away. The two women were alone in the room. Apart from them, Thorn, and the crew, there were no other passengers on board the airship.

  “Did you notice Mr. Thorn’s expression when you started to redistribute your meal all over the airship?”

  “I was rather preoccupied right then, dear aunt.”

  Ophelia peered at her godmother over the rectangles of her glasses. She was as narrow, dried-up, and jaundiced as her mother was plump, moist, and rubicund. Ophelia didn’t know this aunt, who would be her chaperone for the coming months, very well, and it felt strange to find herself alone with her. Normally, they saw little of each other and hardly spoke. The widow had always lived solely for her old papers, just as Ophelia had always lived solely for her museum. Which hadn’t left them much chance to get close.

  “He nearly died of shame,” declared Aunt Rosaline in a harsh voice. “And that, young lady, is a spectacle I never, ever want to witness again. The honor of the family rests on your shoulders.”

  Outside, the airship’s shadow was merging into the water of the Great Lakes, which shimmered like mercury. In the Map Room, the late-afternoon light was fading. The honey-colored plush of the furnishings appeared less golden, more beige. All around, the airship’s framework was creaking, its propellers droning. Ophelia absorbed, once and for all, these sounds, this gentle rolling beneath her feet, and felt better. It was just something to get used to.

  She pulled a spotty handkerchief out from her sleeve and sneezed once, twice, three times. Her eyes were watering behind her glasses. The nausea had gone, but not the cold. “Poor man,” she said, amused, “if he fears ridicule, he’s not marrying the right person.”

  Aunt Rosaline’s skin turned pale yellow. She threw a panicked look over to the small room, trembling at the thought of seeing the bearskin in one of the armchairs. “Ancestors alive, don’t say such things!” she whispered.

  “He worries you?” asked Ophelia, amazed. She herself had feared Thorn, yes, but that was before meeting him. Since the stranger had got a face, she was no longer scared of him.

  “He sends shivers down my spine,” shuddered her aunt, neatening her tiny bun. “Have you seen his scars? I suspect he tends towards violence when in a bad mood. I’d advise you to keep a low profile after this morning’s little scene. And then try to make a good impression on him—we’re going to be with him, me for the next eight months, you for the rest of your life.”

  When Ophelia’s gaze wandered out of the large observation window, what she saw took her breath away. The flaming autumnal forests, gilded by the sun and battered by the wind, had just been replaced by a sheer wall of rock that disappeared into a sea of fog. The airship moved on, and Anima, hanging in the sky, appeared entirely surrounded by a ring of clouds. The further they moved away, the more it looked like a sod of earth and grass that an invisible spade had dug from a garden. So that was it, then, an ark seen from a distance? That little clod lost in the middle of the sky? Who would imagine that lakes, meadows, towns, woods, fields, mountains, and valleys stretched across this ridiculous chunk of world?

  With her hand pressed to the glass, Ophelia imprinted this vision on her mind as the ark disappeared, blotted out by the curtain of clouds. She had no idea when she would return there.

  “You should have brought a spare pair with you. We look like paupers!”

  Ophelia turned back to her aunt, who was looking at her with disapproval. It took her a moment to realize that she was talking about her glasses. “They’ve almost healed up,” Ophelia reassured her. “By tomorrow, nothing will show.” She took them off to puff mist on the lenses. Apart from a little crack in one corner of her vision, she didn’t really have a problem and no longer saw everything in triple.

  Outdoors, there was now just endless sky, in which the first stars were starting to twinkle. When the light came on in the room, the windows became mirrors and it was no longer possible to see anything. Ophelia needed to fix her eyes on something. She went over to the wall of maps. They were veritable works of art, created by illustrious geographers. The twenty-one major arks and the one hundred and eighty-six minor arks were all depicted with the most scrupulous attention to detail.

  Ophelia could go back in time as easily as others cross a room, but she didn’t know much about cartography. It took her a while to find Anima, and even longer to find the Pole. She compared the one with the other, and was amazed by their difference in size: the Pole was nearly three times as big as Anima. With its interior sea, its springs, and its lakes, it called to mind a large tank full of water.

  But nothing fascinated her as much as the central planisphere, which offered a general view of the Core of the World, and the fixed ring of arks surrounding it. The Core of the World was the biggest fragment of the original Earth; it was but a mass of volcanoes, forever struck by lightning, permanently uninhabitable. It was shrouded in the sea of Clouds, a compact mass of vapor the sun never penetrated, but, for clarity’s sake, the map omitted that. It did, on the other hand, trace the wind corridors that allowed airships to travel with ease from one ark to another.

  Ophelia closed her eyes and tried to imagine this map in three dimensions, as one might see it from the Moon. Fragments of stone suspended above a great, an immense and eternal storm . . . Come to think of it, this new world was a true miracle.

  Bells rang out in the Map Room. “Supper,” guessed Aunt Rosaline with a sigh. “Do you think you’ll be able to sit at table without totally embarrassing us?”

  “You mean without vomiting? Depends what’s on the menu.”

  When Ophelia and her godmother pushed open the door of the dining room, they thought for a moment they’d made a mistake. The buffets weren’t set up and a shadowy half-light lurked between the paneled walls.

  A friendly voice stopped them just as they were about to turn tail: “This way, ladies!” A man—white uniform, red epaulettes, double cuff links—came towards them. “Captain Bartholomew, at your service!” he proclaimed pompously. He broke into a wide smile, in which a few gold teeth glittered, and flicked dust off his stripes. “In fact, I’m just second in command, but let’s not quibble. I hope you’ll forgive us, but we’ve started on the hors d’oeuvres. Come and join us, ladies, a touch of femininity will be most welcome!”

  The first mate showed them to the back of the room. Between a long openwork screen and the lovely picture windows, a small table was catching the final glow of the sunset on the starboard promenade. Ophelia spotted immediately the tall, thin figure that she didn’t want to see there. Thorn had his back to them. All she saw of him was an endless spine under his traveling tunic; pale, shaggy hair; and elbows moving to the rhythm of knife and fork, with not a thought of stopping for them.

  “But, for goodness sake, what are you doing?” asked a shocked Bartholomew.

  Ophelia hadn’t even sat down on the chair beside her aunt before he was grabbing her by the waist, making her dance a couple of steps, and sitting her straight beside the last person she wanted to be near. “At the table, one must always alternate men and women.”

  With nose down towards plate, Ophelia felt completely swamped by Thorn’s shadow, higher by two heads as he sat bolt upright in his chair. She buttered her radishes without much appetite. Opposite her, a small man saluted her with a friendly inclination of the head, his smile stretching between salt-and-pepper side whiskers. Within seconds, only the clicking of cutlery filled the silence around the table. Crudités were munched, wine drunk, butter passed from hand to hand. Ophelia tipped over the saltcellar she was handing to her aunt.

  The first mate, on whom the silence was clearly weighing, spun like a weather vane towards Ophelia. “How are you feeling, my dear child? Has that nasty sickness gone away?”

  Ophelia wiped her mouth with a flick of the napkin. Why was this man talking to her as though she were ten years old? “Yes, thank you.”

  “I beg your pardo
n?” he guffawed. “You have a tiny little voice, miss.”

  “Yes, thank you,” articulated Ophelia, stretching her vocal cords.

  “Don’t hesitate to let our onboard doctor know about any discomfort. He’s a master in his field.”

  The man with the salt-and-pepper side whiskers, opposite her, displayed a polite modesty. It must be him, the doctor.

  Another silence fell around the table, which Bartholomew broke by drumming his restless fingers on his cutlery. Ophelia blew her nose to conceal her annoyance. The first mate’s twinkling eyes kept dragging themselves from her up to Thorn, and from Thorn back down to her. How bored he must be to seek entertainment from them.

  “Well, I must say, you’re not very chatty!” he said, chuckling. “Yet, if I understand correctly, you’re traveling together, no? Two ladies from Anima and a man from the Pole . . . quite rare, a combination like that!”

  Ophelia risked stealing a glance at Thorn’s long, thin hands as he sliced his radishes in silence. So, the crew knew nothing of what had prompted their meeting? She decided to adopt his attitude. She just gave a weak but polite smile, without clearing up the misunderstanding.

  Her aunt didn’t see it like that at all. “These young people are going to be married, sir!” she cried, outraged. “So you weren’t aware of that?”

  To the right of Ophelia, Thorn’s hands clenched around his cutlery. From where she sat, she could see a vein bulging on his wrist. At the head of the table, Bartholomew’s gold teeth gleamed.

  “I’m terribly sorry, madam, but, indeed, I wasn’t aware of that. Come now, Mr. Thorn, you should have told me that this charming child was to be yours! How does it make me look, now?”

  Like someone who is relishing the situation, replied Ophelia, to herself.

  Bartholomew’s glee didn’t last long, however. His smile faded as soon as he saw Thorn’s countenance. Aunt Rosaline went pale when she, in turn, noticed it. Ophelia, on the other hand, couldn’t see it. She would have had to lean over and unscrew her head from her shoulders to see right up there. In any case, she had no trouble guessing what was going on above her. Eyes as sharp as razors and a hard line instead of a mouth. Thorn didn’t like to make a spectacle of himself—at least they had that in common.