There, he says, Fire knows who’s master.
White fire? Are they not made of snow and ice?
He shakes his head.
Fire? All of them?
Again he nods. Most, I’d say, my Lady. Who can tell?
She has reached out a hand and is turning it this way and that in time with the flames, dark fingers rimmed red and one gold ring. At his words she draws back.
Ours is not, she says. Or the moon. They are snow and ice.
His face splits in a grin. I may be only a simple Fool, but I say ours is a ball of stone and the moon likewise.
Stone? The moon –
– may or may not have snow over it, my Lady, but underneath it is solid stone, I say, as the sun is solid fire, if you see what I mean. But this world is stone under the snow and ice and water and deep under the stone it too has a heart of fire.
As if in answer the fire sputters and flares up in the hearth and, dazzled, she closes her eyes and the room goes dark. It is too much to take in. She is stunned. By the time she gets her breath back and opens her eyes he is gone again.
Lying sleepless on fur that night under the dome, gazing up, she has a glimpse, a vision out of place, of time, of the sled, not as he said, with herself on it, let alone of him, but of drawing up in a flurry of snow and steaming away along its wake in the snow at nightfall, a speck, a star, burning low, going out.
If he is right and she came on the sled, might other brides have come too? Might there be others already? Why would they not all live together, if there were? But how could there be? She would have seen them. I am the Lady Bride, she tells herself, I alone. If a bride can be a bride alone. Whose bride? I am like the gold ring and the gold clock and the gold ball. The bride of silence, absence, solitude. The forsaken bride.
I have a question. Who is he?
Who, my Lady?
My Lord. Tell me.
You know, my Lady! He is the Master of snow and ice –
I know that –
– and Master of the here and now. He is all he can seem, and more –
He waves his hands, lost for words, and she holding her breath for what is to come.
– the Master of appearances, he utters at last.
I see, she says, puzzled, and nods as if she did.
He is the light, he goes on, in the darkness. The darkness in the light.
She ponders that. You said you were the Master, she says.
Of Fire, my Lady, I said, you heard me – only of Fire, this small Fire – although, mind you, Fire is no small matter. Bent over the hearth, he shakes his head and sends up another flurry of sparks. More so than he seems, is Fire. As you might say the same of our Lord and Master. More so than he seems.
Yet we are so alike, she says, he and I… Am I more so than I seem?
More or less, but who am I to say? Ask him. He is the Master of all seeming.
Allseeming? Where is that?
Here, there and everywhere. Seeming what, is the question.
And the answer?
Yes, and the answer. He shrugs. What he likes, my Lady, is all I can say. All forms he seems to take at will and sometimes none.
What forms?
Any, as far as I know. No more questions now.
Appearances, she says, more to herself, but aloud. And disappearances.
The Fool is gazing into the fire, lost in it, having brought it back to life. No way of knowing if he even heard her. He has on his usual thick shaggy shapeless pelt that, like his hair and beard, is dark until it catches the firelight, now taking on an amber depth of glow all over and a rim that fades where it meets the air, now giving off the dark smoulder of embers in the hearth. Otherwise it looks like the white fur that she folds herself in to sleep; and yet at the same time so unlike that her eyes are drawn ever more curiously to the supple changing thicknesses and the flaring fuzz of its surface, so soft, as she secretly discovers one day, as soft and loose as hair. From that first touch, the skin of her palms itches for another feel of it and soon she is taking any chance she has – it must be idly, as if by chance, only in passing – to let a hand fall on the pelt and have in response the hairs rise, rough, and tickle her palm. If he ever senses it (as if he could through all its rumpled thicknesses) he shows no sign.
Another day her Lord is explaining something when she glances away and his voice goes stiff and cold.
If I might have your attention?
You have!
Not if you have lost interest.
Lost – ?
You looked away.
Something caught my eye –
Well then.
– but not my ear!
It seems that you have still to master, he says, the art of attention.
I am sorry –
Sorry? He stares back. Are you? Not as far as I can see.
Now she is the one to stare at his retreating back.
Now for something you have not seen before, he says affably another time, moving on to two grey bowls carved of the same speckled, sparkling stone, one small and plain with a hole in the bottom, and the other one with ring on ring of stripes inside.
The stone has diamond specks in it!
What do you think they are for?
I – what are they for? The specks? But she is distracted, moving her head so that the diamonds glitter and fade.
For holding water.
She looks at him with amused eyes, but he is serious. The little one has a hole in the bottom!
So it has.
So how can it hold water?
It goes inside the other –
– and so must the water then!
So it does. And as it goes down in the top bowl it goes up in the other. Stripe after stripe goes underwater.
As in the bath –
– each stripe marking a unit of time.
Oh. She droops. A timepiece.
More or less. He sighs. Simple, of course, beside the gold clock.
Yes, but then the clock is what it is, always one and the same.
As are these. The clock is infinitely more intricate and various, ever-changing, ever in motion.
I know. But only its parts and only ever the same motion. It winds itself up into itself and out again. Like the golden ball.
The same goes for the water bowls, if you only knew.
Let us put some water in and see!
Enough for today.
You do know, she says, pleading, that I can only know what I see.
Your choice.
Is it? That is not how it feels. Does it matter?
More than you know, he says.
She sighs. Well then, if I must choose, I have taken a liking to the bowls. With the clock, nothing outside of it counts –
Which is the beauty of it –
But the bowls come alive once they have water in them, when one is inside the other. And the bowls are like eyes of water…
He stares. Are they? Eyes to see you?
What do you mean?
Or for you to see yourself?
She opens her hands, mystified. Our eyes look the same – do they not see the same?
See what?
Whatever the water sees, I suppose.
Go on?
Me, a part of me, or you, or the sun or the moon, the stars. See for yourself!
His smile is cold. See myself – for myself.
As we do in water.
You see water as alive?
More so than ice. She shivers. Or stone. As alive as we are to water, I daresay.
There is a good deal too much daresay-ing going on here these days, he says, for my liking, and turns on his heel.
How strange it is that this water always goes around the same way, as if driven, almost like the clock. And the sky.
So it does. And must.
Must it? It looks as loose and free to move as we are. More so.
It always looks so free!
More so? Like us, water behaves only according to the law of
its being, and in that, and that alone, lies its beauty.
I do not follow you.
So I have observed.
I do not understand what the law –
Undo one such small matter as the behaviour of water, my Lady Bride, he says, in dry amusement, and the rule is that you may undo the universe.
Undo the universe? she repeats, obscurely thrilled. She closes her eyes. I, undo the universe?
By now her Lord is more often away than he was at first, and mostly takes the Fool with him. Left behind alone in the silent palace, restive, and lonely, she has gone back to staring out at the world through the crystal walls of her prison and seeking solace in the hearth room. On one of these forays she comes across what she has so long yearned and pleaded to know – a doorway into a hall that seems part of the outside world, with a floor of ice furry with snow.
Is there no end to the wonders of the dome? Here is a vastness, where she was expecting a box of space, all aglow; and where fire shadows should be rippling on the walls and ceiling, there is only the motionless glint of ice, clear panes of ice behind which lie open furrows and webs and caves of emerald and lapis lazuli, beyond a floor of soft snow. It looks like the outside, this innermost heart of the dome. A curved half-open door she has never known was there into a tall round room dimly lit by one narrow pane of ice, bare but for fur rugs from wall to wall, as in the dome. But as soon as she steps inside they are soft snow that her footsteps abolish step by step, a bare line of footprints in the snow of her wake. The floor under the snow is ice, as on the outside. How does she know? She knows. She squats down and brushes away a patch of snow to make sure. Yes, ice, a great round pane of ice. So this is what ice is like, and snow! Supple and soft, crumbly, a pinprick of light on the skin, that slides away as water; but ice clings drily and shrinks on, and looks like marble; and it is as if she has always known. She crouches forward: yes, dim depths of ice, clear in patches, riven with silvery cracks, and at the edges, caverns, hollows of sapphire and emerald, faintly alight, like the sky. She breathes on the surface and wipes a patch of mist with her hands, clapping to beat the snow off, and looks down.
But like the sky, the ice is not empty. As she leans over it a reflection in a long hood of hair rises to meet her, and just underneath in the ice pane are eyes or bare sockets fixed on her in a silent laugh, or shriek; a face in a veil of bone with a cavity for a nose and long red teeth bared under the weight of the ice. The bride recoils, slips and, losing her balance, falls on her hands. When she gets to her feet, in the new clear space another face shines faintly and again she sees a stiff head and long form stretched out in a robe in folds like her own silken robe, belted with silver, only this robe is deep red overlaid with black. Or is it shadow? They all have bare knuckles clasped at the bodice and wear a gold ring. In a fever of haste she makes great sweeps with her sleeves and crouches and sees again and again, in the dim haze of the ice, faces and robes like firelight all in a rime of frost. Far below, and smaller, is another blur of black, white and red, and another, more, they are everywhere, bodies as small and plentiful as the leaves on the floor of the pond, and on every other hand, clasped or outflung, a gold ring like her own. They inhabit a core of fathomless ice. She claps her hands to her mouth in horror and pity, and the snow on her hands sears her lips. Her breath hangs mistily in the room. With her sleeves she spreads the coverlet of snow smoothly back over and turns to go.
But she had dropped her ball when she fell. She can see the glow of it across the floor, far out of reach.
Keeping her head, not daring to look down again, on shaky legs, she who had wished for many brides for company in the palace crosses the ice floor, stoops to pick up the ball and makes her way back out and up into the dome like a sleepwalker, having learnt the truth with her own eyes and been unable to believe them.
One night in her sleep a fine goblet of ruby crystal cracks open into six fragments as exactly as a snowflake, but veined, still standing on its stem but loose, quivering, blurred. On yet another night she sees living selves in amber skins gather in the water at her feet and peer up with their mouths open so wide that they are square, like doorways. More than once she watches as a long shape rears up off the snow waving its arms, as tall as herself, and flies off in a shuffle of wings, beating like breath, a heartbeat. Night by night a new world opens to her only to close over by day.
On each floor a stream of water wells up, crystalline, out of the depths to wind its way along the passages into one shallow bath or another and back again until it runs back down and away. For the first time she wonders how it does and where it comes from. There was a time when she could have asked him about this water that passes their lips and laves their reclining bodies, in the expectation of a fond response, if not a revelation. Somehow his answers only deepen every mystery. By now she knows better than to trust herself to ask a question that will be well received and she refrains. Nor does he have anything more to say. In their silence, at least, they are at one. Better so? But she no longer reaches out to him in bed, in case of a rebuff; and he no longer lingeringly farewells her when he goes away.
The substance of the dome, every surface, is as translucent as the water, only thick and solid to the touch, and in the daylight and lantern light also full of patterns, of filaments and bristles, bubbles, orbs, a universe of forms.
When the Fool comes back he bows and presents her with a hand mirror of gold that he says the Lord and Master has sent with his love and a message that he will be back soon in person. She gazes into the glinting oval in disbelief.
Is this a game? What is this? Not me!
The mirrors here are bound to tell the truth, my Lady.
She cannot take her eyes off it, even to interrogate his.
And you, my Fool? Are you so bound as well?
Come now, my Lady! Do you doubt it?
Have I not seen myself time and time again in my Lord’s eyes, reflected?
And instantly in her mind’s eye she sees her own round face in those eyes of his, caught there like the bee in amber. Exactly like the bee, caught in her own eternity. She reels, her mind suddenly blank with the surge of a new feeling she has no name for. Do they not tell the truth, then, the clear eyes of her Lord?
It never crosses her mind to look for her true self in the eyes of the Fool.
Whether or not, by the time she is her usual self again alone by the fireside, she and her image in the mirror, her pale skin and hair and robe are flickering in the sway of the firelight. And yet what the mirror is still telling her as clear as day is that she is as translucent as the dome itself – face, body and robe, her whole being, all as faint and clear as water and as formless, insubstantial. And yet a thickening shape has formed inside her, fretty, like the clock, but of a whiter density.
So this is the truth! Either that, or her own eyes are playing games. Or is it all a game, a step further in the marry dance? Much further, if so, further than she can follow, and she is lost. But he is not even here so how could it be so? Shaking now, she looks again – insubstantial! – and sends the mirror flying into the hearth, and the ball after it for good measure, for leading her astray.
The ball only brightens, every thread glowing, still blinding in her mind’s eye. The mirror falls with a loud crash into a pool of heat. And now in her own awakening eyes all she can see of herself is as substantial as ever and she is saved. Even the ball is back by her side in its niche, as if for once it had followed her home. She had learnt all by herself to forgive and forget, more was the pity.
The flutter of the little fire is what she loves, and the faint image of itself that shifts its shape like water in time to the sound of its fluttering, around the room and over him, and her, and the shadows looming at their backs as she tells him what she saw.
That is the nature of sleep, my Lady.
Was I asleep? Was I?
He spreads his hands. Maybe, maybe not.
But you know!
What is in your sleep only yo
u know. Who else if not you?
But I know nothing when I am lost in sleep.
Such an everyday thing as sleep, he parries.
Everything I know nothing of, she says, is an everyday thing.
He yawns, rimmed in firelight. A dream, he says, a mirage, who knows?
It is both – it is what I saw and what I dream of – or all three? A mirage? Is it something to do with mirrors? It is indeed. But he has got to his feet and she frowns in dismay. She will be alone again in the palace.
You are leaving already?
I must be gone but Fire will keep on burning. Goodnight, my Lady.
Another time he tells her that there will come trees of many kinds and shapes and colours, the coming of tall trees all thickly crowded together. The ice and snow will vanish away, but not forever, they will go and come again, just as the sun does.
Go where?
Where does the sun go, my Lady?
That is no answer!
Into air and running water.
And then? She is shrill with excitement.
The trees will come clothed in green, some for life and others newly every year.
And for a moment she sees what he means as in a dream and has no need to ask him what trees are, until she gropes with her mind’s eye for them. No, nothing. They are gone, back to where they came from. For once she is determined not to ask.
Trees from where?
Deep under the snow.
The coming of the trees!
It has all happened before. And in their shadow, instead of snow and ice, fur will grow.
Fur!
Green fur in a fine long coat all over the world, and the coming of the trees! A thrill runs through her at the words. When?
One day soon.
And the coming of the waters?
The waters first, then the trees.
And then?
Ah. Then one day the seas.
Where from? she whispers.
From under the ice, with all the wild things that belong here.
Wild? Living things? Many? She sees hordes of them already, in that mind’s eye that opens to her dreams, surging, plunging, whirling in flight, as many as the snowflakes of this world. And how many seas?
They are one and many, like snow and ice.
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