by Kai Meyer
“Here between the mirrors I can’t feel the Stone Light anymore,” said Junipa. “It’s as if I had an entirely normal heart. And I can see better than you or probably anyone else. I think I belong here.”
And perhaps that was the truth; perhaps Arcimboldo had in fact created her eyes out of the glass of the mirror world. Junipa is a guide, Lalapeya had said. And weren’t guides always natives of the place? The thought sent shivers down Merle’s spine, but she made an effort not to show it.
“Don’t let go of my hand,” said Junipa. Then she whispered the glass word tonelessly and the two of them took the decisive step together.
Leaving the mirror world was accomplished just as unspectacularly as entering it. They went through the glass as if they were passing through a soft breeze, and on the other side they found—
“Mirrors?” Merle asked before she realized that this was by no means the same place from which they’d started.
“Mirrors?” the Flowing Queen asked as well.
“Burbridge’s mirror room,” said Junipa. “Exactly as your mother said.”
Behind them someone cleared his throat. “I’d hoped you’d find the way here.”
Merle whirled around, even faster than Junipa.
Professor Burbridge, Lord Light, her grandfather—three completely different meanings in one person. He walked up to them but stopped a few steps away. He didn’t come too close, as if he didn’t want to make them nervous.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “In here I’m only myself. The Light has no power over me in the mirror room.” He sounded older than outside in Hell. And he looked that way too: He was much more bent now, and he acted frail.
“In this place I am not Lord Light,” he said with a sad smile. “Still only Burbridge, the old fool.”
The mirror out of which they’d walked was only one of many, arranged in a wide circle. Most were still in the glued frames that Arcimboldo had placed around the magic mirrors when he supplied them to his customers.
The mirrors that Arcimboldo had sold to Lord Light were arranged on the walls, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred of them. Some were also lying on the floor like puddles of quicksilver, others hung flat beneath the ceiling.
“They keep the Stone Light away from here,” Burbridge explained. He wore a morning coat similar to the one he’d had on at their first meeting. His hair was disheveled and he looked untidy, as if his dapper appearance before was only a semblance that the Stone Light had kept in place. All that faded in here. The pouches under his eyes were heavier, his eyes lay deeper in their sockets. The veins showed dark on the parchmentlike backs of his hands. Liver spots covered his skin like the shadows of insects.
“We’re alone.” He’d noticed that Merle kept surveying the room mistrustfully, for fear of the Lilim, Burbridge’s creatures. He appeared to be telling the truth, in fact.
“My mother sent me.” Suddenly it didn’t feel at all difficult to use that word. It sounded almost matter-of-fact: my mother.
Burbridge raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Lalapeya? How I hated her in the old days. And she me, no doubt about that. And now she’s sending you here, of all places?”
“She said you could explain everything to me. The truth about me and my parents. About Lalapeya … and about Steven.”
Burbridge had been standing in the center of the room at her arrival, as if he’d expected her coming.
“It is because of the mirrors,” the Flowing Queen said. “If the mirrors really protect him, then perhaps he is safest in the center where their looks meet.” Arcimboldo had said something similar to her once: “Look into a mirror, and it looks back at you. Mirrors can see!”
“It is no coincidence,” the Queen continued, “that Burbridge named the capital city of Hell Axis Mundi, the axis of the world. The same way that symbolically marks the center point of Hell, this place here is the axis of his existence, his own center, the place where he is still always himself, without the influence of the Light.” After a short pause, she added, “Most are on the search for their center their entire life long, for the axis of their world, but only the fewest are aware of it.”
Burbridge again took two steps in the girls’ direction. The movement had nothing threatening about it.
Is he my axis? Merle asked in her thoughts. My center?
The Queen laughed softly. “He? Oh, no. But the center is often that which stands at the end of our search. You have sought your parents, and you are perhaps on the point of finding them. Perhaps your family is your center, Merle. And Burbridge is, for good or evil, a part of it. But sometime you will perhaps seek other things.”
Then is the center something like that happiness that one always seeks but never finds?
“It can be happiness, but also your downfall. Some seek their entire lives for nothing but death.”
At least they can be certain that they’ll find it sometime, Merle thought.
“Do not joke about it. Look at Burbridge! The Stone Light has kept him alive for decades. Do you not think he is ready for death? And if he will find it anywhere, it will be here, where the Light cannot get at him. At least not yet.”
Not yet?
“The Light will know of our presence. And it will not look on much longer without taking action in spite of all this.”
Then we must hurry.
“Good idea.”
Merle turned to Burbridge. “I must learn the truth. Lalapeya says it’s important.”
“For her or for you?” The old man seemed amused and at the same time desperately sad.
“Will you tell me about it?”
His eyes slid over the endless round of mirrors. Arcimboldo’s legacy. “You perhaps don’t know much about Lalapeya,” he said. “Only that she is a sphinx, isn’t that so?”
Merle nodded.
“There is also a piece of the Stone Light in Lalapeya, Merle. As in you yourself, for you are her child. But I’ll get to that. First the beginning, yes? Always the beginning first … A long time ago the sphinx Lalapeya received the task of protecting a grave. Not just any grave, it goes without saying, but the grave of the first ancestor of all the sphinxes. Their progenitor and not, as many believe, their god—although he easily could become that, if his old power awakens again. They call him the Son of the Mother. After his death thousands upon thousands of years ago, the sphinx people laid him to rest in a place that later was to become the lagoon of Venice. At that time there was nothing, only gloomy swamps, into which no living thing strayed. They set watchers, a long line of watchers, and the last of them was Lalapeya. In that time, during Lalapeya’s watch, it happened that men settled in the lagoon, first building simple huts, then houses, and finally, over the course of the centuries, an entire city.”
“Venice.”
“Quite right. The sphinxes ordinarily avoided humans; in fact, they outright hated them, but Lalapeya differed from the others of her people, and she decided to leave the men and women alone. She admired their strong wills and their determination to wrest a new home from the wet, desolate wasteland.”
An axis, thought Merle in sudden comprehension. A center of their small, sorrowful human world. And the Queen said, “It is so.”
“Over the centuries the lagoon took on the form that you know today, and Lalapeya abided there all that time. Finally she was living in a palazzo in the Cannaregio district. And there my son met her. Steven.”
“Who was Steven’s mother?”
“A Lilim. Naturally not one like the ones you’ve come to know. Not one of those barbaric beasts, and not a plump shape changer, either. She was what people in the upper world call a succubus. A Lilim in the shape of a wonderfully beautiful woman. And she was beautiful, believe me. Steven grew into a child who carried the inheritance of both parents in him, mine as well as hers.”
This thought made Merle’s head spin. Her mother was a sphinx, her father half human, half Lilim. What was she herself, then?
“I often brought Steven here as a c
hild,” said Burbridge. “I told him of the Stone Light, what it was doing to us, what it was making of us. Even then, as a little boy, he resisted this idea. And when he was older, he went away. He told no one of it, not even me. He took a secret gateway, which ended in the lagoon, and he felt the influence of the Light fall away from him. He must have thought he could live as a quite normal human being.” Burbridge lowered his voice. “I myself had lost this dream a long, long time ago. When I was still able to flee, I didn’t want to. And today I cannot. The Light would not permit it. Steven, on the other hand, was unimportant to it, yes, perhaps it was even glad that he was gone—always provided that it thinks at all like a human, of which I have some doubt.
“So Steven went to Venice and remained there. He met Lalapeya, perhaps by chance, although I rather believe that she sensed where he came from. He was, like her, a stranger in the city, a stranger among your people. And for a while they were together.”
“Why didn’t they stay together?”
“What neither had thought possible happened. Lalapeya became pregnant and brought you into the world, Merle. Steven … well, he went away.”
“But why?”
“You must know him to understand that. He couldn’t bear it when anyone held him fast anywhere, when anyone subjected him to firm … firm obligations. I don’t know how to express it. It was the same as in Hell. He hated the Stone Light because it rules us all and only rarely allows one’s own thoughts. He felt himself constricted again by Lalapeya and her child, again limited in his freedom. And I think that was the reason he went away.”
Merle’s lower lip trembled. “What a coward!”
Burbridge hesitated a moment before he answered. “Yes, perhaps he is one. Just a coward. Or a rebel. Or a disastrous mixture of both. But he is also my son and your father, and we should not pass judgment on him hastily.”
Merle saw it entirely differently, but she remained silent so that Burbridge would tell her the rest. “Lalapeya was in despair. She had detested me from the beginning. Steven had told her everything about the Light and about my role in the world of the Lilim. Lalapeya blamed me for Steven’s disappearance. In her anger and her grief she wanted nothing more to do with Steven, and also not with her child, in whom she saw a piece of Steven.”
Junipa grasped Merle’s hand.
“Is that why she put me out on the canal?”
Burbridge nodded. “I think she’s regretted it many times. But she hadn’t the strength to make herself known to her daughter. She was still always the watcher of the forefather, the Son of the Mother.”
Merle thought of the water mirror, of the many times when she’d pushed her hand in and was touched by the fingers on the other side. Always tenderly, always full of warmth and friendship. It didn’t go with what Burbridge said: Lalapeya had made herself known to her, even if in the unique, mysterious way of a sphinx.
“Lalapeya must have known that you were living in the orphanage. Probably she was observing your every step,” Burbridge went on. “It was harder for me. It took years, but finally Arcimboldo located you on my orders and took you to him.” His eyes sought Junipa and found her half-hidden behind Merle. “Just like you, Junipa. Even if for other reasons.”
Junipa made a face. “You made me into a slave. So that I could spy on other worlds for the Stone Light.”
“Yes,” he said sadly, “that too. That was one reason, but it wasn’t mine; rather, it was the Light’s. I myself wanted something different.”
Merle’s voice became icy when she understood. “He used you, Junipa. Not for himself, but for me. He wanted you to bring me here. That was the reason, right, Professor? You had the eyes put into her so that she could show me the way to the mirror room.”
Again Burbridge nodded, visibly affected. “I couldn’t have you brought here by the Lilim—that would only have made the Light aware of you. When you finally came into Hell of your own free will with the lion, you were in the kingdom of the Light. And how little power I possess there you have already seen, when the Lilim took you prisoner. I wanted to spare you all that. Junipa was to have brought you here through the mirrors, as she did today, into this room, where you are safe from the influence of the Light.” He paused a moment and wiped his forehead. Then he turned to Junipa. “The business with your heart … that was never planned. Not I but the Light arranged that. I couldn’t prevent it, for at that point I was also under the Light’s influence. It was hard enough to resist it when I fetched Merle out of the Heart House.” He shook his head sadly and looked at the floor. “It would have killed me for that if it were not dependent on me. It has made me into the master of Hell, and the Lilim respect and fear me. It would be difficult to find someone to take my place. And it would take a long time to build him up to what I am today.” The shadow of a bitter smile flitted across his face. “But that has always been the fate of the Devil, hasn’t it? He can’t simply quit like some captain of industry or abdicate like a king. He is what he is, forever.”
Merle only looked at him while her thoughts whirled in circles, faster and faster. She caught herself trying to give her father a face, a younger version of Burbridge, without the wrinkles, without the gray in his hair and the weariness in his eyes.
“I must be grateful for the moments in which I can still be myself. But they are becoming ever fewer, and soon I will only be a puppet of the Light. Only then will I really deserve the name of Lord Light,” he said cynically.
Was he actually expecting her to commiserate with him? Merle simply couldn’t make him out. She looked into herself for hatred and contempt for everything that he’d done to her and Junipa and perhaps also to her father, but she wasn’t able to find any shred of it.
“I wanted to see you, Merle,” said Burbridge. “Even when you were still a little child. And I had so hoped the circumstances would be different. You should have met me first, not Lord Light. And now it has happened the other way around. I cannot expect that you will forgive me that.”
Merle heard his words and understood their sense, but it didn’t matter what he said: He remained a stranger to her. Just like her father.
“What happened to Steven?” she asked.
“He went through the mirror.”
“Alone?”
Burbridge looked at the floor. “Yes.”
“But without a guide out there he will become—”
“A phantom, I know. And I am not even sure if he didn’t know that too. But I have never given up hope. If it is possible to look into other worlds, perhaps one could find him.”
Junipa was staring at him with her mirror yes. “Was that what you wanted? For me to look for him?”
He lowered his eyes and said nothing more.
Merle nodded slowly. Suddenly she put all the pieces together. Junipa’s mirror eyes, her lessons in the mirror workshop with Master Arcimboldo: Burbridge had determined her course since she’d left the orphanage.
“But why the messenger who offered to protect Venice from the Egyptians?”
“It was you I wanted to protect. And Arcimboldo, because I needed his mirrors.”
“Then the business with the drop of blood from every Venetian wasn’t anything but—”
This time it was Junipa who interrupted her. “He wanted to keep up appearances. And the picture people have of Hell. He’s still Lord Light, after all. He has—” she said it very matter-of-factly—“duties.”
“Is that true?” Merle asked him.
Burbridge sighed deeply, then nodded. “You can’t understand that. This wrestling between me and the Light, the strength of its power … how it forces its thoughts on one and changes all that goes on in one. No one can comprehend that.”
“Merle.” The Flowing Queen ended her silence, speaking gently but urgently. “We must get away from here. He is right when he speaks of how powerful the Stone Light is. And there are things that have to be done.”
Merle pondered briefly, then thought of something else. She turned to the p
rofessor again. “In the pyramid, when we were flying away from you … you said something there, you know a name. I didn’t understand what you meant by that. Whose name?”
Burbridge came closer; he could have touched her with his hand now. But he didn’t dare to. “Her name, Merle. The name of the Flowing Queen.”
Is that true? she asked in her mind.
The Queen gave no answer.
“What would it change if I knew what she’s named?”
“It isn’t only her name,” he said. “It has to do with who she really is.”
Merle inspected him penetratingly. If it was some kind of a trick, she didn’t understand what he was driving at. She tried to move the Queen to an explanation, but she seemed to be awaiting Burbridge’s.
“Sekhmet,” he said. “Her name is Sekhmet.”
Merle dug into her memory. But there was nothing, no name that even resembled that one.
“Sekhmet?”
Burbridge smiled. “The ancient Egyptian goddess of the lions.”
Is that so?
Hesitantly the Queen said, “Yes.”
But—
“In the old temple ruins and in the graves of the pharaohs she is depicted as a lioness. Ask her, Merle! Ask her if she was a lioness of stone.”
“More than that. I was a goddess, and yes, my body was that of a lioness…. At that time most of the gods still had their own bodies and wandered over the world like all other creatures. And who can say if we were really gods. We could not, in any case, but the idea pleased us and we began to give credence to the talk of the humans.” She paused. “Finally we also were convinced of our own omnipotence. That was the time when the humans began to hunt us. For the images of the gods are much easier to misuse for human purposes than the gods themselves. Images have no will and no desires. Statues stand for nothing but the goals of the rulers. So it has ever been. The word of a god is, in truth, only the word of the one who erected his statue.”
Merle exchanged a look with Junipa. Her friend could not hear the Queen. In the mirror eyes Merle saw her own exhausted face and was afraid of herself.
