by Kai Meyer
Merle was the last who walked to the grave, a pit that Vermithrax had dug out of the mud with his claws. She went down on her haunches and looked for a long time at the cloth in which they’d wrapped Serafin. Utterly quiet, utterly stunned, she had taken her leave, or tried to at least.
But the true leave-taking would last months, years perhaps, she knew that.
Shortly afterward she followed the others to the boat.
Merle had thought she wouldn’t have the desire to come back once more later, alone, in the evening, after the grave was filled with sand and earth, but then she did it anyway.
She came alone. She hadn’t even told Junipa what she had in mind, although her friend of course guessed. Probably they all knew.
“Hello, Merle,” said Sekhmet, the Flowing Queen, perhaps the last of the old gods. She was waiting for Merle at the grave, a dark silhouette on four feet, very slender, very lithe. Almost unreal, had there not been the scent of wild animal wafting from the rock.
“I knew you would come here,” said Merle. “Sooner or later.”
The lion goddess nodded her furry head. Merle had trouble bringing the brown cat’s eyes into harmony with that voice she’d heard inside for so long. But finally she managed to do it, and then she thought that really, they went quite well together. The same teasing, even contentious expression. But also eyes full of friendship and sympathy.
“There’s no happy ending, is there?” Merle asked sadly.
“There never is. Only in fairy tales, but not even there particularly often. And if there is one, then it is usually made up.” No question, it was the Flowing Queen speaking, no matter from what body and under what name.
“What happened?” asked Merle. “After you were yourself again, I mean.”
“Did the others not tell you?”
Merle shook her head. “Junipa brought everyone through the mirrors to safety. You and your son … you were still fighting.”
A breeze wafted over the nighttime desert and stirred the goddess’s fur. Merle hadn’t noticed the difference in the moonlight—everything here was gray, icy gray—but now she saw that Sekhmet’s body was no longer of stone. Serafin’s vital power had made her again what she had once been: an uncommonly slender, almost delicate lioness of flesh and blood and fur. She didn’t look at all like a goddess. But perhaps that made her just that much more godly.
“We fought,” said Sekhmet in a throaty voice. She sounded sad, probably not only for Serafin’s sake. “Fought for a long, long time. And then I killed him.”
“That’s all?”
“What do details matter?”
“He was so big. And you are so small.”
“I have eaten his heart.”
“Well,” said Merle, for nothing better occurred to her.
“The Son of the Mother,” Sekhmet began, then she broke off and started over: “My son was perhaps big and very strong and even sharp—but he was never really a god. The sphinxes revered him as a god, and his magic was strong enough to bear their fortress through the mirror world. But he was eaten away by greed and hate and by a rage for which he had long forgotten the reason.” She sadly shook her lion head. “I am not even sure whether he really recognized me. He had underestimated me. I opened his flank and ate through his entrails. Just like the time before.” Sekhmet sighed as if what had happened made her sorry. “That time I left him his heart. This time not. He is dead and will remain so.”
Merle let a moment pass before she asked, “And the sphinxes?”
“Those your friend has left alive are scattered to the winds. But there were not many. They have seen what I have done. And they fear me. I do not know what they will do. Hide, perhaps. A few will try to advance to the Stone Light, to their father. But they pose no more danger, not today.”
“What happened to the Iron Eye?”
“Destroyed.” Sekhmet noted the astonishment in Merle’s face and purred gently. “Not by me. I guess it could not withstand the heat and cold that was called up inside it.”
“Heat and cold,” repeated Merle stupidly.
“Your two friends have not been idle.”
“Winter and Summer?”
Sekhmet purred agreement. “They ground the mirrors between the elements. All that is left is a mountain of silver dust, which the Nile will carry away into the sea with the passage of time.” She tilted her head toward the grave. “Do you want to see him? I can bring him here.”
Merle thought about it for a couple of seconds, then shook her head. “I don’t want anything more to do with all that.”
“What do you plan to do now?”
Merle’s eyes roamed over the insignificant grave mound once more. “Everyone is talking about the future. Eft is going to stay with the pirates”—she smiled fleetingly—“or with their captain, depending on whom one believes. So she can live in the sea, even if she isn’t a mermaid anymore. And Dario, Aristide, and Tiziano … oh well, they want to become pirates too.” Now she actually had to laugh. “Can you imagine that? Pirates! They’re still only children!”
“You should be one too. At least a little.”
Merle’s eyes met the lion goddess’s, and for a moment she felt in complete harmony with her, understood through and through. Perhaps they were still two parts of one and the same being, in some way; perhaps it would never really end, no matter what happened. “I haven’t been a child since I …” Merle sought for the right words, but then she simply said, “Since the day I drank you.”
Sekhmet gave out a lion sound that might have been laughter. “You actually believed that I would taste like raspberry juice!”
“You lied to me.”
“Only fibbed.”
“Fibbed considerably.”
“A little.”
Merle walked over to Sekhmet and put both arms around her furry lion neck. She felt the warm, rough lion tongue lick her behind the ear, full of tenderness and love.
“What are you going to do now?” Merle tried to suppress her tears, but she choked and the two of them had to laugh.
“Go north,” said the lioness. “And then east.”
“You want to find the Baba Yaga.”
Sekhmet nodded on Merle’s shoulder. “I want to know who she is. What she is. She has protected the Czarist kingdom all these years.”
“As you did Venice.”
“She had more success than I. Nevertheless, we could have much in common. And if not … well, it is at least something that I can do.” Sekhmet again looked Merle in the eye. “But you have still not answered my question. What are you planning?”
“Junipa and I are going back to Venice. Eft and Calvino are taking us there. But we can’t stay there long.”
Sekhmet’s eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Junipa’s heart.”
“The Stone Light is too powerful. At least in this world.”
“Then you will go with her? Through the mirrors?”
“I think so, yes.”
The lion goddess licked her across the face, then she touched Merle’s hand gently with the rough ball of one paw. “Farewell, Merle. Wherever you go.”
“Farewell. And … I’m going to miss you. Even if you were a real pain in the neck.”
The lioness purred softly at Merle’s ear, then leaped over Serafin’s grave in one spring, bowed in front of the dead boy under the sand, then turned and glided soundlessly into the night.
A gust of wind carried her scent back.
Vermithrax left the next morning.
“I’m going to look for my people, no matter what Seth said.”
It pained Merle to see him go. It was the third departure in a few hours: first Serafin, then the Queen, now he. She didn’t want him to leave her. Not him, too. But at the same time she knew that it didn’t matter what she wished or did. Did not each of them seek a new task, a destiny?
“Somewhere they are living still,” said Vermithrax. “Flying, talking lions like me. I know it. And I’ll find them.”
&n
bsp; “In the south?”
“Rather in the south than elsewhere.”
“Yes, I think that too,” said Lalapeya, who was standing beside her daughter. “Perhaps they found protection there.” Lalapeya wore her human form like a dress, Merle thought. Every time she saw her mother like that, it seemed to her a little like a masquerade. She was the most beautiful woman Merle knew, but still she was always a little more sphinx than human, even in that body. Merle wasn’t certain if anyone else felt that.
She turned again to Vermithrax. “I wish you luck. And that we’ll see each other again.”
“We will.” He bent forward and rubbed his huge nose on her forehead. For a moment she was blinded by the glow that he gave off.
Junipa walked up beside him and stroked his neck. “Good-bye, Vermithrax.”
“I hope we’ll meet again someday, little Junipa. And take care of your heart.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And of Merle.”
“Of her too.” The two girls exchanged a look and smirked. Then they both fell on Vermithrax’s neck together and only let him go when he growled “hey, hey” and shook as if he had fleas in his fur.
He turned around, unfolded his stone-feathered wings, and rose from the ground. His long tail whipped up sand. The ground was gradually drying out, now that the sun was in the heavens again.
They looked after him until he was only a glowing dot in the endless blue, a meteor in broad daylight.
“Do you think he’ll really find them?” asked Junipa softly.
Merle didn’t answer, only felt Lalapeya’s bandaged hand on her shoulder, and then they went back to the boat together, where Eft was waiting for them.
The crew had polished the submarine to a high gloss. Golden pipes and door handles flashed; glass doors were, insofar as they were available, newly replaced; and a pirate who handled brush and paint better than a saber (Calvino said) had gone about repairing one of the ruined frescoes. Gradually he would take on the painting all over the boat. The captain had allowed him an extra ration of rum (for he painted better when he was drunk, he maintained), which made the other pirates offer themselves eagerly as helpers. Some had established a workshop, and every place in the boat was scrubbed, refined, and polished. Others discovered their cooking talents and prepared a festive meal in Merle’s honor that wasn’t bad at all. She was grateful and ate with appetite, but still, in her thoughts, she was somewhere else, with Serafin, who now lay alone on his rock and perhaps dreamed of the desert. Or of her.
Eft sat by Captain Calvino. Arcimboldo’s mirror mask lay before her on the table. Sometimes, depending on how strongly the gas flames flickered in their little copper boxes and danced on the silver of Arcimboldo’s cheeks, it looked as if his features were also moving, as if he were speaking or laughing.
Occasionally Eft bent forward and appeared to whisper something to him, but that might have been only an illusion and she was in truth reaching for a bowl or pouring wine into her goblet. But then what was it that made her break into laughter unexpectedly, even when neither Calvino nor one of the others had said anything? And why did she refuse to leave the mask below deck with the other treasures?
By the end of the meal she had wrung out of Calvino the promise to mount the silver face on the bridge, above the viewing window, where it could keep everything in view and, prophesied Calvino, probably know everything better than he. Eft stroked his hand and gave him a shark smile.
“All that’s missing is for her to flutter her eyelashes at him,” Junipa whispered in Merle’s ear. The two burst out laughing immediately afterward when Eft gave the captain a flirtatious look that broke the rough fellow’s resistance once and for all.
“I guess we don’t need to worry about her anymore,” said Merle, while Lalapeya, sitting with the two girls in her human form, laughed—in her, even that looked a little mysterious, like everything she did or said.
After the meal Junipa withdrew into the mirror world through a six-foot-tall mirror in her cabin. Only thus could she prevent the Stone Light gaining in power and influence over her. Of course she could have taken Merle and herself to Venice that way, but the two of them were enjoying the time left with Eft and the others. Furthermore, there was a promise that Merle intended to keep.
Somewhere in the Mediterranean, about halfway between continents, Calvino made the boat surface, in response to her request. Merle and her mother climbed out of the hatch onto the hull, walked over the tangle of splendid designs in gold and copper to the bow, and from there looked out over the endless sea. The surface nearby was moving, fish perhaps, or mermaids. They’d already met several. Now that the galleys of the Empire were floating rudderless on the sea, the sea women had come out of their hiding places and sank the warships wherever they encountered them.
Merle took the water mirror from Lalapeya. She touched the surface gently with her fingertips and said the magic word. The light vapor of the mirror phantom instantly gathered around her skin.
“I want to redeem my promise,” she said.
The milky ring under her fingertips quivered. “Then the time has come?” asked the phantom.
“Yes.”
“The sea?”
Merle nodded. “The biggest mirror in the world.”
Lalapeya gently laid a bandaged hand on her shoulder. “You must give it to me.”
Merle held her fingers in the interior of the oval frame a little longer. “Thank you,” she said after she thought for a moment. “You probably don’t know it, but without your help—”
“Yes, yes,” said the phantom, “as if anyone had ever doubted it.”
“You can’t wait a moment longer, can you?”
“I can feel others. Others like me. The sea is full of them.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” He was sounding more and more excited. “They’re everywhere.”
“One more question.”
“Umm.”
“The world you came from … did it have a name?”
He thought it over for a moment. “A name? No. Everyone just called it ‘the world.’ Nobody knew there was more than one of them.”
“That’s exactly how it is here.”
Behind them Calvino stuck his head out of the hatch. “Are you done yet?”
“Just a minute,” Merle called back. Turning to the mirror, she said, “Good luck out there.”
“You too.”
She pulled her fingers out, and the phantom began to rotate, fast, like a whirlpool. Lalapeya received the mirror and closed her eyes. She raised the oval to her mouth and breathed on it. Then she murmured a string of words that Merle didn’t understand. The sphinx opened her eyes and flung the mirror out into the sea. It flew through the air in a glittering arc. Shortly before impact, the water left the frame, an explosion of silvery beads, which melted into the waves immediately. The mirror splashed into the sea and went under.
“Is he—”
Lalapeya nodded at the waves, which thumped splashing against the hull. What Merle had taken at first for white foam revealed itself to be something nimble, ghostlike, that formed a multitude of crazy patterns before it looked like a hand waving good-bye and then faster than lightning whizzed away in a zigzag through the waves, away, away, away into freedom.
LA SERENISSIMA
VENICE ON A RADIANT MORNING, VENICE LIBERATED.
Seagulls screamed over the wrecks of galleys, half-sunk along the banks of the lagoon like the ribs of bizarre ocean creatures of wood and gold and iron. Men of the City Guard were posted on most of them to protect the wreckage from plunderers. Days would pass yet before the cleanup work in the city was far enough along for anyone to attend to the costly shipwrecks in the sea.
Above an island in the northeast of the lagoon, far away from the main island, a dark column stood out against the sky. Black smoke rose from the fires that burned there day and night. The fallen mummy soldiers were carried thither on ferries and laid on pyres for their final
rest. The wind stood favorable and carried the ashes out over the sea.
Over the roofs and towers of the city the guardsmen flew their rounds on silent stone lions with widespread wings. The men were vigilantly observing the activities in the streets, making sure that no mummies lay undiscovered, even in the remotest back courtyards and gardens. Calling loudly from the sky, they directed the cleanup troops, repair crews, and soldiers on the ground. Down there all differences were suspended: Everyone, whether in uniform or day laborer, whether fisherman or tradesman, was busy cleaning up the streets, clearing the remains of mummy soldiers out of houses and from piazzas, and taking down the barricades, soot-blackened witnesses to the meager resistance against the Empire.
At the broad opening to the Grand Canal, Venice’s main waterway, the activity was as lively as it used to be only on feast days. Dozens of boats and gondolas darted around on the water like ants at the foot of their hill, transports in one direction or the other. Everywhere, shouting and calling and sometimes even, again at last, individual songs from the sterns of polished gondolas.
On the bank of the canal mouth, at the harbor wall of the Zattere quay, stood Merle, Junipa, and Lalapeya. They waved at the departing rowboat that had brought them to shore. Tiziano and Aristide lay to the oars, while Dario and Eft waved good-bye with arms outstretched. The sea wind tore the words from their lips. The submarine lay far outside, on the other side of the ring of wrecked galleys, but none of the three turned away until the little dinghy was entirely out of sight. And even then they remained standing there, looking out over the water to where their friends had vanished.
“Will you go back with me for a little way?” Lalapeya asked finally.
Merle looked at Junipa. “How do you feel?”
The pale girl ran one hand over the scar on her chest and nodded. “Right now I don’t feel anything. It’s as if the Stone Light has withdrawn for the time being. Maybe to get over the defeat of the sphinxes.”
Lalapeya, who had covered her petite woman’s body with a sand-colored dress from the pirates’ stores, led them through an alley deeper into the confusion of streets and piazzas. “The Light will probably rest for a while. After all, it has all the time in the world.”
