The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (28 page)

—Novalis
,
Hymn to the Night
(1799, translated by
Emilia Emeryse Smallwood, 1805)

“There, with malignant patience,

He sat in fell despite,

Till this dracontine cockatrice

Should break its way to light.”

—Robert Southey
,
“The Young Dragon” (1829)

M
aggie went looking for the Mother.

“She must wake up,” said Maggie to Charicules, perched on her shoulder.

“No more sleeping,” Maggie said to Isaak, who trotted along beside her.

At first they had moonlight, but then they walked a long way in a lightless place that became narrower and narrower. The ground beneath them flattened, walls flowed beside them.

At last, they saw ahead a sharp, thin line of light perpendicular to what had become a smooth floor under their feet. Making their way towards it, Maggie knocked a hammer from a shelf on the wall, reflecting the shaft of light for a moment as it fell. Isaak jumped three feet in the air when the hammer banged and hopped along the floor of the tunnel.

The line of light was a gap between two doors. Maggie reached out, pushed the doors, and stumbled blinking into a brightly lighted hallway. Isaak, regaining her poise, stalked gracefully out of the doorway. Her pupils got very small but she did not blink.

They had exited from an enormous armoire made of mahogany. Turning and peering back into the cabinet, they saw rows of hammers, files, rugines, bores, crimps, and many other tools neatly hung or stacked on hooks and shelves, gleaming, dustfree, ranks of implements diminishing into the gloom.

“Ah, there you are, right on time,” said someone behind them in the hallway.

Startled, Maggie spun about, dislodging Charicules from her shoulder. Isaak’s tail burst up and her claws went wide. A large woman wearing a body-length leather apron over a black muslin dress stood before them. She was consulting a golden pocket watch.

“Well, tick tock, come along then, mustn’t keep her waiting,” was all the woman said before putting the watch into an apron pocket, spinning on the heels of her sturdy boots and proceeding briskly down the corridor.

Rooms and rooms they passed, each providing a blurred glimpse of women—and men—working at drafting tables, blowing glass, hammering on strips of metal, twisting wire, weaving, cording, painting, colouring, carving stone and wood.

Beneath and around the sound of the work—all the tapping and clinking, the burring, bending and clanking, the sound of voices raised in debate, praise, and exhortation—was a low, steady humming, like a thousand bees at a thousand beeskips, a hum that rose and fell rhythmically. Or maybe the humming was the sum of the sound of the work, not external to the effort, but the quintessence, the very circling, soaring spirit of the effort, rising and falling, opening and shutting, spire and respire, always coming back to its source.

Charicules began to harmonize atop the basso continuo of the humming.

Eventually they came to a very large room, filled with people coming and going. Two hundred yards across and five storeys tall, the room was ringed with balconied gangways on each of the upper storeys. Overflowing bookcases were built into every wall, a seamless expanse of books interrupted only by great louvered windows letting in rivers of light, by framed maps, drawings, paintings and charts celestial and nautical, and by vitrines filled with tools, specimens, maps, maquettes, models, and objects less describable. Four large brass-figured clocks stood on columns one storey high, one at each major point of the compass. Floating at the centre of the roof was a rose-window skylight.

On the floor in the very middle, directly under the skylight far above, was a massive wooden bench, surrounded by dozens of people. On the bench was an incomplete model of a ship, seven feet tall. Blueprints, sketches and maquettes surrounded the large model.

Maggie pushed her way into the crowd around the bench and stared hard at the model, the blueprints, the maquettes. Charicules flew up and perched on one of the ship’s spars, singing notes of inquiry. Isaak, after a prodigious leap to the top of the bench, explored the rudder and pintle—purring all the while with suspicion. Murmurs and whispers ran through the crowd, right ’round the bench. Everyone watched her.

The woman who had met Maggie at the tool-case in the hallway disappeared into the throng. A smaller, older woman walked up to Maggie.

“I know you,” Maggie said. “Saint Macrina.”

“Indeed, well met again,” said the older woman. “Be at home here in the House of Design, the workshop of desire and architective joy. But I think you already know your way around this place, though perhaps you do not yet fully remember.”

Maggie looked upon Saint Macrina wonderingly, and mused a while. She felt the humming in her ears and mind and heart, a melody she knew but could not quite name. She shook her head at last.

Saint Macrina smiled, took Maggie’s hand, and led her out of the great workroom. Charicules flew along side them in the hallways and Isaak trailed, stopping frequently to interrogate the tools in a glass cabinet or to challenge the leather boots of a worker.

They walked for about an hour, through corridors and across other workrooms—none so vast as the one containing the large ship model, but none of them small either—and up many staircases. Isaak was a bounding ball of gold as they ascended.

Opening a blue door, Saint Macrina ushered Maggie, Charicules, and Isaak into a garden encompassing a roof two hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide. Crenellated brick walls five feet tall enclosed the garden, espaliered with rose canes, clematis, small pear, quince and plum trees. Beds of herbs, brambles, shrubs and flowers—most notably the blue bixwort, grace-noted by hedge mustard—constituted the garden proper, traversed by winding brick walkways and dotted with a profusion of fountains. Hundreds of bees worked the flowers, bending down stems under their temporary weight, flying off in minute showers of pollen. Hundreds of butterflies dappled the air just above the blooms: sylvanders, marbled yellows, ecailles, great coppers, tortoise-shells, apollos no larger than a half-penny piece, lucines the size of a horse’s hoof.

Charicules and Isaak lost no time losing themselves in the garden. Maggie followed Saint Macrina more slowly to the centre of the garden, where a white-columned, blue-roofed pavilion sat, raised ten feet up on a dais. A large, white-faced clock, encased in a ruddy metal, crowned the pavillion. The saint left Maggie at the foot of the stairs. Maggie went up the stairs and found there another woman, seated at a table.

“Sit with me,” said the woman.

Maggie and the woman sat across from one another, saying not a word for many minutes. They looked out over the garden and beyond, at a city that stretched to the horizon on every side. The garden sat on a roof that was nearly forty storeys high, taller than the top of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the tallest building in London. The upper air was clear, the lower smudged by smoke issuing from many chimneys. The humming took on an even thicker note, an accumulated bass line. The bees in the garden syncopated that line; the butterflies slip-winged and worried it.

“Impressive,” said Maggie. “But I am not here to enjoy a view, no matter how glorious. I am seeking the Mother. She must be woken. Can you help me?”

“Of course I can,” said the woman. “Yet not so hasty, if you please, dearest. Let us dine first. I have not eaten in a long time, you see, and I am very, very hungry.”

Maggie could not recall seeing food or drink on the table when she arrived, but now two pale yellow plates sat there filled with beef tripe-and-eggs on boiled potatoes and two tall glasses of cloudy deep-golden beer topped with a mass of foam.

“Ah, the
Hefeweiss
, I have dreamed of this!” said Maggie’s host, before taking a long pull at the glass.

The two ate in silence, the host because she was utterly engrossed in the eating and the drinking, Maggie because she was examining every feature of the woman across the table. The woman resembled Maggie, except for the addition of a decade or perhaps fifteen years (though around the eyes and the corners of the mouth she seemed much older still).

Maggie thought, “Well, Mama, if you could see me now. Your little eagle has flown very high.”

Polishing her plate with a last bit of potato, the woman said, “Now then, Miss Maggie, ask me your questions, or else I fear you might burst.”

Maggie, pausing before her response, said, “I have come a very long way and will not burst now of a sudden at this final step.”

The woman laughed merrily and said, “I felt your spirit come to me on tigerish feet while I dreamed! I see now that your precursor was but a weak outline of your fierce reality, my child.”

Maggie said nothing to this, though the woman’s tone was disarming and seemed to invite a reply.

“You seemed quicker to speak when I saw you in my dreams, but perhaps that was the element of your character that your shadow-self overweighted,”continued the woman, puzzlement creasing her face for a moment. “Howsoever that may be, here you are now. You—not you alone, by the way, please do not presume so highly—have wakened me. Though be warned that I am still very sleepy, and some part of me sleeps still, while yet another part of me yearns to return to my bed. It is hard to rouse oneself in the middle of such a sleep, and a well-deserved one at that.”

Maggie said nothing, but narrowed her eyes and shrugged ever so slightly.

“You
are
bold, my Maggie. Most mortals show a bit more deference when first meeting me, those few who find their way to me at all. Perhaps I should appear as a dragon or a sphinx, something to compell awe or fear. Though seeing you now, I do not think even a dragon would cow you.”

“I mean not to be impolite,” said Maggie, picking up Isaak, who had wandered in from the garden. “It’s just that I need you,
we
need you, and it has been a long time since any of us heard from you. And very few of
us
get much sleep either, down where we live.”

As if to emphasize the point, Isaak glared at Goddess.

“Ah, I must concede a point fairly if brusquely spoken,” said Goddess, furrowing her brow. “Having set the mainspring of self-direction within each of you, I am obligated to abide by the results of how you govern yourselves, . . . no matter how coarse or ill-judged I may find those results.”

Charicules perched on the railing nearest Maggie but did not sing.

“Goddess, I am not so foolhardy as to pick a quarrel with you, who are the object of my searchings. I need your help. I can fight the
okakpu
of an owl, but not all his followers too, and at the same time outfit and send a ship into the riddlesome places,
and
haul a world-island back over those same unlucky roads.”

Maggie ceased talking when she realized she was being ignored. The Mother was giving her complete attention to a slice of honey-glazed almond cake that now sat on the plate in front of her. No cake or dessert appeared on Maggie’s plate. Isaak walked across the table and sat in front of Goddess, who slowed her chewing.

“I do not recall giving the same free will to cats,” she said, her mouth half-full. “It seems much has changed since I nodded off and now cats,
some
cats at least, have grown almost to become people.”

Maggie feared then she might have stirred the wrath of Goddess, though she did not let her fear show. Isaak sat as still as marble.

Goddess laughed instead. A slice of cake appeared on Maggie’s plate.

“Forgive me, children. I am peevish when I wake and easily crossed, mostly because I do not yet understand the state of affairs but hate to admit to my ignorance and my own possible need for assistance. Not befitting divinity, I know, but I must own it.”

Isaak returned to Maggie’s lap.

The mood having been softened, Maggie and Goddess talked for hours in the synagogic garden, each learning from the other. Goddess spoke of the Original Song that she and God made together, how they sang themselves into existence, two paired notes in self-aware harmony and mutual rhythm who pierced and overwrote forever the precedent silence. She told of how they sang the angels into being, how the universe was sung from nothingness to house them, how they massed the seraphic choirs to shape a near-infinite variety of other beings.

“You know the Song, little Maggie, we all do: it is inscribed in the blood and sinews of every single being past, present, and future across all the multitudes of worlds. You hear its aortic bass line right now, the upbeat and the downbeat, the diastolic and the systolic. I
am
that song, Maggie, and I also hearken to it, both itself and following it at the same time.”

Goddess recounted the story of the three great rebellions, born less of wickedness (though this was often a consequence) but more from folly and despair. The first angels to rebel wished to un-make themselves, being unwilling and unable to accept self-awareness, and especially desperate to avoid their own immortality. But Goddess and God could not un-make; notes once sung cannot be un-sung. The first rebels have sought fruitlessly to obliterate themselves since their beginning very near to the Beginning—in their ever more inventive and grotesque attempts at their own un-doing, they have caused and will continue to cause great havoc across the universe. The second cohort of rebels enjoyed their consciousness but rejected its musicality; they could not abide being, hearing, and singing the Song for eternity, and have sought to live purely in prose, only to discover over and over again that there is prosody also in prose, as in all things, and thus no escaping metre and harmony. Forever thwarted in their efforts to denude music of melody and flatten all rhythm into static, the second-wave rebels rage against the universe, laying waste and causing pain (the resulting dirges and lamentations being musical only incites these angels to further rage, propelling the cycle forward endlessly). The third flight of rebels loved music but too well, seeking to commandeer it for their own various purposes, and to impose singular, rigid musical regimes where they could. The inherent flexibility of music precluding the permanency of any such regime, each of the rebellious paladins angrily tries to force compliance through punishment and denial.