Waterfall (4 page)

Behind Solon, Basil snickered. Solon’s second assistant was nineteen, tall and swarthy, with slick black hair combed into a ponytail and an impish twinkle in his eyes. Basil wasn’t like the other boys in their community. He listened to old country music, not electronica. He idolized the graffiti artist Banksy and had painted several of the nearby rock formations with colorfully distorted superheroes. He thought he had done the graffiti anonymously, but Filiz knew he was the artist. He liked to show off his English by speaking in proverbs, but he never translated them right. Solon had taken to calling him “the Poet.”

“You can lead a horse to water, but your coffee tastes like poop,” the Poet said, chuckling into Filiz’s glare.

The Poet and Filiz looked older than their boss, whose pale and sculpted face was as smooth as a child’s. Solon appeared to be about fifteen, but he was far older than that. He had searing blue eyes and shorn blond hair dyed with black and brown leopard-print spots. He stood over a silver robot that lay on a long wooden table.

The robot’s name was Ovid. He was five foot eleven, with enviable human proportions, a handsome face, and the blank stare of a Greek statue. Filiz had never seen anything like him and had no idea where he had come from. He was composed completely of orichalcum, a metal neither the Poet nor Filiz had heard of before, but which Solon insisted was priceless and rare.

Ovid was broken. Solon spent long days trying to resurrect him but would not tell Filiz why. Solon was full of secrets that straddled the border between magic and lies. He was the kind of crazy that made life interesting, and dangerous.

In the seventy-five years since he’d arrived at the remote Turkish community, Solon had rarely left the vast warren of narrow passageways that led to the cave he called the Bitter Cloud. He had a workshop on the grotto’s lower level. From there, a spiral staircase led to the living quarters—his salon—then up another flight to a small veranda. It offered a scenic view, overlooking a field of cone-shaped rocks that formed the rooftops of Solon’s neighbors’ caves.

The most magical feature in the Bitter Cloud was Solon’s waterfall. Tumbling fifty feet from top to bottom, the waterfall spanned two towering stories and comprised the back wall of the cave. Its salty water was dove white and always roaring, a sound Filiz heard even after she left work. At the waterfall’s summit, a fuchsia orchid clung perilously to the stony peak, trembling against the current. And at the waterfall’s base, a deep blue pool of water bordered Solon’s workshop. The Poet
had told Filiz a long flume connected the pool to the ocean hundreds of kilometers away. Filiz longed to take a dip in the pool but knew better than to ask permission. So much inside the Bitter Cloud was forbidden.

Turkish rugs hung over small alcoves in the salon, sectioning off two bedrooms and a kitchen. Candles flickered on stalagmite candelabra, constructing ropy hills of wax with their drippings. Skulls lined the walls in elaborate zigzag designs. Solon had positioned each skull carefully in his Gallery of Grins, choosing them for size, shape, color, and imagined personality.

Solon was also the artist of a vast floor mosaic depicting the marriage of Death and Love. Most nights, after giving up anew on Ovid, he sifted through a heap of jagged stones in search of the right shade of translucent blue for Cupid’s wedding veil or the proper flash of red for Death’s blood-dripping fangs.

Filiz specialized in finding these russet stones on local creek banks. Every time she brought Solon an acceptable stone, he allowed Filiz a few moments to wander through the secret butterfly hall behind his bedroom. A hot spring burbled through it, so the hallway was a natural steam room. Millions of species of winged insects roamed the humid chamber and made Filiz feel like she was inside a Jackson Pollock painting.

“You know where they have real coffee?” Solon asked as he dug through a dented metal toolbox.

“Germany,” Filiz and the Poet said, and rolled their eyes.
Solon compared everything with Germany. It was where he’d been old and in love.

Solon, like all Seedbearers, was haunted by an ancient curse: love drained life from him, aging him rapidly. Knowing this had not prevented him from falling desperately in love with an exquisite German girl named Byblis seventy-six years earlier. Nothing could have prevented that, Solon had told Filiz many times; it was his destiny. He’d aged ten years leaning in for their first kiss.

Byblis was a Tearline girl, and she had died for it. Her death had regressed Solon as rapidly as her love had aged him. Without Byblis, he returned to eternal boyhood by shutting off his emotions more completely than any Seedbearer ever had. Filiz had caught him admiring his reflection in the pool at the bottom of his grotto. Youthful beauty radiated from Solon’s face, but it was pore-deep, with no suggestion of soul.

Solon thrust his hand inside Ovid’s skull and probed the ridges of the robot’s orichalcum brain. “I don’t recall if I’ve ever switched these two circuits here—”

“You tried that last week,” the Poet reminded him. “Great minds think alike.”

“No, you’re wrong.” Solon clenched a pair of pliers between his teeth. “Those were different wires,” he said, and switched them.

The robot’s head popped off its shoulders and hurtled into the dark wilderness on the far side of the room. For a moment Solon and his assistants listened to a stalactite drip water onto the robot’s always-open eyes.

Then the wind-chime doorbell sounded. Its flat link pulleys and the triangular sprockets connecting them jerked back and forth across the ceiling of the cave.

“Don’t let them back here,” Solon said. “Find out what they want, then send them far away.”

Filiz didn’t make it to the door. She heard the telltale buzzing, then Solon’s curse. The gossipwitches had let themselves in.

There were three of them today: one looked sixty, the next a hundred, the third no more than seventeen. They wore floor-length caftans of amethyst-colored orchid petals that rustled as they filed down Solon’s spiral staircase. Their lips and eyelids had been painted to match their gowns. Their ears were pierced from lobe to tip with stacks of the thinnest silver hoops. They went barefoot and had long, beautiful toes. Their tongues were subtly forked. A cloud of bees swarmed above each witch’s shoulders, continuously encircling their heads—the backs of which no one ever saw.

Two dozen gossipwitches lived in the mountains around Solon’s cave. They traveled in multiples of three. They always entered a room walking forward in single file, but for some reason, they left by flying backward. Each one possessed spellbinding beauty, but the youngest was exceptional. Her name was Esme, though only another gossipwitch was allowed to call a gossipwitch by name. She wore a gleaming crystal teardrop on a chain around her neck.

Esme smiled seductively. “I hope we haven’t interrupted anything important.”

Solon watched the candlelight playing off the young witch’s necklace. He was taller than most of the gossipwitches, but Esme had several inches on him. “I gave you three damselflies yesterday. That buys me at least a day without your persecution.”

The witches glanced at one another, sculpted eyebrows raised. Their bees swarmed in busy circles.

“We are not here presently to collect,” the oldest of them said. The lines on her face were mesmerizing, pretty, like a sand dune shaped by a strong wind.

“We bring news,” Esme said. “The girl will arrive shortly.”

“But it isn’t even raining—”

“How would a hermetic fart-hammer like you know?” the middle witch spat.

A spray of seawater shot out of the waterfall’s pool, drenching the Poet but glancing off of Solon’s Seedbearer skin.

“How long will it take you to prepare her?” Esme asked.

“I’ve never met the girl.” Solon shrugged. “Even if she’s not as stupid as I suspect, these things take time.”

“Solon.” Esme fingered the charm on her necklace. “We want to go home.”

“That’s crystal clear,” Solon said. “But the journey to the Sleeping World is not possible at this juncture.” He paused. “Do you know how many tears were shed?”

“We know that Atlas and the Filling are near.” Esme’s forked tongue hissed.

What was the Filling? Filiz saw Solon shudder.

“When we glazed your home, you promised to make it worth our while,” the oldest witch reminded Solon. “All these years we have kept you out of view from your family.…”

“And I pay you for that protection! Three damselflies only yesterday.”

Filiz had heard Solon grumble about being indebted to these beasts. He hated obliging their incessant requests for winged creatures from his butterfly hall. But he didn’t have a choice. The witches’ glaze rendered the air around Solon’s cave imperceptible to the senses. Without it, the other Seedbearers would detect his location on the wind. They would hunt down the brother who betrayed them by falling in love with a Tearline girl.

What did the witches do with the fluttering dragonflies and damselflies, the regal monarchs and occasional blue morpho butterflies that Solon bestowed on them in small glass jars? Judging from the gossipwitches’ hungry eyes when they snatched the jars and slipped them in the long pockets of their caftans, Filiz imagined it was something terrible.

“Solon.” Esme had a way of speaking that made it sound like she was both a galaxy away and inside Filiz’s brain. “We won’t wait forever.”

“Do you think these visits speed the process? Leave me to my work.”

Instinctively, everyone looked at the pathetic spectacle the headless Ovid made, wires protruding from its neck.

“It won’t be long now, Solon,” Esme whispered, drawing something from the pocket of her caftan. She placed a small tin on the floor. “We brought you some honey, honey. Farewell.”

The witches smirked as they arched their arms behind their heads, lifted their feet off the ground, and flew backward, up the waterfall and out of the damp, dark cave.

“Do you believe them?” Filiz asked Solon as she and the Poet laid the robot’s head next to its body. “About the girl being on her way? You knew the last Tearline girl. We have only heard the stories, but you—”

“Never mention Byblis,” Solon said, and turned away.

“Solon,” Filiz pressed, “do you believe the witches?”

“I believe nothing.” Solon set about reattaching Ovid’s head.

Filiz sighed and watched Solon pretend to forget that she existed. Then she crept upstairs to the entrance of the cave. On her way to work the sky had been a strange silvery color that reminded her of a wild foal she used to see frequently in the mountains. There had been a chill in the air that made her walk quickly, rubbing her arms. She’d felt nervous and alone.

Now, as she stepped outside the cave, a great shadow fell over her. An immense storm cloud dominated the sky, like a giant black egg about to crack. Filiz felt her hair begin to frizz, and then—

A raindrop fell onto the back of her hand. She studied it. She tasted it.

Salty.

It was true. All her life, her elders had warned her of this day. Her ancestors had lived in these mountain caves since the great floodwaters receded millennia ago. Her people possessed a murky collective memory of Atlantis—and a deep-rooted fear that another flood would one day come. Was it actually going to happen, now, before Filiz had climbed the Eiffel Tower or learned to drive a stick shift or fallen in anything resembling love?

Her shoe smashed her reflection in a puddle, and she wished she were smashing the girl who’d made this rain.

“What’s your problem, frizzball?” The middle gossipwitch’s voice was unmistakable. Her forked tongue flicked as the gossipwitches hovered in the air over Filiz.

Filiz had never understood how the wingless witches flew. The three of them were suspended in the rain, arms slack at their sides, making no visible effort to stay aloft. Filiz watched droplets of salty water settle like diamonds on Esme’s lustrous black hair.

Feliz ran her hand through her own hair, then regretted it. She didn’t want the witches to think she cared about how she looked. “This rain will kill us, won’t it? Poison our wells, destroy our crops—”

“How would we know, child?” the oldest witch asked.

“What will we drink?” Filiz asked. “Is it true what they
say, that you have an infinite supply of freshwater? I have heard it called—”

“Our Glimmering is not for drinking, and it is certainly not for you,” Esme said.

“Are the girl’s tears as powerful as they are said to be?” Filiz asked. “And … what did you mean when you mentioned Atlas and his Filling?”

The witches’ beautiful bright caftans contrasted with the giant cloud above them. They looked at one another with amethyst-lined eyes.

“She thinks we know everything,” the oldest witch said. “I wonder why.…”

“Because,” Filiz said nervously, “you’re prophets.”

“It is Solon’s task to ready her,” the eldest said. “Take up your fear of mortality with him. If he can’t prepare the girl, your boss will owe us his cave, his possessions, all of those pretty little butterflies—”

“Solon will owe us his life.” Esme’s eyes darkened, and in a suddenly terrifying voice she said: “He will even owe us his death.”

The witches’ laughter echoed over the mountains as they floated backward and disappeared into the strengthening rain.