The witchery, p.15
The Witchery, page 15
Hundreds, nay thousands of birds there were, big, little, but all blindingly white. Indeed, the shadowed corners of the courtyard sparkled, glistened as the roosting flock flew out from within the twining vine. There were the hummingbirds, yes; but also there were other species—merles, for one: blackbirds that were not black but white—darting through the dark and the light. The effect, the result was a chiaroscuro Rembrandt would have envied.
I fell to my knees, and crossed my arms over my head; for surely these birds would attack as the hummingbirds had. But no: The wave of light receded—I could feel the flap of their wings, hear it, too, but the birds themselves made no noise at all, no cry, no caw. Soon the aviate band retook to its common roost, and I watched as the vine seemed to absorb them, hide them save for what seemed a dim yet steady glow: Imagine the light of a small room wherein a lamp has just been lowered. Soon all the leaves had fallen still, and silence presided. It was then I felt upon my arms what at first I thought was perspiration; but it was—most disconcertingly—guano, golden, fine-grained guano that I washed away in the flow of the fountain. And I mention this grotesquerie for one reason alone: That effluent that had rained down upon me—I had it in my hair, and the shirt I then wore would have to soak for a full day—was not golden in the way a sunset is said to be golden. No: In the thin, odorless guano there shone gold, actual gold in the shape of flakes, some large enough to cover the nail of my smallest finger. It was quite like what the hummingbirds had secreted, though it stung not at all, being upon, not under, my skin.
Some nights hence, I caused that same exodus again. This time—wiser—I stood sheltered from the fall of precious…shit; and yes, down it came, glistening: a rain of gold. How odd, how eerie to see the birds in the dark, moving en masse, like a flag of light whipping in an unseen wind. When all fell still, there the courtyard lay, glistening beneath the moon as the streambeds of California will be seen to do beneath the sun. But let me say: Never once did I see this scene and think Value, or wonder how I might gather the guano. No: It was all too weird for that. Moreover: Greed was ever low on the list of my many faults, and what riches later came to me came…not naturally, no, but…hélas, all in due time, all in due time.
Upon the right-side wall—and recall: access to the assoltaire was via the far left corner of the courtyard—this spreading vine formed a portico of sorts; and in the dank, shit-slick space beneath this darkening drape, upon the balconies, there’d been set potted roses. How they grew, I cannot say; for it seemed too dark a demesne for roses. (Doubtless the flow of fertilizer helped.) So grateful was I to see these roses—though they, too, were white, and contributed no color at all to that courtyard showing naught but blacks, whites, and the myriad shades between—I determined to drag a few of the pots out into the courtyard and set them center-all. This I did, only to wake the next morning to find their leaves fallen to ash, as if incinerated by the sun. Or the moon. And well I recall waiting to hear about this from Brù. Doubtless I’d fouled some experiment of his. But if so, he never said a word, though later I found those same pots returned to their places, the roses returned, fuller than before, transformed. If I were to admire them—revivified, as it were, the roses had rather less appeal—I’d have to do so in the dark beneath that living, shit-dripping drape. Merci bien, mais non. And so it was I came to fancy the cacti.
They were everywhere, and grew without regard to the light. (Yes, these, too, were white.) One, set in a stony pot, in the courtyard, was as big around as a barrel, with spines six inches in length ranged along its folds. Once, I was witness to a hummingbird battle, the which are brutal. A battalion of birds dipped and dove near this cactus, desperate for something I could not see, or did not know to be a hummingbird delicacy. Was it the dew that yet glistened on those spines? Could it have been a morsel of the cactus flesh that was sought? I knew not; and if my tale here lingers overlong it is only to say:
I saw one of the light-birds impaled upon a spine. By day, it was more easily ignored; for the bird itself blended with the sunlight. But by night, well, there the creature shone in its struggle, and in struggling impaled itself upon a second spine. You’ll deem me cruel, perhaps—though you will agree: I owed no kindness to those creatures that had summoned me so—but I watched the bird in its throes for a week, maybe more. It was neither vengeance nor cruelty that drew me to that potted cactus each twilight; rather I came to wonder how long the creature could live, struck through and deprived of food or other sustenance. The sight of the bird became quite troubling and eventually I freed it, pushing it from the spines with a stick. It fell to the still-warm stones below, and I watched it where it lay, still, for no more than a minute, its color, or rather its light, undiminished. Was it dead, or…doubly so? Or was this like those swordsmen who survive being run through, only to die when finally their enemy’s steel is withdrawn?…No; for up, up flapped the bird, and back it went behind that living wall of vine when, by Nature’s laws, it ought to have died days prior.
But in Queverdo Brù’s world the laws of nature were not laws at all; rather they were theses, tenets to be tested, and, often as not, disproved. As he’d disproved death. Or (as he’d have said) attained Perfection—leastways amongst his fauna and flora.
How was it I stayed at Queverdo Brù’s Sinuessa, so like the abode of that name we know from Ovid, where flocks of snow-white doves dwelled? Alors…
When the nuns at the convent school first threw me away, discounted and discarded me—as indeed they did, having deemed me destined neither for God’s glory nor the plainer purposes of man—they threw me—blessedly—into a library, yes; wherein I verily lived, at home in the ash of life, if not its fire. From that day to my death, I could make myself a home wherever a library were present. This I had done both at Sebastiana’s Ravndal and the Duchess’s Cyprian House, and this I did in Havana as well. I took to Brù’s study, ever shuttered and lamp-lit, wherein were arrayed some several thousand volumes, some so old they may have been secreted from Alexandria before that city’s library—the first of the world’s great libraries—burned some fifteen hundred years ago when Julius Caesar set fire to the Egyptian fleet and flame leapt from ship to shore, taking the library and its store of ancient knowledge.
Brù’s library was a large room needful of shelves, wherein I sat upon stacked books whilst perusing others upon a table made of, yes, more stacked books. It was dark, cool and quiet as a crypt, and I was told in certain terms to keep it that way; and so I read by lamp or candle, never daring to open a window to let sunlight tint the books or a breeze blow from them that dust-coat accumulated over the ages. (This I did not from fear of Brù, mind, but from love of books.) And I recall that room’s earthy tang, an elemental admixture of earth and still, still air. Hours, hours passed as I sat in that library; or sometimes I’d take a tome to my room above it, a room equally dark, equally drear. How many hours? I never knew; for all the clocks in Queverdo Brù’s home were stopped, as is the custom of his country (so said he), as guests ought never to feel rushed, or hurried from the host’s home…. Indeed. Would that I had hurried from Brù’s; but instead I descended once again into books.
Seated in that library, I’d sometimes draw back from a book and let my witch-fixed eyes refocus upon a ceiling painted with Pompeian murals, pale with age and peeling in places. No doubt an owner prior to Brù had commissioned such pieces; for—to judge from that ceiling crowded with toga’d philosophes and the Muses, clustered in its corners—the room had long been a library. Too, ringed round the door’s lintel was the charge “Ora, lege, relege, laborat, et inventis.” Pray, read, reread, work, and ye shall find. And this I did (minus the praying, of course)…. Yes, when those books, and the sheer weight of all they held, pressed upon me, I’d toss a cushion onto the parquet and lie back to look up, to lose myself in a landscape over which Vesuvius loomed; and inevitably my thoughts would hie toward Sebastiana, in whose Book of Shadows I’d read descriptions of that volcanic pile, seen when she—une artiste of the first order, and bearing letters of introduction to the Neapolitan queen; which letters were signed by that queen’s sister and Sebastiana’s great patron, Marie-Antoinette—had gone south to make her way, much as she, many years hence, would send me overseas to do the same. But as it saddened me to think of my sister, my savior—Wherever was she?—I’d return to Brù’s store of books, copying from them into volumes of my own; for to copy is to learn twice over, and knowledge was the water in which I waded, waded whilst awaiting…what? The coming of Sebastiana? The return of Calixto? Yes; but also the putting into place of those plans Queverdo Brù had for me, his long-sought Rebus; all of which plans he kept hidden from me ’neath a veil of hospitality.
Chapter Twelve
For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “Tamerlane”
IF YOU, READER, ARE A WITCH WELL VERSED IN SIGHT, you’ll wonder why I did not seek out Calixto as any Pythoness, any Sibyl, any Seeress might. Well, let this suffice: I was afraid to do so, at first, and thought it better, safer, to seek the boy by mortal means.
My search began the morning after I’d been invited to stay by Brù and Ourobouros. To invite seems not quite the right verb, no, implying as it does politesse and perhaps the gentlest persuasion, whereas the alchemist offered his home to me whilst his pet python threatened to squeeze the Blood from me and hasten my Red End. Was I then impressed? Compelled to dwell in so strange a place? Regardless, I agreed to stay, having first made it clear that I must, must be let to come and go as I pleased; for I’d not be captive.
Not much time had passed before I tested my host. The streets of Havana were still wet when I set out over them by first light, having first climbed down from the tent atop the assoltaire. I was ever watchful for any light-born creature coming after me. None did. Not that I could see. And so wary was I of being followed, I soon was lost, having neither plan nor firefly to follow. Luck alone led me back to the Hotel de Luz, where I paid the prying Señora Almy in full, gathered my few things, and returned to take to my room beneath the roof of Queverdo Brù.
Later that same day, though it was not yet noon, I left Brù’s house again. I wandered now, and heard the Havanan hours cut by bells into quarters and halves. It was the bells that would lead me—though none too directly—to news of Calixto.
Wandering, enfin searching the old city, I reasoned thusly:
Cal was a sailor. He’d been weaned on the sea. To it he’d return, as any boy-child might to his mother’s breast. As I’d first confounded and later lied to him, it seemed doubtful he sought me on those same streets. Conversely, it seemed quite probable that he would seek passage out of the city as soon as possible, eager to put blue-green leagues of sea between himself, me, and my mysteries.
I’d worn the dress to elicit pity amidst the port’s men: I confess it. But there was greater risk involved now as well, and I was fearful. Of detection, yes. Of molestation, too—corporal or otherwise—coming at the hands of a man; for, if faced with same, how would I hide from any witness or passerby my sisterly defenses? Understand: I did not fear for my safety—surely I knew suitable sister-work, and spells enough to thwart any thuggery—rather I feared discovery of the sort that had come from Calixto’s witnessing the death of Diblis. Should bad devolve to worse, and someone cause me to strike, well, what would I say to a contingent of the city’s thousand-odd soldiers come to stare down at some sister-slain sailor? Alors, soon I’d a mind full of lies, one for every conceivable occasion…. Oh, but wasn’t it lies that had brought all this on the day before? It was. And, in truth, the thing I most feared was finding the boy I sought; for whatever would I say to Calixto, caught as I was between lies of little efficacy—he’d seen too much of my witchery to be dissuaded, this I knew—and truths which yet were unformed, were mere words which I could but toss at his feet, like so many dice, shaken and shot from the cup of my heart?
Fearful, I wandered; and—despite the fact that I’d recovered my plan of the city, and had it to hand—I ended up not at the port proper but rather at the cathedral. There I sat attending the hour of the previous day’s appointment: noon; for this seemed to me logical. It was not logic, however; it was a lie I told to buy myself time. Calixto was not coming back to that cathedral: Gentle, graced though he was, still he had that outsize pride common amongst young men, pride that can seem a charade at times—I must do this or that, I must do what a fuller man would…—and whereby the heart is suborned to the mind, rather as a rabbit may be said to be suborned to a trap. And Calixto’s pride—strengthened, perhaps, by the shaming he’d suffered aboard the Athée—would yet be too powerful to allow for his return to the cathedral the day after.
I sat a long while at—not in—the cathedral, despite the veritable call of my Saint Sebastiana—quite odd, this, quite—and watching the papists parading in and out. Rites were being read for the peacable disposition of the dead; and once a coffin came too near where I sat, in the plaza, and its occupant—or its occupant’s after-soul, hovering near—caused my blood to course at that death-speed I so disdained, and sought to avoid at all costs. Again I determined to turn to the plan, lest I, in my wandering, wander too near the massed dead, a cemetery wherein they lay a-churning in their graves. But as I drew forth my plan, I heard two things in succession: the bells broadcasting half-twelve, and a man, coming westward up Empedrado—from the port, I presumed—calling out, in singsong fashion, the weather, as all the Cuban serenos do, or did, in another day, their own appellation unchanging even when the weather they sang of was less than serene.
The sereno had not come directly from the port; for as I set off in the direction from whence he’d come, I found, at the end of Empedrado, the fish market. I knew it by scent before sight. The sun was high, the day hot, and doubtless the fishmongers still there—at an hour late for marketing—were peddling the worst of their wares.
It stretched an eternity, that market; and I hurried from it, keeping as close to the coast as I could. In so doing, I came upon the Customs House, and the port proper.
In Spanish, in English, in French, I asked questions of any man who did not, on first sight, dissuade me from doing so. There were women portside, too, of course; but they scared me more than the men. Women require the slyest of lies if they are to be won over by another woman. Had I been wearing slacks and a vest, had I bound my breasts beneath my blouse, I’d have asked my questions of the women, be they sailors’ mothers, wives, or treats. But, as I wore my dress of bolan, it was the men I approached, knowing that in their appraisal of my person they’d be so bald, so brazen, so showy and slow that I’d have time to appraise them as well, proceeding with my plan in accord with those instincts born of my…duality; for such instincts always served me well.
I’d bought a pearl-handled fan at a wharfside stall. Expensive though it was, I’d learned at Cyprian House just how efficacious a fan can be when dealing with men whom one must approach (as a woman) alone, and without benefit of introduction. Of course, if it’s the man who approaches the woman, the fan must be fluttered in accord with a wholly different set of rules, and one can be less coy than I was, then, saying, to a stevedore who, despite his bulk, was whistling the gentlest of airs, one whose words, I knew, were English:
“Sir…Sir?” Speaking the word a second time, I curled it at its end, the way one curls a ribbon with a blade to render it a bow. When this furthered my cause not at all, I made so bold as to snap tight the fan and with it tap, tap, tap at his muscled back; his shoulder, more precisely, which already he’d bent toward a barrel on which was written, or stenciled, characters I could not read. Had any of the Cyprians been present to see me at my game, they’d have descended into hysterics; for here was harlotry, the which I quickly fled, saying, pathetically:
“Please, oh please, sir, do say you speak English.”
He said nothing. But when finally he smiled, I redoubled my efforts, smiling up at him—up, I say, as I’d taken care to choose a man taller than myself: No mean feat, this, but a necessary one, as shorter men sometimes grow skittish when made to look up to a woman—and I began to spin a story the particulars of which are of no import now. The gist was this: What ships had left in the last half day, and which were preparing to leave in the next?
Saying nothing, the stevedore returned to his barrels; which now I saw bore alliterative labels in Roman script as well as those characters I’d seen earlier. Pepper. Poivre, they read, Palau-Penang.
I repeated myself. I pressed. Finally, flinging a fleshy finger outward—as one would fling scraps to a cur—he directed me toward a house, nay a hut, a shingled lean-to over the open door of which there hung a sign: Port-Master. This I approached, leaving no thanks in my wake.
Therein I found not the port-master but rather some fat, jowly minion of his from whom I learned the disheartening fact—muttered in a Spanish slurred by the tobacco he chewed, and showily spat—that nearly two thousand ships put in at Havana in a given year. “Señor,” said I, in Spanish—and only when angered can one truly gauge one’s knowledge of a studied tongue—“I am not interested in the traffic of this or any other year. I am interested in ships that may have sailed in the last twelve hours, as well as those readying to sail as we speak.”
In truth, I cared little about the ships soon to sail; for already I knew it: Calixto had sailed. Witch’s or woman’s intuition? I cannot say; but as I benefited from both, and sometimes a bit of Sight, en plus, my suppositions were rarely wrong. He’d sailed, yes. The questions, then, were these: With whom? To where? And when oh when would he return?
