Illuminations, p.4
Illuminations, page 4
“Oh,” said Rosa. “Like the Sirens in Ulysses—”
And then she had it.
Ulysses, when he wanted to listen to the Sirens, had tied himself to the mast to keep from going to them. Rosa needed to look at the box, but she had to keep herself from going away. “Thanks, Sergio!” she cried, and stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.
He looked vaguely surprised. “Welcome!”
Rosa ran off in pursuit of twine. (Rope would have been better, but grown-ups tend to ask rather strange questions when you demand to know if there is any rope suitable for tying yourself up with.)
Eventually she found some. Grandmama had bunches of herbs hung up and tied with twine, and both the ball of twine and the big scissors to cut it were in a drawer in the kitchen. Rosa snipped off several generous lengths and stuffed them in her pocket along with the scissors, and went back downstairs to deal with the crow.
She slid and slithered through the stacks to the closet with the crow box. Once she was there, she tied the twine around her wrist, several times, although she was careful not to tie it too tight, because she didn’t want to cut off the circulation and have her hand turn black and fall off. (That would have been very interesting and not at all boring, but she used her hands a lot and would have found it very inconvenient.)
Rosa tied the other end of the twine to the doorknob on the outside of the closet, careful not to look inside. She couldn’t keep her eyes closed and tie the knots at the same time, but she kept one eye closed and her face turned away.
When she had tied herself quite firmly to the doorknob—and had yanked several times and not broken the twine—she took a deep breath and turned to face the crow box.
Let’s see, middle shelf…
Her eyes locked on the painted eyes of the crow. She turned immediately away, marching toward the door, and was brought up short by the twine.
Why am I tied to—oh, right…
“Sneaky crow,” she said aloud. “Sneaky, sneaky crow. But I’m even sneakier.”
She rummaged around for one of the bolts of lace. Her eyes skipped over the crow box twice and the twine jerked her back to reality both times.
Rosa grinned. She was winning.
With the big kitchen scissors, she hacked off a long length of yellow lace. It was not the best material, but it was better than nothing.
She squeezed her eyes shut and began to feel her way down the shelves.
Her fingers crossed wood, old calendars, crumpled fabric…and there. It could only be the crow box. It was wood with a complicated sort of latch on it. Rosa could feel the small raised lines of brush strokes.
“Got you,” she whispered, and began wrapping lace around the box.
It was surprisingly difficult to do with her eyes closed. Having one wrist tied to the door didn’t help. She opened her eyes a crack, spun around, walked toward the door with the strong conviction that the stuffed armadillo was somewhere outside the room, came up short, and grumbled. Apparently she hadn’t wrapped it nearly enough.
It took her twenty minutes and she brutalized the bolt of lace in the process. She had to wrap the box four or five times so that it was impossible to make out the pattern through the lacework. Her wrist was covered in narrow red lines where she yanked on the twine while trying to walk away.
Finally, when she was thoroughly frustrated and thoroughly determined to beat the crow box or die trying, she looked down…and nothing happened.
The box sat on the shelf, a misshapen lump of wrapped and wadded lace. One corner stuck out, but apparently that corner did not have enough of the illumination visible to drive her away.
Rosa blew out her breath through her long black bangs.
“Well, then,” she said.
She cut the twine holding her to the door and picked up the box.
It wasn’t particularly heavy. Probably not stacks of gold, then. But when she tilted it, she felt something shifting inside, so it wasn’t empty.
She cradled it to her chest. She felt a little weird, thinking that the crow was wedged right up against her, glaring through the lace into her lungs and her heart, but it couldn’t do anything.
“If you were the sort of illumination that killed people, I’d be dead already,” said Rosa. “And who would have put you in the basement, anyway?”
She hefted the box and made her way out through the stacks.
She was most of the way across the studio floor when she spotted Walter trundling determinedly along. She tucked the box under her arm and grabbed him by the shell. His legs kicked and he waved his mandibles in the air, but he was basically a good-natured beetle.
Uncle Marco was overjoyed. “Walter! Why do you wander off, my interesting little friend? I can’t do this without you.” He held out his hands and Rosa dropped the beetle into them, and left artist and model alone.
She took the box to her bay of the studio and set it down on the bed. She had to think carefully about what to do next.
If I see the crow, it makes me walk away. So if I’m going to open the box, I need to make sure I don’t see it.
She tied her wrist to the bedpost with a long piece of twine and stared fixedly at one of her fanged radishes.
She could just close her eyes…but if she opened them on accident, she’d waste a lot of time going back and forth.
“What I need is a blindfold!” said Rosa out loud.
She would have preferred an elegant silk blindfold, something that looked very impressive and sinister. Unfortunately she didn’t have anything like that.
She opened her sock drawer and scowled. Rosa had very small feet and the socks were all very short. She would have had to tie three or four together to make a decent blindfold.
On the other side of the drawer, though…
Rosa sighed.
They were clean and they were the right size and she wanted to get into the box right now, and that was how she ended up kneeling on the bed with a pair of underwear on her head. She could feel her hair sticking up through the leg holes. I hope nobody comes in and sees this.
Still, she had more important things to worry about. Rosa began carefully unwrapping the lace around the box.
She had barely gotten two turns done when Grandmama said “Rosa? Is that underwear on your head?”
“No!” said Rosa, snatching it off. “Or—um—yes, but—”
Her grandmother and her uncle were standing in the doorway.
“Why are you…no.” Grandmama held up a hand. “I don’t want to know. I don’t ask Sergio when I come in and he’s standing on his head with his eyes closed—”
“Helps me think!” shouted Cousin Sergio, who was headed for the kitchen. “Improves blood flow!”
Uncle Alfonso did not comment, but his lips did twitch just a little. Instead he said, to Rosa, “Would you like to come with me? They are fitting together the great illumination at the sewer, and your grandmother and I are going to watch.”
“Yes!” said Rosa, jumping up.
The twine caught her wrist and pulled her back down.
Grandmama covered her face with her hands. “I will not ask,” she said, to no one in particular. “If you are in a family of artists, you learn not to ask. So I will not ask.”
Rosa hurriedly cut herself free with the scissors and shoved her feet into her shoes. “Coming, Uncle!”
The crow box was important. But the great illumination that Uncle Alfonso had been part of was the most important work that the city had seen in a hundred years.
EIGHT
Afternoon
Wheat Day
Messidor, the Month of Harvest
* * *
If you were going to make a list of the most glamorous places on earth, sewers would be unlikely to make the cut.
True, there are some that run through ancient, buried cities and some that are lined with the bones of unfortunate armies and some that enter the mouth of a live sea serpent and run out again through the other end—well, only one of those, to be precise, located in the ancient and terrible city of Thran, and tourists do not go to Thran except in small pieces intended for consumption by the priesthood—but the majority of sewers are really quite boring.
The sewer in Rosa’s city was not one of the exciting ones. Fortunately, they did not actually have to go down into it. Instead, Uncle Alfonso and Rosa and Rosa’s grandmother walked through the tangled streets to the great canal that ran in a slithery half-circle around and through the city.
There were many bridges across the canal, but the bridge they walked to was very wide and had a squat stone building built directly into the surface of the water. A set of stone steps ran down to the water-building’s door.
You could smell the canals long before you got to them. They smelled like dead fish and rotten garbage and nobody drank the water. You got water from the well or piped into the house, but you would never, ever drink from the canal itself. The sewers in the city hadn’t been dug very deep, and every time it rained they overflowed into the canal. In practice, that meant that if you flushed the toilet during a rainstorm, whatever you flushed went floating by in the canal ten minutes later. It was…unpleasant. The canal was connected on one end to the lake, and once upon a time, the other end had connected to farmer’s fields, but eventually the water got so unpleasant that the farmers didn’t want it, so it just sat in the canal and stank and occasionally backed up into people’s basements.
The Dynast, who ruled the city, aimed to change that, and that was where the city illuminators came in.
Uncle Alfonso knocked on the door of the building and a little man in a hat opened it. He wore a paper mask over the lower half of his face. He tipped his hat to Grandmama, smiled in a vague way at Rosa, and ushered them inside. “Come on,” he said. “We’re almost ready to start.”
They followed the little man into the building. The smell was appallingly bad, even worse than it was outside. Grandmama made a noise and put her hand over her mouth.
“I know,” said the little man, “believe me, I know! Put these on, it helps.”
He handed them little paper masks. Uncle Alfonso helped tie Rosa’s. The mask covered the wearer’s nose and mouth, and the paper had been soaked in perfume, so it smelled very strongly of lavender and lemon.
They followed the little man through another door and down a hallway which opened onto an enormous room. A group of illuminators stood there, all wearing paper masks. Rosa recognized Serena’s brother by his eyes, and Serena’s father by his lack of hair.
They waved to the Mandolinis, and Uncle Alfonso lifted a hand to wave back. Rosa was glad that Serena wasn’t there. It would have been very awkward.
It also meant that she got to see a great illumination come to life, and Serena didn’t. Rosa found this a cheering thought. When they were speaking again—if they were ever speaking again—she was going to tell Serena all about it.
The floor of the enormous room dropped away in front of them, going way down into the ground. There was a railing around it so that people didn’t fall in. The Mandolinis went right up to the railing and looked over, and Rosa said, “Ewwww.”
On the far wall, there was a gigantic sewer grate. Flowing out of it, dropping into the canal below, was the nastiest, ickiest, grimiest water that Rosa had ever seen.
You could hardly call it water. It didn’t trickle, it oozed. It was the color of dark coffee and it was thick and sludgy. Green scum hung from the bottom of the grate in slimy ropes.
“That’s the sewer outlet,” said Serena’s brother, leaning against the railing next to Rosa. “Isn’t it disgusting?”
Rosa nodded.
“When it rains, it doesn’t just dribble out like that. It shoots out like a fire hose.” He shuddered theatrically, and Rosa did too.
Rosa tried to imagine that disgusting brown water shooting out like a fire hose and backed away from the edge.
Serena’s brother laughed. “They’re going to let more water out—oh, look! We’re starting!”
Around the rim of the sewer grate, in a circle twenty feet across, were six immense curved tiles. Five had been slotted into place, and only the gap at the top was empty. The tiles were the size of tables, and each one was painted carefully with illuminations.
“Which one’s yours?” asked Serena’s brother.
“The top right,” said Uncle Alfonso. “Which one is Studio Magnifico’s?”
“The bottom two,” said Serena’s brother.
“Fine work,” said Uncle Alfonso easily, while Rosa thought Two! They got to do two tiles?
“What little you can see of it from here!” said Serena’s brother, laughing. “They had to glaze those two twice over, since they’ll take a pounding.”
Uncle Alfonso had worked on his tile every day for over a month. Everything had to be done with the special glazes that the Dynast’s men had supplied, and then the tile had been taken and fired in a kiln and glazed again so that the water wouldn’t wear it away. The glazes had been thick and turned heavy as mud if you left them for long, so Rosa had spent hours stirring the pots while her uncle worked.
But why did the Studio Magnifico get to paint two tiles, and we only got to paint one?
While she was thinking these gloomy thoughts, two men went along the walkways, and began hauling on ropes. Grandmama pointed, and Rosa looked up and saw the last and largest tile being lowered from the ceiling.
“Who did that one?” asked Uncle Alfonso.
“Studio Lasrina, I think,” said Serena’s brother. “The one that keeps all the barky little dogs.” He grinned. “I guess all the dog hair burns off when they fire the tile in the kiln.”
The tile was lowered until it was nearly in front of the gap in the circle. Uncle Alfonso reached out and took Rosa’s hand, and she realized that he was nervous.
Why would he be nervous? He’s been an illuminator for years and years, I know he did it right!
“Please let this work,” muttered Serena’s brother, almost to himself. “And if it doesn’t work, let it be someone else’s fault and not mine…”
Uncle Alfonso laughed. “From your lips to the ears of the saints!”
The last tile slotted into place.
For a moment nothing happened, and then Rosa began to feel…something.
At first she thought that the smell really was making her dizzy, but it was clear that everyone else felt it too. A wind seemed to blow from nowhere. The warm feeling of an illumination coming to life began to fill the air, but it was stronger than anything Rosa had ever felt.
“Five studios…” murmured the little man in the hat. “Two years to get the design right…” He wrung his hands together. “If it works, the illuminations will keep all that nasty stuff in the sewer, and only let pure water through…if it works…”
“If it works,” said Uncle Alfonso, “the canals will be clean. People will be able to drink from them. No more walking blocks to a well, if there isn’t a pipe.”
He squeezed Rosa’s hand.
Rosa tried to picture it. They had piped water at home, but in the poor parts of the city, people still had to use wells and pumps. Grandmama had said that when she was young, before the pipes had been installed, she had to spend hours every day fetching enough water to cook and bathe and clean brushes with. Rosa could hardly imagine how much work that must have been.
“And no more smell!” said Serena’s brother.
“Can illuminations do that?” asked Rosa. There was a canal less than a block away, and in summer you could smell it even indoors. They burned sweet candles by the armload to purify the air.
The notion that a simple painting, even a magical one, could clean the horrible sludge coming out of the grate boggled the mind.
“Look!” said Grandmama.
The mortar between the tiles, previously invisible, began to glow.
Golden light bathed their faces. Serena’s brother put up a hand to shield his eyes.
The wind intensified. Even through the mask, Rosa could smell it. It smelled of clean pine and cedar, and it swirled around them, tugging at her hair and the paper mask, cutting through the scent of waste and lavender.
The pipe behind the grate began to rumble.
“They’re releasing the water now,” said the little man in the hat. He sounded as if he were watching an execution. “Oh please, please, Saint Anthony, please…”
With a roar, water poured through the pipe and struck the grate. Rosa jumped back. The sound of the water hitting the metal was like an immense fist striking a board. The whole room shuddered with the impact.
The golden light from between the tiles blazed up to meet it. It was so bright that Rosa couldn’t even see what was happening at first—and then the light ran down the metal of the grate, running over the iron bars like golden syrup, until a spiderweb of light covered the opening.
For a moment, Rosa saw what looked like a dark serpent, thirty yards long, thrashing inside the pipe, ramming against the web of light, as all the filth in the sewer struck the illumination…and was thrown back.
Water poured out of the grate, reflecting a hundred sparks of the golden light, and it was as clean and clear as the water that came out of the pipes in the studio. The horrible sludge was gone.
One of the men on the walkway put out a cup on a long pole and filled it with the clear water. He passed his hands over it, carefully—“Water-witch,” murmured Serena’s brother—and then nodded.
He brought the cup back with him, to the little man in the hat.
“It’s clean, sir,” he said.
Rosa could actually see the little man’s hands shaking as he looked into the cup.
He lifted it to his lips and took a drink. He closed his eyes.
And nodded.
“It worked,” the man whispered. “Saints have mercy on us. It worked.”
NINE
“It will take a bit for the canals to be clean,” said Uncle Alfonso, as they made their way home. “They’re going to drain them, a little at a time, into the sewer so that the water can pass through the illumination. And someone will have to muck out the sewer itself, which is a whole different set of problems. But now we’ll have clean water everywhere in the city, not just for the people who can afford wells and good pipes.”
