She would outlive both the Princess and the Professor, and from that day on, never had a leash upon her.
Master and Mistress walked arm in arm down to the bathing beach in the wolf-light, reflecting upon the bankruptcy of their business venture, smoking their pipes, and regarding their new island, so amphorously regurgitated from the Mze. Only yards from the bank, it already sported a fern.
Felix flung the bag of garnets far out in the stolid waters. Ainoha snapped the pleats out of her skirts, raised them above her sunburnt legs to her golden bee, and beckoned her husband to follow. He removed his boots and trousers, and they waded through the murmuring reed-beds, the face of a virgin saint on the tip of each stalk of underwater grain. And there like Quality and the Muse, Mnemosyne, they had a quiet conversation on an uninhabited island.
“I’ve never seen the Mze so low,” Felix murmured, and for the first time in his life, he saw a streak of fear in his wife’s eyes. Realizing that her sorrowing, even for good reason, was the only thing which could frighten him, Ainoha took her husband’s hand and resolved to change the subject.
“Dearly beloved, I know you have need of your men friends, but it’s their friends who have become the issue. What a pair of cold fish, I should say.”
“Indeed,” Felix concurred, “there is such a thing as too thoughtful a performance — and too singular a person.”
“But perhaps the Professor is on to something with his obsession with. . bourgeoisiosity? Darling, what sort of century do we face when aristocratic royalty behave like plebs? Perhaps,” she threw back her head and laughed like a horse, “perhaps the time has come for a bit of anti-bourgeois thinking?”
Felix stroked her hair as he stroked his beard. His concentration had been broken for a moment, for while pondering the receding waters, he had noticed a dark shape circling the island, a shadow longer than the largest sturgeon. “Well,” he murmured absently into her loosened hair, “it’s their century, no doubt, but wouldn’t it be grand to throw them off-stride for a moment?!”
They embraced as he placed his right hand on the flat of her back. Then Felix began a gliding stride about her, counterclockwise, though he was following more than leading, and once she had thought several moves ahead, sure of her loveliness, Ainoha tempered his figures by placing a bare foot with great care into his pauses, as if the new sand of the island was scorching — and with this counter-proposal, it was he who twirled in the air, a grin in his underwear.
“Oh, Cavalier,” she gushed, “one is always making history, isn’t one.”
“Let us put it all behind us, dear. Live and learn.”
“Oh, darling,” she punched the heavy air. “Learning or forgetting. Who knows what’s worse.”
They raced each other back to Semper Vero for an early dinner and bed, but were surprised to find Count Zich’s sweat-drenched grays standing at the door. He sat slumped behind his silver-buttoned groom, swathed in a cadmium orange blanket embroidered with his huge monogram, his granite hatchet-face pale and unshaven.
“There’s not enough water in this landscape,” he greeted them in a bad humor.
From my lookout, I had watched their pretty dance, and knew my place in the Age to Come — the dumb dancer who must keep silent during the dance, acting the part of the clown and cracking a whip to keep away evil spirits. But I was also the flagbearer, the dumber one who will invariably assume the lead.
In the last of the wolf-light, the foothills and answering ranges beyond gleamed like sheetmetal hammered into angles, and the Mze was ablaze with floating shields and helmets. Deep, diurnal shadows rocketed up the peaks and zigzagged down ravines, convex and concave changed from insubstantial radiance into geometric figures — parallelograms, rhomboids, polygons — as drought brought spring and autumn into one. I felt it ludicrous that this landscape would one day be registered in my name.
But suddenly, as if to trump my own self-mockery, thermal hurricanes were charging down the gorge, a cold front turning the sky green and the grass blue. The air was filled with the disordered wingbeats and jargon of birds, lightning was held captive in the incandescent cloudbanks, and when it finally struck without a single drop of moisture, small fires broke out in the cornfields, and the currents paled in sulfurous ravines. White legions of thistledown blanketed the flickering thickets, and the woods were garlanded with snowy wool. Flash after flash of lightning ripped from the burst clouds, and the air was sullied by the chemical smell of fading leaves as the solar winds tore about our house.
A large tulip tree was uprooted in the garden, its soil-clotted roots ripping a hole large enough for a swimming pool, its branches parting just in time to fall to either side of a statue without injuring it. Shutters opened, slammed shut then opened again, shattering their hinges. Rooftiles and chimney cornices spun through the air like ducks with their heads shot off. Stripped of their leaves, empty colonnades of poplar bent double. Hedges were flattened, yews exploded. And from his tower suite, Father’s papers fluttered in an endless stream from the open windows, leaves of manuscript littering the grounds like a week-old battlefield of a lost empire.
The last aria had gone sharp and faint at the same time, shuddering bell-notes on our grim scene. Then there was a great beating of wings behind me, and against the gray clouds a flash of white, as dearest Waterlily, a lace-strewn dove in gilded talons, was borne from the cold heights across the lustral waters to the Field of Mars. Her corpse was never found.
The wind and sun went down together. A tongue of flame licked at my hair but did not burn; I was blushing for my sister and myself, Ainoha’s Fire Child. My thoughts were full of singeing old men’s beards and burning babies in their cradles, as I heard for the first time in many years the fly buzzing in the buried doll’s skull, and every image cried out, “Kill!”
I descended into the spinal fluid of Cannonia to cool off. The shore was no longer a resilient couch but a shingle in a chalk-white sea. The remnants of the Mze seemed to be a series of strings, syrupy, glassy, and clear, like something you could cut with scissors.
Half in unhappy love, I leapt into the slack shallows. The exposed reed-beds issued no love song; their chant had been replaced by cicadas. The young virgin’s faces on the stalks of underwater grain now fell flat on the black ooze. I washed my own flushed face as Ainoha once did when she smeared her half-frightened boy with mulberry juice upon his brow and temples, and set prehistoric time to ticking. But I now knew I was well beyond her rule over the limpid, beyond the reproval of her rosy lips. Stripping down, I walked briskly through the Mze to the meadow bank, never once submerged, then back again to the deepest part of the motionless channel, to take the tally of the darkness. The water came up only to my heart. There, beyond my father’s athletic instincts, I could ponder his pre-Christian lesson — that while the father can lighten every care and crisis and shape his fall, the father cannot save his son from fate or bring him back to life. For it is the world itself which has a tragic flaw.
The water boiled around me and the seething Mze went white with the bellies of dead fish. The percipiencies of the river washed my wounded senses; its susurances tempered something sharper than mere manhood. Rising from the sheen of marble with a penumbra of reeds and poplar leaves, beneath a straying moon, I moved naked through the clichés of shadows, returning to my home and a sleep of iron. Above the river, resting in its course, the stars ran backward.