Part 18 (2/2)

”The Martian year,” Jupiter interrupted, ”is six hundred and eighty-seven days; astronomers have calculated it. So we may take that as a sign that the Sphere of Mars experiences time at roughly half the Earth's rate.”

”A sign?”

”A sign.”

They were like Humpty-Dumpty, Arthur thought. Words meant what they said they meant.

Therese Didot held the position of Mars. She was middle-aged, pet.i.te, pretty, and French. She appeared one sunny afternoon at the flat off Piccadilly, breezed past Arthur with a smile into the hallway, and told him that she had decided to make it her business to teach him a thing or two. In return she said that she wanted to know all about Josephine, and their engagement, and their plans for their wedding, and their hopes for their children. She said she was very fond of children.

”I'm afraid I'm not in a mood for conversation, Miss Didot.”

Therese sat daintily on the sofa. ”Then perhaps I will talk and you will listen.”

Miss Didot smiled and looked around the flat. Her eye landed on the little shaving-mirror on the mantelpiece, which Arthur had purchased after discovering, to his irritation, that Atwood's flat had no mirrors. She tsk-tsked.

”I advise you to dispose of that, Arthur. All sorts of wickedness may be done by means of mirrors.”

”Mirrors?”

”Please. Sit. I would like to help you, Arthur. It's been too long since I had the pleasure of teaching the young.”

Arthur sat down on a chair by the table, in somewhat ungracious silence.

”How do you suppose I come to know Lord Atwood?”

”I have no idea, Miss Didot.”

”I was his governess, when he was just a tiny thing. His mother was dead, poor creature.”

”Hmm. I wouldn't have guessed. Hard to imagine him as a child.”

”He was a very sweet boy.”

”I don't see that this is any of my business.”

”So, you see, I am a teacher. I am not the greatest or wisest of teachers. I cannot teach you enlightenment. I do not have it, and I do not know if you want it. But I can teach you some things that will be helpful in this world. May I tell you a story? It concerns mirrors.”

”I suppose so.”

”It also concerns a young man-no older than you are today. And I suppose this was not very long ago-not quite ten years, which does not seem so very long at my age. This young man was a talented magician-but then, his father was a talented magician, too; in fact, he was one of the stately old magicians of England. This young man's father lived in a big house in the country, which was very old, and had belonged to his father, and his father before him, and he knew every stone, and he knew every tree in the woods, and he knew every man and woman in the village of which he was the lord; and he believed in fairies in the woods, and devils abroad at night, and was very old-fas.h.i.+oned, in the way of English magicians.”

She paused to smooth down her skirts. Then she glanced over Arthur's shoulder at the mirror behind him and tidied away some stray hairs. Then she smiled.

”And so the young man learned magic the way other boys might learn the alphabet, or playing with a ball. And because he was proud, and his father was proud, they struggled, and they grew to hate each other. And when he was a young man he fled; to London first, then to Paris. But Paris was not far enough to escape from his father's shadow. Because the young man wanted to be a magician, and in that world his father's shadow was very great, and very wide. Other young men in a similar predicament might have struck their fathers, or shot them. But that was not how this young man had been raised.”

”You refer to Atwood, I take it.”

”I am telling you a story, Arthur. He sent letters. From Paris, first, then from Berlin, then from Morocco. At first those letters were quite ordinary; he sent stories of his travels, just as any loving son might; stories of his studies, the libraries that he visited. He wrote that he had visited Rome, and that he thought he might become a Catholic, and sought his father's blessing-which was denied-and so on. Then the young man began to write of nightmares. He wrote that he had contracted a fever, and that ever since, he had been followed on his travels by nightmares. In those nightmares he woke under a night sky-no stars, moon-lit-and all around him were black men: a crowd of them, black as ebony, and black-eyed, and silent as statues, and the moon also was black. The old man, as it happened, had a peculiar horror of Africans; he did not like those stories at all!”

She glanced at the mirror over Arthur's shoulder, smiled, and adjusted her hair.

”Still the letters came. This young man was on the Grand Tour: they came from Madrid, from Switzerland, from Jerusalem and Istanbul. He wrote of his visits to the old libraries, the bath-houses, the mountains-and he wrote of his dreams. Each time a new detail added to the dream: a crow, a black lion, a crack across the moon, a man who held a horn in his hand. And the old man was no fool; of course he understood by now that magic was being worked against him, but it was too late, you see. Once you see, it is too late; because then if you were to stop reading, and the words kept coming, you would not know what was in them, and wouldn't that be worse? You would have no defence against them. They would continue in your dreams.

”The old man could not sleep. He paced. He wrote back, and his letters were full of hate and spite and the blackest curses. Because he was old-fas.h.i.+oned, he invoked the names of devils and angels; there was magic in them to singe a postman's fingertips! But not this young man, who put them directly into the fireplace, and then wrote of his travels in Italy. He left Rome-he wrote-and he went up into the mountains. On a path across a stream one evening he saw a man who was as black as a crow and had but one eye in his head. He fled. On the train that took him away from Turin, he saw the man again, from the window, at a station. Please, Father, please help me. Mockery! The old man went red in the face with fury, and clutched his heart. Mockery! The young man wrote of his dreams: a black eye, a veiled face, the sky itself like a black veil being pulled aside, to reveal the true stars beyond! He wrote that he was consumed with fever, and that he was writing from a hospital bed. He wrote in such a trembling hand that the old man had to get out his spectacles and pore over the pages to read them, as if he were reading the oldest of grimoires, made of ancient parchment that might crumble to dust if he breathed on it. The old man held his breath. Father, help me, please, he read. A voice spoke to me in the mountains, and it will not stop whispering. It will not stop. Its voice is as black as the night. And then one night the old man cried out, and when the servants came running they found him dead, stretched out on the floor, lying in a corridor beneath a black mirror.”

She seemed to be waiting for Arthur to say something. He wasn't sure what to say. Her story struck him as revolting.

”But of course it was black,” she laughed. ”Do you see? It was night!”

She stood, looking pleased with herself, and straightened her skirts.

”Atwood killed his father; is that what you're saying?”

”That is one version of the story. There are others. I want you to understand what a magical war is-what it can be.”

”That didn't sound terribly magical, Miss Didot. It sounded like an unpleasant trick to play on a confused old man.”

She sighed.

Arthur stood to see her out, and observed to his shock that the shaving-mirror had fallen from the mantelpiece, and now lay shattered at the foot of the fireplace.

”Every mirror is an eye, Arthur; every eye is a door. Please do not replace it.”

”Miss Didot,” he said. ”How did you do that?”

”Gla.s.s wants to shatter! The things of this world tend towards decay; the trick is keeping them whole. But since you ask, perhaps I will teach you a thing or two-since we must go to war together. Abby! Abby, my darling, will you fetch us some wine-gla.s.ses? Not good ones! Now, Arthur, sit, sit.”

She reclined smugly on the sofa. ”The shattered mirror, as it happens, is one of the symbols of Mars; so too are blood, and sand, and rust, and the sword. By these signs, Mars makes itself known in our sphere.”

VI: JUPITER.

The Company had never explored as far as Jupiter, and it was likely that no human consciousness could survive at those depths. Imagine a vastness of ice and storms, Atwood said. Something like a polar wasteland, something like an ocean, formless and always night. The waters, before G.o.d moved upon them and gave them life. Probably only very simple creatures lived in those vast ink-blue depths. They would be slow and ugly giants, like the dinosaurs, built to endure terrible cold and endless pressure.

The symbols of Jupiter included the whale, Behemoth, and Jormungandr; the anchor, the empty throne, the barren womb. The hours of Jupiter were suitable for necromancy. The woman who went by that name was as secretive as a spy, and Arthur never learned a thing about her.

VII: SATURN.

To imagine what it would be like to walk in the Sphere of Saturn, Atwood said, imagine a flat and endless plain of lead, beneath a sunless sky of lead. Nothing could live beneath that terrible grinding pressure; if there were inhabitants of Saturn they could be made of nothing but shadow, and their movements would be so slow as to seem almost timeless.

Arthur said that he didn't see why G.o.d should make such a dreadful place.

”Well,” Sergeant Jessop said, after sucking thoughtfully on his pipe for a while, ”he made h.e.l.l, didn't he?”

Saturn's hour was favourable to rituals pertaining to gross physical motion and the opening of doors. The role of Saturn was occupied by a young actress named Caroline Arnold, who liked to dress in what she thought of as Indian attire, and who believed that she could see ghosts and fairies. For all Arthur knew, perhaps she could. The experiment into which he'd blundered was the first time she'd joined one of the Company's rituals. She didn't attend the war councils of the Company, and so far as Arthur could tell she had no idea of the danger that they were all in. He advised her to quit the Company, for her own safety. She didn't listen.

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