Miranda and Caliban(50)

“Yes, Papa.”

“Very well.” He gives my shoulders a meaningful squeeze, hard enough that his fingertips dig into my flesh, then releases me. “You may begin.”

The unfamiliar materials and the vast expanse of white-washed wall should intimidate me; and yet they do not. I study the image in the book, memorizing the lines of the figure. I choose a brush of middling size, the cleverly bound goat’s hair tapering to a point.

Papa watches me.

I dip the brush into the pot of oily black pigment. There is a stepping stool placed against the wall and I understand without being told that it is there for my use, that I might render the image on a scale larger than life itself. I climb the steps of the stool with care, heedful of my trailing skirts. Hidden from view, my bare toes curl to grip the edge of the top step. The brush’s handle feels good and right in my hand and the brush droops under the weight of the pigment, black as night and shining with infinite possibilities. The white-washed wall beckons me in all its emptiness. Holding the image of the first face of Aries in my mind, I put the brush to the wall.

A heady sense of power fills me. I shall be like the Lord God Himself, dividing light from the darkness.

With one fearless stroke, I begin.





TWENTY-SIX





CALIBAN


Miranda is alone with Master in his big room today.

It is a thought that follows me as I go far, far away from the palace, away from Miranda in the blue gown that shows all her throat and the curves of the tops of her little breasts, down to the seashore.

I know, because I did hear him say it yesterday when he did not know I was listening around a corner. Tomorrow, Master did say. On the morrow, you shall assist me in my sanctum.

That is where it happened.

Where he punished her.

I shake my head hard to shake away the thoughts, thoughts of Miranda that are all mixed together; Miranda naked, Miranda in the blue gown … oh, you were so happy this morning, Miranda! But then there is Miranda still and pale and not moving, Miranda almost dead, Miranda waking scared and unknowing, Miranda learning slowly, so slowly, all over again.

The tide is low and the air smells of salt and briny things that live in the sea. Undines play in the waves beyond where the tide is breaking, but the shoreline is empty. I climb over the rocks with my pail and gather mussels. There are many, many, many of them on the rocks where the sea has gone out, olive-black shells closed tight with hairy little beards. I twist them loose and drop them in the pail filled with seawater one by one, plinkety-plink-plink. It is a thing that should be pleasing to me, a sound that makes singsong sounds echo in my thoughts, but today it is not. This work is suited to my hands, my monster’s hands, rough and ugly with half-healed scrapes on the knuckles and sharp, ragged nails good for prying loose stubborn shells.

These are not hands that should touch anything so fine as Miranda’s skin, I think to myself; no, Caliban, they are not.

Oh, but, but, but …

She did kiss the thumb of this rough right hand once, kissed it so tender when I hurt it. Yes, she did.

I tear more mussels from the rocks.

It was the day she did speak to me at last of what happened in Master’s big room, Master’s sanctum. She cried and cried, and I did stroke her hair, her soft golden hair, with these very hands.

Master almost killed her, and she is with him there now.

I do not know what to do.

The more I think upon it, the more my heart becomes angry and hurting inside me. I swing my pail, roaring and shouting, and I splash and stomp through the shallow pools the tide has left, crushing harmless, soft little sea-creatures under my splayed monster’s feet, squelchity-squelch. I think that Ariel will come to mock me, but he is nowhere.

At last I look toward the high crags behind me. “Oh, Setebos!” I cry. “What am I to do?”

There is no answer in words, but a quietness comes inside me, and I remember I did make a promise beneath Setebos’s very shadow—long, long years before the sight of Miranda naked, even before Master did hurt her so badly that she almost died—that I would always return for her.

So I do.

In the palace, I place the pail full of mussels in the larder and creep up the stairs, creep down the hallway.

Outside Master’s door, I listen.

I hear nothing.

I raise my hand to rap upon the door, then lower it. Today is not like the day when Miranda began to bleed. Today I have no reason to disturb Master at his studies; no, nor Miranda with him.

Master will be angry, and my flesh flinches at the thought of the punishment he will inflict upon me. I only want to know, to be sure that Miranda has taken no harm. She was frightened to return to this room where she did almost die, where the thing her father called her mother, the thing that Ariel named a homunculus, did die at her careless hand. I know she was.

And yet I cannot make myself knock upon the door. Angry at my own fearfulness, I retreat.

Oh, but there are ways and ways.

Outside, I circle the palace, gazing upward. There is a balcony on the upper story that looks into Master’s big room, his sanctum. A gleaming metal tube sits atop it, pointed at the sky.

It is not meant to be a place that anyone could reach save from inside Master’s sanctum itself, but I am not anyone. I am Caliban, a misshapen monster with strong bent legs and hunched shoulders meant for climbing, and hard-nailed fingers and toes that can wedge deep into the smallest of cracks, like those between the crumbling old stones of the palace.