Miranda and Caliban(52)

But that was many years ago, and there is no honor in Ariel’s bow, only mockery. He goes away and I am alone.

My mouth is cut and hurting, and there is a taste in it like ashes from the mussel shell. I spit out the last of the shards and think to myself, oh Caliban, you are a foolish monster indeed.

There is a storm in the offing.

That Ariel is a tricksy spirit and I do not trust him, no, not for one heartbeat; but he has no love for Master. It may be that in his own tricksy way he was trying to tell me something.

Or it may be that the spirit only sought a new way to make mock of me.

But, but, but …

I think of that day, oh, so long ago, when Master did arrive on the isle with you, Miranda. There was a storm that day, too. I think of Master’s voice and the cold, hard, angry words he did speak across the sea while you were sleeping, sleeping on the sand. I wish I could remember what words Master did say, but that was from before, when words were lost to me.

I think Ariel did speak truly. Another storm is coming, and I do not know what it will bring.

Oh, I would protect you, Miranda! You are like sunlight to me. I would protect you from aught that might harm you; yes, and from your own father who seeks to use you for his own ends, whatever they may be.

If only I could bear to look you in the face.





TWENTY-SEVEN





MIRANDA


Papa’s sanctum is a wondrous place.

I have not forgotten what befell me there, but the more time I spend in his private chamber, the more faint and distant the memory grows; and the more ashamed I feel of the fear it instilled in me.

I am oh, so enamored of this process of painting! It is quite simply magical. With every stroke of the brush, I learn more and more of what I am about and to what I aspire. When I sleep, I dream of figures passing over me as the spheres of heaven rotate above me, and I seek to memorize the lines and planes of them, and every aspect of their visages that I might render them truly.

Under Papa’s tutelage, I learn to care for my brushes, cleaning them in the pungent turpentine he has distilled from pine sap and wiping them dry on rags. I learn about the bright pigments which the little gnomes have delved from the deepest and most remote places on the isle and ground to a fine powder: lead white, red cinnabar, azurite blue, yellow ochre, green malachite, brown umber, and carbon black. For each of these elements, there are correspondences; some logical and some unexpected. Cinnabar, for example, from which the vermilion pigment is ground, is also the element from which quicksilver, the living metal itself, is extracted.

Who could have imagined such a thing? Truly, this isle is filled with magic.

Papa is generous with praise for my efforts, and I drink it in like a thirsty plant.

I am careful, always, to touch nothing without permission, but Papa takes pleasure in showing me some of the wondrous apparatuses that aid him in his working. He allows me to peer through the mighty telescope on the balcony that lets him see great distances across the isle, and into, he tells me, the very heavens themselves when the skies are benighted. It seems to me a very work of divinity, but Papa assures me that it is all a matter of lenses and mathematics.

To be sure, I cannot fathom it.

A great deal of Papa’s art involves charting the heavens. There is the brass astrolabe with its moving plates that calculates time and distance and oh, ever so much! There is its near cousin the cosmolabe that Papa uses to calculate the angles between heavenly bodies and cast his charts. Many of Papa’s calculations regarding the planets, he records in tables he calls ephemerides. There are pages and pages of these tables, so that he can determine the position of the planets and the aspects of the stars on any given date and time.

I confess, my mind fair boggles at the complexity of the work that Papa’s art requires.

And yet I feel the power of it in my bones. When I paint upon the walls of Papa’s sanctum, it seems as though I am at the very center of existence, with the spheres of heaven rotating far above and all around me while the images I render draw down the influences of the seven governors and the crystalline sphere of fixed stars in the firmament beyond them; and beyond that, the Lord God Himself in the Empyrean where nine orders of angels sing His praises. Hours pass without my notice while I am engaged in the process of painting, until I realize my arms are aching from being raised so long and my fingers have become stiff and crabbed.

Papa says that I am filled with the Spiritus Mundi when I paint, the mystical energy that suffuses the whole of creation.

I believe it is true.

Always, I paint at his bidding; and I am content to do so, humbled by the realization that the calculations Papa employs are so very far beyond my ken.

As the weeks pass, additional figures slowly take place alongside the glowering, crimson-eyed form of the first face of Aries. The first face of Virgo is a young girl holding a curious red globe of fruit called a pomegranate. Papa is in good humor and tells me a tale from the myths of the ancient Greeks about a maiden named Persephone who was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, who sought to make her his bride. After wandering the earth in despair, her mother Demeter learned of her abduction and begged Zeus, the king of the gods, to rescue her and restore her, but because Persephone ate six seeds of a pomegranate fruit, she was bound to spend six months of every year in the underworld with Hades.

It seems to me that the gods are cruel to women who eat fruit, but that is a thought I keep to myself.