Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (24 page)

Up ahead an archway held the warmth of torchlight and through it was the witch’s chamber, unexpectedly cheerful. Rugs woven in scarlet and purple covered the rocky floor, swallowing Lily’s footsteps. The witch sat at a table, laying down cards made of stiff paper and painted in elaborate detail, colored with powdered lapis lazuli and gold leaf.

The witch did not look up until the last card had been laid down. Then finally she raised her gaze.

“
You’re new,” she said. “Got you running errands, does he?”

“
I’ve brought the key you wanted made.”

“
Have you now? Let me see it.”

A touch of reluctance slowing her movements, Lily put the velvet bundle in the witch’s hands. She unwrapped it like a long-awaited present, her eyes gleaming with avarice.

“
I’ll lift a curse with this,” she gloated, fondling the haft and ignoring its tiny thorns. She frowned as it twisted in her grasp. “What’s this? This key has already decided its purpose—one that is no good to me.”

“
I brought it straight from Solon’s hands,” Lily said, bewildered.

Drawing back her arm, the witch flung the key in Lily’s direction. It glanced across her cheek, drawing blood as it hit and fell without a sound to the carpet. “Take it back and tell Solon I demand a new one within the next century.”

Shaking with fear, Lily picked up the key and put it back in her pocket. She moved to retrieve the scrap of velvet but the witch motioned her away. “Be off and be glad I don’t set the blood in your veins to boiling! It’s you I blame for the key’s decision.”

The trip back through the corridors seemed longer than it had going down but at last she saw the light of the entrance and made her way out. A beast snapped at her, rending her cloak, but she hurried on.

Back at the tower she hesitated at the foot of the stairs. Solon’s temper was slow to rise but fierce as a dragon’s blaze when awakened. She wavered on the bottom step, slipping a hand into her pocket. The thorns stung her and she thought,
Why bring pain upon myself now? He won’t know until he asks the witch for a favor, and that may be centuries away.
She turned and went to the workroom to grind sulfur crystals into the fine powder that summoning spells demand. Distracted by the demands of constructing a matrix for water elementals, Solon never asked about her errand.

Days passed and the key remained in her pocket. At night she puzzled over what its purpose might be—if she and Solon were the only people who had touched it before the witch then it must be shaped to the desires of one or the other of them.
If it is Solon’s, it could be anything
, she thought,
but after all he took precautions and great care in shaping it. He must, after all, know the best way to prevent such things.

Perhaps it’s my desire that gave it purpose,
she thought.
The witch did say she blamed me. Perhaps it is the key to Solon’s heart.
She fell into daydreams of romance where Solon declared his passion and vowed to lay the world at her feet, where he slew hippogriffs and kings for her and built a castle of rose-colored crystal on the slopes of Berzul, the dwarf-infested mountain that is the tallest in the world.

Yes, he’ll love me,
she thought.
He will be unable to kill the woman he loves.
She began to watch him for signs of passion: sighs or glances, or uncharacteristic lapses into poetry. Sometimes she thought she glimpsed warmth in his eyes as he demonstrated how to dissect a basilisk and preserve its delicate, fan-shaped heart or as he leaned over her to show the steady back and forth of the pestle necessary to produce a diamond powder as fine as flour, glittering particles floating in the air around the mortar, falling onto the sheet of parchment Solon had placed on the table to catch them.

But there was nothing certain as the years passed and finally Lily thought,
He’s waiting until I am no longer his apprentice, but his equal, before he approaches me. How just of him! For he knows that otherwise I’d be distracted from my learning.

And learn she did.

In the twentieth year of her apprenticeship, she learned to tie time in a loop to keep herself from aging; in the twenty-fifth year, how to weave moonlight and sunlight together in a rope that neither creatures of the day nor creatures of the night could escape. In the thirtieth year, Solon showed her how to make a saddle that could sit any steed, from dragon to crocodile, and more. At night the knowledge dancing in her head kept her from sleeping and she took to midnight walks around the tower roof, walking in circles until the cloud of facts settled, sifting into layer upon layer in her mind.

In the fortieth year she became aware that Solon watched her covertly, gazing when he thought she would not notice. It confirmed her hopes and she took to wearing fripperies and furbelows, making sure her shirt fit snugly, and putting belladonna in her eyes to make them shine.

As the forty-ninth year approached, Solon taught her more and more and praised her for her quickness. “No apprentice has ever taken to things so swiftly,” he told her and she glowed with happiness.

The beginning of the year came and went. Lily took simple precautions such as checking her food and drink with a unicorn’s horn because she did not want Solon to think her stupid or that she knew his secret love. The moment that he announced it would be all the sweeter if he thought she did not know. She imagined it over and over again, wondering how he would choose to tell her, picturing his handsome face creased with worry that she might not reciprocate. She was pleased to see that he took over more of the work that she had previously performed, such as preparing his morning meal and doing his laundry.
Getting used for the rearrangement of the household when I become his wife,
she thought.

On a day that dawned clear and bright Solon asked her into his workroom.
Now
, she thought,
he’ll tell me now
. He stood framed by the sunlight coming in the window, gazing at her. She gathered her skirts and took a chair.

“
I regret to tell you,” Solon said, still looking at her, “that you will be dead by tomorrow. The laundry soap has had a poison in it for the last two weeks—I calculated it to match your body weight and allow it to cumulate into a dose sufficient to end your apprenticeship at midnight. Give or take a half hour.”

She looked at him, horrified. Her fingers played over the key in her pocket. “But you love me,” she protested.

He looked surprised. “Dear child, where would you have gotten that idea? I am sworn to celibacy for the sake of my art.”

The thorns on the key pricked and stung her but they were not the source of the blood warm tears rolling down her face. She felt the key stir beneath her touch and finally realized its purpose.

And when she plunged it into his heart, piercing it as love could not, he was as surprised as she had been, dying with a startled look fixed on his lean and timeless face.

She went downstairs and put her things in order, tidying the shelves and sweeping the floor one last time. She dusted the tall glass jars of powders and set the flock of chickens loose, shooing them away. Then she went to sit on the tower roof, listening to the owl’s call, and waited for midnight to arrive.

“
A Key Decides Its Destiny” was written in response to the challenge posed by
Say’s
“What’s the Combination?” themed issue in the winter of 2005. It is set a few hundred years ago on the Old Continent, in Tabat’s world. It started with the image of the magician making his key and thinking about what a key is
for
. Superimposed over the creation of the key and its fate is a love story of sorts, albeit one that only exists in the apprentice’s mind.

The Towering Monarch of His

Mighty Race, Whose Like

The World Will Never See Again

It was a peanut butter jar, not even a brand name but generic, the two and a half pound size, as big as a lantern. Oily dust roiled inside.

The woman dressed in gray picked the jar up and held it between her large flat hands. There was something reflexive about the gesture, as though her mind were very far away.

The boy said “Those are Jumbo’s ashes.”

Her eyes returned to regard him dispassionately. It was an old look, a look that had been weighing the universe for many years now and found it lacking.

“
Jumbo,” she said in a leaden voice.

He pushed on, fighting his way against her indifference, wanting to see her thrill and liven, if only he found the right fact.

“
There was a fire in 1975, here in Barnum Hall, and Jumbo, who was the Tufts university mascot by then, burned up. They saved the ashes in that jar.”

She turned it over, watching the flakes stir.

“
Of course, he was stuffed then,” he added. “The bones are in the Smithsonian. His keeper, Matthew Scott, donated them.”

For the first time her gaze sharpened, though not to the degree he wanted. “Is Scott still alive?”

“
No,” he said. “He died in 1914. In an almshouse. How could he still be alive?”

She turned the jar with slow deliberation, letting the contents tumble once, twice, three times. “Stranger things have happened.”

There wasn’t anything Jumbo was afraid of but the big cats, even years and years later, when he was much too big for them to terrorize him. The wind would shift and bring him the tigers’ musty reek and his eyes would roll while Matthew laughed and thumped him on the side, calling him a big baby.

But that wasn’t true. He hadn’t been afraid of any number of things that were worse than lions. Even the swaying of the netting holding him hadn’t frightened him as it hoisted him aboard the ship among the gulls’ harsh screams, in a dazzle of blinding light that left his eyes red and weeping and unable to see until much later in the hold’s darkness, smelling like hay and saltwater.

The thing he remembered best from those first captive days was the hunger. They had lowered him into a pit too deep for him to free himself. He searched the ground over and over again, ravenous. He had been used to constant grazing, being able to snatch a trunkful of grass or leaves as he wanted. But here they did not feed him, and his bulk, even at less than a year old, demanded fuel.

A narrow ledge spiraled down along the side, too narrow for him to climb. He trumpeted his anger, his fear as a face peered down at him from one side before saying something to another face. He had been here two days now, and starvation weakened him. When the man came down the ledge, he could not rise, despite the grain smell. The man came nearer and he tried again to stand, but could not. The hands ran over him, an unthinkable touch that gradually became no more bothersome than a tick-bird picking parasites from his skin. Reluctantly at first, he let the man feed him handfuls of mash from the bucket, tasting of dust and metal, becoming more eager as the strength returned.

For a while the man lived with him, slept by his side, and he became used to him. Even acquired a fondness for him. But no matter how much food the man brought him, it was never enough, and the hunger ate at him during the nights, making him fretful and weak.

Later Matthew had found him in the Paris Zoo, huddled with Alice.
Puniest elephant I’ve ever seen
, Matthew said, tipping his head back to consider him,
think he can make it to London?
The Frenchman shook his head.
Mais non
.

P.T. Barnum liked things big. Say that, he told the reporters in his mind, rehearsing the spiel mentally, “P.T. Barnum likes things big. Why, right now, he’s chasing after the world’s largest elephant, Jumbo, seven tons and eleven and a half feet tall!”

Right now he stood in the offices of the London Zoological Society. He’d been in these sorts of places, smelling of formaldehyde and dusty feathers. He’d bought the Fiji mermaid from such a place, knowing when he saw the nappy black hair, the scaly lower half, that here he had a moneymaker.