Palimpsest (22 page)

They ascend past great vats and printing presses so old the wood-worms in them have written three full encyclopediae of the contents of their empire. The whirr and buzz of insects fills every inch of air, but also the chirruping of squirrels and heated mating of rabbits newly molded. Mice learn from a great machine how to wash their whiskers, and as Casimira passes, they scream a hymn of joy to her name. But the bees are kept high, high in the towers, and still they climb.

“My grandmother built this place,” Casimira says, her voice neither quickened nor stuttered by the endless stairs. “Not really my grandmother, of course, but the number of greats involved is so many it is considered impolite to use the actual number. Outside the family, she is a legend of legends—impossible that she truly lived! Preposterous! Yet still. She is the blood of my blood of my blood, and I know her sorrows like my own bones.”

The stairs become steep—November is winded, panting, but Casimira continues as though they are strolling across a meadow. “She dreamed of a butterfly once, and upon waking was seized with grief that she could not possess it. On three hundred subsequent nights she dreamed of vermin, of cockroaches with shells that shimmered in her heart, of grasshoppers and mantises and centipedes, beetles and mosquitoes and wood lice like tiny pearls. Starlings and ravens flapped darkling in her mind, and chipmunks with livid stripes like war-paint. She was tortured with these visions of beauty, and her family could not heal her, though she was taken to just the seashore where you drank the brine, and she drank, too, but was not calmed. She dug the foundations of this building with her hands, clawed the soil to her will. I am a great admirer of my grandmother. I, too, have my claws. I, too, have my soil. Little must be said of my will. But the day that the first fly opened its wings in her hand, the first worm nosed blindly at her cheek—she knew such sharp and secret satisfactions on that day! I know them now, yes, I know them, I know them as old friends and lovers, but time dims all things. Here.”

They duck into a great room, further up the spires than November would have thought bees would prefer. The chamber is all of wax the color of fine butter, arching like a cathedral dome, hexagonal holes yawning black and thrumming, and more bees than November could have imagined swarm over it, excited, palpitating, expectant. Casimira spins slowly in the center of the room, her eyes shut, her emerald hair coiling around her like seaweed. She reaches out her hands to November as though inviting her to a stately dance, and under a million black-bellied bees, November shyly steps into the strange woman’s arms.

“Do you know why it is that I have done so much for you?”

Casimira says fiercely, drawing November too close, too tight. “You would agree that I have done much, and promised more?”

“Y … yes.” November’s stomach turns over. She begins to think that Casimira was never taught the word “no.” The matriarch is beautiful, and terrible, and she takes everything in the world for her own. November has been taken, she knows this, and one does not argue with the one who takes. No one whose father was a librarian is ignorant of their Greek myth: when Hades hauls you into his chariot, you do not argue that he has been rude not to ask if you really wanted to go.

“It is because you are my proof,” Casimira breathes. “You are proof of all I have done, all I have done in service of my city. Proof of my rectitude, of my virtue. You stand in my halls and I know that I was right, I was not a fiend that tore into my home as though … well, as though I had the mouth of a lion. I am a creature of complex geometries, General of Grotesqueries, Princess of Parallelograms. But I am not a queen, and never shall be. No matter what they say I did not want to be. I have committed my crimes, and horrors have flown from me into the world, but you look at me in your blue dress, in Aloysius’s dress, and in your innocence say:
Casimira, all is forgiven, for I am here.
My bees scream:
Casimira,
all is forgiven, for she is here.
”

“What do you want from me now, Casimira? There are …” November’s lip trembles, her eyelids slide shut in a half-swoon. She does not want to do this, but she feels she must give something in return for the seawater, and the dress, and this golden room. “There … there are … nine sorts of people …” She swallows hard, marshaling her nouns into columns, her heart into steadiness. “There are nine sorts of people deserving of absolution: wives, saints, children, adulterers, debtors, students, those thwarted in love, melancholics, and those seized by occasional angers.”
This is
my gift to you,
November thinks, as loudly as she can,
I have
wrapped it specially, a list, for you and only you.
“Nowhere are there listed beekeepers or generals. We find comfort only in each other. There is no grace waiting at the end of a long journey, not for us. Tell me what you want from me.”

Casimira sniffs slightly, her eyes reflected crystalline in a rim of hard tears. “I thought you would have guessed it. They want you, they want you as their own, forever. They have not made a queen in all their lives, they have no jelly, being all wire and glass and infinitesimal engines. I have always been enough. Perhaps this is my punishment. It is certainly keen. Secret, and sharp. But I am willing to give them what they want. A mother must be willing.”

November shakes her head, laughs a little, ruefully. “What will that mean?”

“I don’t know, exactly. They won’t tell me.” Casimira frowns. “I am … jealous. Yes. I am jealous. But it is all right.”

An arrow of aspic life tears from one of the combs and arcs toward them, landing before November in the shape of her bee-manikin, her suitor of the second night, the night of her dress and the memorial on Seraphim Street. It bows to her, and when it rises its buzzing hands are full of golden liquid. It holds out its palms to her, imploring, beseeching.

“I thought they hadn’t any jelly.”

“I made it for them, as I make all things in this palace of industry. How could I do else? I clawed the soil to my will. In a vat of red clay I stirred so many of their poor bodies, golden oils to lubricate the invisible gears of their hearts, their honey, which is a secretion under the thorax and has a peculiar flavor of pine pitch, and my own blood, which is all of a queen they have known. It is their first jelly, and they are very proud of it.”

The manikin opens its mouth as if to speak, and the buzz that issues from it is like a strangling. November rushes to it as to a crying child and hushes it, crooning in her way, the way she has always used to calm her bees, and though she has no flowers for them, no heather or heartsease, no basil or orange, she supposes she is enough, and if you put enough bees together they become more than bees, just as nouns become more than nouns, and she cannot turn that away.

My dress; my sail.

“This is not, of course, your present,” says Casimira casually.

November hushes the manikin, strokes its buzzing forelock gently. “Oh … I thought—”

“Yes, well, being a queen may sound nice, but it is not much of a present in the end. You must earn that.” Casimira gestures at the mewling bee-manikin. “Thrust your fist into his heart, and you will find it. They brought it for you, from their comb. The manikin will fall to pieces and, without its heart, will never rise again. But you will have your present.”

November looks at the prone bee-golem. It smiles at her, full of black, thrumming trust. She feels the tiny fur of the bee-bodies under her fingers.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” she protests.

“This is Palimpsest, November. This is the real world. Nothing comes without pain and death.” Casimira kneels by November’s side and kisses her, her mouth soft and open, but tongueless, half-chaste. “I chose you,” she whispers. “The difference between myself and my bees is very small, in the end. I chose you because they chose you. They love you because I love you. If you want to stay with me, and drink from the ocean, and rule over the bees, you must do as I say, and be a good girl. It’s not a sin to cause death if by doing it”—Casimira swallows hard—“if by doing it you make something new.”

November shakes her head—she doesn’t know what Casimira is talking about, but it doesn’t matter. If she wants to stay. If she wants to stay. If she wants to circumnavigate Fairyland. It’s not so hard. She just has to kill a few thousand bees. Bees who danced with her, and protected her, and walked down avenues with her like a gentleman suitor. That’s all. And then she can stay, in a place so big she can never outgrow it. She can
stay
.

November closes her eyes and puts her palm to the manikin’s chest. It begins to cry, an awful, humming, droning, broken sound. November’s eyes flood in sympathy, and she turns her head away as her palm curls into a fist and punches through the thin bee-sternum, ignoring the crushed wings and thoraxes, the scream of agony from the manikin’s gaping mouth, searching, grappling in the mass of bees—and she finds it, wet and slimy and hard, the heart of the bees.

November pulls it out, her hand stung and swollen, a tiny golden thing, like an egg, covered in jelly. She scoops the jelly off into her palm and swallows it—it tastes like honey, nothing more. Perhaps there is an undertaste of motor grease, of metal, but it is fleeting. It does not taste like red lilies, or heather. There is no patina of the heart with which November has always layered her own honeys. It is pure, an essence, distilled past tasting of anything but itself. It is the emptiest thing she has ever tasted.

The manikin, in its last motion, clutches her head with a desperate, outflung arm, dragging her face down toward it, embracing her, clamping its mouth over hers in a husband’s kiss. Suddenly November knows what is coming, and yet cannot steel herself, cannot be prepared for it. Their stingers pierce her in a thousand places, everywhere they can reach her. She is penetrated by all of them, their venom in her sweet and sour and sharp and secret. She is rigid with it, and they are dying all around her, their one great sting spent and finished, falling from the body of the manikin as others fly to join it, and she pulls away before the hive can obliterate itself in its frenetic, desperate desire for her.

She falls, of course she falls. She is only a woman, and her flesh runs with poison and honey, it spills from her pores like golden sweat. She shudders and seizes on the floor of the great honeycomb, her back arching and spasming, her legs jackknifing beneath her. The egg clatters out of her hand. She is so full, and the venom pours from her mouth, the honey and the blood.

Casimira watches, without expression.

_______

Far away, two men fall, spasming, to the floor of a boat and a church, and a woman falls to the floor of a train car. Their mouths fill with honey, and their vision goes white, and black, and white again.

_______

“Wake up, November,” the boy says. “Wake up.” November slits her eyes open, as cats will do, unwilling to commit fully to waking. The boy smiles at her very perfectly, an expression of pristine technical accuracy, as though he had practiced the smile in a round mirror for twelve years. “I have kept a room for you,” the house says, and blushes perhaps more deeply than it is correct for boys to blush.

She opens her eyes fully, and in the boy’s hands is a golden egg, shiny as a beetle’s back. It is carved over with long streets that intersect each other at wild angles, cut deep into the metal of it. The boy can hardly contain himself, it is as though the present is for him. She fits her fingernails into an equatorial street, and with no strength in her, flicks at it until it creaks open, sticky with jelly.

Inside is nothing more than a scrap of paper, finely cut, thick as a violet-leaf. On it is written in a flowing hand which can only be Casimira’s:

Oleg Sadakov
Amaya Sei
Ludovico Conti

November thinks of a girl with blue hair, a man with stained fingernails, a man with keys jangling his belt. She does not know if the images come from her or the bees. She cannot tell the difference, anymore. Her mind leapfrogs over itself, seeking logic, seeking a reason.

The bees flow out from November, propelled by her will, and their buzzing in the dark streets sounds like names, whispered over and over.

TWO

Y
ES

Things that are unsightly: birthmarks, infidelity, strangers in one’s
kitchen. Too much sunlight. Stitches. Missing teeth. Overlong guests.

H
er name was Clara. November stayed in her apartment for four days. They made love again on the fifth, a small and cheerless farewell. After everything, it wouldn’t really be fair to call it anything more. Clara had kept her eyes shut when November kissed her, fiercely shut, her lids wrinkling with the effort.

November was too much for most of them, she understood. Too much now, with her ruined face and her severed fingers. No one else was mutilated like that. It had never cost any of them so much. She was hard to look at.
I can’t even look at you
, Clara had said, after they had gotten the blood out of her hair. November thought it better to leave when the sky was still a cutting blue, and Clara lightly snoring. She did not have to see again the disappointed, pitying look on that pleasant face. She ran from the house with her hooded coat drawn up around her face like a leper.

But Clara had been kind, and possessed a strange and tiny tea service of solid blue agate, brought home from Iran by a lover of hers. A lover from
before
. Clara poured blueberry tea into the palm-sized cups and rubbed vitamin E oil into November’s fingers, though that did not seem to be strictly necessary. She made chicken sandwiches and brought oranges from the winter market. After the second day, she managed to stop looking at November’s mauled hand while they drank and ate and spoke softly, as if the apartment might overhear them.

“Clara, do you know who Casimira is?” November had whispered on the third day, over that blueberry tea and frosted gingerbread. She was in a fever, her mind slamming pistons into place, full of Casimira, full of the house. She had hardly remembered to make her list that morning, she was so prickled with high blood and the ghostly soprano in her ear. “Have you heard her name, you know,
There
?” November disliked how she had begun to capitalize the indistinct “there” in her mind, but the name of that secret city remained a thin knife in her mouth.