The Water Mirror Read online

  CONTENTS

  1 MERMAIDS

  2 MIRROR EYES

  3 EFT’S STORY

  4 PHANTOMS

  5 TREACHERY

  6 END AND BEGINNING

  7 THROUGH THE CANALS

  8 MESSENGER OF FIRE

  9 THE ANCIENT TRAITOR

  10 SUNBARKS

  1

  THE GONDOLA CARRYING THE TWO GIRLS EMERGED FROM one of the side canals. They had to wait for the boats racing on the Grand Canal to pass, and even then, for minutes afterward there was such a jumble of small rowboats and steamboats that the gondolier chose to wait patiently.

  “They’ll be past pretty soon,” he called to the girls as he grasped his oar with both hands. “You aren’t in a hurry, are you?”

  “No,” replied Merle, who was the older of the two. But actually she was more excited than she’d ever been in her life.

  People in Venice had been talking about nothing but the regatta on the Grand Canal for days. The promoters had advertised that the boats would be drawn by more mermaids at once than ever before.

  Some people disparaged the mermaids as “fishwives.” That was only one of the countless abusive terms they used for them, and worst of all was the claim that they were in league with the Egyptians. Not that anyone seriously believed such nonsense—after all, the armies of the Pharaoh had wiped out untold numbers of mermaids in the Mediterranean.

  In today’s regatta there were to be ten boats at the starting line, at the southern end of the Grand Canal, at the level of the Casa Stecchini. Each would be pulled by ten mermaids.

  Ten mermaids! That had to be an all-time record. La Serenissima, most serene lady, as the Venetians liked to call their city, had never seen anything like it.

  The mermaids were harnessed in a fan shape in front of the boats on long ropes that could withstand even needle-sharp mermaid teeth. The people were gathered to watch the show on the right and left sides of the canal wherever its banks were accessible and, of course, on all the balconies and in the windows of the palazzos.

  But Merle’s excitement had nothing to do with the regatta. She had another reason. A better one, she thought.

  The gondolier waited another two or three minutes before he steered the slender black gondola out into the Grand Canal, straight across it, and into the opening of a smaller canal opposite. As they crossed, they were almost rammed by some show-offs who’d harnessed their own mermaids in front of their boat and, bawling loudly, were trying to act as if they were part of the regatta.

  Merle smoothed back her long, dark hair. The wind was making her eyes tear. She was fourteen years old, not big, not small, but a little on the thin side. That was true of almost all the children in the orphanage, though, except of course for fat Ruggiero, but he was sick—at least that’s what the attendant said. But was it really a sign of illness to sneak into the kitchen at night and eat up the dessert that was to be for everyone else?

  Merle took a deep breath. The sight of the captive mermaids made her sad. They had the upper bodies of humans, with the light, smooth skin that many women probably prayed for every night. Their hair was long, for among the women of the sea it was considered shameful to cut it off—to such an extent that even their human masters respected this custom.

  What differentiated the mermaids from ordinary women was, for one thing, their mighty fish tails. The tails began at the level of their hips and were rarely shorter than six and a half feet. They were as agile as whips, as strong as lions, and as silvery as the jewelry in the treasury of the City Council.

  But the second big difference—and it was the one that humans feared most—was the hideous mouth that split a mermaid’s face like a gaping wound. Even though the rest of their features might be human, and strikingly beautiful as well—innumerable poems had been written about their eyes, and not a few love-smitten youths had voluntarily gone to a watery grave for them—still it was their mouths that convinced so many that they were dealing with animals and not with humans. The maw of a mermaid reached from one ear to the other, and when she opened it, it was as if her entire skull split in two. Arising from her jawbone were several rows of sharp teeth, as small and pointed as nails of ivory. Anyone who thought there was no worse bite than that of a shark had never looked into the jaws of a mermaid.

  Actually, people knew very little about them. It was a fact that mermaids avoided humans. For many of the city’s inhabitants, that was reason enough to hunt them. Young men often made a sport of driving inexperienced mermaids who’d gotten mixed up in the labyrinth of the Venetian canals into a corner; if one of them happened to die as a result, people thought that was too bad, certainly, but no one ever reproved the hunters.

  But mostly the mermaids were caught and imprisoned in tanks in the Arsenal until a reason for keeping them was found. Often it was this boat race, more rarely fish soup—though the taste of their long, scaled tails was legendary, surpassing even delicacies like sea cows and whales.

  “I feel sorry for them,” said the second girl, sitting next to Merle in the gondola. She was just as undernourished and even bonier. Her pale, almost white blond hair hung way down her back. Merle knew nothing about her companion, only that she also came from an orphanage, though from another district of Venice. She was a year younger than Merle, thirteen, she’d said. Her name was Junipa.

  Junipa was blind.

  “You feel sorry for the mermaids?” Merle asked.

  The blind girl nodded. “I could hear their voices a while ago.”

  “But they haven’t said anything.”

  “Yes, under the water,” Junipa countered. “They were singing the whole time. I have quite good ears, you know. Many blind people do.”

  Merle stared at Junipa in astonishment, until she finally became conscious of how impolite that was, whether the girl could see it or not.

  “Yes,” said Merle, “me too. I feel they always seem a little . . . I don’t know, melancholy somehow. As if they’d lost something that meant a lot to them.”

  “Their freedom?” suggested the gondolier, who had been listening to them.

  “More than that,” Merle replied. She couldn’t find the words to describe what she meant. “Maybe being able to be happy.” That still wasn’t exactly it, but it came close.

  She was convinced that the mermaids were just as human as she was. They were more intelligent than many a person she’d learned to know in the orphanage, and they had feelings. They were different, certainly, but that didn’t give anyone the right to treat them like animals, to harness them to their boats or chase them through the lagoon whenever they pleased. The Venetians’ behavior toward them was cruel and utterly inhuman—all the things, really, that people said about the mermaids.

  Merle sighed and looked down into the water. The prow of the gondola was cutting through the emerald green surface like a knife blade. In the narrow side canals the water was very calm; it was only on the Grand Canal that stronger waves came up sometimes. But here, three or four corners removed from Venice’s main artery, there was complete stillness.

  Soundlessly the gondola glided underneath arching bridges. Some were carved with grinning stone imps; bushy weeds were growing on their heads like tufts of green hair.

  On both sides of the canal the fronts of the houses came straight down into the water. None was lower than four stories. A few hundred years before, when Venice had still been a mighty trading power, goods had been unloaded from the canal directly into the palazzos of the rich merchant families. But today many of the old buildings stood empty, most of the windows were dark, and the wooden doors at the water level were rotten and eroded by dampness—and that not just since the Egyptian army’s siege had closed around the city. The born-again pharaoh and his sphinx com
manders were not to blame for all of it.

  “Lions!” Junipa exclaimed suddenly.

  Merle looked along the canal to the next bridge. She couldn’t discover a living soul, to say nothing of the stone lions of the City Guard. “Where? I don’t see any.”

  “I can smell them,” Junipa insisted. She was sniffing at the air soundlessly, and out of the corner of her eye Merle saw the gondolier behind them shake his head in bewilderment.

  She tried to emulate Junipa, but the gondola must have gone on for almost another two hundred feet before Merle’s nostrils detected something: the odor of damp stone, musty and a little mildewed, so strong that it even masked the breath of the sinking city.

  “You’re right.” It was unmistakably the stench of the stone lions used by the Venetian City Guard as riding animals and comrades-at-arms.

  At that very moment one of the powerful animals appeared on a bridge ahead of them. It was of granite, one of the most common breeds among the stone lions of the lagoon. There were other, stronger ones, but that made no difference in the long run. Anyone who fell into the clutches of a granite lion was as good as lost. The lions had been the emblems of the city from time immemorial, back to the days when every one of them was winged and had been able to lift itself into the air. But today there were only a few who could do that, a strictly regulated number of single animals, which were reserved for the personal protection of the city councillors. The breeding masters on the island of the lions, up in the north of the lagoon, had bred out flying in all the others. They came into the world with stunted wings, which they bore as mournful appendages on their backs. The soldiers of the City Guard fastened their saddles to them.

  The granite lion on the bridge also was only an ordinary animal of stone. Its rider wore the uniform of the Guard. A rifle dangled on a leather strap over his shoulder, pointedly casual, a sign of military arrogance. The soldiers had not been able to protect the city from the Egyptian Empire—instead, the Flowing Queen had done that—but since the proclamation of siege conditions thirty years before, the Guard had gained more and more power. Meanwhile they were surpassed in their arrogance only by their commanders, the city councillors, who managed affairs in the captive city as they saw fit. Perhaps the councillors and their soldiers were only trying to prove something to themselves—after all, everyone else knew that they weren’t in a position to defend Venice in an emergency. But so long as the Flowing Queen kept the enemy far from the lagoon, they could rejoice in their omnipotence.

  The guardsman on the bridge looked down into the gondola with a grin, then waved to Merle and gave the lion his spurs. With a snort the beast leaped forward. Merle could hear all too clearly the scraping of its stone claws on the pavement. Junipa held her ears. The bridge quivered and trembled under the paws of the great cat, and the sound seemed to careen back and forth between the high facades like a bouncing ball. Even the still water was set in motion. The gondola rocked gently.

  The gondolier waited until the soldier had disappeared into the tangle of narrow streets, then spat into the water and murmured, “The Ancient Traitor take you!” Merle looked around at him, but the man looked past her down the canal, his face expressionless. Slowly he guided the gondola forward.

  “Do you know how far it is now?” Junipa inquired of Merle.

  Before she could answer, the gondolier replied, “We’re there now. There ahead, just around the corner.” Then he realized that “there ahead” was not information the blind girl could use. So he quickly added, “Only a few minutes, then we’ll be on the Canal of the Expelled.”

  Narrowness and darkness—those were the two qualities that impressed themselves on Merle most strongly.

  The Canal of the Expelled was flanked by tall houses, one as dark as the next. Almost all were abandoned. The window openings gaped empty and black in the gray fronts, many panes were broken, and the wooden shutters hung aslant on their hinges like wings on the ribs of dead birds. From one broken door came the snarling of fighting tomcats, nothing unusual in a city of umpteen thousand stray cats. Pigeons cooed on the window ledges, and the narrow, railingless walks on both sides of the water were covered with moss and pigeon droppings.

  The only two inhabited houses stood out clearly from the rows of decaying buildings. They were exactly opposite one another and glared across the canal like two chess players, with furrowed faces and knitted brows. About three hundred feet separated them from the mouth of the canal and from its shadowy dead end. Each of the houses had a balcony, that of the one on the left of stone, that of the one on the right wrought of intertwining metal grillwork. The balustrades high over the water were almost touching.

  The canal measured about three paces wide. The water, though still a brilliant green, looked darker and deeper here. The spaces between the old houses were so narrow that hardly any daylight reached the water’s surface. A few bird feathers rocked languidly on the waves caused by the gondola.

  Merle had a vague notion of what lay ahead of her. They had explained it to her at the orphanage, repeatedly mentioning how grateful she should feel that she was being sent here to apprentice. She would be spending the next few years on this canal, in this tunnel of greenish gray twilight.

  The gondola neared the inhabited houses. Merle listened intently, but she could hear nothing except a distant murmur of indistinguishable voices. When she looked over at Junipa, she saw that every muscle in the blind girl’s body was tensed; she had closed her eyes; her lips formed silent words—perhaps those she was picking out of the whisperings with her trained ears, like the movements of a carpet weaver, who with his sharp needle purposefully picks out a single thread from among thousands of others. Junipa was indeed an extraordinary girl.

  The building on the left housed the weaving establishment of the famed Umberto. It was said to be wicked to wear garments that he and his apprentices made; his reputation was too bad, his quarrel with the Church too well known. But those women who allowed themselves to secretly order bodices and dresses from him swore behind their hands as to their magical effect. “Umberto’s clothes make one slender,” they said in the salons and streets of Venice. Really slender. For whoever wore them not only looked slimmer—she was in fact so, as if the magical threads of the master weaver drew off the fat of all those who were enveloped by them. The priests in Venice’s churches had more than once thundered against the unholy dealings of the master weaver, so loudly and hatefully that the trade guild had finally expelled Umberto from its ranks.

  But Umberto wasn’t the only one who had come to feel the wrath of the guilds. It was the same with the master of the house opposite. There was also a workshop housed in that one, and it too devoted itself in its way to the service of beauty. However, no clothing was woven there, and its master, the honorable Arcimboldo, would doubtless have protested loudly at any open suggestion of a connection between him and his archenemy, Umberto.

  ARCIMBOLDO’S GLASS FOR THE GODS was written in golden letters over the door, and right beside it was a sign: MAGIC MIRRORS FOR GOOD AND WICKED STEPMOTHERS, FOR BEAUTIFUL AND UGLY WITCHES, AND EVERY SORT OF HONEST PURPOSE.

  “We’re there,” Merle said to Junipa, as her eye traveled over the words a second time. “Arcimboldo’s magic mirror workshop.”

  “How does it look?” Junipa asked.

  Merle hesitated. It wasn’t easy to describe her first impression. The house was dark, certainly, like the whole canal and its surroundings, but next to the door stood a tub of colorful flowers, a friendly spot in the gray twilight. Only at the second look did she realize that the flowers were made of glass.

  “Better than the orphanage,” she said somewhat uncertainly.

  The steps leading up to the walk from the water surface were slippery. The gondolier helped them both climb out. He had already been paid when he picked the girls up. He wished them both luck before he slowly glided away in his gondola.

  They stood there a little lost, each with a half-full bundle in her hand, just un
der the sign offering magic mirrors for wicked stepmothers. Merle wasn’t sure whether she should consider this a good or a bad introduction to her apprenticeship. Probably the truth lay somewhere in between.

  Behind a window of the weaver’s workshop on the other bank, a face whisked past, then a second. Curious apprentices, Merle guessed, who were looking over the new arrivals. Enemy apprentices, if you believed the rumors.

  Arcimboldo and Umberto had never liked each other, that was no secret, and even their simultaneous expulsion from the trade guilds had changed nothing. Each one blamed the other. “What? Throw me out and not that crazy mirror maker?” Umberto was said to have asked loudly. The weaver asserted, on the other hand, that Arcimboldo had cried at his own expulsion, “I’ll go, but you’d do well to bring charges against that thread picker, too.” Which of these accusations matched the truth, no one knew with utter certainty. It was clear only that they had both been expelled from the guilds because of forbidden trafficking with magic.

  A magician, Merle thought excitedly, though she had been thinking of scarcely anything else for days. Arcimboldo is a real magician!

  With a grating sound, the door of the mirror workshop was opened, and an odd-looking woman appeared on the pavement. Her long hair was piled up into a knot. She wore leather trousers, which emphasized her slender legs. Over these fluttered a white blouse, shot through with silver threads—Merle might have expected such a fine item in the weaver’s workshop on the opposite bank of the canal, but not in the house of Arcimboldo.

  But the most unusual thing was the mask behind which the woman hid a part of her face. The last Carnival of Venice—at one time famous the world over—had taken place over four decades ago. That had been 1854, three years after the Pharaoh Amenophis had been awakened to a new life in the stepped pyramid of Amun-Ka-Re. Today, in time of war, distress, and siege, there was no occasion to dress up.

  And yet the woman was wearing a mask, formed of paper, enameled, and artfully decorated, doubtless the work of a Venetian artist. It covered the lower half of her face right up to her nostrils. Its surface was snow white and shone like porcelain. The mask maker had painted a small, finely curved mouth with dark red lips on it.