The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

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Gold and Glass

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Looking through a window should not be painful.  Looking into a mirror should not be painful either.

Nimruzimir eyed himself with distaste in the mirror.  Ringlets were fashionable, and his triangular face was now surrounded by them, dyed from boring mouse-brown to something closer to a rich gold at his father’s instruction.  He hated them.  They matched the setting of the ring his father’s choice of son-in-law had given him.

Well, that was perhaps too generous and too unfair at the same time.  The chosen son-in-law had not really given him the ring; his father had supplied it.  And his father had, Nimruzimir thought, tried to choose someone who would be—kind, perhaps.  Protective, certainly, and kind; he had seemed confused by some of Nimruzimir’s interests, but hardly judgmental.

But—Nimruzimir twisted the ring viciously on his finger.  If he went along with this now, this last thing, if he was his father’s perfect daughter in this as in all else, he would lose himself entire.  He thought he understood, now, why his mother had left.  He was no worshiper of her ancient, terrible, incomprehensible gods, but no more did he desire to bow his head to the island ones, such as they were.  They were kind, in the tales, and protective, just as the chosen son-in-law would be.  But the universe was a mechanism, empty and old, and those gods had even less to do with him than his mother’s ladies and lords.

(Has he seen weeping charcoal eyes peeping out at him from the cracks in weathered cobblestones, where the rainwater collects?  No, no, no—he has seen nothing.  He does not see anything.)

The ring had clearly been made to echo his necklace, or perhaps it had been commissioned at the same time, and his father had not told him of it.  That was not impossible, and Nimruzimir would not even have particularly blamed his father.  He was still uncertain whether the necklace had been purchased after they had arrived on the island, or whether it had been purchased much earlier as a gift for his mother.  It did not matter, he told himself.  None of it really mattered.

He wrenched the ring around his finger again in frustration.  None of this was correct.  He had tried and tried, but it all felt so terribly hollow.  He would never be the perfect daughter.  He would never make up to his father for his mother leaving.  He could find in him no desire to play any of the social games that were apparently necessary here, at least for a woman of his social status.

A woman of the necessary social status to be his father’s daughter.

But he was no fool.  Several times, he had already stolen into his father’s rooms and come out dressed in one of his father’s long black raincoats.  It hid his form well, and with a little judicious maneuvering, he had been able to speak to some of the apprentices to the guild of natural philosophers, many of whom were stationed at the king’s palace.

He was not certain how he felt about the Kings’ Men; his father was careful to walk the fine line between throwing in his lot completely with the Faithful, who were out of favor but presumably seemed more palatable to him, and those in power, who could certainly cause difficulties for the two of them were they to come to their attention.

But they were the ones who had the resources.  Ugly rumors about the Black Temple or no, Nimruzimir thought, worrying vaguely at his lip, the King’s Men had power and wealth and the desire to expand their borders.  And all of that came with a need for technology, and a need for engineers and philosophers, including chemisters.

He had the mental ability, and some of the training—had fortuitously, as an adolescent, attracted the attention of one of the professors at a small local academy.  Despite the fact that the school itself had been for young men and that no one regarded him as such, the professor had taken it upon himself to instruct Nimruzimir for several years.  He was certain he could easily supplement the early instruction with whatever was necessary, as long as he was given a chance to do so.

It was a fearful prospect, to leave everything behind.  To leave his father, who loved him but did not see him.  To leave his father to wonder why his perfect daughter had left him just as his wife had done.  But Nimruzimir could not really see that he could do anything else.  He wondered if his mother had felt this way, like a bird trapped in a too-small cage.

With trembling hands, he reached for the small nail scissors lying upon the vanity table.  He raised them to the side of his head, took a deep breath, stopped thinking, and simply acted.  One of the too-gold curls fell to the table a moment later, and Nimruzimir’s heartbeat expanded in his ears.  He cut again, and again, curls and coils of his hair falling all around him like autumn leaves.  He ran a hand across his head, freeing another handful of it and scattering it across the ground, then collapsed back into the chair, panting.

His face was still the same, white and very thin, but he had left enough length in some places to tug the ends of his hair down in front of his ears like the beginnings of sideburns.  He had an old shirt and trousers that he had stolen from one of the servants months ago.  If he took his father’s coat and threw it over him, the shape of his body would not be so obvious.

As he stood, his body was wracked by a sudden wave of tremors—as if the island whispers her destruction into his ear—and he nearly had to sit down again.  After taking one or two shaky breaths, he decided not to leave the necklace behind, or the ring.  He might need them to barter with.  And a small, small part of him wondered whether they had been his mother’s and whether somehow she might still care, if he went out into this fading twilight all alone.

* * *

She was a boy, Chalcedony repeated to herself as she checked her mushrooms.  If she had had any doubts about this fact, the most recent memory would certainly have removed them.  To become a girl, she would have to leave her family behind, and she couldn’t do that.  She didn’t know a trade, as Nimruzimir had or would or did, and even if she did, she couldn’t leave Ma and Da, she couldn’t leave the Shire, with its happy bustle, Uncle Sam with his garden, Elanor, her friend, or Frodo—

No, she couldn’t leave any of them.  Which meant she had to be a boy.  Her hands trembled slightly as she rotated the saucer, trying to inspect every angle of it.  This set of mushrooms were growing particularly well, despite repeated applications of the water from the poisoned pond.  Several of them had put out tiny stalks now, and Chalcedony was realizing with rising excitement and a twinge of fear that she was going to be able to take them and try to get them to grow in and around the poisoned pond now.  She hadn’t really expected this to work.  Some fundamental pessimistic thing inside her had kept insisting that she had made all of it up, or that even if she hadn’t, she was too young or not talented enough, even with Nimruzimir’s memories to help her, to make it work.

But it was working.  It was working.  And the more it works, the more excited she gets, the more she sees in her mind’s eye the memories of the necklace, tinted aubergine in the glass, falling thick and fast about her like snow in midwinter—

* * *

Skilled hands wind the soft glass around a thin metal rod.  It glows dull-orange from the heat of the fire, matching the shade of the sky overhead.  Voices murmur in the background, but the girl winding the beads pays them no attention.  Instead, she hums a soft little song that wraps itself into the amorphous lattice of tiny humming clouds that make up the glass.

The song is about birds waking, and it’s also about time, harmony, and interconnectedness.  It’s a song the Lord in Black heard from the stars and whispered in a dream, and now the young glassmaker is singing it to her pretty tinted glass beads as she winds them round the inner core.  Once she has finished winding the beads and they have cooled, she will send them to another apprentice, who will use sandpaper to rub the outsides until they look like the icicles that the Lord in Blue breathes onto the trees in the dead of winter.

Later, the jeweler’s apprentices will make little gold beads, tiny golden leaves with molds so small and delicate they might be fairy work.  The gold and glass will be woven together into a long necklace and a young sailor will buy it at market, hoping to win the heart of the black-haired, brown-limbed girl who works at the market as a translator.  It will work for a little while, before their beliefs and backgrounds fracture them apart beneath the looming growth of the colossus to the west, whose vast metal ships spill black oil like blood into the seas, until the tears of the Lady in White no longer run clear.

* * *

Chalcedony’s heart beat like a bird’s, too fast.  She wasn’t supposed to be here, not really.  She was pretty sure Annamir was trailing her again, anyway, and would let anyone know if she somehow didn’t come back.  But really she was less worried about herself and more worried about her cargo.

She had brought the first set of mushrooms with her, the ones that had grown well.  She had gently extracted part of them onto more potato jelly, because if something did go wrong, she needed to have some left so she could try again.  

They had tried so hard and grown so well.  She knew this was a little silly of her—Nimruzimir would not be daunted by such a silly thing.  Her great-uncle however many times removed Bilbo would not be daunted.  And the scholars she had read of in the books tucked away in the libraries—they would not have been worried about the little white mushrooms.

But they had tried so hard, Chalcedony thought.  What if the poison killed them anyway?  The pond was so still.  No sign of movement lurked in its depths.  Little grew around it, either; the nearby trees were dead, grey branches reaching for the sky.  Here and there a limb had fallen to the earth, but little seemed to have decayed.  Even the rooting of new life in the dead seemed to have been curtailed.

Chalcedony took a deep breath, set down her pack, and began to get out her equipment.  “You can do it,” she whispered to the mushrooms.  “I know you can.”

* * *

Nimruzimir dreams of hyphae, white as snow, spreading beneath the earth.  In the dream, he has a little sister, sleeping beside him, older than the one who slipped away from them before she was born.  Almost of age, as his mother’s folk would reckon it, this new living little sister.  They dream of the hyphae together, and of the way each tiny, questing tendril finds another, and another, braiding and entwining to make a mat beneath the earth of fine white fibers.

Altogether each one reaches for its neighbor, and Nimruzimir’s little sister takes his hand and squeezes.  Nimruzimir reaches out his other hand to Lilóteo, who murmurs something gentle under his breath and then starts to snore.  Half-here, beneath the eaves of his father’s old house, with the rain pelting down outside, half-somewhere else, with the fungi knitting their mycelium, then pushing their way up through the constricting earth to bloom, white and wrinkled above the soil, waiting for a gentle wind to carry their tiny children away on the wind.

Sparkling poison in the water at their feet does nothing; they suck greedily at the moisture and secrete the glittering treasure where it can do no damage.  They are not bothered.  The fruiting bodies emerge, carrying the poison away, captured in their semi-rigid structures and inert.  The hyphae quest ever outward.

As they grow and bloom, gloved hands pluck them like flowers, laying them across the bottoms of baskets.  Not to be eaten, these mushrooms, but to be safely dried and entombed.  Harvesting poison as if it were grain.  This is of no concern to the hyphae, which spread and spread until they are cut off by the roots of curious plants.  As the poison begins to recede, other brave life roots and surfaces, leaves turned upwards to the Sun above.

Nimruzimir has never known if the things he sees lie beyond the world or only behind his own eyes.  When he is unflinchingly truthful, he does not know which prospect he fears more.  But for once, he wants this thing to be true, or at least rooted somewhere outside of himself.  The girl at his shoulder stirs, clutching at her throat, and he hears the soft almost-musical click of glass against glass.

The Sun spins onward, the planet rotating madly, years churning past.  Mosquitos return early to the stagnant water, and the spiders follow them.  Lilóteo sometimes speaks of a historian friend at the palace who used to talk at length about the spider iconography of the pre-islandic civilizations, and it tended to be rather negative, but Lilóteo himself says—occasionally, and only when he has had rather more than a cup or two of wine—that those are not spiders but only spider-shaped things.

After the spiders come the birds, the frogs, and the fish.  The place bursts into new life: green leaves and green grass, brown reeds sprout up all around the turquoise water.  

The cats return last.