The Glass Word (14 page)

“Why didn't they stay together?”

“What neither had thought possible happened. Lalapeya became pregnant and brought you into the world, Merle. Steven … well, he went away.”

“But why?”

“You must know him to understand that. He couldn't bear it when anyone held him fast anywhere, when anyone subjected him to firm … firm obligations. I don't know how to express it. It was the same as in Hell. He hated the Stone Light because it rules us all and only rarely allows one's own thoughts. He felt himself constricted again by Lalapeya and her child, again limited in his freedom. And I think that was the reason he went away.”

Merle's lower lip trembled. “What a coward!”

Burbridge hesitated a moment before he answered. “Yes, perhaps he is one. Just a coward. Or a rebel. Or a disastrous mixture of both. But he is also my son and your father, and we should not pass judgment on him hastily.”

Merle saw it entirely differently, but she remained silent so that Burbridge would tell her the rest. “Lalapeya was in despair. She had detested me from the beginning. Steven had told her everything about the Light and about my role in the world of the Lilim. Lalapeya blamed me for
Steven's disappearance. In her anger and her grief she wanted nothing more to do with Steven, and also not with her child, in whom she saw a piece of Steven.”

Junipa grasped Merle's hand.

“Is that why she put me out on the canal?”

Burbridge nodded. “I think she's regretted it many times. But she hadn't the strength to make herself known to her daughter. She was still always the watcher of the forefather, the Son of the Mother.”

Merle thought of the water mirror, of the many times when she'd pushed her hand in and was touched by the fingers on the other side. Always tenderly, always full of warmth and friendship. It didn't go with what Burbridge said: Lalapeya had made herself known to her, even if in the unique, mysterious way of a sphinx.

“Lalapeya must have known that you were living in the orphanage. Probably she was observing your every step,” Burbridge went on. “It was harder for me. It took years, but finally Arcimboldo located you on my orders and took you to him.” His eyes sought Junipa and found her half-hidden behind Merle. “Just like you, Junipa. Even if for other reasons.”

Junipa made a face. “You made me into a slave. So that I could spy on other worlds for the Stone Light.”

“Yes,” he said sadly, “that too. That was
one
reason, but it wasn't mine; rather, it was the Light's. I myself wanted something different.”

Merle's voice became icy when she understood. “He used you, Junipa. Not for himself, but for me. He wanted you to bring me here. That was the reason, right, Professor? You had the eyes put into her so that she could show me the way to the mirror room.”

Again Burbridge nodded, visibly affected. “I couldn't have you brought here by the Lilim—that would only have made the Light aware of you. When you finally came into Hell of your own free will with the lion, you were in the kingdom of the Light. And how little power I possess there you have already seen, when the Lilim took you prisoner. I wanted to spare you all that. Junipa was to have brought you here through the mirrors, as she did today, into this room, where you are safe from the influence of the Light.” He paused a moment and wiped his forehead. Then he turned to Junipa. “The business with your heart … that was never planned. Not I but the Light arranged that. I couldn't prevent it, for at that point I was also under the Light's influence. It was hard enough to resist it when I fetched Merle out of the Heart House.” He shook his head sadly and looked at the floor. “It would have killed me for that if it were not dependent on me. It has made me into the master of Hell, and the Lilim respect and fear me. It would be difficult to find someone to take my place. And it would take a long time to build him up to what I am today.” The shadow of a bitter smile flitted across his face. “But that has always been the fate of the Devil, hasn't it?
He can't simply quit like some captain of industry or abdicate like a king. He is what he is, forever.”

Merle only looked at him while her thoughts whirled in circles, faster and faster. She caught herself trying to give her father a face, a younger version of Burbridge, without the wrinkles, without the gray in his hair and the weariness in his eyes.

“I must be grateful for the moments in which I can still be myself. But they are becoming ever fewer, and soon I will only be a puppet of the Light. Only then will I really deserve the name of Lord Light,” he said cynically.

Was he actually expecting her to commiserate with him? Merle simply couldn't make him out. She looked into herself for hatred and contempt for everything that he'd done to her and Junipa and perhaps also to her father, but she wasn't able to find any shred of it.

“I wanted to see you, Merle,” said Burbridge. “Even when you were still a little child. And I had so hoped the circumstances would be different. You should have met
me
first, not Lord Light. And now it has happened the other way around. I cannot expect that you will forgive me that.”

Merle heard his words and understood their sense, but it didn't matter what he said: He remained a stranger to her. Just like her father.

“What happened to Steven?” she asked.

“He went through the mirror.”

“Alone?”

Burbridge looked at the floor. “Yes.”

“But without a guide out there he will become—”

“A phantom, I know. And I am not even sure if he didn't know that too. But I have never given up hope. If it is possible to look into other worlds, perhaps one could find him.”

Junipa was staring at him with her mirror yes. “Was
that
what you wanted? For me to look for him?”

He lowered his eyes and said nothing more.

Merle nodded slowly. Suddenly she put all the pieces together. Junipa's mirror eyes, her lessons in the mirror workshop with Master Arcimboldo: Burbridge had determined her course since she'd left the orphanage.

“But why the messenger who offered to protect Venice from the Egyptians?”

“It was you I wanted to protect. And Arcimboldo, because I needed his mirrors.”

“Then the business with the drop of blood from every Venetian wasn't anything but—”

This time it was Junipa who interrupted her. “He wanted to keep up appearances. And the picture people have of Hell. He's still Lord Light, after all. He has—” she said it very matter-of-factly—“duties.”

“Is that true?” Merle asked him.

Burbridge sighed deeply, then nodded. “You can't understand that. This wrestling between me and the Light,
the strength of its power … how it forces its thoughts on one and changes all that goes on in one. No one can comprehend that.”

“Merle.”
The Flowing Queen ended her silence, speaking gently but urgently.
“We must get away from here. He is right when he speaks of how powerful the Stone Light is. And there are things that have to be done.”

Merle pondered briefly, then thought of something else. She turned to the professor again. “In the pyramid, when we were flying away from you … you said something there, you know a name. I didn't understand what you meant by that. Whose name?”

Burbridge came closer; he could have touched her with his hand now. But he didn't dare to.
“Her
name, Merle. The name of the Flowing Queen.”

Is that true? she asked in her mind.

The Queen gave no answer.

“What would it change if I knew what she's named?”

“It isn't only her name,” he said. “It has to do with who she really is.”

Merle inspected him penetratingly. If it was some kind of a trick, she didn't understand what he was driving at. She tried to move the Queen to an explanation, but she seemed to be awaiting Burbridge's.

“Sekhmet,” he said. “Her name is Sekhmet.”

Merle dug into her memory. But there was nothing, no name that even resembled that one.

“Sekhmet?”

Burbridge smiled. “The ancient Egyptian goddess of the lions.”

Is that so?

Hesitantly the Queen said,
“Yes.”

But—

“In the old temple ruins and in the graves of the pharaohs she is depicted as a lioness. Ask her, Merle! Ask her if she was a lioness of stone.”

“More than that. I was a goddess, and yes, my body was that of a lioness…. At that time most of the gods still had their own bodies and wandered over the world like all other creatures. And who can say if we were really gods. We could not, in any case, but the idea pleased us and we began to give credence to the talk of the humans.”
She paused.
“Finally we also were convinced of our own omnipotence. That was the time when the humans began to hunt us. For the images of the gods are much easier to misuse for human purposes than the gods themselves. Images have no will and no desires. Statues stand for nothing but the goals of the rulers. So it has ever been. The word of a god is, in truth, only the word of the one who erected his statue.”

Merle exchanged a look with Junipa. Her friend could not hear the Queen. In the mirror eyes Merle saw her own exhausted face and was afraid of herself.

How long ago was that? she asked the Queen in her mind.

“Eons. Further back than the family tree of the Egyptians extends. Others worshipped me before, peoples whose names are long forgotten.”

“Is she telling you the legend?” Burbridge asked. “If not, I will do it. Sekhmet, the mighty, wise, all-knowing Sekhmet, was impregnated by a moonbeam and then bore the first sphinx, the progenitor of the sphinx people.”

The Son of the Mother! flashed into Merle's mind. Why didn't you tell me that?

“Because then you would not have done what you have done. And what would it have changed? The dangers would have remained the same. But would you have faced them for an Egyptian goddess? I have never lied to you, Merle. I am the Flowing Queen. I am the one who protected Venice from the Egyptians. What I once was before—what role does that play?”

A big one. Perhaps the biggest of all. Because you've brought me here. You know what the sphinxes are planning. Have probably always known it.

“We are here to stop it. The Son of the Mother must not rise again. And if he does, I am the only one who can oppose him. For I am his mother and his lover. With him I bred the people of the sphinxes.”

With your own
son?

“He was the son of the moonbeam. That is something different.”

Oh, really?

Again Burbridge spoke. “Sekhmet can do nothing about it,” he said, surprisingly defending the Queen, even if he could only guess what she was telling Merle. “What she thought was a moonbeam … was in truth something else. It was a beam of the Stone Light, when it plunged down to the Earth. Did it find its target intentionally? And why Sekhmet in particular? I don't know the answers to that. Probably the Light foresaw that its plunge deep into the interior of the Earth would bury it and that it would be hard to influence the creatures on the surface. Therefore—and this is only my theory as a scientist—I think that therefore the Light impregnated the lion goddess intentionally so that it could found its own race. A race of creatures that bore in them a piece of the Light, possibly without being aware of it. A people, in any case, that sometime could be taken over by the Light in order to carry out its orders on the surface. As the Lilim do in the interior of the Earth.” Weary and worn out, he broke off. At the end his voice had sounded weaker and weaker, increasingly older and rougher.

You heard him, Merle said to the Queen.

“Yes.”

And?

The Queen seemed to hesitate, but then Merle heard the voice in her head again.
“It was I who killed the Son of the Mother. I felt too late that he bore the Light in him. It was too late because the people of the sphinxes were
already born. I could only hinder him from rising to be their ruler. But as it has turned out, I only achieved a postponement. The sphinxes have become what I always feared.”

Then you went to the lagoon—

“In order to watch him. Just like Lalapeya and those who came before her. Nevertheless, there was a great difference: The sphinxes worshipped him and kept watch to keep anyone from desecrating his grave. I, on the other hand, watched him to prevent his resurrection. Lalapeya was the first one who guessed what he had in him. She had no information, of course not, but she felt it. Especially when she learned that the sphinxes were behind the Egyptian Empire and saw the resurrection of the Son of the Mother as the highest of their goals.”

Merle understood. This was the connection she'd been seeking, the connection between the sphinxes and the Stone Light. The Pharaoh, the Horus priests, they'd all been tools in the hands of the sphinxes.

The war, the destruction of the world, had that all not been important, really? Had it always been only about Venice and what was buried beneath it?

“With the prospect of world domination, the sphinxes made the Horus priests and the Pharaoh compliant. But their most important goal was always the lagoon. And I was the only one who could keep them away from there.”
Her voice faltered for a moment, as if she'd lost power
over it. Then she added more collectedly,
“I failed. But I have come into the stronghold of the sphinxes in order to set things right. With you, Merle.”

You wanted to go there from the beginning?

“No. In the beginning I thought that we would find help in Hell. I wanted to draw the Lilim into the war against the Empire. But I did not know how great the Stone Light's power over Burbridge already was. We have lost valuable time because of that. The Son of the Mother is already in the Iron Eye, I can sense him. Even Lalapeya cannot stop that. That is why she is there.”