The Choir Boats (42 page)

Bewildered, Maggie nodded.

“My love,” said St. Macrina the Younger. “Meet your sisters/
daughters/mothers.”

Maggie looked at each of the others. Suddenly she knew them:
Saint Crispina of Numidia with the shaved head of her martyrdom,
tall and unyielding to her male interrogators; St. Monica of Hippo
Regius near Carthage; the Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, also of
Carthage; Ijeoma Chidera, weaving intricate geometrical designs
for the honour of Aha Njoku, the Lady of the Yams; and Nne Adaobi,
holding a spear inscribed to Oya, the goddess of wind, fire and
lightning from across the river. Maggie knew them and they knew
her in that instant, just as they had known each other forever.
Maggie beheld her
ndichie
, and they embraced her.

“But why?” asked Maggie.

“Come,” said St. Macrina the Younger. She took Maggie by the hand.
They walked in the sunrise/sunset to the nearest bell tower, ascended
the winding staircase, and emerged in the carillon. They looked out
and Maggie gasped, partly in surprise, partly in recognition.

“Behold the Garden,” said the saint. The wall was an enormous
circle that was also a dozen other shapes, all perfect. Inside the
wall was much larger than outside, an infinite regression, fractals
of lawns and arbours and fountains. The air was so transparent
Maggie discerned the follicles on the feathers of birds perched in
trees across hundred-mile greenways. The air was so quick Maggie
smelled the aroma of flowers a day’s walk away.

“
The
Garden?” she asked, knowing the answer now but wanting
confirmation.

“No,” said the saint. “Not that one, but not so far away either.”

Maggie considered the flowers, which named themselves to her
as she gazed. She had seen very few flowers since coming to New
York City and then London. The last time she had seen and smelled
such a profusion of flowers, she had been a very small girl, barely
able to speak, in the place called Maryland. Her memories of that
place were not good.

“Maryland,” she said.

The saint looked at her sadly, and said, “A different place but
not so far away either. The mockery of its intended. Maryland is
not Mary’s Land. And here we are, at the Garden of Patience, the
Inns of Learning, where we sing the Quadrivium and the Trivium
throughout the constant dawn and dusk, the forever-becoming, as
we plan for some other end.”

“I don’t understand,” said Maggie, who was beginning to
understand but only as a frog begins to appreciate far above it the
rim of the well into which it has fallen.

“Look,” said the saint.

Maggie saw now thousands of others in the garden. A few she
recognized: Saints Paula and Eustochium with their books and
brooms, steely-eyed Saint Radegunde with her mason’s trowel, Saint
Teresa writing and writing, Hypatia surrounded by a dozen pupils.
The names of others formed in her mind as she beheld them: Rabia
al Basri, with her broken jug, Meerabai singing
bhajan
prayers, Guan
Yin holding a willow branch, Dhashi Zhi at her feet, both listening
to the music of the world, Machig Labdron, the Queen of Bliss,
playing her drum and bell, Tse Che Nako the Thought Women, the
Spider Woman, Estsanatlehi the Self-Renewing One, clan-mothers
of the Haudenosee, women from every people, every country, every
continent, from Africa, Europe, Persia, India, Siam, China, from
Australia and Peru, from California and the polar North, from
everywhere on Earth. Women sat in libraries, vast libraries opening
onto the garden. Women sat at drafting tables, wove patterns into
cloth, mixed chemicals in retorts, manipulated large engines of
calculation and analyzed the results.

From the assembled minds arose a humming, a music that
probed and retreated, advanced and circled back, concentric and
tangential, always emerging and always receding at the same time.
Like the perception of a lost time on the tip of one’s tongue, thought
Maggie, or the memory of an event that has not yet happened
but certainly will. Maggie saw that men were also present, fewer
of them, but working alongside the women, and likewise of every
possible race and type. And then — Maggie had to rub her eyes to be
sure — she perceived other beings, also working with the men and
the women. Some were all covered in fur, some had feathers instead
of hair, some were as tall and thin as storks with superbly long noses
to match. Maggie saw across the pellucid air that their beak-noses
had three nostrils.

“What am I to do?” said Maggie.

“This you know though you have forgotten,” said Saint Macrina
the Younger.

Maggie considered this as sunrise and sunset coddled the air,
lacing the sky with shades of tin, cream, and coral.

“I fear the Owl,” she said at last.

The saint said nothing while the world turned around and onto
itself.

“Fear him but not forever,” she said at last. “And not into despair,
not into inaction. He and his kind are not the highest powers.”

The saint pointed down at the great fountain with the statue of
the self-mutilating pelican, a thousand fountains replicated across
the gardens below. The water gushing from the pelican’s wound
turned to blood, a splashing river of blood out of which the dolphins
leaped with cries of alarm. Rivers and rivers of blood, thousands
and thousands of dolphins. As quickly as it began, the blood ended,
replaced by water that turned mirror-silver. At first the thousand
mirrors reflected up to Maggie and the saint the turquoise and lilac
of the sunrise and sunset. Then the mirrored garden revealed a
vision of ingenious power to Maggie, the creation of a key to open
the mightiest gate ever made. All the music, all the equations, all the
geometry of the universe would have to go into the engine depicted.
And all the love, all the mercy, or else the device would fail.

“We need seven for this song of building,” whispered Maggie.
Saint Macrina the Younger nodded, and all the saints did the same
down below, every man and woman of every species in the garden
nodded.

In the mirror were the images of six individuals. Maggie knew
them. Most of all Maggie looked at the image of the young white
woman, the one with the small-chinned, anxious face. The white
woman was sailing beyond the edge of the world, desiring herself to
go to a place where sad dreams come true. The young white woman
looked out at Maggie and, for one instant, Maggie and the white
woman hummed to one another, “I know you!”

The mirrors clouded over, the waters of the fountains swirled
again. A long sigh broke from the massed scholars.

“The other six seek you, though they do not realize that yet,
not fully,” said Saint Macrina the Younger. “They must find you
and together you seven must sing the Song Eternal to awaken the
Mother.”

Maggie said, “I know. But still I fear the Owl.”

“Look,” said the saint, pointing to a dark grey shape that soared
out of the thousand bell towers at the instant, a shape that swooped
low over the fountains and gardens before flying over the heathlands
and downs beyond the wall.

“The owl of wisdom flies at dusk,” said the saint. The owls hovered
and then circled towards the line of shore, hunting by the sea. “The
Wurm-Owl is not this owl. The Wurm-Owl is a usurper, a bloated,
leucristic mockery. Fear the Wurm-Owl but not unto death.”

From the far side of the sea, something stirred on its pillar of
bone. Maggie shuddered and, despite herself, so did Saint Macrina
the Younger.

“Come down now,” said the saint. “You must go.”

Maggie descended the staircase, and re-entered the garden.
Larks, thrushes, and wrens greeted the dawn. She heard the bees
flying from flower to flower, could see the hairs on their legs, full of
pollen as they worked at a million pistils and stamens. She smelled
sandalwood and acanthus, galbanum and sarara, the spices of every
archipelago. The lawns were strewn with small blue flowers.

“Go forth now, find your six sisters and brothers,” said the saint,
and all the saints of every nation.

“May I return?” asked Maggie.

“You need not ask,” said the scholars together in every language.
“You are of this place and can never leave forever. In the end
you must return, not having left, to complete with us the Great
Psalter — which has already been written and sung — to solve the
Great Equation — which was solved before Time began.”

A lark of many larks flew from a plum tree of many plum trees
and alighted on Maggie’s shoulder, a little streaked golden fire on
Maggie’s brown shoulder.

“Goodbye for now,” said all the scholars.

“Goodbye,” said Maggie.

She walked out the gate, patting the flanks of the bowing griffins
as she passed. Down a long road over the swales she walked, with
the lark for company. The darkness grew, the stars came out. On
and on, colder and colder. The lark sang, “What is the square root
of infinity?” and, before Maggie could answer, it flew back up the
moon-lit road.

Maggie woke up in the alley, cross-legged with a book in her lap,
almost unable to stand.

At the winter solstice, all of Yount celebrated
kjorraw
, the chant of
solemn joy, the wistful search for memory, and the shield against
loneliness. At dawn, every house, every ship, had a Small Moon
hanging from roof or mast to reflect the sunrise. At dawn, the
harp-boats and ship-violins rode in Yount Great-Port harbour, as
they did everywhere in Yount, playing the symphony of longing and
hope, fanned by the wind and poured out into the water through
resonating strings hanging from the keels.

The dolphins sang back first, crowding around the breakwater
and leaping high before all two hundred thousand residents of the
city. Then the whales sang back, their great heads and fins surging
in the waves just off the breakwater. The humans and the cetaceans
sang to one another, whale-matins in exile, a shared melody to
kindle light in the darkness.

The Mother’s Song
, thought Sally, watching the proceedings from
the royal barge.
I know this melody. I sang it to defy the Owl in the
Temple.

Sally moved to the bow and sang, waving her arms like the
conductor of an orchestra. As she did so, the dolphins raced towards
her, leaping and tumbling to match her gestures.

“A
lail-obos
!” cried people on the barge, and the word spread
throughout the multitudes. “The Karket-soomi woman rules the
dolphins!”

Afsana, Tom, and Barnabas joined Sally, held hands, and sang
as well.

“
Kaskas
, look!” cried the people. “A whale enters the harbour!
Not in living memory has one passed the breakwater. They’ve called
the grandsire of whales, look how he lifts his head, his tail must be
thrust into the harbour mud. His eye is enormous. See how he looks
at the Karket-soomi singers. . . . Ah, now he sings with them. Oh, by
the Nurturing Mother, such a singing!”

And all two hundred thousand sang together, and millions more
did the same everywhere in Yount, led by four Big Landers and,
above all, by two young women, cousins warily clasping hands in
front of Neptune’s herald.

As the crowds dispersed to the rest of the
kjorraw
ceremonies,
Sally thought,
So now we are four. Afsana is strong. We are too alike and
not alike enough, but we need her strength, her anger. Who shall be our
fifth?

“Glorious, that’s what it was!” said Reglum. “A song for the ages!
Now come, let us enjoy the rest of
kjorraw
. There are Dorentius
and Noreous on the next ship — I hope they are not too envious of
my good fortune in being onboard the royal barge — we can all go
together to break our fast.”

Sally, aware of the spreading talk and what her performance
would do to fuel it, was glad for diversion. As they were rowed back
to shore, she said to Reglum, “I feel funny inside right now. Empty
and full all at once. I cannot put it any other way.”

“You are a marvel,” said Reglum. “Truly, you begin to scare me a
little too with what you can do. You scare others as well, you know.
Some people think you might be the
sukenna
-
tareef
, the Saviour.
Others say that is heresy. Some fear you are in league with the
Cretched Man. And now Tom and Mr. McDoon, as well as Afsana!
Old prophecies are on many minds now. Be watchful in the midst of
our rare moment of joy!”

Sally looked back at the Arch-Bishop, who affected a look of
bland hauteur.

“But forgive those who fear you. Our fear springs from our
situation, alone here in the wilderness. We do not know our origins,”
said Reglum. “We do not know where we came from or why we are
here or where we are going. We lost our history when we arrived here
and, at first, we had even forgotten the concept of what history is
or what it means. The Great Confluxion was like an explosion from
which the survivors awake with no memory. We are amnesiacs. Our
only progress has been, over the past two thousand years, to become
aware
that we are amnesiacs.”