The Water Mirror (25 page)

“Perhaps,”
said the familiar voice in her head.
“Who knows?”

“Who, if not you yourself.”

“I am only the lagoon.”

“You know so much.”

“And yet I possess no knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of this world.”

“Is that true?”

“Certainly.”

Vermithrax joined in. His booming voice drowned out the rushing of his wingbeats. “Are you speaking with her? With the Queen?”

“Yes.”

“What's she saying?”

“That you are the bravest lion the world has ever seen.”

Vermithrax purred like a house cat. “That's mighty nice of her. But you don't have to flatter me, Merle. I owe you my freedom.”

“You don't owe me anything at all,” she said with a sigh, suddenly downhearted. “Without you I'd probably be dead.”

She stuck the water mirror back in her pocket and carefully buttoned it in. A piece of another world, she thought numbly. So close to me. Perhaps Serafin was really right in what he said about the mirror pictures in the canals.

Poor Serafin. What had become of him?

“There ahead!” cried Vermithrax. “Left of us, to the south!”

They had all three known that there would come a moment when they would face the military power of the Pharaoh. Yet so much had happened since they'd left the Campanile, the fears of the siege ring had become distant and diffused for Merle.

But now it had come to the point. In a few moments they would be flying over the ring. It was still a blurry
line on the horizon, but it was inching nearer and nearer.

“I'm going to have to climb to a higher altitude,” explained Vermithrax. “The air will become thinner, so don't be afraid if you find breathing a little difficult.”

“I won't be afraid.” Merle tried to give her voice a firm ring.

The gigantic obsidian wings of the lion bore them higher and higher, until the sea beneath them became a uniform surface, without waves, without currents.

Far ahead of them Merle saw the war galleys of the Pharaoh, tiny as toys. The distance could not obscure the fact, however, that the ships had enough destructive power to easily take the insufficient Venetian fleet within hours. The same ships had already—at the beginning of the great mummy war—set loose the first scarab swarms in all the leading countries. The thumb-size eating machines of chitin and malice had rolled inexorably over the continents. First the harvests fell victim to them, then livestock, and finally people. The scarabs were followed by the mummy armies, umpteen thousands snatched from their graves by the high priests of the Pharaoh, furnished with weapons, and sent out to battle, will-less and incapable of feeling pain.

The great war had lasted for thirteen years; then its outcome was decided—as if there'd ever been any doubt about it. The Egyptian Empire had enslaved the people and its armies marched on nearly every street in every part of the earth.

Merle bent deeper over the mane of the stone lion, as if that might protect her from the danger that threatened them from below, from the surface of the sea.

The hulls of the galleys were painted golden, for the indestructible skin of the Egyptian desert gods was also of gold. Each galley had three masts with a multitude of sails. Two rows of long oars projected from the flanks of the hull. In the stern of each ship there was a high construction with an altar on which the high priests in their golden robes performed sacrifices—animals, ordinarily; but also, some whispered, humans.

Small steamboats crossed between the galleys and were used for reconnaissance, provisioning, and pursuit. The siege ring was some fifteen hundred feet wide and extended across the water in both directions to the coasts on either side. There sat diverse arrangements of war machines and foot soldiers, thousands upon thousands of mummy soldiers, who waited, without will of their own, for the signal to attack. It was only a question of days before the Egyptian commanders would receive the final confirmation: Without the Flowing Queen, Venice was helplessly awaiting its downfall.

Merle closed her eyes in despair, before Vermithrax's voice suddenly snatched her from her thoughts. “Are those the flying ships you've spoken of?” He sounded both puzzled and fascinated at the same time.

“Sunbarks,” Merle confirmed wryly, as she looked
ahead over the fluttering mane. “Do you think they've discovered us?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

Half a dozen slender shapes crossed some distance ahead of them. Vermithrax was flying higher than they were; with a little luck they would pass the barks without the captains noticing them.

The sunbarks of the Empire gleamed golden like the galleys, and since in the sky they were closer than the powerful battleships on the sea, the gleam of their keels was brighter many times over. They were three times as long as a Venetian gondola, roofed over, and provided all around with narrow, horizontal window slits. How many men were behind them was not visible from the outside. Merle estimated that a bark held places for ten people at most: a captain, eight crew members, and the priest whose magic held it in the air. In sunshine the slender flying ships were lightning quick and featherlight to maneuver. When the sky was cloudy, their speed slowed and their movements became clumsy. Finally, by night they were next to unusable.

But on this morning the sun was beaming brightly in the sky. The barks glistened like predators' eyes in front of the hazy background of water and land.

“We'll be over them any minute,” said Vermithrax.

Merle's breathing became faster. The obsidian lion had been right: The air up here was thin and caused a pain in
her chest. But she said nothing aloud; she was only thankful that Vermithrax was strong enough to take them up so high and over the Egyptians.

“We have almost made it,”
said the Flowing Queen. She sounded tense.

The sunbarks were now directly under them, glittering blades that soared in wide arcs around the lagoon. No one on board was thinking about the flight of a single lion. The captains were concentrating their attention on the city, not on the airspace above their heads.

Vermithrax sank lower again. Merle felt grateful as her lungs filled more quickly with air. But her eyes were still fixed, spellbound, on the barks, now rapidly falling away behind them.

“Can they see us from the galleys?” she asked hoarsely. No one gave her an answer.

Then they had crossed the ring of warships.

“Made it!”
the Flowing Queen exulted, and Merle repeated her words.

“It would have been ridiculous not to,” growled Vermithrax.

Merle said nothing. But after a while she spoke again. “Didn't you notice anything?”

“What do you mean?” asked the lion.

“How still it was.”

“We were flying too high,” Vermithrax said. “Sounds don't travel so far.”

“Yes, they do,”
contradicted the Queen, without Vermithrax's being able to hear her.
“You are right, Merle. Complete stillness prevails on the galleys. Deathly stillness.”

“You mean—”

“Mummy soldiers. The ships are crewed by living corpses. Just like all the war machines of the Empire. The cemeteries of the conquered lands offer the priests an inexhaustible stock of supplies. The only living men on board are the high priests themselves and the captain.”

Merle sank into a deep silence. The idea of all those dead who were fighting in the service of the Pharaoh made her even more anxious than the thought of what lay ahead of them.

“Where are we flying?” she asked after a few minutes. They'd gone around the Pharaoh's armies in a large arc and now finally were gliding toward land.

“I'd like to see my homeland again,” boomed Vermithrax.

“No!” said the Flowing Queen, and for the first time she availed herself of Merle's voice. “We have another goal, Vermithrax.”

The lion's wingbeats became irregular for a moment. “Queen?” he asked uncertainly. “Is that you?”

Merle wanted to say something, but to her horror, the will of the Flowing Queen overcame her own and suppressed her words. With crystalline sharpness it was borne in on her that from now on her body no longer belonged to her alone.

“It is I, Vermithrax. It has been a long time.”

“That it has, Queen.”

“Will you help me?”

The lion hesitated, then nodded his mighty obsidian head. “That I will.”

“Then listen to what I have to say. You too, Merle. My plan affects each one of us.”

And then Merle's lips spoke words that were completely foreign to her—places and expressions and over and over a single name: Lord Light.

She didn't understand what it had to do with her, and she wasn't even sure whether at that moment she wanted to know any more about it at all. For the time being nothing could faze her, nothing frighten her. They'd broken through the siege ring, that was all that counted. They'd escaped the grasp of the greatest army the world had ever seen. Merle's relief was so overpowering that all the Flowing Queen's dark prophecies and plans bounced off her as though they had nothing to do with her at all.

Her heart was beating furiously, as if it wanted to burst in her chest, the blood was rushing in her ears, and her eyes were burning from the headwind. Never mind. They'd escaped.

Several times she looked back and saw the rows of galleys and swarms of sunbarks becoming smaller and finally merging entirely into the blue and gray of the horizon—only grains of sand within a world that was too great to
look on any longer at all the wrong that the Egyptians had done to it without taking action.

Something was going to happen, Merle could feel that suddenly. Something big, something fantastic. And in a flash came the awareness that this was only the very beginning, mere child's play in comparison to what lay ahead of them.

And then, very gradually it dawned on her that Fate had prepared a special role for her in all of it. She herself and the Flowing Queen, perhaps even Vermithrax.

Although the Queen was still speaking through her, although her lips were moving unstoppably and articulating strange words, Merle permitted herself the luxury of closing her eyes. A rest. Finally. She wanted simply to be alone with herself for a moment. She was almost surprised that she succeeded, in spite of the guest she was harboring.

When she looked again, they had reached the mainland and were flying over scorched fields, bald mountain ranges, and burned villages, and for a long, long time none of them spoke a word.

Lord Light
echoed in Merle's thoughts. She hoped the words would provoke the voice inside her to a reaction, an explanation.

But the Flowing Queen was silent.

Merle's fingers curled more deeply into the lion's obsidian mane—something to hold firmly to, a good feeling among so many bad ones.

In the distance they saw the peaks of mountains, far, far away on the horizon. The land stretching to there from the sea had once been full of people, full of life.

But now nothing was living here anymore. Plants, animals, people—nothing.

“They are all dead,” said the Flowing Queen softly.

Merle felt the change taking place in Vermithrax even before she stretched out a hand and felt dampness and realized that the obsidian lion was weeping.

“All dead,” the Queen whispered.

And then they were silent, looking toward the far peaks ahead of them.

Kai Meyer
is the author of many highly
acclaimed and popular books for adults and young adults in his native Germany. The Water
Mirror, which was nominated for the German Book Prize and was on many bestseller lists
in Germany, has been translated into fourteen languages. Kai Meyer lives in Germany.

M
ARGARET
K. M
C
E
LDERRY
B
OOKS
Simon & Schuster, New York

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,
real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and
incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual
events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

English language translation copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth D.
Crawford
Die Fliebende Koenigin
: Text © 2001 Kai Meyer
Original German edition © 2001 Loewe Verlag GmbH, Bindlach

Published by arrangement with Loewe Verlag

First U.S. edition, 2005

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or
in part in any form.