Radiance

The rest was all about older Chamomile, and how Fate helped her do fantastic things because Chamomile had made her laugh, which is a hard thing to do, Anchises agreed. Chamomile escaped a wicked prince who wanted to marry her, and went down to the Chalet Under the Sea where she made friends with a gentleman octopus named Mr Bergamot and a seahorse named Mrs Oolong, and together they had terrific adventures battling submarines and manta rays, and in the end Chamomile turned into a mermaid and didn’t marry anyone but became the Queen of the Ocean anyway.

Afterward, Anchises could talk of nothing but the little girl who put on wolf’s ears and the poppy dress. The others teased him about it and said he should take his pretty face and go find her back Home. Wouldn’t he like to meet her and see if she had worked out how to smile yet? Maybe if he threw a coin in the well and made a wish…

“No!” Anchises cried on the dark beach, quite terrified. “No, I never, ever want to meet

her, not ever! I hope I’ll never see her in real life, not even once, not even for a minute!”

And he ran back toward Adonis with his heart screaming inside him.

On the night of the Nutcake Festival, Adonis ate itself silly, cider and moth-steaks and fried nutcake and callowmilk meringue and piglet pies and cassowary custard. By the time the projector had been set up and the screen stretched flat without a wrinkle and benches arranged in rows in front of the tower of diving bells that marked the centre of Adonis, the whole of the village was groaning, patting their bellies, and telling old Home jokes about chickens and roads and horses with long faces walking into bars, even though no one could quite agree on what a chicken was, or a horse, for that matter. A road is like a river, right? Like a canal. There is more water than earth in the Land of Milk and Desire, where a current is ever so much better than a wheel. Hesiod herself was as happy as a taxman, burping and yelling and singing in Turkish in a voice so deep and sweet even the English speakers cried a little.

Finally, a hush fell. Sometimes, without anyone saying so, folk know it’s time for the show. A fiddle picked up—and then a viola, and a big warbly bass, followed by a zither, a balalaika, and a koto. A clarinet and an oboe joined in. Above them floated a single lonely trumpet. Below them moaned the big belly of a tuba. It was a motley orchestra, all the instruments Adonis had. They began to play a lively march, which the men in White Peony Station had assured the elders was the very one played by the big-city orchestras when The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh premiered in the theatres there. (It wasn’t, really. It was, in fact, the opening march from another movie entirely, The Miranda Affair, but only one person in Adonis would ever come to know that.)

And when the title cards came up, with their lovely white writing on black backgrounds, Anchises and the others would say the lines aloud, so that the movie was not silent at all.

Better run, Your Majesty, or I’ll eat you all up!

I’d rather marry a mushroom!

Oh, how I should like to see how the fish live under the sea!

Anchises said Mr Bergamot’s lines. He put on a deep voice like he thought an octopus—a hideous creature he could not imagine being real—might have. Once, he said his line through a bowl of water, which made everyone laugh. He felt wriggly all over when they laughed, like bathing in the Qadesh. When Mr Bergamot danced on-screen in his eight shining spats, Anchises danced a little, too, and that made them laugh again. It was wonderful.

You’re a funny-looking fish.

Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

I love you bigger than the ocean.

But when it came to the climactic scene, the one where Mr Bergamot and Mrs Oolong and Chamomile are swimming through a shipwreck on the run from the vicious manta ray Dr Darjeeling and all hope is nearly lost, the girl in pigtails who was supposed to say Chamomile’s lines had fallen asleep at the tuba player’s feet.

The schoolteacher shoved Anchises forward to say her line, even though that was a bit confusing, as he was a boy, and he had the next line, too. He tried to make his voice high and soft like a girl’s, like he imagined Chamomile’s would sound.

I wish the night would end and I could see the sunlight again. I wish I could stay here forever with you under the sea.

The blood drained from Doctor Callow’s face. He clapped his hand over his mouth.

Far offshore, the red Qadesh trembled.

The night ended in the Land of Milk and Desire. But it did not end in Adonis. It did not end for Anchises.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[The screen is dim. SEVERIN UNCK has awakened from dark dreams in the middle of the night. She is five years old. Her father sits on her bed, an enormous wrought-iron bower of briars piled high against the lunar autumn with embroidered quilts and an infinitude of pillows. SEVERIN drowns in it; she is a tiny ship adrift on the sea of linen. PERCIVAL UNCK wraps his long arms around his daughter.]

PERCIVAL

Don’t fear, my little hippopotamus. Dreams can be frightening, but they can’t hurt you.

SEVERIN

They can! Oh, they can, Papa. [She begins to weep quietly.]

PERCIVAL

Tell your papa what you dreamt that was so terrible. When something is very awful indeed, so awful you can’t bear it, there’s a magic trick you can do. Tell the something’s story from start to finish, and by the time you get to the end, you will often find you can bear it quite well, and perhaps it was never so bad in the first place.