Meyr the Liar

by Brett Davidson

It was Kairoseve, when the year-clocks struck to mark the days before the five days of the Festival of Misrule. In the auditorium of her clan’s domus, Meyr squirmed with impatience as she waited for the eveplay to begin. The theatre was a small, intimate space, with a minstrel’s gallery behind the stage and the audience of her clan ranked around on three sides.

The play was the thing, her siblings and cousins had told her, but the curtains were down and the lights were up and it was the audience she was watching and she couldn’t suppress a delight in the bright richness all about her. At the centre of the arc of seats, like a jewel set in a ring, was the grand box of the Ma and Da and their guest, a tall soft-spoken man in luminously embroidered purple. Meyr was fascinated by the deep wine colour of his velvet coat and the golden vines that flourished over it and seemed to rustle in a silent breeze as he moved. She had stared wide-eyed at him as he arrived for whatever reason it was that had brought him - and he had glanced curiously at her, which for some reason had provoked her Nurse to hide her from his direct sight thereafter.

“That man is a Monstruwacan, from the uttermost, from Augyre Siege!” Nurse whispered sharply as she ushered her towards the most distant wing of the seats. “He’s here to conduct business with your Da.” Meyr knew that there was business of some sort involved. The play was some sort of demonstration for the man in purple because there had been celebrations and ceremonies, which everyone had to attend and witness. The play was supposed to illustrate the glory of the occasion and allow everyone to relax and be amused and flushed with their success.

“What’s a Mostr’wan, a Mons…?”

The older woman cupped Meyr’s chin in her hand. “A very clever man,” she said smiling, but with a certain sadness at the edge of her expression. “You must be very careful around such men.”

“Why?”

“Because they can read!”

“I can read too!” Meyr said proudly, and a little too loud.

“Shh, he can read behind your eyes if he looks at you… be careful not to think of other than you see tonight.”

“I will,” Meyr agreed, though she did not understand.

“Of course you will darling - now be quiet, the play is about to begin.”

To the sound of drums and viols and polite applause, the curtain rose and the company of Masquers danced on to the stage. “Neither-nors, from out of the walls,” Meyr sang, remembering a nursery rhyme about them until she remembered also that she had to be quiet. She blushed.

Meyr couldn’t follow all of the play, but Nurse whispered in her ear now and again when she perceived that her smile was just the shape of a smile or her eyes wandered in the wrong direction. The story was a history of the world, from the Days of Light that all claimed to remember in their dreams through the present day to the far future that all of them then might dread to see in their later lives.

First there was the rise and fall of the Sun-Imperator, Viraten, grander even than a rich family’s hearth-lamp. He was depicted with the gilded mask of an aged man seated on a throne and surrounded by his children, the Wanderers. There was the great Pretender Jove, with his four sons and daughters, one with the red hair, and there was Arys, with his armour like rust but his heart strong. There was veiled Iss, lovely pearl over cinnabar, dour but loyal Sister Cynt, hot magical Hesperr and slow melancholy Kron. The woman representing Earth was particularly beautiful, clothed all in green and her body looped about with the fine silver chains representing her roads and hung with the turning jewels that were her cities. Though diverse and squabbling, the children of Viraten kept in orbit around him, huddling ever more closer as the peripheral players - the stars, Nurse said - circled ever more distantly until they pulled veils over their faces, bowed and left the stage. This was a very sad part of the play, because now the old man and his children were all alone. The Sun-Imperator gave a very moving speech to his weeping children, explaining that he was afflicted by the plague that had slain the stars. As he spoke, players in shadow velvet pinned red ribbons of an increasingly dark hue on his mantle and painted black tears on his mask. Finally they draped a black veil over his head and all his children bowed their heads.

The player’s Oracle gave a speech closing this portion of the story. “Though they will never see him again, the children will know that the body of their dead father remains with them always in the eternal darkness,” she declaimed in a curious ageless voice. “Some were comforted and some felt dread. Some have sought him, and legend says that in an olden age indeed one ship of the sky did fly to him, and men did walk out of it and touch his face… but it was cold and beyond the breath of hope. The End of Light had come upon the Earth, and with these words, Eternal Night fell upon our souls.”

There followed then a great Funeral for the Sun. Meyr sniffed and stifled her tears while Nurse hugged her and all about the audience sang the ancient threnody. Even though she knew that this had all happened a very long time ago and that clearly she was safe and warm now, it made her shiver and prickle.

The next act and age began even more dreadfully. In the absence of their protector, the Children of the Sun were lost to each other and vulnerable to attack. Terrible raiders that had been held back by their father’s golden fire now charged on to the stage, poisoning Pretender Jove, cutting brave Arys down and even violating dear beloved Earth. They tore the bright chains and jewels from her and wrapped her in bindings of frost and darkness and then dealt a blow with a sword that seemed to split her wide open. However, in such destruction there was opportunity, for the great cleft that was cut in her belly opened her womb again to her own children, humanity, and they huddled there and were warmed by her blood. Though the bearers of the black ribbons came for her and draped her in shadow, her children stayed strong and circled about her, cutting down in turn the killers.

Again the Oracle spoke: “Though her wound is mortal and her heat slowly fades, she has taught us well, her children, and we have found now that there is a heat that will sustain us even more truly than our Mother’s blood. Brother danced with brother, sister with sister and man and woman danced together.”

And so they did dance, the people all in the grey of armour and the red that symbolised the warm blood beneath. The Masquers, who Meyr thought were very clever, all climbed on top of one another to make a great pyramid five tiers high. She counted the rows: five on the bottom, four above, three above that, two above that and at the very top there was one in purple, representing the wise Monstruwacans who looked out over the Night Land that was the dying Earth and kept everyone safe. “That is us, that is where we live!” Meyr clapped her hands, drawing indulgent smiles from others nearby.

“Yes, that is the Last Redoubt,” Nurse confirmed. “Where we all live.”

Meyr looked about, remembering her father’s guest. The Monstruwacan seemed duly flattered, nodding in acknowledgement.

A drum was struck and a long note was drawled from a deep viol. Meyr looked at the stage again. There was another act to come. Rising from the stage she saw a thing almost as high as the pyramid, a thing from the corpses of the stars or from out of time or out of a forgotten war - the great and terrible Watcher. This was of course just an effigy made of poles and fuligin cloth, but Meyr was frightened by its five faces and its cloak embroidered with a labyrinth that could drive one mad. Even the pyramid trembled and toppled, but the Masquers landed lightly on their feet and stood up to the towering Watcher, their sharp diskoi raised and coronaed in blue.

“Thus we are, on this Eve!” cried the Oracle and the clock stuck a new hour. Everyone knew the balance that teetered on midnight. The Last Redoubt would fall and the ever-closing Watcher would triumph for time eternal, though then there would be nothing for it to see. In the prophetic section of the play, the great tragic beast sang in five voices of its own doom and the loneliness that would be its fate for ever. Despite all the bright colours and the glory and the excitement, it was such a sad play and as it went on, Meyr became more and more miserable. She tried to be bored, kicking her feet and pinching Nurse. It did no good and she was forced to watch. Fortunately there was a second prophecy, or an answer to the huge, evil, sad thing.

From out of the huddle of human beings there came a single figure, appearing first as a child and then as a Queen, her face painted in elaborate whorls of jale, her body clothed all in red and gold and holding in her hands an orb representing all the souls that had ever lived through their serial lives in the Last Redoubt. In the very last scene of the play proper, this Red Queen, whom was named properly Final Child, held up her globe, which shone clear bright green like the dress of dead Mother Earth, and she sang her own song. It was a song of remembrance for all that had gone, but it was a song of life, for in her, as long as she remembered, all that had lived still lived. In memory there was hope.

Her song rose and everyone sang with her.

Meyr knew about the Final Child, and she knew too that the Monstruwacans did not care for that part of the story, but the eminent guest seemed to take the play in good, albeit cynical cheer.

The Oracle stood one more time and brought the drama to a close, begging the audience’s regard and continued thoughtfulness through their long lives in the endless night, and then she bowed and faded away herself into the shadows.

Ma and Da and the Monstruwacan visitor stood in their box and bowed to applause. The audience dispersed into the extended suite of rooms about the great central hall of the hearth-lamp. Many people borrowed masks from the players and performed improvised vignettes there to impress their paramours - with varying degrees of skill.

When the entertainment was over at last, the formal speeches with their incomprehensible sly subtexts were concluded and a full audience was no longer required, Meyr was sent away, back through the maze of private domicile halls to her own chamber.
 

Little Meyr saw little of her parents and the public apartments of her clan domus, but she was so furnished with company and opportunity she did not know that she was lonely. Her nurse cared for her and bathed her and combed her hair. She was given baubles and toys, singing insects in cages, books and spieltier-dolls whose shape could be changed to suit her moods. She was kept soft and safe amongst care and enjoyment and had much to keep her occupied in the place of her parents’ attention most of the time. It did not matter that she was bundled away out of sight like this, but she did wish that she had been able to hug her Ma and Da on a special night like tonight.

She picked up a malachite dodecahedron from her bedside console and played with it for a while, looking at the vivid swirling patterns on each of its faces. It might have been a lump of cultured stone to anyone else, but this was hers and of her family and was as good a link for her to her bloodline as the touch of her mother’s hand.

Many of her favourite possessions were made by her own clan’s workshops and she liked them all the more because she knew the true story behind every one of them, including how their very material had been made. Clan Voyact had been stone-cultivators for many, many ages - almost since the foundation of the Reboubt. They made exquisite clays and peculiar gems of the finest quality, peculiar hybrids of jewels and metals, stones that were ground to powder to make pigments that appeared different to every eye, and, most of all, the fine silicates that went to make the very best glass that had ever been made. Under the lantern suns of the Underground Fields, wide pans of shallow water glimmered where the calcium of ground human bone was combined with dust, rust and charcoal carefully selected and purchased from the best suppliers. This sediment settled under natural time and contrived heat and pressure to make artificial stone and stranger, hybrid materials. Nurse said the finest minerals took ages to blend, many generations longer even than the best wine, though Meyr had never tasted wine and didn’t know why its age mattered. But she could see that her room was tiled with many subtle shades, their shining glazes further polished by the touch of a thousand generations of children before her, and she tried to imagine what such a span of time might mean.

She stroked those tiles herself, sometimes rubbing furiously to see if she could make a mark of her own, but the glazes were hard, harder even than diamond and all the other crude natural materials that their art had surpassed.

Glazes and glasses were the proudest wares of the Voyacts. Glass had fascinated her: it was a hard thing, but it could bend light like water. Glass, she was sure, was really the original for water. Nurse told her that her body was mostly made of water but she wished that she were made of glass. She had looked though lenses and globe of glass and had been confused at first by the refractions, but eventually the glass had become a teacher. She had seen while playing with prisms that when a beam of light was bent in a particular way, certain colours would appear at set angles and in an unalterable sequence of the five primary colours: ulfire, red, green, blue and jale. It was like a melody

Nurse, as was her way, had turned this into a lesson, but it did not matter. Nurse could make any lesson into a game. Take for example the glasses adorning the clan’s great hearth-lamp that were perfectly transparent to some colours and opaque to others. These glasses magnified on command, collaborated with the lanterns to cast their insubstantial splinters of colour joyfully about a room so she could chase these fragments of red and blue about, hold them in her hand and then see them flicker away. See too the unique slow glass, she said, see how it absorbed light from one side and would release an image through the other side hours, days or years later.

Then there were the bells that sang, the iridescent glazes that were like a butterfly’s wings, the obsidian that was completely opaque and yet paradoxically reflected infinity.

She was even told that glass was in fact a supercooled fluid. She didn’t know what that meant, but she was shown a room where the glass ornaments were so old that they had dripped in slow cascades from the ceiling to the floor, making strange castellated fairy castles and chains that would, in a few more million years, make a shining pool on the floor. This shining grotto was but a slow instant in a process of aeons and impressed upon her the great age of the Redoubt more effectively than any book or fable could.

“Would you like to play here in this grotto?” Nurse had asked her.

Of course she had said yes, and Nurse had played an antique musical instrument called a synaesthiser that had made colours and sounds at the same time and Meyr had danced among colours that were also sounds and butterflies at once.

She liked her room and hoped she’d live there forever, in this one room, with all its shining glass things. She wondered if she’d be there long enough to see the glass run.

Nurse tucked her in this night, and just when Meyr was almost comfortable, she pricked her with a tiny needle, which made her squeal in pain.

“Why did you do that?!” she demanded, tears of betrayal threatening to spring from her eyes. “It hurt!”

Nurse kissed her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “It was part of a check I have been ordered to…”

Meyr pouted, unconvinced, and Nurse had to stroke her forehead and read from the tales of Aesworpth to mollify her. The stories of the Night Land and of the heroes who went out into it to fight the mysterious Silent Ones and sack the evil House of Silence were meant to be instructive: if a child was good, they followed the example of the heroes and if they were was bad, then they heard about the Masquers, who would come and take her away and put a mask over her face so that her family could never find her again.

“Of course they’ll find me!” she cried, secretly thrilled at the prospect. “My hair is black! Neither-nors, living in the walls… they’ll get me unless you stop them!”!

Nurse smiled and shook her head. “All little girls and boys have black hair. When you are a woman, it will be white as ice and shimmer like spun glass.” This sort of thing disappointed Meyr. She had never seen another child bareheaded and thought that she was special!

Tell me another story,” she asked to put off for a few more minutes the unconsciousness of sleep. She knew that the tales were meant as lessons, but they inevitably served their own end in her imagination and she drank eagerly every drop of their inexhaustible inspiration. Most of the tales she heard were about the Last Redoubt itself, told as if it were a character in itself, how a great mass of metal fell from the sky and split the Earth wide open and how its pieces were found and sculpted into an impregnable fastness in the valley that it had made. There were stories about the Fey and the strange peoples of the Dead Cities. There was a story called ‘The Green Man and Mother Grey,’ a tale of a mysterious leafy face that appeared in the walls and babbled. “Who is Mother Grey?” asked Meyr, because she didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the story, but was always referred to as a stern and protective presence by its characters.

“Mother Grey is the Last Redoubt,” Nurse told her. “The Leviathan made of each and every one of us gathered under the common crown while all about the dread Watchers and Eaters creep up on us.”

Meyr, with her literal mind, tried to make sense of this and could only imagine a cluster of people awkwardly craning their necks to fit their heads under a narrow circlet as gibbering figures capered about their feet. She giggled. “Like in the play tonight?” she asked, thinking that it was a joke.

“Oh yes,” said Nurse, quite seriously. “Just like the play tonight”!

“Oh.” Her eyes went round. On nights after that she staged plays of her own with the obedient spieltier-dolls as players. The exercise of her imagination was fun, but she had to admit that the dolls were rather dull and wished they showed just a little will of their own, even if such a quality in non-living things revolted most people.

There were other stories of Mother Grey whose metaphors were easier to understand, such as those that were of lots of little people who sheltered under her skirts. There was also a story called ‘Mother Grey’s Daughter’, and that was about another Redoubt, who had rejected her mother and wandered off into the Night Land, never to be seen again. This was such a very sad and lonely tale that it made Meyr cry, and the story of Sartor the Harlequin, who went there and came back again, did not mollify her. She much preferred to hear the one about the Green Man, since he was funny and a little like the face she had seen in her truly best glass globe.

Oh yes indeed, her special friend Face.
 

In the flux of time, glass seemed to have the ultimate protective power, and Meyr collected many small baubles of a certain type, globes and lenses that contained within them swirls of colour like jewels rendered molten, or metallic veils caught fluttering in a breeze and then held within their discrete universes for, if not eternity, then her whole lifetime - periods which for a child were identically unimaginable. When she was upset she often wished that she could break the boundaries of their surfaces and climb inside them. And there was someone who had already done this, made a home inside a sphere.

She had been admiring one bauble, marveling and laughing at the strange distortions of her face that appeared on its reflective convex surface and trying to focus her eyes simultaneously on her own reflection and the green and gold helices within, when it seemed that something moved.

Was this movement with the sphere, or without? Cross-eyed for a moment, she could not tell. She leant close and the face loomed back, then spread and swirled. The movements it made were not quite what they should have been according to what she knew of refraction or reflection or whatever it was that light should do in proper glass.

Disturbed, she put the globe down and tried to look away, but could not.

The face was still there every time she peeked at it, and it was more and more clear in its shape, and more and more clearly not a reflection. She stuck out her tongue and like a reflection, it stuck its tongue out too - but it did that a second after she did. That proved it then; the face, Face was real!

She smiled and it smiled too. She had her own special friend now, one that nobody knew about. Meyr was so excited she almost dropped the sphere, juggling it for a second before setting it down safe on her bed quilt. It wouldn’t break of course, not even if it were thrown from the very top of the Tower of Observation, eight miles above the Land, but the shaking might frighten Face and she peeped apologetically inside to see that he wasn’t upset.

“Sorry,” she said.

Face didn’t seem to mind. He looked about the room, turning this way and that, his features blooming hilariously under the distortion of the glass. She laughed in relief. Thereafter the two became firm friends. She ceased to keep a diary and told everything to Face instead, and while he could not speak yet, she thought that she could read sympathy in his expressions. She told him stories too, improvisations that she made up from the seed tales that were told to her by Nurse. Face seemed to absolutely love stories, and love her because she was a storyteller. This delighted her, and because he sang songs of his own invention, she decided that he was definitely a much better toy than any dull old spieltier.

Meyr decided one day that Face was to be let out of his globe so that the two of them might have adventures of their own together. She held it up to the ceiling lantern and let it case patterns of light upon the wall. If she squinted, she could imagine Face appearing in the substance of the wall. If she tilted the globe a certain way, it seemed that he moved, and if she tilted it another way, it seemed that he flowed through the metal like a wave. She giggled and put the globe down. The image stayed a while, to her delighted horror, and when he went, he had the habit of coming back again. He appeared in the wall first as a pair of big eyes, then a suggestion of a nose, a mouth and a hint of cheekbones then a whirlpool that might be hair, or perhaps just folds in the alloy of the wall. He had a voice at last - a quiet but musical voice - and he would whisper delicious nonsense to her seemingly from a place between her own ears: “Ah, ye wai a giff - nei cappen ye’en mar eiss!” he would say in his peculiar li

lt and blink amusingly. She would squeal, pretending to be frightened and peep at him through the bars of her fingers. “Ulla! Noy fort, nei lay’en ye!”

Somehow she knew what he meant, though she could never explain to her nurse exactly what it was that he had said. The words evaded translation into the Set Speech and Nurse never saw him herself, though sometimes Meyr would see him watching over her shoulders when she spoke to her. It was most frustrating - until she fully understood that Face was her special friend and was invisible and inaudible to everyone else.

Nurse thought, or said, playing along with what she thought was a game, that perhaps she’d conjured up a daemon. She reminded Meyr earnestly to remember the Master Word, which would madden and drive away all inhuman entities. But Face was already obviously mad and would not be driven away. “Ulla! Ulla!” he would cry in his strange voice when she tried to send the silent sound of the Word to him. He seemed to be eager to hear more of it, though his expression turned quizzical.

Sometimes his tones were unhappy or urgent, though she could not tell why: “Ull! Ell! Ne ne ne ne ne!” he would whine. Meyr would cry in turn at this and run away, teasing him, though she would find him manifesting himself around the corner. He had no legs, but he certainly seemed to be able to find his way around the Redoubt fairly well nonetheless. She laughed again at this, since he pulled faces at her, and resolved never to tell Nurse about him again, otherwise she might report her to the Monstruwacans, who seemed to spend all of their time looking out for things such as these and destroying them, according to the tales. “I wage the Monstr’cans couldn’t wipe thee though,” she said to Face. “You’re hiding in my head eh, you say aye?” Even if the Monstruwacans couldn’t destroy Face, they might still take her away to see the doctors if she told them any more about him, so she was definitely going to keep him a secret.

“Ne.”

“Nay?”

“Farai…”

“Yea Face, you’re all mine aren’t you, say so? Thee to mine, aye? Mine own, mine own!” She sang and danced down the hall.

It was not odd to Meyr that stone, glass and metal should take upon strange qualities such as sentience and speech. She was, after all, a child, and a mirroring by the environment of her own thoughts and wants was exactly what the environment was for. Face proved to her the reality of Mother Grey and she decided that one day she’d like to meet her. Perhaps she could be her daughter since she never ever saw her own parents and Mother Grey’s child had run away and been lost. That would be nice, she thought. It would be proper.