The Water Mirror (10 page)

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Merle wanted to
know.

“You'll enter the mirrors and drive out the phantoms with a
little aid that I shall give you to take with you.” He laughed aloud. “My
goodness, don't look so flabbergasted! Dario and the others have done it countless
times. It may seem a little unusual to you, but basically it's not very difficult.
Just tiresome. Therefore, you apprentices are allowed to experience it, while your old
master puts his feet on the desk, smokes a good pipe, and doesn't worry about a
thing.”

Merle and Junipa exchanged looks. They both felt apprehensive, but they
were also determined to get
through this business with dignity.
After all, if Dario had already done it, they probably would be able to as well.

Arcimboldo pulled something out of a pocket of his smock. Between thumb
and forefinger he held it in front of the girls' noses: a transparent glass ball,
no bigger than Merle's fist.

“Quite ordinary, eh?” Arcimboldo grinned, and for the first
time, Merle noticed that he was missing a tooth. “But in fact, it's the best
weapon against mirror phantoms. Unfortunately, it's also the only one.”

He said nothing for a moment, but neither girl asked any questions. Merle
was certain that Arcimboldo would carry on with his explanation.

After a short pause, while he gave them a chance to look at the glass ball
more closely, he said, “A glassblower on Murano produced this captivating little
thing according to my specifications.”

Specifications?
Merle asked herself.
For a simple ball of glass?

“When you put it next to a mirror phantom, you must just speak a
certain word, and he'll immediately be trapped inside the ball,” Arcimboldo
explained. “The word is
intorabiliuspeteris.
You must
imprint it in your minds as if it were your own name. Intorabiliuspeteris.”

The girls repeated the strange word, becoming tongue-tangled a few times,
until they were sure they could keep it in their heads.

The master pulled out a second ball, handed one to
each girl, and had them step up to the mirror. “Several mirrors are infested, but
for today we'll let it go with one.” He made a sort of bow in the direction
of the mirror and spoke a word in a strange language.

“Enter,” he said then.

“Just like that?” Merle asked.

Arcimboldo laughed. “Of course. Or would you rather ride in on a
horse?”

Merle ran her eye over the mirror surface. It looked smooth and solid, not
yielding like her hand mirror. The memory made her briefly look over at Junipa. Whatever
she'd seen this morning, it had made a deep impression on her. Now she seemed to
be afraid to follow Arcimboldo's instructions. For a moment Merle was tempted to
tell the master everything and ask for understanding for Junipa to remain here and Merle
to go alone.

But then Junipa took the first step and stretched out her hand. Her
fingers broke through the mirror surface like the skin on a pan of boiled milk. She
quickly looked over her shoulder at Merle; then, with a strained smile, she stepped
inside the mirror. Her figure was still recognizable, but now it looked flat and somehow
unreal,
like a figure in a painting. She waved to
Merle.

“Brave girl,” murmured Arcimboldo with satisfaction.

Merle broke through the mirror surface with a single
step. She felt a cold tickling, like a gentle breeze at midnight, then she was on
the other side and looking around.

She had once heard of a mirror labyrinth that was supposed to have been in
a palazzo on the Campo Santa Maria Nova. She knew no one who had seen it with his own
eyes, but the pictures that the stories had conjured up in her mind bore no comparison
with what she now saw before her.

One thing was clear at first glance: The mirror world was a kingdom of
deceptions. It was the place under the double bottom of the kaleidoscope, the
robbers' cave in the
Tales from a Thousand and One
Nights,
the palace of the gods on Olympus. It was artificial, an illusion, a
dream dreamed only by those who believed in it. And yet at this moment it seemed as
substantial as Merle herself. Did the figures in a painting also think they were in a
real place? Prisoners who were not aware of their imprisonment?

Before them lay a room of mirrors: not like Arcimboldo's storeroom,
much more a structure that from top to bottom, from left to right, consisted of mirrors
and mirrors alone. Yet the first impression was deceptive. If you took a step forward,
you bumped up against an invisible glass wall, while there, where the end of the room
appeared to be, was nothing but emptiness, followed by other mirrors, invisible
connecting passageways, and fresh deceptions.

It took a moment for Merle to realize what was really
troubling about this place: The mirrors reflected only each other, not the two girls who
were standing in their middle. So it happened that they could walk straight up to a
mirror and bump against it without being warned by their own reflection. On all sides,
the mirrors reflected themselves to infinity, a world of silver and crystal.

Merle and Junipa made several attempts to move deeper into the labyrinth,
but again and again they bumped against glass.

“This is pointless,” Merle protested and stamped her foot in
anger. Mirror glass creaked under her foot without splintering.

“They're all around us,” Junipa whispered.

“The phantoms?”

Junipa nodded.

Merle looked around. “I can't see any.”

“They're afraid. My eyes scare them. They're avoiding
us.”

Merle turned around. There was a sort of door at the place where
they'd entered the mirror world. There she thought she could perceive a movement,
but perhaps that was only Arcimboldo, waiting for them in the real world.

Something whisked past her face, a pale flicker. Two arms, two legs, a
head. Close up, it no longer looked like a patch of fog but rather like the blur caused
by a drop of water in the eye.

Merle raised the glass ball, feeling a little foolish.
“Intorabiliuspeteris,” she cried, and immediately felt even more
foolish.

There was the sound of a soft sigh, then the phantom shot right at her.
The ball sucked him to its inside, which soon flickered and grew streaky, as if it were
filled with a white, oily fluid.

“It works!” Merle gasped.

Junipa nodded but made no attempt to use her own ball. “Now
they're terribly afraid.”

“You can really see them all around us?”

“Very clearly.”

It must have to do with Junipa's eyes, with the magic of the mirror
pieces. Now Merle also saw other blurs at the edge of her vision, but she couldn't
make out the phantoms as clearly as Junipa seemed to be able to.

“If they're afraid, that means that they're living
beings,” she said, thinking aloud.

“Yes,” Junipa said. “But it's as if they
weren't really here. As if they were only a part of themselves, like a shadow
that's separated from its owner.”

“Then perhaps it's a good thing if we get them out of here.
Perhaps they're prisoners here.”

“Do you think in the glass ball they aren't?”

Of course Junipa was right. But Merle wanted to get back into the real
world as fast as possible, away from this glassy labyrinth. Arcimboldo would only be
satisfied
when they'd caught all the phantoms. She was afraid
otherwise he'd send them right back into the mirror.

She no longer paid any attention to what Junipa was doing. Merle stretched
out her arm with the ball, waved it in different directions, and called the magic word
over and over: “Intorabiliuspeteris . . .
intorabiliuspeteris . . . intorabiliuspeteris!”

The hissing and whistling became louder and sharper, and at the same time
the ball filled with the swirling fog until it looked as if the glass were being steamed
up on the inside. Once, in the orphanage, one of the attendants had blown cigar smoke
into a wine glass, and the effect had been very similar: The layers of smoke had rotated
behind the glass as though there were something living inside trying to get out.

What sort of creatures were these that infested Arcimboldo's magic
mirrors like aphids in a vegetable garden? Merle would have loved to know more.

Junipa was grasping her ball so tightly in her fist that it suddenly
cracked and shattered in her hand. Tiny splinters of glass rained onto the mirror floor,
followed by dark drops of blood, as the sharp edges cut into Junipa's fingers.

“Junipa!” Merle stuffed her ball into her pocket, sprang to
Junipa's side, and anxiously examined her hand. “Oh,
Junipa . . .” She slipped out of her sweater and wrapped it around
her friend's forearm. That made visible the upper edge of the hand mirror, stuck
into her dress pocket.

Suddenly one of the phantoms whizzed in a narrow
spiral around her upper body and disappeared into the surface of the water mirror.

“Oh, no,” Junipa said tearfully, “that's all my
fault.”

Merle was more concerned about Junipa's well-being than about the
mirror. “I think we've caught all of them anyway,” she said, unable to
take her eyes from the blood on the floor. Her face was mirrored in the drops, as if the
blood had tiny eyes that were looking up at her. “Let's get out of
here.”

Junipa held her back. “Are you going to tell Arcimboldo one of them
went—”

Merle interrupted her. “No, he'd just take it away from
me.”

Stricken, Junipa nodded, and Merle reassuringly laid an arm around her
shoulders. “Don't give it another thought.”

She gently urged Junipa back to the door, a glittering rectangle not far
from them. Arms tightly wrapped around one another, they walked out of the mirror into
the storeroom.

“What happened?” asked Arcimboldo, when he saw the wrapping
around Junipa's hand. Immediately he unwrapped it, discovered the cuts, and ran to
the door. “Eft!” he bellowed out into the workroom. “Bring bandages.
Quickly!”

Merle also appraised the cuts. Happily, none of them
seemed to be really dangerous. Most of them weren't very deep, just red
scratches on which very thin clots were already forming.

Junipa pointed to the blood spots on Merle's wadded-up sweater.
“I'll wash that for you.”

“Eft can take care of that,” Arcimboldo interposed.
“Instead, tell me how this happened!”

Merle told in a few words what had occurred. Only, she kept to herself the
flight of the last phantom into her hand mirror. “I caught all the
phantoms,” she said, pulling the ball out of her pocket. The bright streaks in its
interior were now rotating hectically.

Arcimboldo grasped the ball and held it up to the light. What he saw
seemed to please him, for he nodded in satisfaction. “You did very well,” he
praised the two girls. Not a word about the broken ball.

“Now rest,” he advised them after Eft had treated the cuts.
Then he waved to Dario, Boro, and Tiziano, who'd been lurking at the storeroom
door. “You three take care of the rest.”

As Merle was leaving the workshop with Junipa, she turned once more to
Arcimboldo. “What happens to them now?” She pointed to the ball in the
master's hand.

“We throw them into the canal,” he replied with a shrug.
“Let them settle into the reflections on the water.”

Merle nodded, as if she'd expected nothing else, then led Junipa up
to their room.

The news spread around the workshop like wildfire. There was going to be
a festival! Tomorrow it would be thirty-six years to the day since the army hosts of the
Egyptian Empire were massed at the edges of the lagoon. Steamboats and galleys had
crossed the water and sunbarks were standing ready in the skies for the attack on the
helpless city. But the Flowing Queen had protected Venice, and since then this day had
been celebrated throughout the entire city with festivals of rejoicing. One of them
would be taking place very close by. Tiziano had heard about it that morning when he
went with Eft to the fish market, and he immediately told Dario, who told Boro and, a
little reluctantly, passed it on to Merle and Junipa.

“A festival in honor of the Flowing Queen! Right around the corner!
There'll be lanterns up everywhere and beer barrels tapped and wine corks
popping!”

“Something for you children too?” Arcimboldo, who'd been
listening, wore a sly smile as he spoke.

“We aren't children anymore!” flared Dario. Then, with a
scornful sideways glance at Junipa, he added, “At least most of us.”

Merle was about to leap to Junipa's defense, but it wasn't
necessary. “If it's an expression of adulthood,” Junipa said with
unwonted pertness, “to pick your nose at night, scratch your behind, and do lots
of other things, then you're of course
very
grown-up.
Right, Dario?”