Mirrors in the Deluge Read online

  This terrace was part of his front garden and it overlooked the beach and sea far below. One by one the ships bearing his possessions appeared on the horizon and docked at the jetty that extended out from the shore, servants and sailors scurried and scampered to unload the various cargoes and carry all the separate items up the steps carved in the side of the cliff and deposit them inside the house in the designated locations. While he rocked the hours away.

  Within a few weeks most of his furniture and other possessions had been transferred from his old home to his new mansion. But his collection of genies was still on its way. It was such an extensive collection that it needed a ship all to itself, and this particular vessel was making slow progress because the captain had been ordered to take extra care to avoid bad weather. The ship had already delayed its departure thanks to adverse meteorological forecasts. Winter was coming!

  The collection consisted of thousands of bottles and brass lamps and sealed jars in which a comprehensive variety of genies dwelled. There was at least one example of every possible kind of genie from all the cultures and mythologies in which they may be found. Most people may imagine they are only indigenous to deserts and oases, and the bazaars of Baghdad and Isfahan, but in fact they are universally distributed across the face of the world. They just happen to be very rare.

  The collector, who was named Eugene, waited and waited for this final ship to arrive, but it never came. It had sunk in a storm and settled on the seabed far below and all the bottles had escaped back to the surface through a crack in the hull. They drifted in a great mass wherever the wind and waves and currents wanted them to go, and gradually they separated from each other and became isolated from their companions by vast expanses of ocean. An illusion of freedom.

  The genies inside the bottles were generally genial and there was a good reason for this, namely that they now stood a better chance of winning true liberty for themselves than when they had formed Eugene’s collection. In the collection they had been stuck with no hope of release but they finally had a chance of being washed up on some random shore, found by a person who was strolling the beach, and let loose. For the truth was that each genie had only one wish to dispose of before winning its freedom.

  Genies generally grant three wishes. Eugene always used up two of them whenever he acquired a new addition, but never made a third wish, for he had no desire to let a genie escape him. He always wished for relatively modest things so that the world wouldn’t be disrupted too much, and little by little he increased his wealth and power. If one wishes for a small business transaction to be successful then not too many things need to be influenced in order for this to actually happen.

  But, if one wishes for the moon, the end result will be disaster. Too many of the forces that make life on Earth possible will have to change and all the careful balances of nature will be skewed. Not only will the wisher be crushed by the mass of the moon as it lands on him or her but all other living things will be seriously, and perhaps fatally, affected by the meeting of two enormous celestial bodies. Eugene was wise enough to be cautious. He was a slow and steady accumulator, a patient individual.

  Therefore the total amount of wishes in his entire collection divided by two-thirds was the number of tiny steps it had taken to increase the success of his life over a period of many years. Then the genies were retired into the collection with a single unused wish that he never planned to exploit and this was a most frustrating situation for them. They resented him for it but could do nothing to help themselves, and so they lurked in their bottles, lamps and jars, and washed themselves morosely in the flow of time.

  And now the collection was dispersed and there was hope again for them. Eugene, however, had hopes of his own that were in direct opposition to theirs. He decided to retrieve his collection genie by genie, and was willing to spend a lot of money in order to do so. He didn’t really make much of a physical effort but he employed others to search for the genies on land and sea, for he suspected that some had already been washed up on the shore while the others were still adrift on the deeps.

  So he spent most of his time on his rocking chair on the terrace in his garden and, while he waited for news about any genie that might be located, he indulged himself with luxurious food and drink. He nibbled chocolates and emptied his port decanter; then he emptied his starboard decanter too and moved onto gâteau. But he wasn’t a fat man. He had once wished for a fast metabolism. The weeks passed and none of his hired men reported any success in the difficult search.

  Then, one evening as he rocked the sunset to bed, the almost horizontal ray of the final flash of the top of the sinking sun struck something in the water and made it sparkle. Eugene was instantly on his feet. He hurried to the staircase hewn into the cliff and almost tumbled to his doom in his eagerness to reach the beach. The ink in my pen is about to run out so please excuse me while I search for a replacement... Yes, I still use a pen to write. I am absurdly old-fashioned.

  This replacement pen is the last one in my possession and it would be dreadful if it also ran out of ink before I had told the entire tale so I really should abandon these unnecessary digressions. Eugene waded into the sea and snatched up the bottle that had found its way to him. It was indeed one of his genie bottles and he carried it carefully back to his house – the first specimen in a new collection – and positioned it proudly in the room originally designed for the display of his accumulated genies.

  But it looked very forlorn there, on its own in a vast room, and over the next few days Eugene flirted with an idea that previously would have seemed unthinkable to him: namely, the uncorking of the solitary genie and the utilisation of the single remaining wish. Finally, he could resist the impulse no longer and he descended into that incongruously empty chamber, took hold of the bottle and released the genie, who poured out in the form of thick green smoke before congealing into his preferred anthropomorphic shape.

  “I want my final wish,” said Eugene.

  The genie bowed deeply and resumed hovering. “Of course. Make it and set me free: this is my greatest desire. But...”

  “But what?” frowned Eugene.

  “Permit me to make the small observation that had you been a woman instead of a man, you might have been named Eugenie rather than Eugene, and in a story about genies that would have been even more apt. But the author of this text is clearly incapable of achieving the optimum aesthetic resonance in his work. Too bad. Now please kindly state what you want to wish for.”

  “I wish for all the other genies in my lost collection to find their way here so that the entire set might be regained.”

  “Minus myself, of course, so not quite entire.”

  Eugene shrugged. “I am bitter about this fact but what can I do? I am willing to sacrifice you in order to be reunited with the others. Your absence will then glare like a missing tooth in a mouth but, at the moment, I am facing a collection that is a single tooth in a wasteland of gum tissue. I must do what is best for me, even if it is not an ideal solution.”

  “Nonetheless, this wish is a very big wish.”

  “Indeed. The largest I have ever made.”

  “Therefore the consequences will be considerable and very difficult to calculate beforehand. It is only right to point this out.”

  Eugene sighed. “Grant my wish anyway.”

  The genie bowed again and waved his arms. “It is done,” he announced with an enigmatic smile. “Farewell.” And he drifted through the wall and vanished. Eugene exhaled, steadied his nerves, went back out onto the terrace and planted himself in his rocking chair, gazing out to sea. Against his better judgement he was hoping that the wish would work instantly and that a flotilla of bottles and jars would already be in the process of getting stranded on the sands below the dwelling.

  But manipulation of the forces of the universe rarely produces immediate results and, in this case, the execution of the wish took time. The currents of all the oceans had to change, the winds too, and the dis
ruption this caused to the climate and therefore civilisation was considerable. The global economy suffered greatly. But, very gradually, one by one, the bottles and lamps and jars returned to him and he took them to the special room and his collection grew to more than three-quarters of what it once had been.

  These genies had been drifting hither and thither in all the seas of the world for a long time, remaining intact through storms and whirlpools, but suddenly they all found themselves being nudged by wavelets towards the same destination, which was the beach beneath Eugene’s house. They arrived with a certain regularity and were snatched up – but then they stopped coming. He waited with an impatience even greater than before and he even cursed the genie who had granted this wish for a trickster.

  “Why the delay?” he growled to himself, pacing the floor of the room where his collection was assembled. “The economy has crashed and I am almost ruined and to reclaim the missing genies is the only thing that can ever console me. I don’t understand why they don’t all return to me!”

  A short time later they found him.

  But Eugene had forgotten one crucial fact. Before he had made his wish, some of the genies had already found freedom. Some of the bottles, lamps and jars had smashed in collisions with ships or floating debris, or on rocks, or even against each other. The contents were released and those genies went home to the oases, lagoons and volcanoes they originally came from. Others were washed up on other shores and found by ordinary people walking on the beach who uncorked them out of curiosity and then...

  Well, the genies had appeared and granted a single wish to those fortunate individuals, discharging their obligation to remain in our dimension. They had vanished into another realm, a parallel universe, a place where free genies enjoy themselves without the burden of having to grant wishes. These genies have retired from the stresses and tribulations of our cosmos. The last thing they want is to return to our reality, and in fact they never do, but Eugene had forced them to do exactly that.

  So they came to him through the four walls of that room in which he stood, converging on him with great velocity and determination, and they were no longer very genial at all, he had almost no time to even begin to understand what was happening before it had already happened. They took an ungenial revenge. It might be supposed that they would imprison him in a bottle, lamp or jar, so that he might know how it feels; or even transform him into a sentient version of one of those objects…

  But this solution seemed too simple to them, too unimaginative, and what they actually did was turn him into a writing implement: a pen with his soul as the ink inside it. One of those pens that have a tendency to get lost, to fall down the side of a sofa or roll under a chair and remain lost for years until they are suddenly needed as a replacement for one that has run out. I am glad that the one I am using still appears to have enough ink remaining for me to finish this story, in the most...

  Najort Esroh

  Before the full-sized wooden horse was built, Odysseus made a model to demonstrate the viability of the design to his comrades. Usually not much is said about this in the epics but it was a nicely done figure and long after the sack of Troy it somehow found its way into an antique shop in a faded seaside resort on the south coast of England. That’s where I discovered it, on a shelf cluttered with cobwebbed bottles.

  “How much for the toy horse?” I asked the darkness.

  No reply. So I repeated the question.

  But there was nothing lurking in the shadows other than more shadows and it seemed that the shop had no keeper. Maybe he had slipped out for a minute on an errand; or perhaps he had died behind the counter, deep in a neglected gloom so thick it could be spread on toast or used to creosote a fence. I picked up the horse and examined it more carefully. It was in a fair condition despite the passing of three millennia.

  “I’m not for sale,” it suddenly said.

  As you may imagine, I was surprised by this outburst.

  “You are alive?” I wondered.

  “No, no, not at all. I’m an automaton.”

  And then it explained who it was and how it came to be in this place, a remarkable tale in itself, and I shared the joy and terror of its experiences. Of being carried back to Greece as a souvenir by a sailor, of ending up in the clutches of a Roman, then a Hun, then a Crusader, and so on passing from hand to hand down the centuries, crisscrossing the continent, finding a home in sundry bazaars, museums and taverns.

  The horse paused to clear its throat.

  “But I wasn’t automated until 1571 and that was in Germany when my owner was a clockmaker of incredible skill. My voicebox is powered by a spring kept permanently wound tight thanks to the eternal fluctuations of barometric pressure. Before that time I was utterly mute and non-sentient, just a jumble of wooden slats and nails, nothing more. Jakob Kremkraker was the name of my liberator, my teacher.”

  “If this is true, then how do you remember all the things that happened to you before that year?” I demanded.

  “Because the clockmaker included a memory into my mechanism that was already primed with my personal history. He was a very considerate man as well as an engineering genius.”

  “Will I find him mentioned in history books?”

  “Unlikely. He kept his marvellous secrets to himself. He experimented with perpetual motion, and heavier-than-air flight but chiefly he preferred to enjoy a mild life among his timepieces. Herr Kremkraker has certainly remained obscure since then. I have no reason to lie to you; I’m merely a talking model horse, nothing more. I would visit his grave if I was sure he had one and if I knew where it might be.”

  “And if you could walk,” I added.

  “Oh, I can trot along if I must,” the horse said. “But the effort depletes the tension in my spring faster than it can be wound up again, so I require frequent rests when I do move. Speech, on the other hand, is less wasteful of energy. I can talk to you all afternoon.”

  “On the other hand? On the other hoof, you mean!”

  He failed to find my quip amusing.

  “Would you like me to talk to you all afternoon?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you intend to say?”

  “That’s up to you. Ask a question.”

  “Any question at all?”

  He nodded and rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Tell me, what is the strangest thing you’ve ever observed during your three thousand years of experience?”

  He grinned at this and I saw that his tiny wooden teeth were varnished but rotten. They must have been chemically treated after starting to decay and not before. I therefore assumed that Herr Kremkraker had inherited a poor specimen, a battered ornament full of nothing but ancient air and he had reconstructed the model’s exterior as well as inserting clockwork into the hollow belly, but the teeth were too far gone.

  “It happened in the city of Troy…”

  “Shortly after you were made?” I interrupted.

  He swivelled his head to one side.

  “Not that Troy but another. I’ll try to explain more carefully. After the Greeks invaded and sacked the city the survivors fled in many directions. The most illustrious went west. One of them, Aeneas, founded Rome; and Brutus was responsible for Tours; Priam himself became the first ruler of the Franks; and the son of Memnon, who called himself Thor, established several of the Scandinavian kingdoms.”

  “But is any of that real history?” I quibbled.

  The horse ignored my objection. “Some of these refugees gave to their new homes the name of the old, so from the destruction of one Troy came others. I visited a few and lived in one.”

  “Very well. Tell me about this new Troy.”

  “I ended up there after serving time as a paperweight on the desk of a captain’s cabin; he was an explorer. When he retired, he cleared out all his possessions and relocated them into his new house. I was positioned on a windowsill overlooking the main square of the town. Although referred to as a city in official rec
ords, it was a fairly small settlement really. I had an excellent view of all the significant streets.”

  “Were the times troubled?”

  “All times are that,” he replied with a sigh.

  “Wars? Plague? Famine?”

  “Not quite. Not that time. It was mutiny.”

  “The poor of the town rebelling against the rich? Agitation because of unfair taxation? Was that the case?”

  “No, the horses, that’s who!”

  “A mutiny among the horses of New Troy?”

  “Yes, yes, and why not?”

  I nodded sombrely. Horses are often used as slaves, treated very badly by their owners, underfed and abused, worked to death, and this has been true for thousands of years, ever since they were domesticated by the first man who had the idea of leaping onto the back of one and shouting, “Gee up!” or the equivalent of that in the language he spoke. It is not so surprising that horses should revolt.

  The teller of the tale fell silent.

  “Did they break down the doors of their cramped stables and run amok in the narrow streets?” I prompted him.

  The toy horse blinked rapidly, as if awakening from a thick and sticky dream, and replied, “No, they were cleverer than that. They had recently heard a story about men who constructed a wooden horse in order to get into a city and they saw no reason why they shouldn’t try something very similar but opposite in order to get out of theirs. This story is overfamiliar to your kind but quite new to the equine race.”

  “I understand perfectly,” I said.

  “They built an artificial man, a wooden giant.”

  “And they hid inside it?”