Porcelain Princess (15 page)

‘
You
saw the Illuminator’s room, when you looked out of the window?’ the
Princess asked Carey as she led the way up the stairs.

‘
Yes;
with what looks like a large telescope or something?’

‘
It’s
a set of lenses, but not a telescope. It’s more like, I suppose, a
camera obscura; you’ve heard of a camera obscura
before?’

‘
Isn’t it a darkened room, where the lenses can project images
from outside against its walls?’

‘
That’s right; only in this case, the room doesn’t have to be
darkened, as it isn’t light but other energy rays that the lenses
are collecting together and projecting.’

‘
Not
light?’ Carey said breathlessly, the steps running up much higher
and for longer than she had originally supposed. ‘Is that
possible?’

The Princess
chuckled.

‘
Well, obviously yes, Carey; how would the Illuminator create
his illustrations otherwise?’

At last, they
reached the top of the stairs, coming out into the very centre of
what Carey had taken to be a ball of glass when she had viewed it
from below. The walls were indeed mainly of glass, with only a
wrought iron frame holding the variously shaped panes together.
Between these glass walls and the steps there ran a gallery, again
of finely wrought and ingeniously patterned iron. The light from
the windows illuminated all manner of sketches and watercolours
placed around the gallery on easels and slim plinths.

‘
These aren’t illustrations but just ideas the Illuminator’s
working on,’ the Princess explained, seeing Carey’s interest in the
roughly yet expertly rendered pictures.

Carey recognised
the drawing and paintings as work in progress, being familiar with
the use of colour swatches and experimental draft outlines when she
was designing her posters. Here, too, were sticks of charcoal,
pencil stubs, paint blocks, squeezed tubes and bottles of diluting
and cleaning oils.

She stared
curiously at the various images the Illuminator was bringing
together on his canvases and boards and paper. There were deft
executions of men toiling, of industry, of whole landscapes being
changed. The Elements – Air, Fire, Water, Earth – were portrayed in
god-like magnificence, as if the story being told were one of the
ancient myths.

There was
something about the pictures that seemed familiar to Carey, almost
as if they were trying to remind her of a well-known story, yet she
couldn’t quite work out which one it could be. Although not as
brilliantly coloured or detailed as the Illuminator’s final
illustrations, these sketches still hummed with a vibrancy and life
Carey could never hope to capture in her posters.

‘
I’d
always told myself he must have some secret ingredient,’ Carey
admitted, scrutinising the equipment surrounding the canvases and
finding to her dismay that there was nothing out of the ordinary
amongst the paints. ‘But all I can see here are things I’ve bought
myself.’

‘
Ah,
but for his
final
illustrations, he of course doesn’t use
paint!’ the Princess replied, looking back as she made her way
towards two great doors on the other side of the
gallery.

‘
No
paints?’

Looking up,
Carey followed the Princess as she crossed the gallery. The doors
she was heading for were massive, of both thick oak and iron, and
heavily adorned with scenes of beaten and embossed
copper

‘
The
colours flow from his fingertips!’

‘
No!
How can he possibly do that?’

‘
Use
your imagination, Carey!’ Having tried to open the doors and
finding them solidly unmoving, the Princess stepped back with a
disappointed frown. ‘Ah, sorry Carey; I had hoped the doors would
be open. But it seems he doesn’t want to be disturbed.’

‘
But…can’t you knock?’ Carey was dismayed. ‘Can’t you just
open the doors anyway, ask him if I could please just see him for a
moment? I’ve travelled so far! And for so long!’

She looked up at
the doors, massive and impregnable. Just beyond them, just a few
steps away now, was the Illuminator, the man she’d been searching
for all this time.

‘
Carey, please try and understand.’ The Princess placed a
comforting hand on Carey’s shoulder. ‘Even I rarely get to see the
Illuminator; his work is important, difficult, and he doesn’t like
to be disturbed when he’s working on anything. As for opening the
doors, well, they can only be opened by a code that even I’m not
supposed to know!’

Carey stared
forlornly at the doors, wondering what this secret code could be.
If only she knew, she’d use it, bursting in on the Illuminator and
insisting he helped her friends no matter how busy he was and no
matter how upset he’d be at being disturbed.

But the doors
were like the forbidding entrance to a fortress, wrought of thick
iron, the trunks of great trees. Even the beaten copper panels, she
recognised now, emanated a sense of immense power and strength; for
they told the familiar tale of
The Sea Empress
.

*

The
Sea Empress

The vast armies
of the great Empress Atlantopatris were feared wherever they went,
the thunder of their marching alone enough to make fortresses and
walled cities quake and fall in submission. The land she ruled over
soon stretched for thousands of miles, taking in forests,
mountains, endless grass plains, and great lakes, such that her
lands came to be known as The Empire of The Earth.

She had
conquered and brought together so many other empires that The
Empire of The Earth almost completely surrounded a huge sea, upon
which the Empress’s trading ships plied back a forth between
increasingly prosperous ports. Yet here, the Empress realised, was
a weakness to her empire, for the sea was not really hers to
control.

Of course, her
magnificent navies, just like her invincible armies, had carried
all before them, relentlessly obliterating anyone foolish enough to
try and oppose them. Yet the sea itself remained unconquered, for
it could smash apart a whole naval fleet in little more than an
evening of storms. Her trading fleets often fared even worse, their
precious cargoes of uncountable gems, heady perfumes and rich silks
decorating nothing but the sea bottom rather than the Empress’s
lords and ladies.

‘
I
must tame this last great foe!’ the Empress fumed.

‘
Build me a ship,’ she ordered, ‘a ship impervious to her
highest waves, her sudden storms, her sharp and hidden rocks. Build
it so large that the waves beat uselessly against it, as if it were
an island that refuses to succumb to the worst that she can throw
against it. Build it with our hardest wood, then plate its hull
with our most perfectly formed iron, so that there is no weakness
her rocks can probe for. Call her
The Sea Empress
, for,
through her, I will rule over an Empire of The Sea!’

And so the
incredible resources of The Empire of The Earth were called upon to
build this magnificent ship. Whole forests were cut down and, in
innumerable sawmills across the empire, transformed into countless
beams and planks. Iron was mined, along with the coal that would
smelt it, and worked into girders and plates. Canvas was prepared
in sheets encompassing entire fields. Huge caravans of camels and
horses and carts transported all this from each and every side of
the empire to Atlantopatris’s capital. The Empress’s fleets were
also used in the transportation of these materials, of course, but
as if knowing of and fearing the intent of men and their ruler, the
sea took a particularly heavy toll of these ships.

Even the
shipyard in which the great vessel was being slowly put together
had had to be specially constructed. A whole bay had been dammed,
then the waters pumped away, creating the dry dock in which the
carpenters, ironsmiths, and shipbuilders could safely
work.

When, at last,
The Sea Empress
was complete, the dam was destroyed by
setting fire to its props; and the Sea rushed into the bay once
more, wondering what she would find there.

The Sea herself
gasped at the magnificence of
The Sea Empress
.

As the Empress
had commanded,
The Sea Empress
wasn’t so much a ship but a
floating island. It was a city of the sea, with buildings of stone
and marble, with roads and streets for carts and horses, with
markets and places of entertainment, including a coliseum where her
citizens would sit enthralled watching chariot races and mock
battles. It even had its own harbour and dock, for
The Sea
Empress
was never intended to go ashore but, rather, to let
relatively smaller ships move between her and the land.

As
The Sea
Empress
left the shelter of the bay, the Sea laughed with glee;
‘
Now
we’ll see just how powerful this arrogant empress
is!’

The Sea shrugged
her great blue cloak, with its deeper shades of green, its
decorative sprays of white. She whipped it up into the air, causing
a rippling of wind to become a gust and the gust to become a storm.
She threw up her spray, as high as it would go, so that when it
fell back to earth it had become a hard, torrential
rain.

The Sea beat
relentlessly against
The Sea Empress
, seeking to smash its
side with her iron-hard blows, to send it tossing and turning on
her highest waves, to send it heading uncontrollably towards her
sharp and hidden rocks.

The Empress
Atlantopatris was on board, of course. She was in her opulent
palace, with its vast marbled halls, its courtyards of vines and
fountains, entertaining foreign dignitaries with dancing and
feasts, a demonstration of how her power had increased beyond all
measure with the building of
The Sea Empress
. Secretly,
every dignitary aboard that day wanted the remorseless attack of
the Sea to prevail, even if it resulted in their own deaths; for
otherwise, who could resist the Empress and her iron-clad
ship?

Yet no dancer
was forced to make a faulty step. Not even the slightest drop of
wine was spilt. For
The Sea Empress
sailed on as smoothly as
if the Sea were at her calmest.

The only ones to
shake and quake and shiver and feel sick to their very souls were
the assembled dignitaries. For they had seen
The Sea
Empress
’s unbreachable fortifications, that even the greatest
fleets would uselessly smash themselves against. They had seen its
army of thousands of men, a thousand horses, and hundreds of
elephants. If the Sea herself couldn’t make this vast war machine
tremble, then what chance their empires? That very night, as the
Sea herself tired of the fruitlessness of her rage, they each began
the process of capitulation and amalgamation into The Empire of The
Earth and The Sea.

‘
How
did these weak, puny creatures manage this?’ the Sea seethed as she
forfeited her great harvests; the shoals that the men hauled in in
their nets, the lobsters they raised in their pots, the whales they
harpooned and quickly transformed into oil for their lamps and
perfumes.

‘
Hah,
working together through me, these weak, puny creatures have turned
your own power against you!’ the Empress Atlantopatris triumphantly
answered, proudly watching the great windmills that turned the
immense paddlewheels that churned the sea. ‘No force on earth can
stop us now!’

Sailing beyond
the pillars that hold up the sky,
The Sea Empress
conquered
ever more land for the empire, controlled more and more of the sea.
Eventually, with no more land to overcome, no more seas to master,
she headed for home.

After combating
the ferocious ocean that lay beyond the pillars, the sea around
their homeland seemed calm, clear, and reassuringly familiar. After
all, for hundreds of years they had recorded and mapped the
currents, depths and rocks around these islands, and so they knew
of the idiosyncrasies and dangers of these waters surprisingly
well. Everyone aboard
The Sea Empress
laughed at the
primitive fears they had once held about these placid
seas.

Submitting to
the power of
The Sea Empress
, the blue sea turned white with
fear, then blushed pink and red with shame.

‘
It’s
coral!’ someone cried out, recognising the colours and the shapes
of the fragile pieces left floating on the waves. ‘We’ve smashed
through a coral reef!’

‘
Nonsense, we have our maps,’ everyone laughed at his alarm.
‘The rocks and the coral reef are all far too deep for even our
hull to touch!’

But unlike
rocks, whose positions rarely change, coral is a living organism,
the home and creation of countless, incredibly small creatures. And
so the reef had grown in size since it had been mapped all those
years ago.

‘
Besides, our great iron plates can’t be pierced or
gashed!’

But the coral
hadn’t tried to either pierce or gash the great iron plates.
Instead, turning
The Sea Empress
’s own weight and momentum
against it, the coral had merely buckled the plates.

And the Sea,
seeing a small gap appear where the great plates had been joined
together, gleefully poured in. She rushed into the holds of the
great vessel, where its many captured treasures had been stored.
She flooded into the cellars of the great houses, where wines from
around the world were shelved. She ran down the city streets,
transforming them first into streams then into great
rivers.