Porcelain Princess Read online

‘Well, take a look at the windows themselves; then tell me what you see there.’

  Carey looked up towards the windows, taking in the incredible beauty of the stained glass images, the bright yet surprisingly dark reds, greens, blues and yellows, the sparkling, misty silver.

  And then it struck her what the Princess wanted her to see; or, rather, not see.

  ‘There’s no magenta in the windows themselves; not even any purples or pinks. But doesn’t that just mean that the colours are blending in the air to create the magenta?’

  ‘Yes; and no. For, as our finest alchemists and natural philosophers can verify, magenta is a colour that shouldn’t exist.’

  ‘Shouldn’t exist?’ Carey was confused. ‘But it’s there; we can see it.’

  Turning back to face the way they had originally been heading, the Princess started walking once more.

  ‘Yes, yet according to those who know of spectrums and rays of light, magenta exists in space already occupied by other types of rays; rays that can transfer messages over great distances, or even damage our bodies.’

  ‘The colour magenta can harm us?’ Carey said, horrified, as she walked alongside the Princess.

  ‘No, no, thankfully not,’ the Princess chuckled. ‘I simply used it as an example of how things we take for granted aren’t always what they seem. Take yourself for instance Carey; how old are you?’

  They were moving through the rooms much quicker than they were walking, as if the carpet beneath their feet were also swiftly moving, taking them along at great speed through hallways and larger, multi-mirrored areas.

  ‘Oh, well, I…I’ve never really thought of it before,’ Carey replied, a little surprised that she couldn’t give a more definite answer. ‘I’ve been so busy travelling, trying to find your kingdom or arranging shows, it never seemed important to me.’

  It was true, she suddenly realised; she had never given her age much if any thought. There had always seemed to be so many more important things to think about.

  ‘Ah yes; I take it you’ve been searching for a very long time. For how long, do you think? Months? Years?’

  Just as the carpets in the rooms seemed to be carrying them smoothly along, whenever they reached and stepped onto one of the long, gracefully curving staircases, these too carried them upwards at dizzying speed.

  ‘Oh years and years, I think,’ Carey answered the Princess doubtfully. She couldn’t really remember how long it had been. ‘Well, no – I suppose it must just seem like years and years, of course. I stopped counting long ago; so long ago in fact, I can’t even remember when I stopped counting!’

  ‘Well, to look at you,’ the Princess said, looking Carey up and down, ‘I’d say you were around fourteen or sixteen. And me? Even though I look very much the same age as you, I suppose you have some idea of my age, yes?’

  ‘Oh, almost a hundred years at least, maybe,’ Carey said casually before realising it might sound like an insult to the Princess. ‘Oh, er, sorry! Not that you look anything like it, of course!’

  The Princess laughed good naturedly.

  ‘Like you, I gave up counting long ago!’

   

   

  *

   

   

  Chapter 20

   

   ‘From here, you can see where the Illuminator works,’ the Princess declared proudly, casually waving a hand towards the incredibly tall windows running the entire length of a corridor they had entered at the top of a long, graciously rising flight of stairs.

  Their walking now was unhurried and back to normal, as neither the carpet nor the floor moved in this particular room. So Carey excitedly skipped over towards one of the windows, leaning closely against the glass and peering up towards the slim, high tower she could see jutting out from the wall at the farthest end of the corridor.

  At its top, the towered flared out into what could have been a ball of glass, it had so many windows. On one side, however, this ball extended out into yet another but stubbier tower, this one completely windowless and topped with a gloriously white dome. The dome was split down its centre, with what looked like a gigantic telescope protruding from it.

  Behind her, Carey heard an odd clanking, a shiver of metal over metal.

  Turning, she found herself surrounded by the strangest and smallest knights she had ever seen, every one of which had a long, sharp spear pointed directly at her.

  ‘Captain!’ the Princess barked from slightly higher up the corridor.

  As Carey had peered out of the window, the Princess had continued to walk along the hallway, and now – hearing the same metallic clinks Carey had heard – she had turned back to see what was going on. In response to her call, one of the armoured soldiers spun around on his heels, giving her a smart salute. There wasn’t really anything to differentiate him from his men for, just like them, he was an amalgam of wood, leather and iron plates. He was hardly much taller than Peregun, and moved just as jerkily.

  ‘She’s with me, Captain,’ the Princess calmly explained.

  The armoured men immediately stepped back away from Carey, smartly raising their spears in the same, easy movement and bringing them tightly up against their sides.

  ‘You can stand your men down; and thank you for your and their alertness.’

  The men stepped farther back, spinning sharply on their feet. Then each one headed towards an alcove in the wall. As soon as one of them reached an alcove, his constituent parts moved and flowed over each other until he had blended into the wall, a flame and oil reservoir smoothly slipping out from within his back to become an innocent looking wall lamp.

  ‘Sorry, Carey,’ the Princess apologised. ‘They’re here to protect the Illuminator’s privacy; because you’d dropped back behind me, they took you as a threat.’

  At the farthest end of the corridor, they turned into the doorway that lead into the base of the Illuminator’s tower. Spiral stairs ran up through the tower’s interior, much as steps run up the inside of a lighthouse, although these were a beautifully elaborate mix of wrought iron and stone.

  ‘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 th
e 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.

   

   

  *

   

   

  Chapter 21

   

  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 and 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 thou
sand 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.