Papa is generous with praise for my efforts, and I drink it in like a thirsty plant.
I am careful, always, to touch nothing without permission, but Papa takes pleasure in showing me some of the wondrous apparatuses that aid him in his working. He allows me to peer through the mighty telescope on the balcony that lets him see great distances across the isle, and into, he tells me, the very heavens themselves when the skies are benighted. It seems to me a very work of divinity, but Papa assures me that it is all a matter of lenses and mathematics.
To be sure, I cannot fathom it.
A great deal of Papa’s art involves charting the heavens. There is the brass astrolabe with its moving plates that calculates time and distance and oh, ever so much! There is its near cousin the cosmolabe that Papa uses to calculate the angles between heavenly bodies and cast his charts. Many of Papa’s calculations regarding the planets, he records in tables he calls ephemerides. There are pages and pages of these tables, so that he can determine the position of the planets and the aspects of the stars on any given date and time.
I confess, my mind fair boggles at the complexity of the work that Papa’s art requires.
And yet I feel the power of it in my bones. When I paint upon the walls of Papa’s sanctum, it seems as though I am at the very center of existence, with the spheres of heaven rotating far above and all around me while the images I render draw down the influences of the seven governors and the crystalline sphere of fixed stars in the firmament beyond them; and beyond that, the Lord God Himself in the Empyrean where nine orders of angels sing His praises. Hours pass without my notice while I am engaged in the process of painting, until I realize my arms are aching from being raised so long and my fingers have become stiff and crabbed.
Papa says that I am filled with the Spiritus Mundi when I paint, the mystical energy that suffuses the whole of creation.
I believe it is true.
Always, I paint at his bidding; and I am content to do so, humbled by the realization that the calculations Papa employs are so very far beyond my ken.
As the weeks pass, additional figures slowly take place alongside the glowering, crimson-eyed form of the first face of Aries. The first face of Virgo is a young girl holding a curious red globe of fruit called a pomegranate. Papa is in good humor and tells me a tale from the myths of the ancient Greeks about a maiden named Persephone who was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, who sought to make her his bride. After wandering the earth in despair, her mother Demeter learned of her abduction and begged Zeus, the king of the gods, to rescue her and restore her, but because Persephone ate six seeds of a pomegranate fruit, she was bound to spend six months of every year in the underworld with Hades.
It seems to me that the gods are cruel to women who eat fruit, but that is a thought I keep to myself.
Thinking to use my own face as a model for Virgo, I seek to steal a glimpse of it in the round mirror which Papa obtained from the hoard of pirates’ treasure that now hangs upon one wall. It is greatly altered as Papa has etched a series of concentric circles of arcane names and symbols upon its bright surface, but there is room enough between them that I can make out my own features.
Papa rebukes me sharply for it. “Miranda! Leave it be.”
Stung, I turn away from the mirror. “I was but looking! I did not touch it, Papa, I promise.”
“’Tis dangerous merely to look.” Finding a length of ragged cloth, he drapes it over the mirror. “But ’tis not your fault,” he adds in a gentler tone. “Of course a young woman such as yourself would be hard-pressed to resist the lure of vanity, and I did not think to forbid you until this moment.”
Across the chamber, the salamander in its nest of fire opens its jewel-red eyes to regard me. In all this time, it has not spoken once, and I have begun to think I imagined it years ago.
Still, there is something unnerving in its stare.