The Edelstone (page 75)
Sitting on the rock in the sea, waiting for Emil to come back, not knowing what happened on the wedding ship, Wilhelmina Wang recalled an earlier time she had sat on a stone table. It was when she was still a very young child, hardly out of toddlerhood, and she had been planting dawn redwood saplings with her mother in a birch, pine, and hazel coastal forest. Her mother had been telling her the story of the seven swordsmen who had come down mount Tianshan, and she had sat on a stone stable held up on stone legs her mother had called a dolmen.
A dolmen is a megalithic tomb, made before the wheel. It is flat on top, and looks like a table. A sacrificial table.
And she sat on one now, in the middle of the surf. For the sealine can change, and what was once on land, belong again to water.
Continuing Wilhelmina’s strand from page 59
She thought of her mother’s rhododendrons at home, and of her father’s peonies as well. She thought of the banana leaves and bamboo that belonged to her great-great-grandmother Dowager Li in her Jiangnan garden of surpassing beauty.
There was a light, a soft glow from under the waters. Out of it, still glowing the soft fluorescence of green and blue, rose just above the waves the head and bust of a woman. There were lines on her beautiful, proud face, and the sea-green of her hair was a little faded to grey. From her coral crown to the shells decorating her tail, a soft eerie blue light came from within. But where it glowed brightest was in her hand: a stone, large and iridescent like a perfectly formed pearl, but red and orange in colour like the smoldered fire of an extinguished star. So it was, the Edelstone was a long faded sun, captured in resin, the amber of all ambers.
The meer-woman’s mouth opened, she looked to be speaking, but no voice came out. Where her tongue should be, was only a stump. The scar was old and healed, but the pain and the shock are eternal. Wilhelmina looked with horror at her injury, incongruous with her beautiful face. The sorrow in the line between her eyes was worn in, the lines between her nose and lips fine but defined. She had suffered, that was clear, and whatever it had been, her erstwhile beauty had not been able to protect her.
The waves began to roar and toss into ever higher folds behind and around the meer-woman, but she remained still in the midst of the fomenting dark waters. Even had she been able to speak, Wilhelmina could not have heard her in the angry crash of the walls of water against the sacrificing rock, spraying cold plumes high into the dark sky.
Many treasures come out of the seafloor: corals, pearls, delicacies for the table, treasures sunken by pirates and their victims of yore. Among them perhaps most beautiful are the ambers, those memories of before, captured in a tree’s blood, fashioned by an artisan, strung around the neck or tender wrist of a woman or her daughter. Or daughter-to-be.
The Edelstone, so dearly sought, so bloodily fought over, so cursed and desired, was here being offered, so simply, from Undine to Wilhelmina.
Sometimes a particularly precious piece of amber may capture an ant, a wasp, or a bee. The Edelstone preserved a star.
Seven swordsmen from the Tianshan mountains. Tian 天 is sky, shan 山 is mountain. Seven Cathayan dawn redwoods planted by the Baltic Sea. Seven (known) stars in Ursa Major, known in Cathayan as Beidou seven stars 北斗七星.
See the first lines of page 73 the moment Emil plunged the stone-knife into the Danish prince’s heart:
望北斗星辰
wàng běidǒu xīngchén
Look to the Beidou sky of stars
Both the Greeks who called these seven stars Ursa Major and the Cathayans who called them Beidou navigated much by the celestial seas, and had their own starmaps and ways. And some of the oldest, oldest men and women knew, there had been an eighth star, that had been extinguished once upon a time. Some old great-great-grandma or -grandpa may even say, that it was sacrificed.