"The novel is about life -- represents life... It is... the realization of an idea. But an idea cannot be put into one sentence." (page 30)
-- Novalis
“Magia, or magic, infuses the Blue Flowers, carried by the Blue Rider,” said Doktor Doktor Bombastus Paracelsus to Huohu the Cathayan firefox.
The two have retired to the parlor of Villa Undine, where the good doktor doktor had lit a fire in the kamin against the cold Baltic summer evening. The piano on the other side of the room was newly vacated. The timbre of Clara Schumann’s last note still hung in the air, dreamily reverberating.
“They say he rides over water and land, sometimes to the Neverland, where he is a great favourite of the Lost Boys and the meer-maids. They say he carries the Blue Flowers for them, the meer-maids who love the earthly blooms above all other blossoms of the air, earth, or water. The Blue Flowers do not wilt or dissolve in the salt water, but will take root in the sandy bottom, among the corals and the unseeing sightless pale fish of the deep, and the meer-maids grow them in the gardens below.”
“Doktor Doktor, have the meer-maids the Edelstone?” Huohu asked directly and to the point, “If so, how shall we get it from them?”
Without answering him, Paracelsus asked of the firefox instead, “Tell me about Wilhelmina’s mother, Tang Lili, please.”
“Her voice is still like silver bells. And her clouded leopard, Yunbao, does not leave her side, except when she came with us, Wilhelmina and me, to the Tianshan Mountains to search for the snow lotus that only blooms at the top. The Chang’an doctors had said to try it, so Yunbao, Wilhelmina, and I went to the west icy mountains in the sky, Tianshan, to pick it.”
“How did it go?” asked the doktor doktor.
“Hard to say. Didn’t hurt. Hard to say it helped, much. It was very beautiful, the snow lotus. Yunbao carried it all the way back to Chang’an in her maw. When she saw Tang Lili, she climbed up to her side in the chair she was leaning back in, and delicately dropped it on her breast. Tang Lili took the snow lotus to her face, inhaled from its depth as the doctors had instructed. But I’m not sure the doctors who prescribed it ever really thought we’d be able to do it, to get it from the heights of Tianshan. But we did, and she tried. Wilhelmina was frantic, and her father, too. He was out in the courtyard with his sword, wanting to hack at something, anything, but too fair to wrong an innocent tree or one of the gigantic artistic boulders dotting the ponded compound. They had moved back to Jiangnan, because Tang Lili missed her old water town. The sandstorms every winter in northern Chang’an had filled her face and everyone else’s with yellow sand and dust, and she wanted to go back to where the banana leaves grew tall in the soft southern rain.”
“How did you and Wilhelmina come to look for the Edelstone?”
“Since Li Bai went westward toward Rom five years ago, Wilhelmina had quizzed emissaries and merchants of all kinds who enter Chang’an from the westward Silk Road. Here and there, bits and pieces, she began to hear of the Edelstone and its powers. Desperation, hoping against hope, wanting to do something, anything, the harder the better, set her on this road. Along the way, we gleaned more at each stop. Through the desert places we’ve come. Then up the riverways. Until here, at the edge of the sea. And she’s gone beyond and onto it. She will seek it. Because she cannot say to herself, ‘I have not done everything I can.’”