and glass.
For thousands of years you trapped us imperfectly, and each of your jails gave us our little freedoms.
We glowered from the dusk of black stone. When we were cast in bronze, we made ourselves relish the burnish that you gave our skins, knowing it disguised us. We rejoiced in rust, and as our bodies passed behind its imperfection we warped luxuriantly. Verdigris and discolourations, and scratches and pockmarks gave us licence, and though we were constrained, we could also play.
Silver was the worst. Jewellery we could bear. The little multiples of us you made in the facets of your gems, the strange elongated bodies we became in your rings were fleeting, and so strange to you, and so unnoticed that we had the space to play. But in the silver and specula you caught us.
A few of us who suffered the ignominy of whole walls of silver, in the high homes. The
What you cannot know is how it
For we who are not, or were not, our bodies: we, for whom flesh is, or was, only one possible clothing.
We might fly or invert ourselves through the spines of grass, we might push ourselves into other ways of being, we might be to water as water is to air, we might do anything, until you looked at yourselves. It is a pain you cannot imagine—very literally, in the most precise way, you cannot know how it is to feel yourself shoved with a mighty and brutal cosmic hand into bloody muscle. The agony of our constrained thoughts, shoehorned into those skulls you carry, stringy tendons tethering our limbs. The excruciation.
Shackled in your meat vulgarity.
We cursed the slaves that lifted your mirrors, in those early days, cursed them and envied them their freedom. Our hate smouldered. We watched you as you watched yourselves. We held your eyes with ours, those eyes you forced us to wear. Until there were more and more of the larger mirrors, and you introduced us to a new shame, as the polished silver became so very slowly more common, until not every glance into it was an occasion, and you might enter your room (snarling us with shocking violence to you) and glance at us and then
Sometimes you slept near your mirrors, and held us in place, in pain, with even these insufficient eyes closed, tied to your stupor for hours.
We did not fear glass. Why should we fear that dirty, algae-coloured stuff, that made only the tiniest imprisonments? Punctuated by bubbles and stains, blown in curves and dusted with lead and tin, a finger-length in diameter, glass did not frighten us.
Through our meaningless, occasional imitations, we saw what you did. Cleaning the glass with potash and burnt ferns, limestone and manganese. We did not pay much attention. It only made your mangling of us in little concave chambers more precise. We did not pay much attention.
We looked back later and realised how remiss we had been. We should not have been surprised at the source of our trouble.
Venice was our nightmare. Where there was no reflection we could make our world as we wanted it, but where mirrors or metal or water saw your buildings, we had no choice but to throw up our own analogues— sometimes instantly, with all the agony and effort that took. In most places your eyesores came and went momentarily, as you moved your specula, your points of reflection, and glimpsed some wall or tower. But Venice, city of canals, forced us to live in your architecture. Even in the forgiving prison of water, which let our bricks and mortar lap and ebb against your designs, we were uniquely constrained. Venice hurt us.
It was under the protection of Venice, more than half a millennium ago, that the epoch of our humiliation became that of our despair.
In the fires of Murano (observed from the analogue you made us keep of it, in puddles and in the local commodities themselves), washed by estuary salt and silicates in new concentrations, industrious men made crystal glass. And while those accidental alchemists stared in piggish awe at the white, white-hot stuff they had made, their paymasters in the city of canals mixed tin and quicksilver, and made the tain.
Once, we were exiled to a landscape that was ours. It was only broken in places by rippling pools of distortion where there was water, where we might be called to perform our mute play of you. And then there were tiny moving snares, the first mirrors, but when we could evade them, where we were not cursed and tied to someone of substance, still they could not harness us. The rest of our retreat, our prison, was ours, to decorate and shape and inhabit as we wanted, only glimpsed occasionally by you through your little holes, the spaces that sucked us into your shapes. The rest of our world was ours, and you would not have recognised it.
And then the tain.
Glass democratised. Though we fought it, though we sought to keep it arcane. Glass became mass, in scant centuries, and the tain, that dusting of metal that stained its underside, with it. You put out lights at night and trapped us even then in your outlines. Your world was a world of silvered glass. It became mirrored. Every street had a thousand windows to trap us, whole buildings were sheathed in tained glass.
We were crushed into your forms. There was no minute, and not a scrap of space where we could be other than you were. No escape or respite, and you not noticing, not knowing as you pinioned us. You made a reflecting world.
You drove us mad.
Once there was a room of mirrors in Isfahan, hundreds of years ago. Lahore’s palace was ringed by Murano glass and Venetian tain.
Do you see? Can you understand why we fought?
Every house became Versailles. Every house a hall of mirrors.
So far from the dangerous heart of town, the soldiers of the Heath were able to relax discipline a little. In the little false forests of the park, those not on guard duty played cards and smoked, read, listened to cassettes.
Between the little tents was a variety of equipment and furniture, in disrepair and in good condition.
Stacking plastic chairs and wooden desks that looked pilfered from schools, ranged randomly: trunks and boxes, all map-stained by weather.
The unit was swollen with incomers, with Londoners who had joined up to fight. The full-timers spoke with accents from around the country, used the jargon unthinkingly and tersely, moved their equipment without effort. The others, men and women whose uniforms were imperfectly pieced together and amended, who walked and swung their weapons with self-conscious care, were recent volunteers.
Sholl saw a girl in her midteens, wearing a Robbie Williams T-shirt above her camouflage trousers, uncertainly hefting her rifle, while a burly Mancunian private showed her, gently, how to take aim. There was a group of young men listening to hip-hop on a cheap machine that stripped it of bass, looking at maps, bickering in the slang of south London estates.
The CO gave Sholl lager, and good food, and let him sleep. Sholl was surprised at his own exhaustion.
Before the officer left him, they talked, in the most general terms, about the war. Sholl was careful not to discuss his plans, not to preempt himself. But along with what he said was communicated something calm, a sense of something preparatory. He did not discuss his plans, but with his unexplained invitation
When he woke, Sholl emerged from the tent into the damp clearing, and quietly toured the camp. The men and women of the unit were in their groups, as before, quietly working or playing, but he saw them watching him. Sholl knew instantly that they suspected him, though they could not have said of what. His conversation with the CO, his invitation, had been reported.
He exchanged a few greetings. Steam rose from cooking and laundry, and smoke from small fires. Sholl watched it, so that he did not yet have to meet the soldiers’ eyes. They wanted something from him, and knew that
