The Heartstone Wedding
by Soylent Green
In the center of the earth I will push aside
the emeralds so that I can see you—
you like an amanuensis, with a pen
of water, copying the green sprigs of plants.
What a world! What deep parsley!
What a ship sailing through the sweetness!
And you, maybe—and me, maybe—a topaz.
There'll be no more dissensions in the bells.
- Pablo Neruda
In every strong marriage there is a healthy mix of shared and unshared.
It is an autumn evening not long after Nephrite's death, and Zoisite lies in bed on his stomach with his hair in a towel. He is eating his favourite dinner, seal blubber and peaches from a can, and propped open against the bowl of peach syrup is a book of photographs. Wedding Album, says Zoisite's writing on the cover, and below it is something in Kunzite's hand, but it's a dead language and scholars disagree over its translation. The writing is smeared with seal grease.
In the margin beside the first photograph, Zoisite writes a list of the things he shares with Kunzite.
home
bed
bathwater
blood
dreams
murder
secrets
semen
tears
time
Unwritten are the things they do not share, of which there are many, and which Zoisite understands to be a good thing. He and his lover are, after all, from different orders of being. Their hearts have different crystal habits and occupy different points on the Mohs Hardness Scale. They have different colouring, different luster, different points of fracture. They have different ideas of what it means to love.
They do not share memory, save what the photographs tell them. And they do not share much in the way of biographical knowledge. Zoisite does not know how old Kunzite is, much less how old he believes himself to be. Kunzite does not know that Zoisite plays piano in a jazz bar called Rag Time (although he does know about the Rain Tree). Zoisite does not know what it means when Kunzite goes dark and speaks in the rocktongues, muddy black words spilling out like pebbles and rolling off into the night. And Kunzite does not know where Zoisite keeps the double-pointed seeking stone that responds sometimes to love, but mostly to monsters.
- But I see you are looking at the photographs. You would like to know more about them. Photography's a mysterious art even in the best conditions, but in the Dark Kingdom it's classified as witchcraft. Who but a witch can make a medium that records the behavior of light in time function in a world without light, outside of time?
Oniwabandana is a sorceress and a monster as well as a photographer. She can capture images that few others can see but that are no less real for their invisibility. She has documented this marriage between two creatures who love behind the light. She has performed this service gratis, because she hopes to find favour when the Kingdom comes to glory and requires someone with a camera to memorialize its triumph.
You are likely familiar with some of her work already. The portrait that sits conspicuously in its gold frame, right in the open where anyone might see it. Look at how stiffly they pose, like night animals caught in the porchlight. They are not used to mugging for the camera. Their arms bend awkwardly; their hips stand a meter apart. The flash has caught the tapetum lucidum behind their eyes, giving them a moony, diabolical glow. Stranger still is the backdrop: instead of the tasteful arrangement stalagmites and taproots agreed upon earlier, there is nothing but a hot pink glare. An error in the development, insists the witch, but we wonder if her flash didn't simply catch a facet of Kunzite's heartstone in one of its rare moments of visibility.
Perhaps that is why Zoisite treasures this photograph above the rest. It was meant to communicate everything the two of them shared with each other, and it would have failed abysmally, yet quite by accident a scorching intimacy bled through.
True love can only be photographed when its guard is down.
The first picture in the album, the one next to Zoisite's list of shared things, is the oldest by far. By rights it should not exist. Neither Kunzite nor Zoisite could tell you exactly what it depicts, but they know it's important, so here it sits right at the very beginning.
If you want to know the story behind it, you'd be better off asking the shockheaded boy wearing the exotic pajamas and the shortsword, who stands near the far right corner of the frame. He is seventeen, but his black hair sticks up at the crown of his head like it did when he was six. He looks a trifle afraid, and well he might be, for there's something shackled at the other corner of the photograph, and when it moves, the chain slithers and clinks.
The photograph is dark—an ancient, pre-electric dark—but it was not taken underground. In fact, it predates the Dark Kingdom as we know it by about three years. As I said, this picture should not exist. But when you are a witch as well as a photographer, you are granted access to exclusive venues.
The boy isn't alone with the thing on the chain. The longer you look at the picture, the more the dense Elysian night discloses its features. A third figure occupies the centre of the composition: a tall man wound in a cape that was once white but has been dragged many times through the earth. The moonbone hair, luminous in the dark, is a dead giveaway. It's Kunzite. In another photo -– lost and presumed destroyed -– we see him enter the scene, crawling up through the floor to kneel before his Prince, who clutches at the thick white mane and buries his face in it like a child. Kunzite's long eyes slide shut in contentment. They seem profoundly happy to see each other.
We can discern from their postures that Kunzite and the Prince are discussing what to do with the chained thing. Those of you who have read your history will remember that Kunzite, in his former life, was charged to travel to and fro within the earth, rooting out the old gods so that the Prince's celestial consorts would meet no obstruction when they came down from the sky. We do not know if he relished his task, but there is no doubt that he excelled at it. Just days before this photograph was taken, Kunzite bit the head off the forest god Humbaba, thus opening the last great cedar woods to logging.
It's clear the Prince thinks he has another Humbaba at the end of the chain. It was captured in the broadleaf forests of the north, where the tattooed Picts who pay tribute there called it a spook and asked Elysium to put its three godkillers on it. Endymion sent Kunzite, his best, who brought it back in one piece and was now asking the Prince to spare its life. But why? The black hair stands up in confusion.
I was sent a dream, replies Kunzite in the caption below the photograph, that I would be given a brother.
(That, at least, is the translation we're given. Other versions render it as special friend or wife.)
If you look closely, you can see that Kunzite is smiling with mysterious tenderness. A dim light glimmers on the pointed grey flints of his teeth. From his cloak he produces a rock, pinkish and faintly luminous, and for a moment you recoil in horror to think that Kunzite has brought up his heartstone— for what?
But no; the pink is only a small inclusion at the centre of the rock; the rest is dull green. It is not regular and prismatic like a spodumene but occluded, uneven, rough. Nevertheless, a heartstone is a heartstone; there is no mistaking one even before it's taken root in its host.
The photograph remains frozen in time, but there is an inevitability to its composition that allows us to extrapolate what will happen next. Kunzite will approach the chained thing with his habitual calm. It will not fight him, at least not very hard. There will be a brief scuffle and the chain will be cut away and Kunzite will hold the forest menace gently but firmly by its golden hair. It will not want to swallow the green-pink stone, but Kunzite's argument is persuasive. The wild green eyes will go as blank as laurel leaves and its mouth will open and the heartstone with its ruby inclusion will be placed on its tongue. The ruby will cause trouble later on, Kunzite knows, but it means love. It means a brother. A friend. A wife. The picture commands it.
Endymion watches the making of his fourth godkiller.
The photograph is not labeled as such, but anyone studying it will know they are looking at a wedding.
In the photo album of every married couple, there will be a picture of a house. A shared residence: proof of togetherness: a life built for two. No singleton ever takes a picture of his home.
So we should not be surprised to see, in the next photograph, the camera pan up the face of a dwelling that is mostly rock, but partly root. My, but how the two have grown together. The house's foundation is stone, hewn out of the rough metamorphics that compose the geology of the D-Point, but the space around it is forest, trees either carnivorous or cannibalistic, for we are underground now and plants must devise means of nourishment other than light.
The house was made by Kunzite, but the forest is Zoisite's. Elysium is gone and the godkillers, the stone-eaters, have retreated to their natural habitat.
You would think at first that there are no people in this photograph, but you'd be wrong.
Just as every marriage requires the picture of a home, so it requires an image of children. Babies have an inevitable way of issuing out of wedding houses. But in a sunless world dug fathoms under the snowpack, where the only sustenance is canned peaches and roasted seal and the happiness of oblivious humans—that is no place for a child to be conceived.
Nevetheless- the vegetation surrounding the house. Take a closer look.
It does not happen every time. But on occasion, when the mood is right, when Kunzite comes to his wife with a towel and and three cloths and a jar of seal blubber, and Zoisite shoves aside his magazines and pretends he has not been lying awake all night with a hot pink knife twisting and twisting down low in his body, right at the base of his tailbone— however, cameras are not permitted in scenes such as these.
Does it surprise you to find these two so deeply in love, even after all this time? Does it surprise you to learn about their offspring? We are trained to follow a succession of moons: daughter issuing from daughter issuing from daughter. But if we reeducate our our gaze to watch the lines of root and sediment, we will see what new life blooms in the ground beneath our feet, deep down where the frost can't touch it. Even dark earthly creatures have heartstones that they bring into their mouths in times of intimacy, to crack and crack and crack and until the dust of them falls on the rich arctic soil.
In the woods at the bottom of the photograph, three saplings grow in a cluster. They are all female, and their limbs are vines and thorny branches. Zoisite will teach them to be efficient killers - good daughters, in other words - and set them upon Nephrite to extract his second heart.
But that is purely conjecture based on what we know of this marriage and its history. The photograph shows us nothing more that a forest and a tall house with a single lighted window, like some bright idea being born.
The next photograph was taken to accompany an interview, now lost, given by the Dark Kingdom's chief trauma surgeon.
Oniwabandana was with him when the two casualties arrived almost at the same time, sending the small hospital into uproar. But she kept her head and took the photo dispassionately.
This is usually where Zoisite closes the album. He does not care to look at this picture. A photographer records the behaviour of light in time, but a witch can record the behavior of darkness long before time finds a place for it in the light.
In the photo there are two wounded bodies laid out on stretchers, side by side. They are approaching death at similar velocities. Kunzite leans over the doctor in an attitude intended to be commanding but which appears, in the flash of the camera, more like supplication. The doctor will not let his face be photographed. They are both looking down at one of the bodies: a boy like a new root smothered in charcoal-coloured clay, which you will recognize as the uniform of the godkillers. His gold hair is singed and smoke rises from his parted lips. His wide pleading eyes have gone as blank as laurel leaves.
In Kunzite's fist there is a chunk of rock, which the astute viewer will recognize as the particoloured heartstone that Kunzite pushed down the boy's throat on their wedding day. Only now the green part has been burned away, leaving just the rough pink inclusion.
I wanted to help them, says the doctor in a quote from the lost interview. I wanted to put the ruby back where it belonged. But I had orders from the Queen to attend only to the first casualty.
He means the other body: a young man in exotic pajamas with a glass sword standing up from his middle like a mast. His short black hair stands up too, as though he's been frightened half to death.
The last photo can't be viewed properly. Oniwabandana developed it on a sheet of mica rather than cardstock, so when you turn the page of the album, the surface of the image flashes and then grows maddeningly opaque. Obscurity in witchcraft is a form of self-protection.
But I will tell you what I see. It might be different from your interpretation.
Kunzite with his back to the wall is a terrible thing. See what loneliness and persecution does to an animal. Was he always this savage? Perhaps. It's no secret that Endymion and then Beryl drafted him for his ruthlessness, which over time and through darkness became cruelty beyond measure. See how he twists in and out of his human skin: now light, now dark, now light again – this is part of what makes the photograph so difficult to make out.
In his hands he holds two sharp objects, which he uses on the five girls who have fallen down this hole.
The weapons have a hot pink glare, and we suspect an error in the phototransfer. But no—the flash has merely caught two heartstones in a rare moment of visibility, one a rough ruby and the other clearer, like a wedding bell. Spodumene, from the Greek spodumenos, meaning burnt to ash. They have been sharpened and seem to cut like knives, but in fact they are breaking. Kunzite throws them again and again and they fracture against the girls' white moonstones, tiny spinters whipping off into the dark like memory.
A brother. A wife. A special companion.
No one has the power to end the life of a stone. A stone can only aspire to one thing: to break, and break, and break, until the wind lifts it in its hand and scatters it over the heads of the wedding guests, who are earthbound and caught in the light, notoriously heavier than air.
-FIN-