The Hundredth Feather (1984)
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sutcliff_spaceThis is a story by Sutcliff of just under 3000 words, which I think will be new to most readers. It’s a Roman story, in fact the last Roman story of her career. It follows two main characters, an older man and a little girl, dealing with the classic Sutcliff themes of art and sacrifice.
She wrote it for the children's anthology Hundreds and Hundreds, edited by Peter Dickinson: writing and art on the theme of “one hundred” in honour of the centennial of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to which the proceeds were donated. (You can read Dickinson's bits of the book here.)
This story is not among the ones I shared on LiveJournal in 2012-14, collected byisis in the Short Stories by Rosemary Sutcliff e-book, because at the time I didn’t know it existed! It’s not in any Sutcliff bibliography I’ve read. I only came across a mention of it in an article on JSTOR in late 2018.
Some of you may remember that unheard-of Sutcliff stories have turned up before: in late 2013 Google Books digitized an anthology which included “Flowering Dagger”, a story that Sutcliff’s estate, not to mention fandom, was not previously aware of. Like I said about her non-fiction, Sutcliff’s contributions to anthologies remain rather obscure, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are more out there that few of us know about.
THE HUNDREDTH FEATHER
Andros the maker of picture-floors took a cube of greenish-blue slate from the ordered scatter of tesserae beside him, and leaning forward, fitted it carefully into the place waiting for it, settling it down into the cement bedding with a few taps of his round-headed wooden mallet, and sat back on his heels. The peacock’s breast was finished.
The whole floor was nearly finished. It had been early winter when he started on it, laying the key-pattern borders that made a frame for the goddess Juno and her peacock. Now it was spring. The leaves were breaking on the carefully tended rose bushes of the courtyard garden, and the jackdaws were nesting in the old army signal tower further up the hill. He could hear their ‘ka-ark’ and jabber in the quiets between the gusts of March wind. In a few more days he would be on his travels again, looking for somebody else who wanted a picture-floor but who could not or would not pay for a really good one.
When he was young and learning his trade, Andros had dreamed of becoming the kind of artist-craftsman that the greatest and richest people sent for from Gaul, even from Rome itself, when they wanted their floors made beautiful with pictures of the four seasons or Bacchus the wine-god in a chariot drawn by panthers. But now his hair was grey and his shoulders humped from years of stooping over his work, and he was resigned to the fact that he was a good craftsman and nothing more, and that it was only moderately prosperous merchants like Cornelius Kaeso, or the town councils of small back-woods settlements, who would not know a good pavement if they saw one, who would employ him. At least he was almost resigned. Never quite.
He shifted back a little, for a better view of the whole pavement spread before him. The colouring was pleasant, but it could hardly be anything else, when the tesserae with which the picture was made, none of them bigger than the tip of his forefinger, were blue slate and creamy chalk, golden sandstone and soft rust-red tile. The borders were well enough; but Juno, standing with one outstretched hand on the peacock’s neck, her tunic falling in elaborate folds about her, looked stiff and lumpish. His people always looked stiff and lumpish. With birds and animals he was better. He turned his attention to the peacock.
The sun, which the moment before had been behind a cloud, came out and flooded the softly-coloured pavement with light; and it seemed to Andros that the peacock was beautiful. The small snake-like crested head on the slender neck turned towards its mistress, the wings drooping, half spread, and behind, the proudly arched splendour of the great fanned-out tail. One hundred feathers, from the smallest and shortest close in to its body, to the tall ox-eyed plumes of the outer rim. There were still unfinished patches in the tail, but the position of each ‘eye’ was already marked, with a space left in its centre for the cube of blue glass that would catch the light of the sun and lamps and moon and bring the whole to life.
The slave who had broken the big blue glass jug had been soundly whipped for it, for it was a household treasure. But Andros could not help rejoicing in the accident, and in three days of careful chipping and rubbing down he had managed to get just one hundred pieces of the right size and shape. He felt that the gods had been kind to him, if not to the slave, and he gave thanks accordingly.
A shadow fell across the patch of sunlight from the doorway, a rather small shadow, and looking up, he saw Serenilla, the daughter of the house. Serenilla was nearly eleven years old, and dull-looking and lumpish as the goddess on the pavement. But Andros, cocking a half-friendly eyebrow at her as he took up a cube of yellow sandstone – for he was used to her visits – wondered suddenly what was inside the dull lumpishness, looking out. He was the first person who had ever wondered that.
After the windy sun-dazzle in the courtyard, it seemed dark in the new dining-room, and Serenilla stood blinking until the red and green patches faded and she could see properly again. The little grey-haired, sour-looking man squatting among the tools of his trade looked as he always did, as though he had squatted there, nothing changing, since her last visit.
But today something was changed; something to do with the peacock. There was a new life, a new magic about it. She moved, and the sunlight lancing in past her woke a flake of blue fire in the eye of one of the proud tail feathers, and another, and then another.
‘Oh!’ She gave a little gasp, delight waking in her. ‘You’ve put the blue eyes into some of the peacock feathers!’
Some of the sourness went out of the man’s face. ‘A few, little mistress. The others are not ready yet.’
Serenilla came in, walking with care round the sides of the new pavement, and squatted down beside him.
Andros went on quietly with his task. Generally speaking he did not like people watching while he worked, but he did not mind Serenilla.
‘It’s nearly finished,’ she said. ‘It’s all nearly finished’ – half with a kind of contentment, and half with regret, because when it was finished, the making would be over, and she had loved the making, watching it grow under Andros’s hands. She wished she could make something like that, something beautiful.
For a while she sat and watched, not speaking, not even wanting to speak . . . He took one of the precious cubes of blue glass from the crock in which they were stored, and set to placing it in the eye of one of the tallest feathers. She leaned forward to watch more closely, and the necklace she was wearing swung forward. It was just a string of cheap glass beads that she had bought with her own sweetmeat money from a travelling seller of such things. Her nurse said it was vulgar, and her mother had sighed when first she saw it. Neither of them liked her wearing it, though nobody had actually forbidden her. ‘It’s just a new toy. She’ll grow tired of it soon,’ she had heard her mother say, hopefully. But Serenilla knew that she would not grow tired of it, because of the blue bead. One bright and lovely bead the colour of all the clear skies of all the fine summer days since the world began. A colour that sang like a lark among all the white and brown and dull red earth-bound beads of the rest of the necklace. Almost the colour of the peacock eye that was catching the light under Andros’s hand. She put up her own hand, lovingly, to touch it as it swung; and Andros said without looking round, ‘You have another eye there to shine back at the sun, or the moon, or the lamps at evening.’
Serenilla reached out to touch in the same caressing way the newly set cube of glass. ‘Is it the most beautiful thing you have ever made?’
He considered. It was not a question to be answered lightly. ‘I think so,’ he said at last.
‘I think so, too,’ said Serenilla, gravely.
He laughed, a little harshly. ‘You have not seen anything else that I have made.’
‘But I can see the peacock,’ said Serenilla.
A short while later, her nurse came calling for her. ‘Your mother wants you. It is time for you to try on your new tunic. Quick now!’
And Serenilla sighed, and got up, and went obediently after her across the courtyard, with a sinking heart. She knew what a disappointment she was to her mother, who so wanted a pretty daughter to dress in pretty clothes. She was a disappointment to her father, too, but it did not so much matter to Father because there were the two boys, and he really only cared about sons, anyway. She wished he would notice her, and take her seriously, as he did the boys. She wished the boys did not treat her as a baby. She wished, oh how she wished, that Mother would not make her wear pink . . .
The jackdaw flapping over on his way back to his nest in the old signal tower gave a mocking ‘ka-ark!’ that sounded as though even he were laughing at the idea of Serenilla dressed in pink. She cast a glance of protest after him as she reached the opposite colonnade and the doorway of her mother’s room.
‘She’s still such a baby. I suppose it’s foolish to expect her to take any interest in her appearance, but one must try –’ she heard her mother saying to a visiting woman friend, as she came in.
Soon afterwards, another shadow darkened the dining-room doorway. A much larger shadow than Serenilla’s; and when Andros looked up, it was to see Cornelius Kaeso, the master of the house.
‘Hrmph,’ said Cornelius Kaeso, coming in with his fine stomach well in advance of the rest of him, to get a closer view of the work. ‘Hrmph.’
He always said that, every time he came. Andros guessed that he did not know what else to say. Probably he would have been more at home with just the straight plait-work and key-pattern borders carving the floor up into nice manageable squares and triangles; but he had to have Juno and her peacock to show his fellow-merchants that he lived in a grander style than they did.
‘Well, you’re charging me enough for it, but I will admit that it looks worth it,’ he said at last. ‘Very expensive looking. Especially by lamplight.’
Andros set another cube of sandstone in place and said nothing.
‘How long will you take to finish it?’ Cornelius asked.
‘Four days. Maybe five – and another three for the last part of it to be hard enough for use.’
‘Hrmph,’ said Cornelius Kaeso. ‘Then I shall give a dinner – just a small dinner to a few friends – in eight days’ time. Very pretty, those bits of blue glass – good idea. Yes, well, eight days’ time. Be sure it’s ready.’ And he padded out.
Andros stared down at the peacock. It looked clumsy, lacking in all pride. ‘Maybe it would look even more expensive in the dark,’ he said under his breath.
The days passed. The first pair of jackdaws had almost finished their nest in the old signal tower; the garden slave had spring-pruned the roses, and the kitchen was buzzing with preparations for Cornelius Kaeso’s dinner party.
The fifth day came, and Andros was putting the final touches to the peacock’s tail. It was then he discovered that where the last five cubes of blue glass should have been at the bottom of the crock – there had been five yesterday, he had counted them – there were only four.
Serenilla, arriving on one of her visits, found him hunting through the folds of sacking that protected the floor where he was working. ‘What is it? Have you lost something?’
Andros shook his head like a baffled boar. ‘There are only four of the glass tesserae left. There should be five.’
‘O-oh!’ Serenilla came and sat on her heels beside him, and began to search too, looking carefully in all the places where he had just looked, so that he wanted to shout at her to leave be. But he knew that in its different way, and for some unknown reason, her caring was as deep as his own, and he did not.
‘There isn’t another blue glass pot anywhere in the house,’ she said at last in a small hopeless voice, when they had looked everywhere.
‘And if there was, I could scarcely expect Marcipar to break it for me and get another flogging,’ Andros said. ‘And with your father’s dinner party in only three days’ time . . .’
‘What will you do?’
‘There’s only one thing I can do – replace the eye of one of the lesser feathers with slate, and move that cube up to the top, where it shows more.’
‘But if you do that, it won’t be perfect.’
‘It won’t be perfect anyway,’ Andros said savagely. ‘Your father said it would look expensive by lamplight. But that’s a different matter.’
Serenilla said, ‘It won’t have its magic, not without its whole hundred peacock-eyes to shine.’ The peacock that was so nearly perfect, and yet would always now be flawed, blurred on her sight, and for a moment she was on the edge of tears. And then suddenly she knew what she must do; and knowing, she scrambled to her feet and ran.
She ran to her own little sleeping cubicle, and opened the clothes chest at the foot of the narrow bed, and rummaged inside for the painted olive-wood box in which she kept her treasures. Inside she found her silver scissors among all the tangle of other things there. Then she took off her necklace, and without giving herself time to think, cut the thread.
The beads ran pattering down into the box, all save the blue glass one, which she caught as it came off the string. She could gather them up and re-string them later. But she knew that she would not. They would not be worth re-stringing, just the white and brown and rusty-red. Still, she had no regrets. She got up without even waiting to shut the lid of her clothes chest, and ran back the way she had come.
Andros, who was delicately prising out the glass cube from the smallest and least noticeable feather, glanced round as she squatted down beside him. And something he saw in her face caught at his breath. ‘Little mistress – you have not found it somewhere?’
She shook her head, and holding out her closed hand to him, opened it slowly and carefully, and he saw that lying in the cushiony hollow of her palm was the precious blue glass bead.
‘It is very nearly the same colour,’ she said.
They sat and looked at it together. The light striking through it made a tiny stain of living blue on Serenilla’s hand where she held it; and Andros thought suddenly that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
‘It is the blue bead from your necklace.’
‘Yes. It’s for you – for the peacock.’ All at once she was afraid that he was going to treat her like a baby and say that he could not take her pretty toy.
But Andros understood how great a thing she offered, and he accepted it gravely. ‘My thanks to you, for the gift. It must go here at the crowning-point, in the eye of the master feather.’
‘But you have one there already.’
‘No matter; I can get it out and set it elsewhere. If I put yours into a lesser feather it will throw the whole balance out, because it is more beautiful than the others, and being round, the light strikes differently on it.’
And he set to work to lift out the blue tessera that he had set into the master feather yesterday, and put it aside while he replaced it with Serenilla’s blue bead. When it was done, they sat back, side by side, and looked at it.
The morning sunlight through the high window fell across the peacock, and the branches of the poplar tree outside, swaying in the spring wind, made the light flicker and dance as though the pictured bird were on the edge of life, and the points of blue fire in its tail feathers woke and darkened and woke again.
Andros, who had come near to hating it, saw it proud and beautiful again because someone whose sight he trusted had found enough of pride and beauty in it to make it worthy of her most treasured possession. And Serenilla knew that whenever she looked at the peacock on Father’s new dining-room floor, she would know that she had had a share in making something beautiful, and she would know also that she was a real person who mattered in her own right, because the little grey man who had made the rest of the beauty had treated her that way.
The sunlight stilled for a moment, and the eye of the master feather, the hundredth feather, shone out clear and steady; a blue star.
Next day Andros moved on in search of more picture-pavements to make, and two days after that Cornelius Kaeso held his dinner party, and the lamplight woke wavering blue sparks in the new floor, which his fellow merchants politely admired, missing all the magic in it. And when the dinner was over and the lamps put out and the dining-room was empty, the moon came in through the high window and, making its own cool patterns on the pavement, struck a sharp blue point of radiance from the eye of the peacock’s master feather.
And the lost hundredth cube of glass? The same moonlight, slanting in through the gap where a stone had fallen from the wall of the forsaken signal tower, was answered by a tiny point of blue light that might have been a glow-worm among the dark stick-tangle of a thieving jackdaw’s nest.
She wrote it for the children's anthology Hundreds and Hundreds, edited by Peter Dickinson: writing and art on the theme of “one hundred” in honour of the centennial of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to which the proceeds were donated. (You can read Dickinson's bits of the book here.)
This story is not among the ones I shared on LiveJournal in 2012-14, collected by
isis in the Short Stories by Rosemary Sutcliff e-book, because at the time I didn’t know it existed! It’s not in any Sutcliff bibliography I’ve read. I only came across a mention of it in an article on JSTOR in late 2018. Some of you may remember that unheard-of Sutcliff stories have turned up before: in late 2013 Google Books digitized an anthology which included “Flowering Dagger”, a story that Sutcliff’s estate, not to mention fandom, was not previously aware of. Like I said about her non-fiction, Sutcliff’s contributions to anthologies remain rather obscure, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are more out there that few of us know about.
THE HUNDREDTH FEATHER
Andros the maker of picture-floors took a cube of greenish-blue slate from the ordered scatter of tesserae beside him, and leaning forward, fitted it carefully into the place waiting for it, settling it down into the cement bedding with a few taps of his round-headed wooden mallet, and sat back on his heels. The peacock’s breast was finished.
The whole floor was nearly finished. It had been early winter when he started on it, laying the key-pattern borders that made a frame for the goddess Juno and her peacock. Now it was spring. The leaves were breaking on the carefully tended rose bushes of the courtyard garden, and the jackdaws were nesting in the old army signal tower further up the hill. He could hear their ‘ka-ark’ and jabber in the quiets between the gusts of March wind. In a few more days he would be on his travels again, looking for somebody else who wanted a picture-floor but who could not or would not pay for a really good one.
When he was young and learning his trade, Andros had dreamed of becoming the kind of artist-craftsman that the greatest and richest people sent for from Gaul, even from Rome itself, when they wanted their floors made beautiful with pictures of the four seasons or Bacchus the wine-god in a chariot drawn by panthers. But now his hair was grey and his shoulders humped from years of stooping over his work, and he was resigned to the fact that he was a good craftsman and nothing more, and that it was only moderately prosperous merchants like Cornelius Kaeso, or the town councils of small back-woods settlements, who would not know a good pavement if they saw one, who would employ him. At least he was almost resigned. Never quite.
He shifted back a little, for a better view of the whole pavement spread before him. The colouring was pleasant, but it could hardly be anything else, when the tesserae with which the picture was made, none of them bigger than the tip of his forefinger, were blue slate and creamy chalk, golden sandstone and soft rust-red tile. The borders were well enough; but Juno, standing with one outstretched hand on the peacock’s neck, her tunic falling in elaborate folds about her, looked stiff and lumpish. His people always looked stiff and lumpish. With birds and animals he was better. He turned his attention to the peacock.
The sun, which the moment before had been behind a cloud, came out and flooded the softly-coloured pavement with light; and it seemed to Andros that the peacock was beautiful. The small snake-like crested head on the slender neck turned towards its mistress, the wings drooping, half spread, and behind, the proudly arched splendour of the great fanned-out tail. One hundred feathers, from the smallest and shortest close in to its body, to the tall ox-eyed plumes of the outer rim. There were still unfinished patches in the tail, but the position of each ‘eye’ was already marked, with a space left in its centre for the cube of blue glass that would catch the light of the sun and lamps and moon and bring the whole to life.
The slave who had broken the big blue glass jug had been soundly whipped for it, for it was a household treasure. But Andros could not help rejoicing in the accident, and in three days of careful chipping and rubbing down he had managed to get just one hundred pieces of the right size and shape. He felt that the gods had been kind to him, if not to the slave, and he gave thanks accordingly.
A shadow fell across the patch of sunlight from the doorway, a rather small shadow, and looking up, he saw Serenilla, the daughter of the house. Serenilla was nearly eleven years old, and dull-looking and lumpish as the goddess on the pavement. But Andros, cocking a half-friendly eyebrow at her as he took up a cube of yellow sandstone – for he was used to her visits – wondered suddenly what was inside the dull lumpishness, looking out. He was the first person who had ever wondered that.
After the windy sun-dazzle in the courtyard, it seemed dark in the new dining-room, and Serenilla stood blinking until the red and green patches faded and she could see properly again. The little grey-haired, sour-looking man squatting among the tools of his trade looked as he always did, as though he had squatted there, nothing changing, since her last visit.
But today something was changed; something to do with the peacock. There was a new life, a new magic about it. She moved, and the sunlight lancing in past her woke a flake of blue fire in the eye of one of the proud tail feathers, and another, and then another.
‘Oh!’ She gave a little gasp, delight waking in her. ‘You’ve put the blue eyes into some of the peacock feathers!’
Some of the sourness went out of the man’s face. ‘A few, little mistress. The others are not ready yet.’
Serenilla came in, walking with care round the sides of the new pavement, and squatted down beside him.
Andros went on quietly with his task. Generally speaking he did not like people watching while he worked, but he did not mind Serenilla.
‘It’s nearly finished,’ she said. ‘It’s all nearly finished’ – half with a kind of contentment, and half with regret, because when it was finished, the making would be over, and she had loved the making, watching it grow under Andros’s hands. She wished she could make something like that, something beautiful.
For a while she sat and watched, not speaking, not even wanting to speak . . . He took one of the precious cubes of blue glass from the crock in which they were stored, and set to placing it in the eye of one of the tallest feathers. She leaned forward to watch more closely, and the necklace she was wearing swung forward. It was just a string of cheap glass beads that she had bought with her own sweetmeat money from a travelling seller of such things. Her nurse said it was vulgar, and her mother had sighed when first she saw it. Neither of them liked her wearing it, though nobody had actually forbidden her. ‘It’s just a new toy. She’ll grow tired of it soon,’ she had heard her mother say, hopefully. But Serenilla knew that she would not grow tired of it, because of the blue bead. One bright and lovely bead the colour of all the clear skies of all the fine summer days since the world began. A colour that sang like a lark among all the white and brown and dull red earth-bound beads of the rest of the necklace. Almost the colour of the peacock eye that was catching the light under Andros’s hand. She put up her own hand, lovingly, to touch it as it swung; and Andros said without looking round, ‘You have another eye there to shine back at the sun, or the moon, or the lamps at evening.’
Serenilla reached out to touch in the same caressing way the newly set cube of glass. ‘Is it the most beautiful thing you have ever made?’
He considered. It was not a question to be answered lightly. ‘I think so,’ he said at last.
‘I think so, too,’ said Serenilla, gravely.
He laughed, a little harshly. ‘You have not seen anything else that I have made.’
‘But I can see the peacock,’ said Serenilla.
A short while later, her nurse came calling for her. ‘Your mother wants you. It is time for you to try on your new tunic. Quick now!’
And Serenilla sighed, and got up, and went obediently after her across the courtyard, with a sinking heart. She knew what a disappointment she was to her mother, who so wanted a pretty daughter to dress in pretty clothes. She was a disappointment to her father, too, but it did not so much matter to Father because there were the two boys, and he really only cared about sons, anyway. She wished he would notice her, and take her seriously, as he did the boys. She wished the boys did not treat her as a baby. She wished, oh how she wished, that Mother would not make her wear pink . . .
The jackdaw flapping over on his way back to his nest in the old signal tower gave a mocking ‘ka-ark!’ that sounded as though even he were laughing at the idea of Serenilla dressed in pink. She cast a glance of protest after him as she reached the opposite colonnade and the doorway of her mother’s room.
‘She’s still such a baby. I suppose it’s foolish to expect her to take any interest in her appearance, but one must try –’ she heard her mother saying to a visiting woman friend, as she came in.
Soon afterwards, another shadow darkened the dining-room doorway. A much larger shadow than Serenilla’s; and when Andros looked up, it was to see Cornelius Kaeso, the master of the house.
‘Hrmph,’ said Cornelius Kaeso, coming in with his fine stomach well in advance of the rest of him, to get a closer view of the work. ‘Hrmph.’
He always said that, every time he came. Andros guessed that he did not know what else to say. Probably he would have been more at home with just the straight plait-work and key-pattern borders carving the floor up into nice manageable squares and triangles; but he had to have Juno and her peacock to show his fellow-merchants that he lived in a grander style than they did.
‘Well, you’re charging me enough for it, but I will admit that it looks worth it,’ he said at last. ‘Very expensive looking. Especially by lamplight.’
Andros set another cube of sandstone in place and said nothing.
‘How long will you take to finish it?’ Cornelius asked.
‘Four days. Maybe five – and another three for the last part of it to be hard enough for use.’
‘Hrmph,’ said Cornelius Kaeso. ‘Then I shall give a dinner – just a small dinner to a few friends – in eight days’ time. Very pretty, those bits of blue glass – good idea. Yes, well, eight days’ time. Be sure it’s ready.’ And he padded out.
Andros stared down at the peacock. It looked clumsy, lacking in all pride. ‘Maybe it would look even more expensive in the dark,’ he said under his breath.
The days passed. The first pair of jackdaws had almost finished their nest in the old signal tower; the garden slave had spring-pruned the roses, and the kitchen was buzzing with preparations for Cornelius Kaeso’s dinner party.
The fifth day came, and Andros was putting the final touches to the peacock’s tail. It was then he discovered that where the last five cubes of blue glass should have been at the bottom of the crock – there had been five yesterday, he had counted them – there were only four.
Serenilla, arriving on one of her visits, found him hunting through the folds of sacking that protected the floor where he was working. ‘What is it? Have you lost something?’
Andros shook his head like a baffled boar. ‘There are only four of the glass tesserae left. There should be five.’
‘O-oh!’ Serenilla came and sat on her heels beside him, and began to search too, looking carefully in all the places where he had just looked, so that he wanted to shout at her to leave be. But he knew that in its different way, and for some unknown reason, her caring was as deep as his own, and he did not.
‘There isn’t another blue glass pot anywhere in the house,’ she said at last in a small hopeless voice, when they had looked everywhere.
‘And if there was, I could scarcely expect Marcipar to break it for me and get another flogging,’ Andros said. ‘And with your father’s dinner party in only three days’ time . . .’
‘What will you do?’
‘There’s only one thing I can do – replace the eye of one of the lesser feathers with slate, and move that cube up to the top, where it shows more.’
‘But if you do that, it won’t be perfect.’
‘It won’t be perfect anyway,’ Andros said savagely. ‘Your father said it would look expensive by lamplight. But that’s a different matter.’
Serenilla said, ‘It won’t have its magic, not without its whole hundred peacock-eyes to shine.’ The peacock that was so nearly perfect, and yet would always now be flawed, blurred on her sight, and for a moment she was on the edge of tears. And then suddenly she knew what she must do; and knowing, she scrambled to her feet and ran.
She ran to her own little sleeping cubicle, and opened the clothes chest at the foot of the narrow bed, and rummaged inside for the painted olive-wood box in which she kept her treasures. Inside she found her silver scissors among all the tangle of other things there. Then she took off her necklace, and without giving herself time to think, cut the thread.
The beads ran pattering down into the box, all save the blue glass one, which she caught as it came off the string. She could gather them up and re-string them later. But she knew that she would not. They would not be worth re-stringing, just the white and brown and rusty-red. Still, she had no regrets. She got up without even waiting to shut the lid of her clothes chest, and ran back the way she had come.
Andros, who was delicately prising out the glass cube from the smallest and least noticeable feather, glanced round as she squatted down beside him. And something he saw in her face caught at his breath. ‘Little mistress – you have not found it somewhere?’
She shook her head, and holding out her closed hand to him, opened it slowly and carefully, and he saw that lying in the cushiony hollow of her palm was the precious blue glass bead.
‘It is very nearly the same colour,’ she said.
They sat and looked at it together. The light striking through it made a tiny stain of living blue on Serenilla’s hand where she held it; and Andros thought suddenly that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
‘It is the blue bead from your necklace.’
‘Yes. It’s for you – for the peacock.’ All at once she was afraid that he was going to treat her like a baby and say that he could not take her pretty toy.
But Andros understood how great a thing she offered, and he accepted it gravely. ‘My thanks to you, for the gift. It must go here at the crowning-point, in the eye of the master feather.’
‘But you have one there already.’
‘No matter; I can get it out and set it elsewhere. If I put yours into a lesser feather it will throw the whole balance out, because it is more beautiful than the others, and being round, the light strikes differently on it.’
And he set to work to lift out the blue tessera that he had set into the master feather yesterday, and put it aside while he replaced it with Serenilla’s blue bead. When it was done, they sat back, side by side, and looked at it.
The morning sunlight through the high window fell across the peacock, and the branches of the poplar tree outside, swaying in the spring wind, made the light flicker and dance as though the pictured bird were on the edge of life, and the points of blue fire in its tail feathers woke and darkened and woke again.
Andros, who had come near to hating it, saw it proud and beautiful again because someone whose sight he trusted had found enough of pride and beauty in it to make it worthy of her most treasured possession. And Serenilla knew that whenever she looked at the peacock on Father’s new dining-room floor, she would know that she had had a share in making something beautiful, and she would know also that she was a real person who mattered in her own right, because the little grey man who had made the rest of the beauty had treated her that way.
The sunlight stilled for a moment, and the eye of the master feather, the hundredth feather, shone out clear and steady; a blue star.
Next day Andros moved on in search of more picture-pavements to make, and two days after that Cornelius Kaeso held his dinner party, and the lamplight woke wavering blue sparks in the new floor, which his fellow merchants politely admired, missing all the magic in it. And when the dinner was over and the lamps put out and the dining-room was empty, the moon came in through the high window and, making its own cool patterns on the pavement, struck a sharp blue point of radiance from the eye of the peacock’s master feather.
And the lost hundredth cube of glass? The same moonlight, slanting in through the gap where a stone had fallen from the wall of the forsaken signal tower, was answered by a tiny point of blue light that might have been a glow-worm among the dark stick-tangle of a thieving jackdaw’s nest.
