Allie’s Reviews > The Mirror & the Light > Status Update

Of all the words he as written, will this plea endure? Rats have eaten the laws of ancient times. They relish fish glue and vellum, anything that was once alive, they will eat it, and then out of habit they will eat what is dead; from the margins they chew their was into the secret history of England.

He thinks, they have bruised me, but it will not hurt until tomorrow. The water rocks beneath them, cerulean blue. The Tower is in sight. The flint sparkled like sunlight on the sea

The monuments of the dead monarchs draw together, as if their bones were counselling each other; and the prophetic pavements beneath them, those stones of onyx, porphyry, green serpentine and glass, advise through their inscriptions how many years the world will last.

He is a monk who descends the night stair, still wrapped in dreams, so that the shuffling feet of his brethren are transformed to the whisper of leaves in the forests of infancy: and like a hidden creature stirring from a leaf-bed, his mind stirs and turns on a restless circuit.

You cannot greet the world in the morning with anything less than ferocity, or by evening you will be destroyed

What the king has made you, that thing you are

That makes him laugh, the thought of Henry sacked and tied for market, forgotten in a farmyard and forlorn in the rain.

Nothing protects you, nothing. In the last ditch, not rank, nor king. Nothing between you and the fire

But he is tired of trying to wake up different. In stories there are folk who, observed at dawn or dusk in some open water space, are seen to flit and twist in the air like spirits, or fledge leather wings through their flesh. Yet he is no such wizard. He is not a snake who can slip his skin. He is what the mirror makes, when it assembles him each day: Jolly Tom from Putney. Unless you have a better idea?

Frowning face and massive shoulders. Bloated waist and cos. Legs like the pillars that hold the globe in place. Legs that could never stagger, feet never lose the path.