A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  “Dead,” I said out loud, letting the weight of the word fall flatly against the air in this room full of maps. I said it again: “Dead.”

  Because of course, it was possible. Possible that she hadn’t passed through the maps like a glowing spark, possible that she hadn’t gone to purgatory at all, at least not as a living woman, but was somewhere else. A body, not Aoife. Possible that, even if she had gone to purgatory, there was some sort of expiration date on her visit, that when her visa expired, she wouldn’t get deported, but instead made like all the other souls there.

  I didn’t say it a third time.

  • • •

  Cartography, the making of maps, is based on the idea that we can model reality. When it comes to a map, the reality being modeled is usually some kind of physical location.

  I looked at the room I sat in, covered with Aoife’s maps. Maps that modeled no reality, except the one she wanted them to have, the river Lethe as red thread connecting the pieces. Maps to places she imagined into being. Maps to the places we once were.

  A pile of maps, purgatory burnt through, erased from existence. You could go anywhere, so long as you had the right map.

  That was what I needed, if I was going to bring Aoife home again.

  I left Aoife’s for the first time in days, blinking wraithlike against the sun, walking a path of circles through all the places that had been our maps. I gathered take-out flyers from our favorite restaurant, with their delivery ranges hand-scribbled over the dessert list, and folded concert posters from the club we’d sneaked into with bad fake IDs to dance at, directions stamped in the bottom right corner, and an old history textbook from our high school, one that had a map of Prussia in it. Bits and pieces of our reality.

  I took them back to Aoife’s and got to work. First, I drew the compass rose, sidereal, because the stars were everywhere. All thirty-two points—the rising and setting positions of the brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere, with myself as Polaris in the north and Aoife as Sigma Octantis, the true southern pole star, which is almost impossible to see unaided. Then I cut pieces from all the things I had gathered that afternoon, and all the maps Aoife had made.

  I cut the burned-out center from one of Aoife’s maps that had shown St. Patrick’s Purgatory, a reproduction of Behaim’s, the map that had started all of this. A map should reflect reality, and I would use that piece as the blinking “You are here” icon that would help her find her way home.

  I fit all the pieces together, taping them tightly, until the borders between one and the next were erased. When it was almost complete, I wrote the words “HIC SVNT LEONES,” not at the traditional place on the margin, but over the one place on the map I was unsure of. The center. Purgatory. The last piece I fit in the map was the marker for St. Patrick’s Purgatory. I had mended the burned-out spot, made sure that it was no longer missing from the map.

  And nothing happened.

  I thought it would be enough—finish the magic, bring back Aoife. But nothing.

  I closed my eyes tight and clenched my fists until my hands hurt. She was gone. Really gone, and I didn’t know how to find her.

  Once I felt like I could breathe again, I got up. I folded all Aoife’s maps, the atlases, and put them back in the chest. I set my map on top of all her maps of purgatory.

  Maybe I would buy a ticket to Ireland, go to Station Island. To a purgatory, even if it wasn’t the one where Aoife was, where I could atone for not knowing how to find my lost friend.

  It was dark when I walked home, but I knew the way. My parents’ home, which I had come back to for the summer between college years. Knew it well enough to walk it half-blinded by tears and exhaustion.

  “So hey. Nice map. You ended it at your house, though, not mine. Still our true north, I guess.” Her voice was rough—a glitch recording. She stood up from the front step, stumbled, then caught herself on the doorframe. “Thanks for bringing me home.”

  Aoife.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Just like the way there. Through the map,” she said, hugging me.

  Her hair smelled like stale earth, and I could feel the knobs of her spine. Her hands dug into my arms. “I couldn’t find a map. After I got there, after I realized I wanted to go home, I spent the whole time looking. But I couldn’t find one. Not until you made it.”

  I didn’t ask, not about anything. Not then. I just held her, held her here, a fixed point in a map of turning stars.

  Saints’ Tide

  When the saint came to the baptism, the entire church went silent. Even the baby, who was only a second before screaming her indignity at the wet, cold process, hiccuped and hushed.

  I don’t even remember hearing the church door open. Only that sudden silence, and then looking up to see a miracle walking through the church.

  The saints don’t speak. It’s said they can’t, that their voices are one of the things the tide takes from them. Maybe they just don’t need to speak. It is enough, I suppose, to be a miracle. And that, they certainly are. They used to be people, the saints. People we grew up with, who lived here with us. But once they become saints, they look like impossible, not like human. Bones the bleach white of driftwood visible beneath skin that is glass. Lightning-struck sand turned into a person, the translucent softness of sea glass in some places and perfectly clear in others. Salt water rather than blood in their veins. The light shines right through them, blinding. Pearls, which were once eyes. The Saints’ Tide takes and the Saints’ Tide transforms.

  The saint continued their progression toward the baptismal font, toward the child. They walked slowly, taking the tide’s own time, then stopped. There was a noise then—a gasp—from my sister, Rinna, the child’s mother, as the saint took the baby from her arms and lowered her into the salt water of the baptismal font. Fully. Rinna’s face was terrible—torn between her obvious desire to rescue her child, and the knowledge that what was happening was an unasked-for wonder. The baby didn’t cry at all, not even when the water closed over her head, and not when she returned into the world of the air. She simply opened her eyes, the holy water beaded on her lashes like glass.

  The saint handed her back, nodded once to Rinna, and left.

  The Sister of the Tide who was performing the baptism reached for the baby, then dropped her hands back to her sides. “Truly, the ceremony was performed, and I can add nothing to what has been done. Do you have a name for the child?”

  “Her name will be Maris,” Rinna said, her voice almost steady, “for the sea.”

  • • •

  In the beginning was the sea. The saints came after.

  • • •

  Word of the saint’s visit, of their participation in my niece’s baptism, traveled fast, and it seemed like everyone in town tried to squeeze themselves into Rinna’s small house that day. It was a miracle, certainly, and one everyone wanted proximity to. A sign—though no real agreement as to what. Perhaps that Maris would someday be a saint, though that was said in whispers.

  I wished they wouldn’t say it. A sacred destiny is a hard thing to wish upon a child.

  But whatever it meant, the saint’s participation in Maris’ baptism was a wonder, one large enough that contingents of both the Sisters of the Tide and the Sisters of Glass stood in knots on Rinna’s front porch. Separate knots, of course—the Sisters did enjoy their disagreements over the finer points of doctrine.

  No matter what you believe, the saints are inescapable. They live among us, they walk our streets, they gather at the edges of the beaches, but there is something in them that changes when they become saints and not people. Their past washes off of them—they return smooth-faced and unrecognizable. After the sea, they don’t interact—they are observers, silent and lovely and strange, but they are like statues, untouchable signs and symbols, not participants. The fact that this one had broken that distance was something remarkable and something everyone was talking about.

  I nodded and smiled and said hello to
more people in the time I spent crossing my sister’s living room than I had in the entire month. It was a relief to finally make it into the kitchen.

  “How are you doing?” I asked Rinna as I took the sleeping Maris from her arms. She was a small bundle of warmth, her dark hair a silk fuzz. I pressed my cheek to the top of her head.

  “I don’t even know,” she said. “I haven’t had time in all this to breathe. A saint baptized my daughter, and all I can think is that Sean Locke ate at least three pieces of honey cake! Three! I’m running out of food because the entire town has come by, there are no clean dishes left in the house, and I still need to make the offering to the tide sometime today.”

  I laughed. “Sean knows you’d never bake him your honey cake, so he’s trying to take advantage while he can. And I can make the offering for you.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” She brushed her hair back from her face and ran water into the dish-filled sink.

  “Honestly, I’d rather be out there than in here with all these people.”

  “No, but I mean—I know that isn’t really your sort of thing. It was enough that you came to the baptism.”

  “It’s not the sea I have the problem with,” I said. “I promise, I’d be happy to do it.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “The stuff’s by the door. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem.” I tucked Maris into her little baby seat, wrapped the ends of the blanket around her feet so they wouldn’t get cold, and kissed her head. Then I grabbed the basket of things Rinna had assembled, and went out to the beach.

  The quiet was a relief after the press of people and voices in Rinna’s house. It was growing late, the approaching winter bringing on the darkness sooner and sooner each day. The sky was a cauldron of clouds, slate splotches pushed about by the wind. There were streaks on the sand, patterns left by the wind. The air felt thick and heavy, like a storm coming in. My favorite sort of weather.

  After I’d walked far enough that the waves broke over the tops of my feet, I stopped. I set the basket on the sand and waited, breathing in and out with the tide until I felt quiet and peace in the rhythm of the waves. Then I made the offering.

  “I offer these gifts in thanks for the gift of Maris, and in hope that she may one day be safely returned to the sea,” I said. I poured out the jar of seawater Rinna had collected on the day she learned she was pregnant, the source of life held as a promise for the life to come. I scattered salt on the waves, to take bitterness from Maris’s days. Finally, I dropped a tiny, clear piece of glass, that the saints might bless her. The waves grabbed it, tumbled it across the sand, and then pulled it under.

  A good sign. Rinna would be happy. She’d been religious enough when we were younger that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had chosen to cast herself on the tide, to aspire to sainthood. I was glad she hadn’t—I liked my sister here, and speaking. I’d never really understood the holiness in silence. To me, holiness should be a living thing—not a glass example, but something that breathes and feels with you. The sea, not the saints.

  Even though the offering was finished, I stood, lingering in the quiet, in the setting sun. The waves swept back and forth over my feet, the tides pulling at the sand beneath them, sending me just enough off-balance to remind me that the sea was not my place. Something smooth bumped against my left ankle. I looked down.

  A glass heart.

  A saint’s heart.

  • • •

  I’m not the sort of person who’s used to dealing with miracles.

  • • •

  I didn’t take the heart into my sister’s house. I knew how she would react—it would terrify her. She’d see all the day’s previously good signs as twisted, as bad omens, as things of terror gathered around Maris. The saints go back to the sea one last time when they are ready to end. After that second, final death, they break apart, and their relics occasionally wash up. This heart was a piece of one the sea hadn’t kept—nothing soothing in it. I left it on the edge of the sand, then went inside, slipping in the back door so I could avoid any remaining crowd.

  “It’s all taken care of,” I said.

  “And the glass?” she asked.

  “The waves took it.”

  Relief softened the lines of her face. “Thank you for doing that. I just want everything to be right for her.”

  “Of course you do,” I said. “So do I.”

  “The house has cleared out some—most everyone’s gone home. Do you want to sit down and have a drink? I think there might even still be some food somewhere.”

  “No—it felt like a storm was coming in. I want to get home. But before I go—how are you?” She looked drawn. And it had been a day, and probably more of an exhausting one than she had planned for, but she looked thin around the edges.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and pressed the heel of her hand to her heart. “It’s just—everyone kept talking about what this means for Maris. Her future. Her destiny. When she would become a saint herself. She’s only little, you know? I want her to have a life first.”

  Rain hissed and spattered, the first part of the storm. “Anyway, you better go if you don’t want to get drenched. Good night.”

  “Good night.” We hugged, and I left. I took the saint’s heart with me. I wanted Maris to have a life first too.

  • • •

  The storm roared through the night, the rain falling in sheets, the wind a constant howl. I wondered if Maris slept through it, or if she was keeping Rinna as tired and wakeful as I was.

  I kept thinking of the heart. Occasionally fragments of the saints wash back up after their return to the sea. Partial hands and feet are the most common. But never a heart. Or at least I’d never heard of such a thing washing up before. The tide brought many blessings, but this—I wasn’t sure what this was.

  The storm tapered off just before dawn, but its remnants clung to the morning like sea wrack. I walked through gusts and drizzle, stepped over puddles and downed branches. I passed a clutch of people, stopped to let a saint make their slow way across a street, rain streaking iridescence on its glass skin. I looked as closely as I could but saw no heart beating beneath the shining glass.

  Then I walked inside the Convent of the Sisters of Glass.

  I hadn’t been in the convent in years, but muscle memory is a powerful thing: without even thinking, I dipped my left hand into the basin of seawater just inside the door and traced the sign of the wave over my forehead and my heart. The convent was quiet—the silence held, purposeful.

  There relics were displayed in the long hallway that was the public part of the convent. Hands, it seemed, tended to last—there were three, two of which were complete. One foot, the big toe missing. Part of a head. Nothing even remotely like the glass heart I had, wrapped in fabric and tucked into my bag.

  Aside from being unlike any of the other pieces here, the heart was in immaculate condition—not a chip, not a scratch. It was as if the heart had been made separately, or perhaps never used, to still be so perfect.

  I pressed my hand against my chest.

  “Can I help you?” Unlike the Sisters of the Tide, who dress in sea colors—blues and greys and greens—the Sisters of Glass dress in white and silver. They each wear beads of sea glass strung into a circle and wrapped around her wrist. This one wore glass that was all clear, clear as the saint’s heart. She was my age, which seemed young for a nun. Usually, women don’t choose to care for the saints until after they’ve had lives of their own. But vocations come when they will, or so I’ve always been told. She smiled. “My name is Olivia. I’m sorry to disturb you if you wished to keep silence, but you looked a little lost.”

  “I found something,” I said. “I think it might be from a saint.”

  “What is it you’ve found?” Her voice low and calm, her expression polite interest.

  I looked around. The hallway, people passing through, an older woman praying in a corner, seemed like too public a place for
what I had to show. “Here?”

  “We stand amongst holy relics.”

  She had a point.

  I pulled the glass heart from my bag and opened the wrappings. Olivia turned fish-belly white, stepped close, and silently re-covered the heart. Her hands still on the fabric, she said, “Perhaps someplace less public would be more appropriate. If you’ll come with me?”

  She walked in that way that eats the ground while still being graceful enough not to look like hurrying. I followed her down the long hall and into a small room. There were windows open—I could hear the waves crash.

  She closed the door behind us. “Let me see the heart again.”

  I passed it to her.

  Her hands shook as she unwrapped it. “Where did you find this?”

  “In the sea, last night. It washed up right before the storm came in. I had just finished making the offering to the tide for my niece, and there it was.”

  “Your niece. There was a saint at her baptism, yes?” The question sounded like an afterthought. All her attention was on the heart in her hands.

  “Yes. Do you think that could be related?”

  “I wouldn’t think so—the saint’s appearance at the baptism is a blessing on the child. Did the offering to the tide go smoothly?”

  I let pass the fact that the heart’s appearance had not been described as a blessing on anyone. “It did—the waves took the glass. Then I stood in the water for . . . a while. I’m not sure how long. Then the heart washed up.”

  “I won’t say they aren’t connected—the tide does as it wills. But I believe the heart is a sign for you, not for your niece.”

  “I’m guessing since we’re tucked away in here, it’s not a good sign.” The weight of it in my hands was as heavy as a secret.

  “You are holding someone’s preserved and unbroken heart in your hands. What kind of a sign do you think it is?”

  It felt like the sort of question that was almost rhetorical, that had an expected call-and-response answer that I was supposed to give regardless of how I actually felt. “I’m holding a saint’s glass heart, and whatever it means, I think it’s a sign that should have gone to someone else.”