Sword Stone Table
Page 15
“I would very much like to see where you come from, and to meet this magician Merlin,” Amoret said, slanting a look at Britomart. “And to thank your parents for being thoughtful enough to raise so brave and beautiful a daughter.”
Britomart almost tripped over her own feet. No one had ever called her beautiful before, yet while there was a teasing edge to Amoret’s tone, it didn’t sound as if she were entirely joking. All confusion, Britomart still didn’t know what to say in response. She feared if she started talking, she might not be able to stop.
They journeyed on, talking about this and that, until the sun was sinking low once more and they were both tired and worn out. They made camp at a spot by the river, letting the roan loose to graze. Britomart used her spear to catch a couple of fine fish while Amoret kindled a fire.
Once they’d both eaten their fill, Britomart decided to remove the armor, at least for the night. It was heavy and hot, and she wanted nothing more than to scrub her face and hands and arms with clean river water. Even with several days’ practice, the buckles were still even more difficult to undo than they were to fasten. Amoret had to help, her nimble fingers working loose the leather and lifting the weight of plate armor from Britomart’s shoulders.
“There!” Amoret said with satisfaction, sitting back on her heels. “Don’t you look much—oh, no, wait.” She leaned in and tucked a stray strand of hair behind Britomart’s ear and redid one of her plaits that had come loose. “Now there. Perfect.”
Britomart’s face felt hot. “What did you mean,” she blurted out, “when you said I was the woman from the mirror?”
“Oh, well.” Amoret bit her lip for a moment. “This might sound a little strange, but my grandmother had a looking glass that she inherited from her grandmother. And I never knew why, but anytime I looked at it, it never showed me my face, only—well, you. You were never in armor, mind, but I’m sure I’d know that face anywhere, I looked at it so often.”
Destiny, Britomart thought vaguely. She had never seen more than a hazy glimpse of Amoret’s face before today, but the more she looked at it, the more she felt as if she’d known it all her life: her warm, dark eyes, the dimple in her cheek, the line of her nose. “I…I believe you. I think that, well…” She trailed off, because she didn’t have all the words for it yet, but she couldn’t deny that she felt it: a tug behind her breastbone, the just-formed knowledge that what lay between them could well be greater than them both.
“Yes?” Amoret looked at her with a smile on her face and kept smiling when Britomart crept closer, and she smiled even as she took one of Britomart’s hands in hers.
Britomart thought of the question she’d had in mind when she’d sought out her father’s looking glass: How will I find the one who’s truly meant for me? She thought of Merlin telling her there was no way out but through and of the encouragement to follow the example of Queen Angela, to be as bold as the circumstances required.
She thought about giving a woman back her heart.
Britomart leaned in and kissed her, and Amoret kissed her back. She pressed the sweet curve of her smile against Britomart’s mouth, and her hand cupped Britomart’s cheek, and Britomart had never, ever known a kiss could feel like this: like liquid sunshine, like a destiny fulfilled. Like the fitting end to one story and the beginning of a whole new book.
PRESENT
Mayday
Maria Dahvana Headley
ITEMS FOUND AT THE WEST SISTER ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE, LAKE ERIE
SET FOR AUCTION
On August 13, 1975, during a search for abducted teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, suspected to have been transported by boat from Detroit to Lake Erie’s remote West Sister Island, raucous noises and a variety of semi-intelligible curses were heard from the locked lighthouse’s interior.
The West Sister Island Lighthouse, a 55-foot-tall conical tower made of white limestone and brick, was erected in 1848 on the southwest point of the island and kept in manual operation by lighthouse keepers during summer navigation seasons for nearly 90 years, until the lighthouse was automated in 1937. Since, the island has been an uninhabited wilderness refuge and rookery for great blue herons, great egrets, black-crowned night herons, double-crested cormorants and snowy egrets. Other nesting birds include purple martins, red-winged blackbirds, crows, catbirds, song sparrows, warblers and endangered bald eagles. Aside from the lighthouse, West Sister Island has no remaining structures and is entirely forested. In 1971, the island was designated the sole wilderness area in Ohio.
Upon hearing the protestations of what seemed to be a human prisoner inside the tower, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on-site cut the lighthouse locks and discovered the following:
1. A domesticated gray parrot, age unknown
Flying at liberty in the upper reaches of the tower. The parrot speaks English with a distinct twang, has an extensive and explicit vocabulary and is a required purchase as part of this lot, as neither the U.S. Coast Guard nor the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nor indeed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have any intention of continuing custody of this avian.
2. One large wooden coffin, sealed
Hackberry wood, handmade, mortise and tenon. Carved with wild plum trees in the style of William Morris. No odors/leakage.*1
3. A tuxedo jacket, custom-made from silk and wool, with matching trousers and top hat
For a very tall, very slender person. There is a bullet hole in the left lapel and evidence of dark staining on the interior, though no corresponding exit portal in the shoulder.
4. A “Letter from the Editor” clipped from the inaugural issue of the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, The Maroon, 1892
“The Muckraker’s Responsibility”
I never had a father with footsteps to follow. I was raised until the age of eight on an Ohio farm after being—allegedly—rescued from a shipwreck on Lake Erie as an infant. I assume the true story is something rather less fantastical, an abandonment on someone’s front stoop or at a hospital.
Possibly, you’ve noted my presence in the library, a man of 6 and ½ feet, with white hair, pale blue eyes, high cheekbones, a nose that takes a sharp angle from my forehead. I look nothing like my adoptive family. When I was eight, however, a family member appeared in my life. An aunt, who, despite significant hardship, had managed to put herself through medical school in Philadelphia and subsequently practiced as a doctor. She informed my foster parents she’d been searching for me for eight years and that an investigator had given her my whereabouts. Of my biological mother, she would only say: she died of grief. Of my father, she had no comment.
With her, I stayed until I arrived here. The University took me in and, as my unknown father never did, taught me to write, to interview, to scavenge for the truth. The case may be made that my interest in journalism came from the many possibilities my own story yielded me. I might’ve been prince or pauper, a paperless baby, a child without a position in the family Bible.
The only certainty I have is that I, like you, am a student at the University of Chicago.
Here I am now, the editor of this fine journal, ready to bring you facts netted from the bogs of the waking world, gleaned and sorted into the treasures they might well be. To expose scandal and hypocrisy, to unearth secrets. It is the muckraker’s responsibility to scavenge for the truth and to bring it out into the most blazing light.
Yours,
The Editor
5. An albumen silver photograph, 1874
Two men, one in his 80s, one in his 20s, both with naturally white hair and pale eyes, in tailored black suits. The younger man holds a pickax, the elder a pen. A gum label on the reverse reads: Uther Pendragon, Chairman, & Arthur Pendragon, President, The Pendragon Company,*2 Cleveland, Ohio. 1874. Photographer: M. Ambrose.
6. A letter dated May 25
, 1875
Written on thick cardstock embossed with a crest that combines a pen nib with a dragon’s tail. The message has scored the paper deeply enough to scratch through the stock.
A—
Do not make the mistake I made.
End this now, if you wish to inherit.
—UP
7. A clipping from the Chicago Record, March 15, 1894
A March of Destitutes & Demons
FIRST INSTALLMENT
Massillon, Ohio. The world ends, give or take, every 20 or 30 years, and this is no exception. Only last year, the country fell into wrack and ruin; the Panic of 1893, spurred by shortages of two sorts of gold: bullion and grain. Six hundred banks have failed across this nation; half the country is in foreclosure. This reporter has undertaken a study of attempts at restitution and recovery. This is a serial dispatch from the planning of a protest march of the unemployed and insulted upon Washington, D.C., where President Grover Cleveland awaits. The instigators of the march seek to demand legislation to cure the national malady with a Roads & Highways Bill, which would employ the unemployed in macadamizing the nation’s thoroughfares at the expense of the Federal Government.
The proposed march will be the opening salvo in a Presidential run for Mr. Arthur Pendragon, the Cleveland-based millionaire bankrolling it.
This reporter learned of the march, dubbed “Arthur’s Army” by its instigators, when the offices of the Chicago Record began, in late February, to be inundated with telegrams, handwritten and typed letters, and singing messengers announcing that the intrepid Army would be departing Massillon on Easter Sunday, the 25th of March, with 100,000 men, most on foot, though a hundred would be mounted on the Thoroughbred horses of Pendragon.
After expeditioning for mentions of Pendragon in the archives of both the Record and Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer and submitting several specific written requests to interview Mr. Pendragon directly regarding his personal and corporate history, his ambitions toward the Presidency, and the planned march, this reporter relented and took a night train from Chicago on March the 13th, having requested from his Editors the assignment to cover the Army. Now he plans to take to the open road—however ill-maintained—with two unusual gentlemen, both bent on provocation, united in their goal of bringing “goodness to the land.” This reporter was not the only one with the idea—it seems that a dozen journalists sent by various newspapers will march alongside the Army, each allotted 70¢ a day, sufficient to procure pie, coffee, and whisky.
Are the march’s instigators the honest men they purport themselves to be? Have they a goal beyond goodness in their minds? Time and this reporter will tell.
When this reporter arrived in Massillon, having requisitioned a buggy to transport himself 5 miles to the rural farmhouse of Mr. Pendragon, it was Pendragon’s business partner and publicist, the cowboy poet, patent medicine seller, soap-box agitator, and magician Mr. Merle Ambrose, who opened the front door and doffed his silver Stetson, not without taking pains to mention that it, the “Boss of the Plains” model, had been a gift of John Stetson himself during a hunting expedition in 1865 and was made of the felted fur of a rare silver beaver. His own sterling beard, twirled into two cones, was of a length to tuck into his waistcoat, leather, tooled with a saga involving a sword and a stone and fastened with coins of Mexican silver, each stamped with the word “Free.”
Mr. Ambrose initially struck this reporter as an invention, a Wild West show transplant and Buffalo Bill look-alike, arrived in Massillon, Ohio, a quiet town of approximately 11,000 residents on the banks of the Tuscarawas River, with intent to convert the unemployed masses to the side of revolution. The man’s nose showed evidence of recent knuckling, and his aspect was untamed, more mountain man than politician, but here was one of the men behind the march every newspaper in America had been apprised of by urgent wire.
“You must be one a them muckrakers,” said Ambrose.
“I am that,” said this reporter. “Proudly so. Where is the Army you petitioned my newsroom to cover?” The march was a mere 10 days in the future.
Ambrose waved his hand dismissively and informed this reporter that “there’re millions of men out of work in America, and we’ve put out the word to all of ’em they’d best hop trains to Massillon. We’re only worried now they’ll overrun the town.”
“And how was this word put out?” this reporter inquired, pen to notebook, expecting a discussion of handbills and telegrams, but instead, Ambrose walked to the open window and whistled with unexpected skill at a flock of birds that so happened to be transiting the clear blue. The birds saw fit to approach the farmhouse at such speed that this reporter stepped back from the window, shielding his face.
“Little birds told ’em,” said Ambrose, laughed, then passed over first a shovel, then a calling card, embossed with the legend “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“The Pendragon, that is,” commented Ambrose, indicating the card, and laughed another conspiratorial laugh. “The shovel’s for mucking out the stable. Got a rake out there, too, you prefer. We pay in silver, and one a them little birds told me the press corps was fixing to starve.”
This reporter saved himself a dime of per diem by accepting a cup of coffee filtered with eggshells and adulterated with Canadian whisky, alongside a generous slice of ham, and reflected briefly on notions of might, before departing to the stable.
To be continued…
8. A small wooden boat, seaworthy, painted blue
Carved into the wooden plank seat, perhaps with a penknife: the initials ML.
Found inside the boat: multiple shed snakeskins, shattered eggshells from various birds and a black leather doctor’s bag dating to the late 1800s, still filled with vials containing such substances as opium, vellum envelopes containing grains of lead and arsenic, glass hypodermic needles, flannels, bandages and other medical paraphernalia. In the bag as well is a photograph depicting a bespectacled young man in a woolen sweater emblazoned with an embroidered crest, leaning over a pile of books in an office. Framed on the wall behind him is a photograph of a woman in a tailored man’s suit, carrying this same doctor’s bag, standing beside a white-haired child.
9. A much-handled card—a souvenir of a sideshow—hand-colored, ca. 1870
Surrounded by a dreamer’s cloud is an illustration of a duel. A white-haired man with pale blue eyes draws on a man like enough to him to be his twin. The men have fired their pistols at each other. Between the two men stands a dark-haired woman, gloved hands raised. The bullets have penetrated both of her hands and are traveling through the air toward her heart. The dreamer, depicted with the duel drifting up from his skull, is a man in a silver Stetson hat, with a long gray beard and wild eyes.
The card bears the legend: Come See Your Future and Navigate Your Past at Merle Ambrose’s Wild World Show,*3 Presented by the Pendragon Company!
10. An albumen silver photograph, 1863
The graduation ceremony of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1863.
A group of 40 women poses, garbed in white dresses, in front of an impressive building. The women are a diverse group: Caucasian, Black, Japanese, Syrian, Indian.
One graduate, an American Indian woman, is circled in green ink.
11. A clipping from the Chicago Record, March 19, 1894
A March of Destitutes & Demons
SECOND INSTALLMENT
Massillon, Ohio. Some 40 reporters from around the country are now perched here in Massillon, coaxed by the temptation of spectacle and adventure. Spurred by the provocations of Merle Ambrose, who consistently urges the authoring of increasingly fantastical accounts and then claims the press are the devil’s work, bringers of false news to the masses, the press have dubbed themselves the Demons, and in rollicking voices descri
be themselves as an army of Hell’s journalists marching alongside an army of the unemployed, who notably have yet to make it to Massillon.
That said, the Demons, too, have been coaxed by the willingness of Mr. Arthur Pendragon and Mr. Merle Ambrose to provide bacon, whisky, layer cake, and even tickets to a sponsored Western show near Massillon, at which Mr. Ambrose is set to perform. Together, the press corps, stationed in their own tents, await the arrival of the marchers, harboring significant doubt they’ll appear. It has been suggested that Ambrose and Pendragon plan to hire the Western show workers as marchers—a number of roustabouts, riders, clowns, and trick shooters have made the rounds of the Pendragon estate, all willing to seat themselves at the Demons’ campfire to offer up accounts of their adventures.
An assortment of characters other than the sideshow folk have arrived, however, some by Pullman, others riding the rigging. Of the 100,000 marchers promised, there are only 27 to be counted, thoroughly outnumbered by press. This does not concern Ambrose and Pendragon, who emerged from the farmhouse two nights ago to drive hatpins into a map of the United States.
Arthur Pendragon, the march’s benefactor and prospective candidate for President, is a man of some 45 years, over 6 feet in height, with a driven air. As befits these rural surroundings, which include a stable containing Pendragon’s collection of Thoroughbred horseflesh, Pendragon is often costumed as a gentleman farmer, though his substantial fortune was made in metal, about which he is said to have a sixth sense. It is a truth universally held amongst Pendragon’s associates—he refers to them poetically as his “knights”—that he’s capable of standing on any plot of land or rock, driving his pickax into it, and striking gold or silver at will, depending on the day. The sole quirk of Pendragon’s ensemble is the elaborate tooled-leather holster at his hip, containing an ivory-handled, much-polished silver pistol.