Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  I never saw him actually leave the blue angel. I don’t think anyone did. He was simply standing right in front of me, tall enough that I had to look up to meet his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t a thousand years old, but Aunt Rifke hadn’t missed by much. It wasn’t his clothes that told me—he wore a white turban that looked almost square, a dark-red vest sort of thing and white trousers, under a gray robe that came all the way to the ground—it was the eyes. If blackness is the absence of light, then those were the blackest eyes I’ll ever see, because there was no light in those eyes, and no smallest possibility of light ever. You couldn’t call them sad: sad at least knows what joy is, and grieves at being exiled from joy. However old he really was, those eyes were a thousand years past sad.

  “Sephardi,” Rabbi Shulevitz murmured. “Of course he’d be Sephardi.”

  Aunt Rifke said, “You can see through him. Right through.”

  In fact he seemed to come and go: near-solid one moment, cobweb and smoke the next. His face was lean and dark, and must have been a proud face once. Now it was just weary, unspeakably weary—even a ten-year-old could see that. The lines down his cheeks and around the eyes and mouth made me think of desert pictures I’d seen, where the earth gets so dry that it pulls apart, cracks and pulls away from itself. He looked like that.

  But he smiled at me. No, he smiled into me, and just as I’ve never seen eyes like his again, I’ve never seen a smile as beautiful. Maybe it couldn’t reach his eyes, but it must have reached mine, because I can still see it.

  He said softly, “Thank you. You are a kind boy. I promise you, I will not take up much room.”

  I braced myself. The only invasive procedures I’d had any experience with then were my twice-monthly allergy shots and the time our doctor had to lance an infected finger that had swollen to twice its size. Would possession it be anything like that? Would it make a difference if you were sort of inviting the possession, not being ambushed and taken over, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I didn’t mean to close my eyes, but I did.

  Then I heard the voice of the blue angel.

  “There is no need.” It sounded like the voice I knew, but the breath in it was different—I don’t know how else to put it. I could say it sounded stronger, or clearer, or maybe more musical; but it was the breath, the free breath. Or maybe that isn’t right either, I can’t tell you—I’m not even certain whether angels breathe, and I knew an angel once. There it is.

  “Manassa, there is no need,” she said again. I turned to look at her then, when she called the dybbuk by his name, and she was smiling herself, for the first time. It wasn’t like his; it was a faraway smile at something I couldn’t see, but it was real, and I heard Uncle Chaim catch his breath. To no one in particular, he said, “Now she smiles. Never once, I could never once get her to smile.”

  “Listen,” the blue angel said. I didn’t hear anything but my uncle grumbling, and Rabbi Shulevitz’s continued Hebrew prayers. But the dybbuk—Manassa—lifted his head, and the endlessly black eyes widened, just a little.

  The angel said again, “Listen,” and this time I did hear something, and so did everyone else. It was music, definitely music, but too faint with distance for me to make anything out of it. But Aunt Rifke, who loved more kinds of music than you’d think, put her hand to her mouth and whispered, “Oh.”

  “Manassa, listen,” the angel said for the third time, and the two of them looked at each other as they music grew stronger and clearer. I can’t describe it properly: it wasn’t harps and psalteries—whatever a psaltery is, maybe you use it singing psalms—and it wasn’t a choir of soaring heavenly voices, either. It was almost a little scary, the way you feel when you hear the wild geese passing over in the autumn night. It made me think of that poem of Tennyson’s, with that line about the horns of Elfland faintly blowing. We’d been studying it in school.

  “It is your welcome, Manassa,” the blue angel said. “The gates are open for you. They were always open.”

  But the dybbuk backed away, suddenly whimpering. “I cannot! I am afraid! They will see!”

  The angel took his hand. “They see now, as they saw you then. Come with me, I will take you there.”

  The dybbuk looked around, just this side of panicking. He even tugged a bit at the blue angel’s hand, but she would not let him go. Finally he sighed very deeply—lord, you could feel the dust of the tombs in that sigh, and the wind between the stars—and nodded to her. He said, “I will go with you.”

  The blue angel turned to look at all of us, but mostly at Uncle Chaim. She said to him, “You are a better painter than I was a muse. And you taught me a great deal about other things than painting. I will tell Rembrandt.”

  Aunt Rifke said, a little hesitantly, “I was maybe rude. I’m sorry.” The angel smiled at her.

  Rabbi Shulevitz said, “Only when I saw you did I realize that I had never believed in angels.”

  “Continue not to,” the angel replied. “We rather prefer it, to tell you the truth. We work better that way.”

  Then she and the dybbuk both looked at me, and I didn’t feel even ten years old; more like four or so. I threw my arms around Aunt Rifke and buried my face in her skirt. She patted my head—at least I guess it was her, I didn’t actually see her. I heard the blue angel say in Yiddish, “Sei gesund, Chaim’s Duvidl. You were always courteous to me. Be well.”

  I looked up in time to meet the old, old eyes of the dybbuk. He said, “In a thousand years, no one has ever offered me freely what you did.” He said something else, too, but it wasn’t in either Hebrew or Yiddish, and I didn’t understand.

  The blue angel spread her splendid, shimmering wings one last time, filling the studio—as, for a moment, the mean winter sky outside seemed to flare with a sunset hope that could not have been. Then she and Manassa, the dybbuk, were gone, vanished instantly, which makes me think that the wings aren’t really for flying. I don’t know what other purpose they could serve, except they did seem somehow to enfold us all and hold us close. But maybe they’re just really decorative. I’ll never know now.

  Uncle Chaim blew out his breath in one long, exasperated sigh. He said to Aunt Rifke, “I never did get her right. You know that.”

  I was trying to hear the music, but Aunt Rifke was busy hugging me, and kissing me all over my face, and telling me not ever, ever to do such a thing again, what was I thinking? But she smiled up at Uncle Chaim and answered him, “Well, she got you right, that’s what matters.” Uncle Chaim blinked at her. Aunt Rifke said, “She’s probably telling Rembrandt about you right now. Maybe Vermeer, too.”

  “You think so?” Uncle Chaim looked doubtful at first, but then he shrugged and began to smile himself. “Could be.”

  I asked Rabbi Shulevitz, “He said something to me, the dybbuk, just at the end. I didn’t understand.”

  The rabbi put his arm around me. “He was speaking in old Ladino, the language of the Sephardim. He said, ‘I will not forget you.’” His smile was a little shaky, and I could feel him trembling himself, with everything over. “I think you have a friend in heaven, David. Extraordinary Duvidl.”

  The music was gone. We stood together in the studio, and although there were four of us, it felt as empty as the winter street beyond the window where the blue angel had posed so often. A taxi took the corner too fast, and almost hit a truck; a cloud bank was pearly with the moon’s muffled light. A group of young women crossed the street, singing.

  I could feel everyone wanting to move away, but nobody did, and nobody spoke, until Uncle Chaim finally said, “Rabbi, you got time for a sitting tomorrow? Don’t wear that suit.”

  SALT WINE

  All right, then. First off, this ain’t a story about some seagoing candytrews dandy Captain Jack, or whatever you want to call him, who falls in love with a mermaid and breaks his troth to a mortal woman to live with his fish-lady under the sea. None of that in this story, I can promise you; and our man’s no captain, but a plain blue-eyed sailorman name
d Henry Lee, AB, who starts out good for nowt much but reefing a sail, holystoning a deck, taking a turn in the crow’s-nest, talking his way out of a tight spot, and lending his weight to the turning of a capstan and his voice to the bellowing of a chanty. He drank some, and most often when he drank it ended with him going at it with one or another of his mates. Lost part of an ear that way off Panama, he did, and even got flogged once for pouring grog on the captain. But there was never no harm in Henry Lee, not in them days. Anybody remembers him’ll tell you that.

  Me name’s Ben Hazeltine. I remember Henry Lee, and I’ll tell you why.

  I met Henry Lee when we was both green hands on the Mary Brannum, out of Cardiff, and we stayed messmates on and off, depending. Didn’t always ship out together, nowt like that—just seemed to happen so. Any road, come one rainy spring, we was on the beach together, out of work. Too many hands, not enough ships—you get that, some seasons. Captains can take their pick those times, and Henry Lee and I weren’t neither one anybody’s first pick. Isle of Pines, just south of Cuba—devil of a place to be stranded, I’ll tell you. Knew we’d land a berth sooner or later—always had before—only we’d no idea when, and both of us hungry enough to eat a seagull, but too weak to grab one. I’ll tell you the God’s truth, we’d gotten to where we was looking at bloody starfish and those Portygee man-o’-war jellies and wondering… well, there you are, that’s how bad it were. I’ve been in worse spots, but not many.

  Now back then, there was mermaids all over the place, like you don’t see so much today. Partial to warm waters, they are—the Caribbean, Mediterranean, the Gulf Stream—but I’ve seen them off the Orkneys, and even off Greenland a time or two, that’s a fact. What’s not a fact is the singing. Combing their hair, yes; they’re women, after all, and that’s what women do, and how you going to comb your hair out underwater? But I never heard one mermaid sing, not once.

  And they ain’t all beautiful—stop a clock, some of them would.

  Now, what you didn’t see much of in the old times, and don’t hardly be seeing at all these days, was mermen. Merrows, some folk call them. Ugly as sin, the lot: not a one but’s got a runny red nose, nasty straggly hair—red too, mostly, I don’t know why—stumpy green teeth sticking up and out every which way, skin like a crocodile’s arse. You get a look at one of those, it don’t take much to figure why your mermaid takes to hanging around sailors. Put me up against a merrow, happen even I start looking decent enough, by and by.

  Any road, like I told you, Henry Lee and I was pretty well down to eating our boots—or we would have been if we’d had any. We was stumbling along the beach one morning, guts too empty to growl, looking for someone to beg or borrow from—or maybe just chew up on the spot, either way—when there’s a sudden commotion out in the water, and someone screaming for help. Well, I knew it were a merrow straightaway, and so did Henry Lee—you can’t ever mistake a merrow’s creaky, squawky voice, once you’ve heard it—and when we ran to look, we saw he had a real reason to scream. Big hammerhead had him cornered against the reef, circling and circling him, the way they do when they’re working up to a strike. No, I tell a lie, I misremember—it were a tiger shark, not a hammerhead. Hammer, he swims in big packs, he’ll stay out in the deep water, but your tiger, they’ll come right in close, right into the shallows. And they’ll leave salmon or tuna to go after a merrow. Just how they are.

  Now merrows are tough as they’re unsightly, you don’t never want to be disputing a fish or a female with a merrow. But to a tiger shark, a merrow’s a nice bit of Cornish pasty. This one were flapping his arms at the tiger, hitting out with his tail—worst thing he could have done; they’ll go for the tail first thing, that’s the good part. I says to Henry Lee, I says, “Look sharp, mate—might be summat over for us.” Sharks is real slapdash about their meals, and we was hungry.

  But Henry Lee, he gives me just the one look, with his eyes all big and strange—and then rot me if he ain’t off like a pistol shot, diving into the surf and heading straight for the reef and that screaming merrow. Ain’t too many sailors can really swim, you know, but Henry Lee, he were a Devon man, and he used to say he swam before he could walk. He had a knife in his belt—won it playing euchre with a Malay pirate—and I could see it glinting between his teeth as he slipped through them waves like a dolphin, which is a shark’s mortal enemy, you know. Butt ’em in the side, what they do, in the belly, knock ’em right out of the water. I’ve seen it done.

  That tiger shark never knew Henry Lee were coming till he were on its back, hanging on like a jockey and stabbing everywhere he could reach. Blood enough in the water, I couldn’t hardly see anything—I could just hear that merrow, still screeching his ugly head off. Time I caught sight of Henry Lee again, he were halfway back to shore, grinning at me around that bloody knife, and a few fins already slicing in to finish off their mate, ta ever so. I practically dragged Henry Lee out of the water, ’acos of he were bleeding too—shark’s hide’ll take your own skin off, and his thighs looked like he’d been buggering a hedgehog.

  “Barking mad,” I told him. “Barking, roaring, howling mad! God’s frigging teeth, you ought to be put somewhere you can’t hurt yourself—aye, nor nobody else. What in frigging Jesus’ frigging name possessed you, you louse-ridden get?”

  See, it weren’t that we was all such mates back then, me and Henry Lee, it were more that I thought I knew him—knew what he’d do when, and what he wouldn’t; knew what I could trust him for, and what I’d better see to meself. There’s times your life can depend on that kind of knowing—weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be here, telling this. I says it again, “What the Christ possessed you, Henry bleeding Lee?”

  But he’d already got his back to me, looking out toward the reef, water still roiling with the sharks fighting for leftovers. “Where’s that merrow gone?” he wanted to know. “He was just there—where’s he got to?” He was set to swim right back out there, if I hadn’t grabbed him again.

  “Panama by now, if he’s got the sense of a weevil,” says I. “More sense than you, anyway. What kind of bloody idiot risks his life for a bloody merrow?”

  “An idiot who knows how a merrow can reward you!” Henry Lee turned back around to face me, and I swear his blue eyes had gone black and wild as the sea off Halifax. “Didn’t you never hear about that? You save a merrow’s life, he’s bound to give you all his treasure, all the plunder he’s ever gathered from shipwrecks, sea fights—everything he’s got in his cave, it’s the rule. He don’t have no choice, it’s the rule!”

  I couldn’t help it, I were laughing before he got halfway through. “Aye, Henry Lee,” I says. “Aye, I’ve heard that story, and you know where I heard it? At me mam’s tit, that’s where, and at every tit since, and every mess where I ever put me feet under the table. Pull the other one, chum, that tale’s got long white whiskers on it.” Wouldn’t laugh at him so today, but there you are. I were younger then.

  Well, Henry Lee just gave me that look, one more time, and after that he didn’t speak no more about merrows and treasures. But he were up all that night—we slept on the beach, y’see, and every time I roused, the fool were pacing the water’s edge, this way and that, gaping out into the bloody black, plain waiting for that grateful merrow to show up with his arms full of gold and jewels and I don’t know what, all for him, along of being saved from the sharks. “Rule,” thinks I. “Rule, me royal pink bum,” and went back to sleep.

  But there’s treasure and there’s treasure—depends how you look at it, I reckon. Very next day, Henry Lee found himself a berth aboard a whaler bound home for Boston and short a foremast hand. He tried to get me signed on too, but… well, I knew the captain, and the captain remembered me, so that were the end of that. You’d not believe the grudges some of them hold.

  Me, I lucked onto a Spanish ship, a week or ten days later—she’d stopped to take on water, and I got talking with the cook, who needed another messboy. I’ve had better berths, but it got me to M�
�laga—and after that, one thing led to another, and I didn’t see Henry Lee again for six or seven years, must have been, the way it happens with seamen. I thought about him often enough, riding that tiger shark to rescue that merrow who were going to make him rich, and I asked after him any time I met an English hand, or a Yankee, but never a word could anyone tell me—not until I rounded a fruitstall in the marketplace at Velha Goa, and almost ran over him!

  How I got there’s no great matter—I were a cook meself by then, on a wallowing scow of an East Indiaman, and trying to get some greens and fresh fruit into the crew’s hardtack diet, if just to sweeten the farts in the fo’c’sle. As for why I were running, with a box of mangoes in me arms… well, that don’t figure in this story neither, so never you mind.

  Henry Lee looked the same as I remembered him—still not shaving more than every three days, I’d warrant, still as blue-eyed an innocent as ever cracked a bos’un’s head with a beer bottle. Only change in him I could see, he didn’t look like a sailor no more. Hard to explain; he were dressing just the same as ever—singlet, blue canvas pants, same rope-sole shoes, even the very same dirty white cap he always wore—but summat was different about him. Might have been the way he walked—he’d lost that little roll we all have, walked like he’d not been to sea in his life. Aye, might have been that.

  Well, he give a great whoop to see me, and he grabbed hold of me, mangoes and all, and dragged me off into a dark little Portygee tavern—smelled of dried fish and fried onions, I remember, and cloves under it all. They knew him there—landlord patted his back, kissed him on the cheek, brought us some kind of mulled ale, and left us alone. And Henry Lee sat there with his arms folded and grinned at me, not saying a word, until I finally told him he looked like a blasted old hen, squatting over one solitary egg, and it likely rotten at that. “Talk or be damned to you,” I says. “The drink’s not good enough to keep me from walking out of this fleapit.”