Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  Henry Lee burst out laughing then, and he grabbed both me hands across the table, saying, “Ah, it’s just so grand to see you, old Ben, I don’t know what to say first, I swear I don’t.”

  “Tell about the money, mate,” I says, and didn’t he stare then? I says, “Your clothes are for shite, right enough, but you’re walking like a man with money in every pocket—you talk like your mouth’s full of money, and you’re scared it’ll all spill out if you open your lips too wide. Now, last time I saw you, you hadn’t a farthing to bless yourself with, so let’s talk about that, hey? That merrow turn up with his life savings, after all?” And I laughed, because I’d meant it as a joke. I did.

  Henry Lee didn’t laugh. He looked startled, and then he leaned so close I could see where he’d lost a side tooth and picked up a scar right by his left eyebrow—made him look younger, somehow, those things did—and he dropped his voice almost to a whisper, no matter there wasn’t a soul near us. “No,” says he, “no, Ben, he did better than that, a deal better than that. He taught me the making of salt wine.”

  Aye, that’s how I looked at him—exactly the way you’re eyeing me now. Like I’m barking mad, and Jesus and the saints wouldn’t have me. And the way you mumbled, “Salt wine?”—I said it just the same as you, tucking me head down like that, getting me legs under me, in case things turned ugly. I did it true. But Henry Lee only sat back and grinned again. “You heard me, Ben,” he says. “You heard me clear enough.”

  “Salt wine,” I says, and different this time, slowly. “Salt wine… that’d be like pickled beer? Oysters in honey, that kind of thing, is it? How about bloody fried marmalade, then?” Takes me a bit of time to get properly worked up, mind, but foolery will do it. “Whale blubber curry,” I says. “Boiled nor’easter.”

  For answer, Henry Lee reaches into those dirty canvas pants and comes up with a cheap pewter flask, two for sixpence in any chandlery. Doesn’t say one word—just hands it to me, folds his hands on the table and waits. I take me time, study the flask—got a naked lady and a six-point buck on one side, and somebody in a flying chariot looks like it’s caught fire on the other. I start to say how I don’t drink much wine—never did, not Spanish sherry, nor even port, nor none of that Frenchy slop—but Henry Lee flicks one finger to tell me I’m to shut me gob and taste. So that’s what I did.

  All right, this is the hard part to explain. Nor about merrows, nor neither the part about some bloody fool jumping on the back of a tiger shark—the part about the wine. Because it were wine in that flask, and it were salty, and right there’s where I run aground on a lee shore, trying to make you taste and see summat you never will, if your luck holds. Salt wine—not red nor neither white, but gray-green, like the deep sea, and smelling like the sea, filling your head with the sea, but wine all the same. Salt wine….

  First swallow, I lost meself. I didn’t think I were ever coming back.

  Weren’t nothing like being drunk. I’ve downed enough rum, enough brandy, dropped off to sleep in enough jolly company and wakened in enough stinking alleys behind enough shebeens to know the difference. This were more… this were like I’d fallen overboard from me, from meself, and not a single boat lowered to find me. But it didn’t matter none, because summat were bearing me up, summat were surging under me, big and fast and wild, as it might have been a dolphin between me legs, tearing along through the sea—or the air, might be we were flying, I’d not have known—carrying somebody off to somewhere, and who it was I can’t tell you now no more than I could have then. But it weren’t me, I’ll take me affydavy on that. I weren’t there. I weren’t anywhere or anybody, and just then that were just where I wanted to be.

  Just then… aye, you give me a choice just then, happen I might have chosen…. But I’d just had that one swallow, after all, so in a bit there I were, me as ever was, back at that tavern table with Henry Lee, and him still grinning like a dog with two tails, and he says to me, “Well, Ben?”

  When I can talk, I ask him, “You can make this swill yourself?” and when he nods, “Then I’d say your merrow earned his keep. Not half bad.”

  “Best you ever turned into piss,” Henry says. I don’t say nowt back, and after a bit, he leans forward, drops his voice way down again, and says, “It’s our fortune, Ben. Yours and mine. I’m swearing on my mother’s grave.”

  “If the dollymop’s even got one,” I says, because of course he don’t know who his mam was, no more than I know mine. They just dropped us both and went their mortal ways, good luck to us all. I tell him, “Never mind the swearing, just lay out what you mean by our fortune. I didn’t save no merrow—fact, I halfway tried to save you from trying to save him. He don’t owe me nowt, and nor do you.” And I’m on me feet and ready to scarper—just grab up those mangoes and walk. Ain’t a living soul thinks I’ve got no pride, but I bloody do.

  But Henry Lee’s up with me, catching ahold of me arm like an octopus, and he’s saying, “No, no, Ben, you don’t understand. I need you, you have to help me, sit down and listen.” And he pulls and pushes me back down, and leans right over me, so close I can see the scar as cuts into his hairline, where the third mate of the Boston Annie got him with a marlinspike, happened off the Azores. He says, “I can make it, the salt wine, but I need a partner to market it for me. I’ve got no head for business—I don’t know the first thing about selling. You’ve got to ship it, travel with it, be my factor. Because I can’t do this without you, d’you see, Ben?”

  “No, I don’t see a frigging thing,” I says in his face. “I’m no more a factor than you’re a bloody nun. What I am’s a seacook, and it’s past time I was back aboard me ship, so by your leave—”

  Henry Lee’s still gripping me arm so it hurts, and I can’t pry his fingers loose. “Ben, listen!” he fair bellows again. “This is Goa, not the City of London—the Indians won’t ever deal honestly with a Britisher who doesn’t have an army behind him—why should they?—and the Portuguese bankers don’t trust me any more than I’d trust a single one of them not to steal the spots off a leopard and come back later for the whiskers. There’s a few British financiers, but they don’t trust anyone who didn’t go to Eton or Harrow. Now you’re a lot more fly than you ever let on, I’ve always known that—”

  “Too kind,” I says, but he don’t hear. He goes on, “You’re the one who always knew when we were being cheated—by the captain, by the company, by the lady of the house, didn’t matter. Any souk in the world, any marketplace, I always let you do the bargaining—always. You’d haggle forever over a penny, a peseta, a single anna—and you’d get your price every time. Remember? I surely remember.”

  “Ain’t nothing like running a business,” I tell him. “What you’re talking about is responsibility, and I never been responsible for nowt but the job I were paid to do right. I like it that way, Henry Lee, it suits me. What you’re talking about—”

  “I’m talking about a future, Ben. Spend your whole life going from berth to berth, ship to ship—where are you at the end of it? Another rotting hulk, like all the rest, careened on the beach, and no tide ever coming again to float you off. I’m offering you the security of a decent roof over your head, good meals on your table, and a few teeth left in your mouth to chew them with.” He lets go of me then, but his blue eyes don’t. He says, “I’d outfit you, I’d pay your way, and I’d give you one-third of the profits—ah, hell, make it forty, forty percent, what do you say? It’ll be worth it to me to sleep snug a’nights, knowing my old shipmate’s minding the shop and putting the cat out. What do you say, Ben? Will you do it for me?”

  I look at him for a good while, not saying nowt. I remember him one time, talking a drunken gang of Yankee sailors out of dropping us into New York harbor for British spies—wound up buying us drinks, they did, which bloody near killed us anyway. And Piraeus—God’s teeth, Piraeus—when the fool put the comehither on the right woman at the wrong time, and there we was, locked in a cellar for two days and nights, while her hus
band and his mates went on and on, just upstairs, about how to slaughter us so we’d remember it. Henry Lee, he finally got them persuaded that I were carrying some sort of horrible disease, rot your cods off, you leave it long enough, make your nose fall into your soup. They pushed the cellar key under the door and was likely in Istanbul, time we got out of that house. Me, I didn’t stop feeling me nose for another two days.

  So I know what Henry Lee can do, talking, and I sniff all around his words, like a fox who smells the bait and knows the trap’s there, somewhere, underneath. I keep telling him, over and over, “Henry Lee, I never been no better than you with figures—I’d likely run you bankrupt inside of a month.” Never stops him—he just grins and answers back, “I’m bankrupt already, Ben. I’m not swimming in boodle, like you thought—I’ve gone and sunk all I own into a thousand cases of salt wine. Nothing more to lose, you see—there’s no way you can make anything any the worse. So what do you say now?”

  I don’t answer, but I up with that naked-lady flask, and I take another swallow. This time I know what’s coming, and I set meself for it, but the salt wine catches me up again, lifts me and tosses me like before, same as if I was a ship with me mainmast gone, and the waves doing what they like with me. No, it’s not like before—I don’t lose Ben Hazeltine, nor I don’t forget who I am. What happens, I find summat. I find everything. I can’t rightly stand up proper, ’acos I don’t know which way up is, and I feel the eyes rocking in me head, and I’m dribbling wine like I’ve not done since I were a babby… but for a minute, two minutes—no more, I couldn’t have stood no more—everything in the world makes sense to me. For one minute, I’m the flyest cove in the whole world.

  Then it’s gone—gone, thank God or Old Horny, either one—and I’m back to old ordinary, and Henry Lee’s watching me, not a word, and when I can talk I say, “There’s more. I know you, and I know there’s more. You want me to come in with you, Henry Lee, you tell me the part you’re not telling me. Now.”

  He don’t answer straight off—just keeps looking at me out of those nursery-blue eyes. I decide I’d best help him on a bit, so I say, “Right, then, don’t mind if we do talk about merrows. Last time I saw you, you was risking your life for the ugliest one of them ugly buggers, and him having to hand over every farthing he’d got sewn into his underwear, because that’s the frigging rule, right? So when did that happen, hey? We never seen him again, far as I know.”

  “He found me,” Henry Lee says. “Took him a while, but he caught up with me in Port of Spain. It’s important to them, keeping their word, though you wouldn’t think so.” He keeps cracking his knuckles, the way he always used to do when he weren’t sure the captain were swallowing his tale about why we was gone three days in Singapore. “I had it wrong,” he says, “that rule thing. I expected he’d come with his whole fortune in his arms, but all the merrow has to bring you is the thing that’s most precious to him in the world. The most precious thing in the world to that merrow I saved—I call him Gorblimey, that’s as close as I can get to his name—the most precious thing to him was that recipe for salt wine. It’s only some of them know how to make it, and they’ve never given it to a human before. I’m the only one.”

  Me head’s still humming like a honey tree, only it’s swarming with the ghosts of all the things I knew for two minutes. Henry Lee goes on, “He couldn’t write it down for me—they can’t read or write, of course, none of them, I’d never thought about that—so he made me learn it by heart. All that night, over and over, the two of us, me hiding in a lifeboat, him floating in the ship’s shadow, over and over and over, till I couldn’t have remembered my own name. He was so afraid I’d get it wrong.”

  “How would you know?” I can’t help asking him. “Summat like that wine, how could you tell if it were wrong, or gone bad?”

  Henry Lee bristles up at me, the way he’d have his ears flat back if he was a cat. “I make it exactly the way Gorblimey taught me—exactly. There’s no chance of any mistake, Gorblimey himself wouldn’t know whether I made it or he did. Get that right out of your headpiece, Ben, and just tell me if you’ll help me. Now,” he growls, mimicking me to the life. He’d land in the brig, anyway once every voyage, imitating the officers.

  Now, I’m not blaming nobody, you may lay to that. I’m not even blaming the salt wine, although I could. What I done, I done out of me own chuckleheadedness, not because I was drunk, not because Henry Lee and me’d been shipmates. No, it were the money, and that’s the God’s truth—just the money. He were right, you can live on a seacook’s pay, but that’s all you can do. Can’t retire, and maybe open a little seaside inn—can’t marry, can’t live nowhere but on a bloody ship… no, it’s no life, not without the needful, and there’s not many can afford to be too choosy how they come by it. I says, “Might do, Henry Lee. Forty percent. Might do. Might.”

  Henry Lee just lit up all at once, one big wooosh, like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. “Ah, Ben. Ah, Ben, I knew you’d turn up trumps, old growly truepenny Ben. You won’t be sorry, my old mate,” and he claps me on the shoulder, near enough knocking me over. “I promise you won’t be sorry.”

  So I left that Indiaman tub looking for another cook, and I signed on right there as Henry Lee’s factor—his partner, his first mate, his right hand, whatever you like to call it. Took us a hungry year or so to get our feet under us, being just the two, but the word spread faster than you might have supposed. Aye, that were the thing about that salt wine—there were them as took to it like a Froggie to snails, and another sort couldn’t even abide the look of it in the bottle. I were with that lot, and likely for the same reason—not ’acos it were nasty, but ’acos it were too good, too much, more than a body could thole, like the Scots say. I never touched it again after that second swig, never once, not in all the years I peddled salt wine fast as Henry Lee could make it. Not for cheer, not for sorrow, not even for a wedding toast when Henry Lee married, which I’ll get to by and by. Couldn’t thole it, that’s all, couldn’t risk it no more. Third time might eat me up, third time might make me disappear. I stayed faithful to rum and mother’s-ruin, and let the rest go, for once in me fool life.

  Year and a half, we had buyers wherever ships could sail. London, Liverpool, Marseilles, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Athens, New York, Rome… no, not Rome, not really, more Naples—we did best in seaports, always. I didn’t travel everywhere the wine went; we hired folk in time, me and Henry Lee, and we even bought a ship of our own. Weren’t no big ship, not so’s you’d take notice, but big enough for what we put aboard her, which was the best captain and crew anyone could ask for. That were me doing—Henry Lee wanted to spend more on a fancier ship, but I told him it weren’t how many sails that mattered, but the hands on the halyards. And he listened to me, which he mostly did… aye, you couldn’t never call him stupid, poor sod. I’ll say that, anyway.

  Used to look out for that merrow, Henry Lee’s Gorblimey, times I were keeping the wine company on its way. Not that I’d likely have known him from any other of the ones I’d see now and again, chasing the flying fish or swimming along with the porpoises—even nastier, they looked, in the middle of those creatures—but I’d ponder whiles if he knew what were passing above his head, and what he’d be thinking about it if he did. But Henry Lee never spoke word about merrows nor mermaids, none of all that, not if he could help it. Choused him, whiles, I did, telling him he were afeard Gorblimey’d twig how well we was getting on, and come for his own piece, any day now. That’d rouse him every time, and he’d snap at me like a moray, so I belayed that. Might could be I shouldn’t have, but who’s to say? Who’s to say now?

  He’d other matters on his mind by then, what with building himself a slap-up new house on the seafront north of Velha Goa. Palace and a half, it were, to me own lookout, with two floors and two verandas and four chimneys—four chimneys, in a country where you might be lighting a fire maybe twice a year. But Henry Lee told me, never mind: didn’t the grandest place in that
Devon town where he were born have four chimneys, and hadn’t he always wanted to live just so in a house just like that one? Couldn’t say nowt much to that, could I? Me that used to stare hours into the cat’s-meat shop window back home, cause I got it in me head the butcher were me da? He weren’t, by the by, but you see?

  But I did speak a word or two when Henry Lee up and got wed. Local girl, Julia Caterina and about five other names I disremember, with a couple of das in between, like the Portygee nobs do. Pretty enough, she were, with dark brown hair for two or three, brown eyes to crack your heart, and a smile to make a priest give up Lent. Aye, and though she started with nobbut hello and goodbye and whiskey-soda in English, didn’t she tackle to it till she shamed me, who never mastered no more than a score of words in her tongue, and not one of them fit for her ears. Good-tempered with it, too—though she fought her parents bare-knuckle and toe to toe, like Figg or Mendoza, until they let her toss over the grandee they’d promised her to, all for the love of a common Jack Tar, that being what he still were in their sight, didn’t matter how many Bank of England notes he could wave at them. “She’s a lady,” I says, “for all she’s a Portygee, and you’re no more a gentleman than that monkey in your mango tree. Money don’t make such as us into gentlemen, Henry Lee. All it does, it makes us rich monkeys. You know that, same as me.”

  “I’m plain daft over her, Ben,” says he, like I’d never spoke at all. “Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t do a thing but dream about having her near me all the time. Nothing for it but the altar.”

  “Speaking of altars,” says I, “you’ll have to turn Papist, and there’s not one of her lot’ll ever believe you mean it, no more than I would. And never mind her family—what about her friends, what about that whole world she’s been part of since the day she were born? You reckon to sweep her up and away from all that, or try to ease yourself into it and hope they won’t twig what you are? Which is it to be, then, hey?”