The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  “The gateway to Yount is near, but hard to measure,” said Nexius. “Distances are different in your world than on the road to Yount. Soon we leave your world, what we call in our language ‘Karketsoom,’ which means ‘Big Land.’ We call all of you ‘Karket-soomi,’ ‘Big Landers.’ Yount is ‘Sabo-soom,’ that is ‘Small Land.’ We await the ship that will carry us there, the Gallinule, translated into English.”

  “Funny name for a ship,” said Barnabas. “When will it arrive? We really need to push on. Tempus fugit, if you know what I mean.”

  Nexius did not know the phrase but he understood its import. “Very hard to say. We will leave as soon as we can, but time for leaving is not possible to know. An East India ship can take three months or maybe seven months to go from London to Cape Town, all depending on wind and water, yes? It is the same for our next ship, only more so.”

  “I see,” said Barnabas, who did not. “How is that?”

  “I lack the words,” said Nexius, with a gesture of frustration. “Not just wind and water our next ship must face. Other things. You will see. Be patient.”

  “So we might be here for . . . some time then, is that right?” asked Sanford.

  “Yes,” said Nexius, who looked again at Barnabas. “Key still with you always, yes?”

  “Of course,” said Barnabas, checking beneath his vest (a silver foulard).

  “And Tom is healthy?” Nexius asked, turning to Sally.

  “Yes, at least he was a few minutes ago when last I checked the pendant,” said Sally. She dreaded yet cherished the pendant, hating to look but driven to do so almost hourly.

  “Good. You will be protected here as you were in London. Our friends have arranged with the British Army and the East India Company to put soldiers on guard for you. Tomorrow I introduce you to these friends, good friends of Yount who know about your mission.”

  The next day Nexius brought them to the house of Cornelius Pieterszoon Termuyden and his wife the Mejuffrouw Agnetha Termuyden, wholesale merchants. And what a house it was. Large, with a sprawling garden, it sat on the first slope leading to Table Mountain, just off the Herrengracht, above the castle-fort and the Dutch East India House, overlooking the bay. The McDoons fell in love with that house and its owners almost at once.

  “The house we call the Gezelligheid,” said Cornelius Termuyden in beautifully accented English that made one want to sit up straight. He pointed to a well-made sign above the main door. Two mermen astride rearing hippocampuses, bearing tridents and blowing on conch shells, bracketed the word “Gezelligheid,” while dolphins swam below the letters.

  “Which means ‘companionship,’” said the Mejuffrouw. She had masses of white hair done up in a complicated style, and her eyes were as grey as sea-waves.

  “And ‘cosiness,’ like with good friends,” said Cornelius, whose trim grey hair was framed by a dapper black hat. He and his wife had pale skin turned rosy red from years in the Cape sun, and fine wrinkles at the corners of their eyes.

  “It’s the Last Cosy House East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” declared the Mejuffrouw.

  “Or the First,” said her husband, “depending on which way you are going!”

  Everyone smiled. The Last Cosy House . . . it put them in mind of old legends.

  “Do please come in,” said the Termuydens together.

  There was something for everyone in that house. The library overflowed with books in a dozen languages, smelling of cracked leather bindings and slowly browning pages. There were rooms for dining (they even had a set of the indigo pheasant china that Sally adored) and rooms for talking, including a large drawing-chamber called “The New Eglantine,” all equipped with mahogany furniture and families of porcelain figurines on every shelf and mantelpiece, and clocks short and tall striking in unison throughout, and prints on every wall. Half a dozen guest rooms were occupied by banian-merchants from the Bengal and spice-doctors from Batavia, a ship’s surgeon or Swedish apothecarist here, a London factor or a supercargo from Dublin there . . . and not infrequently visitors from Yount travelling under other guises. One room was for music, a little old-fashioned without a pianoforte but with a large harpsichord (“A real Blanchet,” said Cornelius) in one corner. Another room, encased by windows looking up to Table Mountain and across to Signal Hill, was an aviary with cages full of yellow and green lorikeets and large papegaai with rosy beaks from the East Indies, and canary-finches that hopped from one bar to another whenever anyone entered.

  Outside in the large garden were other birds, equally mysterious to the McDoons: sugar-birds with long tails, rock-thrushes, the bokmakierie with its yellow throat and black mask, sun-birds, the robin-chats that the Termuydens called “Jan Fredriks.” Best of all, by the little stream running down from the mountain: kingfishers with a versicolour breast! How they laughed when Sally said, “Look, look, the kingfisher wears a vest just like Uncle Barnabas!” Thereafter, they were “Uncle Barnabas-birds,” even to the Termuydens.

  Other creatures inhabited the garden, first and foremost, the Termuyden’s dog Jantje. “Johnny,” explained the Mejuffrouw. “Like your jolly Jack-tar, our name for our sailors.” At first, Jantje took offense at Isaak, who immediately sought to oust the canine pretender. When a young baboon wandered down from the mountain, however, cat and dog made common cause in defence of the garden and were good friends thereafter. Isaak would spend many contented days hunting the strange rodents and insects of the place.

  Barnabas also spent many days in the garden. “Beans and bacon,” he’d say to Sanford. “See what they can grow here. This might be the first garden, the one in the Book, so much grows here.”

  As summer advanced with unbroken sun day after day, the garden and all of Cape Town blossomed in such profusion that the McDoons nearly wept to see it. Barnabas’s horticultural joy was complete when he found a smilax in one corner of the Termuyden garden. “Sanford, what a beauty it is! A smilax, a real Chinese smilax! To think it might be growing as we speak, back home in Mincing Lane. Oh, what’s their word? Gezelligheid, it is, to be sure!”

  Gezelligheid. The evenings especially were full of good cheer. Some nights the English visitors would teach the Dutch (and Germans and Swedes and so on, whoever might be in attendance) the rules of whist, learning the rules to Poch and Rapuse in return. Other nights were sing-songs. Kidlington, so frequent a guest that the Termuydens considered him part of the McDoons, had a rich singing voice. He was equally good on old English ballads like “Sweet William’s Ghost” and “Barbara Allen” and on the newer London tunes like “The Devil and the Hackney Coachman” and “Merry Miss Mary of Mayfair.” Everyone laughed to hear the English stumble through the words of Dutch songs, the lyrics for which the Mejuffrouw provided.

  The longer they stayed, the more the McDoons felt at home, embraced by the oddness of the house itself. The oddness, Sally decided, was paradoxically a familiar oddness, like a dream one forgets in the morning but remembers in the afternoon. “Or like the glimpse of a bumblebee in the flowers,” she thought as she watched Isaak stalk something in the garden. “Only the bumblebee is violet or purple. Familiar but not.”

  The garden contained more secrets than the smilax. Its upper reaches, as it extended into the foothills of Table Mountain, were given over to massive hedges that created a maze. “We call it a doolhoff in Dutch,” said the Mejuffrouw. “‘Confusion garden,’ you could say in English.”

  “The hedges are very old,” said her husband. “They were here before we arrived.”

  “Oh, long, long before we arrived,” said the Mejuffrouw.

  “Indeed,” agreed Cornelius. “Legend has it that these hedges have roots that go down for miles.”

  “Well,” said the Mejuffrouw. “As for that, it seems that the hedges have no roots at all, since I would swear — yes, swear — that the paths in the maze change from season to season.”

  “The Mejuffrouw is right,” agreed her husband. “And sometimes the hedges rustle as if with wind wh
en all else is still in the garden.”

  “I am not so sure of that,” said the Mejuffrouw, her sea-grey eyes twinkling. “But I do know that the birds won’t nest in the doolhoff.”

  The house held secrets as well. At the far end of the library, behind a lacquered Chinese screen, was an alcove full of curios and souvenirs left over the years by appreciative guests. The alcove was a jumble, what the cook would have called “a right hember-dember auction.” Stuffed animals (including a baboon that Isaak liked to challenge) competed for table space with rock specimens, antelope horns, seashells, ivory figures, porcelain, and carvings from the East Indies. Nearly every inch of wall space right to the ceiling and almost down to the floor was covered with paintings, prints, silhouette drawings, medallions, fine textiles, ladies’ fans, and more.

  “Figs and fiddles,” Barnabas said to the Mejuffrouw one day, as he bent over to examine a silhouette drawing. “Is this really Sir Barrow?”

  “Bien sur,” said the Mejuffrouw. “I remember him well: tall and thin, with deep eyes. You cannot see his eyes in the silhouette, of course, but you would always remember them if you had seen them. He stayed with us for a long time back in, let’s see, it must have been ’01. This was his base when he wrote his book about the Cape. We have a copy here, inscribed by him.”

  “Figs and fiddles,” said Barnabas again, whistling. “The Second Secretary of the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow himself, only I guess he wasn’t yet the Second Secretary then, but no matter! Wonderful! I shall have to tell Sanford.” Barnabas grimaced, wishing he could tell Tom too and remembering how much Tom loved the Navy.

  His gaze landed on a small, carved box. With a start, Barnabas reached down. “Sandalwood,” he said. “Lovely, lovely example this is of Indian art. Do you know where it comes from?”

  “Bombay,” said the Mejuffrouw, looking intently at Barnabas.

  “I thought as much!” said Barnabas. He turned the box over and over, opened its lid, admired the fine jointry, surreptitiously inhaled as much of the sandalwood smell as he could. He felt the pressure of the Mejuffrouw’s deep grey gaze. “Do you remember who gave this to you?”

  “Bien sur, I remember the givers of all these gifts,” said the Mejuffrouw. “An Indian merchant, his wife, and their niece stopped here from Oman. They were taking the girl for special schooling.”

  “Ah,” said Barnabas. He ran his hand over the lid of the box. “Just reminded me, this box did, of something . . . someone.”

  The Mejuffrouw said nothing but Barnabas was acutely aware of her scanning his face. “I have a box like this at home, you see,” Barnabas said, looking at the box and not at the Mejuffrouw. “Back at Mincing Lane. Gave me a turn, that’s all, to see a similar one here.”

  The Mejuffrouw nodded, as if she had heard the answer to a question she had long asked herself. “Come,” she said. “Perhaps that is enough for today. You look sad now, and that is not what we want you to be in the Last Cosy House. Come out to the veranda where the birds are. Sally is there, you can tell her about Sir John Barrow.”

  Sally pretended great interest in her uncle’s description of Sir John Barrow, but she was far away in troubled thoughts. The night before she had dreamed a vision that not even the cosy magic of the Gezelligheid could keep away.

  Like the pelicans on the beach here, she thought. I am flying, gliding like a pelican above a bay, as far above the water as the spire-top of St. Jakobi’s in Hamburg, or maybe even St. Paul’s dome in London. Why I am not frightened, I do not know! But then I am frightened because there is no moon in the sky. No moon!

  She knew with the certainty dreams give that the moon was not simply full-waned or in eclipse. The moon, in this sky, was not. Ahead she saw a promontory plunging into the bay, with waves rolling around its base. She floated just over the promontory. The outthrust land was smooth towards the sea but its interior was ridged and wrinkled. The landmass behind it was heavily wooded, but the small cape itself was grass- or moss-covered except for five massive, wind-twisted trees, four in a square and one at the entrance to a structure in the middle of the square.

  A building with a fissured roof and pillars dislodged, made of white stone, marble maybe, recalled Sally. A temple, a place for offerings and thanksgiving and grief. No one there, not on land or at sea, not in the forest, not on the lawn, not in the temple, but then I heard voices, hundreds of voices.

  Sally was certain they sang in a language not English but that their words were being translated in the dream for her benefit.

  A kiss for the wind in the moonlight,

  A thief made bold, in the unbright.

  Ride away, run away, run away, hide.

  Then she woke up. She wondered at the words and the voices that spoke them. The accent was, she remarked this particularly, a deep Northern one, so that “unbright” came out as “oon-bright,” and so rhymed with “moonlight.” She thought it funny how spellings didn’t always answer to the sounds of words, as when the Purser spelled his name “Salmius Nalmius” but pronounced it “Salms Nalms.”

  When she had the same dream three nights in a row, Sally decided she had to tell the others. The captain emeritus from Yount was, for the first time since any of them had met him, nonplussed. He looked at Sally with something bordering on awe, and — Sally thought — a streak of fear deep in his eyes.

  “How you could see this, or be shown this I do not know,” said Nexius Dexius. “You saw the most holy place in all Yount: the Sign of the Ear.”

  “The Ear!” Barnabas said. “That is the place where I am to be exchanged for Tom! Where the Cretched Man will meet us, that devil.”

  Sally said, “The promontory was like a giant wrinkled ear protruding from the mainland.”

  “Yes,” said the man from Yount. “But it is hard to see that except from a high place.”

  “I saw a row of hills on the mainland, like a necklace around a fat throat,” said Sally. “Only ears don’t have throats.”

  “Yes,” said Nexius. “Those hills are the Mavkuzem monhudde.” He paused, looked to the Termuydens.

  “Hills of the Temple,” said the Mejuffrouw.

  “We have many stories about the Sign of the Ear,” Nexius said. “Some believe that it is the ear of the god who brought us to Yount. Only her ear remains above the ground, the rest of her under the earth, sleeping but always listening to the sasa serxim, prayers, of her people above the earth.”

  Sally leaned forward. “That’s why the temple is there — to bring the prayers directly into the ear of God.”

  “Yes,” said Nexius. “That is the reason. We must pray to her because only she can take us away again, make Yount free, bring us to the place we are supposed to be.”

  “But then why was the temple deserted, ruined?” said Sally. “If you need to pray to God directly for . . . ?”

  Nexius put his hands on his collarbones and bowed his head, looking pained as he said, “We do not all agree in Yount, any more than you do here in Karket-soom. We’ve had terrible wars. You can hear all about these from the Learned Doctors if we reach Yount. For now, it is enough to know that the temple has been broken.”

  Sanford thought, “God created man in his own image . . . male and female created he them.” He shook his head and asked, “You say ‘she’ and ‘her.’ How can that be?”

  Nexius shrugged and said, “The god we pray to in Yount is a Mother, not a Father. I cannot explain better than that.”

  Before Sanford could query him again, Nexius turned to Sally and asked, “You saw the five trees?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A quincunx with one tree and the temple in the middle.”

  “And the trees had their leaves?” asked Nexius.

  “Yes.”

  “There is our hope,” he said. “As long as the trees are alive, we believe that the temple can be rebuilt. The trees must live, and the moon must return. The key is to help bring us back the moon.”

  A shiver passed through Sally. No moon! There was no moo
n in Yount!

  That evening, as he prepared for sleep, Barnabas looked hard at the key, turning it over and over in his palm. “Buttons and beeswax,” he said, and gave a low whistle. “A key to bring back the moon. No wonder the Cretched fellow and the Wurm-brute want it. Strange though, it hardly looks like it would open the door to the attic in Mincing Lane, let alone draw down the moon. . . . Ah, the Man in the Moon came down too soon . . .” And then, grasping the key, he fell asleep.

  Sally’s dream, especially when it returned to her twice more, broke the spell of calm cast by the Gezelligheid. Sally tried to delay the onset of sleep by spending hours gazing at the stars and the moon, “lunaticking” as Tom had called it in London to tease her. The Gezelligheid had a star-walk around the cupola at the peak of its roof. Sally lost herself for hours in the heavens, the clarity and immensity of which were unlike anything she could see in London. James Kidlington joined her once or twice, but the Mejuffrouw was Sally’s steady companion as the moon waxed and waned and the stars wheeled. Looking north, Sally and the Mejuffrouw on December nights saw the Milky Way running in a great arc from the northwest to the southeast. The Pleiades and Aldebaran in Taurus shone brightly in the middle sky, pointing to Orion’s Belt and, brightest of all, Sirius overhead. Turning around, they could see Fomalhaut, Achernar, and Canopus — the Three Torches — aligned just above the rim of Table Mountain. Something tugged at Sally’s mind as she looked at these stars. She traced the lines of the stars, and kept coming back to Adhara, the Virginal Star, outshone in Canis Major by Sirius: Adhara was a seventh star, sitting at the intersection of the lines formed by Aldebaran-Orion’s Belt-Sirius and the Three Torches. Adhara the Maiden also looked at the Mother, Maia in the Pleiades, just to the northwest of Aldebaran. Melody and meaning hid in the pattern: “This picture, this gathering of the stars,” Sally murmured. “But why, and for what?”