Sister Emily's Lightship

by Jane Yolen

  She brushed her silvery hair back from her forehead with a delicate hand. “You do not understand the nature of the djinn,” she said. “You do not understand the nature of the bottle.”

  “I understand rank,” I said. “On the sea I was between the captain and the rowers. In that house,” and I gestured with my head to the palace behind me, “I am below my master and above the kitchen staff. Where are you?”

  Her brow furrowed as she thought. “If I work my wonders for centuries, I might at last attain a higher position within the djinn,” she said.

  It was my turn to smile. “Rank is a game,” I said. “It may be conferred by birth, by accident, or by design. But rank does not honor the man. The man honors the rank.”

  “You are a philosopher,” she said, her eyes lightening.

  “I am a Greek,” I answered. “It is the same thing.”

  She laughed again, holding her palm over her mouth coquettishly. I could no longer see straight through her though an occasional piece of driftweed appeared like a delicate tattoo on her skin.

  “Perhaps we both need a wish,” I said, shifting my weight. One of my feet touched hers and I could feel a slight jolt, as if lightning had run between us. Such things happen occasionally on the open sea.

  “Alas, I cannot wish, myself,” she said in a whisper. “I can only grant wishes.”

  I looked at her lovely face washed with its sudden sadness and whispered back, “Then I give my wish to you.”

  She looked directly into my eyes and I could see her eyes turn golden in the dusty light. I could at the same time somehow see beyond them, not into the sand or water, but to a different place, a place of whirlwinds and smokeless fire.

  “Then, Antithias, you will have wasted a wish,” she said. Shifting her gaze slightly, she looked behind me, her eyes opening wide in warning. As she spoke, her body seemed to melt into the air and suddenly there was a great white bird before me, beating its feathered pinions against my body before taking off towards the sky.

  “Where are you going?” I cried.

  “To the Valley of Abqar,” the bird called. “To the home of my people. I will wait there for your wish, Greek. But hurry. I see both your past and your future closing in behind you.”

  I turned and, pouring down the stone steps of my master’s house, were a half-dozen guards and one shrilling eunuch pointing his flabby hand in my direction. They came towards me screaming, though what they were saying I was never to know for their scimitars were raised and my Arabic deserts me in moments of sheer terror.

  I think I screamed; I am not sure. But I spun around again towards the sea and saw the bird winging away into a halo of light.

  “Take me with you,” I cried. “I desire no freedom but by your side.”

  The bird shuddered as it flew, then banked sharply, and headed back towards me, calling, “Is that your wish, master?”

  A scimitar descended.

  “That is my wish,” I cried, as the blade bit into my throat.

  We have lived now for centuries within the green bottle and Zarifa was right, I had not understood its nature. Inside is an entire world, infinite and ever-changing. The smell of the salt air blows through that world and we dwell in a house that sometimes overlooks the ocean and sometimes overlooks the desert sands.

  Zarifa, my love, is as mutable, neither young nor old, neither soft nor hard. She knows the songs of blind Homer and the poet Virgil as well as the poems of the warlords of Ayyam Al-’Arab. She can sing in languages that are long dead.

  And she loves me beyond my wishing, or so she says, and I must believe it for she would not lie to me. She loves me though I have no great beauty, my body bearing a sailor’s scars and a slave’s scar and this curious blood necklace where the scimitar left its mark. She loves me, she says, for my cynic’s wit and my noble heart, that I would have given my wish to her.

  So we live together in our ever-changing world. I read now in six tongues beside Greek and Arabic, and have learned to paint and sew. My paintings are in the Persian style, but I embroider like a Norman queen. We learn from the centuries, you see, and we taste the world anew each time the cork is drawn.

  So there, my master, I have fulfilled your curious wish, speaking my story to you alone. It seems a queer waste of your one piece of luck, but then most men waste their wishes. And if you are a poet and a storyteller, as you say, of the lineage of blind Homer and the rest, but one who has been blocked from telling more tales, then perhaps my history can speed you on your way again. I shall pick up one of your old books, my master, now that we have a day and a night in this new world. Do you have a favorite I should try—or should I just go to a bookseller and trust my luck? In the last few centuries it has been remarkably good, you see.

  A Ghost of an Affair

  1.

  MOST GHOST STORIES begin or end with a ghost. Not this one. This begins and ends with a love affair. That one of the partners was a ghost has little to do with things, except for a complication or two. The heart need not be beating to entertain the idea of romance. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of the universe.

  To think otherwise is to miscalculate the odds of love.

  2.

  Andrea Crow did not look at all like her name, being fair-haired and soft voiced. But she had a scavenger’s personality, that is she collected things with a fierce dedication. As a girl she had collected rocks and stones, denuding her parent’s driveway of mica-shining pebbles. As an adolescent she had turned the rock-collection into an interest in gemstones. By college she was majoring in geology, minoring in jewelry making. (It was one of those schools so prevalent in the ’80s where life-experience substituted for any real knowledge. Only a student bent on learning ever learned anything. But perhaps that is true even in Oxford, even in Harvard.)

  Andrea’s rockhound passion made her a sucker for young men carrying ropes and pitons and she learned to scramble up stone faces without thinking of the danger. For a while she even thought she might attempt the Himalayas. But a rock-climbing friend died in an avalanche there and so she decided going to gem shows was far safer. She was a scavenger but she wasn’t stupid.

  The friend who died in the avalanche was not the ghost in this story. That was a dead girl friend and Andrea was depressingly straight in her love life.

  Andrea graduated from college and began a small jewelry business in Chappaqua with a healthy jump-start from her parents who died suddenly in a car crash going home from her graduation. They left a tidy sum and their house to Andrea who, after a suitable period of mourning, plunged into work, turning the garage into her workroom.

  She sold her jewelry at crafts fairs and Renaissance Faires and to several of the large stores around the country who found her Middle Evils line especially charming. The silver and gold work was superb, of course. She had been well trained. But it was the boxing of the jewelry—in polished rosewood with gold or silver hinges—as well as the printed legends included in each piece—that made her work stand out.

  Still, her business remained small until one Christmas Neiman Marcus ordered 5,000 adder stone rings in Celtic scrolled rosewood boxes. The rings, according to legend, “ensured prosperity, repelled evil spirits, and in 17th century Scotland were considered to keep a child free of the whooping cough.” She finished that order so far in the black that she only had to go to one Renaissance Faire the following summer for business.

  Well, to be honest, she would have gone anyway. She needed the rest after the Neiman Marcus push. Besides, she enjoyed the Faire. Many of her closest friends were there.

  Well—all of her closest friends were there.

  All three of them.

  3.

  Simon Morrison was the son and grandson and great grandson of Crail fisherfolk. He was born to the sea. But the sea was not to his liking. And as he had six brothers born ahead of him who could handle the fishing lines and nets, he saw no reason to stay in Crail for longer than was necessary.

 
; So on the day of his majority, June 17, 1847, he kissed his mother sweetly and said farewell to his father’s back, for he was not so big that his Da—a small man with a great hand—might not have whipped him for leaving.

  Simon took the northwest road out of Crail and made his way by foot to the ferry that crossed the River Forth and so on into Edinburgh. And there he could have lost himself in the alehouses, as had many a lad before him.

  But Simon was not just any lad. He was a lad with a passionate dream. And while it was not his father’s and grandfather’s and great grandfather’s dream of herring by the hundredweight, it was a dream nonetheless.

  His dream was to learn to work in silver and gold.

  Now, how—you might well ask—could a boy raised in the East Neuk of Fife—in a little fishing village so ingrown a boy’s cousin might be his uncle as well—how could such a boy know the first thing about silver and gold?

  The answer is easier than you might suspect.

  The laird and his wife had had a silver wedding anniversary and a collection was taken up for a special gift from the town. All the small people had given a bit of money they had put aside; the gentry added more. And there was soon enough to hire a silversmith from Edinburgh to make a fine silver centerpiece in the shape of a stag rearing up, surrounded by eight hunting dogs. The dogs looked just like the laird’s own pack, including a stiff-legged mastiff with a huge underslung jaw.

  The centerpiece had been on display for days in the Crail town hall, near the mercat cross, before the gifting of it. Simon had gone to see it out of curiosity, along with his brothers.

  It was the first time that art had ever touched his life.

  Touched?

  He had been bowled over, knocked about, nearly slain by the beauty of the thing.

  After that, fishing meant nothing to him. He wanted to be an artisan. He did not know enough to call it art.

  When he got to Edinburgh, a bustle of a place and bigger than twenty Crails laid end to end to end, Simon looked up that same silversmith and begged to become the man’s apprentice.

  The man would have said no. He had apprentices enough as it was. But some luck was with Simon, for the next day when Simon came around to ask again, two of the lowest apprentices were down with a pox of some kind and had to be sent away. And Simon—who’d been sick with that same pox in his childhood and never again—got to fetch and carry for months on end until by the very virtue of his hard working, the smith offered him a place.

  And that is how young Simon Morrison the fisherlad became not-so-young Simon Morrison the silversmith. He was well beyond thirty and not married. He worked so hard, he never had an eye for love, or so it was said by the other lads.

  He only had an eye for art.

  4.

  Now in the great course of things, these two should never have met. Time itself was against them—that greatest divide—a hundred years to be exact.

  Besides, Simon would never have gone to America. America was a land of cutthroats and brigands. He did not waste his heart thinking on it, though—in fact—he never wasted his heart on anything but his work.

  And though Andrea had once dreamed of Katmandu and Nepal, she had never fancied Scotland with its “dudes in skirts,” as her friend Heidi called them.

  But love, though it may take many a circuitous route, somehow manages to get from one end of the map to another.

  Always.

  5.

  Because of the adder rings—a great hit with the Neiman Marcus buyers—Andrea was sent to Scotland by Vogue magazine to pose before a ruin of a fourteenth century castle. The castle, called Dunottar, commanded a spit of land some two and a half hours drive along the coast from Edinburgh and had at one point been the hiding place for the Scottish crown jewels.

  Windy and raw weather did not stop the Dunottar shoot; in fact it so speeded things up, the shoot finished early on a Thursday morning. Andrea then had three and a half days to explore the grey stone city of Edinburgh.

  She loved the twisty streets and closes, with names like Cowgate and Grassmarket and Lady Wynd, and the antique jewelry shop on a little lane called Thistle.

  Edinburgh seemed to be a city of rain and rainbows. A single rainbow over the Greek revival temple on the hill, and a double over the great grey castle.

  “If there is such a thing as magic…” Andrea found herself whispering aloud, “it’s here in this city.” For the first time she actually found herself believing in the possibility.

  The first two days in Edinburgh went quickly, but she soon tired of tourists who spoke every language except English. She knew she needed some quiet, far away from the Royal Mile and its aggressively Celtic shoppes, and far from the Americanization of Princes Street, the main shopping road, where a Macdonalds (without the arches) sat right next to British franchises.

  It was then that she discovered a hidden walk that wound around and under the city.

  Leith Walk.

  Leith had been the old port on the Firth and once a city in its own right, but was now a bustling part of Edinburgh. The old port area after years of decay was now being tarted up, and modernized flats with large To Let signs dotted the streets. At first Andrea kept misreading the signs, wondering why toilets were advertised everywhere. Then giggling over her mistake, she went aboard a floating ship restaurant for a quiet lunch alone.

  She didn’t mean to listen in, but she overheard an elderly English couple near her talking about Leith Walk, which sounded wonderfully off the beaten tourist path.

  “Excuse me,” she said, leaning over, “I couldn’t help hearing you mention Leith Walk. It’s not in my book.” She pointed to the green Michelin Guide by her plate.

  They told her how to find the walk which, they said, snaked under and over parts of Edinburgh along the Leith River.

  “Though the locals call it the ‘Water of Leith,’” the woman said. “And as you go along, you will often feel as if you had stumbled on to a lost path into faerie.”

  Andrea was struck by how earnestly she spoke.

  “The Walk looks as if it ends up in Dean Village,” the English woman added.

  “An old grain milling center, that,” interrupted her companion. “End of Bell’s Brae. Off Queensferry. Solid bridge. Pretty, too.” His bristly ginger moustache seemed to strain his words for they came out crisp and unadorned.

  “But do not be fooled, my dear,” the woman continued. “It becomes a mere trickle of a path. But it does go on.”

  “The path…” Andrea mused, remembering her Tolkein, “goes ever on…”

  The English couple laughed and the man said something in a strange tongue.

  “I beg your pardon,” Andrea said. “I don’t speak…” She wasn’t in fact sure what language he had used.

  “I beg your pardon,” the man said. “Certain you’d know Elvish.” His eyes twinkled at her and he no longer seemed so starchy. “I simply wished you a good journey and a safe return.”

  “Thank you,” Andrea said.

  She smiled at them as they stood, and went out, without—Andrea noticed—leaving any kind of a tip.

  6.

  Simon was not much of a drinker, certainly not as Scots go. He rarely went out with the lads.

  He was a walker, though.

  Hill walking when he could get out of the city bustle on holiday.

  Town walking when he could not.

  He always took his lunch with him and during a work day, he would spend that precious time walking, eating as he went.

  Fond of hiking up Calton Hill or Arthur’s Seat—both of them affording panoramic views of the city—Simon also liked strolling to the Royal Botanic Garden. There he’d dine amidst the great patches of carefully designed flower beds or, in winter, in the Tropical Palm House, enjoying the moist heat.

  Occasionally he would take a sketch book and set off along the winding Water of Leith walk in the direction of St. Bernard’s Well. He passed few people there, unlike his walks up Calton Hill or Arthu
r’s Seat. And he enjoyed the solitude.

  The little drawings he did as he sat by the river found their way into his silverwork—intricate twists of foliage, the splay of water over stone, the feathering on the wings of ravens and rooks.

  He had begun such drawings as an apprentice, and continued them—with his master’s approval—as a journeyman. He perfected them when he became a master silversmith himself.

  In time he became famous for them.

  In time.

  7.

  So you think you see the arc of the plot now. They will meet—Simon and Andrea—along the Leith Walk.

  They will fall in love.

  Marry.

  And…

  But you have forgotten that when Andrea takes her first steps along the Leith Walk, heading away from the old port towards Dean’s Village and beyond, Simon is already dead some one hundred years earlier. There’s not a bit of flesh on those old bones now.

  It does present certain intractable problems.

  For logic, yes.

  Not for love.

  8.

  It was a lovely early spring afternoon and Simon was grateful to have a half day off. Having had an ugly argument with another of the journeymen over the amount of silver needed for a casting, he wanted some time to walk off his anger.

  His anger was with himself more than anyone else, for the other journeyman had been right after all. Simon was not used to making such mistakes.

  He was not used to making any mistakes.

  The master valued Simon too much to argue over half a day. Besides, he knew that with Simon, nothing was ever really lost.

  “Go on out, lad,” he said. Though Simon was scarcely a lad anymore, the master still thought of him that way. “Walk about and think up some more of yer lovely designs.”