by Dale Peck
And Charles had the mirror book in his lap. There was the seal missing from his own book: a golden blob, slightly heart shaped, into which those seven lines had been scored. Other than that, it didn’t seem at all like the book Mario had given him. It was brown, for one thing, and smaller too—less like a pizza box and more like a volume of an encyclopedia. It didn’t tingle either. In fact, it seemed pretty much like a normal book, and idly, Charles reached to open the cover.
A very solid hand stretched out from the deerskin cloak and pressed on the cover of the book. When Charles looked into the Wanderer’s face, it seemed to him that the man was concentrating to keep his hand solid. Charles took his hand off the cover, and the Wanderer’s arm vanished beneath his cloak, but not before it… faded slightly and became slightly transparent.
“It will tempt you that way. When you don’t even realize it.”
Charles was about to say something when he suddenly noticed that the slight rocking had stopped. The litter was no longer moving.
“Put the book in your bag, Charles. Do not let anyone see it or take it from you.”
A glimmer of light appeared in one corner of the litter. Charles realized that the Wendat were unlacing the straps that held the deerhide closed.
“But what do I do with it?” Charles asked, stowing the book in his bag next to Mario’s.
“Murray will know what to do with it.”
“Murray? Mario?”
“Murray, Charles. You need to be able to tell the difference.”
The flap opened wider. As light poured into the chamber, the Wanderer of Days seemed to fade in the glow.
“But where? When?”
“When it is time, Charles.”
The flap folded open. A pair of spears were thrust in, separating Charles from the Wanderer, penning him in. Charles stared up at the old man’s face imploringly, but the Wanderer only repeated himself.
“It is time, Charles.”
In the bright shaft of daylight Charles could see that the boxed lines had been painted across the spears’ stone blades. And now a face appeared in the open side of the litter, just as Uncle Farley’s had appeared in the side of the dumbwaiter.
“Charzo?” Tankort said. The anger had left his face, and he stared into the litter’s shadowy interior with a mixture of fear and awe. “I take you to your family now.”
SEVENTEEN
The Parrot Speaks
Karl Olafson had made off with Osterbygd’s three largest ships, leaving the colony only a rickety boat that was basically a long canoe, and a second craft that looked as though it had been cobbled together from pieces of driftwood. Susan opted for the canoe (it had sides for one thing, and the waves had grown choppy as the day progressed) but she regretted her choice once she climbed aboard and her tennis shoes splashed in two inches of icy water. The wood was crumbly and smelled like gym socks, the bung corked with a fistful of grass. The craft survived the journey, however, and once in Drift House she, Mario, and Uncle Farley met with Iussi, Gunnar, and Iacob for a brief conference in the music room.
Iussi stood in the middle of the room and stared at the rug and the chandelier and everything in between. He wandered to a table and picked up a glass paperweight.
“Amazing! Your land must be fantastically wealthy.”
“Um, yes,” Uncle Farley said. “I suppose it is. And my own family is blessed with a certain amount of luxury. But perhaps we should discuss the, ah—”
“The Amulet of Babel,” Susan put in, impatient to learn more.
Iussi nodded. He set the paperweight down. “There is little to tell. Karl Olafson came back with it from the last Nordseta. He had taken it from the little people—”
“The Qaanaaq,” Iacob cut in here. He was standing in a corner, and Susan had almost forgotten he was in the room.
Iussi glanced at him uneasily. “Yes,” he said, “the Qaanaaq. I myself did not see it. Karl Olafson guarded it jealously. He wore it beneath his shirt, on a length of seal intestine.”
Gross, Susan thought. Just—gross.
“Karl was a different man after he came back,” Iussi continued. “Swaggering and starting fights with anyone who crossed his path. Then stories began to come from Karl’s house. They said he had stopped sleeping. That he stopped eating as well, and spoke languages no one could understand.”
At this, a look went around the room, from Susan to Mario to Uncle Farley, but none of them said anything. Iussi’s eyes followed the silent exchange, at the end of which he smiled slightly and nodded.
“I see these stories are significant to you. Very well then, I will not ask you to tell me about things of which you are loath to speak. If someone will show me where the firepit is, my men and I will begin to prepare a bit of sustenance for our journey. We have dried fish. If you have water, we can reconstitute it.”
Uncle Farley made a bit of a face. “Actually, you can hold on to your, ah, dried fish.” He put his hand around Iussi and steered him toward the door. “I have a rather remarkable woman in my employ who can whip up the most amazing dishes from seemingly nothing.”
“If they are like the ‘pick nick’ you served us earlier,” Gunnar said, smacking his hands together, “we shall be most grateful indeed.”
“Oh, that? That was just a snack.” And, beginning to describe some of Miss Applethwaite’s specialties to the two Greenlanders’ jaw-dropping amazement, Uncle Farley led them from the room.
Susan hoped that Mario might speak more openly now that the adults were gone—if not about the amulet, then about his life as an Accursed Returner—but all he said was, “I’d better set up camp too. We’re going to need all our energy in the morning.”
“Are you going to sleep in the room you shared with Charles?” Susan smiled weakly. “Or are you big enough for your own room?”
“Nah. I’ll get a sheet from Applethwaite and set up in the solarium. Ever slept in a hammock, Susan? The sea’ll rock you to sleep every night.”
And then it was just Susan and Iacob. They looked at each other helplessly. What strange positions they were both in! He was helping her in an expedition that might very well end in his father’s death. And she was fighting with her brother for an object that could get only one of them back to their own time (although how that worked was still a mystery). When you tried to sort out the rights and wrongs and the emotional allegiances, it all ended up a muddle. Lacking any clear plan, Susan fell back on good manners.
“C’mon. I’ll show you around.”
They wandered from room to room. To Susan, everything in Drift House was old and quaint, and yet to Iacob the objects and artifacts were still far in the future. He was fascinated by the wonders possessed by the “Ropians,” but almost every time he asked Susan what this object was, or who was that figure in a painting, she didn’t know. It was as if they were not only from different worlds, but there was a whole world between theirs, one that was lost to Susan as much as it was off-limits to Iacob. Reencountering the broken Pompeian cast in the drawing room, she felt how truly large the past was: how much it had given the people of her time, and how much of it had disappeared, never to be recovered—not even to the owners of Drift House.
Eventually they ended up on the poop deck. The cold southern coast of Greenland lay before them—along with a dozen Qaanaaq. They sat in a long umiak that looked to have been carved from the trunk of a single tree. Since there were no trees on Greenland, Susan assumed it must have come from the mainland, which raised a question that had been bothering her ever since she’d first heard of the colony. Pointing to the Qaanaaq vessel, she asked Iacob,
“How come you never moved to the mainland? I would think there’s much more of what you need to live there.”
Iacob stared at the long, narrow vessel floating on the water. “The Qaanaaq go back and forth between our island and the big land to the west,” he said finally. “They say it is very different from where we live. The water bathes only one edge of it, and it stretches west an
d south farther than a man can walk or row in his lifetime. There are great forests there, and grains, and other food-bearing plants they have tried to describe to me, but who can understand a food he hasn’t tasted? And there are other people there, other tribes, many of which far outnumber the Qaanaaq, as the Qaanaaq far outnumber us.”
Susan knew that if she wanted to she could go downstairs to Drift House’s library and find out the tribes’ names—not just their names, but where they came from, and what became of them in the centuries after this one. But she stayed where she was, feeling that Iacob’s perspective, though so much more limited than her own, still offered her something she would never discover through an encyclopedia.
“They say that Leif Erikson, the son of our founder and the man after whom Leifsbudir is named, visited the big land and saw this richness for himself. It was Leif’s idea that we move from the island Erik the Red had brought us to and instead make our home in this other place, which he too considered more suited to our way of life. The Ropian way of life. But Leif rashly attacked the people who lived on the big land, and was lucky to escape alive. We have not returned since.”
“So he trapped you,” Susan said, waving a hand at Greenland’s rocky, treeless coast.
“Trapped?” Iacob laughed slightly. “I suppose we are trapped, but not by Leif Erikson. Centuries have passed since that first encounter. Wrongs can be righted, sins forgiven, or forgotten. The only thing that traps us now is our unwillingness to change.”
“What do you mean?”
Iacob laughed again, a bitter laugh that seemed old beyond his years.
“The last boat from Norway came years ago, when my father was a boy. It was the first vessel from the Old World that had been seen in nearly half a century. And do you know what my father and his generation did? They bought linen. Cloth. Because cloth was one of the things that separated us from the Qaanaaq. Made us think we were better than them. They bought metal too—blades for knives and hoes, and one plow that Iussi thinks is the only thing that stands between us and oblivion. Decades of ivory and white fur and feathers traded for a few trinkets of dubious value, a few yards of cloth that offer almost no protection against the cold. But the most expensive thing they bought?”
He paused, obviously waiting for Susan to guess. But Susan had no idea, and she just shook her head.
“A Bible.”
“A Bible?” she repeated, not sure why he’d said the word with such vehemence. Father Poulsen flashed in her mind. Perhaps it was the priest he disliked.
“The men traded nothing less than a live polar bear cub for it,” Iacob sneered. “For that price, they could have bought a dozen swords. But they traded it all for a book.”
“Well, it is a religious book—”
“It could have been a book of spells for all the difference it made. No one in Osterbygd can read!”
“You can’t read?”
Susan didn’t mean for her question to come out, well, snotty. Iacob’s face turned a bright shade of red, but he recovered his composure quickly.
“For the same things, the Qaanaaq would have given us parkas and kayaks, which we could have studied and learned to make ourselves. But no, we must catch our fish in our own rickety boats, in woven clothes that absorb the moisture rather than repel it, and sit shivering in our church staring at a book whose pages are enjoyed only by termites. The way I see it,” he went on, “there is always ‘some place better.’ Some place where the air is warmer, the sea full of more fish. But the Qaanaaq have taught me that people must learn to make their homes where they are, to measure happiness not by the things your world brings to you, but by the things you bring to your world.”
Susan slept fitfully that night (although “night” was a relative term, since it never actually got dark that far north in early June). The North Atlantic swells heaved the house about. Every time she dozed off she woke up immediately with the sense that she was falling out of bed. Uncle Farley had given her a chamberpot “just in case,” but fortunately it never got that bad.
At one point she opened her eyes and saw that the light had changed from the yellowish haze of night to the icy gray of morning. Beneath the comforter her body felt warm, but the tip of her nose registered the chilliness of the air. Last fall, Mr. Zenubian would have had a fire going before she woke up. Her robe would have been hanging on its peg near the firescreen, toasty warm and awaiting her. As she stared at her breath fogging the air, she almost would have welcomed his sour odor, if he’d been there to build a blaze for her.
From somewhere she remembered how Charles had christened her Captain Susan, and she called on that strong, independent girl to take charge now, get up, get dressed, get her ship ready for the extra crew members who were sleeping on the next floor. She dashed out of bed, ran to the dresser and pulled on pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and her fleece, which was the best she could do in the way of warm clothing (it was summer vacation, after all, and she hadn’t thought she’d need to bring her winter coat and, like, mittens). She put on socks and shoes, then headed downstairs.
She walked down the hall quietly, staring at the glass cases that lined the hall. The objects in them were a little jumbled, but nothing had fallen to the floor, and it occurred to her that that was why everything was behind glass—to keep it in place while sailing. And even as she thought that, she realized that the house’s wild motion had ceased considerably.
“We’ve stopped!” she said out loud, then immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. No sense waking everyone before they were ready. Uncle Farley had been up late, after all, preparing beds for nearly a dozen men, so she should let him get his sleep. She would wake him after she’d done a little reconnoitering.
Moving as quickly and quietly as she could, she skipped to the window at the end of the hall. Thick bolts of gauzy fog lay over the water, but through it she could see a dark green strip of coast stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction. The coast seemed to be covered by a dense coniferous forest, with only a thin strip of rocky beach separating the trees from the ocean.
“Why, we’re here!” she said out loud again, and then she laughed at herself and whispered, “Stop talking to yourself, Susan.”
Downstairs she went to the dining room first, for breakfast. She was a little surprised when Miss Applethwaite offered her only a big cup of steaming hot chocolate. A little disappointed too: she’d thought she wanted a nice buttery crumpet or two. But in fact she was too jumpy to sit down to eat. The chocolate was thick and filling and warm and, most important, she could carry it from room to room.
She went to the drawing room next, but its walls still seemed to be broken. That is, the swirling darkness had lost its swirliness, and was now merely dark. As she stood sipping her chocolate and staring into the blackness, Susan remembered her previous voyage in Drift House, when the drawing room’s walls had also gone dark. The family had thought the walls were broken then as well, but Susan later realized the darkness actually depicted the lightless bottom of the Sea of Time, where the mermaids had taken her. Was that the case here, she wondered. Was she destined to end up in another black place?
She set her cup down and went to a window again. The fog was already thinning, and Susan could make out more of the landmass in front of her. The island—presumably Vinland—or Newfoundland as it was known in her time—was densely empty, crowded with rocks and trees. Nothing suggested human habitation. although the mist did make it hard to see very far inland.
As she stepped back from the window she noticed Marie-Antoinette on her perch. It seemed to Susan that the parrot’s eye flickered slightly, as if she were shutting it just as Susan turned. Susan walked over to the elegant, dainty bird.
“Good morning, Marie-Antoinette,” she said—but quietly, in case the parrot really was asleep.
Marie-Antoinette shook herself. A yellow eye opened, took in Susan and the gray light in the room, then closed again.
“I don’t understand why you
persist in this charade,” Susan continued. “Don’t you ever want to talk to someone?”
A long breathy sigh escaped the parrot’s nasal slits, but other than that she didn’t stir.
“I mean, I’m sure it’s fun to torment President Wilson and all that. It’s always fun to tease boys. But it’s just us girls right now. Come on, you can confide in me. I promise to keep your secrets.”
Throughout Susan’s speech, Marie-Antoinette’s fluffed plumage had gradually settled back into place. The parrot’s head and tail drooped, and her breathing settled into an even rhythm. Susan wondered if the bird had actually gone back to sleep.
“Oh, come on, Marie-Antoinette. There are a dozen Greenland soldiers sleeping upstairs, and Uncle Farley, and Mario, and Iacob.” Susan wasn’t sure why she separated the boy out from his fellow Greenlanders, but she heard the stammer in her voice and felt her cheeks grow hot. “I get so tired of being the only girl aboard. Can’t we have a little female solidarity? Can’t—”
Susan broke off. A dark shadow had floated across the window behind the porch. Since the morning had grown perceptibly brighter, the shadow was distinctly noticeable—and ominous.
One of Marie-Antoinette’s eyes flickered open again, but Susan didn’t care now. She stepped back to the window and pressed her eye to the slit between curtain and wall and peered out. What she saw sent a chill down her spine.
A long Viking ship lay ten feet off Drift House’s starboard side. It was so close Susan could see the barnacles stubbling the boat’s hull, not to mention the bearded faces of the sailors on deck, all of whom brandished clubs and spears, and stared at Drift House with malevolent expressions.
When Susan stepped back from the window, she started a second time. Marie-Antoinette was facing her, and the look in her eye was anything but ignorant.
“We must hide, Susan. Now.”
Susan didn’t remark on Marie-Antoinette’s decision to speak finally. “We have to warn Uncle Farley and the others!”