by Dale Peck
There was a soft thump as something, the prow of the alien ship or perhaps a towline, struck the side of Drift House right by the front door.
“There’s no time, Susan,” Marie-Antoinette hissed. “They’re here!”
“Marie-Antoinette!” Susan hissed back. “Our crew could be slaughtered in their sleep!”
Marie-Antoinette slitted her eyes in frustration. “Humans! So much trouble! All right then, stand back!”
“What—”
But Marie-Antoinette had already stood up tall on her perch. Flapping her wings like a rooster bringing in the morning, she opened her beak and a piercing wail erupted from her tiny body. Susan had to cover her ears to shield them from the noise (which sounded, she couldn’t help but notice admiringly, exactly like a New York City police siren).
“Now,” Marie-Antoinette whispered while hopping deftly from her perch to Susan’s shoulder. “Hide.”
“Where—”
Marie-Antoinette pointed with her wing. “The radio.”
As Susan ran across the room for the shelter of the large tombstone radio, she heard commotion all through the house. Footsteps thumped above her, the stairs creaked with heavy treads.
Closer to her, and more frightening, was the loud smash of something against the front door, followed by the tinkle of falling glass. There was a second smash, and Susan heard the door slam against the other side of the drawing room wall. She practically dove behind the radio as a THUD—THUD—THUD announced the arrival of three Viking soldiers jumping into the hall.
Susan squeezed herself into the tiny space between the side of the radio and the corner of the room. A shout rang out from what sounded like the stairs; there were answering shouts from the doorway. With a start, Susan realized she couldn’t understand what was being said.
“Marie-Antoinette! I forgot my translation charm!”
“What, and you think I can translate for you?” Marie-Antoinette made a thin sound like a snort. “Keep it down, Susan. You don’t exactly need to talk to them.”
Susan couldn’t believe she’d forgotten something as important as her translation charm. How careless of her! Her Captain Susan days were long past.
Footsteps ran down the hallway. Thuds and smashes and more thuds, all punctuated by unintelligible shouting. Viking—Greenlandish? Norwegian?—was certainly a fearsome-sounding language. It had sounded perfectly civilized when she’d understood it.
Now there was another shout. Though she couldn’t see anything, the voice was so loud Susan knew it was coming from right in front of the door. And, though she couldn’t understand what was being said, Susan could tell from the tone that it wasn’t particularly nice.
“Susan, look!” A red wing reached into her peripheral vision. “This panel seems loose.”
“Really, Marie-Antoinette,” Susan hissed. “Let’s leave the radio repair to Uncle Farley and Charles—”
A loud crash cut her off, followed by a terrible scream—not of anger or fear, but pain. Before the sound had run its course, it changed to a strangled gurgle.
Susan tried to speak again, couldn’t. She looked down at Marie-Antoinette helplessly.
“I think we can get inside, Susan,” the parrot said in a calm, matronly tone of voice. “It might be our only chance to get out of this with both wings intact.”
The gurgle gave way to a keen moaning, over which the shouts and smashes still sounded.
“Wh-what?” Susan said.
Marie-Antoinette slipped a few feathers in the narrow seam between the side and back panels of the radio. “I can’t do it myself, Susan,” she said, her voice still calm, although a thin edge of panic was audible. “We need fingers. Now get yourself together or I’ll bite your ear off.”
Susan nodded, tried to tune out the moans of the man on the other side of the radio. Dazedly, she prized her fingers into the crack and pulled. The wood stuck a moment, and then slid open about six inches. Susan could see a dark empty chamber within.
Suddenly there was a different shout in the hall outside.
“Get off my ship, you ruffians.”
“Uncle Farley!” Susan said, in close to a normal voice.
“Sshh!” Marie-Antoinette hissed. “You can’t help him. Get inside now.”
“I warn you,” Uncle Farley went on in a forceful voice, “I was an alternate on the Sorbonne fencing squad! I know how to use this!”
“But, but—”
“Susan”—Marie-Antoinette snapped her beak threateningly—“now!”
Susan gave the panel one more pull. It opened wide enough for her to squeeze inside. She hesitated, then felt the sharp edge of Marie-Antoinette’s claws on her rump, and wormed her way through the opening. Turning around, she saw Marie-Antoinette slip through after her, then reached and pulled the panel closed. It snapped back into place so quickly she had to jerk her fingers out of the way to avoid getting them pinched.
Suddenly everything was different.
“Bjorn!” a thick deep voice cried. “Take Henni back to the ship and see to his wound. Bow-legs, search the lower chambers for the talking box. The rest of you, help me take the stairs. We shall throw these weaklings from the deck of their lumbering vessel and set it alight on the water like a funerary barge!”
Susan realized the radio was somehow acting as a translation charm, allowing her to understand what the renegade Greenlanders were saying. Of all their words, the two that stuck in her mind for some reason were “talking box.”
“MARIE-ANTOINETTE! KARL OLAFSON’S MEN ARE LOOKING FOR THIS RADIO!”
“SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SQUAWK!”
Susan had thought she was hissing her words, but her voice exploded out of the radio, followed by Marie-Antoinette’s even louder shrieks, amplified as if through a loudspeaker. Well, not so much a loudspeaker as the sound system for a rock concert. When her voice faded, she could hear the pictures still rattling on the wall, followed by a crash as something fell to the floor. Everything else had gone silent.
“Men,” said a slightly startled, slightly amused voice. “I believe it’s in here.”
Suddenly there was a crash. A smash. The bash of one club against another, and then:
“Lecki! Onno! Hold off the giant! He has the strength of one and a half men!”
Uncle Farley! Susan thought. But she was too preoccupied to fret about this, because she heard footsteps run directly toward her, followed by a loud thumping as someone knocked on the side of the radio.
“We have it, Myrki!”
“To the ship with it! We will hold off the giant’s crew while you move it out!”
Later Susan realized she should have braced herself. But at the time all she could think was that the men were stealing the radio—with her inside it. She was paralyzed. Paralyzed, but not, unfortunately, rooted in one spot, and when the radio suddenly tilted backward so did she. The last thing she heard before she hit her head was an impossibly loud
“SQUAAAAWK!”
And then: blackness.
Just as the drawing room walls had predicted.
EIGHTEEN
Return to Drift House (Redux)
“I am sorry, President Wilson.”
Silence came from the front of the slim canoe, where President Wilson stood like a masthead, shrouded by fog and darkness.
“I didn’t know how to get a message to you. And I didn’t want to give away your existence, or else you might have been captured too.”
“Steady, Charzo,” Tankort said from his position in the rear of the canoe.
Charles made firmer strokes with his paddle. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see the water it stirred, though he could hear its faint plash—and feel it too, on his feet, in the damp bottom of the canoe. Charles had decided that the bottom of the canoe was damp before he got into it, because he didn’t want to think about the possibility that the thin shell of bark separating him from this vast body of water had a slow leak in it.
“And I certainly didn’
t mean to exclude you from my conference with the Wanderer of Days. I’m sure you could have been of use there. You’d’ve thought to ask him far more pertinent questions than I did.”
Charles thought he heard the parrot “hmph.”
“To tell you the truth, President Wilson, I’m not sure how I ended up in the litter in the first place. The Wanderer said the book Mario gave me has a funny reaction when it’s around him. It causes a little, um, ripple I think he called it, in the temporal flow. So I was kind of blinking ahead every once in a while, sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few hours.”
Charles couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that the parrot’s shadow thickened slightly. The bird must have fluffed his feathers against the coolness of the foggy air.
There was the sound of a throat clearing behind him.
“This is why you fell, isn’t it?” Tankort said in a hushed voice. Charles wondered if it was him the Wendat didn’t want to disturb, or the sea—or whatever might be living in it. “When I made fun of you for being clumsy?”
In his relief, Charles hardly noticed that Tankort’s English seemed much improved. “Exactly!” he said.
“I am sorry for teasing you.”
Charles was impressed. He and Susan so rarely apologized to each other for much bigger offenses. “Thank you,” he said now, turning slightly. “I appreciate it.”
“Steady, Charzo,” Tankort said as the boat wobbled. “Or we’ll end up in the wrong place.”
Something in Tankort’s voice made Charles think that the place he referred to was more than just geographical. Turning his head as gently as he could—the canoe was so slight that even the tiniest movements affected its course—Charles peered into the fog. But the swirls of mist gave back nothing. Within a few feet all was blackness, and now Charles found himself wondering if he and Tankort were not paddling on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean as he’d assumed when they set out, but had in fact navigated onto the Sea of Time. That would certainly explain the Wendat’s expanded vocabulary.
When he’d emerged from the litter, he’d seen that the tribe had marched to an immense body of gray water Charles assumed had to be the Atlantic. As soon as he got out, a pair of men immediately sewed the litter shut again. From the outside, Charles could see that the deerhide was laced tight as a drum to a frame of sturdy beams—though in truth the leathern square seemed less like a drum than a cage. The outside of the litter was painted with the boxed Amulet of Babel over and over, as well as several other strange symbols in ochre and indigo. Charles wondered if the symbols actually gave the Wendat some sort of power over the man inside, or if perhaps they were there to protect them.
It was Handa who led Charles and Tankort to the canoe, where President Wilson was already installed, along with a pair of paddles. The paddles worried Charles: he had used the rowing machines in the gym in the basement of his building, and never managed to go for more than ten or fifteen minutes without getting tired (not to mention bored).
Handa said something that Tankort translated.
“Handa says, since you are leaving the tribe, you are no longer Handa-vey. He says the two of you are free of any obligation to each other.”
Charles nodded at this. “Please tell him I say thank you.”
Handa took the sheath that held his knife and held it out to Charles. He spoke again; Tankort translated.
“Handa offers you his weapon of his own free will. Not as vey, blood obligation, but man to man. He says for you to use it in safety and necessity.”
Charles took the knife solemnly. It was very light, but weighed heavily on his mind. “But what will he use?”
Tankort didn’t quite manage to suppress a laugh. “He has five more just like this one, and after another winter of quiet nights around the fire he will have another five.”
Charles nodded. The sheath had a long thin length of braided cord attached to it, and he slipped it over his shoulder diagonally, like a military sash.
“Tell him I would give him something as well, if I had anything to give.”
Tankort gave Charles a funny look. “I am not sure he would take anything that comes from your world, Charzo. Somehow gifts from the English never seem to be free.”
The two boys climbed in the canoe then, and Handa ran them out into the water. Tankort took the stern to steer, occasionally correcting Charles’s form. Paddling a real boat was nothing like the machine in the gym. For one thing, each boy only got one oar, which was short and made of wood. Years of use had worn a depression in the shaft, and Charles’s left hand fit naturally into this groove; his right rode the flat end of the shaft, pushing down to complement the pull of his left hand, and with slow, even strokes, the boys propelled the craft into the open water. The sky was banded in shades of blue and orange and black that merged imperceptibly with the dark water at the horizon. Charles stared out at the open water for a long time, conscious that his arms—his and Tankort’s—were piloting them into that endless expanse.
Certainly a part of him was afraid. The canoe was so tiny and frail, the ocean huge and inexorable. In some ways it seemed much bigger than the Sea of Time. It was certainly more present in the tiny boat, as opposed to Drift House’s carpeted and wallpapered rooms. The swells were more pronounced, the occasional drops of water splashing into the canoe on Charles’s skin were much colder, and the smell of salt was everywhere.
But Charles had learned to acknowledge his fear, rather than repress it and let it get the better of him. The swells were bigger, but they also had a regularity to them, and if you paddled across them they didn’t rock the canoe too alarmingly. And, too, Charles had faith in Wendat technology. It was strange for a boy used to airplanes and subways and computers to think of canoes and paddles and moccasins as technology, but they were, in fact, intelligent human adaptations to the environment, and they worked perfectly. Charles’s feet stayed warm and dry despite the dampness in the bottom of the canoe, and the boat cut evenly through the water, not just propelling the two boys away from the shore, but propelling them toward Drift House, toward Uncle Farley and Susan and the comforts of home. That was enough to keep Charles from feeling truly afraid, and as he stared at President Wilson’s back he imagined that he was looking at Drift House’s coat of arms, and let that be his guide.
He hardly noticed as the color of the sky darkened, thickened really, as though night were being stirred into it like soup, the stars glowing like phosphorescent bits of pasta. By then, too, Charles was tired. Tankort had kept the pace slow, and periodically had the boys switch which side of the boat they paddled on, so no part of Charles actually hurt, but all of him was a little achy and fatigued. Though Charles hadn’t asked to take a break, Tankort had at one point volunteered that it was unsafe for them to stop rowing, because without any forward motion the boat could run afoul of the swells, and so Charles rowed with the knowledge that rest wasn’t possible until they reached their destination. When the fog started rolling in, he watched it impassively, noting only in the farthest depths of his mind that the mist was warmer than he would have suspected, and that the water beneath the boat seemed to have calmed somewhat.
“Tankort,” he said, “are we on the Sea of Time?”
“Steady now, Charzo. Even strokes.”
Charles moved the paddle from his right side to his left. “Are you piloting us through time?” he tried again. The silence went on for so long that he thought Tankort wasn’t going to answer him. But then:
“Do you not know? The thing you carry—it sets the course. You have only to listen to it.” He paused a moment, as if listening. “It is not very far now.”
Charles listened, but didn’t hear anything. The bag was on the floor of the canoe behind him, and he could see it in his mind’s eye, see through it to the pair of mirror books it contained. The whole one he had taken from within the Wanderer’s chest, and the second one with the missing lines scored deep into the front cover, each of the seven grooves as dry as an empty riverbed waiting eagerl
y for the next rain to fill it. It seemed to Charles that a wind blew the cover of his book open, riffled the pages till they showed the Tower of Babel, pyramiding into a swirling purple sky one enormous step at a time …
Charles suddenly realized you didn’t always listen with your ears.
“Wow,” he said.
“It is missing part of itself,” Tankort said. “It wants to join again. It has wanted to do this for a long time. The two parts call to each other.”
Charles thought of the vibrations he had felt from Mario’s book when he’d first held it. These vibrations hadn’t been in the one given him by the Wanderer. Yes, it was just the first book that was calling out. The first book that had desire.
“And you can hear it too?” he said to Tankort, remembering how he’d justified hiding the book from Susan by telling himself that it spoke only to him.
“I do not think ‘hear’ is the right word, exactly. But I cannot think of a better one.” Suddenly the quiet sound of Tankort’s paddle stopped. “Look, Charzo.”
“At what?” Charles also pulled his paddle from the water. “Where?”
Tankort didn’t answer, and Charles peered into the mist. It seemed thinner. No—lighter. With a steady pace, a glow spread over the hidden ocean, and beneath it the mist seemed to dissolve. In what seemed like no time at all—though it didn’t happen particularly quickly—the air was clear and Charles and Tankort and President Wilson sat in their canoe off the coast of a dark green island. And there, some distance beyond the port bow, rocked the familiar galleon shape of—
“Drift House!”
With a great flap and flutter of wings, President Wilson stirred himself in the front of the bow, and now Charles had the real explanation for the parrot’s silence: he had been asleep.
“Why-who-what? Where is the enemy? I shall slice him stem—”
The parrot broke off when he was drowned out by Charles and Tankort’s laughter. He began combing his feathers nonchalantly, then suddenly broke off.