The Golden Specific (7 page)

“And
I
only noticed it thanks to the mapmakers back home who were on my mind now and then,” Theo added, with a slight smile at Sophia. “It was a curtain. Or more like a screen. A square of dark fabric, nailed over the small window to block the sun. I was surprised how clean it was. Everything else was filthy. We pried out the nails and took it down. Sure enough, when I let it flutter in the breeze—”

“It was a map!” exclaimed Sophia.

“Yes,” Miles said. “Although I will eat my warmest winter hat if you or Shadrack is able to make any sense of it.”

“Well, bring it out!” Shadrack demanded. “And get your hat, because it's going right onto that empty cake plate.”

“All right, all right. We'll see how far your threats go once you've seen it.”

Theo disappeared into Shadrack's study, where he and Miles had left their packs, and returned with a bulky white bundle the length of his forearm. Shadrack and Mrs. Clay cleared the table, and Theo unrolled the fabric gently,
revealing inside it a square piece of forest-green linen.

At first, the fabric seemed unremarkable. Its edges were worn and frayed, but the surface remained clean, unbroken, and smooth. Theo carefully turned it over, and Sophia and Shadrack both gasped. The other side of the linen square was densely covered with tiny beads—even smaller than peppercorns—that had been carefully stitched onto the fabric. “Yes,” Theo said, in response to their gasps. “The moment we pulled it down we saw the beadwork, but it took me a little while to figure out what it was, since the beads don't make any pattern or picture.”

“Metal, clay, and glass,” Sophia breathed.

“Exquisite,” Shadrack exclaimed, bending over the table to examine the map more closely. “I have never seen this technique, but what a simple and beautiful method—incorporating the other layers of mapping
into
the weather map. Brilliant.”

“This is nothing like the maps I recall from the academy in Nochtland,” Mrs. Clay observed, looking at it with a baffled expression.

“I have not the benefit of experience in any cartologic academy,” Miles said. “And Shadrack has never bothered to explain to me the mysterious techniques acquired there.”

“Never
bothered
?” Shadrack protested. “Every time I attempt to explain these maps, you tell me they are no substitute for exploration, and then you turn a deaf ear.”

Theo laughed. “He did the same to me.”

“It is not my fault that you make them sound so very
scholarly
,” Miles said with distaste. “Are they
useful
? That is what I wish to know.”

“Incredibly useful,” Sophia explained eagerly. “They can tell you everything that happened in a particular place and time. Usually a cloth map shows the weather, and if you layer it with other kinds of memory maps—a clay map to show the earth, a metal map to show everything man-made, and a glass map to show human life—you have a complete impression of what was happening.”

Shadrack looked up with an expression of delight. “But this map has omitted the need for the others by creating a single layer of clay, metal, and glass beads. It is a significant innovation. And I have never seen a metal map made of gold—too costly—but these beads are almost certainly gold.” He paused. “Do you see any glass beads here, Soph? My impression is that they are mostly clay, with about a quarter gold and—”

“Five glass,” Theo put in. “It took me a while to find them.” One by one, he pointed out the five clear glass beads hidden in an irregular pattern among the others.

“Five people?” Mrs. Clay asked.

“More than five,” Shadrack said. “But perhaps not many more.”

“There isn't much human life on this map,” Sophia said thoughtfully.

“There isn't much of anything!” Miles complained. “Go ahead, take a look at it.”

Theo lifted it up and released a puff of air, making the cloth flutter. Then he placed it back on the table with the beads
facing down. A fine network of white lines spread across the linen surface.

“Now that the map has woken,” Shadrack said in anticipation, “we can specify the time.” He indicated a nested set of concentric circles at one corner. The outermost circle was numbered to sixty, as was the second; the third was numbered to eight, the fourth to thirty, and the innermost to twelve. “Seconds, minutes, hours, days, and months,” he murmured, “and the hours are not New Occident hours. No year. Sophia . . . ?”

She had already gone to the cupboard. “What about barley? Or rice?”

“I think rice.” After a brief search, she returned with a small handful of rice, which she poured onto the table. “You choose,” Shadrack said, looking up at her with a smile.

Sophia felt a flood of happiness as she placed a grain of rice within each circle. It felt almost like old times; here they were, reading maps together, just as they used to. “To make it easy to remember,” she said, smiling back at him. “The fourth of April at four-hour, four-minute, four-second.”

They each set a fingertip on one of the white lines fanning out across the square of fabric. Immediately, Sophia's mind was filled with a vivid memory of a place and time she had never seen. A vast, dry landscape surrounded her in every direction. The ground was flat and dotted here and there with dark green scrub. In the distance, a few hills rose dustily into the blue sky; it was a blue so brilliant that it almost blinded her. The sun bore down heavily, and the dry heat left her breathless. The air was perfectly still. For a few moments more, Sophia surveyed
in her memory the arid plain around her, and then she lifted her finger.

“Hm,” Shadrack said. He had sat back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest.

“I'll say,” Miles commented. “It's all like that. Hot and dry and empty. Quite useless.”

“But it can't
all
be like that,” Theo countered, “Because there are those metal beads and the few glass ones. Somewhere in this map there must be some people and lots of things made by them—a city or a town or roads, or something. We just haven't had time to look through it all yet. I mean, the map covers a whole year, so you actually need to spend a whole year in every place pictured here, and it looks like it covers at least a hundred square miles.”

Miles shook his head. “You could spend a lifetime combing through that map. No, thank you. I'll leave the maps to you. I'd rather go there in person.”

“It's in the Papal States, I think,” Shadrack said pensively.

Miles nodded. “I agree. The landscape is undoubtedly Papal States—I would guess the southern portion of the peninsula.”

“Yes. And supposedly Cabeza de Cabra was
from
the Papal States,” said Shadrack.

“So these could be his memories?” Sophia wondered.

“Or someone else's, but the map likely came with him from the Papal States,” Shadrack concluded. “Unless . . . It could be that it was made in the Indian Territories using Cabeza de Cabra's memories.”

“We came to the same conclusion,” Miles said. “But, as I said before, remarkable as the map may be as an artifact, I can see no value in it for our search. I'm afraid that Cabeza de Cabra, if he knew anything about Ausentinia, took his secrets with him to the grave.”

Sophia gazed at the white lines webbed across the linen square, her mind turning over each piece of information. Cabeza de Cabra had spoken of Ausentinia. He came from the Papal States, and his map showed a year's worth of time lived there. Despite this clear connection, they had learned nothing certain. Cabeza de Cabra might not have been speaking about Ausentinia; a word so unfamiliar could easily have been distorted as it traveled so many miles by word of mouth. Nevertheless, she thought, her eyes narrowing, the map might contain some useful secret. There was no telling yet.

Her thoughts, as well as the conversation that had been going on without her, were interrupted by a sudden knock at the front door. Then another knock sounded, rapid and light. No one ever used the front door at 34 East Ending Street. They all fell silent, and after a moment's pause the knock was repeated. Mrs. Clay rose nervously to her feet. “Who could it be?”

Shadrack frowned. “It is probably someone from the ministry.”

Mrs. Clay left the kitchen, her heels clicking on the wooden floorboards.

They waited, listening, as she opened the door, and a male voice announced itself. Moments later, Mrs. Clay reappeared,
followed by a slight man in a pale gray suit.

“Bligh!” Shadrack exclaimed, getting to his feet. “What has happened?”

“I'm very sorry to interrupt your celebration,” Prime Minister Bligh said, taking in the half-eaten cake and the gathering at a glance, “but the matter is urgent. Broadgirdle is making his way here at this very moment. He will be attempting to persuade you to take steps to dissolve the treaties with the Indian Territories. He has some leverage to force your hand, but I do not know what it is. He does not know that I know, and he cannot know that I am here. But I had to warn you.”

Shadrack stared at him, aghast. “Dissolve the treaties? That's as good as declaring war.”

Bligh shook his head. “Ignore that for the moment. What leverage might he have? What does he know about you that could hurt you? And what can we do to make it ineffective?”

“I don't know. I—” Shadrack ran a hand through his hair. “Nothing. Or any number of things. It depends on how dirty he is willing to get.”

“I believe very dirty.” Bligh set his mouth in a firm line.

There was another knock at the front door, this one loud and steady. They all stood frozen. “You must answer it,” Bligh said tersely. “It will seems suspicious otherwise.”

Shadrack took a deep breath. “Miles, take Bligh to the map room and do not leave until I come down to find you. Sophia, Theo—upstairs. Mrs. Clay, I will wait for Broadgirdle in the study.” He quickly rolled up the map on the table.

“Very well, Mr. Elli,” Mrs. Clay said, her voice unsteady. She left the kitchen. Bligh followed Miles out of the room in the opposite direction.

Sophia stood rooted to the ground. “Come on,” Theo said, pulling at her hand.

“It will be fine,” Shadrack said. He squeezed her shoulder. “Go on up. I'll call you when this is over.”

 6 

Wren's Roost

February 20, 1881

I clung to the piece of the
Kestrel
's mast as the sea heaved around me, laden with the ship's wreckage. While the sky remained dark and inscrutable, the howling of the Fellweeds had subsided, and I heard a distant call over the continuing crash of the waves:
“
Minna! Minna!
”
It was my husband. My throat rasped and raw with salt water, I shouted back as loudly as I could. Finally, he heard me.
“
Stay where you are and call my name!”
he cried.
“I'll swim to you.”

I called his name until my voice was shredded, until I saw a piece of debris moving toward me through the settling waters. Kneeling on a large, jagged piece of the deck, Bronson was using a broken plank as an oar. He pulled me up onto the makeshift raft carefully, and then we collapsed, exhausted, into each other's arms.

The relief was short-lived. Soon, the terror of being so lost on such a great expanse of water overtook us. I would have cried, but that my body and mind were too spent, and for a time I slept, or lost consciousness, or simply drifted in that vast emptiness made by the ocean at night.

When I returned to the world, Bronson and I were still tightly wrapped around one another. The waters were as calm as I had ever seen them on the open sea, and the sky had begun to lighten. I realized that I had been roused by the sound of shouting voices, and I shook Bronson awake.

We turned as one to look at the ship that sailed toward us: similar in size to the
Kestrel
, its figurehead was a mermaid with a small bird in her cupped, outstretched hands. The
Roost
, as the ship declared itself to be in fine, white letters, moved gently toward us, and a pair of deckhands tossed down a rope ladder. I thought for several seconds that I was imagining it. I could not believe our luck.

From the ship's name, its familiar aspect and equipment, and the loud cries in English of the sailors, we took it to be from New Occident. Indeed, Captain Wren, who met us on deck, confirmed that he had sailed from a remote port neither of us had heard of in Upper Massachusetts. Incredibly tall—as, indeed, was his entire crew—he had a keen blue gaze that spoke powerfully of both his competence as a captain and his curiosity as to our circumstances.

The captain ushered us immediately into his cabin, where he provided us with clean clothes and tumblers of fresh water. He left us to bathe and compose ourselves. “I am anxious to be informed of your misadventure as soon as you are well enough to speak of it,” he said with a kind of formality, even stiffness, that I have not often observed in sea captains. “But I know you must be completely exhausted. Please rest, and
then find me on deck when you are able.” We thanked him warmly for his kindness and set about following his generous instructions.

Bronson has often claimed that I was as taken in as he was, and that neither of us observed anything unusual about Captain Wren and his crew. He argues with me that we were half ruined by the destruction of the
Kestrel
and the long night on the open sea, and that we could not have been alert, observant, and circumspect. But I maintain that my memory is correct, and that even from that first moment in Captain Wren's cabin—indeed, from the very moment he welcomed us aboard the
Roost
—I suspected that he was not who he claimed to be.

The clothes he had provided were too well made. It will sound absurd, but this made me uneasy from the start. They were finer and more compact than ours. I have mentioned that Wren and his crew were all tall men; they also had extraordinarily white and even teeth. They seemed too healthy, too well kept to be mariners. The items in Wren's cabin, too, seemed unlike the objects in Captain Gibbons's. I cannot explain how they seemed wrong to me, other than to say that while half of them seemed peculiarly new, as if they had never been used, the other half seemed entirely too old, as if unearthed in a curiosity shop. Some of the nautical charts, for example, which I glimpsed on his desk as I was drying myself, were printed on a paper so white that I had never seen the like. At the same time, the magnifying
glass—identical to one owned by Gibbons, and made by a manufacturer in Boston—seemed to carry centuries of use. The wooden handle was cracked and blackened as if from a thousand Atlantic crossings. I can observe these things now, with hindsight, more clearly. At the time, I knew only that the sum total of Captain Wren's cabin, however familiar in its form and composition, made me ill at ease; something was not quite right. I said as much to Bronson before we made our way up to the deck. “What do you make of him?” I asked.

“Seems a good man,” Bronson said. He reached out to cup my chin. “Don't worry, my love. We're safe now.”

“Yes. Yes, we're safe.” I paused. “Does it not strike you that there is something different about him and his crew? He's not like any man from Upper Mass I've ever known.”

Bronson laughed. “True. Probably not from Upper Mass, though. He said that he had sailed from a port there, not that he was
from
there.” He put his arm around me. “Don't worry yourself. If he had wanted to do us harm, he had only to leave us in the ocean.”

I could not deny such sound logic, and my sense of unease was shortly put to rest by the captain's friendly reception, even while many aspects of his bearing and the ship itself continued to strike me as unusual. He wanted to hear every detail of our misadventure.

Bronson began by showing him the letter from Bruno Casavetti that had precipitated our voyage:

December 2, 1880

Minna and Bronson, my dear friends—

I write to you in great need, with the most desperate of pleas.

As you know, I departed from Boston six months ago to map the border between the Middle Roads and the Papal States. I cannot at this moment recount the details of how this objective changed along the way, so that I lost all possibility of fulfilling my purpose. My friends, something terrible has happened. In this place I thought I knew so well, I have discovered a new Age. I cannot explain how it came to be here, but it brings with it fear, intolerance, and persecution.

I write to you now—on smuggled paper—thanks to the kindness of a child, whom I saved from a fate that I, sadly, was unable to escape. They believed this child to be a witch, and they believe me to be some similar agent of devilry. A terrible plague that they call
lapena
has wreaked havoc on the region, and the people see witchery in everything and everyone. I was able to prove them wrong in the case of the girl, Rosemary, but the case against me is stronger, and I have not the advantage of being a winsome, likable child native to their Age.

At present I am imprisoned in the town of Murtea (I have also seen it Murcia or Mursiya in some of Shadrack's volumes—do not trust my spelling), and the judges slowly gather evidence against me. Loath as I am to call you here, I feel that you are my only hope. The child Rosemary will deliver my letter to a distant town so that through the royal mail it may
reach the port and, from there, I hope, some traveler heading to Boston. I enclose a map and directions for locating her when you arrive. Protect her if you can—she is not to blame for this.

I am sorry, my friends, to bring this misfortune into your path. My life is in your hands.

Bruno Casavetti

“Very serious indeed,” Wren agreed, handing the letter back. “And you decided to respond in person to his call for aid?”

We described the voyage aboard the
Kestrel
and the terrible encounter with the Fellweeds. Captain Wren's eyes lit up with something near excitement when we described the creatures that had destroyed our ship. “I have never seen a Fellweed,” he said, in a low, awed voice, “though I have heard them described.”

“Frankly,” Bronson admitted, “we both thought it a mere fancy. I would never have believed the things existed if I had not seen them with my own eyes.”

“I would have said the same before this morning,” Captain Wren agreed. “Although some part of me always wanted them to be real.”

“Why should you wish such a thing?” I asked him, astonished. “The Fellweeds were merciless.”

“Well, yes,” Wren replied, somewhat embarrassed. He
wore an amber-tinted monocle on a golden chain, and whenever he was at ease he would twirl the monocle idly. Now the monocle came to an abrupt halt. “An idle curiosity, I suppose. In any case,” he went on, changing the subject, “it will be no difficulty to take you to Seville, if that was your destination.”

“It was. Are you certain this does not make you deviate from your intended route?” Bronson asked.

“Not in the least,” Captain Wren replied, without actually telling us what his intended route was. “We have ten days of sailing ahead of us, and I will look forward to your company during that time.” Wren's tanned face and white, even teeth seemed to shine at the prospect. And he did, indeed, appear to savor our conversation. Over the next few days, we told him about our past journeys, and our dear Sophia, and how we had planned to take her with us on this voyage, but the dangers Bruno had written of prevented it. He had a thousand questions for us about Boston, which he justified by saying that he was from a remote and isolated part of Seminole, and that he had never visited our capital. I would have believed this explanation but for his unwillingness to talk about the area he claimed to call home and—more strikingly—what emerged as his surprising ignorance regarding New Occident in general.

This ignorance was hard to place, as he certainly seemed to know a great deal about some aspects of life in New Occident. Yet at other moments he would ask a question or use a phrase that baffled us. Finally, on the third night aboard
the
Roost
, my discomfort prompted me to confront him more directly. We had been telling him about our journey, some years prior, into the Indian Territories. Bronson, with his skillful pen, drew quick sketches of the people and places we had seen along the way. Captain Wren leaned in over the wooden table, quite literally on the edge of his seat. His bronzed hands clasped each other; his blue eyes were wide with interest at our description of riding through upper New York toward Six Nations City. “I have never been to Six Nations City. What is it like?” he asked eagerly.

“A great trading city,” Bronson said, “much like Charleston or New York. People from all over the territories and New Occident live and trade there—more or less peaceably.”

“An Eerie woman once told me that Six Nations City should more rightly be called ‘Sixty Nations City,' given the variety of languages and peoples one finds there,” Wren remarked.

Bronson and I glanced at one another. “That's true,” Bronson finally said.

“You've met the Eerie, then?” I asked. “Few people in New Occident ever have.”

Captain Wren sat back. He looked flustered. “Yes, I had trade with some of the Eerie not long ago.”

Now it was our turn to ask wondering questions. “There are many stories about them in New Occident,” Bronson said, “but little is known for certain. We hear that they are
great healers who traveled all the way from the Pacific after the Great Disruption. Is that true?”

“I couldn't say,” Wren demurred. “Yes,” he added after a moment, “I believe so.”

“Their territory is very difficult to reach,” I pressed him.

“Is it?” the captain asked, with a cautious air. “We reached the Great Lakes from the north, not through New Occident, so perhaps I took an easier route.”

Bronson and I glanced at one another again, this time with greater meaning. “The Great Lakes?” I queried. “Do you mean the Eerie Sea? No one in New Occident calls them ‘lakes,' as far as I know.”

Wren flushed. “Of course, I mean the Eerie Sea. It's a local phrase—a seaman's term. We have difficulty conceiving of those frozen expanses as a ‘sea.' You can imagine.”