The Vanishing Island (4 page)

Finally he turned down an alley, sprinted to the end, and slid to a halt outside a heavy wooden door, pounding the door twice with his fist. No one answered at first, giving Duke and his friends time to arrive, all breathing as if they had run there from France.

“Nowhere to run, Owen,” said Duke, and he and the others huffed and puffed their way forward.

Bren closed his eyes, preparing for the worst, and at that moment the door finally swung open. A tall, thin man emerged holding a tall, thin weapon—a long pole with a curved blade the size of a sword.

“I thought I heard cats,” said the man.

“You kill cats with that?” said one of the boys weakly.

“No, I like cats,” said the man, twirling the scythe in his hands. “Bullying children, not so much.”

He swept the blade with a great
swoosh
through the space between Bren and his pursuers. Duke's friends backed up.

“You can't run forever, Owen,” said Duke, sounding tough even as he retreated. He then made an obscene gesture at both of them and ran off with his gang.

“You may as well come in,” said Archibald Black. “I was just putting some tea on. And you and I need to have a talk.”

A
rchibald Black led Bren from the back of his store to the front, through a maze of books stacked in crooked columns, each leaning over slightly as if poised to tell something important.

“Your little friend is already here,” said Mr. Black, motioning to a large table upon which sat Mr. Grey, lapping up a saucer of milk. He returned with a tray of biscuits, which Bren ate as if they were his first morsel of food in days.

“I guess running from trouble stimulates your appetite?” said Mr. Black.

Bren shrugged and ate another biscuit. He was used to the older man's teasing by now. Black's Antique Books and Collectibles had been his home away from home as long as he could remember. Mr. Black had been close with his mother, and he was the nearest thing Bren had to a best friend in Map, even though he was both old and crotchety.

“Are you ever going to name him?” said Mr. Black, nodding toward the cat. “The way he follows you around, I think you should call him Shadow.”

“That's not bad,” said Bren. He lowered his voice and said to the cat, “He doesn't know I call you Mr. Grey because you're as fussy as he is.”

The cat gave Bren a look that suggested he was barely tolerating this interruption to his milk drinking.

“Are those new books?” said Bren.

Mr. Black was leaning on the counter with his elbows, his bony chin resting in his even bonier hands. There was a stack of books next to him, but he was staring at a chessboard. “Those books are for law-abiding citizens.”

“I'm not a criminal,” said Bren, somewhat defensively.

“No,” said Mr. Black. “Merely Map's most feared juvenile delinquent.”

Bren actually sort of liked the sound of that. Pirates could be famous. Why not delinquents?

Mr. Black carefully rotated the board so that he was now playing white. He was involved in a match with a man
in Belgium, the two mailing their moves back and forth to each other. The game had been going on for six years.

“Are you losing?” said Bren.

“Never mind,” said Mr. Black, who pushed the board away and came out from behind the counter to sit with Bren.

“I know what you're going to say,” Bren said.

“Do you?” said Mr. Black. “Then you must be very clever. Unfortunately, your behavior suggests otherwise. I brushed off your two previous attempts to run away, but this time you could have caused a serious catastrophe. Worse, you could have gotten yourself killed.” He glanced at Bren's wounded arm as he said this.

Bren knew Mr. Black was right, and perhaps his luck to date had given him a false sense of security. It was as if he were one of those mortals under the protection of a Greek god or goddess, meant for some higher purpose. That was silly, of course, but the idea appealed to him.

“What if they try to hold your father responsible for the ship's repairs?”

“Why would they?” said Bren. “It wasn't my fault that man was smoking.”

“No, it's never your fault,” said Mr. Black.

Mr. Grey finished his milk and jumped off the table with a
thump.

“If you care so much, why weren't you in court with
me?” said Bren. “Why didn't you come by the house after the accident?”

His friend sighed. “I was assured your injuries weren't life-threatening. And your father was with you in court. He already thinks I meddle too much.”

The explanation didn't sit well. “Can I look at the new books now?”

“I know things have been difficult for you, Bren, since Emily . . . your mother . . .”

Bren looked away and fingered his necklace again. He hated it when anyone brought up his mother. Even someone who had been as close to her as Mr. Black couldn't understand how much Bren missed her.

“You remember how your mother and I used to play chess while you looked around the store? And when it was your turn you could play all your moves without ever bothering to come look at the board. First time that happened I told your mother you were special, but of course, she knew.”

Bren kept up the silent treatment, and finally Mr. Black gave up and brought over the new books, spreading them out on the table. They were chapbooks—short adventure stories printed on cheap paper. “I almost don't want to give you these,” he said. “I'm afraid they might encourage you. Apparently the American colonies have proven fertile for storytellers.”

Bren eagerly took in the sensational titles:
The Throat-Cutters of Carib; The Isle of Dread; Adventures in Amazonia . . .

The truth was, the bookstore was a blessing and a curse for him. Every few weeks seemed to bring in new adventure books, travelogues, and epic poems of war and conquest that were so popular these days. Tales from other lands and other times. For Bren, they offered proof that all things exotic and exciting lay anywhere but here.

“This is a neat one, too,” said Mr. Black, showing Bren
The Poisoner's Handbook.
It looked like an ordinary book, but when he opened the front cover, the inside was hollowed out, and contained instead an apothecary's cabinet of small drawers and cubbies.

“Oh, and speaking of reading material . . .”

Mr. Black made a production of holding up Bren's note, unfolding it, putting on his half-spectacles, and reading, “‘Dear Beatrice . . .'”

Bren scrambled up and looked at the back of the letter, where he had written Mr. Black's name. “I must have labeled them incorrectly after I sealed them.”

His mind began to race . . . if Mr. Black had gotten the letter he wrote to Beatrice, then either Beatrice or his father got the letter he'd meant for Mr. Black. And the last thing he wanted was for his father to read the letter he had written to Mr. Black.

“Well, don't keep me in suspense. What did the court
decide to do with you? The stocks or the gallows?”

“Actually, Rand McNally came in before the judge could sentence me,” said Bren.

“Really? Go on.”

“I have to meet him tomorrow morning,” said Bren. “I assume he's just going to make me start my apprenticeship early.”

Mr. Black was back at his chessboard, rubbing his thumb and index finger together over his white bishop before changing his mind. “Perhaps,” he said. “Though in my opinion that seems like getting off a bit easy for nearly destroying one of the queen's ships. Do you have any idea how long it takes to build one of those?”

“Six months,” said Bren. “Everyone knows that.”

“Of course, look who I'm talking to,” said Mr. Black. “Our resident expert on seafaring.”

Bren wanted another biscuit, but he doubted Mr. Black would offer him more now.

“You know, it's not really running away,” said Bren. “Putney Smythe is only home once a year, and his wife is fine with it.”

“You would be too, if you were married to Putney Smythe,” said Mr. Black. “But your father needs you right now.”

“That doesn't mean you have to keep me under lock and key for the rest of my life.”

“You're twelve. Let's not be hysterical. Besides that, your idea of life on the high seas . . . I'm afraid you've been reading too many stories.”

“Whose fault is that?” said Bren.

Mr. Black replied with a look that said,
No one is forcing you to come in here
, but he left Bren alone to read, and read he did, until the store closed, finishing
The Isle of Dread
and starting on
Throat-Cutters
. Then the two of them went to supper at the Gooey Duck, which Bren regretted the moment he walked through the door and Beatrice twisted his ear.

“Not even going to say good-bye?” she said, steering them to a table and then pulling a letter out of her apron. “I reckon this was meant for your father.”

Bren's appetite left him. That meant his father had indeed gotten the letter intended for Mr. Black.

When Bren finally got home, his father was asleep at his drafting table. An uneaten bowl of stew sat on the small counter next to their galley kitchen. Bren stood over his father to see what he was working on, the parchment held down on one corner by a bottle of ink and on another by a bottle of cabbage wine. He recognized the subject immediately, even without a title—it was a map of Map. A street map, to be exact, the spidery streets and alleyways as familiar to Bren as the lines crisscrossing his hands.

He put the cap on the inkwell and the cork in the cabbage wine. He admired his father's work, the detail and the precision. He could have put his finger down on the exact spot in the Textile District where the wool makers hung their fleece to dry, or the building where the Belgians brewed their ale, or the furnaces of the forbidding Alchemy District, where blacksmiths, glaziers, and glassmakers practiced their delicate arts. Or their own small house, just one of many of the narrow wooden dwellings with thatched roofs on the outskirts of town, where Map's streets turned from cobblestone to dirt and mud.

The longer he looked, the more he hated it. The map gave a bird's-eye view of how Map's tradesmen and their families crowded the margins so the merchants, lawyers, and nobles could enjoy wider paved streets and larger houses built of stone and slate. And beyond the borders were the rolling estates of the land barons.

This was all his father knew, this work and this place, and he wanted the exact same thing for Bren. Bren could have worked for a local sail maker, or even a shipbuilder in Newcastle. Anything connected to the sea. His father might even have consented, before Bren's mother died. Now he was lonely, and Bren was being punished for it. He looked at the map again—the limits of his world, as drawn by his father.

Bren was about to climb the ladder to his sleeping loft
when he noticed something sticking out from under a stack of papers. He knew what it was but pulled it out anyway.
Dear Mr. Black . . .
the letter began. Why had his father kept it? To reread it? To show it to Bren?

Bren didn't want to find out. He crumpled the letter and tossed it on top of the dwindling fire in the woodstove.

He took the cold bowl of stew to his loft and lit a small candle to check for rats before he went to bed. He set the stew on the floor, and, as if by magic, Mr. Grey leaped through the window. Bren still had no idea how he managed to get up there.

“Can I help it if Mr. Black has always made more time for me?” he said, watching the cat eat. “That he and I have more in common than my father and I do? You understand, don't you?”

Mr. Grey's savage chewing made it look like he was nodding in agreement.

Bren undressed and opened the lid of his small writing desk, taking out another map he had drawn but preferred to keep hidden. It showed an island called Fortune, a place his mother had told him about when he was a child. It was part of local folklore, an enchanted island that hovered between sea and sky, appearing and disappearing as unpredictably as the luck of the fishermen who repeated the tale year after year.

“I'd like to think it's real,” his mother had told him
once. “A place of peace, where only the people you love can find you.”

Bren had mapped the imaginary island in detail, its coastline and inlets, rivers and mountains, land area and elevations, rocky shores and safe harbors. When he was younger, and more childish, he had hoped that mapping Fortune would make it real.

He pulled the black stone necklace over his head and looked at it. His mother had given it to him two years ago, shortly before she died. “Let's pretend this is a piece of Fortune,” she had said. Bren had worn it for good luck ever since.

“Fat lot of good it's done me, Mr. Grey,” he said, tossing the necklace in the desk and letting the lid fall shut with a bang.

He heard his father stir below, and so Bren quickly snuffed his candle and got in bed, watching the smoke curl away in the afterglow like a wasted wish.

T
here was no name on the outside of McNally's Map Emporium, but everyone knew the massive, royal blue doors with his logo: a golden globe spanned by the twin arms of a golden compass. Over the entrance flew the flags of Britannia and the Highlands, where the McNally clan was from. Above them, set into walls of castle limestone, was a gold frieze of an ouroboros, an ancient symbol of a serpent devouring its own tail, accompanied by the Latin phrase
Ubique terrarum
—“All around the world.”

Perhaps the only building larger was McNally's private
residence—a manor house north of town once owned by a minor knight of King Arthur's Round Table, before the Black Death killed him and all his vassals.

It was Saturday and the Emporium was officially closed for business, but Bren had been summoned. The doors creaked open just as he got there. Rand McNally expected people to be on time, and this would not have been the day to disappoint him. He was large enough to open both doors at once, and for a moment he just stood there in the entrance as if he were holding up the building. Bren could imagine him having been a Titan once, overthrown by the Olympians and forced to remake an empire on Earth.

“Come,” he said, and Bren entered the vaulted entryway. His boots echoed on the stone floor, inlaid with a huge compass rose pointing to the four corners of the earth. On each of the stone walls were towering murals of the Angels of the Four Winds: Tramontana, who lives beyond the mountains and brings the frigid North wind; Ostro of the South, who carries the Cyclone in his fist; Levante, of the East, who raises the Sun and blows it forth across the sky; and Maestro, whose mercurial Western wind keeps sailors from their loved ones.

Bren had always hated passing through here when coming to see his father, hated being under the vengeful stares of the angels. Every wind blew against him, beating him back to Map.

They crossed the long floor, past the vacant reception desk, to another of McNally's wonders—a lift that carried you to the second floor of the building without the use of stairs. He rolled aside a wooden door and then a second, latticed door and ushered Bren inside. Bren's stomach leaped when McNally followed him and the carriage abruptly sank several inches, causing the ropes and pulleys to strain with all their might to keep them from plunging into whatever abyss lay below. But the ropes held, and with a flip of a lever, they began floating upward.

The lift moved slowly and Bren looked at McNally out of the corner of his eye. As bald as the top of his head was, his face was covered with a wiry red beard, and red chest hair showed through the top of his linen shirt. The blaze of red against his mountainous body made Bren think of a simmering volcano, with the same sense of unpredictable danger.

The lift opened onto the heart of McNally's: the drafting room. This large, open area was normally filled with nearsighted men hunched over drafting tables like a bale of turtles, including Bren's father. The walls boasted large casement windows with real glass, and McNally had fitted the top of the building with what he called a sky-light—several massive panes of leaded glass that served as both roof and window. There was nothing else like it in Britannia, or in the world, for all Bren knew. On a normal
workday, natural light flooded the room, making it easier for the draftsmen to see, and reducing the risk of parchment catching fire from lanterns.

“Sit,” McNally said, pulling a stool out for Bren. He obeyed, and McNally sat down opposite him. Bren felt as if the tall walls were looming over him, all of them lined with trophies: the flag of a Barbary pirate ship that McNally claimed had kidnapped him as a child; one of the original copies of Mr. Mercator's ingenious projection map, which showed the world as if it had been unrolled flat like a scroll; a large, ornate tapestry from Japan that depicted a battle between shogun warriors; dozens of other smaller artifacts from lands far and near.

In a display case under lock and key was perhaps his most valuable single trophy—the copy of
The Travels of Marco Polo
owned by Christopher Columbus, complete with the Italian explorer's handwritten notes in the margins about China's “gold in the greatest abundance,” “rare silks and spices,” and “mountains of jade and rubies.”

“When one of my employees' ill-behaved sons nearly blows up one of Her Majesty's ships,” said McNally, “it doesn't do much for my business.”

“No, sir.”

“My job is helping the queen build her empire and her treasury. You're lucky the explosion wasn't as bad as it sounded.”

It wasn't my fault!
Bren wanted to say. But what he said was, “Yes, sir.”

“Do you know why I'm so successful, lad?”

Bren shifted nervously and his stool squeaked. Everyone knew Rand McNally was the reason Map had become so important. McNally himself was master of the Mapmaker's Guild, which basically meant his maps had the royal seal of approval. But it was more than that. All around them stood huge maps mounted on rolling wooden frames like theater backdrops. They showed how the world was divided up. Among them were maps of the New World, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic Ocean. On all of these were territories shaded with blue for Britannia, green for France, and yellow for Iberia, the unified empire of Spain and Portugal. It was like some great board game being played by European rivals, and yellow was winning, in the New World at least. McNally didn't just sell these maps—he had helped shape them by providing reliable guides for the most profitable trade routes.

McNally slowly leaned forward, enough to make Bren worry that he would collapse on top of him. “You've heard of the Dutch Bicycle and Tulip Company?”

Bren's eyes immediately went to a large world map. The entire right half, east of Africa and south of China, was swathed in orange. The Dutch Bicycle & Tulip Company was the shipping company that had staked all these claims
by rounding the cape of Africa and crossing the vast Indian Ocean when no one else had the ships or the sailors to do it. By having the most valuable colonies, the Netherlands had become the wealthiest and most powerful kingdom in the West.

“The Netherlands have an absolute monopoly on Far East trade, in large part because they guard their maps as state secrets,” said McNally. “They know the fairest routes, the safest harbors, have learned the native customs. With no intention of sharing them.”

Bren nodded, although he had no idea why he was getting a history lesson. He knew all this.

“I, on the other hand,” said McNally, “saw the value of
trading
knowledge rather than hoarding it. Take these, for example.” And here he grabbed one of Bren's favorite books—a leather-bound portfolio entitled
Known and Authentic Treasure Maps, Vol. 7
, his inventory of maps that supposedly led to buried treasure, pirate booty, and shipwrecked spoils. These were a steady stream of income for McNally, sold to investors and risk-seeking adventurers. Or, as Bren's father called them,
fools
.

McNally didn't even have to open the book—Bren had memorized every map, each one emblazoned with an X next to a caption explaining the type of alleged treasure, where it came from, how it supposedly got there, and the source of the information. McNally offered no guarantees
of success. You were trusting the mapmaker, not the seller. But McNally's true genius was that he had acquired legal backing for them. By order of Her Majesty, anyone buying a treasure map from Rand McNally had lawful claim to anything they found.

“Foolish people think the trick to wealth is a ship and a shovel,” McNally continued. “But look at me, lad. Information, hope, power—that's what I deal in. That's the real treasure. And I don't have to sail around the world to acquire it.”

McNally sat upright, and Bren quietly exhaled.

“I think you get my point, lad?”

Bren nodded again. Here was another adult telling him he was a fool for wanting to be a sailor. Stay put and help build McNally's Empire of Maps! The only problem was, Bren had watched his father toil for McNally all these years, and the only person getting rich was Rand McNally.

“You could have a bright future here,” said McNally. “Your father has shown me your schoolwork, so I know you have his mechanical skills. I also know you have his devilish memory. And it's right and good that a boy should learn his father's trade.”

Bren didn't know what to say. When McNally referred to his father's devilish memory, he meant that David Owen could take one long look at a detailed map and then duplicate it with hardly another glance at the original. Bren
could do the same. He could have told you where every book he had ever browsed at Black's was shelved, and he remembered the final position of every chess game Black had played with Bren's mother. But so what? Perhaps it made his father's job—making copies of existing maps, for the most part—easier. But it didn't make it any more interesting to Bren.

“But you don't want to be a mapmaker,” said McNally, “you want to be an explorer! Well, come with me.”

Bren followed McNally out of the drafting room, down stairs leading toward the back of the building. They walked down a long hallway until they approached a pair of large, gold doors. Bren's heart began to beat faster. He knew where those doors led—the Explorers' Club, where Rand McNally hosted the most famous adventurers of the day, the men who had been to the remotest parts of the world and back. The club had made McNally's a destination for more than just maps. Guests enjoyed fine tobacco, wine, brandy, and dinners prepared by a French chef. And in return, of course, McNally got first dibs on new maps, discoveries, and collectibles. Bren had never been inside, but he often fantasized about walking through a sea of deep leather chairs, and hearing a half-seen man begin a story that would trump anything he had heard in the Gooey Duck.

“This way,” said McNally, leading Bren away from the
gold doors down a hallway to a single, ordinary, non-gold door. “You didn't really think I was going to invite you into the club, did you?”

Bren blushed. McNally pulled out an iron ring jangling with keys.

“Boom times these days for explorers,” he said, unlocking the door. “More guests in the club than ever before. My man Rupert could use a hand. And let's face it, I don't have to pay you.”

Rupert?

When McNally opened the door onto a darkened room, windowless except for slits near the ceiling, Bren's stomach dropped. He knew exactly where he was.

“Welcome to the vomitorium,” said McNally. “Where you will attend to the needs of respectable citizens who have
overindulged
.”

There were only a few lamps, for the privacy of the “guests,” but Bren could tell McNally was smiling. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he could see that the room was divided up into small nooks, each with a cot. At least two men, well dressed but in sorry states, were there. One was still asleep, but the other sat up and proceeded to convulse and breathe heavily. A middle-aged man dressed like a valet rushed over to him, bowing slightly and holding out a bucket just in time for the man to puke his guts out.

“Look at the bright side,” said McNally. “You get to be around
real
explorers. You can pretend you're swabbing the deck of a ship. And who knows, maybe down the road, mapmaking won't seem so objectionable to you.”

And that was that. He ushered Bren into the street, to enjoy his last afternoon of freedom. Mr. Black was wrong: Bren hadn't gotten off easy when he was handed over to Rand McNally. He had been given a life sentence.