Sister Emily's Lightship (27 page)

“I am what you would have me be, master,” her low voice called down to me.

I reached up a hand to help her step to earth, but my hand went through hers, mortal flesh through smoky air. It was then, I think, that I really believed she was what I guessed her to be.

She smiled. “What is your wish, master?”

I took the time to smile back. “How many wishes do I get?”

She shook her head but still she smiled, that Alexandrian smile, all lips without a hint of teeth. But there was a dimple in her left cheek. “One, my master, for you drew the cork but once.”

“And if I draw it again?”

“The cork is gone.” This time her teeth showed as did a second dimple, on the right.

I sighed and looked at the crumbled mess in my hand, then sprinkled the cork like seed upon the sand. “Just one.”

“Does a slave need more?” she asked in that same low voice.

“You mean that I should ask for my freedom?” I laughed and sat down on the sand. The little waves that outrun the big ones tickled my feet, for I had come out barefoot. I looked across the water. “Free to be a sailor again at my age? Free to let the sun peel the skin from my back, free to heave my guts over the stern in a blinding rain, free to wreck once more upon a slaver's shore?”

She drifted down beside me and, though her smoky hand could not hold mine, I felt a breeze across my palm that could have been her touch. I could see through her to the cockleshells and white stones pocking the sand.

“Free to make love to Alexandrian women,” she said. “Free to drink strong wine.”

“Free to have regrets in the morning either way,” I replied. Then I laughed.

She laughed back. “What about the freedom to indulge in a dinner of roast partridge in lemons and eggplant. What about hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with vermilion. What about cinnamon tripes?” It was the meal my master had just had.

“Rich food like rich women gives me heartburn,” I said.

“The freedom to fill your pockets with coins?”

Looking away from her, over the clotted sea, I whispered to myself, “‘Accursed thirst for gold! What dost thou not compel mortals to do,'” a line from the
Aeneid.

“Virgil was a wise man,” she said quietly. “For a Roman!” Then she laughed.

I turned to look at her closely for the first time. A woman who knows Virgil, be she djinn or mortal, was a woman to behold. Though her body was still composed of that shifting, smoky air, the features on her face now held steady. She no longer looked like the Alexandrian girl, but had a far more sophisticated beauty. Lined with kohl, her eyes were gray as smoke and her hair the same color. There were shadows along her cheeks that emphasized the bone and faint smile lines crinkling the skin at each corner of her generous mouth. She was not as young as she had first appeared, but then I am not so young myself.

“Ah, Antithias,” she said, smiling at me, “even djinns age, though corked up in a bottle slows down the process immeasurably.”

I spoke Homer's words to her then: “In youth and beauty, wisdom is but rare.” I added in my own cynic's way, “If ever.”

“You think me wise, then?” she asked, then laughed and her laughter was like the tinkling of camel bells. “But a gaudy parrot is surely as wise, reciting another's words as his own.”

“I know no parrots who hold Virgil and Homer in their mouths,” I said, gazing at her not with longing but with a kind of wonder. “No djinn either.”

“You know many?”

“Parrots, yes; djinn, no. You are my first.”

“Then you are lucky, indeed, Greek, that you called up one of the worshippers of Allah and not one of the followers of Iblis.”

I nodded. “Lucky, indeed.”

“So, to your wish, master,” she said.

“You call me master, I who am a slave,” I said. “Do
you
not want the freedom you keep offering me? Freedom from the confining green bottle, freedom from granting wishes to any
master
who draws the cork?”

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.

M
OST 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.

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.

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.