The Golden Specific

by S. E. Grove

  He uncrossed his arms and held out his scarred hand, a surprising tremor running through it. “Are you going to make me wait another hour for a hug, or what?” he demanded gruffly.

  Sophia pitched herself forward with a delighted laugh and wrapped her arms around him. “Where have you been?” she cried. “You’ve been gone forever!”

  “Still having trouble keeping time, I see,” he said laughingly, but the pleased smile on his face as Sophia pulled back left her no doubt that Theo had missed her, too.

  She turned away with effort to greet Miles, who embraced her happily, and whose mane of white hair, looking even more unkempt than usual, threatened her with imminent suffocation. “My dear Sophia,” Miles exclaimed, finally releasing her, “we have fought our way back to you tooth and nail, and here we are at last, back where we belong.” He grinned conspiratorially. “Although if you ask me, it is the perfect moment for another journey.” Shadrack and Mrs. Clay groaned. “It is!” Miles protested. “Sophia is finally done with her classes, the forecast in the Farmer’s Almanac is very auspicious, and I love the smell of foreign breezes in June!”

  Shadrack shook his head with mock exasperation. “At least take a few minutes to tell us about the Indian Territories before you leave in search of savory foreign breezes, Miles.”

  “Well, if we all leave together, Theo and I can report along the way!”

  Sophia and Mrs. Clay laughed.

  “Miles,” Shadrack remonstrated, “I am forced to conclude that you expressly intend to torment me. Knowing full well that the Ministry confines me to Boston like a rabbit in a pen, or a chicken in a coop, or—more accurately—a helpless prisoner in jail . . .”

  “Very well, very well,” scoffed Miles. “I can see that the Ministry has given you license to put on airs, and that now there are too many other issues of importance competing for your time, so that even the merest little sea voyage—a slight skip and a jump—is an interruption to Great Matters of State.”

  Sophia and Theo exchanged grins.

  “By all means, Miles,” Shadrack burst out, “let me resign my post at once and nominate you. I would do anything to rid myself of the unfathomable Matters of State and the inevitable headaches that accompany them.” He sighed and said in a more serious tone, “In truth, I would not wish the Ministry position on my greatest enemy.”

  “Not even the magnificent, handsome, and brilliant Gordon Broadgirdle?” Miles’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Surely you could spare the esteemed member of parliament a headache or two, if only to remind him of how it feels to be mortal.”

  “Well.” Shadrack smiled, as if determined to see the problem humorously. “Perhaps Broadgirdle.” He stood up with sudden energy. “But on such a night we should be celebrating, not inviting thoughts of our least favorite MP into our midst! If you’ll join me upstairs, you’ll see that I’m not entirely unprepared for a small celebration. I have ginger beer and two meat pies from the Stamp and Whistle, and Mrs. Clay bought the largest maple-sugar cake she could find at Oliver Hamilton’s. Miles and Theo, if you would kindly bring the maps to show us every mile of your progress, we will have everything we need.”

  Miles bounded for the stairs. “Theo will have to do the talking; my mouth will be full.”

  Mrs. Clay followed him, muslin skirts bunched in her hands to avoid tripping on the stairs, with Shadrack close on her heels. “Hurry, Mrs. Clay, for Fates’ sake,” Shadrack urged her. “The man will leave us nothing to eat, and we’ll be forced to make a meal of the crumbs on the floor.”

  “What a good thing the maple cake is upstairs in my apartment, then,” Mrs. Clay replied.

  “Oh, he’ll find it,” Shadrack cried. “Nothing is safe from that man’s stomach, not even the kitchen table.”

  Sophia and Theo laughingly followed. “Hey,” Theo said, grasping Sophia’s hand as they climbed the stairs. “How have you been?”

  Sophia smiled, the sudden shyness she had felt at first seeing him momentarily returning. “Fine.” She squeezed his hand. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Me, too. Shadrack says you’ve been spending all your time at the library.”

  Sophia looked down at her feet. “Yes. Just trying to decipher the letter. I’ve made no progress. Right now I’m trying to read through three hundred volumes that might possibly have some clue.”

  “Well, now it’s summer. Maybe,” he went on, his voice light, “it’s time to take a little break from that letter.”

  Sophia looked up at him with surprise. They had reached the top of the stairs. “Take a break from the letter?” she asked, astonished, as if he had suggested burning it in the fireplace.

  “Sure. You know, sometimes things look different after a break. Rest your head a bit. Do something other than read for a while.”

  Sophia pulled her hand away. “I’m not taking a break.”

  “I don’t mean forget about the letter—I’m not saying that. Just a break. We could persuade Shadrack to let us sail for a month with Calixta and Burr. Maybe you’ll have some new ideas.”

  “I don’t want to take a break. I want to find my parents.”

  “All right, all right,” Theo said at once, his tone conciliatory. “I just got back. I don’t want you mad at me already.” He grinned. “I can come along. We’ll go read those three hundred volumes together, and it will go twice as fast. What do you say?” He reached for her hand again.

  Sophia looked up at him, her expression softening. “I have to read them myself. But thanks. I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Sophia, Theo,” Shadrack called. He appeared in the doorway of the study. “Are you going to help us fight Miles for the food or not? He has already plunged a fork into one of the pies, and I’m not sure we can hold him off much longer.”

  “The scoundrel!” Theo exclaimed, pulling Sophia after him. The meat pies and bottles of ginger beer had pride of place on the kitchen table; as Mrs. Clay laid out the plates, napkins, and utensils, she swatted Miles’s hands away from the main course.

  When they were all seated, Shadrack divided up the first pie, poured ginger beer out for all, and raised his glass in a toast. “Welcome home, Theo and Miles. Here’s to a safe voyage concluded.”

  “And many more to come,” Miles added, raising his own glass. “Starting tomorrow.”

  They all laughed and dove into the pies, which were every bit as good as Shadrack had promised. When they had finished, leaving only crumbs and empty glasses, Mrs. Clay brought dessert down from upstairs and served generous portions of the soft yellow cake slathered in maple sugar frosting alongside cups of Charleston tea.

  Miles sat back with a satisfied sigh after his third piece. Then he began his account of the journey, describing the long route west through New York and the northwest corner of Pennsylvania that led to the Indian Territories. At times flaring into argument with Theo where his recollection of certain circumstances differed, Miles admitted that their travels west had been fairly uneventful, even up to their arrival at the Eerie Sea. “The only difficulty we encountered was a decidedly prejudicial view toward Bostonians,” Miles said sourly. “The border closure has not improved our popularity. An old man in Salt Lick actually spat at me when I told him where we came from.”

  Theo chuckled at the memory. “Miles spat back, of course.”

  “Well, I had to!” Miles protested. “I had to explain why I loathe the border closure more than he does.”

  “Apart from that lively event, the only obstacle was finding Cabeza de Cabra. We took as many days doing that, once we reached the Eerie Sea, as we did getting there from Boston.”

  “That’s true,” Miles assented.

  “No one could agree on where he lived,” Theo explained to the others, “and the lead we were following was so vague to begin with.”

  Miles and Theo had departed in late winter in pursuit of a rumor. Wo
rd had reached Boston of a hermit living near the glacial Eerie Sea, a man from the Papal States named Cabeza de Cabra who, for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, shunned all human contact. Then, on the three hundred and sixty-fifth—the day of the winter solstice—he emerged from his solitude to rant about the end of the world, the next Great Disruption, and the mysteries of Ausentinia. He spoke a curious amalgam of Erie, Castilian, and English, and the unsolicited sermons were dismissed by the villagers as the wanderings of a madman.

  But the distant echoes of his annual ravings had traveled all the way to Boston, along with the name “Ausentinia,” which had been mentioned nowhere else except Bronson’s letter. The March snows were still falling when Miles and Theo journeyed west.

  “By the time we found the tree house where Cabeza de Cabra had been living,” Miles continued, “it was late April, and his body had been lying unattended so long the crows had taken it to pieces.”

  “Ugh,” Mrs. Clay said, shuddering.

  Shadrack sighed with disappointment. “And did you find anything there, in his home, to indicate how he might know of Ausentinia?”

  “Cabeza de Cabra lived like an animal,” Miles said, frowning. “He dressed in skins and slept on a filthy piece of hide. There were no pots and pans, shoes or books or tools. I have no idea how he fed himself. We were about to leave the place, after finding it so barren, when Theo noticed something that I, frankly, would have missed.”

  “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 agr
ee. 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.”