by S. E. Grove
—From Sophia Tims’s Reflections on a Journey to the Eerie Sea
THE MEAL SAGE and Ash had prepared was waiting on the table. Sophia recalled Smokey’s warning as she looked at the food and wondered where it had come from: corn porridge with mushrooms, bread and butter, summer apples baked with honey. Still, she was very hungry, as Sage had predicted. Casanova had already served himself a full plate; he seemed to have accepted the three sisters’ hospitality entirely. She took his cue, gratefully, and joined them.
“Sophia does not know what goes in the mirrorscope,” Borage announced, helping herself to bread.
“What does that mean?” Theo asked, his mouth already full.
Sophia held up the mirrorscope and explained its purpose. “I suppose I am meant to create a map of the Clime, but I have no idea yet how to do it.” She shook her head, dejected. “Shadrack never got to that part in our lessons. I’ve only ever learned to read memory maps, not make them.”
“Well, you’ll have to learn yourself,” Borage snapped.
Sage gave her a look. “Yes, Borage, she knows that.”
“Perhaps we are to help her,” Ash suggested quietly. “After all, it is the three of us who converse most with the old ones. We know their thoughts quite well.”
“We did help,” said Borage. “Sophia would never have known to make the mirrorscope, would you?”
“That’s certainly true. I wouldn’t even recognize this as a map reader if you hadn’t told me.”
“Knowing their thoughts is not the same as mapping their memories,” Sage reflected. “I am sure Sophia will discover the way.” She held the basket of bread out toward Theo, whose plate was already empty.
“But there’s no time!” Sophia’s stomach was in knots, and she was having difficulty eating, though the food was delicious.
“Here’s what we will do,” Sage said, pushing back her chair. “Sophia?” She went to the tapestry that hung at the left side of the fireplace. “This map shows where we are—here.” She took up the poker and pointed to a gray circle in a tear-shaped blue lake. Narrow blue passageways fanned out from the lake in every direction, including south. “These are the streams that wind through the Stone Age,” Sage said, tapping some of the blue ribbons. “And here is the glacier, to the southeast. Birke will carry you this way, southwest, to avoid it altogether.” She trailed the poker along a riverine route that cut through the gray Stone Age and into the green lands south of them. “This stream runs quite far, look. All the way here, through upper New York, and into . . .” She pointed at a green shape that looked vaguely familiar to Sophia.
“Turtleback Valley!” she exclaimed.
“Precisely.”
“Birke can carry us all the way there?” Sophia wondered.
“What she means is: Does our sorcery extend into New Occident?” Borage commented from the table.
“I—” Sophia began. “Well, I didn’t mean sorcery, but I do not even know where your realm begins and ends.”
“It is a little grand to call it our ‘realm,’” Sage said with a smile. “I don’t know what you heard in Oakring, but I suspect they remember things rather differently than we do.”
“They said you were banished here,” Theo put in bluntly, “for attempting to remake New Occident.”
“And,” Sophia added, “that you came here to make your own Age.”
The three sisters exchanged glances, and Sophia saw in their eyes many years of disagreements. “That is true, in a manner of speaking,” Sage said.
Borage frowned and stared at the table with an embarrassed air.
“It took many years for the Stone Age to become what you see now,” Sage added gently.
“It was a disaster,” Borage said curtly, not looking up. “Or, rather, many disasters, one after the other.”
Sophia waited, hoping for more explanation.
“It is more true to say that we have exiled ourselves here,” Ash said. She reached out and tenderly covered Borage’s hand with her own. “The fewer people who come here, the better. Apart from the three of you, no one has come to the Stone Age for more than two years.”
“We did see someone,” Casanova commented. “In what you call the Stone Age—following us along as the canoe carried us northward.”
Borage chuckled. “One of Ash’s tree-children snuck out after all,” she said, squeezing her sister’s hand. “Sage has tried to keep all this as decorous as possible, but truth will out.” She grinned.
“What do you mean?” asked Sophia.
“We did not wish you to be alarmed as you traveled here,” Sage explained. “Let us say that you are only seeing one side of our world. Not all of it.”
“My tree-children are not alarming,” Ash whispered.
“Not to you, my dear,” Borage commented, pushing her plate aside. “But that is the point. Most people do find animated bundles of roots disconcerting, especially when they are bound up with string in that way. And their voices are a bit odd, you have to admit. Like creaking floorboards.” She sighed. “But I admit some of my experiments had even worse results.”
“But then the people of the Indian Territories have it wrong,” Sophia said, surprised. “Even the Eerie.”
“Of course they have it wrong.” Borage scowled. “They are ignorant. What they know about the workings of our Age would not fill this cup,” she said bitterly, holding up her cup of water. There was a long silence as Sage and Ash looked at their sister, waiting.
Finally, when Borage seemed unwilling to say more, Sage spoke. “What Borage does not say,” she put in gently, “is that we were ignorant as well—at first. We shared the assumptions of our fellow Elodeans, and those assumptions turned out to be wrong.”
“What assumptions?” Sophia asked, intensely curious.
“The easiest way to think of it is as a room,” Sage said, gesturing to the space around them. “If someone from your city of Boston were to imagine the relationship between a people and their Age, they might think of it as a person inside a room. What the Eerie know is that this ‘room’ is sentient. The Eerie imagine a living, waking room that can hear you when you laugh and shout inside it.”
Sophia nodded. “Yes—that fits what Goldenrod has told me.”
“And this is why we hoped to make an Age,” Ash put in quietly. “For cannot the occupant change rooms, and even create a better, more beautiful room?”
“This was the mistaken assumption,” Sage continued. “For, as we learned, it is not accurate to imagine the Age as the room. It is more accurate to imagine the Age as another person in the room.” She paused and looked at them for acknowledgment.
Sophia, Theo, and Casanova looked back at her in silence, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand,” Theo said frankly.
Borage let out a low, bitter laugh. “Imagine how annoying it is to be in a room with someone who ignores you completely. You talk to them and they seem not to hear you. You try to persuade them not to light a fire on the floor, and they do it anyway, and then when you stamp the fire out, they look around shocked, trying to figure out what happened to their fire. Or,” she said, growing more animated, “they start swinging an ax in every direction, smashing the furniture and the walls, and finally hitting you in the shoulder. More than annoying!” she fumed.
“You mean,” Casanova said slowly, “that the actions we take have consequences for the Clime. They upset the Clime.”
“And that what you see happening in the Age around you are responses,” Sage said.
“The rain of ash,” Sophia said, with dawning realization. “The char.”
Borage stormed to her feet. “Among other things. This war is wreaking havoc on every Age it touches,” she raged, stamping over to the tapestry map. “Sinkholes, storms, weirwinds, and more, I’m sure, to come.” She jabbed at the map with a broom. “There is a crack in the earth—her
e—that runs a mile long, and no one seems to wonder where it came from!”
“So the war is causing all of this?” Theo asked, perplexed.
Borage whirled to glare at him. “You can’t keep firing a pistol in a closed room without consequences. Keep firing that pistol and you’re going to hit someone. And make them very, very angry.”
• • •
THE THREE SISTERS walked with them all the way down to the island’s shore, where the canoe waited under the starry sky. “Sleep as much as you can,” Sage advised. “You can trust Birke to carry you safely.”
“I hope you find the solution, Sophia,” Borage said, her voice unexpectedly earnest. “We have mostly left your Age behind, but some part of me still grieves for the destruction I have seen in it—past and future.”
“Certainly you will find it,” Ash said. “This is for you,” she added, handing Sophia a roll of paper. “For the map you are making of the way through the glacier and the Stone Age. It will preserve the memories more clearly.”
Sophia realized that it was a roll of birch bark. “Oh, thank you!”
She had packed the mirrorscope in her satchel, close to hand, and as she said good-bye to the feared, disowned, and outcast sisters who had given them such an unexpected welcome, half of her mind was still turning over the problem of the memory map, as it had been ever since she and Borage had left the turreted workroom.
She intended to ponder the question more fully as they traveled.
Casanova pushed them off, stepping quickly into the canoe and taking his seat at the stern. Theo had already curled up against the hull. Sophia settled herself so that her head was at the bow and her feet lay parallel to Theo’s. Facing northward, she saw Casanova’s silhouette and, behind it, the larger shape of the island castle. Only one light shone in it now, pale yellow but steady. As they began to move, she glanced upward at the clear sky, almost aglow with starlight. There was no moon. The constellations appeared motionless, despite the speed of the canoe.
The murmuring sound of the water beneath them shifted as Birke left the lake and entered the stream that led southwest. It was a low murmur, quiet and calm, and Sophia imagined it was how the three sisters would sound now, sitting around their fire, talking of the travelers who had visited their realm.
Without meaning to, Sophia fell asleep. Her dreams were strange and vivid. She heard high-pitched laughter that sounded almost like birds chirping. A forest came into view, and among the trunks, children were running, chasing one another. It was their laughter that rose and fell, giddy and gleeful. One of the children ran toward her and threw his arms around her. Only then did she see that he was not a child, but only moved like one. Every part of his body was a tangled cluster of roots, and he was clothed in a fine film of thread like a cobweb. His eyes were little brown nuts, and his laughing mouth had no teeth, only a green leaf of a tongue. He pressed his head against her side and cried, “Hiding, hiding!”
The dream shifted, and now Sophia looked out onto a flat plateau of stone, where a giant made of rock tipped his head back and raised his arms high. He seemed about to summon the sky, but instead he suddenly swung down and smashed his head against the ground, as if intent on breaking himself to pieces. The ground trembled, and the giant raised his head again and brought it down once more, and again and again and again, until his great forehead shattered and the splintered fragments cascaded outward like the shards of a broken vessel. Then Sophia heard the voice that had been calling uselessly to him all along, wailing now with anguish, “No, Rore, no! How could you? How could you?” The words trailed off into weeping, and Sophia felt a deep pang of grief, for the stone giant and for the woman whose wordless lament went on and on.
In the last dream, there was a storm. Sophia felt the ground beneath her rumbling. The sky was heavy with rain, and the clouds seemed to press down upon her. They were there, just beside her: great angry clouds of fury, in which the lightning shuddered like a spasm of violence. Sophia felt herself pushed back, and back. The clouds would pin her to the ground, they would eat her alive, they would destroy her. Her mouth was filled with water. She could not breathe. All the air was gone, and the lightning flashed now through water, a cruel stabbing of light that was meant to end her, end her completely.
Sophia woke with a start, sitting up so suddenly that the canoe rocked. The first thing she saw was Casanova’s scarred face watching her. She realized that she could see him because the sky was light; a gray dawn was upon them. Dark clouds overhead recalled her dream, and for a moment she imagined that it would begin again: the clouds would enclose and then suffocate her. Her breath came hard and ragged; her heart was still pounding. She shook her head sharply.
“Nightmares,” Casanova said quietly. “I have them, too.” He motioned with his head at the way before them. “But don’t worry. You’ve left them behind now, and things are going well here in the waking world. We’ve made good progress.”
They were deep in the woods, floating rapidly along a stream that gurgled over mossy stones, past pines and maples. The air was moist and heavy with threatening rain. Birds cried out urgently, as they do before a storm, and only then did it occur to Sophia that it was the first time she had heard birdsong since entering the glacier.
She looked down and saw that she was still clutching the roll of birch bark that Ash had given her, and slowly her thoughts ordered themselves. Her eyes drifted upward to the trees around them. Dreams, she thought, dreams that are memories. Just like the wheel of wood and the piece of antler. I was remembering what this birch has seen.
Theo woke up then. He looked around sleepily and adjusted his sling, wincing slightly. “What?” he said, in response to Sophia’s stare.
“I was thinking,” she said slowly. “About memory maps. What makes them. Not who—what. How they are made. Especially when they are memories that aren’t human. Is it a person who makes them, or are they made by the memories themselves? Do the memories gather on the substance from which the map is then chosen?”
Theo scrunched up his face. “What?”
Sophia’s eyes opened wide. “Sticky,” she said with a burst of awareness. “Casanova, he said they were sticky.”
Casanova nodded and then winked, tapping his nose, in imitation of Pip Entwhistle. “So he did, so he did.”
“What are you two talking about?” Theo asked.
“Precious stones are sticky,” she said excitedly. “They gather memories more easily than anything.” It occurred to her then that mapmaking, great mapmaking of the kind she admired, was as much about inspiration as it was about skill. What had inspired Shadrack to make memory maps out of pennies? Was it the long years he had spent devising maps that revealed the hidden past, or was it a momentary insight when a shopkeeper handed him a palmful of change? Was it a beggar on the corner with hands outstretched, asking for coins? Was it the feel of the metal clinking in Shadrack’s pocket, sounding out a subtle melody that told a story about where each piece had been? Perhaps, Sophia thought, great mapmaking began with noticing such moments and really listening to them.
“Maybe I don’t have to make the memory map! Maybe it is already made!” She dove into her pack and pulled out her satchel, wrestling with the contents until she had drawn out the mirrorscope and then a small leather purse tied with blue string. “Garnets!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “The memories are in the garnets!”
“But you got those in Ausentinia,” Theo said, confused.
“I did. But somehow—somehow—I am sure that when we see them through this mirrorscope, we will find that they are not from Ausentinia at all. They are from here. And they hold the memories of the old one that lives and breathes around us.”
As she opened the mirrorscope, Sophia thought about her last few days in Ausentinia. She remembered when Alba had handed her the purse of garnets—they had seemed so much less important than the map accompanying them. Soph
ia had thought of them as currency of some kind: pretty pieces of red stone whose value lay in how they could be traded and what they might procure in exchange. She realized now that she was wrong. The garnets were not to be traded; they were precious stones in a different way altogether—and yet the way she had gotten it wrong allowed her to connect the pennies with the garnets and make the leap. She carefully poured the garnets into the mirrorscope’s compartment, then fastened the lid. For a moment she paused, looking at the instrument apprehensively.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Theo prompted. “Try it.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
He grinned. “Then you’ll figure out what does. Try it.”
Sophia took a deep breath and put the mirrorscope to her eye, pointing the glass end toward the growing sunlight. Her vision was flooded with crimson. For a moment she saw a beautiful constellation of red and white, and then it was gone. The memories of the old one filled her mind. She had expected something like her encounter with Ausentinia—an immersion into some unrecognizable landscape. But this was nothing like that. The memories contained in the garnets were recent and recognizable, if not familiar. They were one kind of memory, over and over again, recurring with terrible variety and ingenuity and yet repetitive in their horrors. There were people in all of them. And what the people felt, the old one felt. Sophia had not understood until then that the old one not only watched and listened, but sensed. A brief pang of heartache echoed in the old one like a sharp cry in a cavern: filling every dark chamber, vibrating into the deep darkness. This was how it could know so much in so many places—every twitch of gladness and grief was amplified a thousandfold. The question was not how the old one could know and see so much; the question was how the old one could hope to ignore any of it: the dull ache of a doctor dressing one wound after another; the anguish of a mother burying her son; the terrible uncertainty of waiting for a soldiering father to return; the bitterness of hunger in the aftermath of razing fire; the sense of futility, hearing the war cries once more; the emptiness at the sight of a buried town; the fevered desire to be done with life, to be gone from the world, when everyone who mattered in it was gone.
