by John White
John untied the thongs of his sandals and shucked them. Next he pulled his tunic over his head and stood on the wharf again, doing his best to gauge the depth of the water and the position of the thin gold chain. Then he dived.
The water was cold but John was intent on what he was doing. He was an old hand at finding coins on the bottom of swimming pools, and there was no doubt in his mind that he would succeed in recovering his treasure.
It cost him three attempts. Each time he would wait on the surface, treading water while he recovered his breath. His third dive took him right to the spot. The moment he felt the pre-cious metal safely between his fingers he rose to the surface. Joy and relief surged as he rose.
He heaved himself from the water and crossed to where the old man sat. There was no chain. Only the ring and the locket. He handed them to the seer and then reached for his tunic and began to pull it over his wet body.
"I showed them to you in the boat when you rescued me from the tower," he said, his voice muffled from inside the tunic. "I showed them to Folly ... and to Vixenia too, I think. My granma was going to tell me what they were .. . but she died. I told you she died, didn't I?"
"No, John. I've never seen them before. You certainly told me your mother and your grandmother had died. And you said that your father was a drunk who didn't want you."
John sat on the rock and began to lace up his sandals. "There's a picture of a soldier in the locket—and a lock of hair. I keep thinking it might be a picture of my father. Maybe now that I've killed Old Nick, the Changer will come and take me to him. He said tonight. Oh, Mab, I wish he'd hurry."
Mab had already opened the locket and was examining its contents, his wrinkled face a mask. "I should have realized you did not come from a world near here," he said quietly, "nor from an age that is close to us in time."
"What do you mean?" John asked. "Isn't this place sort of connected with the real world? I thought it must be, sort of, like a world-inside-a-world."
"No, John-of-the-Swift-Sword. You have come from a distant world, and an age that is not now." There was a long pause, a pause John knew he must not break. At last Mab spoke. "How slow I have been! I should have known."
John stared at him.
"With the Changer, such things are a small matter." He sighed weakly. "Now I can tell you about your father."
"You know him?"
"Now I do. I now know who he is. Or rather, I know who you are. I have known about your father long enough. There are too many things I have learned in my six centuries here." The seer's voice was weary. He was still staring at the photograph and the lock of hair.
"John-of-the-Swift-Sword, you are known in your own world as John McNab."
"No, Mab, John Wilson."
"Wilson cannot be your real name."
"But it is. I've always been called John Wilson."
"Perhaps so. But your father's name is Ian McNab. Wilson was your mother's maiden name. She and your father married against your grandmother's wishes. Your father knew nothing about your birth. He was away in France. The cable announc-ing your birth apparendy never reached him. He only knew that your mother had died."
John swallowed and took a deep breath. It was a new thought. John McNab. And his father's name was Ian McNab.
"Will I find him?"
"Unhappily, yes. The Changer never lies. His promises are sure."
John struggled with a frightening thought "You mean he won't—won't want me?"
Mab sighed. "Who would not want a son?" he said. "All men long for sons. And from what I know of your father. .
"What do you know about him, Mab? Tell me. Tell me every-thing you know." He shivered with fear and longing as much as with the chill of the water that still clung to him from his dive off the wharf.
Mab closed the locket, then spent almost a minute examining the ring. "Your father was born in the north of Scodand," he said at length. "Twenty miles northwest of Inverness. He spoke Gaelic as a young child and learned to speak English at church, listening to an English minister so that he spoke it with an English accent When he was fifteen he came to England to find employment and for several years worked as a miner in Bolton."
John nodded eagerly, storing every word in his memory. "Is that my father in the snapshot?"
"Yes, and the hair is a lock of his hair. When the photograph was taken he had just volunteered to be a foot soldier in the Lancashire Fusileers. He had been married a week at the time."
"Let me look at it again!" John extended his hand for the locket and stared at the picture with a new eagerness. His fin-gers were trembling.
"Your father was a good soldier, but he drank too much," Mab said quietly after a moment "He became a regimental sergeant major, but was demoted to the ranks for something that happened when he was drunk"
John felt a pang of fear. "What happened?"
"It is little worth repeating. What matters is that the Changer came to him then. The war was virtually over. He had become the personal servant of a British colonel in the Allied head-quarters in Paris. Once he stopped drinking he was able to save enough money to emigrate to Canada and booked a passage on a liner, traveling between Cherbourg and Montreal."
John drew in a deep breath. "So he did go to Canada. Then that's where the Changer will take me."
Mab made no reply. His shoulders were hunched and he fiddled listlessly with John's ring.
"I just can't wait!" John went on excitedly. "I wish the Changer would hurry up and let me meet him!"
"Unfortunately, you have met him already." Mab's voice was low and bitter.
John seemed not to hear him for a moment Then as the words penetrated, he said, "What did you say? I've already met him? When?"
It was then that a peal of gentle thunder shook the rocky walls around them, and a glowing blue mist drove out the red light until the two of them were alone in radiant blue.
"Oh, Changer. You have mocked me!" the old man cried, staggering feebly to his feet "You asked me centuries ago if I wanted a son, and I told you I did. 'Then you shall have one,' you said.
"But hundreds of years have passed. I thought it a kindness that I should live so long. But you brought me here and made me live so many years that I am now old and withered and dry as a stick You have even made me love the child."
His head was tossed back and his body became rigid. He clenched and unclenched his fists in a fever of pain. He swal-lowed, took a deep breath and continued. "I know not by what mysterious magic you placed centuries between us, but you mock me, Changer. You mock me! What good am I as a father when I stand before the gates of death? What use am I to my son? What joy shall I have when I love him for a day or two, only to perish and leave him alone?"
John trembled. His own face was now drawn and pale—just like the seer's. He felt the universe was turning in nauseating somersaults around him. Mab? His father? Or was the old prophet mad?
A sound of rumbling thunder grew in volume, and the voice that John knew to be the Changer said, "Peace, Ian McNab! Peace! Your days are numbered here, but you will not die soon in your own world. Instead you will pick up your youth where you left it, as you enter once again the world of men. I do not mock you, Ian McNab. I restore to you your earthly years and give you your son!"
A steel gray door appeared before them bearing the number 345. And as Mab stepped forward to seize the handle, he was changed. John struggled to his feet
"Mab! What's happening to you?"
The wrinkles were being smoothed away. The white hair was curling and turning a reddish brown. Green eyes sparkled with life and wonder. Mab's face was no longer gaunt nor his frame fragile. His beard vanished and a red mustache sprouted on his upper lip. He stood before John in a Harris tweed jacket, a tartan kilt, gray woolen socks and brogues.
He released the door handle and with a cry of joy seized John in his strong arms, whirling round and round crying, "I am Ian McNab, your father, son! My son, my son, I'm your father!" until he was breathless and J
ohn was dizzy.
So much had happened so quickly that John could only gasp and laugh. His face was flushed and his eyes were round with wonder. John noticed he was wearing his green blazer and shorts and that he was smaller too. He was sure the Salford Grammar School cap must be on his head. He could also feel his glasses resting on his nose.
But he cared little about how he was dressed. His eyes would only look at the marvelous man in the Harris tweed jacket and kilt.
"You said he was ... I mean you were .. .Scotch,.. ."John said breathlessly.
"Not Scotch, son, Scottish . . ."
"Yes, Scottish." John stopped. Then he laughed with nervous delight. "Are you really my dad?"
Ian McNab drew him closer to him again. "I'm your father and you are my son, the son I never knew I had until today," he said, his deep voice trembling with emotion. John leaned against him, taking satisfying breaths of Harris tweed.
Then he pulled away. "What's the door?" he asked.
Mab turned to look at the gray door again. "How old were you when you came to Anthropos?" he asked.
"Thirteen."
"Well, son, I'm not sure what happened. But ten years before then in your time I booked a berth on a ship bound for Mont-real. I never took ship, for the Changer brought me here first. It's all coming back to me now. My cabin number was 345. Perhaps—who can say—there may be berths for both of us beyond that door. But what year will it be in our world?"
The thunder rumbled again, and this time it had a curious effect on them. It took away their excitement and made them solemn and quiet. From the rumbling came the voice of the Changer "Go forward through the door. The year beyond it is 1929. Far. well."
Seizing John's hand Ian McNab turned the handle with his other. As he opened the door they heard a babble of men's voices beyond it.
31
* * *
Link between
Two Worlds
They were still leaning on the rail around the stern of the boat long after midnight Nearly all the passengers had gone below. The only sounds were the muted strains of the small orchestra in the first-class lounge, the soft wash of the sea along the liner's sides and the underlying throb of the ship's engines. Behind them the churning of the screws formed a broad pathway of luminescent green that mocked the faint stars above.
Ian McNab and John had filled the hours since their arrival on board with the endless business of exchanging stories. "I didn't want to know anything about your world," Ian McNab confessed. "Perhaps I knew, deep inside, that you came from here, even though I had no idea who you were. I'm not sure. But I pictured it six centuries into the future, and I dreaded to know what it was like. I knew it wouldn't be my world anymore."
He had said relatively little about his years in Anthropos but had questioned John endlessly about Grandma Wilson, Pimblett's Place and Salford Grammar School. "The old lady had changed a lot in thirteen years. I didn't even recognize her image at the wharf," he said thoughtfully.
"Why did they call you Mab?" John asked him.
"Because they couldn't say McNab. Mab was easier."
"And will you still be a seer? Will you do magic here?"
"Miracles, not magic. Who knows?" Ian McNab grinned. "I don't have my staff, you know, any more than you have your sword."
"Gosh. I never thought about them till now. I wonder what happened to them? And our clothes!"
"Think what a sensation it will create when someone comes across them," Ian McNab replied. "Can you picture them lying on the wharf—your sandals and tunic and my robe, your sword and my staff— but no bodies! What a legend it will make!"
The thought kept them speculating for several minutes.
"Yes, and if time goes by more rapidly there than here," his father continued, "we may have become a legend already. Just think of it. Minstrels may already be singing about us!"
"Will we ever go back?"
"You might, but not me."
"Oh, Mab, I wouldn't want to go back without you."
"You wouldn't want me to die, would you?"
"Die? Oh, no! But why should you die?"
"I was pretty close to it when we left, Sword Bearer. I imagine we would go back in the same condition we left. Maybe not Anyway I'm not about to risk it if I can help it. I'd better stay here."
John remembered that gray face of the dying seer and shuddered. "I never thought of that, Mab."
"We must look before we leap, Sword Bearer."
There was a pause. "Why do you keep calling me Sword Bearer?"
"Why do you keep calling me Mab?" "Did I?"
"You most certainly did."
There was another pause. John felt embarrassed. "I can't get used to saying it," he muttered shyly.
"Saying dad?"
John nodded, and once again Ian McNab's arm pulled him against himself. "You will. Or perhaps I should say, you'd better. If you go on calling me Mab, I shall have to stick with John-of-the-Swift-Sword—and that's far too lengthy."
They had hardly known how to behave when they first had entered cabin 345. Ian had been surprised that though ten earth years had passed since he had left, he had the same cabin number as for his first trip. Fortunately their fellow passengers seemed either to know them already or else to be expecting them. There was an elderly fat man from Montreal and three younger men who were French immigrants to Canada, all of whom greeted them cheerfully. There suitcases were on their bunks so that they knew at once which ones belonged to them. To John's surprise, his clothes from Pimblett's Place were all neatly packed inside his suitcase. He never found out how they got there.
They had first entered the cabin just at the time when Cherbourg was disappearing over the horizon, and the other members of the cabin evidently concluded they had been on deck. John smiled when he thought about it. "I didn't know what to say when we went through the door. It was so funny to feel the ship going up and down with the waves and to meet strangers who knew our names."
Ian McNab was looking down at an old gold ring which he wore on the middle finger of his right hand. He had returned the locket to John. "The Earl of Orkney gave the ring to my grandfather for some service or other," he said, "but we never learned anything about its history." He paused. "I wonder whether we brought anything else away with us. Have you checked your pockets?"
John searched. From his blazer pocket he pulled two stones, the smaller one the pearl-like pross stone, and the larger one the Mashal Stone. They stared at the latter in amazement. Even in the starlight it gleamed a radiant blue. John slipped the chain over his head. But to his disappointment he remained plainly visible.
Ian drew in a long breath. "I have a feeling that you, at any rate, will be going back some day. The stones are a link between the two worlds. We'll have to wait and see what happens."
The remainder of the voyage passed without incident, and eleven days later they arrived in Montreal. From there Ian McNab and his son John traveled overland to Winnipeg.
I suppose I ought to say that they lived happily ever after. For that would be true. But it would only be part of the truth.
They lived eventfully—or at least John did. As Ian McNab had suspected, John did go back to Anthropos, and the stones did have something to do with it. But that is another story. Is it not recorded in the Archives of Anthropos? If you ever get hold of them you may read it for yourself.
