The Lost Cities

by Dale Peck

  “It is the Lord who shall protect Osterbygd, and the Lord who shall forsake you, when you leave the shelter of sanctified land.” The priest dropped to his knees. Susan thought he was going to pray, but instead he used the silver cross in his hands to draw its twin in the sand, where formerly Susan had drawn the insignia that had been on Mario’s book. When he finished he pointed his spiritual pencil at her.

  “We will see if your magic can prevail against the power of the Lord.” And, rising, he stalked back to his church.

  Susan waited until the priest was gone, then turned to Mario.

  “I believe it when Uncle Farley says you negotiated the deal. You could always convince Mum that buying your favorite flavor of ice cream was in her best interest.”

  “Frozen sugar milk?” Iussi murmured.

  Gunnar’s tongue danced over his lips. “Sugar?”

  Susan ignored them. Mario’s face had gone ashen at the mention of their mother. All the self-possession that made him seem more like the grownups than like Susan and Iacob vanished, and he stood there, a ten- or eleven-year-old boy who terribly missed his mum.

  “How is she?” he said. “And Dad? Oh, Susan, you don’t know how much I’ve missed them!”

  “They—they’re well,” Susan said, taken aback. Mario’s loneliness was so desperate it hurt even to witness it. She took a deep breath, then decided to give voice to her earlier suspicion. “Mario,” she said carefully, “do you think Karl Olafson’s amulet is the one you were wearing—”

  “Susan!”

  Uncle Farley’s voice was unexpectedly short, but Susan didn’t take her eyes from Mario, who refused to meet her gaze.

  “Mario,” Susan pressed on, “can we both use it? Or do we—do you have to choose? Between us getting back, or you?”

  “Susan, please,” Uncle Farley insisted. “You know we can’t discuss these things. It might influence the future.”

  Suddenly Mario whirled on his uncle. “None of you understands what I’ve been through! How many times I’ve opened my eyes and looked to see if Charles was awake, only to realize I was alone. How many times I’ve looked in the mirror hoping to see me—five-year-old me—but instead I see this person.” Mario pinched and pulled his skin as though it were a costume he wished he could rip off. “The Amulet of Babel is the only way for me to go home.”

  “Amulet of Babel?” Uncle Farley’s brows lowered.

  “Bjarki told us to look out for something from Babel!” Susan said to her uncle, then turned back to Mario. Conscious of the Greenlanders’ stares, she lowered her voice. “I’m right, aren’t I? Only one of us can use it to go back to our time?”

  Mario looked at his sister pleadingly. “You’ve got to understand, Susan. It’s the only way I can get home.”

  As the full weight of the truth sank in, Susan felt… awful. Just awful. “But don’t you see, Mario? If you take it and go home, we won’t be there.”

  Mario looked back and forth between his uncle and sister, his eyes wet with barely contained tears. “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

  Susan reached for her brother’s hand. “You do get back, Mario. Somehow. Eventually. You come home.”

  Mario’s hand hung in Susan’s for the longest time, limp, defeated. “But I want to go home now. I’m so… alone.”

  His head swayed back and forth for a moment. Then, suddenly, he pulled his hand from Susan’s and stood up straight. The mask of confidence and control was back on his face, although his eyes were still wet. He turned to Iussi.

  “You have enough boats to get your men to our vessel?” Iussi hesitated. The last few minutes had clearly shaken his faith in the strangers. Finally he nodded. “One boat, yes. And the raft. It will take a few trips, but we can manage it.”

  “Good,” Mario said. “I will see you on board.” And, without looking at Susan, he trotted off toward the punt.

  Susan started to follow him, but her uncle caught her arm.

  “Let him go, Susan. He has a hard decision to make. We can’t make it for him.”

  Susan stared after her brother’s retreating form, but it was Iacob who spoke next.

  “The magic is stronger than him.”

  All eyes turned to look at the Greenland boy, who, like Mario, had been made an orphan by time’s magic.

  “It will take him, just as it took my father.”

  “Iacob,” Susan said, “do you think Mario will betray us?”

  Iacob shook his head. “Not Mario. The amulet. The Amulet of Babel. It will betray us all.”

  SIXTEEN

  The Wanderer of Days

  Charles blinked.

  He sat in front of the old man he’d seen his first night with the Wendat. His cheeks itched terribly, and he scratched at them with his fingernails.

  The old man was staring at Charles. “It’s happened again, hasn’t it?”

  Charles sat cross-legged in a dimly lit cube about four feet on a side. It wasn’t until he felt the logs beneath him that he realized he was in the deerhide box he’d seen—earlier today? yesterday? He had no idea, just as he had no idea how he’d gotten inside it. He looked around for an opening, but saw none.

  The deerhide seemed to be lashed tightly—permanently—to its frame.

  The poles vibrated beneath him, and Charles realized they were moving. He looked at the old man, but before he could say anything the man smiled patiently and said,

  “It’s called a litter.”

  Charles rubbed at his painted cheeks some more, peering at the markings on the old man’s face. “Can you read my mind?”

  “I cannot read your mind, either with or without the symbol Votav painted on your cheeks. But you have asked me this question before, with exactly the same expression on your face.” The old man smiled. “It is unusual for the blinks to be this pronounced.”

  “Blinks? That’s the word I used.”

  “No doubt you remembered me saying it.” In response to Charles’s befuddled expression, the old man continued: “Think, Charles. We had our first encounter last night, when you arrived in the Wendat camp. You blinked forward to this very moment, then back again. Your memory retained a shadow of what you experienced here. As I said, it is unusual for the blinks to be so pronounced, but the object you are carrying emits a very powerful energy. As do I, for that matter. I’m afraid you have been—how do the people of your time put it?—caught in the crossfire.”

  Charles suddenly realized he was wearing his backpack. He pulled it off and felt the hard outline of Mario’s book.

  Mario.

  Charles looked again at the old man’s face. At the wrinkled skin and pale hair and thin lips and especially at the eyes. Could it be?

  The old man’s smile grew wider, yet no less wistful. “You asked me that too. And you looked relieved when I told you the answer was no. I am not—and never was—your brother.”

  Charles did feel relief. That would’ve been too, well, weird. Beyond weird. Freaky. Super-freaky.

  “Look, um, sir, mister, whoever you are. Who, well, who are you?”

  The old man sighed breathlessly—as in, no air seemed to leave his body. “I have been known by different names in different places and times,” he said with an air of someone who has said the same words too many times to count. “In this life, to these people, I am known as the Wanderer of Days.”

  “You’re not Wendat?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Charles wasn’t sure how one could “not exactly” be Wendat, but all he said was, “Are you—what Murray is? An Accursed Returner?”

  “‘Accursed’ was a word added by the mermaid queen Octavia, who found the idea of limitless lives horrifying, and wanted only one existence, unchanging and eternal. But yes, I am a Returner. Like Murray.”

  For some reason, Charles didn’t like the way the Wanderer said “like Murray.” He wanted him to say “like your brother.” It was hard to think that someone who was “like” this man could be related to Charles—to anyo
ne human. This man wasn’t “like” anyone Charles had ever met.

  “Why do I keep blinking? It has something to do with Mario’s book?”

  “Something to do with the book you carry, yes.” The Wanderer nodded. “But also something to do with me.” The Wanderer paused, considered. “Every living being is made up of a tiny piece of time and a tiny piece of space, conjoined: that is all life is. Some people use the words ‘soul’ and ‘body,’ but regardless of what you call it, I am not so much body anymore. As such, my presence upsets the regular flow of time. If you think of time as water, as the Sea of Time encourages us to do, then I am solid water. Ice. And when you brush up against me, there is a ripple.”

  “A ripple.”

  “You have been jumping forward in time, a few seconds, a day. Sometimes two times have been laid over each other simultaneously, as on the night you arrived.”

  Something flashed in Charles’s mind. “But I thought—I mean, Pierre Marin said you can only go backward in time. You can never go beyond the present.”

  “That is what distinguishes the Returners from everything else in the universe. We can. And we can take others with us.”

  Charles, thinking of Murray again, didn’t like the way the Wanderer referred to Returners as things rather than people. For a long time there were just the sounds of forward motion—the slight creak of the tightly laced deerhide, the panting of the men carrying them—and then it dawned on Charles: they weren’t just moving, they were going somewhere.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked the Wanderer, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

  “To meet your brother and sister, of course. And your uncle.”

  “Murray’s with Susan?”

  “I believe the one with her calls himself Mario. You met one of them, didn’t you?”

  “‘One of them’? What does that mean? What does being a Returner really do to you?”

  “A soothsayer might tell you that Murray is fulfilling his destiny or some such, but that smacks of superstition. Murray is simply living his life as it was always going to be lived. It just so happens that it is a very different life from the one you and your sister lead. Very different lives.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lives’?”

  The Wanderer smiled patiently, almost fatherly. “You understand the basic principle of Returning?”

  “You… die.” Charles had a hard time saying the word, since it applied to his brother and to the man sitting across from him, neither of whom seemed dead. The Wanderer didn’t seem quite alive either, but that was another story. “You die,” Charles repeated, “and then you’re born again?”

  “Not quite. Rebirth implies reincarnation, or magical transformation. Phoenixes are reborn, and Hindus, and in a certain way, Christians. Returners simply… return.”

  “Return to what?” Charles said.

  “To the moment at which the Returning aspect of their nature was revealed. For your brother, that was the day he hid in the dumbwaiter inside Drift House—what your uncle refers to as Miss Applethwaite. She showed Murray who he was, and so it is to her that he always returns.”

  “She… Miss Applethwaite is real? A real person?”

  “She was. And in her own time she still is. Her story is a complex one, however, and not something we can go into here. I need to finish telling you about Mario, and then I need to tell you about the time jetty, and the mirror book, and the Amulet of Babel.”

  Time jetty. Mirror book. Amulet of Babel. When Charles had gotten separated from Drift House, he had thought he was setting out on an adventure like the one Susan got when the mermaids took her to the bottom of the Great Drain. But it was starting to look less like an adventure and more like a vocabulary test. But the Wanderer was still speaking.

  “Murray, as I’ve told you, will live many lives. Each life will remove a trace of his material essence, but it will take many thousands of Returnings before enough of his body and mind have been stripped away to allow him unimpeded access to the temporal aspect of his being.”

  Charles blinked. Not in the temporal sense. He just opened and closed his eyes rapidly.

  “You mean… you mean he’ll forget what happened? It was like that last time. With the mermaids. Murray thought Susan would do a favor for the mermaids that would get her killed, but it was actually the mermaids who wanted to kill her.”

  “Exactly,” the Wanderer said, “but that is just the tip of the iceberg. As a Returner, Murray is still very new, and as such he is liable to be confused, impetuous, and often angry. He is still bound to his material psyche, you see, and this may lead him astray.”

  Charles thought about this.

  “You mean,” he said finally, “you mean, he’s still human?”

  At this word, some emotion flickered over the Wanderer’s face. Something almost wistful.

  “Yes, that is the very word, Charles. Human.” But he didn’t make it sound like a good thing.

  “You mean, we shouldn’t always trust him?”

  The Wanderer smiled—grimly, but also, Charles thought, a little proudly. “Above all, the one called Mario is driven by the urge to be the five-year-old he was before his true nature was revealed—to be Murray again, so that he can live with his mother and father and sister and brother. These feelings will cloud his judgment.”

  “But Mario—Murray does get home again. He’s there now. With chicken pox.”

  The Wanderer nodded. “You know this. And unfortunately so does Mario. And he is impatient. You must see to it that his desire to get home does not interfere with his other tasks.”

  The litter jolted then, slightly, and the shells on the Wanderer’s cloak rattled. He stared at the deerhide walls as if he could see through them, then turned back to Charles.

  “Our meeting draws to a close. Listen to me carefully, Charles. The object in your possession is called a mirror book. You have noticed that it is missing the seal on its cover. I myself removed that seal thousands of years ago, to mute the book’s power. But in a very short while the seal and the book will be reunited, and when that happens the resulting shockwave will open something called a time jetty. The jetty is like the opposite of the Great Drain. If the drain is a whirlpool, the jetty is a waterspout—a concentrated burst of time that destroys anything it passes through.”

  Something clicked in Charles’s brain. “The lost cities! They were all destroyed by the jetty!”

  The Wanderer nodded.

  “But that’s all in the past,” Charles said. “My past. What can I do about it?”

  “Indeed you can do nothing about the past,” the Wanderer said, as if the destruction of Troy and Pompeii and all those other fabled places was of no consequence. “But,” he continued, “if you act wisely, and in time, you can still save your own city.”

  “My own—New York?” It says something about Charles that he didn’t panic when the Wanderer spoke of the destruction of his home. He knew the old man wouldn’t be telling him this unless there was some way to prevent such a catastrophe. And so he said, “What do I have to do?”

  “I am going to help you obtain a second mirror book. You must take the two books to the end of the jetty, and open them in each other’s presence. Only one mirror book can undo what another has wrought.”

  Before Charles could ask another question, the Wanderer opened the deerhide draped over his shoulders. Charles gasped. For the Wanderer’s chest wasn’t there. Or, rather, it was there, but it was translucent, like the fire Charles had seen his first night. And through the old man’s see-through ribs Charles could discern—

  “Murray!”

  His little brother was curled up in a tiny chamber about the size of the one Charles sat in. He seemed to be asleep. Or…

  “Is he…?”

  “The book, Charles. The book!”

  Charles squinted. And then he saw it: Murray’s head rested on a large book. The chamber he was in was dark, but it seemed as if the book were a bright red.

 
“There is no more time for doubts and disbelief, Charles. Reach in and take it.”

  The words rang in Charles’s ears. This man wanted him to reach into his chest and pull a book from beneath his brother’s head. Gulping, he stuck out his hand, but the Wanderer said, “Wait!”

  A light suddenly appeared, and in the light Charles could see Uncle Farley peering in at Murray. And all of a sudden he realized:

  “He’s in the dumbwaiter! Murray’s in the dumbwaiter!”

  It was true: Charles was looking at the day last fall when Uncle Farley had found Murray sleeping in the dumbwaiter after the children’s momentous game of hide-and-go-seek. Now his uncle reached in to grab his nephew. As his broad back bent over, Charles could see his own face looking on, and Susan’s, and through the dining room windows behind them he could see the wide open sky of the Sea of Time. Uncle Farley lifted Murray out of the dumbwaiter, and as he stood up the doors fell closed behind him, leaving only the red book lying on the plush base of the dumbwaiter.

  “Now, Charles, now!”

  Charles reached without thinking. He felt a strange coldness as his hand passed through what should have been the Wanderer’s ribs. His hand seemed to reach and reach, stretching out like the arm of Mr. Fantastic or the Elastic Man, forever and ever, and then, almost as if he were reaching into a grab bag, Charles felt his fingers close over the edge of the book. He grabbed it firmly and snatched his arm back just as the dumbwaiter’s doors opened again. Uncle Farley peered into the empty chamber. It seemed to Charles that Uncle Farley looked him right in the eye, and then the Wanderer drew the deerhide closed around his hollow chest.