The Lost Cities

by Dale Peck

  And still the boat rowed straight for them, the rower never once turning to check his course. Just plying his oars and singing softly in a voice that sounded young and old at the same time.

  All—of—me—

  Without a sound, the prow of the little rowboat came to shore, neatly seaming the space between Charles and Iacob. The gangly figure in the center of the craft stowed first one oar in the bottom of the boat, then the other, and then he leaned forward and, with a gnarled hand, turned off the small tombstone radio that sat in the boat’s stern. Only then did he turn his grizzled, lined visage to Charles. His teeth—which had once seemed so stained in daylight—glinted bright and white in the reflected fires of Babel.

  In his pocket, Charles felt the miniaturized amulet buzzing with all its might.

  Mr. Zenubian smiled. “Recognize me now, Charles?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Row the Boat

  Susan wasn’t sure how long she rode the carpet. Seconds, hours? Days? Time had never seemed so irrelevant. Darkness had fallen. Not a creepy darkness, but a great emptiness. Looking at it made Susan tired, and she laid her head down and slept.

  A whiff of smoke jolted her awake. She sat up and looked down, expecting to see the burning towers of her own city, but instead saw the light of a thousand fires twinkling over a broad plain. A broken shape on the horizon blotted out the night, and from it came the biggest fire of all, and a column of smoke as large as a mountain range. Susan stared at the broken tower for a long time, until the faint sound of singing came to her ears.

  All of me…

  Why not take all of me?

  The voices were male, a warbling adult bass and one or two boyish tenors, and they all sang terribly, terribly off-key.

  All of me…

  Why not take all of me?

  She recognized Charles’s squeak (she would know her brother’s voice anywhere) and she could guess that the second boy’s voice belonged to Iacob. As the carpet soared down over a wide flat river she added her voice to theirs.

  Baby, take a-all of meee!

  “Susan!” Charles’s voice called out, still half singing.

  “Charles! Iacob!”

  And then the tall figure plying the oars of the boat turned around. A wicked grin split Mr. Zenubian’s lined cheeks.

  “Hello, Susan. Glad you could drop in.”

  As if programmed, the rolled-up carpet aligned itself over the length of the boat and settled into it. The carpet was so long and the boat so short that it had to lie diagonally, and even then a good foot or so hung over the stern, and the boat itself settled so deeply into the water that the top of the craft was only a few inches above the surface. But once she had landed Susan risked capsizing the entire craft to throw her arms around her brother, and then again around Iacob. Charles returned her grasp immediately, and, after a moment, so did Iacob. Only then did Susan turn to face the man who sat in the bow, steadily pulling at the oars to steer the overburdened boat toward the center of the wide river.

  “Hello, Susan,” he said a second time. “Surprised to see me?”

  Susan turned around, looked between Charles and Iacob to the small tombstone radio that sat in the right-hand (was it starboard?) side of the stern. Then, again, she turned to face the rower. Steeling her voice, she said,

  “Mr. Zenubian. It’s very nice to meet you again.”

  At this, Drift House’s former caretaker threw back his head and laughed so hard the boat wobbled from side to side, and one of the oars slipped from his grasp and Susan had to snatch it before it floated away.

  “Now see here!” she said, brandishing the oar like a bat. “You’ll get us stranded if you behave that way!”

  Mr. Zenubian’s laughter redoubled, and he dropped the other oar. Charles lunged for it.

  “Mr. Zenubian!” Susan said. “You needn’t be so self-righteous. Just because you’ve managed to stay one step ahead of us—”

  “Susan,” Mr. Zenubian managed to sputter. “After everything you’ve seen and done, are you still so literal-minded?”

  “I’m not literal-minded! That’s Charles!”

  “What?” Charles said from behind her. “We came twenty-one centuries to save you, and this is the first thing you have to say to me?”

  Susan whirled on Charles. “You came to save me? I’ve come to save you.”

  A fresh bout of laughter at the front of the boat cut off the children’s squabble.

  “Oh, how I’ve missed this,” Mr. Zenubian cackled. “Promise me you’ll never change.”

  Susan looked at Mr. Zenubian, who regarded her with a mischievous smile, and then she turned to Charles, whose smile mirrored Mr. Zenubian’s. Even Iacob seemed amused by the proceedings, although he looked a little scared too.

  Susan squinted at her younger brother. “You know something.”

  Charles fought an unsuccessful battle to keep a smile off his face. “I think you should be looking the other way for answers.”

  Susan turned. Mr. Zenubian stared at her. She searched the caretaker for some clue as to what their big secret was, but all she saw was his familiar uniform, still as dirty—and smelly—as she remembered. His stringy hair hung down his lined, unsavory face, and his long lanky arms plied the oars again. The entire spectacle was maddeningly unrevealing, and made all the more so by the fog that was beginning to swirl over the river, mixing with the smoke into a curious amalgam that was simultaneously wet and dry, cold and hot.

  Still, there was something… In the eyes? The set of the jaw? Something familiar. Some seed of knowledge that she felt would grow if planted in the right soil. But it just wouldn’t come, and the fog was getting thicker all the time, making it that much harder to see.

  “Ugh! I give up!”

  The answer came from a most unexpected source.

  “It’s Murray!” Iacob sang out.

  Susan whirled and looked at the Greenland boy. He stared at her with a pleased grin on his face, and what with Charles and Mr. Zenubian—Murray? really?—she felt so surrounded by self-satisfied boys that she didn’t quite absorb the full impact of Iacob’s words.

  She turned back to the figure in the front of the boat, who still plied the oars, pulling the boat into the thickening fog. The lights of the burning city were a faint glow now, the shouts and clangs as distant as a TV heard through an apartment wall.

  “Is it—?” But before she could finish her question, she saw that it was true. “Murray,” she said in a hushed tone of voice. “Um. Wow. Murray.” And then, waving her hand in front of her nose, she said, “You need a bath!”

  When the laughter had died down, Charles said, “We only just found out too.”

  “He didn’t tell us,” Iacob threw in. “Charles figured it out.”

  The fog had grown so thick that Susan could barely make out Charles’s grin. “I just had more clues than you,” he said modestly. He dug a hand into his pocket, and something glinted in the faint light. Looking past Susan to this strange new version of Murray, he said, “This is yours.”

  Susan gasped—Charles had Murray’s locket. “How did you—?”

  Charles chuckled quietly. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.” He held out his hand to Murray. “Don’t you want it?”

  Susan turned back to Murray, who seemed strangely uninterested in the sight of the locket. “I’ll get it from you later. It’s important that I keep rowing right now, or we might end up in Timbuktu. Or even Timbuk-three.”

  A small grin cracked the side of Murray’s gnarled face, and Charles couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. He stared at his brother for a moment, then, almost reluctantly, put the amulet back in his pocket.

  “Am I correct in assuming you’re taking us onto the Sea of Time?”

  “You are as correct as your grammar, Charles,” Murray said. “I’ll have you back to Drift House before daylight.”

  Now Susan turned back to the front of the boat.

  “Is it,” she began. “I mean,
can I…? Do we…?” She sighed in exasperation. “Will you tell us what’s going on? Or at least what happened?”

  Murray smiled and, though it was a kind smile, Susan was hard-pressed to find any trace of her brother in it. She saw a bit of Mario—the new, sardonic part of his personality that had developed after he became a Returner—but none of the little innocent boy she had known.

  Murray pulled on his oars slowly, patiently. Charles recognized this movement from his own journey with Tankort, but to Susan each of her strange new brother’s strokes seemed to last an eternity, and it was all she could do not to stamp her foot in the bottom of the shallow craft. Finally Murray sighed.

  “This is the kind of story that usually begins ‘Once upon a time,’” he began, “but that beginning would be inappropriate here, because this story in fact begins in the time before time, or at least time as we know it. Not even the Wanderer of Days knows where the mirror book came from, let alone its twin. Some say the Atlanteans made it, and others claim it hails from the New World, from a tribe whose name has long since been lost. Thousands of years ago the Wanderer was able to remove the amulet from its cover, but he knew that eventually the two pieces would find their way back to each other—that the jetty would be opened, and the temporal universe be permanently destroyed. But with your help, that catastrophe has been prevented.”

  “But why would anyone make an object that could only do harm?” Susan said. “What could they possibly gain from it?”

  Murray shook his head. “The Wanderer told me once that he didn’t think anyone made the mirror book. It was his belief that it came into existence at the same time humanity did. That it is nothing more than an expression of the dark side of human nature, the side that has always yearned after destruction and death.”

  “Well, you’ve got the amulet now,” Susan said. “So that’s it, right? No more threats to time?”

  “Not exactly,” Murray said.

  “Not exactly?” Susan echoed.

  “If the Wanderer’s theory is correct—that the mirror book is nothing more than a manifestation of human desire—then the same threat still exists, at least in theory.”

  “I don’t understand,” Susan said. “Are you saying the threat isn’t really the mirror book? That it’s—people?”

  Murray nodded. “Human beings are the only sentient beings left, Susan. As such they control time’s flow completely. As you saw, the time jetty took form in our world in many different ways, all of them reflecting the human psyche: it can be the war that destroyed Babel, or the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the environmental destruction that led to the downfall of the Easter Islanders. Even when the jetty takes a natural form, as with the earthquake that sank Atlantis, its effect is only felt because of human choices: an earthquake can only kill you if you choose to live on a fault line.”

  Iacob cleared his throat. “Is that why Osterbygd failed? Because of the jetty?”

  “A failure to change can be every bit as dangerous as change itself. Often more so.”

  The fog was blowing away now, Susan suddenly noticed, and the breeze was decidedly chilly. Glimpses of cold gray water were visible.

  “But how do we stop this?” Iacob said. “Is it because there are so many people now? Do they have to die?”

  Susan and Charles looked sharply at Iacob. He had said this last so dispassionately, as if he were merely being practical.

  “Nothing so dramatic,” Murray said, his voice as flat as Iacob’s. “It is not so much the number of people that is the problem, but the fact that they all want the same thing.”

  “But,” Susan said, “it seems to me that people want different things. That’s why there are so many wars.”

  “Maybe there are so many wars because everyone wants war.”

  “No one wants war! Wars are terrible!”

  “Then why do we keep fighting them?” Murray said. He held up his hand before Susan or anyone else could answer. “I must leave you with that question to answer on your own. We’re here.”

  And it was true. The last of the fog was whipping away in a fierce, cold breeze. And there, bobbing on the water, was the familiar shape of Drift House. Murray pulled at the oars with more visible effort now, and sometimes little lips of water splashed over the side of the dinghy.

  “This last part,” he said breathlessly, “might be a bit hairy.”

  The boat dipped and rose in the waves, and the three children held on to whatever they could hold on to. Murray said they didn’t need the radio anymore, so Charles turned it off and took it in his lap for safekeeping. Murray’s breath whistled through his nose, and Susan stared at his long thin arms plying the oars, his stringy hair hanging wetly down his gnarled cheeks. On the Sea of Time Murray was sage and strange, but in the real world he was merely old. Her brother. Murray. Old. It was a little sad, but mostly it was weird.

  “I don’t … always… look… like this,” Murray panted, stealing a smile at Susan. “I thought it… would be…a good disguise.”

  Susan laughed. “All I can say is, phew.”

  Eventually, somehow, they made it. One of the Greenlanders spotted them, so Uncle Farley and Iussi were there to help them aboard, and in a moment Murray and the three children were sipping hot soup in the drawing room—whose walls, they all saw, showed a return to Greenland in their immediate future. Uncle Farley used the radio to set a course, and then sat down with them to get the news. “You children always seem to have all the adventure, while I sit here and keep house.”

  But Murray surprised them all by excusing himself. Though it was early, he said the rowing had tired him out. He took the amulet from Charles, dropping it casually in his pocket, then headed to one of the spare bedrooms on the second floor. Just before he went upstairs, he winked at his older brother and said,

  “I think you’ve earned the right to a room of your own.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The End of Osterbygd

  The next morning, when Susan came down for breakfast, she heard low voices coming from the music room. It turned out to be Murray and Iacob. Their heads were bent close to each other, and the Greenland boy had a look of intense concentration on his face, as though he were trying to remember a chemical formula for a test. He looked up with a startled—and, Susan thought, slightly guilty—expression when she entered the room.

  “Susan,” Murray said. “Good morning.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  Murray shook his head. “No, no, we were just waiting for everyone to wake up. Coffee?”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Susan said.

  Murray grinned. “You will,” he said, “before you know it.”

  Iacob had walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Susan saw the coast of Greenland stretched out before them. It seemed familiar, as if it were a place she’d been to many times before. She was able to pick out the sharp roof of the church from the line of houses where Iussi and Gunnar and the remaining colonists lived.

  Iacob turned back to the room. “I think I would like to try some coffee,” the Greenland boy said quietly. “It will be my first taste of… the future. But hopefully not my last.”

  Within a few hours everything was hustle and bustle. In Susan and Charles’s absence, the Greenlanders had worked out a deal with Karl Olafson’s men on Leifsbudir, and the latter’s boats were tied to the stern of Drift House. All morning and afternoon the long dark ships rowed back and forth between the house and Osterbygd, bringing a dozen boatloads of colonists with them. Still, it took Susan a moment to realize what was going on. When she did, though, she pulled her uncle aside.

  “Uncle Farley! Are they… leaving?”

  Her uncle nodded. “I’ve agreed to take them to Iceland.”

  “But… but isn’t that changing history?”

  “History tells us the Greenland colony disappeared at the end of the fifteenth century. No one knows exactly how or why.” Her uncle shrugged. “Well, now we do.�
��

  As the Greenlanders filed on board, they seemed too awed to be frightened. Most of them retreated to the third floor, or hid out in the solarium (the colonists had insisted on bringing their livestock, a small herd of sheep who immediately set to work decimating Drift House’s tropical plant collection). A few of the younger colonists walked through the house looking with fascination at this or that. To make everything just a little more confusing, the translation charms stopped working right in the middle of the transport operation: after three days in the real world, the Sea of Time water had fully deintensified. Murray spoke just enough Old Norse to direct the colonists, but that was all.

  Susan, especially, felt the loss of their ability to communicate acutely. It seemed to her that Iacob was taking the abandonment of Greenland just a little too easily, and she wanted to know what had happened to change his mind about leaving. She felt sure it had something to do with the conversation she’d caught him having with Murray, but there was no way to ask him about it. Whenever they crossed paths, they could only smile and shrug and laugh weakly.

  Last on board was Father Poulsen. No translation device was needed to render the epithets and spittle that flew from his gray-bearded mouth. He waved his cross at paintings and statues and side tables, yelling maniacally, until Iussi and Gunnar half guided, half dragged him up the stairs to the third floor. Occasionally his voice could be heard during the overnight voyage to Iceland, shrieking at this or that imagined sign of the devil.

  They offloaded the colonists about a dozen miles from the modern city of Reykjavik. Last on, first off: Father Poulsen stormed down the stairs as soon as they started herding the animals into the first boat.

  “The phragmipedium schlimii and laelia purpurata are beyond salvage,” President Wilson muttered, watching as the scrawny sheep milled down the front hall.

  “There, there, President Wilson, we can always order more plants,” Uncle Farley said. “I’m more concerned about my—ah!” He rushed to chase a sheep away from an embroidered table runner. “Seventeenth-century Chinese silk,” he said as if the animal might understand him. “Shoo, shoo!”