The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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that I was the old man, standing in the rain outside my house, slowly dissolving in that rain like a candy man, a figure of hard sugar discarded in a gutter. And I dreamt that my daughter sat up suddenly in her darkened bedroom, and called out, “Daddy, are you there?” I tried to answer, but my voice was lost in the rain, in the rushing water, and I seemed to be falling away from the front of the house. Again my daughter called out, and again, and I could not reply, until the front of the house rippled and blurred, like something seen through rain streaming down an automobile windshield. Then there was only darkness, and a sense of drifting, and my daughter’s name, and her face, and all my memories of her began to slip away. I could not cling to them.
It was then that I awoke to the touch of a gentle hand on my shoulder. I sat up abruptly, with a startled grunt, and found a woman standing over me. She was probably in her early twenties, and she wore blue jeans and an army jacket and a stocking cap. A knapsack hung from one shoulder.
She was a traveler, I thought. Yes, someone who travels far, who travels without ever stopping to rest, or to find a home. I could tell all that about her, somehow, as if I were developing a new sense.
“Perhaps I can help you,” she said, and as we beheld one another, we both understood, she why I was there, and I why she had selected me among all the shabby denizens of the train station benches.
She had done so because I was a traveler too, and she had that same special sense, which enabled her to recognize one of her own kind.
“Come,” she said. I rose and followed her, out into the enormous main hall of the station.
It took me a moment to recognize what was different: there had been a war memorial inside the station, a colossal bronze statue of a winged Victory lifting a fallen soldier out of flames. That was how I remembered it. Now the figure was a charging World War I doughboy.
Outside, on the bridge over the river, the old man was waiting for us. He, too, knew me for what I was, and I knew him.
“There are not many like us yet,” he said, “but we are like you, all of us. Like you, we move on. We never stay in one place very long.”
* * * *
We are a family, the young woman and the old man, and the others I met in a cellar, where our band gathers at certain times, when each of us knows deep inside that it is time for another meeting. Sometimes the meeting place is not a cellar at all, but an inn or a courtyard or a field or even the deck of a ship at sea. But always the faces are there, twenty or so familiar to me, and always one or two new ones.
My eyes are newly opened. I see for the first time.
The woman’s name is Mara. She reached into her pocket once and showed me a Woodrow Wilson dime. The old man is Jason, and he is eighty-two and our chieftain and priest and rememberer. It is he who keeps and reads aloud from the book of our lives, in which is written all that can be recalled and preserved. I lived in Philadelphia. Jason was born in New Orleans long ago, shortly after the triumphal entry of the emperor Napoleon IV.
We are alone, but we are together, and the true things about us are written and remembered. The rest drifts away like mist rising from a perfectly still lake.
Remember. That’s all we have. Cling together and remember.
A LANTERN MAKER OF AI HANLO
In Zabortash, all men are magicians. The air is so thick with magic that you can catch a spirit or a spell with a net on any street corner. Women wear their hair short, lest they find ghosts tangled in it. Still, they find them in their hats.
In Zabortash, even the lantern makers work wonders: the present moon is not the first to shine upon the Earth. The old one went out when the Goddess died, but a Zabortashi lantern maker consulted with a magus, and was directed to that hidden stairway which leads into the sky. He hung his finest lantern in the darkness, in the night, that the stars might not grow over-proud of their brilliance, that men might know the duration of the month again.
In Zabortash, a land far to the south and filled with sluggish rivers, with swamps and steaming jungles, the air is so thick that in the darkness, in the night, the face of the moon ripples.
So it is said.
In Zabortash, further, for all that the folk are magicians, there are men who love their wives, who look on their children with pride when they are young and wistfulness when they are old enough to remind the parents what they were like in their youth.
In Zabortash, people know beauty and feel joy, and know and feel also hurt and hunger and sorrow.
So it is said.
* * * *
In the time of the death of the Goddess, there dwelt a lantern maker in Zabortash named Talnaco Ramat who was skilled in his art. He was a young man, and wholly in love with the maiden Mirithemne, but she would not have him, being of a higher caste than he, and he would not be satisfied with any other. Therefore he labored long on a lantern of special design. He cut intricate shapes into the shell of it, making holes for light to shine through. The lantern was like a metal box, as tall as an outstretched hand, rectangular with a domed top and a metal ring hinged onto the dome to serve as a handle. At the outset, it was like any other lantern Talnaco Ramat might make, but he inlaid it with precious stones and plated it with gold. He carved schools of fish into it, swimming around the base, and those winged lizards called kwisi, which hop from branch to branch and are supposed to bring constancy and long life. He carved hills and villages, the winding river which is called Endless, and he fashioned the top half of the lantern into the shape of Ai Hanlo, the holiest of cities and center of the world, where the bones of the Goddess lie in blessed splendor. That city is built on a mountain; at the summit stands a golden dome, beneath which the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess holds court. In this likeness was the dome of the lantern made, complete with tiny windows and ringed with battlements and towers.
Finally, Talnaco Ramat carved his own image and that of his beloved into the metal. He depicted the two of them walking hand in hand along the bank of the river, going up to the city.
Then he lit a candle inside the lantern and carried it into a darkened loft. Light streamed through the carven metal, and all his creations were outlined by it. As he watched, the river seemed to flow. The images were projected onto the walls and roof of the loft. Then he was not in the loft at all, but beside Mirithemne. All around them lizards hopped from branch to branch, wings buzzing, fleshy tails dangling.
Mirithemne smiled. The day was bright and dear. Rivermen sang as they poled a barge along. A great drontha, a warship of the Holy Empire, crawled against the current like a centipede on its banks of oars.
They came to the holy city, entering through the Sunrise Gate, mingling with the crowds. They passed through the square where mendicants waited below the wall that shut them out of the Guardian’s palace. Once a week, he explained to Mirithemne, priests came to the top of that wall, and, holding aloft reliquaries containing splinters of the bones of the Goddess, blessed the people below. Miraculous cures still happened, but they were not as common as they had once been. The power of the Goddess was fading.
He led Mirithemne to a house at the end of a narrow lane. A wooden sign with a lantern painted on it hung over the door. He got out a key.
“This will be our home,” he said.
He unlocked the door and went in, only to find himself alone in the loft, with the candle of the lantern sputtering out.
He was satisfied. The lantern was adequate.
That night, in the darkness, after the moon had set, he spoke a spell into the open door of the lantern and it filled with a light softer than candle flame, with vapors excited by the ardor of his love.
He climbed onto the roof of his shop and set the lantern down on a ledge. He spoke the name of his beloved three times, and he spoke other words. Then he gently pushed the lantern off the ledge.
It hung suspended in air, and drifted off like a lazy, glowing moth on a gentle breeze. He sat for a time, watching it disappear over the rooftops of the town.
But