The Cauldron (15 page)

Chapter 24

Navigator

The navigator tried to imagine what it would be like to be deposited on an alien world, cut off from everyone you knew, like had happened with Delphoros. Would it be any different than his own fate, tied to a tank and only able to see another when they looked in through a small viewport?

And would Delphoros welcome the tank again?

The navigator knew that while Elthor desperately needed Delphoros, they could not allow him to spread his radical ideas to others. If Delphoros’ beliefs—protests against using the living ships—became canon,
otherspace
exploration, which allowed for travel far faster than the speed of light, could halt. There was no other choice: Delphoros had to be tightly controlled upon his return to Elthor, a tank greater than this one built, and strong drugs used to further keep him in check.

If there were other navigators, Delphoros would be left to rot on the planet below. But now the need for Delphoros had eclipsed the danger of his words and ideas. None of the children born on Elthor in recent memory had an
otherspace
gift.

They had to retrieve this one.

Melusine had to coax him back with words or outright capture him.

The Elthoran council would force Delphoros to change his thinking, using whatever medical means necessary. The navigator thought they should have done that more than a century back … reeducate him … perhaps he would not have run. No matter, he would never run again. Perhaps they would cut off his limbs.

The return of Delphoros would give them new life in
otherspace
.

The navigator was almost excited at the prospect. A shudder passed through the navigator. He and the shipkeeper had discussed the possibility of their being two beings below with the sight when he detected the second flash in
otherspace
. There had been a second flash, he was sure of it, but the navigator could not tell for certain if it was the same pattern—Delphoros stepping into
otherspace
twice. But the more the navigator studied the patterns, and the more he thought about it, the more he believed it was two distinct beings. Gaining two individuals with the ability to traverse
otherspace
could be a nearly impossible feat. But if it could be managed, what a boon!

Two. Could there really be two below? Delphoros … and another?

In the past few days the navigator had detected two more flashes of the same pattern as the first using
otherspace
. Why? How? To move from one place to the next, or one life to the next? No more of the second pattern in that timeframe. But he had detected it in the world’s history.

From what Melusine had told them of her research, the Bright One’s life seemed to extend back at least three hundred years, and Delphoros had been gone from Elthor less than half that time. Confusing. Unsettling. Puzzling above all else.

Could the second pattern be from a native of the world below, one with the unwitting power to see into
otherspace
? The native older than Delphoros? Could that native be recruited as a navigator? Yes. Forced, if necessary, to come to Elthor for formal training. Reeducated just like Delphoros would be. Perhaps in the centuries to come others might be found here, or the offspring of either could be culled.

Perhaps this world could be harvested for potential navigators.

Melusine would need to gain both targets soon to keep them from the Alzur.

And if she was successful, they would return to Elthor and he could see his sister.

His sister’s eyes were a luminous gray-yellow that glimmered brightly through shadowlids. He missed her terribly.

“Are you sure?” He recalled once again her asking him that the day he’d agreed to become a navigator. “Are you sure? I have heard it is no easy life.”

The hardship is nothing when such honor is concerned, he had returned.

“There is honor, I will grant you that,” she had said.

He could remember his sister’s words exactly, but he could no longer conjure up the sound of her voice. Despite his considerable imagination, the tones had escaped him.

He was so very old, and his sister was a trace older.

Did she still live?

And, if so, would she have the strength to help hold him up when he at last returned to Elthor and was freed to touch the ground?

His mission intruded once more and his sister’s face faded.

“Do not let us fail, Melusine,” he breathed. He did not want the elders to direct this ship elsewhere in search of another creature that might be in tune with
otherspace
. They had no other leads for navigators. Such a search could go on more years than the navigator had left.

If he died on this ship, the shipkeeper and Melusine would be stranded with his corpse.

The navigator had charted their course through
otherspace
and then the stars on the far side, not by seeing his ship’s path, but by
feeling
it. He could see only the dome cover of his tank, and sometimes through a small window, the face of the shipkeeper come to check on him.

He tried to remember seeing his own face mirrored in the surface of a puddle of rainwater from his youth. The image was elusive. He brushed off the notion of trying to recapture his likeness the way a man might bat cobwebs out of his path. So old, his face would have changed anyway. Perhaps weathered with wrinkles and bleached by the liquid of the tank. Emaciated, most likely, all bony angles.

Perhaps he did not want to see himself after all.

Would his sister shrink from him?

Would it be better if he died out of her sight?

And yet, he did not want to perish here, in this tank, especially not so far from home orbiting a world he could never truly see or touch.

How much life did he have remaining?

And how much more of this utter loneliness could he endure? Despite being in the company of Melusine and the shipkeeper, it was a solitary existence he had enthusiastically, and perhaps in his scant years foolishly, embraced.

An honor it was, to be chosen as a navigator. Blessed to have a mind able to link to
otherspace
, let alone to chart a path through it. He was a rare individual, regaled by his family when he embarked on the training, enshrined by his society.

And entombed by his eager acceptance of what he’d thought was his destined fate.

It took a good measure of his mind to focus and prevent himself from tumbling into madness. But was a piece of himself already there?

“Melusine,” he called to her through the liaison.

While he waited for her to respond, he listened to the ship. Without the liaison he could hear only his heart, and sometimes, when he concentrated, the lap of the liquid against his body. He could hear the shipkeeper whenever he came near the tank, but rarely could he hear Melusine. She moved so quietly. Occasionally the barely audible swish of the fabric of her tunic gave her away.

As it did now.

But that was because she had engaged the liaison, and through it he could hear well beyond his tank.

“Navigator,” she said.

“How is your progress, Melusine?”

***

Chapter 25

Carl Johnson

He had been Albert Johansen in 1916. Through the pale fog that blanketed the countryside he made out the name of a village on a cracked and precariously-tilting signpost: Ginchy. He picked his way across uneven ground on the outskirts. Wounded British soldiers lay on stretchers around him. They were waiting to be evacuated by a horse-drawn ambulance that trundled down a narrow road in their direction. There were too many wounded; the ambulance could not carry them all. He was escorting a nurse from stretcher to stretcher, a young woman who was as beautiful as this scarred landscape was ugly. He asked her if she would go out with him when the fighting was done, and in a lilting British accent she accepted.

Was he British, too? He couldn’t recall. He was in one of their uniforms, though it was tattered and spotted with blood.

In the distance he saw a bomb-blasted stretch of field dotted with shattered trees. He heard the moans of the conscious, smelled their blood and the tang of waste; some had soiled themselves. The clop of the approaching horses’ hooves grew louder, the chatter of medics, more moans, then gunshots and the thunder of explosives.

They weren’t safe here. The enemy was coming.

The enemy would overrun this place, and there were not enough soldiers left standing to fight them off. Ammunition was low, support wouldn’t arrive in time.

There was only the one ambulance. Not enough nurses. He held her hand; it was cool and smooth and covered with the blood of soldiers.

Albert Johansen would somehow survive this battle, and he would go out with the nurse.

But he could not recall what happened after that.

O O O

Elijah Johns heard the news in the spring of 1848 about gold being found in the American River. He became part of the stampede out West, abandoning his masonry trade in Pennsylvania, catching Gold Fever. He arrived just as the two newspapers in Yerba Buena (later to be called San Francisco) folded … their staffs heading into the mountains to pan the streams. The populations in many of the coastal towns were dwindling as amateur prospectors struck out to find their fortunes. Elijah had left a wife behind, promising to return with sacks of money, risking everything on this gamble to give them a good life.

He hired a team of ox to carry his baggage and equipment to a place named Hangtown, passing Sutters Fort and pausing to stare at a collection of mostly-empty buildings around which cattle and mules grazed. He marveled at the canopy of stars at night, cooked his own food, and slept without fear. Green at mining, he pitched his tent along the bank of a stream that cut through a ravine, and took his pan to the water, watching a few others nearby so he could copy their technique and take a turn at the trough. Practice and observation yielded a handful of shining nuggets after several days. The weight felt good in his pocket.

Elijah naively had not expected to find so much sin amid all the promise of wealth. The language was foul; many of the miners gambled and drank, stole from each other, and some even murdered. On a trip into town he watched a man lose a thousand dollars in the span of a few hours at a poker table. Elijah opened a bank account so he could scrupulously save his money until the time he decided he’d earned enough and could return to his wife. He was on his way to the bank one early morning when he was jumped and dragged into an alley, beat and robbed, and left for dead. He managed to hang on, and his wife—looking nearly like the battlefield nurse from the war—made the train trip out here.

O O O

Shortly before 1800 two wagon-roads cut across the Alleghany Mountains, the one he took leading from the Potomac to the Mohnongahela. The Indians had been chased to the Cuyahoga River, and so he felt safe to join with others building cabins on the site of what would be called Cleveland. He worked tirelessly cutting wood until he fell sick that winter, sweating fiercely and shaking beneath what alternately were too many and too few blankets. Despite broth and rest he and a handful of other men and women—including one who he intended to marry—grew weaker and weaker … until the fog came.

O O O

A few decades before that—1760, he placed it—he was in the Royal Navy, stationed on the coast, working to enforce British Colonial policy. He recalled protecting a school teacher and her charges. There was an explosion, a sensation of red-hot pain.

Then the fog came for him.

What was in its icy depths that robbed him of the memories of one life and let him take on a new role? Like slipping off one pair of shoes and putting on another, he became someone else.

O O O

In 1702 the fog took him before the fire did. It was November 10 in St. Augustine when Governor Moore burned down the city. Most everyone had successfully hid in the Castillo, but not him and a handful of others. He saw the flames bearing down and knew he could not escape them.

O O O

In the next vision he saw the face of a woman.

Sarah?

And behind her were the snarling visages of her tormentors.

“Hang her!” someone hollered.

“Drown her!” shouted another.

This dream snippet was even stronger than the others, the images tumbling at him in a cluster that robbed his breath.

It was 1648, Charleston. How did he know that … where he was,
when
he was?

“Hang her right next to Margaret Jones!”

Sarah!

“No! Stone the woman! Him too!”

Him
, they were talking about him … Carl/John … no, in this time he was called Samuel.

Samuel Duncan Ross.

Everything was so ghastly vivid! He felt fear crawl into his belly and take root.

It was as if a window had suddenly snapped open in his mind, unlocking a memory he’d tried to bury with the passing centuries.

Carl/John/Samuel remembered coming to this Colonial town, little more than a village, attracting the attention of the village toughs because of his odd appearance. It wasn’t the way he was dressed; he was careful to look like most other people. It was his eyes.

They had noticed his yellow eyes. In all the other “lives,” people had thought his eyes merely odd. But here …

“Witch!”

The toughs taunted him, their repeated curses drawing the attention of elders, who in turn shouted at him as they gathered in their clapboard meeting house.

“Witch!” someone sneered louder.

A gob of spit struck his cheek.

His arrival had coincided with a distemper that had nearly wiped out the parish livestock before it ran its course.

“Witch. Witch. Witch,” the elders confronted him.

Sarah—his lovely wife Sarah—tried to defend him, only to be accused—first, of being a victim of his spells, then of being a witch herself, then shunned. Sarah, lovely Sarah, tall and with a face that looked so much like Ellen’s.

If only the villagers had left them alone.

Or if only they had picked up and moved elsewhere.

But one sultry summer night when the leeches and herbal decoctions of the local doctor had not saved the life of one of Samuel and Sarah’s chief accusers, the villagers grew poisonous. The elders accused him and Sarah of cursing the man and causing his demise. They were dragged from their bed to the stocks in the town square.

And when the stones began to smash at them, the fog had closed in and he had grasped her hand and pulled her with him—

O O O

The calliope music was bawdy and loud. Petey liked it that way. He was just finishing up for the day, they all were; putting last-minute touches on acts. He was refining a routine that included Freida hoisting him up, trunk wrapped around his waist. He got on well with the elephant. His next routine would include a few bears. The Divine Bear? he wondered.

Petey was the tallest clown with the Cole Bros. Circus; he’d been with them since he graduated from high school in 1930. Ten years later he hadn’t lost a step. He was as agile as he’d been when he first signed on and—

Wake up, Carl!

O O O

“I said, wake up. Are we going to dinner, or what?”

Jerrah stood over him, balled fists set against her waist. He heard her toe tapping against the plank floor of his bedroom.

“She said five. And it’s five. Are we going to dinner or are you going to stay in bed?” A look of concern crossed her face before she regained her stoic mask. “You okay? You sick?”

Carl was trembling from the memories. In the fog he’d recalled Sarah screaming, cursing him and alternately begging the forgiveness of the mob hurling stones. She wore Ellen’s face.

“Are you all right?” Jerrah persisted.

“Fine.” Carl sat up and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’m fine.”

How old am I? he wondered. Who am I?
What
am I?

“Well …” Her foot tapped faster.

“Yes, we’re going to dinner.”

O O O

Jerrah didn’t stay long, eating two helpings of spaghetti, sloshing down a tall glass of milk, then scurrying back to the cabin without so much as a “thank you.” Carl suspected she was trying to be polite to give him some time alone with Ellen, as polite as she could muster in any event.

“Dinner was good.” Carl wanted to say something else about it, ask how she spiced the sauce, if it was her own recipe, but the thoughts died, warring with the images still clinging from his afternoon dreams.

“John …” Ellen covered her hand with her mouth. “Sorry … Carl. You just look so very much like my John.”

I was your John,
Carl thought. It was all he could do to keep from throwing his arms around her aged body and begging her forgiveness for going to buy that wood boat, for drowning and leaving her alone. But he knew it would do more damage than good. She had, it appeared, managed all right. She had long since accepted the fact that her husband died. To tell her now that he wasn’t really dead, would only make her think him mad. And even if, at some deeper level, she believed him … what would it do to the both of them?

“You eat like him, too, the sort of backwards way you hold the fork.”

“Look, Ellen …”

She stepped away from the table and started gathering the dishes, setting them next to the sink and running hot water. Carl noticed the kitchen was large enough for a dishwasher, but didn’t have one. He watched her, his thoughts whirling madly, senselessly. The kitchen was so familiar, the lodge room downstairs, too. During the spring and summer the cottages were always rented, and hardly an evening went by that the downstairs wasn’t filled with chattering, singing, dancing folks. Sometimes this little kitchen would be crowded, too. Somehow even the strangers, the ones renting a cabin for the first time, knew that Ellen’s invitation to “drop over for a chat or a cup of tea” was not simply an empty formality, but was real.

And during the late fall and into winter, when the tourists were gone, there had been only the two of them.

He swallowed audibly, forcing down the ache that had centered in his throat. Nothing had changed … except Ellen’s age.

He shouldn’t tell her. He shouldn’t! But how could he not?

“Ellen.” He swallowed hard. “You’re going to think me mad as a hatter. But I think … somehow … I think I was John Miller. I have these dreams, and in them I’m … John. I believe I really was John,
am
John in some sense. I think …”

She tied on an apron, turned and wiped her hands. “I know.”

They stared at each other for several moments, sounds from outside drifting in. A boat motor purred softly, and there was the gentle crunch of gravel to signal someone driving up to the lodge.

“I’m expecting a beer delivery,” she said, heading for the stairs. “I have to see to this.”

“Ellen …”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“I’m not mad, Ellen. I really think …”

“I know,” she said more firmly. “I know you’re my John.”

“Ellen …”

“I have dreams, too.”

***