The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (23 page)

“Sort of,” he said, as he opened the thermos. He poured her a glass of tea and then lifted the top off the odd contraption and poured some tea inside it as well. Fitting the bowl top back in place, he said, “It's called a hookah, or a
narghile
.”

“Does a genie come out when you rub it?”

Archer laughed. “This part here” he said, pointing to the bowl at the top, “is called the
lule
.” His finger then moved to the neck. “This is the
marpuc
,” he said. “The
govde
,” pointing to the body. “And this is the
agizlik
,” he told her, and put the end of the nozzle momentarily into his mouth to test its draw.

Maggie leaned forward to take her glass of tea from the table, and her uncle thought he caught a glimpse of what she would look like when she was older. There was an expression of seriousness in the brow, a slight indication of uncertainty around the eyes that he feared would become more pronounced with time.

“The
narghile
should always sit on the floor or ground,” he said to her. “That is proper etiquette, but I am too old and crippled to sit down there with my legs crisscrossed like a pretzel.”

“What does it do?” she asked, lazily reaching out for but missing a firefly that passed by her head.

“For smoking,” he said. With this, he lifted his cane and twisted the onyx crow's-head handle, which came away from the stick in his hand. Very carefully, he moved the ornament over the top of the hookah and tilting it, watched as a fine dark powdery substance fell in grains from a tiny hole at the end of the beak, filling the water pipe's bowl.

“Can I try it?” asked Maggie.

“You are too young,” he said as he reattached the black head to the cane. “I need the smoke sometimes to keep my internal engine running, to, as they say, get up a full head of steam. You have all of the energy you need. Besides, the smoke teaches contemplation and patience, and it is a child's job to be
im
patient.”

“Is that tobacco like what my father puts in his pipe?” she asked.

“Hardly, my dear. This is the house blend, the recipe of sultans—mixed with perfume and crushed pearls.”

“What's inside a pearl when you crush it?” she asked. “A yoke?”

“No,” he said, “that's an egg.”

“What?”

“Something,” he said and pulled the trigger on the derringer, lighting the contents in the bowl until it began to smolder. He pocketed the lighter and then lifted the nozzle at the end of the hose to his mouth. For the duration that he drew in, Maggie sipped her tea. Its flavor was a mix of orange and peach and some other soothing ingredient. She imagined she was drinking the glow of the lantern.

Archer exhaled slowly, and the pale violet smoke grew up into the night from his open lips like the ghost of a vine, spiraling, knotting, nearly taking the form of a blossom before dissipating.

“Where's the telescope?” asked Maggie.

“There is none,” he answered.

“But you call this the
observatory
,” she said. “I thought that was a place where you looked at the stars.”

“Precisely,” he said, took another toke, exhaled, and then leaned back in the chair with a faint smile.

“They will be coming for me tomorrow,” she said.

“I'll be sorry to see you go.”

“Will you bring Math with you and visit us in the city at the holidays?” she asked.

“Perhaps.”

“Yes,” she corrected. There was a pause and then she asked, “Do you think my parents have been arguing while I've been away?”

He had meant to tell her, “Of course not,” but instead he heard himself saying, “I don't know.”

“My father is going to leave us,” she said. “Mother told me he might.”

“Well, let's wait and see what happens,” he said. “And while we are here, I believe I promised to tell you a story, one that you will remember until next summer.”

“Tell me one that will make me remember the beach and you and Math even when it's dark and snowing. Something by the sea, please,” she said.

He leaned forward to relight the bowl of the hookah. This time as he drew on the nozzle, she peered through the dim light at him, studying his features—long beard, thinning hair, high forehead, and round cheeks with a scar across the right side—in order to commit them to memory, like a photograph for her mind.

“I left home at a very young age,” he said, his eyes closed, “and went to sea as a cabin boy on a large vessel out of Kelmore, bound for exotic locales, with the sole mission of capturing a strange creature for the garden zoo of a millionaire.”

Maggie put her tea down and leaned back in her chair to listen, all the time thinking what a wonderful father the dog at her feet, Mathematics, would make.

“The name of the ship was
The Mare
, and it had three masts, three bright yellow sails, and a crow's nest. The figurehead was that of a wild horse with a mane of wooden flames and eyes made from what were rumored to be the two largest rubies in the world. Our captain was a fine old man named Karst, easy going and just, who could split a proverbial hair with his tongue and a real one with a dagger at twenty paces.”

Maggie pictured the wild horse, which melted into Math, who rode her on his back to school, made her hard-boiled eggs for lunch, and read stories to her at night next to the fireplace. She saw her mother, tears in her eyes, sitting at the kitchen window of their apartment in the city, staring out at the rain-washed streets while Math sat beside her, quietly, patiently, with his paw resting gently atop her forearm.

“The crew of
The Mare
was an odd and interesting lot, men who had spent so much time on the ocean that their eyes, no matter the color they were born with, had all turned blue, and their faces were like dark leather, cured over time by the sun and salt spray. There was a man named Farso, who had once been a pirate and whose entire body was tattooed in aquamarine and rose with scenes of the war between Heaven and Hell—fierce angels and cunning demons battling with broadswords amongst the clouds, amidst the flames. On our first day at sea, he gave me the nickname Beetle, and it stuck to me the way the jagged legs of that insect fasten themselves to a sweater.”

“Did he ever kill anyone?” asked Maggie, thinking of Math standing upright, with his concave stomach and ridged back, a long gray paw placing the shiny tin star atop the Christmas tree while her mother applauded.

“Farso?” said Archer. “I should think so, for he kept a cutlass in the sash that was his belt, the blade of which was stained red. I don't believe it was raspberry juice that had discolored the metal, if you catch my drift. One night, when we were becalmed in the Sea of Dolphins, as we sat in the rigging of the main mast in the moonlight, he told me how he had witnessed the birth of a child in a tavern of Sechala, the pirate town of Peru. This incident tipped the scales, and the war, the one depicted upon his flesh, between good and evil that had raged inside him since his own birth, was finally won by Life. He had only glimpsed the child for an instant, he said, but its wide eyes, taking in the new world around it, shot out an invisible beacon that bore into his heart and vanquished his fear of Death.”

“We studied the oceans and seas of the world,” said Maggie. “I never heard of the Sea of Dolphins.”

“Am I to be held accountable for the state of education in these dry times?” asked Archer, pouring himself a glass of tea.

She laughed, as Math laughed beside her, at the antics of the marionettes on the stage of the puppet theatre. The dog turned to her in the dark of the auditorium and whispered, “I know how to cure your mother's unhappiness, to dissolve her ghosts and sadness, for you know she is troubled behind her eyes.”

“Insane,” said Maggie, a word she had only recently learned.

“Quite,” said Archer and then continued. “Another of the fellows aboard ship was Hustermann, a giant of a man who had never been granted the power of speech, but who could haul in the ship's anchor by himself. There were also the Fong brothers, identical twins from a village on the South China Sea, who had their own invented language of whistling with which they told each other secrets. A man from the frozen north, Kekmi, ate everything raw and went about without a shirt on even when we sailed through waters littered with icebergs. And there were others, a dozen or so, each as interesting as the next. These rough-and-tumble men, with muscles like rocks and dispositions like exotic creatures, who could not live for more than a year at a time on dry land, who had witnessed firsthand the treachery and wonder of nature, all treated me like a prince. “Beetle,” they called me and, I suppose, saw in my innocence something they had lost and could never regain.”

“Beetle,” said Maggie. “I'm going to call you that sometimes.”

“As you wish,” said Archer. “But you might instead want to call me Collo, the name of the ship's mascot, a monkey from Brazil with a long tail and the refined human face of a leading man in the moving pictures, whose purpose in life was to make the crew laugh precisely when things seemed most grim. I remember a typhoon off the Cape of Bad Faith. We were all huddled below decks, the deafening sound of the storm above, screaming like the ocean itself was angry at us, and the jostling, the buffeting, the chaotic tumble as we all gathered around a single lantern, waiting to see if we were to live, or drown and lay forever, slowly rotting, on the slope of some undersea mountain …”

Mathematics led her into the heart of the city, his narrow snout pointing the way through dark alleys, across the piazza, up and down great flights of steps. “What is it called?” asked Maggie. “The cure, what is it called?”

The dog got down on all fours as they stopped by a fountain. “I cannot speak its name,” said Math, “for then we will never find it. But, here, I will trace it in the water of the fountain with my paw and you will know it.” The whippet leaned over the pool of the fountain and traced the name of the cure in his reflection. Maggie tried to read, to herself, the silvery trail of his design but did not understand. “Never say it,” said Math as she became a monkey riding on his back through the long columned hallway of a museum.

“… but that damned primate was a card, I tell you,” said Archer, laughing so hard he wheezed and coughed, using the index finger and thumb of his right hand to clear the tears from his eyes. “The spitting image of Randolph Mondrian in
The Marble Lark
, I tell you, especially when he combed back his monkey hair and employed his tail as a mustache.” He took the bowl off the hookah and tapped it against the side of the table, clearing its charred contents. He then replaced it atop the water pipe and went through the process of refilling it from the crow's head.

“What about the exotic beast you were capturing for the millionaire?” asked Maggie as her eyelids began to droop.

Archer watched her yawn as he toked at the pipe. He slowly exhaled and said, “Yes, I have yet to tell you about
The Mare
's clandestine passenger, hidden in a crate in the hold. We of the crew had heard only rumors of him, that his name was Chromonis and he needed no air or sunlight or water to survive, and that he was the perfect hunter.”

“How many zeroes in a million?” asked Maggie as her eyelids closed. She pictured the zeros as a string of pearls.

“Do you know a thousand?” asked Archer.

His niece nodded as if in a trance.

“Ten thousand?” he asked.

She tried to nod again and her head went down but did not rise.

“Use your mathematics,” she heard him say and saw an image of the boot at the end of his crippled leg crush a clutch of pearls. A thick dark gas, like the ink of a squid, rose to momentarily envelop her in the aroma of the sultan's perfume. When she looked again, her uncle was asleep and Math had slipped out from under her feet. He stood on his hind legs by the opening to the path they had taken to the observatory.

“Quick, Maggie, we have so far to go,” Math said and dropped to four paws. She wriggled out of the wicker chair and threw off the quilt. Passing Uncle Archer, she leaned over and lightly kissed the scar on his cheek. Then, with a skip and a bound, she was on the dog's thin back, her legs wrapped around his rippled rib cage, and they were dashing, with whippet speed, along the path. The night trees went by in a blur, and the wind in her face momentarily took her breath away. Math's haunches released like powerful springs long held back and, yelling to her, “Put your arms around my neck,” he leaped into the sky. They touched down again in the field near the house and then with one more leap they were out over the ocean glimmering with moonlight, flying.

Archer was about to begin his story again when he saw that Maggie had dozed off. He loved to see her so peaceful, but hated to think of her in the clutches of anything so powerful, such as sleep, where he could not intercede. She looked so small in the wide-backed chair, wrapped like a cocoon in the quilt; so alone in the meager glow from above. The wind blew the leaves and the lantern swung, and he wondered if there was anything more he could have done to save her from the unhappiness that would overtake her the following day.

It was true that her father would be leaving her mother, but what Maggie did not know was that she would be accompanying him because her mother would, by then, have been committed to an asylum for the insane. “Elise,” whispered Archer, contemplating his sister and her ghosts. He pictured her tall, stately figure, her long black hair. She had been a kind and gentle mother to Maggie, but those spirits that only she could see, hounding her day and night, had made her dangerous to herself and others, for she believed the only way to rid the world of them was with fire. The list of disastrous incidents was a catalogue of charred remains and close calls for the child.

The ghosts might as well have also haunted his brother-in-law for, through the years of trying to understand
her
madness, they had drained much of Havrad's personality, leaving him rather cold, haggard, and blank. Archer gave him credit for trying to effect some change that would save the child from any more time in the presence of true madness, but at the expense of a mother's love, it was not a real solution. Life was never so clear-cut as to offer anything as certain as a war between Heaven and Hell. That was for stories. As Maggie's crippled old uncle, he knew that all he was capable of was kindness toward her, and though many would think that enough, he felt its inadequacy tattooed in aquamarine and rose upon his conscience.