The saskiad, p.13
The Saskiad, page 13
Thomas has been saying her name. "I was just the same," he says, smiling on her. "Lost in books. But we're going now."
They pass the tower again on the way to the harbor. An ancient seat of wisdom, out of whose venerable bricks knowledge oozes to coat you like molasses. But the modern world is fallen, graceless. After buying the book Saskia found Jane and Thomas on the tower roof, where the observatory used to be. The telescopes had been replaced by machines with orangutan faces into which you dropped a coin for a minute of magnified city viewing. The machines were so debased they didn't even tilt skyward.
5
Each morning the opposite bunk is empty, unslept in. Thomas says he does not want to disturb the girls, so he sleeps in the galley. But where? Under the table? He makes breakfast, flipping soymilk pancakes into the air. Off they go, free as geese! The whole city is theirs. In the evenings they have dinner back in Thomas's rooms, hyggelig around the wooden table which fills half the galley. Thomas cooks expertly and fast, reaching for his ingredients in the tiny cupboards without looking. In fifteen minutes the food is ready, and somehow the pots are already clean.
"How long have you lived here?" Jane asks.
"I got here two days before you did."
"Where were you before that?"
"Here and there."
Where is his boat, his dog?
When they are done eating, Thomas whisks away the dishes and they are clean almost before they get to the sink. Blink twice and you would think dinner never happened. A pot of coffee bubbles on the stove.
"So why do you like Rembrandt so much?" Saskia asks.
"Excuse me?"
"I was wondering what it is about Rembrandt that makes you like his stuff."
"How did we get onto Rembrandt?"
"I was just . . . Since Lauren was telling me how — you know, you named me after Rembrandt's wife, or whatever. I was just wondering."
"Oh, right. Rembrandt." Thomas scrapes his chair back, crosses his arms. "Well, he's a great painter. Don't you think so?"
"Sure."
"There you go!" He gets up to pour the coffee. "I hope you like your name," he adds, looking concerned.
"I do!" Saskia says. Does it mean "seeker"? Saskia informs Jane that Rembrandt was the greatest of all the painters of Thomas's people.
"How lucky for us if he were," Thomas says. "Unfortunately, he was Dutch." Saskia wonders if hiding under the table is an option. Perhaps "Saskia" means "stupid."
The last dinner in Thomas's galley is the best of all. "After this it will be camp food," he says, removing the frontal lobe of a cauliflower and setting it next to the hazelnut-potato log on Jane's plate. After dinner he unrolls a map and weights it with compass and thermos. "We are here," he points to the city, a black patch on the eastern edge of Phaiakia. "Tomorrow we'll take a train." His finger travels north along the coast. It crosses the straits to Scania, where
Tycho was born, and moves north again, through hundreds of leagues of flat green country, farther and farther north. Saskia exchanges a look with Jane. "To here," Thomas says. His finger has cut through mountains to a long western coast and is pointing to something tiny among a jumble of islands and glaciers. "From here, we hike. We hike for a month through the most stunningly beautiful country on earth." His finger moves still farther north, over mountains and valleys, past glaciers, along dotted ferry lines connecting islands. Watching that finger, Saskia feels a prickling in her scalp. Thomas has to stand up to hold on to his own finger, as it moves inexorably north. Leaning across, he taps a point beyond the edge of the table, where the map hangs down. "Here." Inside the Circle. The land of feasters and sun worshipers, joyful people who live a thousand years: Hyperborea.
"What's there?" Jane asks. A tower. A tower rising from the middle of a vast sea. Childe Saskia to the Round Tower came!
"A river," Thomas says. "A wild river, a living thing. An artery for this whole area" — his hand caresses the map — "flowing down to the sea with water just melted from the snowfields, crystal clear ice-cold ichor."
"Ichor?" Jane asks.
"The blood of the gods," Saskia explains.
"Wow!" Jane says.
"Sounds good?"
"Sounds great!"
"We're going to swim in the river," Saskia murmurs, struck with fear and wonder. They will swim up the artery to the snowfields of Hyperborea and be cleansed of their dross, they will shiver into the essences of themselves. And at the end of this umbilicus will they find the omphalos?
"Not swim," Thomas is saying. "Something more important. We are going to save the river."
6
Dateline:
12:55 a.m., July 10, Anno Neo-Thomasus 1. On a train, north of
Scania.
I am lying in a bunk let down from the wall on two chains. Jane is asleep. Thomas is in another compartment, with some guy with huge hiking boots from Australia. Jane and I have a small washbasin with a wooden cover that you can raise and hook to the wall. You step on a lever and the water comes out lukewarm. There are two luggage racks just above my head, and there are metal hooks for hanging coats or what-have-you. The window is slightly open and cool air is coming in. The landscape is quite flat and everywhere there are fields of grain. When we pass a road crossing, the dinging of the crossing bells gets louder and flashes by, and then the pitch drops because of the Doppler Effect.
Hm. This is going to take forever at this rate. You're supposed to cover the here and now, but perhaps you're also supposed to pick and choose a little.
Other Phaiakians will be gathering with us in Hyperborea. What could be more natural for the water-loving Phaiakians than to save a beautiful river, to keep it forever wild and free? Phaiakian is coming back to me. We say "Godnat" and "Sov godt," which mean "Good night" and "Sleep well," and "Goddag" and "Godmorgen" and "Ha' det godt." You don't pronounce three quarters of the consonants, instead you sort of slide around them juicily.
She stares out the window for a while, watching the farmhouses go past. The night is so light, a tractor is moving across one of the fields.
Unable to sleep
a farmer finds needful work through the twilit night.
Saskia has heard that some people simply stop sleeping. Will that happen to her, whose sleep has always been the lightest tissue, a cobweb across her face that the smallest sound would tear? Of course Tycho didn't sleep at night, because he had his work to do. But what did he do all summer, when the sky was too light for stargazing? Come to think of it, Phaiakia is a pretty strange place for an astronomer, with its twilit summers. He probably pasted stars on his ceiling to tide him over until autumn. He probably lay in his bed and wished he was an Arab, down where the nights are ink black and the desert air thin. Look at all the stars with Arabic names, and not a single Phaiakian one. Tycho became a great astronomer against all the odds. Sort of like if Saskia were to become a great basketball player.
She really ought to sleep. She turns out the light and stares at the ceiling. When they crossed in the ferry from Phaiakia to Scania, she stood at the railing, and Hamlet's castle brooded on her right, with clouds scudding appropriately over it. Far away in the south, rising from the water, she could make out the ghostly low curve of the island of Ven. "Ven" means "friend" in Phaiakian. That was Tycho's island, which the wise Phaiakian king Frederick II gave him, throwing all the island peasants in as part of the deal, because there Tycho would not be disturbed by the gapes of the curious, the autograph hunters, the paparazzi. Just the stupid peasants, who never understood what he was talking about. There he built his castle, dubbing it Uraniborg, after the muse of astronomy.
"What are you looking at?" Jane asked, pulling hard on her cigarette.
"That island."
"I found a slot machine down by the snack bar."
She gazes at Jane, who is lying on her side in her long robin's-egg blue nightgown, her hands flat-palmed between her drawn-up legs, her hair every which way. How that girl can sleep! Sleep, Jane, sleep. They lost twenty crowns at the slot machine.
The sky is growing lighter. If she is going to get any sleep, it has to be now. Saskia is thirteen. An actual teenager. Time passes and folksenhood keeps rolling in like a storm cloud, whether you want it to or not. Jane had her first bout of mooniness in May and she danced around happily, the strange wild girl! Both thirteen, both moony. Thus they grow more like each other every day. What has Saskia done to further close the gap? You will never believe it. She looks at the ceiling, so turned in on herself that not even her men are around to ask her how it is going. Yes. Saskia does the Deed. A swirling out like a reverse Charybdis, out to the extremity and then slowly back in, drawing her into the calm center, the eye, the aye, the I, where she gently sinks beneath a film of sleep.
7
A line of white stones marks the Circle, but the train does not even slow down: they are in Hyperborea. The tracks run through bleak tundra, along the edges of silent lakes, slowly higher into stony uplands. Suddenly the land falls away and the train has somehow gotten itself thousands of feet up the steep flank of a mountain, and it crowds back against the slope like a cat not knowing how to get down. Far below is a crooked bay like mighty Cayuga, but Ithacaless. "That, ladies, is a fjord," Thomas says. Moaning through tunnels and whining on the exposed curves, the train works its way downward and pulls at last into the end station with an endearing gasp of relief.
They stay in the town only long enough for Thomas to buy supplies. The houses are wooden boxes painted red, white, ocher, perched on short stilts. Seaweed spots the stones beneath them like droppings. At the edges of the town either a mountain rears straight up or salt water stretches level away. Along the pebbly shores, fish hang in wooden cages, so dried out they look like shucked-off snake skins. "People pay good money for this," Thomas says, tapping one. "You'll never guess what for." Voodoo rites? Self-flagellation? "They eat it."
"Dis-guusting!"
But something does not compute. The Hyperboreans are always joyfully feasting —
"These were fabulously rich fishing grounds for five hundred years. And now it's mostly gone, because of overfishing." He gestures toward the rows of empty cages, the beached and rusting boats. "These people ignore the evidence. They say it's because of the seals. Too many seals, they say, because the damn environmentalists think seals are cute. So they want to kill the seals. That's the solution to everything up here, kill something, kill more, kill everything."
Saskia watches the large townspeople move clumsily through the streets, their pale hammy hands dangling uncleverly. She listens to them speak to each other, unsmiling and dour, in a guttural sort of Phaiakian, not liquid like a pure running river but stony, clotted with consonants, like the hard land rising up, like the concrete dam they want to build on the river of ichor. Saskia understands hardly a word of it.
Who are these people? Where are the happy Hyperboreans? This is where Thomas, Jane, and Saskia were supposed to meet the other river-loving Phaiakians. The dozen families who would travel together, cook big meals, make it a real family affair. Unfortunately, it seems the girls flew in late, and now the others have already hiked out. Thomas assures them it's OK, they have plenty of time. "We'll probably beat them there."
"This is much better," Jane assures Saskia. "What kind of wanderers move in herds, anyway?"
"I guess." But it seems a small band for a quest through a land of dam builders and seal killers.
After the errands are done they catch a bus and get off at the edge of town. The last zippers are zipped, the last straps strapped. "Everybody ready?" They shrug on their packs and leave the road, ascending a grassy slope. The girls are leaping with excitement. They're off! Wanderers! The sedentary world can eat their dust! Over the hill! Over the next hill, and the next! Who knows where they will sleep? Who cares?
In the chartreuse light under birch trees, they follow a stony stream. There is no path. Thomas will be using a contour map and compass. "This isn't the Appalachian Trail," he calls back to them, pumping skyward. "Here, when you want to get somewhere you pick a point on the horizon and head for it." Picking a point is easy. A few hundred feet above the road the trees shrink to bushes and thin away. Nothing beyond but sedge and wildflowers, and you can see miles, across fjords and islands to the open sea and the edge of the world, where the map hangs off the table.
It was evening already when they left the road, so Thomas is taking them only as far as the first decent campsite. He climbs up to examine some ground, and beckons. "Home!" Aye, a goodly spot, with a fine view south toward mountains crowding one behind another like competitive siblings. They can see a village below. A short first day, and a good thing, she concedes as she slings off her pack and almost falls on top of it. She has developed an ache between her shoulder blades, and a tender place on her foot turns out to be a blister. Jane, meanwhile, hops from rock to rock, care- and blister-free.
There won't be a campfire, Thomas says. He points out that there isn't any wood, and peat fires are all smoke, and anyway, even if there were wood, it doesn't get dark, so a fire just cleans the landscape of its natural organic material and adds to the greenhouse effect for no good reason.
But no songs, no stories around the fire? "The sun is our camp-fire," he says, gathering it into a sweep of his arm. "You need a bigger one?" Can't argue with that.
With his pack open next to him he removes, without looking, his stove, fuel, rice, vegetables, nuts. Dinner is ready. They sit at the top of the steep slope with their steaming cups, their canteen water. "Anybody else want coffee?" No. "Good. Bad habit." This time the girls chorus it: "But not as bad as smoking!"
Thomas scrutinizes the village below while he eats. "These people look on vegetarians as freaks. Down there, they're gnawing on reindeer legs, or the last few fish they've been able to scour out of the fjords. See this green pepper? Three dollars. These leeks look like fossilized bamboo, and they're eight dollars a pound. They don't grow anything up here but potatoes. Everything else is hacked off passing animals."
They put Thomas's tents up. He insisted on two. "You girls need someplace you can get away from me. I don't let anyone get a word in edgewise." And yet he wrote so little. Lauren had told him not to! Why?
Thomas's watch says almost midnight, but that is meaningless. The sun will not even touch the horizon. In this perfect world the dark has been banished. The three of them gaze at Hyperborea for a long time, Saskia and Jane holding hands, Thomas cupping his coffee. The village below them is silent. Are the villagers asleep? But the people here are silent even when awake.
Who are these people? Meat eaters, seal killers, dam builders... Suddenly, awfully, Saskia knows. The Odyssey describes a place where one herdsman, driving his flocks in, may hail another who is driving his flocks out. A place, in other words, where it never gets dark. Towering cliffs rise out of harbors that give out to the sea through narrow entrances. Obviously, fjords. The people are cannibals, given to wasteful, joyless eating. They killed Odysseus' men, dropping boulders from their cliffs onto the wooden boats and spearing the men like fish.
A shiver crawls across Saskia's neck. These people are Laistry-gones.
Of course! The photograph that Thomas sent years ago, the plume of water spouting up next to the inflatable boat of struggling Phaia-kians: a Laistrygonian boulder! But why are they in Hyperborea, overfishing, damming rivers? What joyless ice age are they planning to bring to this sunny, smiling land? And what have they done with the Hyperboreans? Saskia looks down on that silent village, biding its time. As though reading her thoughts, Jane shudders.
She is suppressing a yawn. "Looks like bedtime," Thomas says. Saskia is not tired, but Jane's eyelids are drifting down. Her last view of Thomas, as she zips shut their flap: gazing out over his beloved land. In his hands, his fortifying coffee. At his feet, the camp of his mortal enemies.
8
They hike through Paradise, toward the river they will save. Is it correct to say "morning" when there is no night? Is it correct to say "day"? Midsummer's Day in Tyler is a measly fifteen hours. In Hy-perborea, it lasts two and a half months. A magical time during which koans become commonplace: Lizard Saskia turns out to be a stronger hiker than Wanderer Jane. Truly shall the last be first.
The sky over Hyperborea is God's own clock, with the sun for its hour hand sweeping around the points of the compass. Lie on your back and look at His time: north, midnight; south, noon. After a period of precarious sleep, Saskia unzips the tent flap and crawls out to find Thomas already up, studying a map and yawing the compass. Sometimes he is off gathering mint or mushrooms while his pot of coffee waits on the stove. Saskia makes her way down to a stream to wash her face, skipping back up over the white stones bedded down in the spongy grass. They camp above the trees, in bowls of wildflow-ers and heather strewn with lichen-covered boulders, with silent lakes at their centers, lakes so clean you can drink out of them, and as you lower yourself to the water you can see fifty feet along the stony bottoms. God made all the other countries first, Thomas said. When he made Hyperborea, all he had left were stones. Curious that Paradise turns out to be not a lush garden but a land of stones. The last shall be first.
The utter quiet of the mornings, if mornings they can be called, often cloudy, perhaps softly raining, mist moving over the face of the water. Thomas cups his coffee, silent, and Saskia listens to the silence, rapt, cradling her own cup. She tried a sip of coffee yesterday, two sips today. The gag reflex is already abating.
It rains frequently in Paradise, but Saskia finds she doesn't mind. When you put on your poncho the rain seems convincingly outside, except on your face, where it is actually rather pleasant, like tears of happiness rolling down your cheeks. And then, too, your feet may be wet, but how nice to know that the worst rain can do is make your feet wet, and that you can, after all, ignore it. You can be a good trouper, after all. And the best thing: the pleasure of setting up your tent and pulling out your sleeping bag, still faithfully dry after hours of being carried through the rain, and putting it in the dry insides of the protective tent. For dinner they crowd into Thomas's tent, and Thomas sits cross-legged in the door of the inner shell and prepares dinner on a crescent of grass beneath the fly, while the rain patters ineffectually and Jane and Saskia cuddle inside, warming their feet in the depths of down bags. "What would mesdames prefer for dinner?" Thomas asks. "Rice with vegetables or riz avec legumes?"
