In the closing years of the twentieth century, the artist Gus Rocca was living down on Parker’s Key. He had everything he needed. He had never been a great consumer of anything but red wine, and now, at fifty-five, he couldn’t take too much of that anymore. The launch brought in food and the magazines he needed for his collages. He walked along the beach each morning and evening looking for found objects.
Parker’s Key was a small island, dull and sullen, with few interesting features. After a month Gus decided the place was like a jolie-laide, a beautiful, ugly woman. He lived in a low, gray, weathered house among scrawny palms. There was a shack at the other end of the beach, and it was prettier, covered with bougainvillea, the purple bracts clustered on its sagging roof like a swarm of butterflies. A woman lived in this shack, and Gus, watching her at first with the naked eye, hoped for another jolie-laide at least. But Sophie Moller was something more like a female counterpart of Gus himself, and when he looked through his binoculars he was disappointed. Damn, she would never see forty-five again. He was looking at a solid, sun-tanned weather-beaten woman in worn Bermudas and sunglasses. He took two bottles of wine, nevertheless, and set off, walking. The woman made no move to put on a blouse over the Bermudas until he was halfway down the beach.
As he came up she shouted at him: “Get lost, Rocca! You are disturbing my peace!”
He peered, stung by some memory, but he didn’t recognize her until she removed the sunglasses.
“Hey, you were Clawson’s green girl!”
“I certainly was,” said Sophie. “I still have green in the sides of my toenails.”
“Small world.”
“Too small. What was that the other day with the film crew?”
“Just some crazy art film,” said Gus modestly.
“Famous by now,” said Sophie, wistful but without envy. “Clawson was a good painter but he never sold. Hell, in the end I sold better than he did.”
“You’re painting?”
“Not me!”
He opened the wine, and she took him back to her shack. He found out her name; it was on six travel books. Her jacket photographs were of today’s woman, more or less. On the wall were several Clawsons, including one of the green girl series, the life-size imprint of someone who had been earthily beautiful, a forest flower.
“No,” said Gus, gulping the teeth-blackening red wine. “A tree. You were a beautiful green tree, Sophie.”
“Sure,” said Sophie. “Eat your lasagna.”
He stayed the night. They visited once or twice a month and ran into each other when the launch called. Sophie was writing about the Spanish Main. One day they caught a turtle but hadn’t the heart to kill and eat it. Gus painted the date on its shell in white and it kept turning up, one end of the island to the other. Parkers key, 4/7/99.
Gus worked well and enjoyed himself. He crated up twelve collages and sent them off to a show in Dallas. He painted the front of his house green and brown and tried to grow bougainvillea up the veranda posts. He ran along the beach.
On the last day of October a storm warning came in on the little Coast Guard buzzer he was enjoined by law to keep on the island. His dinghy was already stored in its shed; he went to get Sophie. His house had a hurricane cellar.
Sophie, camouflaged in jungle greens, was typing on her tumbledown porch.
“You were here last Tuesday,” she said, not too displeased.
“It’s Halloween!” said Gus, grinning like a pumkin.
He couldn’t blurt out that he had come about Hurricane Victor. By the time he escorted Sophie up the beach, grumbling and clutching a rucksack of manuscript, the wind was bending the thin palms. When they settled into the cellar at sixteen hours EST, Parker’s Key was under a low roof of yellow-black cloud. The noises above them, orchestral, cruel, sometimes difficult to interpret, lasted for twelve hours.
They crawled out warily into sunshine. A stiff wayward wind was blowing in and out of the damaged house. A corner of the roof had lifted; windows were gone. Sophie pushed aside the unhinged door and ran down the beach looking for her shack. It was only a little worse than it had been; the bougainvillea had been torn down and shredded. Gus came out into the cool sunshine and saw that the shed had collapsed neatly onto the dinghy. Two of the palms were twisted together; it was the damnedest thing. He considered taking a snapshot of the trees to include in a collage.
The world was born again. There was something in the air, or rather there was nothing at all in the air. Sea and sky were washed clean, holding the island in a huge globe of turquoise-blue. The mainland had drawn back a little, and it was more intensely green than he remembered.
Sophie and Gus were partly euphoric, partly in shock for several days during the cleanup period. Gus combed the beaches quickly, expecting some bad harvest; then he went back and combed again. He walked for whole days, eyes down, stooping now and then. He took Sophie along; they filled his big canvas satchels several times. Found objects.
“Hell,” said Sophie. “These aren’t ‘found objects.’ These are apports!”
Gus played around with a pun, any apports in a storm, but all that came out was an anxious question.
“What do you mean by an apport, anyway?” he asked. “I thought it was an object that appeared at some bloody seance. Like… like an apple on the sofa cushions.”
“I mean something that has no business to be where it is,” said Sophie.
She reached over the worktable and picked up a kind of buttonhook in yellow metal. She fingered the shaped fragments of polished black wood and moved on to the largest piece, a curved strip of balsa with brass nails. Gus tried the umbrella again; it was oblong in shape and made of gray latex stretched over a frame.
“Mind you,” he said, “it’s what we don’t find that worries me…”
No more cans. No plastic containers. No tires. No trace of oil slick or gasoline or diesel fuel. No tin, aluminum, steel or chrome. No ordinary fragments of small craft, no life rings—but what was that dark rubber pillow in a rope net? No coins, watches, dentures, sunglasses, frisbees, inflatable beach toys or mattresses.
“No planes,” said Sophie. “Do you realize we haven’t seen one plane?”
“This place isn’t on the jet lanes. We don’t see a plane for weeks on end.”
“No search planes after the hurricane?” she asked.
Gus had a sudden inadmissible thought, almost a vision. Parker’s Key, with search planes zooming overhead, its beaches a tangle of everyday flotsam—and this was happening right now, if only they could see it. He watched as Sophie fingered the blue beads, the shards of blue pottery, the chunks of bubbled, purplish glass.
“These things are beautiful,” she said. “Rich and strange.”
She plucked at the scraps of woven fabric, dark green, turquoise, red, ocher—a kind of silky wool plaid; an embroidered linen. She picked up a handful of golden crescents all stamped with the same round character.
“We have suffered a sea change,” she went on dreamily, “we have come into a different—”
“Different world be damned!” snapped Gus. “This is the same world. We’re on the same island.”
“I was going to say ‘different universe,’ ” said Sophie.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he blustered. “These things were all stirred up by the storm.”
Sophie bent her head over the worktable and said nothing.
“Don’t worry about it. The launch will be here tomorrow,” Gus said firmly.
The launch never came. Sophie drew his attention to the lights; he looked once and would not look again. He floundered, talking of haze and the hurricane. This was the year ‘99, and the days when lights blazed out to sea and sky were gone, long gone. But that faint little broken necklace of lights on the distant keys preyed on him.
He prowled and worried, listening for aircraft. He told himself every perfect morning: today a rich haul, two whitewall tires, seven Coke cans, and a piece of board labeled suzie Q. tampa. Instead there was this trickle of artifacts.
“Mass-produced!” he shouted at Sophie out of a clear sky. “You can’t say some of this stuff isn’t mass-produced.”
“I can’t say anything,” said Sophie, “except that we’re healthy and as sane as we ever were, and we have food, water, shelter. Quit worrying.”
Then after some moments, fingering a bone button and a long green feather, she said in a hoarse whisper: “Gus, has it occurred to you we might be dead?”
“Come on, now.”
He put his arms around her and they sat for a long time, watching the waves on the sunset beach.
“It serves us right,” said Sophie. “What the hell were we doing on this island anyway? We chose to reject the twentieth century and now it’s gone. We deserve it.”
“You’re crazy,” said Gus. “Since when was it wrong to live the way you want to live? I earned this place and you know it!”
Next day he was all alone fishing when he saw a ship far out to sea. He hitched up the binoculars so hard the strap broke. He looked and shouted; he dropped the glasses and galloped wildly down to his house, where Sophie was making lunch. He held on to her, sweating, and buried his face in her shoulder.
“Ship.”
Sophie quickly went out on the porch, but the ship had gone. She came back in and gave Gus a large shot of brandy for medicinal purposes.
“We have to try to identify the ship.”
He nodded, teeth clenched.
“It was a sailing ship, right?”
He nodded again. He felt his eyes stretched wide open, ready to pop out of his head, and closed them with an effort.
“Gus, I’ll get some pictures. We must do an Identikit on the ship.”
So they worked on it: galley, caravel, galleon, brigantine, bark, schooner, junk—junk?—clipper. The ship was imprinted on his retina. He drew, consulting the galleons, argosies, rejecting all but a hint of their structure. He drew a sleek, solid vessel, estimated length forty feet, with a distinctive winged prow, not too high, a big, dark-red lateen sail, and a curious outcrop like the double hull of a catamaran.
“Probably some kind of stabilizer,” he said, “balanced by another one on the starboard side.”
“Beautiful,” said Sophie.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing that I’ve ever seen before,” said Sophie.
“But that sail—”
“Oh, sure,” said Sophie, “and those swim fins? The ship is unreal. It was built for a fantasy film. We’re living in a tank, reduced to the size of microbes. The island is made of pebbles and plastic greenery and papier-mache. I give up.”
“The past?” said Gus, trying to keep it as light as she did.
“I don’t think so,” said Sophie.
Gus drew a pile of rich fragments across his worktable: glass, woods, fabric, and what they would not admit was gold. He began playing around the way he did when a collage was in the making.
“Future?” he asked. “I mean, energy completely gone; everything starting up afresh, maybe after some bad scene?”
“The word you’re dredging for is post-holocaust,” said Sophie. “I think not.”
“What else is left?”
“Some of this stuff is not quite pre-Columbian,” said Sophie.
“But you said—”
“Not quite,” she said, “because he never did set sail. The main out there was never Spanish.”
It took his breath away.
“That is the craziest—” he said violently.
Suddenly the stillness of the afternoon was broken by a loud boom and a hiss, a sound that Gus almost recognized.
“I meant to ask if the ship carried guns,” said Sophie.
They went to the porch window and crouched behind the straw blind. The ship had come in again from the southwest and was harrying another vessel. The second ship was taller, more vulnerable, with sails of palest ocher, emblazoned with circular emblems in turquoise. They could see figures clustered on the decks. The encounter was painfully slow and unreal: The sail that fell seemed to dip down like a petticoat; the cannon smoke was white.
“I hope to Jesus they don’t come too close,” said Gus.
“Who is Jesus?” asked Sophie. “Is he a friend of this Columbus?”
“Sophie,” he cried, “we are in trouble!”
“Not yet,” said Sophie. “Those guys out there are the ones in trouble.”
The tall ship was grappled; the whole hurrah’s nest had moved far out to sea, but they didn’t dare go out onto the porch. They watched until dusk, and over the darkening horizon there came a flash of fire.
“That was big!” said Sophie. “Powder magazine, maybe.”
Gus was apathetic, in shock. He watched, blinked, stared at the sea again.
“Something coming,” he said.
A flickering light lived and died in the hollows of the waves. They waited until they were sure the dark shape would beach and then stole outside. They lay on their bellies behind two sandy clumps of grass. Something flat, a raft or a piece of wreckage. It came on steadily with a faint light aboard and slid up the beach.
“Shine the torch,” ordered Sophie. “It looks like a kid.”
Gus shone the torch and they went stumbling down to the raft. The young boy was sitting bolt upright on a wooden bench, his hands resting on a spreading yoke-shaped handle. It was a pedal raft: The passenger sat there, relaxed and jaunty as a boy on a bike. A small oil lamp with a glass and shade was mounted behind him on a stand.
When they appeared behind Gus’s flashlight the boy blinked and clambered off his seat. He was sturdy, pale-skinned in the light, his hair and eyes very dark. All they could see of his dress was an enveloping cloak of dark wool that brushed the ground when he stood up. He came slowly to the edge of the raft, made a strange scooping gesture with a flattened hand, and spoke in a shrill voice.
“Come along,” said Gus softly.
He reached out, and the boy rested a cold hand upon his palm before stepping down onto the sand. His knees buckled, but he did not cry out. Gus caught him as he fell, and Sophie ran to take over the flashlight. They hurried back into the house.
They carried him into the big front room, the studio. It was the same room that Gus had inhabited, in various places, for twenty years: an organic, untidy place, beautiful as a forest. There were two lamps, sun-powered now: an old Angelpoise and an imitation Tiffany. When Sophie switched them on, the friendly room suddenly looked as alien as the interior of a spaceship. They laid the boy on the studio couch.
“I’ll get some water,” said Sophie.
Then the boy’s dark cloak parted and they stared, guilty and incredulous as conquistadores. The boy wore a linked mail vest of finest gold; gold bracelets held the cuffs of his dark sleeves; a golden bird with eyes of emerald hung among gold chains around his neck. His oddly cut wide trousers were embroidered at the hem with gold thread and polished turquoise; there were golden buckles on his leather boots. Gus couldn’t speak. He passed his hand across his eyes.
“Some heavy gear!” said Sophie.
She ran into the kitchen and came back with a wet towel and water in a cup. She held the cup to the boy’s lips and made him drink; then she wiped his face.
They took turns watching the boy as he slept the long night through. In the morning the boy was wide awake, shrill and demanding. They tried names, but he did not repeat their names and gave no sound they could catch hold of for his own name. He submitted himself to be led to the bathroom by Gus and caught on to the use of the plumbing with scornful efficiency. He carelessly laid his gold gewgaws and his jacket and boots on the bed in a heap and went about in a linen undershirt and the breeches kilted up with two thongs.
The boy would not eat. He eyed them at the table in angry silence, finally snatching fruit from a bowl and taking it to eat on the beach. They watched from the house as he walked around his raft. When he started toward her cottage, Sophie went after him. Gus saw her miming, “Come, I’ll show you my place,” holding out her hand to him. The boy let her pass, then shouted something into the wind and came back to sit on the veranda of the house.
Gus was working when the boy came in and prowled. Gus kept on with his work for some time. Then he took out pencils and a drawing block. He drew the tall ship and wrote the word ship under it. He showed it to the boy and gave him a pencil. The boy broke a lead idly circling on a scrap of paper, and Gus passed him another pencil. After examining the drawing of the ship, the boy carefully wrote a short row of characters under the drawing. Gus repeated the word ship and pointed hopefully to the new word, but the boy was silent. Gus drew a tree and labeled it, then a fish. The boy wrote under each picture; he wrote the same thing every time. When Sophie came over for lunch the boy watched hungrily but still refused to eat and drink.
Sophie and Gus could make nothing of the boy’s written or spoken language. They were nervous but let things ride. The boy ate hard-boiled eggs for supper and drank water. He found one of Gus’s drawing blocks and a pencil and sat on the porch. He was not drawing, he was writing.
“Maybe we should give him a bottle and a cork,” said Sophie.
She washed the dishes and sang “Within These Sacred Bowers” in a sweet, cracked contralto voice. Gus worked away, inspired and sad, thinking of Mozart.
I am Chaytulpan, first-born son of the Prince Governor of the Imperial Province of Southern Mexico. On the twentieth day of the eleventh month of the tenth millenium of the Third Empire of the Sun, one of my father’s ships was taken by pirates. Our people saw to it that I was preserved. I am cast away on a small island. There are two old creatures here, barbarians without caste. They offer me defiled food and have no understanding of the speech hierarchy. I hope rescue will come soon.
As Sophie reached for the last egg to break into the pan, the boy shouted and held his hands over the egg carton. She stared into his face and saw an agonized revulsion. She drew back, let him break the egg, and gritted her teeth while he fried it clumsily together with the bacon. He carried his heaping plateful to the table and began eating with fingers and a spoon.
“I’ve got the hang of it,” she said to Gus. “It’ll be difficult, but we’ll manage.”
Gus was angry at the discovery; it was nearly impossible for them not to touch the boy’s food. They unwrapped, sliced, set things out secretly.
The fishing had never been better; Gus showed the boy how to catch his own fish and cook them over an open fire. Along the beach, he and Sophie had the barbecue going. The two fires were like beacons blazing out into the gathering darkness.
“He sits alone,” said Sophie. “Can’t be more than about thirteen years old.”
“He’s doing fine,” said Gus. “He looks through the magazines.”
“Does he recognize anything?”
Gus shrugged. “He spends his time writing on his pad,” he said defensively.
I am Chaytulpan, still alone. I catch fish and eat them. I pray for guidance and have angry dreams. I think these two old monkeys have been chained to the island by a sorcerer. They have many things here that they could not have made themselves. I think the old hag receives instructions from a machine that makes glyphs. I have seen the old cock drinking blood-colored liquid. I will never be clean again. I will never see my father again. My mother will be displaced by the mother of Teltulpan, my younger half-brother. O mighty all-powerful Sun, look down upon Chaytulpan, your kinsman, and help him in his distress.
Gus watched the boy rise early in the morning and go outside to pray. From the kitchen window he could see him march purposefully to the highest point on Parker’s Key, a miserable ridge, midway between the house and the shack. There, among a few shreds of grass, the boy stood facing the east, arms raised. The rising sun blazed on his clasped hands, and Gus realized that the boy was holding up a gold medallion to catch its first rays. When the mornings were cloudy the boy moped. At night he sat on the beach, staring at the distant lights on the keys.
“This is no good,” said Gus. “He’s a good boy but he’s pining.”
“I see what you’re doing,” said Sophie, “and it frightens me.”
Gus had rescued his boat from its wrecked lean-to; he was making it ship-shape. One sunny morning the boy ran up waving his arms and chattering. He was so excited that Gus thought he must have sighted a friendly ship. He scanned the horizon but it was empty. The boy smiled, took his hand, pointed down the beach. He wanted Sophie to share the fun. Gus and the boy walked hand in hand to the shack, and Sophie came out to meet them.
“He has something going,” said Gus.
The boy, still all smiles, wiped his hand on his breeches and held it out to Sophie. She clasped it eagerly.
“Okay,” she said, “this is peace. This is some kind of breakthrough, thank heaven.”
The boy led them to a place on the beach where he had flattened the sand and made two circles of shells. He made them kneel in circles; then he stood between them and prayed aloud to the morning sun. He went into a modest pantomime and drew pictures in the sand.
“I get it,” said Sophie. “Man, Gus, you’re man. I’m woman.”
The boy repeated the words, he had a little trouble with the W. He veiled his eyes and pointed; they chorused obediently:
“Sun!”
He repeated the words several times, ran about almost dancing.
Sun-Man—that was Gus; Sun-Woman, Sophie. He pointed to himself.
“Sunny Boy?” suggested Gus.
The boy would not accept the name. It was no time for hesitation.
“Ramón,” said Sophie.
The boy tried it out and accepted the name. He spoke more prayers and slipped chains of gold around the necks of Sunman and Sunwoman, each chain embellished with red and green threads of wool that he had unraveled from Gus’s Indian blankets. After a quick demonstration of the way they should lie down, Ramón gave first Sophie, then Gus a hard kick on the shoulder with his bare foot. They flopped down and lay still in their shell circles. Squinting upward Gus saw the boy, naked to the waist, arms extended proudly toward his god.
He saw the dark fall of hair, the face, alien from its very youth. He was filled with anxiety, an unbelief, a hunger for something real, something within his own terms of reference. Then the ceremony was over.
The boy, still excited, smiling, indicated that they should eat and drink. He led them back to the house, and Sophie whipped up a quick celebration meal: canned sweet corn, reconstituted orange juice, crackers, cheese, and sardines. Ramón served them with his own hands.
“What were you thinking of with that name Ramón?” asked Gus afterward.
“Who knows?” Sophie poured herself half a glass of the precious red wine. “Ra, the sun god. Raimundo, Raymond. I near as hell called him David.”
David was the name of Sophie’s own son, Dave Clawson, a neglectful shit in Gus’s opinion, who was “studying graphic art” worlds away in New York City.
“Your girls,” said Sophie, following the train of thought. “They’re fine. They have partners; they’re settled.”
“Living near their mothers,” said Gus, with resignation. “Four grandchildren now. Heidi, the pretty one, had twin boys. Grace was here with that goddamned film crew. We keep—we kept up a little.”
“Where is he?” asked Sophie, changing the subject. “Where’s Ramón?”
“On the porch, with his diary.”
Praise to the Sun, the lord of life. I have been shown the way. The old ones have been dedicated to him; they are ennobled for a golden year; then they are forfeit. It makes my life much easier. I am sure rescue will come long before the year is passed, and I will be able to deliver the Sunman and the Sunwoman to the priests in good condition. I believe it is no defilement if I speak only their language.
A golden age had begun. The boy laughed; he ate their cooking; he demanded games and adventures. After he helped Gus repair the dinghy, they hitched the raft behind it and circumnavigated Parker’s Key. Even Sophie took turns rowing or pedaling. Ramón rattled off English—in fact, he would speak nothing else. He was full of childish imperatives.
He was patient with Sophie’s pictures of Mayan, Incan, and Aztec temples. One day, in answer to some father-mother questioning, he drew for Gus a family tree. Stout male figures with clumps of wives and children reached up in a triangular pile to a faceless giant; above him was the sun disc. Ramón indicated his place in the heap.
“It figures,” said Sophie, at night in the lamplight. “He must be a prince at the very least. Poor little devil.”
“Where was he sailing, I wonder?” asked Gus. “What have they got over there?”
The answer proved to be Big House. A summer place, perhaps?
The weather was perfect: a golden chain of endless mild summer days without a trace of cloud. Gus worked on his collages, and Sophie, in some despair, finished her book on the Spanish Main.
She turned to and revived her garden, and mended the roof of her shack, Gus and Ramón assisting. The boy could be found, now and then, standing worshipfully before Clawson’s green girl. He seemed to understand who the subject was, and Gus had the feeling it gave Sophie more influence. The boy sat patiently while she tried out words on him: place names, the names of ancient gods, scraps of Quechua, and a few words of Nahuatl that she found in a mythology book. Sometimes he laughed or covered his ears.
“How much do you think he understands?” asked Gus one evening. “Are you getting anywhere?”
“He vaguely recognizes words in both languages,” said Sophie. “I pronounce them queerly. He doesn’t want to correct my pronunciation.”
“He still won’t open up.”
“Gus, he can’t. There’s some big prohibition in there.”
“Do we have any kind of picture of this sun kingdom?”
“Sure,” said Sophie. “Pure extrapolation, from the flotsam, the ships, and from Ramón. An empire reaching from—from Peru to California. It developed slowly in some ways by comparison with Europe; it rose on top of other empires some of them very strong on organization. They have the wheel and a good, workable written language. They have gunpowder, and the gold was never taken away by the bad guys, the conquistadores.”
“Yes, the gold,” said Gus. “We’ve had a lot of gold washed up—buttons, buckles, bits of plate. I think those crescents stamped with a sun disc are pieces of money. I found a couple of small ignots the other day. I wouldn’t have believed any civilization used so much gold.”
“The conquistadores believed it,” said Sophie. “I have a quote from one of those greedy bastards saying plainly that the gold in Central America alone would last forever. So they’re an empire with many different races, and they have a strong imperial religion—this sun worship.”
“Great,” said Gus. “And where are we? I mean where are the Europeans? Or do I mean Caucasians?”
“How about north?” suggested Sophie. “Still hacking around in horned helmets. Growing grapes in Vinland. Making raids on the Amerind nations.”
“Come on already,” said Gus. “Why are we the primitives in this scenario?”
He sipped at his wine.
“When the vintage runs out,” he said, “maybe we should head north.”
Sophie stood by the veranda rail and looked over the darkening sea.
“We shouldn’t question Ramón too much,” she said.
“You think it worries him?” asked Gus. “He seems happy enough. Eats well. Sleeps like a baby.”
“He has had servants, tutors, all kinds of people at his beck and call, but not too many people he could relate to as human beings. His relationship to us is stranger than we can imagine.”
Today we ate meatballs, painted the roof of the hovel, and played ball in the evening. I am very pleased with my Sunman and Sunwoman. Truly they come from a world of sorcerers. Their magic will flow back to the Sun and increase his prestige and my own when their blood flows over the stone.
Gus left Ramón curled up on the couch for his siesta and wandered down to Sophie’s shack under the midday sun.
“Look here,” he said. “Look at this!”
He held the boy’s drawing; it had been completed. Under the sun and the sun king and the towering heap of nobles and their families the boy had drawn a row of middle-sized officials or soldiers.
Then he had filled in, painstakingly, a vast crowd of tiny creatures, no more than blobs with two eyes: the rest of the world, the common people. It was a drawing that truly shocked Gus.
“A prince,” said Sophie. “His world view is bound to be a little different. Do you think he draws well for his age?”
“He probably oversimplified a lot,” said Gus, sighing. “I don’t think he does draw very well for his age. Compared with his written script, his drawings are childish.”
“He’s a child and we are grown-ups,” said Sophie, taking Gus by the hand.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s in a strange place. He doesn’t know what to make of us. But there isn’t any doubt in the world, in any world, about the way we should behave with this boy. We can only love him and do our best for him.”
“That might include taking him in—back to the Big House.”
“Yes. He can’t stay here too long.”
I skinned my knees badly on the rocks while bringing in a large bluefish. The pain was great, but Sunwoman cured it with her salves and bandaged my legs tenderly. Sunman praised my courage. He does not know I am a Prince. They sat by me and gave me some of the precious medicinal spirit to make me sleep. I know the Sunman plans to take me to my fathers Holiday Pavilion with his boat and my raft. I ask the Sun: O mightiest one, how has this all been ordered and to what end? What do we know of the northern barbarians? The year of the Sunman and Sunwoman is just beginning . . . if they bring me to the Pavilion they will lose many months of life.
My knees are completely healed. We made a feast for Sunwoman’s birthday, singing, making music, and dancing. Once this Sunwoman was a nymph or priestess; I have seen her likeness. Now she is old but still supple; she inspires Sunman to great feats. I really believe they still do it though they are so old. Of course my grandfather did it until his hair was white, but he was of the blood royal and chose the freshest flowers in the province.
O Sun, O Sun, Emperor, beloved kinsmen, what would you two, indivisible, advise me to do in this matter? I am Chaytulpan, rich in my heritage, poor in understanding. I pray still for guidance. Sunman has made me a game of quoits and a pair of stilts. Today we tried to catch fish with a net and got very wet, and Sunwoman sat on the beach, laughing.
The boat stands ready. They are determined to take me to the Pavilion. I made the mistake of telling them that my mother was there, waiting. I am pierced with sadness and cannot explain the reason. They are anxious: Sunwoman has made my favorite foods; Sunman tries to comfort me.
In a dream I sailed with Sunman and Sunwoman into the harbor before the Pavilion. The court and the priests came. There I stood with two old barbarians. I was honor bound to explain our relationship. Either way they had to die.
Ramón went off by himself. He would not be comforted.
“What’s got into him now, for heaven’s sake?” asked Gus.
“What the hell do we know about princes?” sighed Sophie. “What do we know about this Big House?”
“It can’t be wrong to take him,” said Gus. “It might be all very well for us old farts to stay on a desert island, but a kid?”
“Yes, you’re right. And his mother is probably there too, the poor lady.”
“You could wait here,” said Gus. “I’d come back for you—come back to stay if I didn’t see any future for us in the Big House.”
“No,” said Sophie. “No, I think we ought to stay together. What if the damned island went back again while you were away? Anyway, it might be interesting to see all those El Dorado guys.”
Toward sunset the boy came in, smiling, excited—the way he had been for his first sun ceremony. Now he had another. He led them over a dune to the western tip of the island. He had driven a long piece of driftwood into the sand and anchored it with rocks. He had painted rows of characters upon a board from the boat shed and roped it to the stake. Now he made the pair of them, Sunman and Sunwoman, kneel down again. He removed the golden chains from their necks and hung them on his notice board. In the last rays of the setting sun he chanted and prostrated himself.
He came close to them, Sophie first, then Gus; he kissed them clumsily upon the forehead and raised them up, indicating that he must not speak. He smiled, however, and they went back to the house hand in hand. Ramón ate fruit for his supper. Sophie went down to sleep the last night in her own cottage and packed.
Gus slept lightly, he was restless, but the boy slipped away without waking him. In the morning he was gone. He had taken his raft. The sea was calm; Ramón had a long way to pedal, but he would surely come to his Big House on the keys.
I am Chaytulpan, kinsman of the Sun, and I take full responsibility. I could not deliver these two persons to be killed. Perhaps they are sorcerers; perhaps they come from some fabled land. They are wise and kind and have looked after me when I was cast away. I will never forget them. They can remain upon their island; they are still dedicated to the Sun and so is the island.
I see my sojourn upon this island as a time of testing. It is not the mark of a Prince to sit around waiting to be rescued. Nor is it fitting to bend others to my service if it means the loss of their lives. I was meant to put my trust in the Sun, the lord of all, and make the voyage alone, on my raft.
I will bury these scripts or burn them. I will tell no human of the existence of the island and its inhabitants. There is no need. The Sun sees all and understands.
Sophie and Gus sat on the beach most of the day, keeping an eye on the weather. When the lights came out on the keys, they still sat for a long time, watching.
“Quit worrying,” Sophie said reassuringly. “He’ll get through.”
“But why? Why go alone?”
“Why? Why? Don’t you know why?” she exclaimed. “All this freaky stuff with the not eating, the silence, the way he refused to speak his own language to us?”
“What are you getting at?”
“We were taboo. He knew they wouldn’t accept us. Remember his drawing? Perhaps there was simply no place for us in the scheme of things.”
“He was some kind of prince, wasn’t he?” said Gus. “You’d think his word would count for something.”
“Gus, you knew it from the first. That was a good kid,” said Sophie. “Believe me, he knew what he was doing.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Gus, what can we do? I mean, how long can we sit here waiting for the lights to change?”
“I’m only sorry about your book,” he said. “The Spanish Main.”
“I can stand it,” said Sophie, “but your work. You were a big name back there.”
“I can work anywhere,” said Gus stolidly. “Plenty of good material at hand. I think we might develop a little, have something to knock their eyes out if this damned island ever does change lanes.”
“You don’t want to take the boat, go exploring?” she asked. “I’d go along if that’s what you really wanted to do.”
“No,” said Gus. “No. We’d be foolish. We have everything we need. Well, almost.”
He sighed. “Only two bottles left,” he said. “The last bottles of red in the world.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Sophie, snuggling up to him.
She could just see his rugged profile in the dim light. Gus Rocca. Of all the men on earth. She remembered the brawl when Clawson caught them covered with her green paint in the shower, shamelessly making love.
“I have a vine growing,” she said. “A grape vine. It never grew at all until after the hurricane, but now it looks like we’ll be having purple grapes.”
Florida Commune Esperanza. Nell Susannah to Elsabeth Newhope, Liaison and Records, Reconstruction Center Seven, Southwest. Extract from quarterly overland newsletter, April 2034, Old Style:
“The island is very small, and we get the usual spaced-out reports that it ‘appeared overnight.’ I wouldn’t normally pay much attention to this, but this island is a puzzle. Someone has made it beautiful. It’s like a shrine. The whole place is terraced, planted with grapevines, corn, peppers, sunflowers—wonderful uncontaminated food plants we haven’t seen since the crash.
“There are two buildings on the island, one large and one small, both entirely covered, encrusted with a marvelous variety of natural things and artifacts. There is a lot of gold here, Elsa, real gold, more gold than any of us ever saw in our lives, and turquoise and precious stones. When the sun is shining, the whole island seems to light up, to make its own rainbows.
“Then there are twentieth-century books, pictures, lamps, and tin cans, and one inside wall of the smaller temple is covered with a manuscript book on the Spanish Main, illustrated with ship drawings. They have also done fantastic things with old wine bottles. Yet an awful lot of the stuff is mysterious. Pre-Columbian, almost.”
From a scribe chronicler in the service of Chaytulpan, known as the Navigator, Prince Governor of the Province of Southern Mexico, Third Empire of the Sun:
“In the seventh year of his office the young Prince Governor turned his flagship aside on the way to the Holday Pavilion and, taking a pair of rafts with his advisers, approached a certain island. This was the place, he said, where he had been cast away as a child, fourteen years previously.
“It was a small, desolate place with a ruined wooden shelter of some kind, sinking into the gray sand.
“The Prince, already known for his strength and dignity, knelt down and prayed and shed tears in this strange place. It was rumored among his court that he had seen visions on the island and that he had been magically succored by two eagles.
“While the Prince was at his prayers two of the sailors came up with a find: a large turtle with strange white markings upon its back. Prince Governor Chaytulpan forbade them to kill the creature and proclaimed the island a sanctuary for all living things, dedicated forever to the Sun.”