On the hundredth day after Tariq’s death, Zara wakes to light on her face, the mirrors turning it white-orange with reflected heat. The hiss and hush of the sea outside the cave keeps her company as she rolls from her cot and goes to the shallow pit where the flowers appear.
Today’s is spindly and tall, with broad blue petals the color of the sky when a storm has passed. The color of Tariq’s robe. As she tugs the flower from the ground, she hears his voice, the words he spoke the first time she performed the ritual. Good, brush the dirt from the roots. Gently, gently. There; perfect. Soon all this will be second nature.
She cups the root ball in both hands, then stands and carries the flower to the grave. For an instant, she sees a vision: Tariq leaning against the cave wall, resplendent in blue, a smile on his face. Then, with a flash of reflected light, he is gone again, back to wherever the dead go when they do not haunt the living.
At the cave mouth, the thousands of tiny hexagonal mirrors glimmer. Zara has never liked this part of the ritual, the way they catch and twist and pull at the dim orange sunlight of this world with its night-dark ocean. The flowers reflected in their surface do not always match the one she holds; the hands that appear there are paler than hers, or darker, or clad in jeweled rings. Sometimes, there is only a bleached white pile of bones. Worse are the ones which show nothing at all, the ones that absorb every last gleam of light which strikes them and give back only darkness.
A tin sconce is set into the wall next to the mirrors, and below them stands the upright limestone slab that Tariq called the grave. Each day, she places the flower in the sconce and a name appears, etched into the rock’s pitted surface.
Rather, the name has always been there, even though it differs every day. She does not understand how this happens, or why. The orthography varies, from clean, beautiful Arabic to ornate characters in unknown languages. She copies them all, staring for hours until she memorizes their shapes if she has to. Understanding is not required to produce an accurate record—Tariq told her that when she first took up the duties that once were his. All names must be written in the book.
But today, after she places the flower in its sconce, she does not reach for the book as she should. Instead, she stares, one hand gripping the mirror-shard necklace Tariq gave her when she arrived here as a child.
For the name that appears on the grave is Tariq’s, just as it was on the day that he died.
The day Tariq died began just like any other. The sun’s hot glare, the cave’s musty damp, the pounding of the surf outside.
Zara rose from her cot and boiled water for tea and porridge, then set them next to Tariq’s cot. She’d long taken over his work—his eyes were too poor, he said, his fingers cramped with age—and she did this almost without thinking, the habits drilled into her by long practice.
Today’s flower was a single white rose, bereft of thorns. She worked it free from the dirt and walked to the mirrors at the cave mouth, then placed it in the sconce and squatted to see what name had appeared.
Written in a simple cursive script was the name Tariq al-Abadi. Zara sat back with a gasp, glancing towards Tariq’s sleeping form. She had never learned his full name in all the years she’d spent here, but she knew with bone-deep certainty it was him.
Before he could wake, she pulled the book from its driftwood shelf, opened it to the page where the latest names had been written. She ground ink for the writing stick and set it to the paper, but she could not bring herself to write Tariq’s name. To make his death a real, recorded thing.
She was sitting there still, staring at the grave with her writing stick poised, when he set one hand on her shoulder.
“So, the day is here,” he said. “Did you record my name, Zara?”
She did not question how he knew—she had sat too long at the grave; poor eyesight did not mean poor wits. Still, she did not trust herself to speak. She shut the book, dried the writing stick, took three deep breaths.
“Yes.” She twined her necklace around one finger, managing somehow to keep her voice calm and even. “Yes, Tariq al-Abadi. I recorded your name.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Then all is well. Now come; there is much to do and more before my passing.”
Zara’s cheeks were wet with tears, but Tariq was smiling.
Zara wishes she could ask Tariq what it means—she has never seen a name repeat, and he never mentioned it in all his talks about the grave and its purpose.
But Tariq is dead, is gone. He went to sleep on that years-ago night and never woke. She buried him herself, bundled him into his bed sheet and rolled him from cave mouth as he’d asked, into the dark waves of the sea below.
With shaking fingers, Zara reaches at last for the book. The page where Tariq’s name should rest sits empty, accusing in its blankness.
“You,” a voice rasps out. “What have you done to me? Why have you brought me here?”
Tariq’s voice, although it is all wrong, shot through with venom and agony. And when she turns, Tariq is there, impossibly alive but wearing weather-beaten rags instead of his pale blue robes. His eyes dart like swallows, never resting; his hair is a ragged, dirty white.
“T—Tariq,” she stammers, scrambling to her feet.
Tariq grimaces, twisting his face into a hideous mask.
“Witch,” he growls. “Monster. Why do you torment me?”
Then, Zara understands. This is not Tariq—at least, not the Tariq she has known. She closes the book and sets it down, takes a careful step towards him. “Tariq,” she says, “I—”
With a yell, he closes the distance between them, his hands grasping at her neck. She lashes out, tries to throw him aside or break his grip, but she doesn’t want to hurt him. Doesn’t want to lose him twice and be alone again.
The light begins to fade; she can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t escape.
Ten years Zara lived in the cave before Tariq ever said a word about the flower and the stone at the cave mouth, about what he did each morning after waking. He would let her watch the ritual but would not let her near him when he placed the flower in its sconce. He would not let her touch the book or glance into the mirror.
She marked the years still, then, with little scratches in the dusty back wall for every day, week, and month that had passed since she arrived. And so she knew it was her nineteenth birthday when he relented.
As on every other day, she awoke at first light and boiled water for tea and porridge. Then she snuck glances at the morning’s flower, tried to see what was written on the stone or in the book without going near it.
So it was a surprise when he rolled over in his cot without so much as a glance at breakfast and whispered, “Go. Look.”
She did not need to be told twice. But what she saw there puzzled her. The stone at the cave mouth was smooth and even, unmarked by any name, and the tin sconce where Tariq set the flowers was empty. Now that she thought on it, she’d never seen Tariq dispose of the flowers—had always been caught up in the cave’s other mysteries—but every morning when he placed a flower there it was alone.
She caught a glimpse in the mirror of a jasmine twig in bloom, and a shiver went up her spine as she realized. What occupied the cave wall was not a mirror. It was thousands—uncountable tiny hexagons delicately arranged to give the appearance of wholeness. Most showed her before the stone, the flower sconce empty, as they should. Some did not. Some showed flowers already in the sconce, while others showed Tariq seated there instead of her. Some showed people she had never seen.
“They’re other worlds,” Tariq told her.
She jumped at his sudden presence. “Like… stars?”
A shake of his head. “Worlds like our own, but ones where certain things never happened. Or worlds where certain other things did.”
“Like the world I came from,” she said. “Like home.”
“Yes,” Tariq agreed.
It had been so long now since “home” had mattered that she remembered little of it. Just the faintest impression of whitewashed walls, of glinting sun. Vague images of people who loved her. Whom she must have loved as well. She tugged on her necklace.
“How does it work?” she asked at last. “Who built it?”
Tariq smiled. “I don’t know. Neither did the man who met me when I arrived in the cave as a boy, nor the woman who taught him his tasks, nor the woman who taught her.
“All I know is that this cave is special. A place where the barrier between the worlds is thinner. Sometimes, people slip through.” He gestured to the mirrors on the wall. “These—like the one on your necklace—are left behind every time somebody does. Unless the person needs them, we affix them to the wall.”
“Some are dark. Why?”
“Those show… dead worlds. Those where some cataclysm has torn our planet apart. Where no people still live to tend the grave.”
Zara shivered. Dozens of dead worlds stood out among the live ones. They looked like punched-out teeth. Like holes in the sky. Like scars.
When Zara awakes, the sky outside the cave is lit with glittering stars. The man who is not Tariq sits next to the grave looking out at the sea, his rags indistinguishable from a pale blue robe in the darkness.
Zara gets quietly to her feet, rubs at her neck, which is sore and aching where he choked her. She walks up behind him, her muscles tense, heart racing. But she can’t shake the knowledge that it’s Tariq, even if he’s different.
“I am sorry,” he whispers after a moment. “I just wanted to be home again. To see my children. They were very small when I was taken.”
Her Tariq arrived in the cave as a child and never had children, and Zara does not know what to say to this other man’s grief. What to do with further evidence that he is not the same. At last, she sighs and leaves him there.
Besides, there are things to do. She busies herself with the fire, then fills the cooking pot with water and places it on the rickety tripod. She pulls up a few stunted tubers and breaks them into chunks, then drops them in the bubbling water with two strips of dried perch and the last of the gulls’ eggs—she can venture out onto the cliff and get more tomorrow, after he is gone.
Tariq joins her by the fire when the stew is finished. She pours some into a bowl and hands it to him.
“Thank you,” he says.
He sounds so humble that she feels herself thaw. She is about to say “you’re welcome” when she spots a hexagonal shadow on the floor behind him. It is the mirror shard he left when he arrived, and its surface is as dark as the space between the stars.
And just like that she is a child again, broken and bewildered.
Rock walls. A dirt floor. The ocean, hollow and deep as it echoed through the cave.
Zara had been in this place for only ten days, but already she had trouble remembering where she came from, how she got here. The man who called himself Tariq was no help. He smiled and shook his head when she asked about her mother, her father, her sister—the crumbling white walls and sunlit waves that meant home.
The waters below the cave never glittered. The sun sank into them at night with a baleful orange glare that vanished as soon as it hit the horizon, and even at midday the ocean was a dark blue-grey that admitted no joy.
That night, as on each of the past nine nights, Zara cried herself to sleep while Tariq sat, head bowed, and faced the wall so she would not have to suffer him seeing her tears.
For the first night since she had arrived, she dreamt. She was at home, standing on the roof of their house with Maryam, her sister. Overjoyed, she reached out to Maryam, but then the dream changed. Maryam changed, first her arm and then her body unravelling into a dozen reaching, writhing tentacles that grasped her and would not let go.
Beyond the thing-that-was-Maryam a wound appeared—Zara knew no better word for it, this slash through the sky, lit up inside with blue-and-yellow clouds of smoke. A wind whipped sand up around them both, pushing Zara towards it as she screamed and pulled away. They were almost inside the portal when Tariq appeared on the street below.
He was younger, this Tariq, his hair black instead of salty-grey, his stride long and sweeping, and he carried at his side a scimitar that glimmered like the mirrors at the cave mouth. But for all his differences, Zara knew him. He wore the same blue robes—and even had he not, there was something about the way he carried himself. About the calm that rested in his eyes.
“Tariq,” she shouted. “Help me!”
Tariq drew his mirror-sword and sliced it through the air before him, up and down and side to side in an intricate pattern. The fake Maryam screamed, shriveling to a dry, vine-thin tangle of stalks which crumbled away to dust when Zara brushed against it. In the sky, the wound scabbed over and faded. Then the dream, too, faded, and she slept and knew she slept.
She woke in the morning to the glint of reflected light. Her head rested on Tariq’s lap, her thick black hair sticky with sweat. Embarrassed, she sat up and shuffled away from him.
Tariq stirred as she did so. “You had a fever,” he said.
“I had a dream,” she said, almost at the same time.
He nodded. “You called out for me.”
“Yes.” She saw no purpose in denying it. “Thank you.”
He smiled, then, and pulled something from his pocket. “This is for you.”
It was a tiny mirror, tied to a thin blue cord the color of his robe.
“It is yours,” Tariq told her.
Zara shook her head. “I’ve never seen it.”
“It is how you arrived in this place. It is yours, Zara.”
Zara started, for she had never given him her name, had spoken nothing but questions until the dream.
Tariq pressed it into her hands. “One day you will understand. You will act as you need to. I have seen it in the mirrors, and the mirrors never lie.”
After they have eaten, the man who is not Tariq tells Zara his tale.
How in his twenties he was transported to a cave where an old woman beat and cursed him and forced him to live as her servant. Every day he would climb down to the ocean to catch fish, scale the cliffs to steal eggs from the gulls that nested there. After, she would loop rope around his neck and tie it to the limestone slab by the cave mouth and leave him there in the sun and the rain and the cold.
He spent years that way, he tells Zara, until he forgot where he had come from, what he had been. Until he forgot his name, almost. He began to believe he really was the animal the woman called him. When she died, he stayed roped to the slab for longer than he cared to admit.
Zara cannot help but compare this Tariq’s story to the way the man she knew spoke about his own arrival in the cave. How an old man who guarded the grave taught Tariq everything he knew and shared the work of finding food and cooking it despite his older years. Tariq had come to see the man as a father, and when he died had mourned him for a year.
This other Tariq left the old woman’s corpse in the cave and clambered, limbs shaking, up the cliff face until he reached the ground above. But he found no succor there, nor solace; only a limitless expanse of sand and shrubs. In the distance, ruined spires cut a jagged profile through the sky. At last, he went back to the cave and never left it. He fed on fish and eggs and lichen, and whatever water he could lick from the cave’s back wall.
Last night, he dreamed vividly of a seaside village and a woman he loved. In which he saw his children. He had been reaching out for one of them when he woke to the sounds of Zara’s morning ritual. He knows nothing of the grave, never saw the flowers or the names or the book.
Zara fetches him water and boils him some tea, then tells him of the cave and its mirrors—the infinite glittering worlds that they contain.
“You have one yourself,” she says, pressing the shard he brought with him into his hands. “It is your gateway. It leads to your home.”
“To… home,” he whispers. He looks down. “Why is it dark?”
“You do not need to see it,” she tells him with a swallow, “to know that it is beautiful and vibrant. To know that it is full to bursting with sunlight and laughter and your children’s voices.”
She says nothing of the book or the grave, of his name there and what it means. Instead, she guides him to the cot and lays him upon it and stays there with her hand over his until he falls into a fitful sleep. Then, blinking back tears, she pulls the book down off its shelf and makes the ink and writes his name in the blank space where she should have marked it on the day it first appeared, all those years before.
When she awakes the next morning, he is dead. The faintest smile rests on his lips, and his hand is clutched tight about the mirror shard.
Zara has lost him again, but this time it is different. This time, she is at peace.
She wraps him in the bed sheet and pushes him into the waters, watches the choppy waves long after he has sunk below their surface. And then it is time to boil herself water for tea and porridge, to pull the day’s flower from the dirt and write the day’s name in the book.
Afterwards, she flips back to the page where Tariq’s is written. The lettering is harsh with grief from when she wrote it, but Zara smiles, now, and brushes it with her thumb. She imagines him playing with grandchildren, laughing at something his wife has whispered in his ear.
And even when all memories of him are gone and she is long forgotten, well…
Even then, his name will live on.
She wrote it in the book herself.
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Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction, poetry, and interactive fiction. His most recent game is the Nebula-nominated The Bread Must Rise, a novel-length comedic fantasy from Choice of Games written with James Beamon. Stewart’s stories and poems have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed, Nature and other places. Born in England, Stewart has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and Los Angeles, and now lives with his family within the traditional homelands of the Luckiamute Band of Kalapuya in Oregon—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet. |