Destinations Unknown
A story of maps and mysteries
The cartographer’s apprentice sat in the ship’s bow and watched a thin lip of land darken the horizon.
“What do you think we’ll find?” he asked his master.
“I have heard tales of birds all colors,” his master said. “Birds that possess colors we have not yet seen and cannot yet imagine. Birds that change color with every beat of their wing, and others that are no color at all, and which can only be seen after a meal when the contents of their guts are quite visible through their transparent skin. I have heard that their song can enchant a man so completely that he forgets to eat and will spend his last days, eyes blazing with glory until he collapses to the ground, and the flock that entertained him feeds upon his guts.”
But when they made landfall, it was only the usual gulls that the cartographer’s apprentice saw, and little black birds that chirped and squawked in a way he could not distinguish from any other bird at all.
#
They rode on carts across the plains. The cartographer made notes and sketches in his journal. His apprentice observed, and fetched fresh ink and pens.
“Are those mountains on the horizon?” he asked his master.
“I have read stories,” the cartographer said, “of great creatures made of stone who slumber with the earth pulled up to their chins like a blanket, their craggy faces, jutting from the earth. When they stir, the snow that accumulates on their bald pates tumbles down and can sweep men and beasts alike into their open jaws. Many loses their lives that way, but those who clamber free come back with diamonds the size of man’s fist, and live rich as kings.”
But when their carts arrived among the foothills, the cartographer’s apprentice found he was surrounded by only the same familiar rocks and escarpments that had marked his own childhood. He found nothing new, and his lust for wonder went unsated.
#
As they stood at the apex of the mountain pass, the cartographer and his apprentice looked down on a valley dotted by cities, their spires glinting in the sun.
“I wonder what the people will be like,” the cartographer’s assistant said.
“I once visited a village,” the cartographer told him, “where they said a merchant from these lands had visited. They said he was as tall and thin as a willow tree with hair of the purest white and eyes of a muted yellow. They said he spoke with a voice like the chittering of beasts, and when he sang, rodents came to mill around his feet, and he ate the fattest one.”
The cartographer’s apprentice thought about this. “It’s not going to be like that, though, is it?” he said. “They’ll just be people like you and I.”
“Perhaps,” said the cartographer. “I have heard many stories, and very few of them have proven to be true. But I wonder if sometimes they were true in the moment before I arrived. If they were true before I trapped the place of them on my maps.”
“That doesn’t seem very likely,” said the cartographer’s apprentice.
#
As they descended the mountain, the cartographer took a nasty fall and landed badly and broke his leg. His apprentice helped him back to their wagon, but the next day an infection had set in, and nothing the caravan’s chirurgeon could do would stop it.
“Do not worry for me,” the cartographer told his apprentice as he lay in his cot, sweating and pale-faced, “for I am about to go on the most grand expedition of all, and chart shores that no-one has yet reported on.”
“Death is no adventure,” his apprentice protested. “It is an end.”
“Priests,” the cartographer said, “have told me the most wonderful stories of the place I am to go. They speak of oceans of honey and tell me that the buzzing of the bees who created those amber tides sounds like the most transcendent music. They speak of a sunrise so brilliant that no shadows can exist, and of the world being reduced to a single flat plane, everything upon it revealed, and movement to any place I can imagine suddenly possible. They speak of great rivers that roar as loud as lions, and lions that bleat as softly as lambs. They tell me a million contradictory stories, and I cannot help but believe that all of them are true.”
That was the last they spoke to each other, though, for in the morning, the cartographer was dead.
#
The caravan made its way into the nearest town. And there was nothing truly to differentiate it from a hundred other towns the cartographer’s apprentice had been to. The wares in the marketplace were much the same as any others he had seen.
That night, he took out the map the cartographer had been making, and the pens, and the pots of ink, and he prepared to set the town upon it, and fix it firm and true, and just the way it was so that no story could render it false. But as his nib first brushed the page, he felt a great sorrow whelming up in him that if he did this thing, he would be robbing the world of wonder and erasing all the mystery that lived here. And he found that he wanted to believe that while everything he had seen in that town had been familiar that still perhaps a miracle lurked out of sight around a corner. That if only he had closed his eyes, a million wonders would have played out before him, even though he would not have witnessed a single one.
And so, for the love of the cartographer, he burned the map, and broke the pens, and spilled the ink, and walked away from the caravan. And in the morning, they did not know where he had gone. But they told each other stories, and they wondered.