“There was a maidel, a girl. Nu, a woman now,” Moishe said.
“Always a girl,” Utina said. “Or many.”
“No, I know it’s meshugeh but this one I have never forgotten, and my parents dead. I would search for her: Sarah. I’d bring water from the Fountain. We could both be young again. Or, nu, in a thousand years, this old will seem young. Ach, if I find her. If she still lives.”
“Cockstubble,” Jacome said. “They’re all dead. Or broken. All those we once knew. Or suckling grandchildren. Mad. They—”
I interrupted. “Does the Fountain bring back youth?”
“When I was a girl,” the shaman said. “My mother caught a shimmering thing. Wings like blue light through rainclouds. A butterfly. I held it on my finger and watched. Then I crushed it in my fist. I always remember.”
He smiled cryptically and said no more.
“When I was a girl”? Un shoyn! If my grandmother had beytsim! The shaman was a yenta.
Nu. So maybe she was a shyster only trying to escape, telling us some bubbameisse cockamamy story to buy herself more time. Extending her own mortality as long as she was able.
Or maybe she was an alter bok after all. An old goat.
Nu. Maybe the fountain was a giant hormone bath. A mikveh where you became soft. Azoy, looking closely, her skin was like paper, crumpled and recrumpled a thousand times. Soft and fissured with fractals.
But I wasn’t volunteering to fly into her gatkes on a reconnaissance mission.
Gevalt. But whatever was there, she had more to say than the three books that weren’t there, and was emes easier to understand than the two we had.
Besides, when you have nowhere to go, any direction is as good as another.
Chapter Nine
“Let the mutinous mamzers become the desiccated shlub-leather they deserve,” Moishe said. “Let them become fasheydikt bewildered with loss and loneliness. I maroon them as they would have marooned me on my own ship. As they would have marooned my blood from my body. I never forget. Only a fool remains a fool.”
And so we did not go back to the island for the rest of the crew. Instead, we turned our stern to the shore, and we raised sail toward the horizon. Utina nestled in the quarterdeck, navigating: watching the shape of waves, the scent of wind, the curl of cloud above us. They say that at any time, such spirit wayfarers can detect five different currents in the open water. And many more of ghosts. They draw islands out of the sea, tectonic Prosperos, reverse dowsers.
Utina imagined us a path beyond the horizon and soon we were beyond land, except as it appeared in the second sight of her internal compass.
Dawn. Immense veils of spray rose against our bulwarks and were caught by the wind and whirled away. Bars of purple cloud stretched before us and the green water frothed with delirium. The sky became mauve and scarlet in the east, kishka-coloured. Then west off the starboard bow appeared a vast mass, furlongs in length and breadth, the pale hue of a maideleh’s thighs. It floated on the water, its innumerable long arms radiating from its centre and curling and twisting like a nest of snakes, a monster of flying lokshen. It had no perceptible front: like Adonai, all was face or not-face. It seemed blind and without instinct, more island than living thing, but it undulated on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition. Then without warning, the water stilled and it disappeared.
“There,” Utina said, pointing with her gnarled alteh kokeh finger, which was a trick finger, not pointing forward, but askew like Adam looking sneakily Eve-ways when God in Eden came down to kvetch, post-apple.
Utina with her eye fixed on an indistinct place on the long coastline.
Soon enough, Ponce de Leon would call it La Florida and bring Christianity, cattle, horses, sheep, lemons, pistachios, discount stores, disease, the Spanish language. Death.
People would come here to die or not to die. Shalom. Who could tell?
But now, there were no boats in the ocean, nor sign of people on the rock-strewn beach as we dropped anchor. We climbed into a skiff and rowed to shore.
Utina divined a trail into the seamless jungle and we followed.
“We’re bilge-headed coffinwits. Soon they jump from the shadows and morcellate us for barbecue,” Jacome said.
“They could,” Utina said. “Or I could.” And pulled back her cloak to reveal a stubby musketoon. Jacome reached for his cutlass, but Moishe raised his hand.
“Shat. Hust.” Shh. Be calm.
“Why am I taking you to the Fountain?” Utina asked then smiled. “Ach, I can’t help myself.”
We continued to walk, Jacome glowering as we shlepped through the tangle of vines and leaves.
The sun boiling high above us, we finally came to a clearing. A thin river curled white over boulders then ran into an opening in a rocky mound.
Utina reached into deep green boughs of tree and pulled down a yellow fruit. She sat on a dry boulder, took a short knife from her cloak and began peeling it.
She speared a dripping segment on the bladepoint.