Limekiller!

“But, yes, but Your Grace: it has no precedent.”

“Neither had the Resurrection.”

The small Black priest clearly felt he was not winning, but he tried once more. “Ah, but Your Grace — Have you no fear of the discipline of the Church?”

The archbishop looked at him, and stroked his white, white beard. “My dear boy — Forgive me. My dear Father. When one is eighty years old and a retired archbishop in a Church which never had an Inquisition and which has no pope, one may answer your question very easily: No.”

He gave the same answer to the next question, which was Jack Limekiller’s. “Do you think, Archbishop, that he. that it. that the person we’re talking about. may be heading for St. Saviour’s Caye?”

“Certainly his destination of desire is the Holy Saviour, but not, I think, that Caye. No.”

The night breeze blew through the windows of the small house, which, blessedly, were screened. The Bayfolk commonly had the habit of turning up their gasoline lamps to full power, thus producing a great amount of both light and heat, and then closing the solid wooden shutters of their un-screened windows in order to keep out the “flies” which the light attracted; as for the heat of the lamps, well, that made the nights no hotter than the days. Screens cost monev, true: and when they had the money to buy the screens, they didn’t. They had other things on their priority lists. The room was simply furnished, and, which pleased Jack also, nothing in it was made of plastic.

“Where, then, do you think he’s bound for?”

The saintly old man said, softly. “Where would a dead man be bound for, in these waters? Whv, sir, for Dead Man’s Cave.”

Jack broke the silence, and it seemed his own silence, it seemed the others were satisfied enough by that answer. “But. Archbishop. isn’t Dead Man’s Cave a myth?” They shook their heads at this, all three. “It’s not? I always thought. ” To be sure, he had given no systematic thought at all for it. He had heard the words, had thought them figurative. Did a drunken fisherman insist on setting off a state of drunkenness, be sure someone would say, perhaps with a sigh, perhaps with a scorn, “Mon, he gweyn no — place but Dead Mon C’ye!”

And, although he was aware enough that he had slipped out of the allegedly logical time-stream of the post-mid-twentieth century and into some odd and un-timebound area where other laws, at least, obtained, still… he clutched for some semblance of familiar things. He said, almost like a child who says, But you promised — He said: “But it’s not on the chart! And he spread his hand over the map as it lay spread out on the table.

The old archbishop nodded, faintly sighed. “No. You are correct. It is not on that chart. Not on that new chart. On old ones, yes. Dead Man’s Cave doesn’t break the surface any longer, even. It was smashed by the Great Storm — the hurricane, we would call it — of 1910. I well remember — but that is neither here nor there. No. The new chart, no. The old charts, now. ” He reached his parchmentv hand to the rack of scrolls, more and more reproducing the note of a time and place even more antique than the Caribbean. He might have been the last Librarian at Alexandria, taking up a map made by the hand of Claudius Ptolaemeius himself. Archbishop Le Beau spread it out so that it was roughly approximate to the new one. “Look here,” he said, pointing.

And yet his “here” was not where Limekiller’s eves at once settled. Without willing it or even witting it, his eyes at once went to the largest off-shore piece of land on the old map (and it was old): sure enough. Anne of Denmark Island. This, then, may well have been the map, the original map, the master printed map, that is, from which all other maps down to this most recent-printed one, had copied. And his eyes flitted from the outlines, familiar enough to him, of the once-solid island named for the once-solid queen of James I. flitted to the corners of the margins of the chart. He knew that he ought to be looking where the archbishop was pointing, and so he did look there — but not before he had looked elsewhere: several fingers of the old man’s other hand, holding the chart down to keep it from rolling back up, obscured some of the words Limekiller was looking for. But not all of them. Uncovered were the letters spelling, k, Lt., R.N. Very well, enough for now, some Lt. Black, or whatever, had made the old map, and had made it for the Royal Navy. Now -

Sure enough. A mere speckle of land. But it had its name. And its name was Dead Man’s Caye.

“It is there we shall be going, in the morning, my sons.”

Limekiller felt, anyway, some feeling of relief. “Might as well wait for daylight, I suppose,” he said.

The old man’s sunken eyes opened wider, looked at him. “It is not daylight that we are waiting for,” he said, “Night or day, it is all the same. We are waiting for His Excellency. For the Governor."