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The last burning lighthouse on Insulinde still has Argand lamps and a third-degree Fresnel lens. Sometimes it’s fuelled by kerosene, other times vegetable oil and whale fat. No city is close enough to run electricity to it, and it’s too close to a porch front for anyone to get the idea to start building one.
Nevertheless, it’s named Saint Mother in the sailor’s imagination. It watches over Dolores’ Breach, that terrible stretch of sea where the first explorers came to Insulinde. And so, the Saint Mother Lighthouse still stands, the first contact for hundreds of travellers, yet having nothing to offer but her light.
She watches an ending horizon. In either direction, she could look down the line of where the world stopped. It was a white wall of fog, sometimes, and sometimes, there was truly nothing at all.
The Lightman’s Brigade has a long and tortuous history that no one knows but them. Even they never know the whole story to one man. If someone was to find every log book in every lighthouse across the isola from the beginning of seafaring and read every one, I think they might find out why life is worth living. But for now, it’s in a thousand pieces, on every rocky coast.
Harry Du Bois had come to find one of those pieces. He had an aching heart. His heart bemoaned of old wounds it did not remember receiving and fresh ones it kept reopening. The first day he arrived at his post, he had taken an engagement ring from his pocket and thrown it into the sea. He had watched the opal sparkle in the air until it vanished.
His cohabiter and comrade-in-arms had been one Jean Vicquemare. Vicquemare came clutching a moleskin and enough ink to write world peace. Jean hoped to get ‘touched in the head,’ he had said. “All good poets go a little bit insane. I’m hoping this will do it,” he told Harry as they trimmed the wick for the first time.
The fog rolled in. It came like armies marching on a city, and they were at siege, holed up within this tower keep, driving off the darkness with flashes of light.
“The pale’s leeching in through the fog,” Harry said. He was hearing apricots on the wind. “I’ll put up the screen.”
“Give me a minute,” Jean said. He leaned across the balcony. The fog was wet on his face, and he closed his eyes. “It’s really something.”
“Do you think you’ll find poetry in nothingness?” Harry said.
“Poetry is something and the nothing you put in between it.”
They put up the screens, and apricots and poetry faded from their minds.
Rarely they saw ships. Low-flying aerostatics not built for flight crashed through the wall of noise that circled the horizon, splashing into the water like breaching whales. Lumbering bulks not meant to sail then had to fight currents with massive machinery. Jean and Harry watched them in the distance, flashing their lamp, and welcoming them to the world’s shore. Each was documented in the continuing record of the lightmen.
Exactly one month into their shared post, a pod of dolphins beached on the coast. The lightmen took axes down to the shore to take what they should. They found the animals had no eyes.
“The pale ate them?” Jean asked.
“I’d think so,” Harry replied.
They thought it best not to eat the meat, then, but they chopped up the bodies and threw them into the sea. They wrote the incident in their logbook.
On the opposite end of the isola, Kim Kitsuragi was walking on the beach, trying to get a glimpse of the ship he would spend the next six months on as it came to harbour in Martinaise. While walking, he found a ring washed up on shore, and he put it in his pocket.
He was an experienced sailor of Isulinde waters but had never sailed intersolisary, although he had dreamed of aerostatic engines since he was a young boy. This sea was not vast enough for him. He wanted to sail on the same waters that the rafts of civilization did.
He watched the ship come into harbour, and with his cloth bag hugged to his chest, he ascended the gangplank into the floating city.
Two months into the lightmen’s post, Harry woke up with the bunk below him empty. The sheets were cold, too. He went down to the beach, where he found Jean Vicquemare’s boots on the sand. He walked the stretch of sand until nightfall, but found nothing else.
That night, when the fog rolled in, Harry left the screen down until he could taste sonnets in the air.
Kim was looking at the sky, where the pinpricks of light became a blur. He wondered when there would not be glasses strong enough to show his weak eyes the stars anymore. He gripped the ship’s railing.
The post would not come for weeks. Still, Harry wrote his request for Jean’s replacement the next day and sealed the envelope for delivery. He only now began to wonder if he was cut out for this. He was logging the weather four times a day now, as if he meant to drown the note of Jean’s disappearance with ink.
Lighthouses are the next little celestial bodies. Lightmen all learn this at some point as they become a regular feature of the electromagnetic architecture. They do not become like clockwork, they become like seasons, consistent, rising, yet variable, yet unknowable. It is a shame that the lighthouse keepers have no way to sit down and tell stories with each other, or else, there would be a pantheon of Lightmen, for the sun, moon, and every star.
Harry wondered if he was getting touched in the head when the collapse started talking to him in his ex-fiancee’s voice. When before, it had been quiet at the edge of the world, it was beginning to get very, very loud.
The post eventually got his letter and took it to the nearest post office, where it was radioed to the Brigade point. A week later, Harry opened the door to the postman. Harry had stopped shaving since being alone. He was the picture of the sort of wild animals that would nest in these abandoned places.
The Brigade said it might be a few months before they were able to find a replacement.
“What’s the news?” Kim asked the sailors returning from shore.
“The radio tower says weather’s been getting bad near the point.”
“This ship can handle the pale. She can handle a storm,” Kim said. He still walked below deck and looked at the hull for a bit too long.
Harry faced the lashing rain with his eyes wide open. The water struck them often enough that he did not need to blink to stare into the porch collapse.
“You promised yourself to me,” the sea said.
“Did I?” Harry asked.
“You did. You have yet to give yourself up.”
“I don’t think I want to.”
“There is still a debt to be paid. If you do not pay it, I will take another in your place.”
Harry wondered if Jean had seen it that way.
The morning sky had been blazing red. Kitsuragi was on the deck of the ship when the storm was rolling in. Even keeping the storm at their bow, they encountered currents as he had never seen, and waves that were striking them like the hands of God.
“You’ve never been in pale-infested waters!” someone screamed over the winds to him. The water on his glasses meant he couldn’t see at all, so he tucked them in his pocket, hoping to navigate by shadows.
Harry ascended the lighthouse. In his mind, he wondered if it was for the last time. He tied a rope to one of the support beams, the other end to himself, and through the lashing rain, he fought wind and storm to light the lamps and keep them lit.
Saint Mother had never been so peaceful in the sailors’ eyes from their place on the tossed deck.
“I’m taking the ship,” the sea said.
“I’m a lightman. I keep the light burning. I will not leave my post,” Harry said.
“Then the world will collapse around you. I will break this thing you are trying to save and sweep all of these men into my gullet.”
There was a great shaking of the ship, and they almost halted.
“What was that?” Kitsuragi screamed.
“We hit a reef!”
There had not been a reef in Dolores’ Breach for a hundred years. But, from the bones of a dozen beached dolphins, a forest of calcium had sprouted under the surface. These witch’s fingers now clawed a hole into the hull of the aerostatic, like she was shucking a crab.
Kim had never wanted to go down with a ship. In his hubris, he had planned to live until seventy. He had even planned his retirement accounts around that magical number. Now, with no one to leave it to, that small savings by escheatment will go to the city of Revachol.
He watched the light through the rain as he dumped buckets of water back into the sea.
“No! No!” Harry said. The wind was tearing and ripping at the seams of his rain cloak. The rope that was tied around his waist was firm. The knots would not give. “If you want me, then come and take me!”
The sea stretched around his imagination. She was vast, infinite, and she was grabbing for everything she was owed as she kept falling back into the porch, thousands of gallons at a time. The storm was white noise, cracks of lightning, and the continuous roar of water. The rain descended like locusts to be eaten drop by drop.
He put one foot on the railing, then the other, and he stood up. He was one man on the edge. The wind only buffered him for a second, before he fell.
The rope held taut. Harry was weightless. He was suspended, dangling over the water. And behind him, the beam of light from the lighthouse, folding around his body, refracted through the mist that rose off the heat of his brow and crowned him with radiance.
For a moment, there was an Innocence enthroned. An aureola blazed around him.
And the sea swept a man off the deck. Tumbling through the waves, he thrashed to reach the surface but only succeeded in facing the current as it carried him towards the rocks. He breathed. He breathed water.
At the same moment, some force of Providence took a pair of scissors to the suspension of this demiurge. A comet fell.
Kim Kitsuragi split open his head on the shore of Dolores’ Breach. At the same moment, Harry Du Bois fell to his death, breaking his spine at the foot of the Saint Mother lighthouse, after six months of tending to it. They both died on impact.
When the storm cleared, the aerostatic radioed for assistance, as it was still rapidly taking on water, but it only reported one member missing from its crew. At the same time, a woman with a small parcel of items was arriving on horseback from the Brigade.
While searching through the flotsam washed up by the tides, she found two bodies on the shore. Both were dead. One’s head was pointing inland; the other was looking out to the sea. They were positioned on the sand so that, if they had been sleeping, they would have woken up looking at each other.
The one facing inland wore a ring with a single opal on it.
She found this odd and wrote it in her logbook.