Anthea and Cyrus were on a boat. They’d been on lots of boats lately, and Anthea never quite got used to the lurching feeling beneath her feet, even if she was enthralled by the smells and sounds and sights. Everything on a boat was foreign to the land; foreign to the desert creature she’d aways been.
Not only were Anthea and Cyrus on a boat, but they were working on a boat. She was wearing thick rubber boots, standing on the deck of a ship, enjoying the early summer sun on her bare shoulders, and she was washing clams.
Somehow, Cyrus had gotten them onto this research vessel as it hopped along the North Sea coast, starting somewhere near Amsterdam and ending months later in the Baltic Sea, somewhere in Poland, stopping at set locations along the Danish, German, and Swedish coasts along the way.
The biologists were studying something to do with microplastics, and they were taking measurements by extracting data from the muck along the intertidal zones. Translation: Anthea and Cyrus were washing clams.
It had taken them months to even get this far north from Calais, stopping constantly to backtrack, hike, do odd jobs, or visit some place Cyrus just had to show Anthea.
To her delight, most of their excursions had been food-related. So far, Brittany was her favorite overall for culinary delights, but Cyrus had been making big promises about autumn in the Black Forest, winter in the eastern Mediterranean, and spring the Caucasus mountains.
In the mean time, he was busy pulling every grift imaginable, most involving fortune-telling. Cyrus seemed to come even more alive on European soil, and he was always unearthing some new way of casting about in the unknown. She learned that he spoke fluent French and Czech, in addition to English, and could move seamlessly between any number of cultural traditions, from the mundane to the arcane.
He acquired what looked like an ancient tarot deck from somewhere in Brittany, claiming that it was among the first ever used for divination. Anthea, naturally, had her doubts, but his clients certainly never did.
She wasn’t sure what their long term plan was, but this uncertainty was nothing new for her. She’d spent her life surviving each moment, planning only as far ahead as her next escape. Buying a house in LA had been a huge risk; and an admission that she’d either finally found somewhere safe to settle down, or that she was too tired to keep running.
And then a year ago, God, had it already been a year?, everything had crumbled when her mother reappeared and forced her and Cyrus to flee. She’d spent the first few months in constant anxiety, but in truth she had now started to enjoy their strange life.
Bureaucracy, after they recovered from their episode in Tucson, checked in with the fugitives now and again and provided a welcome consistency in Anthea’s new, strange life.
Bea had taken care of everything. They had sold off her house and her belongings in a shockingly lucrative estate auction by hinting that the home had belonged to an eccentric artist, famous for her reclusive habits. Bea had been beside themselves with glee when they told Cyrus and Anthea this, and Anthea had needed to sit down when she was informed of the balance in her newly-acquired Swiss account. Bea had even smoothed over Anthea’s abrupt departure from her job. They’d truly thought of everything.
And so she had money, she had papers, she had a nearly omniscient friend-army to conveniently ‘forget’ to check her paperwork or to ‘accidentally’ omit her from border-crossing logs or tax records and other pesky paper trails someone could use to track her.
For the first time in her life, thanks to Cyrus’s cleverness and Bea’s compassion, Anthea had gotten what she had wanted her entire life.
She was invisible.
She was safe.
She was free.
She was up to her knees and elbows in silty mud, and was delighted by it.
At night on the boat, Cyrus and Anthea shared a cozy bunk. It was very simple; just two thin bunk beds and a small writing desk, stool, and cupboard. Cyrus banged his head or shin on something just about every day, all the while complaining that maybe the knack was making him taller as well as older. Anthea laughed and insisted he concentrate and continue training her in small earth magics and mundane trickery.
Sea captains were among the most suspicious people on the planet, he had explained, next to baseball pitchers, and he’d spent years of his life pulling grifts on them. He’d meet someone at a bar, accidentally of course, casually drop an observation about something benign that portended a change in the weather. He was right often enough that people noticed and began to casually ask him for more in-depth predictions.
One night, Anthea’s insistence on the truth had finally won out. He’d guiltily produced a top-notch smart phone and shown her the weather apps he’d downloaded. It turned out that not only were sea captains a suspicious group, most of them were also luddites.
She’d laughed herself hoarse.
Tonight, after washing off the smell of clams and seaweed, she’d asked him some more difficult-to-answer question.
“You said you’d spent years doing this. But, how could you predict the weather before smart phones?”
“Ah,” he scratched his nose and crossed one long leg causally over the other at the writing desk, “I’d hoped you wouldn’t think about that, but as always, your curiosity is cleverer than my trickery.”
“Flattery!” she laughed, “You must really not want me to know!”
“No no, it isn’t that. It’s just… complicated. Do you remember when I first explained about the knack, and how I’d learned a little bit from someone else who was like me?”
“Yes,” she said automatically, “You said that he had recognized you. I have questions about that, too. How do people know that they can carry the flame? How can I recognize it in others like that? How-”
Anthea stopped herself abruptly as her question-spiral began to compound.
“Sorry. Yes, I remember him. Please continue,” she said, reeling herself back in.
A small, comfortable moment passed in their quiet cabin on the sea.
“You have learned so much, so fast, about everything,” Cyrus smiled, “You are one of the most valuable friends I have ever had. This man is also one of my most valuable friends, and he is the one we’ve been slowly aiming towards in our travels. I suspect that you already worked that out. But I haven’t told you his full story. Or, at least, what I know of it.”
Anthea’s whole awareness centered on the pleasure of new information, just as she’d learned, as she settled in against the thin pillows of her bunk.
And so, Cyrus told her a story about the man he’d met in France during the wars.
“As far as I can tell, Nikodemus figured out the key to immortality a few hundred years before I did. He called it ‘the knack’ and on the rare occasions that he found a need to explain it, he said simply, “You either have the knack or you don’t”.
He’d been a mathematician in his early life, which at that time necessarily meant that he also had a healthy interest in astronomy and astrology. He began to understand how to use math to predict the movement of heavenly objects, and kept detailed records of his own observations. He trained with men who’s names would be passed down through history, although his never was. In an effort to expand his understanding, he became a more than competent historian, traveling round through the libraries of the manor houses of his home country to pore over the house ledgers of the fastidious butlers of the world.
He used these records to begin making meteorological predictions, which had serious implications for the agriculture based economies of his homeland. Every quarter, he sent a periodical back to his home town outlining his predictions for the coming season. These periodicals hung on the notice board outside the church and everyone read and believed them. He had risen up from an anonymous family of modest means and the folks back home were immensely proud that they’d had a hand in growing up such a brilliant young man with such a sensible outlook.
Gradually, Nik expanded his almanac to include more regions outside his county and continued to send out his periodicals to the places he’d visited for historical research. This endeared him to the local folk in those regions, and even the most weather-weary farmer began to look forward to Nik’s seasonal despatch to save time and toil for himself, his family, and his animals.
Soon it seemed that everyone in the country knew of ‘our young man Nik and his farmer’s almanac’. Most of his predictions were true, and he always included the last few years’ figures to remind folks of their failures and successes.
“This latest spring has been especially wet in this part of the country, so look forward to a dry summer. The last three years when spring was this wet, the early crops rotted and the late crops baked. Plant your water-needy crops after Easter and harvest before midsummer. Patience will not help the rains come, it will only cook your food on the vine. Allow a hard field to lie fallow one more season. Drain the wettest fields but save one for midsummer. Set by plenty of wheat and flax for your animals. The autumn will likely be long and gentle…” and so on.
But as his publications grew in scope and popularity, Nik too began to change. Or, rather, he did not change. Not in the ways that everyone else did. He noticed that his face was not acquiring the lines between his eyebrows that his peers had. His hair had not changed colors. He was not slowing down, acquiring ailments, or becoming ill. Quite the opposite, in fact. His body felt as youthful as ever, and his mind seemed to have limitless energy to tackle new ideas. Some mornings he would wake up before the sun, mind and body tingling and crackling with so much energized potential that he simply couldn’t stay asleep.
Nik can be a very… self-confident person, and so at first he thought that his youthful vigor was perhaps the result of his good diets or other habits. But he soon began to grow more curious. He was a man of science, and so he began to write record even more about his daily life; not just the weather and his publication notes, but the meals and exercises he had taken, looking for a pattern.
He was especially interested in these sudden ‘invigoration incidents’, as he called them, and finally, after several years of this, he came to an astonishing conclusion. The days that he was awoken by sizzling bursts of vitality coincided precisely with the days that his almanacs would have been posted in the town squares of the country, usually within a week of sending them out. This explained the majority of the bursts, but there were still a number of outlying events that did not coincide with publication schedules. Still, it was a start.
To test this idea, Nik travelled back to his home town quietly one Saturday evening, timing his arrival to occur the night before the posting of his predictions. He stayed at the inn in the village square, opposite the notice board and the large stone church. The next morning, his almanac sheet was nailed quietly to the board around sunrise. The bells began their summons and he watched, fascinated, as the parishioners began to arrive for Sunday mass. Several of the men stopped to read the board for a moment, quietly harassed by their pious wives and moving away quickly.
The back of Nik’s neck started to tingle. When mass ended, the entire town stopped to linger and and chat by the board, and Nik felt the power of their belief in every part of him.
“That’s our Nik,” they were saying to each other, educating out-of-town cousins and travelers, “Predictable as a sunrise and just as brilliant. If he says wait to plant, then we wait to plant." He felt as though he could run across water, that he could jump high enough to touch a cloud, that he could pull an entire carriage on his own.
The change was astonishing, nearly overwhelming.
He tested his ideas various other ways, but eventually he put together a rough theory: first, that human patterns of thought could be converted into energy; second, that directed and extended belief was a type of energy; and finally, that he had a knack for gathering that energy. Over time, this energy prolonged his life and health, but was not without a significant amount of work. “Energy,” he reasoned, “can neither be created, nor destroyed. I spend an allotment of energy in the pursuit of my predictions, and it is returned to me in near-equal measure, but by each individual that consumes it.” And so, armed with this understanding of the nature of things, Nik began the never-ending work of being immortal.
Anthea sat silently, digesting this incredible story.
“Energy exchange,” she said finally, “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
Cyrus waited for her to continue.
“But… he said ‘near-equal’ measure. But that can’t be. You must be taking in much more than you give, or else it wouldn’t keep you alive, right?” she looked worried.
“That’s right, and this is what Bea was teasing me about all those months ago,” Cyrus said seriously, “I do not know what, if any, long term effects the knack has on others. I have three main theories. The first is simple exchange; are people losing bits of their own lifespans by believing me? I don’t truly believe so, but I don’t know how to be sure. But until I can find out, this is why I’m careful to spread my tricks across a wide array of people. The second is something that Nik might have figured out by now with his incisive mind; do those with the knack have some innate ability to amplify the energy they receive? I have no idea how to test that theory, but I hope to ask him when we finally see him. Finally, and this is what I suspect and hope is true; is there some inherent quality about belief that makes it more powerful than other kinds of psychic energy?”
“Why would there be?” Anthea said.
“I’m not sure, but perhaps that it is freely given, often at great risk. Or that it comes from a more intimate place than simple ‘knowing’. If you think about it, we don’t actually know that most of the things we believe in even exist: electricity, gravity, buoyancy, black holes, the outer planets, North Dakota. Belief requires faith, much more than simple knowing.”
“I think there’s a huge overlap there, but I understand what you mean,” Anthea mused, “At the camp, knowing and believing were treated as the same thing. Understanding, learning, questioning; all these were discouraged. Even the idea of ‘faith’ was a little suspicious, because it implied believing in things because you couldn’t know them. We all believed what Message said because we knew it was true. As simple as that.”
She stopped and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before continuing.
“If Message was also exploiting the knack, he didn’t have any of the same hesitation that you do,” she realized.
“No,” Cyrus agreed, “In my limited experience, most don’t care at all about the damage they do once they realize what power they have. It seems to really depend on their demons. Yours and mine exist for their own amusement and seem content to leave it at that. Never taking too much, and easy to communicate with or even direct. But there are some demons that exist only to consume. Anger. Fear. Love.”
“Love?”
“Certain kinds of it, yes,” Cyrus said sadly.
They were both quiet for a long time. The waves of the North Sea gently rocked the boat beneath them, while the engines hummed a comforting rhythm. The lights of Norwegian oil platforms shone out across the waves from miles away like fireflies bouncing on the water.
“Cyrus,” Anthea said slowly, “what is Nik’s demon?”