The Cartographer's Addendum
The Tenth of Thaw
I have accepted the position. The Admiralty thinks me qualified to chart the Drifting Isles, which tells you everything you need to know about how desperately they want someone fool enough to attempt it. Three cartographers before me have tried. One returned with blank pages. One returned with pages that changed when no one was looking. The third did not return at all, though his boat was found intact, drifting in circles precisely where no island should be.
The work pays well. More importantly, it pays in advance.
The isles drift, they tell me, on no predictable current. They appear for a season or a day or an hour, then slip back beneath the waves or into whatever place unmade things go. Sailors have learned to navigate around where they might be, which is to say, they avoid a third of the accessible ocean.
I am to make them knowable. Pinned. Fixed.
The Admiralty does not understand that a map is a sort of prophecy. It tells the world what shape it is meant to hold.
The Second of Greening
First sighting this morning, three leagues off the northern current. The island was there and then it wasn't—I am being imprecise. It was there, and then the light changed, and then it was there again, but slightly to the left. By the time I had the transit aligned, it had drifted a quarter mile south.
I have named it, privately, Inconstant. The Admiralty's naming conventions require numerical designations, but the Admiralty is not here, and I am.
The island is small. Crescent-shaped. A single hill crowned with seven trees that might be pine or might be something that merely remembers pine. The shore is white sand that looks, from this distance, like bone meal.
I have made three sketches. They do not agree with each other.
The Seventeenth of Greening
I have developed a technique. If I draw the island where it is going to be rather than where it is, the map remains accurate for nearly six hours. This should be impossible. I do not know how I know where it is going to be.
My hand knows. My hand has started knowing things before I do.
Inconstant has been joined by two others. The second I have called Threshold, because it appears only at dawn and dusk, liminal itself, uncertain whether it prefers existence. The third is Acre, small and square and distressingly persistent, as if it has decided to try very hard at being an island and is not entirely succeeding.
I have sent the first charts back to the Admiralty with the supply boat. Captain Vess looked at them for a long time, then looked at me, then folded them carefully and put them in an oilskin packet without comment.
"Mind yourself," she said, which was more than I expected.
The Fifth of Brightsun
The maps are breeding.
I do not mean this metaphorically. I filed the completed chart of Threshold in the cabinet last night. This morning there were two charts. The second shows Threshold as it will be in autumn—smaller, rockier, with a natural harbor on the eastern shore that does not currently exist.
I burned the second map. By evening, it had reappeared in the ashes, unharmed, smelling of salt.
I have begun to suspect that the third cartographer did not disappear. I suspect he was simply filed incorrectly.
The Twenty-First of Brightsun
Seven islands now, drifting in a loose constellation. I have charted them all. More precisely, I have charted the spaces between them, the geometries they form, the way they pull at each other like bodies with small, insistent gravities.
There is a pattern. I can almost see it. If I could step back far enough—if I could see all of them at once, not sequentially but simultaneously—
The Admiralty's latest letter requests clarity on nomenclature. They do not recognize my names. They want the islands numbered, categorized, made sensible.
I have not replied. I am not certain they would receive it. The supply boat has not come in three weeks. When I look toward the mainland, the horizon is always slightly further away than it should be.
The Ninth of Reaping
I have made a mistake.
Three days ago, I drew an island that did not exist. I was tired, I think, or perhaps I was remembering something—a cove I visited as a child, the shape of safety. The kind of place you would beach a boat and sleep without fear.
This morning, it was there.
Small and crescent-shaped, of course, because that is how I drew it. A cove on the western shore deep enough for anchorage. Seven trees on the hill, but these are definitely pine, because I labeled them as such.
I have named it Irresponsible. The island does not seem to mind.
The Thirtieth of Reaping
I am trying to be more careful.
The problem is this: I cannot chart an island without imagining it completely. The shape of the shore requires me to infer the slope of the beach. The slope of the beach implies a certain geology. The geology suggests what might grow there. By the time I have finished the map, I have thought the island into such specific existence that it has no choice but to arrive.
Or perhaps it was always going to arrive, and I am simply remembering forward.
I have stopped sending charts to the Admiralty. The supply boat came last week, but Captain Vess did not ask for them. She looked at me for a long time, then at the islands scattered across the water like a thought half-spoken.
"You all right?" she asked.
I told her I was fine, which was true in the only way that matters. I am doing what I came to do. That the work is changing me is merely professional development.
She left two extra crates of provisions. I think she does not expect to return before winter.
The Fifteenth of Harvest
There are twenty-three islands now. I know this because I have charted them, and also because I can feel them, the way you feel a headache coming on or the hour before a storm. They are becoming a place. Not individual islands but an archipelago, something with structure and intention.
I have begun charting the negative spaces—the water between. These maps are the most accurate of all. I draw the channels and they remain exactly where I put them. The islands drift to accommodate them, sliding into position like puzzle pieces remembering their box.
The ocean itself is taking notes.
The Fourth of Falling
I went ashore today. Threshold, because it is the least insistent of them, the one most willing to be forgotten.
The sand is bone meal. I was right about that. Whether it was bone meal before I drew it that way, I cannot say.
The trees are not pine. They are something older, something that pine is a childhood memory of. They have no needles, but they have the idea of needles—narrow leaves that whisper the way needles should, producing the correct susurrus without quite committing to the form.
I stood under them for an hour. They did not mind. The island itself was politely neutral, the way a stage is neutral before the play begins, waiting to see what sort of story it will be asked to hold.
When I returned to the boat, the island had drifted a quarter mile east. Not away from me. Toward where I was going next.
The Twenty-Second of Falling
The maps are converging.
I have seventy-three charts now, filed in careful chronological order. But when I lay them out, they are not a history. They are a composite. Each one shows a different version of the same place, like looking at a face from different angles, different lights.
If I could overlay them all. If I could see through them to what they are collectively describing—
I have begun using thinner paper.
The Seventh of Deepcold
No supply boat this month. The sea is calm. The weather is fine. There is no reason for Captain Vess not to come, except perhaps that she has finally understood what I am doing here.
It does not matter. I have provisions enough. More importantly, I have work.
Thirty-eight islands now, and they have formed something almost like a sentence. A statement in geography. I am close to understanding what they are trying to say.
Or what I am trying to say through them.
The distinction has become academic.
The Nineteenth of Deepcold
I have made the master chart.
Seventy layers of paper, each one thin as a promise, each one showing a different version of the archipelago. When you hold them to the light, they resolve into a single image. Not a map of islands but a map of an island. Singular. Whole.
It is the size of a small country. It has forests and hills and seven rivers that flow from a lake shaped like a palm, fingers spread. There are ruins on the eastern shore—I did not draw ruins, but they are there anyway, because of course there are ruins, something this old would have them.
The island has a name. I did not write it on any of the charts, but I know it anyway. It told me, the way the land tells you things if you are paying attention. The Remembered Place.
It remembers being whole. The Drifting Isles are fragments of it, pieces that could not forget themselves entirely. They have been trying to gather, to reconvene, waiting for someone to show them how they fit together.
I have shown them.
The Second of Thaw (Again)
The island is nearly complete.
The fragments have been drawing together all week, drifting into the positions I charted for them. Where they touch, the boundaries dissolve. Threshold and Acre merged last night, becoming something larger than their sum. The channel between them filled with sand that was always meant to be there, that had simply been waiting for permission to exist.
I have gone ashore. I am writing this from the hill with the seven trees, which are now seventeen trees, which will be a forest by spring.
From here, I can see the pattern clearly. The island is not remembering itself. It is being remembered. By me, yes, but also by the ocean, which has held its shape in absence all this time. By the wind, which has blown across its hills even when the hills were not there. By the very idea of land, which insists on existing even when existence is inconvenient.
A map is a kind of faith. You draw a thing and say: here. This is real. This is worth returning to.
I have drawn the Remembered Place so many times now that it has no choice but to believe me.
The Fifteenth of Thaw
The supply boat came today. Not Captain Vess—a younger woman, someone I do not know. She stood on the deck and stared at the island for a long time.
"This wasn't here before," she said finally.
I told her it had always been here. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has spent too long alone at sea.
She had letters from the Admiralty. Seven of them, progressively more urgent. They want their cartographer back. They want an explanation for the reports they have received—sailors finding islands where the charts say there is open water, coastlines that match my drawings exactly, harbors that appear precisely at dawn and dusk.
They want to know if I have gone mad, or if the world has.
I have written a reply. A single sentence: The maps were always accurate. The world was simply running behind.
I do not think they will understand. The Admiralty deals in what is, not what is trying to be.
The Eighth of Greening (The Following Year)
I am staying.
This should be obvious. A cartographer's job is to know a place completely, and I am not finished knowing this one. The Remembered Place is still remembering itself—new hills are rising in the interior, new streams cutting paths to the sea. I chart them as they arrive, or perhaps they arrive because I chart them. The distinction has stopped mattering.
The island has made me a small house on the northern shore. I say the island has made it, but perhaps I drew it without noticing. It is exactly the sort of house I would have wanted, which is suspicious.
Captain Vess came last week with the final letter from the Admiralty. My contract is terminated. I am recalled to explain myself before the Surveyor General.
"You going?" Vess asked.
I told her I could not leave. Someone needs to maintain the charts. The island is stable now, but stability requires attention. If I stop believing in it, even for a moment—
She nodded slowly. "Thought you'd say that."
She left me six months of provisions and a case of very fine ink. On her way back to the boat, she stopped and looked at the forest, the hills, the harbor that fills and empties with the tide.
"It's a good place," she said. "You did good work."
I have done something. Whether it is good remains to be seen. I have made a place that did not exist, or I have remembered a place that had forgotten itself, or I have simply been honest about what was always going to happen.
The maps know. They are filed in the house now, all seventy-three of them, plus the three hundred I have made since. They agree with each other perfectly. They agree with the land.
Sometimes, at night, I hear them whispering to each other, comparing notes, making small corrections. The rustling of paper like wind through almost-pine.
The island is charting itself now. I am just taking dictation.
This is what I came to do. Make the world knowable.
I have made it more than that. I have made it known.
—From the papers of Surveyor Elias Marrow, recovered from the northern island of the Remembered Archipelago, charted year 1247 of the Common Record. The archipelago appears on no maps prior to this date. It appears on all maps after.