The Lightkeeper

If Durban Poison is your strain, this is your sign: the Lightkeeper. Noon at the top of the white tower, the sea bright beyond the glass, the great lens waiting for its rainbows, and you up on the step with a chamois in one hand and no time for shadows.

If Durban Poison is your strain

You are the one who is already up the stairs. While other people are still deciding whether the day has started, you have taken the hundred and twelve steps two at a time, opened every window in the lantern room and said good morning to the lens. You like the hour when the sun stands straight overhead and nothing throws a shadow. You like work you can see.

You move quickly, but you are never careless. You polish in small circles, prism by prism, and you talk while you do it, mostly to the glass. You notice things: the ship that is late, the wind going round to the east, the fingerprint somebody left on the brass rail last week. People climb up to the gallery to ask you about the weather and go back down with a better view of their own day.

At your best you are the brightest thing on the coast, and you make it look easy. You keep something old exactly as good as it was the day it was made, and you never once make a speech about it, although you will happily talk to it all morning. Ships come home on your light without knowing your name, and that has always seemed to you the right arrangement.

Your flaw is other people’s glasses. You cannot see a smudged lens without reaching for your cloth, and you have polished the spectacles of more visitors than you can count, usually while they were still wearing them. They mostly forgive you, because afterwards they can see. Shop windows count too, and so does the brass on other people’s doors.

What you need is a clear day, a clean chamois, a sea with a few ships on it, somebody on deck who waves back, and one minute at noon when the whole room turns to rainbows before you draw the curtains. Give you that, and the light is ready long before anyone needs it.

Your hour: Noon, when the tower throws no shadow
Your place: The lantern room, a hundred and twelve steps up
Your object: A chamois and the great lens
Your tempo: Two steps at a time
Your weather: Bright, with the sun straight overhead
Your flaw: You polish other people’s glasses

Your people

The Daydreamer (Blue Dream)The Daydreamer starts drawing when a lighthouse goes dark at first light. You have never asked whether it is yours, and you both prefer it that way.
The Aurora Keeper (Northern Lights)The Aurora Keeper waits all night for a sky that lights itself; you keep a light that needs you all day. You trade weather and never agree on the best hour.
The Sprinter (Green Crack)The Sprinter once raced you up the hundred and twelve steps and won by a flight. You have offered a rematch every noon since.

Things you say

Nobody looks at a light by day. That’s when you clean it.
Two at a time, or you’re not really going up.
Polish it like it’s the only one. It is.
Curtains before noon. The sun doesn’t know its own strength.
The light is for them. The lens is for me.

A scene from your world

The rainbow minute

The Lightkeeper takes the hundred and twelve steps two at a time, the way he has every noon for nineteen years, and arrives at the top with breath to spare and something to say. “Morning,” he tells the lens, although it is a quarter to twelve. The lens, which is older than anyone on the coast, says nothing and goes on being enormous: a beehive of glass taller than he is, ring on ring of prisms, every one of them ground by hand before his grandmother was born.

He ties on the linen apron, the one with no buttons, because buttons scratch. He unfolds the chamois. Then he starts at the top ring and works down, prism by prism, in small circles, talking the whole time: about the wind, which has gone round to the east; about the supply boat, which is late again; about the smudge somebody left on the brass rail last week, which he has not forgotten and will not mention. Outside, two green sunbirds land on the gallery rail and watch him through the glass with their heads tilted, like inspectors.

Down in the harbor mouth the water is so bright it hurts to look at. A freighter that came in on his light at three in the morning is going back out now, slow and heavy, past the end of the stone wall. Nobody on board looks up. Nobody ever does, by day. That is what the day is for: the light is for them, and the lens is for him.

At two minutes to noon the sun comes round the last pane and finds the lens, and the whole lantern room goes to pieces. Rainbows everywhere: on the ironwork, on the floor, on the backs of his hands, a small one on the end of his nose. The sunbirds hop along the rail for a better look. The Lightkeeper stops polishing, which he never does, and stands in it, grinning like a man who has been let in on something. Nineteen years of clear days, and it has never once been the same minute twice.

Then he draws the curtains. That is the rule of the tower, older than he is: by day the lens stays covered, so the sun cannot gather in it and the glass stays cool and whole for the night. The periwinkle linen slides round on its rail, the rainbows go out one by one like a crowd going home, and the room is quiet and dim and blue.

Below, the freighter clears the harbor wall and gives three short blasts on its horn, which it does not have to do. The Lightkeeper steps out onto the gallery, scattering the sunbirds, and waves the chamois over his head until the ship is a speck. Then he goes back in, because the panes are next, and the brass, and that rail.

The tower

The great lens: A beehive of glass taller than a person, ring on ring of hand-ground prisms. It has never been replaced, and half the lights along this sea were ground to its pattern.
The hundred and twelve steps: An iron spiral from the door to the lantern room. The Lightkeeper takes them two at a time going up and has never been seen hurrying down.
The noon curtains: Periwinkle linen on a brass rail. By day they close around the lens so the sun cannot gather in it; at dusk they open, and the coast gets its light.
The gallery: The iron balcony that rings the top of the tower, painted green every spring. The chamois dries on the rail, and the sunbirds consider the rail theirs.
The harbor mouth: Where the stone wall ends and the open sea begins. Everything this coast sends out into the world passes under the light on its way.
The rainbow minute: Two minutes to noon on a clear day, when the sun comes round the last pane and the lantern room fills with color. It is the only minute of the day the Lightkeeper stops polishing.