
The Shadow of a Dream
The Story of Angus Birnam
Before the days of Drake and Raleigh, lived Angus Birnam. Ginger-shocked, full of bluff and fat of bluster, a bulbous, mercurial man-child stoked by fire and fury, he set sail on the day after May Day, 1543, from Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, upon an untrustworthy vessel acquired by art and rechristened in his surname to erase her provenance as the originally commissioned Treasurer by Robert Barton.
A man of uncareful company kept, Angus Birnam could secure for his audacious journey but meager funding from a brood of unctuous bankers no better than common thieves. A man of questionable character expressed, he could muster but a motley crew of jackleg seamen low enough in self-regard and stature, and loyal, just enough, that they would follow his command.
And so it was in 1543, by hubris alone for it must be said that no right reasoning was in force, did Birnam embark upon a quest to assert dominion by divinity, hegemony by birthright, power by absolute power (corrupted absolutely) over a New World.
Like Methuselah, son of Enoch, he lived for centuries, acting always for aggrandizement. Like Methuselah, father of Lamech, father of Noah, he floated 40 days and nights within an ark until he fell upon dry land.
Endowed a half-millennium by the Infernal Spirit and possessed of guises myriad, Angus Birnam (though he would be known by many names) moved masses to his service with hymns that drowned the song of sin within him, turned vices into virtues, transmogrified himself and others in all attendant monstrosity, and loosed a covetous wrath, with a roiling righteousness of lightning-strike and sulfur, upon a New World that was not his but for the scriptures studied whose meanings his mendacity made them seem as such.
And thus did a dream of one man become a dream of many, lured in the ensuing generations by the false promise of earthly dignity and heavenly reward, seized by awe, and forever prison-pent in vexation of the spirit to material consumption. Which for Angus meant a steadfast dedication to a credo of unfettered life, unlimited liberty, and the rapacious pursuit of property as it would apply, not in justice for all, but by his fickle whim and for his sole satisfaction.
Thirty days out, though it seemed like 30 dozen, Angus huddled alone in the hull that was the fetid womb of The Lady Birnam, writhing in a madness greater than any he had ever stoked in others.
Shivering in the dank among the rotting bodies of a crew as unfit for such a journey as their captain, Angus had drifted for days in and out of dreams, deliria, and desperate waking moments. His ship, mix-masted, floated aimlessly in open water swept upon the seas by capricious winds like papers pushed across a desk by sudden breezes. Compass-crossed, horizon-ringed, he feared now what Columbus feared, that perhaps his fate would be a flat-Earth fall from the edge, over and down into the unknown.
Weak and trembling, bereft of hope and faculty, Angus Birnam looked up into the night, found the only portal which seemed to him above the waterline, sought through mist and must a glint of light on broken glass, and humbled himself before his God in prayer for his salvation: “Lord, I ask not for your forgiveness for I know there can be none for such as I, but for your mercy alone, and the swift deliverance from this Hell in which I have interred myself unto some other place I do not know but know can be no worse than this.”
In darkest moments of the soul, there may appear in the addled minds of hapless men a form, shining and pale, recognizable and indistinct, a form both there and not. Or something like a form, something Angus felt but could not be certain he was seeing, something like the presence of an absence.
“Ananias?” Angus wondered in confusion and in fright.
“None other, my brother,” the Presence responded.
“How come you to this place?”
“Are we not twins?”
“Aye, and yet — ”
“Were not we once mistaken, the one for the other?”
“Many times, especially in our youth.”
“With fondness I recall our frequent folly and also an exasperation.”
Angus bowed his head in shame. “True it is that long ago I employed my likeness against your own to fool our sightless father into saving me by selling you into indenture in my stead.”
“But are you not so indentured now?”
“I am. I can see that, yes.”
“How then, are we certain of the trick, certain of its outcome, certain even as we appear before each other here that the trick was even played?”
Heavy-lidded and hard of mind, his thoughts slow in coming, Angus struggled to keep his consciousness. “In truth, it was so long ago that if I once one way remembered it, I am no longer certain it were not the other. Or that such a thing occurred at all.”
“Such is my remembering similar of fault,” said the Presence in order that the matter be settled and the act of treacherous negotiation begun.
“Can you help me, brother?” Angus pleaded, reaching out a hand.
“How many on this ship remain alive?”
“Only I.”
The Presence seemed disheartened, though through the fetid fog Angus could only wonder, and therefore did he speak tentatively and with respect and reverence for his potential savior.
“Are you displeased at this, my brother?”
“A tad disappointed perhaps,” the Presence responded. “But that’s no matter.”
“Of what matter is there other than that you and I, here prison-pent, should find our way to freedom?”
“Is it freedom that you seek, Angus?”
“Aye, if such a thing be possible.”
“Yes,” sight the Presence. And with a groan, “It be possible.” And heard inside him a voice from below: Well, aren’t you the grammar maven, today? And quite the SNOOT as well? Can you tell truly “who” from “whom”? What say you of passive voices never to be spoken, of infinitives properly or improperly split, or preposition-ending sentences of up with one should never put?
“Tis a good thing, then,” said Angus, relieved.
The Presence shifted now, its face appearing clearer, more animated, even hopeful. He had an idea, though what his manager at the Agency might think of it he wasn’t certain.
“Angus, my brother, are there others like you coming soon to settle in a New World?”
“Aye, and many I should think. I am but one of the first from — ”
“One of how many?” interrupted the Presence, increasingly eager to move the matter forward.
“I confess in truth I do not know.”
“A hundred more?”
“I should think so, yes.”
“Two hundred? Three?”
Angus nodded slowly in agreement. “But what does the number matter?”
“My quota is the matter.”
“I do not understand,” admitted Angus. “Do I not matter to you? Does not our nature twinned count toward some resolution of this matter?”
“Oh, Angus,” the Presence once again sighed in reply. “Poor naive and arrogant, Angus, you know as well as I that all lives matter, that but that only some count.”
Recent memos from the home office were clear about this. New policies and fiscal controls would be put in place by the Agency in the coming quarter century. He’d heard of “re-engineerings”, “re-orgs”, “silo-bustings”, and the creation of a new Department of Redundancy Department, all in the name of cost-containment, risk mitigation, and increased share-holder value as demanded by — and he really hated this — a new breed of so-called “impact investors” said to be coming in the next half millennium from a place called The Valley of Silicon. This business blather irked him no end. It was all balderdash and bilge water.
Angus shook his head sharply now that he might clear his ears, the better to hear his brother, and opened wide his eyes to clear his vision.
Again, he pleaded: “I hear you clearly now, I believe, but what you say is like a riddle. Will you help me? Can you save us both?”
Could he save them both? Angus could be saved, in a manner of speaking, but with only one scrawny soul as his — or even a hundred and one! — the presence of the Presence within the Agency might be in doubt.
Business had been slower than he’d predicted since the 1490s when he’d angled for this assignment, rather presciently he thought at the time given the Columbus voyages and all the money the Spaniards were putting in. But a half century had passed since the first sailings of the naos, the carracks, and the caravels, only a few of the newer and bigger ships had come his way.
He’d been promised more in talks with the Catholic Monarchs in Castille and Aragon, but should have known better than the to trust the Catholics. Based on those and other dubious promises, he’d promised even more to his regional manager at the Agency, inspired to irrational exuberance by the actions of Ferdinand and Isabella. But even Kings and Queens weren’t as Gods (though by Divine Right, they flattered themselves such). They had their wars to wage and budgets balanced. By now, he knew he lacked the mind and mettle to make his bones in the global financial markets. Should have gone for that MBA. But, his head among the Shades as it always had been, he’d chosen to study literature instead on the rumor of a grave-breaking novel, the story of a fabulously unfortunate Mr. Faust soon to be written by a gifted young writer named Goethe. But he had admit he knew as well that publishers were always announcing these “literary events” as they liked to call them, in order to “build a buzz” far in advance of publication.
But this was no time to dwell in bitterness and bad decisions made. He had to make this work or suffer the consequences of his own untruths relayed in business plans and memos, and agreed to by him in those Devil-awful half-century reviews in which he was required to participate.
What choice did he have?
And so he resolved to go forward with a plan only now forming fully in his mind, though an ancient aphorism clung to his conscience as it clanged in inside his mind that a verbal contract wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Here was the crux of the biscuit: a single soul simply would not do.
Had he arrived here perhaps a week or two earlier, he might have taken several dozen. But he could tell that seamen such as these were weak of will, bereft of fortitude, incompent cowards all, possessed primarily of fear that in a situation such as this could they would be to madness most likely moved.
And what was left of the carcasses? He knew as well any that mildew and maggots make a mincemeat of men. Even if he took the time to touch them up a bit — This was a practice, of which the Agency had always taken a dim view, accepting it in only exigent circumstances like the Battle of Thermopylae when big body counts were expected over brief periods of time. In this case, his count, no matter how impressive, would likely be disqualified. As a result, he’d almost certainly face demotion or, Devil-forbid, an unceremonious sacking.
He thought ahead to the century’s ending and back to its beginning. What would be expected of him across a hundred-year expanse of time and space as wide as that between worlds old and new?
“Brother — ” he began, but cut himself short when he realized that Angus had fallen asleep. Or worse.
“Angus! Wake up!” he shouted. He feared the man had just expired. But in relief of a moment later, he saw Angus twitch. “Pay attention, Angus,” he growled through gritted teeth. “It’s your brother, Ananias, over here, come to save your scrawny ass.”
Angus only groaned in pain.
“Rise to the occasion, you sorry sack of shift! We’re going to have to play it fast and loose. So get your game face on or whatever you sea-faring fellows call it. And listen closely. ”
Angus stirred to waking and looked forward. “Forgive me, brother. I am listening now.”
“Three hundred just won’t cut it,” said the Presence sharply. He knew he’d score no points with the Agency upon such skimpy compensation given odds incalculable of future payment.
Angus, more confused than ever, continued simply with the counting up.
“400, then?”
“Would you swear on your last breath — which you are likely sucking through your sorry lungs this very minute! — that at least 500 souls such as yours shall pass this way across five decades hence?”
“I would swear a Heavenful were that your want.”
“That’s not the point, old man. It’s not about what I want, it’s what they want that matters here. Come on now. Get with the program, would you?” he insisted. His frustration had reached a level where he’d lost all patience. “I can’t get by with a Heavenful! My people don’t work in Heavenfuls for Devilsake!”
The Presence looked down to the floorboards and muttered, as if to himself, (but most pointedly to someone else), “Do you see now the things I have to put up with these days?”
“Who are you talking to, brother?” Angus asked. “There are no others among us.”
“Here’s who I’m talking to… bother. I’m talking to you! And I’m telling you, again, that I can’t use a Heavenful.”
“Then how am I, but one, to be of any use?” sadly said Angus, entirely resigned to his fate, though he was thoroughly confused at this as to what the fate might be..
The Presence puzzled a moment. He was running out of time. What could he get by with?
“500!” he shouted, a little too loud and far too proud, but he had to convince himself as well as snatch from near-death a defeated Angus.
“500 will, I think, do quite nicely.”
Angus, stirred now to a degree of consciousness he hadn’t known for days, raised an ale-hoisting hand in the air and replied, “500 it is, then!”
“Really?” the Presence said, both in surprise and small elation. “You can guarantee 500? In 50 years? You can guarantee that at least 500 of your kind will attempted this same crossing you’ve attempted?
“More!” said a raucously revived Angus.
“Don’t promise more than you can deliver, old man.”
“By all that is holy, I promise 500!”
Nothing was holy to Angus, and the Presence knew it. He was a liar and a cheat. And those were his good qualities.
But he was also a somewhat successful businessman. Whether he’d come by it honestly or not, his ship was worth a pretty pound. And funding for the voyage, however inadequate, had to have come from somewhere.
Strictly speaking, the Presence knew he couldn’t trust Angus any farther overboard than he could throw him. Considering his calendar back at the home office, recalling again his quota for the quarter century about to end in just seven years, he realized he didn’t have a better choice than to take the man’s ham-fisted word for it. And what would the Agency care so long as he delivered on the deal?
“Alrighty, then, old bean — er — brother,” he said, reaching into the breast pocket of his favorite Earl-of-Hell’s waistcoat with hand-woven man-skin lining. “Let’s get your John Han — Hmmm, I wonder where that came from — Let’s get your sig — ”
“C- came what fr- fr- fr- from, my br- br- brother?” Angus startled up with a stutter and a wheeze ending in a spattering blood-cough.
Then, in a voice the Presence had heard a thousand times when the end was nigh and action of the essence, Angus continued, lower, slower, hoarse and tremulous. “My… s- s- senses… f- fail me.”
The death rattle!
The Presence panicked. Looking all around him, he just that moment realized there was no desk upon which to place his ink pot and quill pen, nor any other surface suitable upon which to lay the contract flat that shaky hands might hold it still and sign in steady, in a manner legible as to be considered legitimate by the Contract Review Board and recognized as well for uncontested soul-collection upon termination by the signatory. For it was on Collection Day, with time expired, that the Presence took the greatest pleasure in his work, (as did the Agency) watching he who’d signed it, in a moment pathetic and all-too-human, recognize in horror his own hand.
Dammit to Heaven! Why does this always happen to me?
The Presence cursed himself, recalling several recent last-minute failures exactly like this one. How would the Agency regard him now? Barely employable, he imagined. Certainly not promotion-worthy. He’d be re-assigned, he feared, to some tedious territory like the Herbrides, to spend a millenium, scuttling over all those piddly islands in search of scrap!
Throwing himself desperately across a dozen dead bodies, the Presence wheeled himself sideways in front of Angus, settling down on palm and knee, to make of himself a makeshift table, then searching for the tools of his trade among his unusually well-pocketed waistcoat (a feature of which he finally understood the salesman’s enthusiasm for) and awkwardly placed upon his back his ink pot, quill, and contract.
More confused than ever now, the barely breathing Angus sat motionless in a fading stupor, requiring of the Presence to reach below, in horrible awkwardness yet again, to grab the man’s grimy paw, stick the quill within it, stab it in the pot, and, glancing around the room with no small amount of self-conscious trepidate (as though a Presence Notary might appear in witness of this brazen breach of the Free Will Clause), he grabbed up Angus’ slimy, mucussed hand, guided it across the signature line, and then moved it to the right to scrawl the date.
Almost wheezing himself now, the Presence put away his paper, pen, and pot, and shuffled to his feet, noticing in great frustration that goo and guts now clung to his newly purchased waistcoat. Once again to the dry cleaner, dammit! he grumbled to himself. Cost of doing business, my ass! These petty penalties, like a thousand paper cuts, will be the death of me yet, I swear!
The dirty deed done (dirt cheap as it turned out), his blue heart quieted and the ice-blood rushing through him slowed.
Then he realized he had another problem.
His freezing heart beat harder now, ice-blood flowing furiously through his needled veins such that he began to shiver with cold amplified by anxiety.
“O crooked curse of Christ!” he screamed.
He’d used the Standard Contract, of course: one life for one soul. He was short 499. Not at all the deal he needed, especially with his half-century review a scant seven years away.
What now? Was their yet some additional devilish doing to be done?
He thought a moment. And a moment more. No solution seemed apparent. He sulked in failure, the sour taste of foolishness upon his tongue, the sting of embarrassment at his incompetence piercing what would have been his soul had he not traded it in as was required in order to begin his training at The Academy.
His hardened heart thumped a monstrous pain within his breast, and yet another icy jolt coursed through his incorporeal being. He swore and cursed and strained to have his anger answered.
No answer was forthcoming.
He was livid! (Not surprising, really, for lividity was his unnatural state.) He’d screwed up yet again. There’d be Heaven to pay for this, he knew it surely.
And then what? Reassignment as he feared? Or worse than that: a desk job, if any job at all, an ignominious career sweeping crumbs off corporate floors with the broom of the system. The Hebrides were looking better and better. But then something else hit him.
He’d heard for decades now of the Agency’s difficulties in recruiting and retaining talent for the Polar Regions. This was surely the best that he could hope for. But how likely would it be that ice caps as old as Earth itself might some day start to melt that men might come to him? It wasn’t as if he could make a living signing flipper-flapping penguins!
But well-known it is among all souls immortal, both bedeviled and divine, that from deepest despair comes creative action such that emotions melancholy sustain a life-and-love-lost inspiration as anger breeds a brilliance of the moment.
A codicil! That was the solution.
A brief addenda describing the unusual terms would be all that was required. And, as Angus seemed for the moment among the living (albeit by a swift and sudden jackboot’s beating) the essential requirement of a codicil, the Singular Ensuing Signature Decisive, would be satisfied.
And so the Presence began to draft, quickly but carefully. He knew that this extraordinary arrangement would require extraordinary terms marked by extraordinary consideration given.
To his knowledge, no agreement of this future-forward kind had ever before been entered into. He would have to pledge something of inestimable value, a quid pro quo convincing to the Fates who would as much control his outcome now as any other party.
A risky it was, to be certain. But risk is fortune’s nature. And what better option did he have with his career and reputation on the line? Besides, if fortune’s favor beheld him from below, this crafty codicil might become an historic expression of the darker legal arts. In time, it might even lead him to a quieter and more stable academic career. He’d performed with distinction when he’d studied torts. He could see himself teaching a course called Codicils and Consequences perhaps even at the Minus-L3 level.
And so, the Presence crafted with great pride a codicil unprecedented. Which he read three times, twice to check its correctness, and then once more, aloud, to hear the mellifluous melodies he’d so masterfully composed bouncing off the rafters in glorious reverberation.
Then, with enormous pride in his quick-thinking craftsmanship, he reached into his waistcoat pocket. But found there neither pot nor quill. And so, not a jot of dignity left within him, on hands and knees he once again began foraging among the bodies and the maggots and the rats for the tools of his trade.
What the God is going on today? He thought to himself. O the indignity! Is it Monday? It’s Monday, isn’t it? Of course it’s Monday. And Mercury is in retrograde. No wonder my life is falling apart!
Moments later, however, quill, pot, and final paper in hand, he felt himself again triumphant.
And again discovered he was lost.
Angus was dead. The clock of contracts-to-be-made had ticked it’s final tock.
It was over. Angus’ life was done with. And with his death, the Presence’s career was similarly done for.
Here!” he screamed and thrust another angry page at Angus all in futile vanity. “Sign again, you sorry sot-of-a-soul!” But Angus ignored him, not to be rude, of course, but simply as any decent dead man would do.
“Sign!” he yelled again. And still, no movement from the old man.
“Siiiiiignnnnnnn!” he howled in an expression of rage that surprised even him. And then, in an act that surprised him even more, he wound his body back and torqued another knife-blade-booted leg into the miserable deadman’s midsection.
And lo, like a laying Lazarus was Angus resurrected in a start, punctured with pain unimaginable, but by all accounts breathing — or having at least breathed once — if a single cry of agony can be judged an indication.
And then the old man slumped over yet again.
It seemed then to the Presence that he life was at a crossroads: the man he’d hunted and haunted seemed both dead and alive simultaneously.
This was clearly now a matter to be considered by the Review Board. Thinking they might as easily rule within his favor as not, he thrust the paper up against a wooden wall and executed, with a pen-perfect signature forged in a moment of the right and proper signatory’s status unknown, the final contract that contained of which the codicil was part and parcel.
Surely was the deed in bad faith done, but it was at long last done most definitely done. The Presence would direct the ship toward the goodliest land of which knew, a place protected from weather’s whim and the open sea’s tempest-tossed caprice, protected by a chain of barrier islands such that if Angus had been alive at the moment of his death, he would awaken re-enlivened, hail of heart and fresh of faculty, the full force of his untempered ambition restored.
The curious codicil wouldn’t be scrutinized for half a millennium, and who would remember a night like this after even just a century, let alone after five?
Thus was Angus Birnam bound, by a black-handed amanuensis, to a term-limited immortality of 500 years in exchange for his single soul and 449 to be named later, along with a similarly dispensation to the entirety of his race and related cultures, and future generations thereof, that they might flourish in the New World for that half-millennium such that they might rule it at their whim.
This should pass muster, thought the Presence, though if he were willing to admit it at the time, he wasn’t certain that the terms of his own contract with the Agency allowed him to trade in futures.
Perhaps even less sure was he, that by the signature here secured — well, signed himself, but who would ever know? — a proper deal such as the Contract Review Board might regard fair and legal, or at least reasonable and customary, that an Instrument Legitimate had been executed.
No matter. What was done was done.
Though certainly he would re-read at his earliest convenience his own contract with the Agency as to the definitions set forth therein of “fair and legal” and “considerations reasonable and customary”, along with a thorough review of case law regarding notions of instrumental legitimacy. With specific regard to the phrase “fair and legal”, he was confident that his acts would stand as “fair”, the nature of “legality” to be determined he hoped, with the gravity of context weighing at least slightly in favor.
Of “customary and reasonable”, he felt similarly: “customary” this was not, but “reasonable” it may well one day prove to to be, especially if he delivered on the bargain he had himself proposed.
And if he should exceed the expectation before the contract’s closing, his work might well be regarded as that kind of out-of-box thinking his lower-downs were always pressuring him to perform (though, in truth, he hadn’t exactly been operating within the box very effectively for the last century or two).
Nonetheless, he had at least attempted innovation in this matter, and felt that such an attempt, even if it were deemed irresponsible or otherwise invalid, was indeed a bold example of the entrepreneurial spirit constantly championed by the Agency, though not always reasonably rewarded, a source of consistent complaint and mistrust accrued across the ages by his peers, but no less a common aspect of all employments and employers: When they said, “Jump!” He said, “How low?”
He could hear again the last advice his father had given him as the old man dropped him at the train station after college for his initial travels to the East from his Mid-Western European homeland:
“Don’t be too quick to judge people, kid. Most haven’t had the luxury of the hard-earned poverty in which I’ve raised you all these years. You’re a scion of smart Black Collar stock.
Just don’t get caught in the rat and maggot race like you’re old man here. Run your own agency and deal with the competition. Work hard and don’t sweat the small stuff. Cuz it’s all small stuff, right?
If you can’t hack it, by into a franchise. Just don’t be a working stiff your entire death. The pay is lousy and the hours would kill you if you were alive. And don’t get me started on the pension plan. I hear it’s all gonna end up leveraged into the housing market through these new securities with crazy names like Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations. Now, Index Funds, you’re old man knows as well as he knew the back of his hand when he used to have one.. But they’re talking about “bundles” and “tranches” and other crap that only body counters can make sense of.”
All in a night’s work as his father have been here likely would have told him with a manly hug and a two-fisted tapping on his back. “Better it is to seek the souls of the future than to stalk the sins of the past.” Another of his father’s — or everyone else’s father’s — sayings.
And so began the ticking of a clock wound to five centuries. More than enough time, one would think, for even a bunch of pompous will-be plutocrats like Angus Birnam, and thousands of religious separatists yearning to pray free, to collect the lands, subjugate the peoples, and establish their pre-eminence and permanence as the superior race.

