Mythic Journeys

by Paula Guran

  My voice is reduced to a whisper. “What of Mbiti?”

  Mary gives me a deep glance, fiercely bright.

  She says: “Mbiti is lucky. She has not been caught. Until she is caught, she will be one of the guardians of the forest. Mbiti is always an ogre and always the sister of ogres.”]

  11. Ntemelua

  Ntemelua, a newborn baby, already has teeth. He sings: “Draw near, little pot, draw near, little spoon!” He replaces the meat in the pot with balls of dried dung. Filthy and clever, he crawls into a cow’s anus to hide in its stomach. Ntemelua is weak and he lives by fear, which is a supernatural power. He rides a hyena. His back will never be quite straight, but this signifies little to him, for he can still stretch his limbs with pleasure. The only way to escape him is to abandon his country.

  [Tomorrow we depart.

  I am to give the red necklaces only to those I trust. “You know them,” Mary explained, “as I know you.”

  “Do you know me?” I asked, moved and surprised.

  She smiled. “It is easy to know someone in a week. You need only listen.”

  Two paths lie before me now. One leads to the forest; the other leads home.

  How easily I might return to Mombasa! I could steal some food and rupees and begin walking. I have a letter of contract affirming that I am employed and not a vagrant. How simple to claim that my employer has dispatched me back to the coast to order supplies, or to Abyssinia to purchase donkeys! But these scarlet threads burn in my pocket. I want to draw nearer to the source of their heat. I want to meet the ogres.

  “You were right,” Mary told me before she left. “I did go to a mission school. And I didn’t burn it down.” She smiled, a smile of mingled defiance and shame. One of her eyes shone brighter than the other, kindled by a tear. I wanted to cast myself at her feet and beg her forgiveness. Yes, to beg her forgiveness for having pried into her past, for having stirred up the memory of her humiliation.

  Instead I said clumsily: “Even Ntemelua spent some time in a cow’s anus.”

  Mary laughed. “Thank you, brother,” she said.

  She walked away down the path, sedate and upright, and I do not know if I will ever see her again. I imagine meeting a young man in the forest, a man with a necklace of scarlet thread who stands with Mary’s light bearing and regards me with Mary’s direct and trenchant glance. I look forward to this meeting as if to the sight of a long-lost friend. I imagine clasping the clasping the hand of this young man, who is like Mary and like myself. Beneath our joined hands, my employer lies slain. The ogres tear open the tins and enjoy a prodigious feast among the darkling trees.]

  12. Rakakabe

  Rakakabe, how beautiful he is, Rakakabe! A Malagasy demon, he has been sighted as far north as Kismaayo. He skims the waves, he eats mosquitoes, his face gleams, his hair gleams. His favorite question is: “Are you sleeping?”

  Rakakabe of the gleaming tail! No, we are wide awake.

  [This morning we depart on our expedition. My employer sings—“Green grow the rushes, o!”—but we, his servants, are even more cheerful. We are prepared to meet the ogres.

  We catch one another’s eyes and smile. All of us sport necklaces of thread: signs that we belong to the party of the ogres, that we are prepared to hide and fight and die with those who live in the forest, those who are dirty and crooked and resolute. “Tell my brother his house is waiting for him,” Mary whispered to me at the end—such an honor, to be the one to deliver her message! While she continues walking, meeting others, passing into other hands the blood-red necklaces by which the ogres are known.

  There will be no end to this catalogue. The ogres are everywhere. Number thirteen: Alibhai M. Moosajee of Mombasa.

  The porters lift their loads with unaccustomed verve. They set off, singing. “Alibhai!” my employer exclaims in delight. “They’re made for it! Natural workers!”

  “O, yes sir! Indeed, sir!”

  The sky is tranquil, the dust saturated with light. Everything conspires to make me glad.

  Soon, I believe, I shall enter into the mansion of the ogres, and stretch my limbs on the doorstep of Rakakabe.]

  “YS”

  ALIETTE DE BODARD

  September, and the wind blows Françoise back to Quimper, to roam the cramped streets of the Old City amidst squalls of rain.

  She shops for clothes, planning the colors of the baby’s room; ambles along the deserted bridges over the canals, breathing in the smell of brine and wet ivy. But all the while she’s aware that she’s only playing a game with herself—she knows she’s only pretending that she hasn’t seen the goddess.

  It’s hard to forget the goddess—that cold radiance that blew salt into Françoise’s hair, the dress that shimmered with all the colors of sunlight on water—the sharp glimmer of steel in her hand.

  You carry my child, the goddess had said, and it was so. It had always been so.

  Except, of course, that Stéphane hadn’t understood. He’d seen it as a betrayal—blaming her for not taking the pill as she should have—oh, not overtly, he was too stiff-necked and too well-educated for that, but all the same, she’d heard the words he wasn’t saying, in every gesture, in every pained smile.

  So she left. So she came back here, hoping to see Gaëtan—if there’s anyone who knows about goddesses and myths, it’s Gaëtan, who used to go from house to house writing down legends from Brittany. But Gaëtan isn’t here, isn’t answering her calls. Maybe he’s off on another humanitarian mission—incommunicado again, as he’s so often been.

  Françoise’s cell phone rings—but it’s only the alarm clock, reminding her that she has to work out at the gym before her appointment with the gynecologist.

  With a sigh, she turns towards the nearest bus stop, fighting a rising wave of nausea.

  “It’s a boy,” the gynecologist says, staring at the sonograms laid on his desk.

  Françoise, who has been readjusting the straps of her bra, hears the reserve in his voice. “There’s something else I should know.”

  He doesn’t answer for a while. At last he looks up, his grey eyes carefully devoid of all feelings. His bad-news face, she guesses. “Have you—held back on something, Ms. Martin? In your family’s medical history?”

  A hollow forms in her stomach, draining the warmth from her limbs. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” he says, slowly, and she can hear the “not yet” he’s not telling her. “You’ll have to take an appointment with a cardiologist. For a fetal echocardiogram.”

  She’s not stupid. She’s read books about pregnancy, when it became obvious that she couldn’t bring herself to abort—to kill an innocent child. She knows about echocardiograms, and that the prognosis is not good. “Birth defect?” she asks, from some remote place in her mind.

  He sits, all prim and stiff—what she wouldn’t give to shake him out of his complacency. “Congenital heart defect. Most probably a deformed organ—it won’t pump enough blood into the veins.”

  “But you’re not sure.” He’s sending her for further tests. It means there’s a way out, doesn’t it? It means . . .

  He doesn’t answer, but she reads his reply in his gaze all the same. He’s ninety-percent sure, but he still will do the tests—to confirm.

  She leaves the surgery, feeling—cold. Empty. In her hands is a thick cream envelope: her sonograms, and the radiologist’s diagnosis neatly typed and folded alongside.

  Possibility of heart deformation, the paper notes, dry, uncaring.

  Back in her apartment, she takes the sonograms out, spreads them on the bed. They look . . . well, it’s hard to tell. There’s the trapeze shape of the womb, and the white outline of the baby—the huge head, the body curled up. Everything looks normal.

  If only she could fool herself. If only she was dumb enough to believe her own stories.

  Evening falls over Quimper—she hears the bells of the nearby church tolling for Vespers. She settles at her working table, and
starts working on her sketches again.

  It started as something to occupy her, and now it’s turned into an obsession. With pencil and charcoal she rubs in new details, with the precision she used to apply to her blueprints—and then withdraws, to stare at the paper.

  The goddess stares back at her, white and terrible and smelling of things below the waves. The goddess as she appeared, hovering over the sand of Douarmenez Bay, limned by the morning sun: great and terrible and alien.

  Françoise’s hands are shaking. She clenches her fingers, unclenches them, and waits until the tremors have passed.

  This is real. This is now, and the baby is a boy, and it’s not normal. It’s never been normal.

  That night, as on every night, Francoise dreams that she walks once more on the beach at Douarnenez—hearing the drowned bells tolling the midnight hour. The sand is cold, crunching under her bare feet.

  She stands before the sea, and the waves part, revealing stone buildings eaten by kelp and algae, breached seawalls where lobsters and crabs scuttle. Everything is still dripping with brine, and the wind in her ears is the voice of the storm.

  The goddess is waiting for her, within the largest building—in a place that must once have been a throne room. She sits in a chair of rotten wood, lounging on it like a sated cat. Beside her is a greater chair, made of stone, but it’s empty.

  “You have been chosen,” she says, her words the roar of the waves. “Few mortals can claim such a distinction.”

  I don’t want to be chosen, Francoise thinks, as she thinks on every night. But it’s useless. She can’t speak—she hasn’t been brought here for that. Just so that the goddess can look at her, trace the minute evolutions in her body, the progress of the pregnancy.

  In the silence, she hears the baby’s heartbeat—a pulse that’s so quick it’s bound to falter. She hears the gynecologist’s voice: the heart is deformed.

  “My child,” the goddess says, and she’s smiling. “The city of Ys will have its heir at last.”

  An heir to nothing. An heir to rotten wood, to algae-encrusted panels, to a city of fish and octopi and bleached skeletons. An heir with no heart.

  He won’t be born, Francoise thinks. He won’t live. She tries to scream at the goddess, but it’s not working. She can’t open her mouth; her lips are stuck—frozen.

  “Your reward will be great, never fear,” the goddess says. Her face is as pale as those of drowned sailors, and her lips purple, as if she were perpetually cold.

  I fear. But the words still won’t come.

  The goddess waves a hand, dismissive. She’s seen all that she needs to see; Françoise can go back, back into the waking world.

  She wakes up to a bleary light filtering through the slits of her shutters. Someone is insistently knocking on the door—and a glance at the alarm clock tells her it’s eleven a.m., and that once more she’s overslept. She ought to be too nauseous with the pregnancy to get much sleep, but the dreams with the goddess are screwing up her body’s rhythm.

  She gets up—too fast, the world is spinning around her. She steadies herself on the bedside table, waiting for the feeling to subside. Her stomach aches fiercely.

  “A minute!” she calls, as she puts on her dressing-gown, and shoves her feet into slippers.

  Through the Judas hole of the door, she can only see a dark silhouette, but she’d know that posture anywhere—a little embarrassed, as if he were intruding in a party he’s not been invited to.

  Gaëtan.

  She throws the door open. “You’re back,” she says. “I just got your message—” he stops, abruptly. His gray eyes stare at her, taking in, no doubt, the bulge of her belly and her puffy face. “I’d hoped you were joking.” His voice is bleak.

  “You know me better than that, don’t you?” Françoise asks.

  Gaëtan shrugs, steps inside—his beige trench coat dripping water on the floor. It looks as if it’s raining again. Not an unusual occurrence in Brittany. “Been a long time,” he says.

  He sits on the sofa, twirling a glass of brandy between his fingers, while she tries to explain what has happened—when she gets to Douarnenez and the goddess walking out of the sea, her voice stumbles, trails off. Gaëtan looks at her, his face gentle: the same face he must show to the malnourished Africans who come to him as their last hope. He doesn’t judge—doesn’t scream or accuse her like Stéphane—and somewhere in her she finds the strength to go on.

  After she’s done, Gaëtan slowly puts the glass on the table, and steeples his fingers together, raising them to his mouth. “Ys,” he says. “What have you got yourself into?”

  “Like I had a choice.” Françoise can’t quite keep the acidity out of her voice.

  “Sorry.” Gaëtan hasn’t moved—he’s still thinking, it seems. It’s never been like him to act or speak rashly. “It’s an old tale around here, you know.”

  Françoise knows. That’s the reason why she came back here. “You haven’t seen this,” she says. She goes to her working desk, and picks up the sketches of the goddess—with the drowned city in the background.

  Gaëtan lays them on the low table before him, carefully sliding his glass out of the way. “I see.” He runs his fingers on the goddess’s face, very carefully. “You always had a talent for drawing. You shouldn’t have chosen the machines over the landscapes and animals, you know.”

  It’s an old, old tale; an old, old decision made ten years ago, and that she’s never regretted. Except—except that the mere remembrance of the goddess’s face is enough to scatter the formulas she made her living by; to render any blueprint, no matter how detailed, utterly meaningless. “Not the point,” she says, finally—knowing that whatever happens next, she cannot go back to being an engineer.

  “No, I guess not. Still . . .” He looks up at her, sharply. “You haven’t talked about Stéphane.”

  “Stéphane—took it badly,” she says, finally.

  Gaëtan’s face goes as still as sculptured stone. He doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t need to.

  “You never liked him,” Françoise says, to fill the silence—a silence that seems to have the edge of a drawn blade.

  “No,” Gaëtan says. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?” He turns his gaze back to the sketches, with visible difficulty. “You know who your goddess is.”

  Françoise shrugs. She’s looked around on the internet, but there wasn’t much about the city of Ys. Or rather, it was always the same legend. “The Princess of Ys,” she said. “She who took a new lover every night—and who had them killed every morning. She whose arrogance drowned the city beneath the waves.”

  Gaëtan nods. “Ahez,” he says.

  “To me she’s the goddess.” And it’s true. Such things as her don’t seem as though they should have a name, a handle back to the familiar. She cannot be tamed; she cannot be vanquished. She will not be cheated.

  Gaëtan is tapping his fingers against the sketches, repeatedly jabbing his index into the eyes of the goddess. “They say Princess Ahez became a spirit of the sea after she drowned.” He’s speaking carefully, inserting every word with the meticulous care of a builder constructing an edifice on unstable ground. “They say you can still hear her voice in the Bay of Douarnenez, singing a lament for Ys—damn it, this kind of thing just shouldn’t be happening, Françoise!”

  Françoise shrugs. She rubs her hands on her belly, wondering if she’s imagining the heartbeat coursing through her extended skin—a beat that’s already slowing down, already faltering.

  “Tell that to him, will you?” she says. “Tell him he shouldn’t be alive.” Not that it will ever get to be much of a problem, anyway—it’s not as if he has much chance of surviving his birth.

  Gaëtan says nothing for a while. “You want my advice?” he says.

  Françoise sits on a chair, facing him. “Why not?” At least it will be constructive—not like Stéphane’s anger.

  “Go away,” Gaëtan says. “Get as far as you can from Quimper
—as far as you can from the sea. Ahez’s power lies in the sea. You should be safe.”

  Should. She stares at him, and sees what he’s not telling her. “You’re not sure.”

  “No,” Gaëtan says. He shrugs, a little helplessly. “I’m not an expert in magic and ghosts and beings risen from the sea. I’m just a doctor.”

  “You’re all I have,” Francoise says, finally—the words she never told him after she started going out with Stéphane.

  “Yeah,” Gaëtan says. “Some leftovers.”

  Francoise rubs a hand on her belly again—feeling, distinctly, the chill that emanates from it: the coldness of beings drowned beneath the waves. “Even if it worked—I can’t run away from the sea all my life, Gaëtan.”

  “You mean you don’t want to run away, full stop.”

  A hard certainty rises within her—the same harshness that she felt when the gynecologist told her about the congenital heart defect. “No,” she says. “I don’t want to run away.”

  “Then what do you intend to do?” Gaëtan’s voice is brimming with anger. “She’s immortal, Françoise. She was a sorceress who could summon the devil himself in the heyday of Ys. You’re—”

  She knows what she is; all of it. Or does she? Once she was a student, then an engineer and a bride. Now she’s none of this—just a woman pregnant with a baby that’s not hers. “I’m what I am,” she says, finally. “But I know one other thing she is, Gaëtan, one power she doesn’t have: she’s barren.”

  Gaëtan cocks his head. “Not quite barren,” he says. “She can create life.”

  “Life needs to be sustained,” Françoise says, a growing certainty within her. She remembers the rotting planks of the palace in Ys—remembers the cold, cold radiance of the goddess. “She can’t do that. She can’t nurture anything.” Hell, she cannot even create—not a proper baby with a functioning heart.

  “She can still blast you out of existence if she feels like it.”

  Françoise says nothing.

  At length Gaëtan says, “You’re crazy, you know.” But he’s capitulated already—she hears it in his voice. He doesn’t speak for a while. “Your dreams—you can’t speak in them.”