Well, less than perfect. But after all he’d been through, if he had to shinny up a dead tree to smoke the frigate bird’s hashish, he was more than willing.
“Bring one of those embers up here,” the frigate bird said. “We’ll need it for the pipe.”
Ever the helpful one, the pelican plucked an ember from the fire and flew up to the frigate bird’s perch. The fisherman tucked his beloved’s clamshell into the front of his breeches and shinnied up the tree. The cormorant joined them.
“I didn’t know you indulged,” said the frigate bird to the cormorant.
“Ordinarily I do not,” the cormorant said. “But this is a singular occasion.”
The frigate bird drew forth his pistola. “Here,” he said to the fisherman. “This is a lot easier if you have hands.” He told the fisherman how to break the pistola in half, and how to open the secret compartment in the handle. There the fisherman found the bird’s hashish, and the bowl to the pipe, which fit cleverly into the pistola’s breech. He began loading the pipe with a generous amount of hashish.
“How would you do this if I weren’t here?” the fisherman asked.
“Show him,” the frigate bird said to the pelican. The pelican waved his wing in front of his body, and now he was an old woman with sagging breasts and a pelican’s head. Her belly was plump and round, her skin wrinkled and ridged. A sarong hugged her fleshy hips.
“Zounds!” the fisherman said. “I thought you were a man.”
The pelican shrugged. “Would you like me better as a man?” she said. “It’s easy enough to do.” She tilted her head and laid her bill between her breasts, ready to do the sailor’s bidding.
The fisherman considered. He had, he realized, no knowledge of how to tell a male pelican from a female. He nodded at the pelican, who passed her hand in front of her old woman’s body, and now she had only one breast. “Sorry,” she said, looking down at herself, “I’m a bit out of practice.”
Whether the pelican had a man’s body or a woman’s, thought the fisherman, there was still the undeniable fact of the pelican’s head, with its long, striped bill, and those round, yellow eyes. The pelican, for her part, passed her hand in front of herself again, and restored her absent breast.
It was no matter to him, he decided, whether the pelican be male or female. Her eyes, though, were strangely beautiful.
“Stay as you are,” said he.
“As you wish,” she said. She opened her bill just a bit, and the fisherman realized she was smiling at him. He smiled back.
“And what about you?” the fisherman asked of the frigate bird. “Are you also a shapeshifter?”
“I have other gifts,” the frigate bird said. He puffed up his throat pouch for a moment, showing off the bright red skin there, and let loose a rattling sound, as if his throat pouch held a tiny drummer with a tiny drum. “For example,” he said, his throat pouch deflating, “I have the hashish, and if you’ll pass me the pipe, we can all partake.”
Full of surprises, these birds. He handed the pipe to the frigate bird, who put the barrel of the pistola into his bill as if he were going to shoot himself. The pelican dropped the hot coal she’d kept tucked in her bill into the bowl of the pipe, and the frigate bird puffed, sipping air through the barrel until he produced a wisp of fragrant smoke. Then he pulled on the pipe, filling his lungs, and he passed it on to the pelican. “Excellent,” the frigate bird said, letting a stream of smoke rise from the corner of his bill. “From Mazar-i-Sharif,” he said, “the very best they have to offer.”
They passed the pipe around, the frigate bird and the cormorant handling it carefully with their feet, the smoke drifting lazily around their heads, and the fisherman’s thoughts drifting lazily with the smoke.
“And you?” the fisherman said to the cormorant. “Are you a shapeshifter as well?”
In answer the cormorant, whose eyes were closed, passed a lazy wing in front of himself, but nothing happened.
“Open your eyes,” said the pelican. “You know we cannot shapeshift unless our eyes see hand or wing in front of us.” The cormorant raised his languid eyelids and passed his wing in front of his face, and now he appeared as a great horned owl, the curve of his beak like a scimitar.
“Go on, show him how scary you are,” said the frigate bird.
Now, as if he’d awoken from a dream, the owl’s amber eyes grew fierce, his eyebrows menacing, and he regarded the fisherman hungrily, as if calculating whether he could carry him off in his talons. The fisherman was so alarmed he nearly fell off his branch.
“Stop that!” the pelican said, “you’re scaring our guest.” The frigate bird cackled a laugh, the owl passed a wing in front of himself, and the cormorant reappeared. The fisherman let loose a sigh of relief.
He looked at all three of them, the hashish lifting his squelched spirits, and he considered the twist and turn of recent events. Mere days lay between him and the calm of his solitary life on the beach. Yesterday he was trapped in the belly of a whale, all but dead, and now here he was, up a tree with companions of dubious quality, any one of whom might be a spy. He had recovered his beloved’s soul, his belly was full, and he was smoking a premium grade of hashish.
Zounds, it was good to be alive!
§
The crow walked swiftly through the forest to the pyre of scorched bones. The wave that had put the fire out had knocked the pyre catawampus, and that necrotic, disjointed stack—scapulas and skulls, sacrums and illiums, ulnas and radii, carpals, clavicles, phalanges and vertebrae, tibias, fibulas, sternums and humeri, ischiums, mandibles, tarsals, and patellae—what lovely, important-sounding words the cormorant had told him when he asked—the pyre was all collapsed in on itself, and reeked a redolent stench of seared tendons, sizzled ligaments, and charred calcium. The crow drew in that sacred stench, and asked himself again, as he had countless times before, whether he loved the roasted pig fragrance of the early fire, when the flesh was burned right off the bones and spiced with the piquance of singed hair, more than this smell, with its lingering notes of thickened marrow, scorched iron, and the faintest hint of mesquite.
Already the beast was stirring, and there was little time to lose. If the monster awoke before the fire was lit, his wrath would know no bounds. The crow plunged into the collapsed pyre, tossing bones this way and that, clearing a bare spot in the center of the fire pit. There the crow made a loose mound of knuckles and toes, and he encircled it with a cone of ribs and thigh bones, laid loosely together. While he worked, the crow sang an ancient song, a song the Old Gods once used to call forth all the creatures and all the plants from the time before time, only now the crow sang the song with the Kiamah beast’s name, forsaking the Old Gods, who were dead gods devoured by the beast, for the crow served the living evil that was the Kiamah. He circled the pyre of bones four times, and each time he stopped to offer the glow of the embers in his basket to each of the four directions. Then he emptied the basket into the center of the fire pit, and he drew a breath of air as big as a whale’s lungs, and he blew on the embers. They glowed hotly in the dark night of the Kiamah’s belly, and flames grew tall out of that hot glow, and now the cone of ribs and thighs was fully ablaze. Clouds of smoke belched upward, and the crow threw on more bones from the jumble around him, building the pyre taller and wider, and as the fire grew larger the crow passed a wing in front of his face, and grew himself a cubit taller, and now every bone was in the flames. “Kiamah, Kiamah, kiaw aw aw,” sang the crow, his power strong and growing stronger, “I give you thanks.” And the Kiamah answered with a great smoky belch that shook the whole cavernous belly. The sacred fire was once again lit.
§
The hashish smokers were well lit, all four of them, the fisherman so thoroughly ’shish-faced that his head was an anthill, and his thoughts were ants, waving their feelers at one another as they crawled along the tunnels of his mind. The frigate bird puffed up his chest feathers, fixed a haughty eye on the cormorant, and mimicked the
crow—“You’ve no right to judge me”—his voice dripping with self-importance, and then he uttered from his nether end the mother of all farts. That set all of them to laughing, and saying over and over, “You’ve no right to judge me. You’ve no right to judge me,” until they had a chorus going, the fisherman having found a melody for the words, and they sang the refrain into the dark night. The pelican stood and shimmied on her branch, shaking her ample breasts and the jelly of her belly in time with the words, and when her sarong slipped off, she let it fall to the ground. They stared at her openmouthed and openbilled, as it were, until the pelican looked down at herself and giggled, and they all laughed and laughed as she danced naked before them. Their hilarity finally spent, they grew quiet for a moment, but as soon as the pelican looked at the fisherman, they both started giggling, not knowing, as one does not always know when under the influence of hashish, exactly why they were giggling, and soon they were all four giggling again.
Their laughter was cut short by a thunderous belch rumbling through the air, shaking the dead tree on which they all perched. The fisherman clung to the trunk with both arms, and the birds wrapped their claws more tightly round their branches and flapped their wings to keep balanced.
“What was that?” the fisherman said.
“The Kiamah,” the frigate bird said. He pointed at the orange glow from down the beach. “The crow has lit the sacred fire again, and the beast, though he dozes perpetually, is hungry.”
There came then a silence while the hashish smokers looked around in the darkness, remembering that they were inside the belly of the beast. Above them was a sound so deep and rhythmic that only now did the fisherman realize that he had been hearing it for longer than he knew.
“The beating of the Kiamah’s heart,” he said.
Yes, mm-hmm, so it is, the birds muttered. The fisherman looked at them all, his strange companions, their eyes heavy-lidded slits. The frigate bird was on a branch above, and his legs were a startling blue. His long narrow bill was cruelly hooked, not unlike the cuttlefish beak. He had been most helpful earlier, but was that not the way with a spy, to be friendly and ingratiating? And what of the cormorant, who had so swiftly shifted himself into an owl earlier, or was it the other way around? How was he to know which was the creature’s true nature, owl or cormorant? And the pelican, whose woman’s body was so unnaturally topped, her shoulders sloping up to meet that feathered head. A gentle creature by all she had done. Yet the way she sat with her head bent and her pelican bill tucked into her human armpit was somehow the most disturbing thing of all.
“I think,” the fisherman said to her, his voice drowsy with hashish, “I’d feel better if you changed yourself back into a bird.”
“Oh, mm-hmm,” the pelican said, and she waved her hand lazily in front of herself, with the result that her round pelican body returned, and she was feathered down to her waist, but with her human legs beneath her, and her bare human buttocks sticking out behind.
The fisherman sighed and closed his eyes. The birds seemed to be drifting off to sleep, accustomed, no doubt, to sleeping on their perches. He, on the other hand, was stuck where he was for the moment, waiting for his arms and legs to remember how to shinny down a tree. That was the way with hashish. If one climbed up the rigging to get a fine view while one smoked, it might be a while before one quite remembered how to climb back down. Best to let his mind wander, and so he kept his eyes closed, and he caressed the clamshell tucked in the waist of his breeches.
He was going to have to care for her until he discovered the means to render her whole again. So there was a puzzle, for what did a clam require? Sand and sea was their natural home, but he could not bury her in the sand for fear of losing her. He would have to keep her close. Did she thirst or feel hunger? He had no idea what she might need in the way of food and water. The pelican had told him that the souls slept happily in their shells, dreaming of heaven, but with all the commotion of being dug up by the crow, and flown through the air in a basket, was she awake now? Was she desperate to get out, or had she fallen asleep again, content to wait out eternity? Might she hear him, and know his voice? As he pondered all this he let his arms and legs do what they knew how to do, and he shinnied down the tree.
Smoke from the pyre of bones drifted his way, the smell meaty and rather pleasant, although he shuddered when he thought of what was burning there. The beating of the Kiamah’s heart filled his ears with a funereal rhythm, but he was alone on a beach with his beloved, and that was a blessing not to be ignored. Perhaps he would bathe his beloved in the waters of the inlet before they turned in for the night. Yes, and sing to her the sailor’s song she had so loved when she was alive. His own fire was banked low, giving off little in the way of light, and as he walked by the fire pit his foot came down squarely in the gobbet of guano the crow had left earlier.
“Merde,” the fisherman said. That filthy crow. He looked down the beach at the orange glow from the crow’s pyre of bones, and he cursed the crow—may he dine on nothing but turds for the rest of his unnatural life—for his word was as slippery as bilge slime.
The crow’s guano was sticky, and it gathered sand with each step the fisherman took. He snatched up the pelican’s sarong, and he walked down to the beach and waded in. He lowered his beloved’s clam into the water, rinsing her clean, and he held her next to his heart, where her shell touched the silver chain round his neck. In a low voice he sang to her the sailor’s song that had always been her delight.
Believe not what the landsmen say,
Who tempt with doubts thy constant mind,
They tell thee, sailors, when away,
In every port a mistress find.
Yet yes, believe them when they tell thee so
For thou art present wheresoever I go.
When he finished, he held the clamshell up to his ear, listening for any sign that she had heard him, but the clam was silent, as clams are wont to be. So he kissed her, not with the hope that something magical would happen, but simply because he wanted to, and he wrapped his beloved in the sarong. He tied the sarong tightly round his waist with the clamshell secure against his belly, and he dove beneath the surface and swam out to the middle of the inlet. There he lay on his back, the gentle waves rocking him, and he found that with his ears filled with water, he could no longer hear the beat of the Kiamah’s heart.
When he returned to his fire pit he undid the sarong from round his waist. He’d had no time to prepare himself a bed, but he was so tired he lay down on the sand next to the fire pit, with nothing but his arm for a pillow, and he held his beloved close. As he drifted off, he heard, from the mouth of the inlet, a song sung by a chorus, and led by two reedy voices, growing closer as the canoe of the dead made its way into the inlet from the sea. The rhythmic sound of paddles stroking the water soothed him as it passed by, and he was far too tired to even raise his head to look. Tomorrow he would look, tomorrow he would find the way to release his beloved’s soul, tomorrow all things were possible.
§
The crow stared into the flames of the sacred fire, seeing all manner of visions in the shifting shapes. It was a good bargain he had struck with the Kiamah. Raven had been a fool to trust him, a god made gullible by his own arrogance, and by the dimming of his wits as he grew old and gray. The crow had played the part of loyal retainer: unctuous, servile, and too timid not to be trustworthy. “Crow,” Raven had said to him, “I grow weary of my nightly trips to feed the Kiamah, and it is my wish that you go in my place.”
“Yes, my lord,” said the crow. “I am at your disposal.”
“Fetch me a basket of eyeballs, and take them to the Kiamah’s snout as an offering,” said Raven. “Make sure you tell the Kiamah they are from me.” Raven never dreamt that the lowly crow would take the opportunity to speak to the Kiamah on his own behalf. “And be sure to include a goodly number of conaria, lest the beast get too lively.”
“Yes, my lord,” the crow said.
Th
e feathers on Raven’s head were white with age, and his rheumy eyes no longer held the steady sagacity that had been the hallmark of his rule on the Isle of the Dead. Save for his nightly trips to feed the beast, he seldom flew anywhere on his tired old wings these days. For a thousand times a thousand years he had ruled the Isle of the Dead with an even-wingedness that was admirable, but now he grew forgetful, and relied ever and ever more on his companions. Once he had been all-seeing, and he had known that his own fate was to be usurped by this very crow, and so he had kept the crow close at hand so as to never let him gain an advantage. But now, in his dotage, with his mind dimmed, he had forgotten the danger that once kept him vigilant, and so it was that the Turropsi had had their way with him, as they do with all beings who walk or fly or slither or swim.
Now was the crow’s time to rise up. He had flown from the Isle of the Dead to the far corner of the sky, and there he had entered the throat of the beast, careful not to tickle him with his wings. Onward he flew, the basket of eyeballs strapped to his back, the Kiamah’s throat scarred in places from swallowing such huge chunks of the spirit world, until he emerged into the mouth of the Kiamah, where he landed on a tooth.
The Kiamah drowsed, his belly full of all he had swallowed, and his capacity for wakefulness held in check by the conaria he was being fed. The crow shed his crow form and spread his arms, as if he were addressing the greatest of the gods. “O Kiamah, swallower of the spirit world,” the crow called out, “it is I, the crow, who brings you a tasty morsel.”
The Kiamah grunted, and then he yawned, and the crow held on to the tooth with all the strength of his human arms so as not to be inhaled into the Kiamah’s lungs, and held on again so as not to be exhaled into the outer darkness beyond the beast’s lips. The Kiamah’s mouth snapped shut, almost crushing the crow, who escaped by letting go of the tooth and sliding between cheek and gum.
The Alehouse at the End of the World Page 7