There was something strangely familiar about those rocks. He saw, in the rising curl of the next wave, a rounded one, and he marveled at the way it floated in on the surface of the water after the wave broke, shiny and white in the foam. It rolled up the beach and came to a rest on the wet sand. He walked down to it, and when he picked it up and turned it, a pair of empty eye sockets stared back at him.
A skull. Human. He dropped it. The skull lay on its side, and seawater from a spent wave half filled the empty brainpan. The rounded end of a leg bone poked through the sand a few feet away. All along the beach he saw bones, some on the surface, some half buried, some barely there. He saw jawbones, kneecaps, teeth. Here a ribcage lay buried, the sand striped with ribs. A pelvis appeared in the curl of the next wave, and it washed up on the beach as if it held no more significance than a jellyfish.
He headed back toward the mouth of the inlet unnerved, and he hurried along the sandy beach to put some distance between himself and all those bones. He went back to his fire, and he lay his beloved down in the shade of a log. He took wood from his pile and added it to the coals, and the ritual of keeping the fire going restored to him some small sense of ordinary life.
He squatted by the fire for a time, poking at it now and again to soothe himself, but he could not idle the day away. The problems of shelter and sustenance remained, and he busied himself with the task of gathering the next day’s firewood, thankful that it was so plentiful here. He laid the last armful of wood on his pile, and then he unwrapped the sarong, and he saw that the clamshell was dry. He had not even bathed his beloved in the open sea. He held her up to his ear, but he heard nothing this time. The hellish Sea of Bones had made him lose sight of his purpose, and now her soul was at risk.
He carried her down to the waters of the inlet, where he waded in until he was waist deep. He dipped her in the cool water, and held her there, her shell secure between the palms of his hands. A shadow passed over him, and when he looked up, he saw that cursèd crow high above, a dark silhouette against the blue sky, and he remembered seeing that sky through the cormorant’s magic spectacles. Whether the things these birds conjured were real, or if they simply beguiled him into seeing things that were not there, mattered little. They were sorcerers, that was plain enough. Best to be humble, and patient, and to plot an escape.
But he did offer a prayer to the pelican, who he thought was likely a goddess of renewal, for she had healed him. It was always best to pray to the local gods, even if one did not believe in them. When he looked up again, the crow was gone.
Ah, the freedom of birds. In his youth, on a voyage that took him to Xcalak, in the Kingdom of the Mayans, he had seen the sages of Uxmal flying on their wondrous planks. If he could fly like them, held aloft by wood and incantation, he would simply spread his arms and be gone, leaving the hellion crow and all his carrion-grubbing ways behind.
He held the clamshell up to his ear again, and the faint throb of her being had returned. The fisherman allowed himself a sigh of relief. He headed back to his fire to fetch the sarong, but before his feet cleared the waters of the inlet, the crow swooped low over his head and dropped a large splotch of guano at the edge of the fire pit, and his relief was overtaken by anger. He ran to his fire, and he kicked sand over the guano, cursing as only a sailor can curse. “Shite!” he yelled. “¡Mierda! Cac! Skita! Dr’q!” and with each word he stomped his foot and shook his fist at the sky. “I’m sick of this dung heap of a place! I want to go home!”
His anger eased, he took the sarong and soaked it in the waters of the inlet. The gentle waves of the inlet calmed him, and his breathing slowly returned to normal. He tied the sarong round his waist again as a kind of belt, with his beloved tucked securely against the small of his back.
It was time to explore inland. He walked along the beach, past the great pyre, still hot from the night before. Although he kept an eye out for the crow, that scurvy lurch of a bird was not to be seen. The pelican cooed a greeting as he walked by but stayed busy, scraping a nest for herself in the sand. The cormorant once again wore the cap and gown of a scholar, but he looked up from the book he was reading and called out a greeting.
“Ho,” said the cormorant. “How are you on this fair morning?”
“Thirsty,” said the fisherman. “Is there fresh water at that end of the inlet?”
“Oh yes,” said the cormorant. “A freshet flows from a canyon there.”
The fisherman nodded, and, eager for a drink of water, he bade the cormorant farewell. A furlong or two beyond them the inlet gave way to a salt marsh. There were reeds and grasses growing in hummocks, and farther on, cattails and water lilies and lotus flowers. Enormous trees grew almost to the edge of the marsh, and he entered the cool shade of the forest, where the ground was firm and the walking easier. Here and there a maple or an oak was mixed in with the conifers. Deeper in was a jumble of fallen limbs and undergrowth, but he found he could pick his way along just inside the border without much trouble. The oaks had the girth of ancient giants, and the firs and cedars grew straight and very tall, like masts. What boards he could mill from those oaks! The fisherman marveled at the ships that might be built from them, with masts the height of the walls of the great cities.
Rock cliffs walled in the back of the marsh. There were mountains beyond those cliffs, hazy and blue in the distance. No birds called, no insects whirred, no squirrels chirped, as if this were a place before places, in a time before time. In the silence he heard the soft shush of water flowing, growing louder as he neared the cliff. The wetlands narrowed and gave way to dry land along the base of the rock wall. He came to the freshet, which flowed from a narrow canyon, the water so clear as to be invisible where it was still, and the streambed a mosaic of stones, of rusty red and malachite green, of silky brown and azurite blue, all of them rounded and smoothed. He knelt to drink from the stream, the water soft and sweet in his mouth, and he drank his fill, though it made his teeth ache with the chill.
He returned to his camp, his thirst quenched. Fresh water he had in abundance, though he would have given a great deal for a thing so simple as a bucket. Or better yet, some carpenter’s tools, with which he could fashion a bucket, and a simple hut for shelter. But having none, he looked about, and took note of the dry sea grass in the strip of land where the beach gave way to the forest. And so he spent the middle of the day gathering a mound of dried grass and making himself a sort of nest from it. When he was done he had a softer bed than the sand he’d slept on the night before. He had to laugh when he stood back and looked at it, for there was something undeniably bird-like about his efforts.
Now he took his beloved’s clamshell down to the water for a swim. Swimming together had been one of their great pleasures when they lived in her hut on Ambon. Often they had swum out past where the swells broke and floated on their backs, holding hands, their worldly cares left behind. They spoke little, the sky vast and blue above them, and they loved each other much. When it was time to return to the shore, they swam in to the shallows together, and his beloved wrapped her arms round his neck and he carried her through the surf. The weight of her was sweet in his arms.
He waded out until he was waist deep, and he lowered the sarong into the water, and he unwrapped his beloved’s clam, clasping it between his palms. His grip was firm, for he feared that if she fell from his hands she would burrow into the sandy bottom and disappear. She was, he reasoned, a clam, and so she would do as clams do.
He brought her shell back out of the water, and he saw that the striations of color were now indigos and deep greens, and not so vibrant as they had been the day before, but still beautiful. How strange and marvelous was this vessel in which she lived. There was a tiny opening at one end, a gap where the lips of the clamshell did not quite meet. Perhaps she could hear him. “Cariña{3},” he said, speaking aloud his love name for her for the first time in many a year, “I have come for you at your request.” He took the silver chain from his neck and draped it
across her shell. “You see,” he said, “we are meant to be here together, for your chain found its way to me, and its arrival was the first in a chain of miracles that have brought us together. Fate has been kind to us.”
He listened, but the clam made no reply. He kissed the tiny opening at the end of her shell. “To be expected,” he said, “given your current abode.” And so he sang to her a sailor’s song.
she sat down right beside me
and took me by the hand
she kissed me till my lips did bleed
she loved me on the strand
O she’s the girl I left behind me
she’s the girl I left behind
she’s the girl I left behind me
the girl I’ve come back here to find
The sound of his own voice soothed him, and he was in great need of soothing, although his outward appearance was calm. But there was little that was not extraordinary about his circumstances, and the uncertainties regarding his beloved’s future weighed on him. He had only the crow’s word for the notion that he could produce his beloved in her corporeal form, and the crow was a tricksy varlet, and not to be trusted. Still, the cormorant had produced a book of laws for the Isle of the Dead, and the crow had, however begrudgingly, acceded to the cormorant’s advice.
The sun was now three quarters of the way across the sky, heading for the eastern horizon. The fisherman walked back to his fire and his bed, and he lay himself down to sleep. He would be on watch tonight at midnight, ready to greet the canoe when it arrived. Best to rest himself until then. Everything hinged on whether or not he could find a woman willing and able to suckle his beloved’s soul.
§
The great cavern of the belly of the beast was lit with brightest moonglow, which waxed and waned even though the moon was no more, just as the tides yet rose and fell, as if the sea itself honored the vanished moon. Now came the sound of the fish eagles singing their song, high and keening, as the canoe of the dead entered the inlet from the sea. Their canoe was elaborately carved, the prow rising to a head with the fierce eyes, eye mask, and hooked beak of their kind, the stern with the fish eagle’s fan of tail feathers. They stood one in the prow and one at the stern, their wings spread, beating the air together in time. Between them sat a row of paddlers down each side of the canoe, the strokes of their paddles matching the beat of the fish eagles’ wings, the canoe gliding through the water with the silky strength of an orca.
The paddlers were the dead, their paddles worn smooth by the innumerable hands of those who had come this way before, and as their canoe sliced through the waters of the inlet they added their own voices to the fish eagles’ song. They sang the high lonesome sound of lives left behind, of love lost, of all that was once possible fading into what would now never be. Onward they came, and the song made one fantastical creature of them, a cedar-bodied chimera with paddling arms and flapping wings and a fish eagle for a head. Carved along both sides of the canoe were the Old Gods: Cedar Man, Bear, Sasquatch, Clam, Eagle, Coyote, Orca, Raven, and many more. All of them gone now, devoured by the beast, for that was the way of things after the Kiamah came, and the Old Gods gave way to the new.
§
The crow perched in his favorite perch, and the canoe, full of fresh fuel for the pyre, turned its prow to the beach. The nightly arrival of the dead was proof that all men came to their just end. Although really, justice had nothing to do with it. All that mattered was that their bodies be burned to warm the beast.
Justice, it struck him, and not for the first time, was sentimental, a luxury for the living. It had no place here, and he was just the bird to show the dead how things really are.
The pelican was on the beach in her usual spot, ready to greet the new arrivals, the cormorant and that sailor fellow with her. Their conversation fell silent as the fish eagles’ song filled their ears. Though the crow would have liked to eavesdrop on them, he was not overly concerned. No doubt the sailor was going to look for someone to suckle his clam.
“Aw aw aw aw aw,” the crow laughed. This was likely to be a night like no other.
With a last mighty pull on their paddles, the dead beached their canoe. Their song finished, the fish eagles held their wings spread, and directed the dead to climb down. Those in front went first, and were followed by the rest of the paddlers. They kept coming, more and more of them, a man holding a pot-metal funnel, a woman with an awl in her hand, the tools they had been using the moment death overtook them. They gathered on the beach in a huddled mass, and it seemed to the fisherman that the number of the dead on the beach far exceeded the number of paddlers in the canoe. Without the fish eagles’ song to bind them together, they fell into confusion. The pelican moved amongst them, greeting them with kind words, assuring them that they were where they were supposed to be.
They were men, women, and children, and they were full of questions. “Is my husband here?” a woman asked. “Yes,” the pelican told her, “but you must be patient.” “Is this a dream?” a man asked. “Oh no,” the pelican said, “but something wonderful will soon happen.” “What will happen?” a child asked, and the pelican said, “You will find out what comes after life, and you will be content.” “Are you a pelican?” another child said, and the pelican said, “Why yes I am. Aren’t you the clever fellow?”
The fisherman entered the crowd, looking for women of childbearing age. His beloved was wrapped in her sarong at his waist, freshly bathed. “Where am I?” an old woman asked him. “Is this heaven?” a girl with the face of an acolyte asked. “I’m hungry,” said a boy, “Is there any food?”
“I don’t know,” the fisherman said. “I think not,” he said. “I’m hungry too,” he said, pushing his way past their questions and their reaching hands. “Care for a bite of my apple?” said a woman, with a wide grin and a gap between her front teeth. She put her hand on the front of the fisherman’s breeches, and whispered into his ear. “For a ducat I’ll give you a ride you’ll never forget.” The fisherman pushed her hand aside, and kept moving. He had neither the inclination nor the ducat for a common gill-flurt. Through the crowd he saw a woman holding her arms across her belly the way one might cradle a newborn pup, and he made his way to her.
“Pardon me,” he said. “Are you a mother?”
“Aren’t we a bit cheeky,” the woman said. “What business is that of yourn?”
“It’s a long story, ma’am, and I mean no disrespect, but I have an urgent need for a nursing mother.”
“Ahh,” the woman said. She looked him straight in his face, understanding softening the glare she’d greeted him with at first. “You’ve a young babe, and no mother to feed the wee one.”
“Yes,” the fisherman said. Best not to go into too much detail at the outset. “Are you, by chance, in a position to be a wet nurse?”
“That I am,” the woman said. “But I’d as soon nurse my own babe as someone else’s. He died of the pox, not three days ago, and here am I, dead meself, I suppose. Do you know where I might find him?”
“Alas, no,” the fisherman said. “You’d have to speak to the crow about that.”
“Crow?” the woman said. “What crow? And what sort of place is this, where I have to speak to a crow to find me babe?” She rose up on her toes, and began looking about, and she cupped her hands on her breasts as she did so. “I don’t mind telling you, sir, that me tits is full till me nipples ache. I tell you what, you help me talk to this crow, and he finds me babe for me, and I’ll be happy to share what I’ve got here with yourn.”
“Mmmm,” the fisherman said. “The crow is, well, not exactly a very helpful fellow. But I could certainly relieve some of the pressure you’re feeling at present. Perhaps we could speak to the crow afterward.”
“You could relieve the pressure?” she said. “Just what have you got in mind? Where’s that babe of yourn?” She looked around him on one side and then the other, as if he might have behind him a servant holding his babe.
“She’
s right here,” he said, patting the sarong tied round his waist.
“There?” she said. “She must be a little bit of a thing.”
There was nothing for it but to produce his beloved’s clamshell and hope for the best. He drew it out, and held it cupped in his open palms.
“Things are a bit different here,” the fisherman said. “If you’ll allow me to explain—”
“Are you mad?” she said. “That’s nothing but a clam.” She took a step back from him, and bumped into a woman behind her. “Get a load of this,” she said. “Straight from Bedlam, this one is, thinks that clam there is a newborn babe.”
“No, not exactly a babe,” the fisherman said. “It’s a clam, true enough, but inside is the soul of my beloved, and if you let her suckle, she will become a woman again.”
“A woman from a clam?” the second woman said. “What a nutter.” She turned to another woman and said, “Did you hear that?” as did the first woman, and word began to spread, the murmur spreading through the crowd, and people pointing at the fisherman.
“That blue fellow.”
“Wants to suckle a clam?”
“Why is he blue?”
“Who knows? This whole business is more than a bit strange, don’t you think?”
The fisherman pressed forward, trying to reach anyone before the rumor did, working his way to the canoe, where people were still disembarking. But they were men and boys, they were women too old to be of use to him and girls too young, and as he watched, he realized he really did not know how a wet nurse came to be a wet nurse. Was it necessary for the wet nurse to be nursing her own child? Or was it the suckling itself that brought forth the milk, never mind whose babe did the suckling? He thought it was the suckling, but would his beloved’s clam be able to suckle?
The Alehouse at the End of the World Page 10