“Or so I thought, until the letter arrived. It was written by her brother after she died, and it told me that her last words were that she still loved me, and that she would wait for me on the Isle of the Dead.” The fisherman fingered the silver chain round his neck. “The chain was folded within the letter, so I knew it was from her. And so I set out in my skiff, and was swallowed by the whale, and the rest you know.”
The pelican cooed and clucked. “’Tis a story of a great romance,” said she, “and it is not yet over.”
“I let pride be my undoing,” the fisherman said, “and it shipwrecked my heart.”
“Pride,” the pelican said, “is at the bottom of all great mistakes.”
They sat quietly and gazed into the fire. The fish on its spit dropped the occasional bit of fat to sizzle on the coals. The fisherman rose to turn the fish, and when he sat back down he placed the clamshell on his knee. She was so close, his beloved, and yet he could not hold her in his arms.
A shadow passed over them, and when they looked up, they saw the crow, who flew on a bit and then circled back. He came in low over the fire, and he let loose a gobbet of guano that landed on the fisherman’s head. The fisherman shrieked as guano ran down his cheeks, and his eyes burned with the sharp reek of ammonia. He jumped up and ran to the inlet, where he plunged into the water. He swam a few strokes underwater, and when he surfaced, water ran off his head and carried sticky guano into his eyes.
“Swive me!” he cried. He sank his head underwater again, shaking it and then swiping at his eyes with his fingers. The burning slowly lessened. He used his hands to clean his pate, and then he came up for air. The pelican was flying straight at him, coming in for a water landing. Her speed took her past him as she hit the water.
“Are you all right?” she called.
“My beloved,” he yelled. “She must have fallen from my knee.” The crow might have taken a second pass and stolen her. He took a stride toward shore, and another, and another, the pelican paddling to keep up with him.
“Wait,” she said, but the fisherman was too worried to wait. The pelican flapped her wings and paddled her feet, half swimming, not quite flying, until she was in front of him.
“Stop!” the pelican said, and the fisherman stopped. The pelican opened her bill, and there, in the bottom of her pouch, lay the clam, like a baby in the womb. “I brought her along. I thought you might want to bathe her.”
“All I want,” the fisherman said, “is to slit that crow’s throat and be done with him. Can you give me one reason why I shouldn’t?”
The pelican’s yellow eyes were steady, save for one sideways blink of her inner eyelids. She dipped her bill into the water, filling it with the sea, and then raising it up and letting the water spill out.
“Take her,” the pelican said, opening her bill wide. The fisherman did so, and he tucked the clam into the sarong still tied round his waist.
“Violence only begets more violence,” the pelican said.
“So I’ve noticed,” the fisherman said. “But a dead tyrant commits no more evil acts.”
“You are no match for the crow,” the pelican said. “Only a god can kill a god.”
“So kill him,” the fisherman said. “Surely this would be a better place if he no longer were king here. Surely you, or the cormorant, or the frigate bird could kill him.”
“We cannot,” the pelican said. “He is too powerful. Once we might have, but now that he rules in place of Raven, he is our master in more ways than one.”
The fisherman shook his head, his anger subsiding. He waded toward shore, and the pelican swam along beside him.
“There may be a way,” the pelican said, “but we shall have to be clever.”
“And what way is that?”
“Patience,” the pelican said. “We do not yet know.”
§
Three days and three nights then passed on the Isle of the Dead. The fisherman spent these days caring for his beloved, and establishing his camp. He moved his nest of grasses under a cedar tree at the edge of the forest, and built himself a lean-to of branches, sharpening the ends with his new knife so that he could drive them into the ground. He cut smaller branches from live cedars, and wove these limber boughs crosswise across the top of his lean-to, and that night he fell asleep with the piquant resin of fresh-cut cedar reminding him of the sweet-and-sour fragrance of his beloved’s loins. It rained while he slept, and although the raddled structure kept him from being soaked, he awoke damp and shivering.
And so he scouted the cliffs for better shelter. He wanted a cave, where he could have a fire pit at the mouth, and a bed beneath an overhang of sheltering rock. He found no such place along the cliffs that enclosed the inlet, and so he turned his attention to the forest, where he sought the darkest places, where the canopy overhead was thickest, and would provide the most shelter from the rain.
There were no paths in the forest, only a hodgepodge of fallen limbs draped in moss, and a riot of ferns, nettles, and sowberries. Here and there a yew tree grew in the shadow of the forest giants. It was slow going, clambering over dead branches, weaving his way through the undergrowth. The canopy was high above him, and through it the sun sent arrows of light from an ever-replete quiver. A gleam of metal in the forest duff caught his eye, and he bent down to find a gold brooch, with a large ruby set in the metal, and a girandole of pearls hanging below. It was finely made, the sort of reward his courtesan mother was given by her princely patrons, and worth a small fortune. He put it in his pouch with his flint and steel, and he offered a prayer to Sadr, god of navigators, in hopes that he might find his way back home, where a jewel such as this might buy some ease for his beloved and himself.
He was well into the forest, and when he raised his eyes he saw a curious mound a little farther on, beneath a cedar tree as big around as a large coracle. The dull gleam of tarnished metal broke through the surface of the mound, which was very nearly as tall as he was, and wider than the tree it stood beneath. It was a mound of shiny metal objects, rather like the treasure hoard of a dragon. There was a good deal of jewelry—brooches and pins, earbobs and rings, bracelets and beads—all of it in a jumble of silver and gold, copper and brass, nickel and bronze. The mound of bijoux was layered with dried guano, and topped with generous dollops of fresh crow mess. When the fisherman looked up, he saw a stout branch a good ways above the pile, a branch suitable for the perching of the crow, and so he understood this mound to be the crow’s own collection of pretty things. The crow must sit on that branch, examining his treasures until he grew bored with them, and let them fall to the ground.
From the inlet he heard the raucous, grating laughter of the crow—aw aw aw aw aw—and he immediately felt like a thief about to be caught out in the very act of thievery. He put back the silver torsade he was holding, which had been, perhaps, the crowning glory of a lady’s hat, and he looked all around for the crow, or one of his spies. He stepped back from the mound, and it was then he saw, almost buried at the base of it, the head of a felling axe.
The fisherman walked slowly all the way round the cedar tree, his head swiveling in all directions, up and down and before him and behind him and to the sides, and he saw that other bits of jewelry lay scattered on the forest floor. When he came back around to the mound, he knelt and carefully pulled the felling axe out of the pile. The handle was gone, rotted away, but the head was intact, and still had an edge of sorts, although it was covered in rust. There was a clanking of metal as the mound settled on itself, filling in the space where the axe had lain, but the fisherman reassured himself that he was alone, and unobserved, and then he pulled from the pile a wedge, and a second wedge, and a forming chisel.
Praise the gods, he was a carpenter again. With these few tools and his knife he would need no cave for shelter. He lacked a saw, and a hammer, and a beetle, and various other tools of his trade, but this was treasure enough to change his life here, and he dropped to his knees, and said a quick prayer to E
bisu, the lucky god of fishermen and merchants, and another prayer to Dayea, goddess of secrets. He carried his new tools back to his lean-to, taking care to stay in the forest and avoid the open sky lest he be seen from above. He covered the tools with the forest duff under the cedar tree that was his shelter, and then he laid himself down in his nest, where the light through the cedar’s boughs and the raddled roof of his lean-to was soft on his eyes, and he allowed himself a moment of hope.
§
It was during those three days that the colors of his beloved’s clamshell dimmed, and the striations lost all sense of the sky, let alone a rainbow. On the morning of the third day he brought his beloved’s clamshell out into the light, and the striations were colored in shades of umber. The pelican came by his fire that morning, and when he showed her his beloved, she clucked deep in her throat.
“Of what does she dream now?” the fisherman asked.
Again the pelican lay her bill alongside the clam, and closed her eyes to listen. “She dreams now of her dead body being laid out, and then buried beneath the earth.”
The fisherman said, “And is she happy? You told me the souls dreamt of whatever heaven they desired, not of being dead and buried.”
“This is troubling,” the pelican said. “First she dreams of twilight, and then of burial. I fear that we are losing her.”
At this the fisherman’s spirits fell, for he knew not what to do. Two nights had he stayed away from the nightly landings of the canoe of the dead, afraid that his presence there would provoke more violence from the crow. Staying away troubled him, for there was no other chance to find a woman to suckle his beloved’s soul, but his dreams were vexed by the eyes of the dead, his sleep poisoned with the crow plunging his beak into the chest of Samuel Chowder, Esquire. He had only seen it from afar, over the backs and heads of the crowd, but in his dreams he heard the terrible crack of those ribs breaking, and he saw the man’s daughter faint dead away. He had bolstered himself with the illusion that his beloved prospered in her clamshell, even as he avoided finding her a wet nurse. Now it seemed he had no choice but to return to the pyre to seek her salvation.
“I have a notion,” the pelican said, “a way that I might bring forth your beloved from her shell.”
“Yes?” the fisherman said. “Do tell.”
The pelican hopped down off the log, and examined the clamshell. “Yes,” she said, “you see the opening there, where her clam foot can come out? Hold her so the opening is straight up.”
The fisherman did so. The pelican lay her bill against her breast and vulned herself, piercing through her flesh with the hooked tip. She drew forth a drop of her own blood, which hung from the tip of her bill, red and rich with life, and she let it fall into the opening in the clam’s shell. The striations of umber deepened and reddened, and the fisherman felt a trembling from within the shell that matched the trembling of his own heart.
“Something’s happening,” he said. He gazed at the shell, willing it to open. The pelican brought one yellow eye close, but the trembling stopped, and the shades of umber faded, and the shell did not open. The pelican lay her bill against the clamshell, and she listened with her eyes closed, and then she raised her head. A tear fell from one of her yellow eyes.
“She dreams that she is a grain of sand, falling through an hourglass.”
The fisherman held his beloved to his heart, and he wept.
§
And so on the third night he returned to the beach to again meet the canoe of the dead, and he stood shoulder to shoulder with the cormorant and the pelican. His beloved was tucked into the front of his breeches, and although the night was cool, sweat trickled down his sides from his armpits.
“I am a peaceable man,” the fisherman said.
“Mm-hmm,” said the pelican and the cormorant.
“I do not wish to cause any harm,” the fisherman said.
“Mm-hmm,” said the pelican and the cormorant.
“That crow is going to feck with me, isn’t he,” the fisherman said.
“Mm-hmm,” said the pelican and the cormorant.
The pelican, overcome with worry, plucked at her feathers with her bill. She pulled one out from her belly, and let it drop to the sand, where it joined a few of its fellows.
“Stop that,” the cormorant said. “Restrain yourself, you’re a god.”
At this censure from the cormorant, the pelican seized a few more feathers with her bill and pulled them out, revealing a small patch of bare skin.
“I can’t help myself,” the pelican said.
The fisherman put his hand gently on the pelican’s neck and stroked her there. “Calm yourself,” he said. “We’ve a job to do here.”
Now the canoe of the dead entered the inlet from the sea, the singing sad and particularly beautiful that night, for it so happened that there was in the canoe an entire choir of castrati who had fallen to their deaths when a high balcony collapsed at their patron’s castle. The dabbling wet sound of their paddles dipping into the water gave time and tempo to their song, and the canoe of the dead came out of the darkness and into the red glow from the pyre of bones.
The crow flew down from his perch, and the canoe turned to beach itself, the paddlers putting their backs into it to drive their vessel up on to the sand. The crow landed behind the fisherman, and he leaned forward to whisper in his ear.
“Good evening, your feculence,” said the crow. “Back for another clambake, eh?” And the crow laughed, “Aw aw aw aw aw. Well, this should be a lot of fun.”
The crow hopped up to the prow of the canoe, shoving the fish eagle aside. “Welcome, one and all, to the Isle of the Dead,” he said. “Please, step down and warm your bones on our lovely fire.”
A rough-looking bunch of brigands were the first to disembark, the manly crew of some marauding pirate ship, a scarred and battle-worn lot who were missing an eye here and a hand there. They were followed by the dead from a battlefield on the steppes of Khazaria, fierce-looking horsemen all, and not a woman amongst them. Then a long line of boys climbed down, each one more seraphic than the last.
“Where are the biscotti?” said one. “We were promised biscotti.” “Sì,” said another, “e espressi, per favore, ci hanno promesso espressi.”
The fisherman’s spirits drooped as boy after boy came out of the canoe and began milling about.
“Is there a café about?” they asked. “We’re all famished, all that paddling has simply worn us out.”
No, sorry, uh-uh, no such a thing here, said the birds, please line up over there. The crow watched the fisherman as each of the newly dead stepped down, his black eyes delighting in the man’s growing despair. There came a few women after the castrati but these were old women long past their childbearing years, and though some of them hoped to find their long-lost babes, their infant children who had died years and years before, they were in no shape to suckle them.
“You should have been here last night,” the crow cawed. “We had a caw-aw-adre of royal wet nurses come through, their udders bursting, poor dears.”
“You didn’t fetch me?” the fisherman said to the pelican.
“I was going to,” the pelican said. She plucked at her belly, worrying the feathers there, and when she looked up again, her yellow eyes were filled with tears. The cormorant held up a wing, and from behind it he whispered into the fisherman’s ear.
“More savagery,” he said. “The crow ate their nipples as soon as they set foot on the beach.”
“I see how it is,” the fisherman said. Fate had brought him all this way, and put his beloved’s soul in his very hands, only to beleaguer him. The last of the dead climbed down from the canoe, an old man with a cane, and a giant of a Cossack with the face of an executioner, who made a great show of cracking his knuckles and glaring at the fisherman, as if he were choosing his next victim.
“I think I shall go hang myself,” the fisherman said. He could make a noose out of the sarong. Or he could jump off a cli
ff. No one was listening to him now, the gods too busy herding the dead to pay him any more mind. He headed back up the beach toward his fire.
He was not, in truth, feeling much like killing himself, which seemed a messy proposition, and an indulgence that would satisfy the crow far too much. But it was time to face the ugly truth. His quest was over. In the morning, he would take his beloved down to the wet sand and bury her, so that she might recover her clammish health, and someday be reborn again. And then he simply had to find the way back to his home on the cove.
§
“Good lord, that was boring,” said the cormorant. He was walking up the beach with the pelican in the light of morning. Once again the crow had held court, strutting back and forth in front of them, spouting off about what a great king he was, the size of the pyre last night, the night air warmed with the dulcet scent of castrati roasting on an open fire. He’d complained about their lack of testicles, but he’d more than made up for it by eating their tongues. “And making us sing that awful song,” the cormorant said. “My throat hurts just thinking about it.”
“’Tis a catchy tune though,” the pelican said, and she began to sing, “We all live on the Isle of the Dead, Isle of the Dead, Isle of the Dead—”
“Stop that,” the cormorant said. “I’ll have that silly ditty stuck in my head for a week.”
The pelican ceased, a little forlorn at giving up the comfort of her new favorite song, yet unwilling to inflict any discomfort on her fellow deity. The fisherman was ahead of them. He was on his knees in the wet sand, digging a hole with his hands. A dragonfly flew in off the waters of the inlet and hovered above him, its wings whirring, but the fisherman paid him no mind.
The Alehouse at the End of the World Page 13