“Greetings and salutations,” the cormorant called out. The fisherman kept on digging. Tears ran down his cheeks and fell to the ground. The sarong with his beloved’s soul inside lay next to him. The hole he was digging was the size of a bucket from a well. He was shaping the inside of the hole to a perfect roundness, and so intent on his purpose that the birds stayed silent while they watched.
“Where I come from,” the fisherman said, “digging a proper hole is the last good thing a man can do for someone he loves.” The birds clucked and cooed in agreement, and the fisherman scraped and patted smooth the inside of the hole. Satisfied finally that it was as round as he could make it, the fisherman leaned back. He brushed the sand from his hands, and he picked up the sarong, and he unwrapped his beloved from the folds of the cloth.
“I fear I am too late,” he said. “I meant to bury her alive.” The clamshell lay in the palms of his hands, leached to the same shade of white as the bones that littered the beach beyond the mouth of the inlet. “Is this not the color of death?” he said.
Now gathered around the hole, the pelican, and the cormorant too, shed funereal tears. With great care the fisherman lowered his beloved’s clamshell into the hole, laying it to rest on the bottom. “I am sorry,” he said. “I meant well, but I have done you harm.”
A great sob unleashed itself from within his chest, and with it all the grief he had been carrying inside came rushing out. His breath caught again and again in his throat, was squeezed tight there, and then let go. His voice keened beyond words. The pelican laid a wing across the fisherman’s shoulders. A small clot of sand fell into the hole, and scattered a few grains onto the clamshell. He plunged his fingers into the sand and smashed a handful to each eye. He leaned back on his heels and raised his face, and he wailed out his grief.
The sand fell from his face, and he opened his eyes. Seaward, high above him, two figures flew in tandem. One was the frigate bird. The second was unknown to him, but as it came closer the creature appeared to be part bird and part woman. Gold flashed off her wing feathers. They circled the inlet and then soared in and landed on the beach, and immediately the frigate bird turned to his companion and puffed up his red throat pouch. She gave him a slow, regal nod, barely deigning to acknowledge his display of ardor, and then she turned her gaze to the fisherman, and to the pelican and the cormorant, taking them in with a serene benevolence on her features. She was a great beauty, her lips full and red, and her eyes large and a very deep brown. Her hair was obsidian dark and shiny, and coiled on top of her head. She wore a gold hibiscus flower on the front of that coil. She was bare-breasted, with a sarong snugged to her hips, and her skin was the color of freshly ground nutmeg. Her arms were connected to her wings as far down as her elbows, and she had long willowy wrists and slender hands, and tapered fingers. She brought her wings down and closed them across herself, and now she was clothed in feathers, her chest and shoulders in greens and yellows, here and there flecked with gold, and her belly and legs with her flight feathers, in brightest red, and every shade of pink.
“May I present to you,” said the frigate bird, “Dewi Sri, Goddess of Rice, Supreme Matron of Motherhood, and Divine Regent of Bali Dwipa, the Isle of Ritual.”
The pelican and the cormorant bowed, and the fisherman blinked the last grains of sand from his eyes. “Your holiness,” the birds said, “we are honored by your presence.”
“As am I by yours,” said the goddess. She put her hands together in prayer, and bowed her forehead to meet the tips of her fingers.
“It has come to my ears,” Dewi said, “that you are in need of a wet nurse.”
Taken aback, the fisherman stammered for a moment, and then managed to say “Yes, Your Grace.”
The goddess stood with her back to the sun, radiant with the heavenly light behind her, and the dragonfly floated in the air above her head, its wings buzzing, as if it were her familiar. Dewi spread her wings, and with her hands curved gracefully back toward herself, she gestured at her breasts. “Will these do?” she said.
Her lush breasts curved upward from her chest to nipples a deeper shade of brown. The fisherman gawped at them, overwhelmed by his sudden good fortune, and unable to speak.
“Close your mouth,” the frigate bird said, “and stop looking at her like you’ve never seen a woman before.”
The fisherman lowered his eyes. “Forgive me,” he said. “I mean no disrespect.” He took a handful of sand and squeezed it, just to feel the reassuring grit of it against his skin. “It’s only that,” and here he stifled a sob, “I fear you are too late.”
“Bring her to me,” the goddess said.
The fisherman reached into the hole in the sand and retrieved his beloved’s clamshell. With his head bowed he approached the goddess, the perfection of her toes, the curving grace of her ankles, the slant hem of her sarong draped above them. He knelt before her, and raising his arms in front of his bowed head, he offered his beloved up to her care.
“Look at me,” the goddess said, and when he did so, a single note in his ears chimed, and the chime spread to his chest, the gaze of the goddess tuning him from the inside out, his whole being trembling with the clear ringing tone of a gamelan gong. All that was wrong with the world fell away, and inside that sound the fisherman hovered like a hummingbird, drinking nectar from the goddess’s lips. She opened her hands to him and took the clamshell, holding it between her palms. She closed her eyes and felt along the seam where the two halves of the shell joined, and then she brought the shell to her lips and hummed into the tiny opening at one end. She hummed a lullaby, low and sweet, and the fisherman, the sound shimmering within him, saw his beloved’s clamshell begin to open. Slowly, slowly, the gap between the two halves of the shell widened, and there she was, lying on her side with her knees drawn to her chest, shiny and wet and still. Dewi Sri blew a gentle breath into her face. The fisherman could scarcely watch, so fearful was he that his beloved’s soul was beyond revival. But they all leaned in and waited, gods and human alike, their breath held, like so many relatives awaiting the birth of a child, and at long last the delicate creature trembled, and then stirred. Her legs straightened, and she sat up, a veritable Venus on the half shell, and stretched her arms and yawned.
“She lives,” said the frigate bird. The pelican and the cormorant murmured their assent, and the fisherman wept.
Dewi Sri slid her slender fingers beneath the soul and lifted her out of the shell. She brought her, tender as a newborn babe, to her breast, and swaddled her in her folded wings.
“This will take some time,” said Dewi Sri. “Is there some place I might sit?”
The fisherman, with the frigate bird, the pelican, and the cormorant trailing behind, led the goddess to his fire, and he offered her the best seat on the driftwood log.
“My humble home,” the fisherman said, “is entirely at your service.”
The goddess sat, no longer accompanied by the dragonfly, who had flown away when they left the edge of the water. She resumed her humming, crooning a song beyond words to the soul at her breast, while the others watched, waiting for the miracle to bloom.
“Please,” she said, “talk amongst yourselves. Or go about your business, whatever that might be. We’re going to be here a while.”
And so the fisherman gathered firewood, and tended his fire, and the frigate bird told his companions of his flight to the eastern reaches of the Sea of Bones, a distance of many farsakhs{5}, to the island where Dewi reigned.
“The winds were against me,” the frigate bird said. “There are storms out there where there never were before.”
“What are we to make of that?” said the cormorant.
“The belly of the beast grows ever larger,” said the frigate bird. “It is swollen with the foul humor of the monster’s bellyache.”
“Ah yes,” the cormorant said. He now wore the cap and gown of a scholar, and he produced a thick book from beneath his wing. “I believe these papyri from the Middl
e Kingdom cover the subject.” The book, A Treasury of the Medical Scrolls of the Pharaohs, fell open, and the cormorant began flipping through the pages with his bill, pausing only to push his spectacles down more firmly, so that they would not fly off. “Abscesses, dropsy, dysentery,” he murmured, “hair—stimulating growth thereof, leprosy, limbs—feebleness thereof, rheumatism, wait a minute, I’ve gone past it,” and now he flipped pages back the other way, “polyuria, liver disease, gangrene, fainting spells, ah, here ’tis: dyspepsia.” The cormorant peered at the relevant entry over the top of his spectacles. “Dyspepsia—aggravated, dyspepsia—caused by worms, dyspepsia—common, ah, here we are, dyspepsia gargantua: ‘A disease peculiar to certain gods, goddesses, demigods, daemons, and chimeras, especially those of outlandish stature, in which the belly becomes so distended from gluttony that it develops its own weather.”
“I believe I just said that,” said the frigate bird. “So what’s the cure?”
“Cure? Cure. Hmmm, cure, cure, cure, ah. Hic est,” said the cormorant. “There are several preventives and remedies, depending on the severity of the case. Chamomile tea, tea tree oil, oil of liverwort, orc’s liver, sliced thin and served raw. Essential oils, to be rubbed on the belly while colored light is reflected into the nostrils. Change of diet.”
“If only we could go back to the way things used to be,” said the pelican, “when Raven was here, before the Kiamah swallowed us.”
“Too late for that,” said the frigate bird. “And I doubt that there’s enough chamomile tea in all of eternity to treat the Kiamah.”
“‘In extreme cases,’” the cormorant read, “‘similar to bovine bloat, the belly may be pierced with a wide-bore trochar above the pyloric valve to give the foul humor an exit point. Care should be taken as to the strapping down of loose objects, such as trees, horses, and the rooves of houses, as the force of the body’s wind in such cases may be very great.’ Do any of you have a notion as to where the Kiamah’s pyloric valve is?”
“None whatsoever,” said the frigate bird, “but it’s a comfort to know that the physicians of the Middle Kingdom had some experience with this.”
“Actually,” the cormorant said, “a lot of what’s in these scrolls is copied from other, more ancient scrolls, some of them of dubious origin.”
“Dubious origin? What are you saying?” the frigate bird said. He looked over the cormorant’s shoulder and said, “You can read these ancient hieroglyphics? They are nothing but gobbled gook to me.”
“You mean gobbledygook,” the cormorant said.
“Pedant!” the frigate bird said. “Of course I do—have you no sense of word play?”
The cormorant, momentarily abashed, covered his face with his wing before he resumed speaking. “Be that as it may, I am saying you can’t rely on everything you read,” he said. “And I can read these ancient writings because my spectacles were made from the magical Urim and Thummim, and through them the wearer can read all languages.”
“What a marvel those spectacles are,” said the fisherman. “But let us return to the matter at hand.”
“What care is it of ours,” said the frigate bird, “if the Kiamah has a bad case of gas? If we treat his bloat, then he survives, and we all remain trapped in his belly. If we do nothing, and the gas gets worse, eventually the beast will explode and die, and we shall die with him. We’d do better to find a way to slay the beast than to worry about his digestive malady.”
“Worse yet, we might get caught up in the Kiamah’s belly storm,” said the pelican. “He could fart us all into the Outer Darkness with such force that we’d all be killed.”
“The beast would survive, and we would not,” said the fisherman.
“There, there,” cooed Dewi Sri to the bundle in her arms, “our little girl here has some gas of her own.” And with this she brought the bundle in her arms up to her shoulder, and patted her back, and they all saw that the beloved’s soul had grown a newborn’s body, and was now the size of a weaned kitten. The fisherman fell to his knees, and touched his forehead to the sand. “Praise the gods,” he said, “it’s a miracle.”
“Yes,” Dewi Sri said, “a kitling baby is always a miracle.” The baby in question uttered a baby-sized belch, and everyone crowded around to see her face. Her eyes were scrunched shut, and her wet mouth opened up in a baby-sized yawn. Her face had the overcooked flush of a newborn, and her hair was dark, wispy, and tight against her scalp. Dewi Sri guided her mouth back to her breast. “Give us some air, please, gentle sirs,” she said. She gave the pelican a nod and said, “And lady.” The pelican offered Dewi Sri her skew-whiff smile in return, and everyone backed away.
“So this is how it goes?” the fisherman said. “She returns to us an infant?”
“Yes,” said Dewi Sri, “but by nightfall she will be a child, and by the light of dawn, she will be the woman she was when she died.”
Again the fisherman knelt at her feet, and he took one of them in his hands, and he kissed it, and then he rubbed her foot with both hands.
“Good man,” said Dewi Sri. “The goddess approves.”
The fisherman smiled. His beloved was close at hand, and the goddess was pleased with him. Far, far back in his memory was a scene such as this. His mother reclined on a lectus, with the scroll with which she had been teaching him to read—Plutarch’s account of the death of Cleopatra—fallen from her hands. He was rubbing her feet with olive oil scented with elderflowers, and his mother, her eyes closed, murmured instructions to him. “You’re good at this, boy,” she said. “Remember what you do now when it comes time to court a woman.” It was a rare moment when they had been happy together, a moment that had not crossed his thoughts in more years than he could count. He pressed his thumbs into the arch of Dewi Sri’s foot, and she rewarded him with a happy hum of approval.
And so the day passed. They all hovered around Dewi Sri like so many aunties, and she kept shooing them back like so many flies. The fisherman tended his fire, and cooked a fish the pelican brought, and his beloved suckled and slept by turns. At midday his beloved’s fingers were reaching for the goddess’s lips, and as the sun began to set in the east her legs stuck out from the cradle of the goddess’s arms like the ungainly gams of a newborn colt.
By nightfall the fisherman was giving the goddess the latest of several long foot rubs. The birds were gathered by the light of the fire, preening themselves and keeping watch on the body growing in Dewi Sri’s arms.
“She must be getting heavier,” the frigate bird said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The goddess, consumed with the twin pleasures of nursing and having her feet rubbed, could barely murmur a reply. “My shoulders,” she said, “you could rub my shoulders.”
The frigate bird, bereft as he was of a pair of hands, could only stare at his feet. But the pelican waved a wing in front of herself, and she stood behind the goddess in her old woman form, and she did as the goddess bade her to do. The frigate bird shot her a jealous glare, and his throat pouch flared red. It was at this moment that the crow stepped out of the night, and into the light of the fire.
“Kiaw-aw-aw,” said the crow, “what have We here?” His skin was oiled, his breechcloth bore the head—his head—of the crow clan, and his beak was shiny black and sharp. He stood with his arms spread, inviting their admiration, his black eyes lit with the flames of the fire.
The fisherman stood, his hand resting on the hilt of his knife, which was tucked into the top of his breeches at his hip, and the cormorant and the frigate bird closed ranks with him, the three of them ready now to defend the goddess.
“You’re not welcome here, crow,” said the frigate bird.
“Not welcome? The King of the Dead, not welcome in His own kingdom? Who are you, you red-necked stint, to make such a demand on Us? And who, pray tell, is that fair maiden behind you?”
“Stand aside, gentlemen,” said Dewi Sri. “Let the crow see who has come to visit his kingdom.”
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sp; “And what a tawdry kingdom it is,” muttered the frigate bird.
“What’s this?” said the crow. “Tawdry? I see nothing gaudy or gimcrack about this place.” He threw his shoulders back and broadened his chest, his arms spread to encompass all that was his. He glared at the frigate bird, his black eyes full of ire and outrage. The frigate bird glared back, and he puffed up his feathers, and stood ready to draw his pistola from his belt. Dewi Sri raised a hand, her fingers shaped in the mudra for peace, her face serene.
“Good sirs,” she said, “I have a newborn soul at my breast, and for her sake, indeed for all of our sakes, I ask that you set aside all your old enmities.” The goddess hummed a soothing hum, and the crow and the frigate bird were soothed enough to take a step back from each other.
“Cousin Crow,” the goddess said, “we have a history together. Do you not know who I am?”
The crow took a long slow breath while he looked the goddess up and down. “We are pleased to make your acquaintance, O beauteous one, but We are sure that if we had met before We would remember such a beguiling goddess as yourself.”
Dewi Sri stroked the face of the babe growing in her arms, who smiled back at her from within the blissful slumber of a well-fed tot. Satisfied that her charge had everything she required, the goddess raised her eyes. The slightest of smiles was on her lips, but there was laughter in her gaze, as if she thought the crow a court jester, here for her amusement.
“Let me tell you the story,” said the goddess. “In the time before time, long before the world snake, Ananta Boga, made Bedwang, the world turtle,” said she, “Batara Guru, the highest of the high gods, decreed that all the gods should build him a new palace. But Ananta Boga is a Naga, a serpent-god, and has no arms and legs, and so could not work on the new palace, and for this he was sorely troubled. He wept in despair, and three of his tears fell to the ground. It was then that the miracle occurred, as each of these three tears became a shining beautiful egg when it touched the ground, and each of these eggs shone with the luster of a pearl of the greatest price. Ananta Boga the world snake put the three eggs in his mouth, and he set off to offer them to Batara Guru, in lieu of working on the new palace.”
The Alehouse at the End of the World Page 14