Hath No Fury

by Melanie R. Meadors

  When we had finished eating, I told Wing to get my craft ready. “It’s already getting late. It will be so hot,” he said. “We have plenty of fish. You should rest now.”

  I made a gesture to indicate he should do as he was told. I knew the wet earth and moist air had produced many insects, that the fish would stay close to the surface and start leaping for me. The tide was flowing back, carrying smaller fish in from the ocean and the larger ones that preyed on them.

  Our craft were woven from reeds with frames of branches from the slender tough dune trees, made watertight with seal skin and resin. They were very light and most men were too heavy to ride in them safely, though boys played in them until they began to grow hair, pretending they were women as boys do.

  Fin went to the water’s edge and began to dig out river clams. They were small and muddy tasting so we didn’t usually eat them, but they were good for bait.

  Wing asked if he could come with me, but I wanted to be alone and told him to stay and make new fish hooks from the bones and prepare more lines. His face went sulky and I knew he had been hoping for a joining: we often spent the hot afternoons in the shade of the stringybark trees on the island where the pelicans roosted. I would have to make it up to him later.

  I took a light catching net and a heavier basket-like one to tow in the water. The lake’s surface was smooth and slick. When it was calm, the waves died down completely, but the ocean’s movement still made itself felt and swells appeared and disappeared quite suddenly. You could hear sounds from a long way off, the ripple as the swell hit the shore, the piping of the waterbirds, a pelican scratching its head with one huge webbed foot, and the constant underweaving of the surf ’s roar. To all this was added, as I’d known it would be, the buzz and drone of insects.

  As I crossed the channel where the water was deep and green, I could see right down to the sand below. On the farther side, the fish had stirred the sand up and the ocean had turned white and gray with fragments as blue as the sky, flashing silver as the fish thrashed and leaped.

  There were so many fish and they were so dazed by the abundance of insects that it was easy to catch enough for the four of us. I caught some for my seal man and some more just for the thrill of it, and two even leapt into the craft and lay flapping and desperate. I transferred them into the larger net, tied its neck and trailed it behind me as I paddled back before the afternoon breeze pinned me to the shore. The clouds had turned to scales and wisps so I knew it would be windy later.

  My men thought it was magic how I know these things, but it was just craft. All women know it. When women give birth, everything comes from them: all life, all knowledge, all craft.

  I was almost at the shore when a movement caught my eye on the top of the sandhills. Something flashed in the sun. I heard Fin’s voice cry out in surprise. I looked up and saw the dark shape against the cloud-scattered sky. Being low on the water changes the way you see things; they look much larger than they really are. My seal man looked like a giant. He held his blade in both hands, raised it, turned and brought it down faster than a snake strikes or a tern dives. It was like a dance. I watched, fascinated by the subtlety and beauty of the movements, recognizing some deep craft at work.

  My men were screaming. To them it must have seemed a terrifying apparition, a figure from a nightmare or one of the ocean monsters about which we spun tales to keep men from the beach and children away from deep dangerous water.

  Their screams alerted families from all the other sea entrances, and everyone ran out onto the river shore, women grabbing sticks and firestones, men holding the children behind them, and gazed up at the sandhills.

  I beached my craft, pulled the fish nets into the shallow water and told Fin to secure the catch. It was always best in a crisis to give men something to do. It calmed them. I said loudly, “This is my new man, Seal,” and, telling Wing and Talon to follow me, ran swiftly up to the crest where he was cutting those exotic shapes in the air with his blade.

  As I came closer I could hear the blade sigh, sounding like the sea when it retreats across the sand. I thought it must surely cut through the air and reveal, as lightning does, the spirit world that lies behind. It was craft, equal in every way to my own, just as powerful, just as dangerous, and completely strange to me. I felt like my men must have often felt, awed and uncomprehending.

  I stopped a little way from him, and made Wing and Talon stand behind me. I held my hand out to the seal man and beckoned to him. He looked at me, then let his insolent, fearless gaze pass over my men, and the others on the shore behind us. After a long moment, he returned the blade to its casing and made the same bob with his head, like a heron feeding. He walked towards me. I thought he would follow me and turned, but he pushed past me, making a small beckoning gesture as if I should follow him, and headed towards our fire, the nearest one, where he sat down crosslegged, still giving those keen raking glances all around.

  I felt he noticed everything: our shelters built from sand pines and thatched with reeds, the craft pulled up on the shore, the drying fish on poles, the cords and strings Talon had been weaving, the bone fish hooks Wing had made. Again, I saw his smile as though he thought he was superior. His lack of deference and respect irritated and aroused me. I would wipe that look off his face. I would make him join till he could not walk. I would make him appreciate craft in all its forms.

  We sat down around him and I told him the men’s names. He could pronounce them properly, which made him sound like a child. Taron he said and for his own name Shiru. Ooing, he said for Wing which reduced Fin to helpless giggles. He didn’t like being laughed at. I felt sorry for him for I saw he was proud and vainer even than Wing. He reached out and flicked Fin’s cheek. It must have stung for Fin’s face reddened and his eyes filled with tears. Talon and Wing immediately drew closer as if they would protect him and there was a moment when the air thrummed with hostility. Seal’s hand hovered above his blade’s handle. I touched his arm, and made him come with me to the water’s edge.

  Quite a crowd had gathered around us, watchful, muttering, and they continued to stare as I showed Seal the fish in the basket, took one out, cut its spine with my blade and slit its belly to remove the guts. I threw these into the water and crabs immediately sidled up to eat them. Two large pelicans swam lazily towards the shore to see if I was going to share with them. I tossed a fish to each of them. Seal’s eyes flickered as their huge bills opened, as if he had never seen such a bird before.

  I indicated that he should help me and he stared at me as if he could not understand what I was asking. His eyes were so black I could not discern his pupils. He seemed offended but I insisted, using the words we use with boys when they are stubborn. He did not understand them, but they have a power of their own. He frowned and as if against his will took his short blade, grasped a fish, and stabbed it.

  His first efforts were clumsy and the flesh was spoiled by the spilling guts. I threw the fish to the pelicans and continued patiently instructing him as women have always showed their men how to look after themselves. Eventually, we had all the fish gutted and prepared for cooking.

  Talon had built up the fire and Wing grilled the fish on sharpened sticks. They were both very attentive to me, even more than usual. Talon flattered me at every opportunity, Wing made me laugh with his quick wit. He imitated Seal eating, his wary glances, his proud stance, and pretended to flick Fin as the stranger had. It was my right to bring another man into our family—I only had two and a boy—and they were not questioning that. But they feared being supplanted in my affections and wanted to establish their own status.

  When the meal was finished the sky was patterned with dark gray clouds, turning the color of fire as the sun set. The glimmer over the sandhills told me the moon was rising, almost full, out of the ocean. When it cleared the crest and cast shadows on the strand, I took Seal back to the beach and joined with him there, many times, for we had an insatiable thirst for each other. Just before dawn I r
eturned to our river hut and found Wing still awake and desperate for me. Afterwards I slept in his arms until after daybreak.

  EVERY MONTH THE WOMEN WHO were not carrying a child bled together at the time of the full moon. We celebrated our red stream, painted it on the entrance to our shelters and made intricate designs with it, coloring the sand. It was our strength that we bled and did not die. Our blood’s rich smell was the smell of life. It was a time for resting, to replenish and restore. I did not bleed that moon. I already knew my first child was growing within me. I was ecstatic and ripe with love. I had seen other women like this, but I had not known until I felt it myself how all-encompassing, how complete, it would be.

  My men knew at once, and their excitement was intense. When a family was given a child, everyone rejoiced. They could hardly bear to let me out of their sight, and satisfied all my needs and cravings almost before I was aware of them myself. I had never been so happy.

  Shiru—we all called him that now—did not seem to notice. He was aware of so much, but he was not aware of the changes that were taking place in me. He was preoccupied and spent most of his time on the beach staring out at the line between sea and sky. He paced the length of sand between the river mouths, gazing at the surf tossed water. He climbed the sandhills at a run, fifty or sixty times, before taking his stand at the top and going through his dance with his blade.

  Little by little he learned to speak the way we did, and I learned to understand the word pictures he drew in the sand. Sometimes I let myself dream that he would be with us forever and help raise the child he had made, but I sensed it would not happen. The birds formed strange patterns on the shore, on the water, in the sky, as they prepared to leave. They fed urgently and carelessly. I understood now that they did not disappear into the sea and turn into fish. They flew a great distance, far, far away, to where Shiru lived.

  The birds unsettled him as if he would take wing and fly with them. He behaved more like an adolescent boy than a grown man. He and my youngest, Fin, took a liking to each other and often roamed around the river and the lake together, swimming across the channel and basking with the seals on the sandbars in the late summer sun. He was a slow, clumsy swimmer, compared to lithe, fishlike Fin.

  One day I smelled smoke and roasting flesh drifting across the river on the off-shore breeze. A little later an eddy of feathers, black and white, floated past, their tips pink with blood.

  Even after swimming back, Shiru’s and Fin’s lips were shiny with grease and their hands stank of meat.

  I was angry. Fin cried and confessed they had killed two birds and eaten them. I reprimanded them with harsh words. Shiru’s face went hard and he set off over the sandhills to the whale shelter, without speaking.

  I looked at Talon and Wing, saw their expressions of fear and sorrow. We all knew people who had died the previous year. These birds could have been them. Now their souls would never fly free through the clouds to the spirit world. Dread settled in the pit of my stomach.

  “You should not have brought him here,” Wing said, daring in his shock to criticize me.

  “You have to get rid of him,” said Talon. Fin cried harder.

  I knew they were right, but the decision was too bitter. I said nothing for a while.

  “You will have to start making a larger craft for me,” I said finally. “One that will carry me and our child. Take this one to the top of the sandhills for me. I will get rid of it in the morning.”

  For it was our custom to take old craft out into the ocean and sink them there.

  It was one of those rare still nights when there was no wind and the sea was still. The silence when the surf stops was huge and astonishing. The sea stretched out like a reed mat and on the line of the sky a low bank of clouds looked like a distant shore.

  Shiru was sulking, still furious. He thought I had come to seek his forgiveness but it didn’t matter what he thought any more. We didn’t have enough words between us to explain things. We let our bodies talk and his anger made him rough. I accepted it as both punishment and justification. What he did to me that night only confirmed what I had to do to him.

  I meant to tell him about the baby but then I decided not to. If he could not see what was in front of his eyes he did not deserve to know.

  I slept very little, unsettled by the silence, waiting for dawn. The birds started calling while it was still dark. I sat outside the shelter, watching the sea turn gray and the eastern sky pale yellow. There was still no surf and the cloud land looked closer.

  Huge flocks of birds flew overhead, towards the northeast, calling, calling.

  I woke Shiru.

  “I am taking you home,” I said.

  He came out, looked up at the birds and then at the still surface of the sea. A mad light of hope shone in his eyes. I drew on the sand as he had for me, the signs that meant bird and home.

  He said, “Wait, wait,” and began to prepare himself, putting on his clothes and his carapace. He combed his hair with his fingers and twisted it into a tail on top of his head. He took his two blades and fastened them by his side.

  I carried my craft down to the water and held it steady while he climbed in, and knelt gingerly on the reed floor. I pushed it into deeper water, sprang in myself and took up my reed paddle.

  Craft are made for women who are very light and agile. They are not suitable for men, and Shiru was a large man, made heavier by the plated outer garment that I had thought was like a crayfish shell. But because the sea was so calm we skimmed over the surface. All the while, birds flew overhead, thousands and thousands of them, filling the air with the beat of their wings and their cries. He fixed his eyes upwards as though he would fly home with them.

  He did not see me take my blade and cut through the reeds. The water started to seep in. I stood and dived in one movement and swam as far as I could underwater. When I surfaced he was still kneeling, one hand gripping the side of the craft as it sank beneath his weight, the other on his blade as though he would draw it in one last flash.

  I cried then. The salt water hurt me in all sorts of places. He had damaged my body more than I had realized. I mourned the loss of the blades and the garments I had coveted, and I cried for men, how pitiful they were, how wrong it was that we treated them so contemptuously and tried to control them so completely.

  It took me a long time to swim back. I had gone too far, deceived by the calm sea.

  Maybe he will get home, I told myself as I swam, endlessly.

  When I crawled onto the beach, the sea’s surface was beginning to crease, the surf had built up and the distant cloud land had dissolved. Wing and Talon found me and carried me home. They should not have been there but I could not rebuke them. They probably saved my life and when I recovered I could not bring myself to punish them.

  Every time I went to the beach I looked for Shiru. A pile of seaweed, a seal on the shore made my heart dive like a tern. But the waves did not wash him up again. When spring came, the birds returned and I thought his spirit might be flying with them. My son was three months old then. His eyes sought the birds and their cries made him quiver.

  The child was not the only result of the mysterious seal man with his carapace and his two blades. Everything began to change. Wing and Talon often went to the ocean, dug up clams and played in the surf. I had forgotten the reason why they were not supposed to do this and I did not punish them. Other men followed them and no harm came to them.

  Fin started meeting one of his childhood playmates in secret and when I confronted him over it, he declared he loved her and could not live without her. Once, I would have mocked him, but I understood such love now. Soon the girl was pregnant, and since she had no sea entrance of her own, came to live with me. This had never happened before, but I no longer knew how to put a stop to things.

  I took my son out every day in the new craft Wing made for me. He could swim before he could walk. I whispered to him in a forbidden way: this is where the round bones dwell. Hear that
ripple on the shore? It is the wind changing. See the foam quiver and move away? The tide has turned.

  These are the secrets of craft.

  RECONCILING MEMORY

  GAIL Z. MARTIN

  SLEEP NOW.” KESTEL FALKE PATTED the shoulder of the man who lay next to her tangled in the sumptuous satin sheets. He had paid well for her company, presenting her with a diamond bracelet for a weekend’s pleasure.

  Kestel’s companion did not stir. She smiled, assured that the potion she drugged him with had taken effect. He might have slept soundly without the drugs, after demonstrating more amorous vigor than Kestel expected of a man his age. Still, she dared not take a chance he might have awoken and find her gone from his bed.

  Duke Leon Hastings lay on his side, with his right arm crooked beneath him. The lantern’s glow revealed the tattoo of a falcon in flight, the mark of his noble house. The sight of it goaded Kestel to remember the purpose that brought her to Hastings’s bed. She knew he wanted to believe he’d paid for her services, and she allowed him to believe the lie. More powerful men than Hastings had bribed her with exotic and costly gifts far surpassing the gems in the bracelet, all for a few hours of her company.

  Kestel retrieved the silver knife from where she concealed it in her discarded skirts, along with a small glass vial. She turned over the sleeping man’s right hand, and made a tiny cut on the skin of his wrist, just deep enough for blood to bead. She gathered a few droplets in the vial, then used Hastings’s kerchief to staunch the flow and wipe the cut clean. Moving silently, she replaced the vial in a hidden pocket of her skirts and withdrew a silk pouch.

  Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO

  Kestel smiled as she rose from the bed, gathered a satin robe around her, and slipped the knife into a pocket. Let Hastings believe he pursued her; the falsehood suited her purposes. Her seduction of him had nothing to do with sex except as the lure best suited to draw in her prey. For months she had made certain to be within sight of Hastings but always out of reach, on the arm of one patron or another she knew he envied. Men like Hastings were easy to read, even easier to manipulate. Being seen with those men made Kestel a coveted possession to be pursued and won at any cost, just as she had planned.