The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “I’m afraid I am a poor kind of Saint for you, my girl. Maybe the worst kind—”

  Her words were cut off by a loud bang—the door of the Arm slamming open as a riotous group of three bizarre creatures burst into the common room, laughing raucously, like a pack of raccoons squabbling over a rubbish heap. Two enormous men, their muscles knotting under tattooed skin—not an inch of flesh showed which was not covered in colorful illustrations of battles at sea, mermaids with their arms trailing kelp, snarling tigers, lighthouses with beacons alight—carried between them a massive wooden tub filled to the brim with sloshing water. It spilled over the side onto the floor every time the men moved, and by the time they reached the bar, half the floor was swimming in brine.

  In the tub was a woman with green gills opening at her throat, an inferno of green hair blazing around her head, and skin that held the sickly pallor of a fish. Her meaty hands were webbed as a frog’s, her ears long and thin, like tiny fins. She was naked, and her ample breasts sagged heavily, tipped in blue nipples. From the waist down, her legs merged into a long, corpulent tail, silver-violet, with translucent tendrils flapping where her feet might have been. She took great pleasure in thrashing the tail about, spraying other patrons with water.

  Snow stared in wonder. “Is that a mermaid?” she gasped.

  Eyvind pushed back his chair with a loud screech of wood on wood. “If only! Mermaids are pretty as daisies, and they sing nice little rhyming songs all the day long, and they smell a fair sight better than that heap of dead clams. That’s a Magyr, and she’ll drink me into the street in an hour.” He trundled over to the boisterous trio, his face a cold glower. After a moment, Sigrid and Snow followed, curious as a pair of kittens.

  “Oy! Eyvind!” the Magyr hollered, her voice like a wave sluicing through a tide pool cluttered with clapping mussels. “Fill my gullet with ale and my men’s bellies with some of that foul bread you cook up in your back room! Have I got a story for you! You’ll never believe it, not in a month of miracles!”

  “I never believe any of your stories, Grog. And you’ll show me your coin before you get a drop.”

  She ran a corpse-colored hand through her emerald hair, and when it came away, it was full of rough, filthy golden coins, so old that Snow had never seen their like. They were embossed—faintly, worn by countless hands and pockets—with the image of a single eye. Grog bit one of them with satisfaction. Sigrid stiffened.

  “Aye, the great cow knows what these are! Coin from the Arimaspian Oculos! Two hundred years and more extinct, and yet I’ve got more of their coin than any collector in Ajanabh! Ask me where I got it! Go on, ask me!” Grog was crowing, stroking her shiny gills in delight.

  “Where did you get it?” Sigrid asked, her voice icy and low.

  Grog licked her bluish lips in anticipation and seized her tankard in one huge hand, the thin webbing between her fingers slapping wetly against the metal.

  “My men—that’s Sheapshank and Turkshead, you know, and it don’t matter which one’s which—had booked us passage on a sweet little schooner captained by a beast the likes of which a mother wouldn’t even threaten her squalling brats with…”

  SHE WERE SEVEN FEET TALL IF SHE WERE AN INCH, I swear it by my mother’s fifth teat. All sweetness and light from the neck up—a regular princess, with hair like melting butter and starry eyes—but oh, those legs! A deer’s legs, right down to the hoof, or would have been, if she had had hooves. Instead, she had great flapping frog’s feet, and turquoise wings, feathers and all, tucked against her back. Her skin was all over tiger stripes, and her hands were furry as a wolf’s, with great clacking claws. And of all things, a thick gray tail wagged through a slit in her skirts.

  She was a perfect monster. But beggars can’t be choosers! I can swim just as fine as a young shark, of course, but poor Sheapshank, he can’t swim a stroke to save his throat, and Turkshead has a deathly fear of the sea. Anyway, I prefer to travel in style, with my tub full of warm water and a mug of rum in each hand. The ocean is cold as a witch’s womb, don’t you know, and it makes my tail peel to go wallowing through it week after week. A ship is far better suited to my taste, even if Turkshead retches like a pregnant wench every time a stiff wave washes the deck.

  Now, my youngest sister had spawned not a fortnight before, and me being the maternal type, practically bursting at the gills with motherly affection, I wanted to see my little nieces and nephews whilst they was still wiggling little tadpoles—and enjoy a month’s helpings of my sister’s whitefish and squid pies. But the sea has spread my family far as the four winds would take us, and Tack’s grotto is a full month’s sail over the ice caps from Muireann. Muireanners don’t take kindly to those of the maritime persuasion mucking up the berthing on their ships, so Sheapshank and Turkshead asked after the most desperate captain on the docks, one who wouldn’t turn their dainty nose up at a paying fare.

  And that was how we met Magadin.

  Sheapshank and Turkshead carried my tub over to her fingerpier. I slapped the side of the old boat, fine old locust wood by the color, though more than a little dingy and worse for wear. I peered at the hull, where the ship’s name appeared to have been carved into the wood by an inexpert hand. Witch’s Kiss, it read, rather shakily. Just then her head appeared from behind the second mast.

  “Are you looking for passage north, then? Old Man Glyndwr told me you’d be sloshing on by.”

  That woman’s voice was like hot wine on a cold night. I gestured for my boys to set me down.

  “What are you, woman, the City Zoo?” Sheapshank barked laughter at my little joke, but the lady just smiled.

  “Hardly. There was a Wizard, some years back. He favored me with a change of costume.” She scratched at the tops of her blue wings with a lazy claw.

  “Ain’t there always a Wizard, though? Bloody menace, if you ask me. No one cares for the likes of us freaks, but a whole stinking heap of us never caused the trouble of one Wizard in an ever-damned tower.”

  I thumped my tail in sympathy, but Turkshead leered at her and gnashed his teeth. I stroked his bald head to calm him—just like a pup my Turkshead is, can’t stand the smell of a stranger. I traced circles on his painted pate as Turkshead moaned in pleasure. “So, pray tell, Lady Menagerie, how did you come by a ship as big as all this? A captain all by yourself and no one stabbing you in the heart in the depths of night to steal it?”

  The beast-maiden swung lightly down from the upper deck and fixed her amber eyes on me. She moved faster with those mixed-up limbs than I would have thought.

  “If I tell you the tale, will you buy passage on my ship, and look nowhere else? I’m hungry as a whelp without a dam, and I’d be glad of the wage.”

  I gripped her hand in mine straightaway, flippers on claws—no one else would have taken us, anyhow. “Aye, that I will.”

  “Well, then. Just as there is always a Wizard, there is always a hero ready to rescue a pretty girl—and some do think me pretty, strange as it seems. But that’s not important. My life didn’t begin, in truth, until I came to Muireann…”

  BEING A MAIDEN, YOU SEE, IS NOT QUITE THE SAME as being alive.

  It is more like being a statue. The main skill of a maiden is to stand very still and look very beautiful. Even when I was a captive, I did little more than sit on my wooden stool and try not to cry. I was nothing; I did nothing. Not until I rode on the back of a red Beast through the ramshackle gate of Muireann did I ever take a step or utter a word that was not planned out for me by folk in black robes—whether those robes were those of parents or wizards, it didn’t matter much.

  But Beast, kind as he was, could do little more than leave me at the pier and suggest to the townsfolk that I might be a fair hand at sail-mending, or deck-swabbing, if one of them were to take me on. The throng of Muireanners stood stock-still in terror of the scarlet demon that had carried me to them, and a few nodded dumbly, praying only that he would leave, so that they could forget him all the sooner. Beast
nibbled my ear with affection, and trotted off back to his Marsh and his King.

  When he had gone, the crowd spat on me, and knocked me to the ground. They cut the webbing between my toes and half sawed my tail from my body. They would have broken my wings if they could have managed it, but I am no little bluebird in the hands of a child. My bones are strong, and they held. I was left bleeding and broken on the docks while they went laughing into their ships’ holds for dinner, and night was coming on. What was I to do? All I knew, after all those years in my Tower, was how to stay very still so that people could look at me.

  And so I lay there, utterly still, under the stars like chips of ice, until they came. I must have fallen asleep on the cold stones, for I awoke to a hand clamped over my mouth and a toothy hiss in my ear:

  “Hush now, precious. Hush now.” The voice’s owner dragged me up into its arms like a cat snatching the scruff of her kitten’s neck. In a whirl of shuffling feet, foul breath, and foul murmurings, I was carried to a creaking ship and lashed to the mizzenmast.

  “Well, my mixed-up girl, you wanted to serve on a ship—I promise you’ll serve now.” The voice that had hissed in my ear on the docks belonged to a high-cheeked captain in a hat festooned with threadbare blue feathers and worn velvet. He was handsome as a duke—save that when he smiled his mouth was full of rotted teeth, yellow as a decrepit old wolf’s.

  “Now,” he said, “we’re going to sell you off at one southern port or another—if the mummers won’t take you and the slavers won’t take you, the fur traders will, and if they won’t the meat markets will. But in the meantime you can put those mismatched parts to work scrubbing this ship splinter by splinter.” He grinned, and tipped his hat. “And, well, it’s a long voyage south. After a few weeks, you’ll look downright fetching, and really, you’re not bad from the chin up.”

  I looked up at him and my mouth watered behind my gag. I coughed politely, to let him know I wished to speak, and he obligingly removed the filthy rag. I made my voice as sweet and flutelike as a princess can. “You needn’t sell me. I can be useful, and I won’t fight you, or your men.”

  The Captain shrugged and stood straight, brushing the knees of his breeches clean. “This is what piracy is. If we took you willing, what kind of pirates would we be? You can be sweet and yielding as the first cream of the season with me, but try to put on a good scream for my boys. It keeps morale up.”

  I could not scrub the decks. My deer’s legs would not bend, and my frog’s feet slipped on the deck. I stumbled and fell, and a smart punch to the side would answer my clumsiness. I forgot, as the days went by, that I was a maiden, and then I forgot what a maiden was. The Captain told me each morning that he would expect me in his chamber that night; he told me each night that I was too repulsive for his taste, but “less ugly than you were yesterday, and uglier than you will be tomorrow.”

  One night, the crew was drunk on their last rations of rum, and they hauled me to their quarters. I remembered to scream. They jeered like jackals and pelted me with slaps and blows, until one of them thought it would be a fine trick to cut off my hair.

  “We’ll make her a real deckhand,” he said, laughing raucously, “and no one goes to sea with a head of yellow curls! Cut it off!”

  He came behind me and gathered up my hair in his hands, my dragonfly wings fluttering in panic at the ends of the strands. Drawing his short blade, he sawed through the yellow locks, planting a slurping kiss on my bare neck.

  I did not know what would happen, I swear I did not. He cut my hair, yes, but instead of silky curls falling to the floor, blood began to sheet from the severed ends as though he had cut into my heart, and my wings buzzed so loudly I could hardly hear the men’s cries of terror and disgust. They backed away from me, staring, as blood soaked my shirt and the secondhand trousers they had found in a dead sailor’s trunk.

  I stumbled to my feet, my vision a red blur. I felt very strange, as though all the creatures that had gone into my misshapen body were waking up, clawing for purchase on my soul. The wolf and the stag and the tiger and the bear, the frog and the dragonfly and the fish—all their many-colored voices begged to be heard, who had never so much as whispered before. My flesh was filled with howling, howling and baying and croaking and crying, roaring and shrieking, so much shrieking, like broken flutes thrown against a stone floor.

  The wolf leapt first, I think, and then the tiger. I clawed out the throats of three sailors, and chewed through the ear of another before cutting into his eyes. The stag kicked at prone skulls, and the bear lunged into naked bellies. The frog and the dragonfly remembered to scream.

  When it was over none of them were left; the room was empty as a prison cell. I wanted to feel sick. I wanted to delicately retch in the corner or feel faint, collapse in guilt. But I was not sick or faint, and the creatures in me exulted. Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.

  It was easy, once I had decided that, to slip into the captain’s quarters and into that soft bed at last. The pillow was cool on my face, the blood of my hair dried and black against the fabric. I did not wait for him to wake, and I did not need a hidden knife. The bear opened him up like a beehive.

  I sailed a ghost ship back into Muireann port.

  THE BEAST-MAID CARESSED THE RAIL OF HER SHIP tenderly. “No one wants this ship, just as no one wanted me. They say I use no sails, but lash the ghosts of the crew to the mast and let the moon fill them up like wind. This ship is mine. I know it like my own body, and I am not sorry for what I have done. That is what piracy is, I sup pose. I am not a maiden anymore, and I am glad to be done with that sorry state. I washed it off in blood and ocean. No one troubles me, and I do not trouble them.”

  “Well, that’s a fish story and no mistake,” I guffawed. My boys snorted derision along with their mistress, clapping each other on the back. “We’ve a real red-handed villain on our hands, boys! A hundred men at one blow!”

  Magadin smiled patiently. “Not a villain. Not a witch, or a maiden. A captain, which is a little like being all three. But believe what you will. When a mermaid mocks a monster for telling a story too fantastic to swallow, who is to say which is the more ridiculous?”

  I purpled, swelling up with rage like an overripe plum. “I am not a mermaid! Mermaids are skinny little fops with shells to cover their tiny tits! Mermaids do nothing but sit around on rocks staring into mirrors and teasing ships to their doom. Perfectly good ships! Galleons, even! Wasteful milksops, the lot of them, and you couldn’t build half a brain if you had the whole race on a slab. I am a Magyr. I could crush your skull with my hands and drink this rat town under the table afterwards. And if I wanted to kill myself a passel of sailors, I’d bloody well do it with cannon, saber, and a fist in the teeth, not by batting my damn eyelashes. You’d be wise to remember it, Maggie, my love, and if we see a mermaid on our jaunt across the high seas, the best thing for all of us would be to let Sheapshank here put an arrow through her giggling head.”

  With that, I gave her a good splash with my tail and ordered the boys to take me aboard.

  Now it were a week on the waves, and Turkshead vomiting over the side every morning like a fisherman throwing chum to the whales. Weren’t nothing unusual that I could see: the ocean’s blue no matter the day or the tide, and if I loved the great salt thing enough to describe it, I’d love it enough to swim in it, do you get me?

  Maggie, for her part, sailed that ship like nothing I’ve seen. My boys are no layabouts when it comes to crewing a fine ship—I bought them at a bargain from the Ajanabh fleet when they were so poor they couldn’t buy splinters. But she wouldn’t hear of it, running up and down that deck like a dervish. You wouldn’t have thought anyone could man a ship that size all on their own, but Magadin did it, and no lie.

  Which is how it happened that Turkshead was the one to sight the monster
first, while chucking his chum at dawn for the twelfth day. He came spluttering up to my tub like a baby who’s discovered his thumbs, and dragged the old barrel screeching across the deck, spilling my brine everywhere, so that I could stare over the rail and see, horribly, the water breaking over a shell so enormous that at first I thought we’d hit land.

  It was difficult to clap an eye on, a shell like a turtle rising up, but the color of the sea itself, so that it seemed like a wave or a reef, but too impossibly huge to be alive. Turkshead was crying, babbling that it was going to eat us—but I couldn’t see a head to the thing at all. It was nothing but shell, rising and rising, water running off its back, slick tiles of shiny blue and black and green, repeating over and over like a puzzle. The ship was caught in a roil of froth and foam, the sea rushing into us as it rushed away from the beast.

  “Leviathan,” whispered Sheapshank, and he mumbled a prayer so that I could not hear—the boys know I don’t approve of their bloody damned Stars.

  Magadin cried out to us, dashing from sail to sail, fighting to keep us arights. “It’s the Echeneis! Don’t you read books? That’s not even half its girth you see! It can swallow us and not even feel the prick of the mast in its gullet. Man those lines, Sheap, or we feed the monster!”

  The boys were so glad of something to do they fell over themselves trying to get to that flapping jib first. I just watched, frozen as a side of seal meat. The thing was still rising, so high now that it cast its shadow over us, and I shivered in the sudden cold. Goose bumps stood out green and blue on my arms, and soon there weren’t no sea at all, only the ugly black thing, growing like a dead sun. I looked hard for the head, searched like a fish prodding through coral for a meal, for the littlest break in the giant shell.